Inevitable and Only(32)
But Mom poked her head into my room as soon as Raven picked up the phone.
“No phone time after eight,” she said. “Homework time. Then bed.”
No phone time after eight? “Since when?”
“And no talking back, young lady.”
“Jeez,” I whispered to Raven, going downstairs. “I guess I have to talk to you in the basement.”
But Josh was already down there, practicing. “Mom asked me to practice down here so she could go to sleep early.”
“Never mind,” I sighed to Raven. “I’ll just talk to you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she said. “Hang in there, National Park.” Sometimes it made me laugh when she called me that. Tonight it just reminded me of Rain and Bow and wacky names and killing the conversation.
And Mom and Dad and Josh and Elizabeth, laughing around a dinner table without me.
I did my homework on the couch, then fell asleep reading the introduction to Much Ado. When I woke up around midnight, I saw that Dad had come downstairs and fallen asleep in the armchair next to me. Because I’d taken his spot.
What a mess.
The next day was rough. I had trouble keeping my eyes open in all my classes, even drama. We were working on our scenes from The Crucible, and I’d been paired up with Sam Shotwell—at long last. (Thank Zeus I’d worn something nice today: saddle shoes, paired with my red plaid skirt, purple tights, and a low-cut black sweater.) We were doing the scene where Elizabeth Proctor confronts her husband, John, about sleeping with their former servant, Abigail, who is now accusing Elizabeth of witchcraft—hoping to get Elizabeth sent to the gallows so Abigail can marry John herself. It wasn’t exactly the most romantic scene.
We were trying to memorize our lines, to get “off book,” because Robin wouldn’t let us start working on blocking—stage directions—until the lines themselves were “engraved into our bodies,” as he put it. (Which sounded sort of painful.) Sam clearly hadn’t worked on his lines over the weekend. Not that I had either—I’d completely forgotten about the assignment, what with dress buying and churchgoing and all—but it was a short scene, and there weren’t that many lines.
“I’m sorry,” Sam finally said, after our sixth attempt to get through the scene without picking up our books. “I’ll work on it tonight and be better for next class. Let’s just use the script for today.” So we read through it again, on book.
“Inevitable and only, people!” Robin kept calling, marching around the room. “Each line must be the inevitable and only continuation of the one before it. Don’t read your lines. Listen to your partner and respond. Listen for what makes your next line inevitable.”
I liked playing Elizabeth Proctor’s character. It was a challenge to understand where she was coming from—hard to get into her head. An important plot point was that she couldn’t tell a lie. She blamed herself for John’s infidelity, saying she’d been a cold woman and her neglect had forced him into Abigail’s arms. At the end, she let her husband give himself up to the gallows, because she knew that was the only way he could feel that his soul was cleansed of his sin. And yet, by the end of the play you had respect for this woman, not just pity. She stood by a code of ethics that didn’t make sense to me, but you couldn’t help admiring the fervor with which she believed in it.
I wondered if I could ever feel that way about Elizabeth’s religion—not Proctor, the one who was sleeping in my bedroom every night.
Sam and I stumbled through the scene one last time, then he threw his book down in disgust and said he was going to the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the stage and watched Robin coach Zephyr, who was paired up with a quiet girl named Nina. She always sounded too terrified to speak above a whisper. They were working on the scene at the very end of Act Two, when John Proctor finds out that his new servant girl, Mary Warren, knows about his past with Abigail. He tries to bully her into confessing that all the servant girls are fabricating their stories of witchcraft at Abigail’s bidding. Nina, her eyes widening as Zephyr ranted and raved, with his hands buried in his thick hair, was actually sort of perfect for the role. So was he, of course. Zephyr could play any role he wanted to.
“Cut!” Robin yelled, waving his arms. “What does that mean, ‘only what we always were, but naked now’?” he asked Nina, quoting a line Zephyr had just spoken.
She bit her lip. “Um. They’re, um, they’re being uncovered?”
“Not they, we. You are Mary Warren, Nina. Think like Mary Warren. What are you doing to John Proctor here? Not taking his clothes off, obviously. But uncovering him, yes. In what way?”
“Um, uncovering him, like, for who he really is?”
Zephyr frowned down at his hands. “Who he’s always been. That’s what he says. ‘Only what we always were.’”
“Right,” Robin said, addressing Zephyr now. “You say, ‘no great change.’ This is not some moment of epiphany, of coming to understand that you’re someone totally different from who you thought you were. This is about acknowledging what was buried inside you all along. Who you are even though maybe you’d been masking it, or trying to be someone else.”
Zephyr was still staring at his hands, not making eye contact with Robin, but Nina was scribbling notes on her script. I wondered if Zephyr resented the direction. Why? Robin was right.