A Train to Moscow(25)
As she gets up to leave, she looks down and sees Andrei grab a lime-green grasshopper pulsing on its spindly legs by the stem of a bluebell flower and crush it between his fingers.
14
At home, Sasha steels herself for the announcement that she wasn’t able to utter in the field. She waits for everyone to be sitting around the table, for Grandma to stop running into the kitchen and lower herself into her chair. She ignores Grandpa’s dictum “when I eat, I am deaf and mute” because she knows that the severity of what she is about to say will overshadow the prohibition against speaking during the meal.
She takes a deep breath and focuses all her strength on the words, as if she were about to go onstage. “I want to be an actress,” she utters in what she thinks sounds like a Theater voice. “When I finish school this summer, I am leaving for Moscow to take the entrance exam to drama school,” she continues, even as her resolve is leaking out, making her look down into her plate, into the puddle of cabbage soup.
This is the first time she has wrapped words around this desire that has been burning inside her for almost ten years. Spoken out loud, her intent is now serious and real, validated by the fact of having been announced.
When she lifts her eyes, she thinks of the mute scene at the end of Gogol’s The Inspector General. Grandpa is sitting with his mouth gaping open, his hand with a spoon full of soup frozen in the air. Her mother is staring at her with her most serious frown, the one she saves for talk of war and other dangers. Grandma is looking down into her plate, her hand covering her mouth, as if she is afraid she will accidentally say something positive about Theater and acting.
Her mother is the one to break the silence. “And afterward, what will you do?” she demands. “Will you spend your life in some provincial theater so you can come out at the end of the first act to announce, ‘Dinner is served’? Will you end up in Vladivostok or Pinsk, with the rejects who can barely make it through a plumbing course?” Her voice is her teaching voice, and this is a lecture. “You wanted to be a lot of things when you were growing up. You wanted to be a streetcar driver. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, I remember,” Sasha says. “I was six!” It makes her furious that her mother would compare Theater to streetcars.
“And what is acting, anyway? You don’t treat the ill; you don’t teach; you don’t produce anything. You aren’t doing anything of value. It’s all frivolous and chaotic, an unworthy job for a serious citizen.”
“You know nothing about acting! It’s not unworthy and it’s not frivolous,” Sasha says angrily, challenging her mother and her worship of the practical. “I will be producing something, but it’s something you can’t touch. Something you and Grandpa will never understand.”
“It’s time to grow up, Sasha.” Her mother takes a deep breath, a sign that she has heard enough arguments she considers senseless. “You’re not going anywhere,” she announces in a voice swollen with anger. “I’m your mother and I’m not letting you go. You will stay here and go to college and get a decent job. And that’s that.”
Sasha doesn’t know how her mother or Grandpa can stop her from leaving, unless they bar the windows and double-lock the front door. The thought that they are powerless makes her sit up and pull her shoulders back.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed, this gesture of defiance, and she sees her mother pause, but it’s a pause before a storm.
“Why can’t you be normal, like everyone else?” Her mother’s voice is both authoritative and pleading. “Can’t you see that acting will take you nowhere? That all you’ll be doing is wasting your life?”
“I’m wasting my life now!” Sasha spits out.
Her mother gasps. “Better than an actress, why don’t you join a circus and become a clown! You’re certainly acting like one.”
“An actress?” roars Grandpa, who has been uncharacteristically silent. He throws his spoon to the table and fixes his blue-eyed stare on Sasha. “I won’t allow you to make this house into the laughingstock of the entire town. Do you hear me?”
His ridicule of Theater makes Sasha livid. “If I want to be a clown, I’ll be a clown!” she cries out in what remains of her stage voice. “I’ll be anything I want to be! Even a circus is better than this pretense of life.”
“Don’t you dare yell at us!” her mother shouts. “What makes you believe they will even look at you in Moscow? You think those plays you put on in your drama club were so great? They weren’t. They were pathetic. Pathetic plays in a pathetic theater in a pathetic little town. You’re nothing but a fool, like all the other young fools from all over the country who race to Moscow like flies to sugar, all wanting to be stars, all thinking they’re the next Sarah Bernhardt.”
Sasha cringes because she fears her mother may turn out to be right. The best drama school in Moscow, the one where she wants to go, admits only twenty-five applicants a year from all over the country, and there must be thousands of people like her who have been infected with the germ of Theater and who will do anything to have a life of real make-believe. The thought that she may fail makes her anger blaze even hotter.
“I will go to Moscow and I will become an actress!” she screams. “I’m not you and I won’t live like you’ve lived. I won’t spend my life in this house being ordered around by him.” She thrusts her finger in Grandpa’s direction.