An Uncommon Education (24 page)

Jun was close behind her, splashing in, fully dressed, as Ellie ran, calling out to the streakers, “Wait up!” “She’s completely shit-faced,” Julie observed. Phyllis marched over to us. “Ruth?” Ruth looked only slightly apologetic. “I thought a little more would ease the pain,” Ruth protested. “No more drinking, ever, at forensic burning,” Phyllis scolded. We all nodded. “At least not underage.”

We watched Jun wrap Ellie up again. She winked at us as she walked past. “No pain,” Jun remarked. Ruth winked back. “Medicinal,” she explained sheepishly as Phyllis stared her down. “Well, maybe medicinal drinking,” Phyllis said, breaking the tension. “Sound right to you, Dr. Feinstein?”

I hadn’t expected she’d registered me as part of the interaction. We could hear Ellie singing as Mara and Julie began to rouse the other sober members to start collecting our things. In groups of twos and threes we made our slow way back toward campus, tired and reeking of wood smoke and alcohol and the muddy lake.

“She’s a type,” Phyllis said, suddenly at my shoulder. I was surprised she’d sought me out again. She lifted her chin to refer to Ellie, whose singing could still be heard in the clear night. I wondered if Phyllis was afraid I’d be scared off, or likely to blow their cover, or upset at what I’d seen. “If the stakes aren’t high enough,” she went on, explaining Ellie to us both, “she won’t play the game. Don’t spend a minute worrying about her,” she added. “Believe me, she’ll never be happier than she is when she’s on the verge of hysteria.”

A.J. began to sing an off-key, drunken, and diminishing version of “America the Beautiful.” A few more joined her lustfully, but as soon as we were back on campus paths, the group sobered, splitting into pairs and singles, drifting off hurriedly. I wonder how many of them were thinking they could capture a few more hours of sleep on such a quiet, frigid night.

B
ack in my own room, there was a voice mail from Jun and the emergency technician at Newton-Wellesley, forwarded to the whole society, announcing that Ellie was fine, that, as Jun made the tech report herself, “polyester had probably saved her life.”

“Yes, folks, that’s right,” Jun concluded the message, “the horrid flying purple people eater that Ellie was wearing saved her life. Let this be a lesson to us all.”

That night, I dreamt for the first time in a while, more a dreamt memory than an imaginary image: my mother sitting with her feet wrapped, me trying to read to her from one of her books, my mispronunciations and earnestness making her laugh.

The next morning I dug out a photograph I’d stolen from home of her standing in sunlight, laughing into it instead of squinting, an image I treasured for being both completely strange and as close to perfect as I could imagine. I taped it to the wall beside my bed.

Part III

Eighteen

A
fter an unremarkable Thanksgiving break during which my parents made noises about how happy they were to have me home and I dutifully ignored my mother’s unusually sallow coloring, I returned to campus, finished my final exams perfunctorily, and then took advantage of the elective winter session to stay on campus until the spring semester began.

It was typical to cast the spring play in the fall, so that we could begin rehearsals as soon as we returned for the new semester. And so it was that
Hamlet
practices were in full swing as soon as classes began again. Here are some of the things we practiced when we weren’t onstage:

1. Fight rehearsal: Once or twice a week, overseen by a kendo master who visited us three times that semester. We were told that his wages came out of our annual fees, but it was clear to everyone that we didn’t really have that kind of money. Jun was as wealthy as my father had hinted, but she was not interested in acknowledging that wealth in public. Her generosities simply surrounded her. It was rumored that Sensei Mutsoko was a
hachi-dan
who had been exiled by his countrymen for killing a man, but he did not act like a man who had been so lost.

Although kendo sparring is categorically different than fencing, Phyllis claimed that she simply wanted us to use it to connect with our inner violent aggressors. And with Jun, it was terrific fun; it reminded me of our tennis practices, but the pretend intent to kill was glorious play. Why had I even started with tennis when I could have just picked up a sword? Phyllis insisted that mammals thrive on fighting as much as on food or love. Sensei wanted our spirits to soar, our breath to float when we spoke our lines, the language to become the wind to fuel the action, or something like that. Sometimes the act even quieted my tendency to record every moment, so that fighting brought with it a sensation of extraordinary fluidity; a thoughtless, almost transcendent experience I hadn’t found outside of running. I couldn’t help but wonder why women have so little occasion to fight.

2. Walking like a man: When our voices weren’t convincing, when our addresses were too indirect, Phyllis had us grab whatever we could find that could be rolled into a man-sized wad and jam it down the front of our pants. When the play was on, our breasts would be bound with cheesecloth. There were rolls of it stashed in the basement dressing room, and we began to use them two weeks before we played to an audience. Binding the breasts was at least a two-person job. There was a binder, usually Ruth or Tracy Leeds, because they were the steadiest, and the bindee, whose job it was to hold the other end of the cheesecloth and turn into it as tightly as she could, creating layers until she reached the end and the binder, who helped her to pin the cloth to her chest: two pins on top, two on the bottom. Once bound, we had to walk around a bit before we could sit or catch our breath.

No one could remember how long this tradition had gone on, not even Calbe, the junior from the night of forensic burning, rumored to have been Pope’s favorite since freshman year. She was an active member of the society, but was also a sort of ambassador for Pope, the one who explained his disappointments and delights. In general, he found little about Shakes delightful.

3. Imagining Shakespeare: In an idle moment, I asked Calbe to explain to me what it was that Pope didn’t like. She pulled her hair back carefully, as if preparing a speech.

“The purist, the scholar, is always irked by the practitioner,” she told me. “There are maybe five other scholars in this country who know more about Shakespeare than Pope does. It’s his life’s work. Let me ask you something.” She walked over and opened the set of doors that led into the secondary greenroom, a space to the south of the great room downstairs with access to the stage up a small iron staircase. The room was long and narrow, with a fireplace just to the right of its entrance.

Calbe stood in front of it and turned to me. “When was Shakespeare born, and when did he die?” she asked me. I had to admit I didn’t know. She gestured toward the fireplace. I went over to it and read the dates above. “Fifteen sixty-four to sixteen sixteen,” she read out loud. “Can’t blame him, can you?”

I couldn’t. But I understood, too, the desire to give in to the amateur experience of the plays, the faulty, slow discovery of each masterpiece. I wanted to nurse a crush on Shakespeare, not devote myself to him, to take the glimpse I wanted and savor its pleasures.

And I was in good company. So many of us came for the sheer thrill of the plays, clumsy players that we were with his words. I suppose it was no wonder that the college dutifully looked the other way. We were at our least polished behind those walls: women playing men playing at anguish and betrayal and doubt in an archaic form of our language. We were probably the ones who would have crowded the stage at the Globe: too rough to sit, too enamored of the players to absorb the play without commentary. Phyllis was convinced that Shakespeare himself would have preferred this section, that it would have been a welcome relief from the scrutiny of the higher rows.

She made the best sense, too, out of why our invitations to the president and dean of Wellesley so often resulted in empty seats. “It would never do for Gertrude to acknowledge Yorick, hon,” she said once. “Recognize, yes, but acknowledge? Yorick was both jester and surrogate parent. He was the first to show Hamlet the flaws in the patriarchal line. Gertrude would never have looked him in the eye.”

4. Dressing like a man: To understand the fixations of 2 and 4, you must recognize how many roles in Shakespeare are written for men. Also, men are better at posing as women; it’s primarily a matter of added roundness for them, and they enjoy inflating their bodies. Women, on the other hand, need to compress and straighten themselves, stand taller. And even the bravest among us are reluctant to be that flatly exposed and falsely bold. Costuming was a challenge, despite the wealth of dresses donated to us, sitting in a musty closet to the rear of the basement rooms. Though when one of us tried to act too untouched, Phyllis corrected us.

“Oh, honey,” she told me once, “it’s the
men
that are so romantic. Just look at Will himself. Drama, drama, drama, life or death, do or die. They’re way more romantic than chicks.”

We were working on the last of the foils, repairing them for the stage. She was immobilized for once, holding in place the handle she’d just glued to the sword, waiting for it to set. “Think about a woman’s body,” she continued. “It’s so evolved. Both efficient and subtle. Men are clearly the lesser model. They might
be
stronger, but they charge through life with their weaknesses ignored. But they sense the denial; deep down they know those weaknesses are there and they can’t get to them. I hate it when girls play men like they’re stoic. Like they want to prove just how tough they can be. Men know their beloved mothers could squish them with just a flick of the wrist. And it terrifies them, makes them rage and muscle all the more. Oh God, just talking about it gets me hot.” I laughed at her, but she just shook her head.

5. Negotiating Phyllis’s temper: She had no patience with the following: missed lines, missed cues, disengaged actors, poor actors, shy actors, hammy actors, actors late for rehearsal. She’d taken a shine to me when she realized I could be a human prompter, and I took to the revelatory experience of being able to use my memory as a game. I even got a word wrong here and there, errors Ruth loved to crow about when they turned up. Phyllis cut her short. She had no patience for ribbing, either. We were frequently being chastened to “sober up.”

“Do you realize what you’ve got here?” she’d shout at us. “Do you know what it means to have this kind of language on your
tongues
? And most of you don’t even have to play the half-assed women.” She tried, unsuccessfully, to rein herself in. “Sorry, A.J.” (Gertrude), “and Tharine” (Ophelia). “But, Jesus, folks. You’re Hamlet, Jun. Fucking Hamlet! I want to hear every single one of those words in the back row, and in that beautiful Wycombe Abbey accent you’ve got. Go on. You of all people should know what it means to honor thy father. Hamlet knows he
wants
to kill Claudius. He
wants
to be right. That play’s his creation, his one chance to toy with his prey. Would it kill you to look a little vindicated? Have some presence, for god’s sake! Fuck!” she concluded before storming out.

6. Dying: This was particularly challenging to those of us who were new, or those who were less athletic. The problem with dying is that a player has to fall, convincingly. In other words, she has to fall intentionally, giving up control long enough to achieve the desired effect. The best at this were those who could both let themselves fall and achieve a soft landing. Jun had particular trouble uttering the line “O, I die, Horatio,” and doing just that.

“It’s ridiculous, Phyl,” she objected. “Who the hell says, ‘O, I die,’ when they die? That’s just bad writing.”

Phyllis glared at her. “Would you care to rewrite the scene?”

“No, but we could cut the line.”

When Phyllis was angry she got red in the ears first. “I’m not cutting, it, Jun Oko, you sacrilegious, wooden excuse for a Hamlet.”

“I don’t see why we have to narrate what’s obvious,” Jun objected.

“It’s called verse, moron.”

“The key,” Ruth called out from her assistant director’s chair across the room, “is to focus on the Horatio part of the line. What’s important is
who
Hamlet signals out when he dies. He calls to his friend.”

“That’s because everyone else is fucking dead,” Jun grumbled.

“I just don’t believe the Japanese can perform Shakespeare to Western standards,” Phyllis declared.

Jun glared at her. “You mean unimaginative and pretentious?”

“Phyl,” Tiney objected, silently watching them all until that moment, “that’s enough.”

“Now you’re where I want you,” Phyllis said to Jun. “Kill Naomi.” She sat down.

I
was told that a rocky dress rehearsal always meant a smooth opening night. The house’s full basement consisted of a large common dressing room and an unfinished, cluttered back room full of props and costumes. Photographs and programs from past performances covered the walls and it smelled of body odor, the furnace that heated it, the musky clay of cake makeup, and the sweetness of fake blood. It could be accessed from the rear or front of the house, both of which had narrow staircases leading down. It was well lit and warm, and most of us waited down there between scenes.

Ellie was crying in the corner, her gauzy dress shirt already coming undone in the back. She was going through a breakup. All of us were trying not to watch her, though I couldn’t help but wonder how she could, ever again, wear such a loose fabric. The scars on her arm were open to the world as the sleeve fell back, making me look away. Jun sat down beside me at the bottom of the stairs.