In Harmony(100)

It bends to the storm.

Harsh winds whip it,

its leaves are torn

and carried away.

It bends but doesn’t break.

It may weep

but it will

never

fall.



I smiled as I lifted my coffee mug, gratitude and anticipation in every sip. Counting the minutes until this weekend, when Angie would be at the final performance of A Doll’s House at the HCT.

I hadn’t seen my best friend in three years.

I showered, tied my long hair in a braid down my back, and dressed in a pale green sundress with yellow daisies on it. While Marty didn’t enforce a dress code at the HCT offices, I liked to look as professional as I could on my little budget.

After a quick breakfast of toast, juice, and coffee, I grabbed my bike off my front porch and strapped my helmet under my chin. Greta, my neighbor, was already in her front garden with a smock and gloves, weeding.

“Morning, Greta.”

“Guten Morgen, my girl.” She stood up and stretched her back. “I have fresh peas for you,” she said in her thick German accent. “When you come back from work.”

“I’ll trade you for some lemonade,” I said.

“Yes, that would be fine.”

I had a little lemon tree in a pot in my tiny backyard. It was my pride and joy, watching it grow tall and bear fruit. Bright yellow suns in a galaxy of green leaves. Greta said it wouldn’t survive the winter, but I’d put it in a pot just for that; so I could bring it inside when it got cold.

I wouldn’t leave it to die in ice and snow, but would take care to always keep it warm.

That afternoon, the sun was bright and warm on my face. People groused about Midwest humidity, but I basked in it. I craved being warm. I turned my face into the rays, let it seep into my bones and drive out the terrible memories of Canada when I was so lost.

Everything I loved—Harmony, Isaac, Angie—had been ripped away and trampled on. For long, agonizing months, I was a passenger in my own body. Feeling nothing, because allowing myself to feel anything hurt too much. Numbness was easier; and I’d returned to the dark, cold place I’d been the summer after Xavier had assaulted me.

My parents didn’t know what to do with me. My eighteenth birthday came and went, but I had no money, no job, no savings, and no will to do anything. I stayed in my room for three solid months, hardly eating or bathing or sleeping. My mother tearfully begged and pleaded. My father sternly told me to stop acting like it was ‘the end of the world’ and to ‘pull myself together.’

I had no sense of self to pull together. I was broken and scattered, the pieces of me spread out over a cold ocean floor. More than once, I imagined my robotic body transporting me out onto the small lake behind our house in Edmonton. Maybe the ice wasn’t thick enough yet, and I’d hear a crack under my feet—a gun shot across the still, frigid air. A split second later, it would give way, and drop me down into the black water.

Bonnie McKenzie saved me.

My father had confiscated my phone and laptop for months, cutting me off from the world. When he finally permitted me a new phone, I called Angie one cold November night. She was home for Thanksgiving. One word in my cracked and trembling voice made her pass the phone to her mother.

It took months of late night phone calls and secret Skype sessions to break through the numbness. To pull myself together. By January, I got a job at a clothing store in Edmonton, and from that first paycheck to the last from a boutique in Austin, I saved for my return to Harmony.

Now I saw Bonnie twice a week at her downtown office on Juniper Street. She was kind enough not to charge me for her time, and I vowed to make it up to her somehow. On my own. If I were starving to death, I wouldn’t ask my parents for a dime. I’d never be dependent on them or helpless without their money, ever again.

I rode my bike downtown. Past The Scoop, where tourists and locals crammed every booth, down to the theater. I locked my bicycle to a parking meter out front and glanced up at the marquee.



Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House

Final Performances this weekend!



When I returned to Harmony three months ago, one of the first things I did was visit Martin. Stepping back into the theater felt like coming home, and Marty’s arms closed me up like a benevolent, kind father. He was about to start auditions for A Doll’s House, a play about a young woman who is tired of being treated like a precious doll by her older husband and bucks 19th century conventions and leaves him to find herself.

Martin thought I’d be perfect for the part. Nora was the opposite of Ophelia. Treated like a pretty toy by her father and husband, but instead of succumbing, she fights back. Fighting back was something I was slowly learning to do. The play gave me a road map. Bonnie’s therapy was rebuilding my shattered self-worth. And Harmony had given me the peace to let it happen.

In the lobby’s dim, coolness, I waved at Frank Darian, our stage manager. He waved back from the box office where he was preparing for this Friday’s performance.

In the theater itself, the lights were low over the stage, casting spooky shadows on the sets. The chairs and tables of a 19th-century well-to-do home felt like a haunted house, waiting for Len, Lorraine, and myself to come give it life.

I found Marty upstairs in the offices with a pile of paperwork in front of him, as usual