“Of course not.”
“Then please. Bring a positive headspace to the next rehearsal, and I’m sure you’ll see the play begin to come together.”
“Okay,” I mumbled. “Sorry.”
Reanne hugged me. She was a huggy woman. “You’re more important than you know, Sadye.”
I thanked her, and walked outside, heading toward my Stage Combat class.
I couldn’t help but notice that I’d been told to shut up.
LATER THAT afternoon, I got out of Stage Combat and was walking to the cafeteria when I saw Demi and Lyle ahead of me on the path.
Demi reached over and took Lyle’s hand. Just for a moment—squeezed it and dropped it. Then Lyle leaned over and whispered in Demi’s ear, letting his hand touch the back of Demi’s neck.
There was something between them. I could tell.
“What’s up with you and Lyle?” I whispered to Demi while we were in line for tacos and Lyle had gone to get pasta salad.
“I should have told you, Sadye. I’m so sorry.” Demi looked contrite.
“But what is it?”
He took a plate of tacos and put them on his tray. “I don’t know what to say. It’s only been a couple days.”
“A couple days?”
“I should have told you. My bad.”
“You wouldn’t mess with Lyle, would you?” I said. “Not like, to get back at Blake?”
It popped out of my mouth, accusing without my intending to. Because Lyle looked so happy. In love.
Whatever was going on between them, it was a big deal to Lyle. That was certain.
“Sadye, what are you saying?” Demi stopped halfway to the soda machine and looked at me.
“I hope you’re not messing with him, that’s all.”
“What?”
“I hope you’re not messing with him.”
“I heard you,” Demi said under his breath as people milled around us. “I—where does that come from? No one said I was messing with anyone.”
“I know, but—”
“Really. When have I ever messed with anyone? Tell me.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“How did you mean it, then? Because it sounds to me like you’re saying I mess with people.”
“I—” This was all going wrong.
“Whose side are you on, here?” Demi looked hostile. “Mine or Lyle’s?”
“Yours. Yours. Of course, yours.”
“Then act like it.” Demi turned his back and went to sit with Lyle and Nanette.
DEMI AND LYLE fell in love. Real love, based on huge admiration for each other’s talent, passion for the theater, and a hunger for affection, plus a true interest in what the other one had to say. They accepted each other’s faults, and teased each other, and had occasional spats about stupid things, and made up. They found each other beautiful and adorable. They told each other secrets.
Within days they were an established couple, so clear in their connection that even Candie just accepted them as a pair. Lots of nights they held court on the roof of the boys’ dorm. After rehearsal or evening rec, the two of them made the eighteen-minute beer run down to the convenience store off campus, then lay on the roof drinking and staring at the stars, while acolytes like me, Iz, and Nanette basked in the glow of their happiness.
Demi was at home with Lyle at Wildewood. More at home than he ever had been anywhere else in the world.
More at home than he’d been with his parents.
And more at home than he had been with me.
Gone was the straight-boy drag and the drab don’t-notice-me clothes. And gone with them was the urgency of the Sadye/Demi connection, what we had when I was the only one who loved what he was really like.
Demi at Wildewood and Demi with Lyle was Demi freed from the half-closet he’d lived in since long before we met. It was Demi who knew who he was— without fear.
I tried not to be jealous.
I GOT BACK into Demi’s good graces two days after our fight by writing a song. Made an early morning run down to Cumberland to buy notebook paper and a hotpink pen, then wrote it out in nice handwriting and passed it to Demi after Acting.
Demi and Lyle,
Yes, Lyle and Demi,
Oh, they will be together
In health and in phlegm-y.
Lyle and Demi,
Yes, Demi and Lyle,
Although I must admit
That their age is juvenile,
Lyle and Demi,
Yes, Demi and Lyle,
Their bond is even stronger than
A hungry crocodile!
They love each other so,
It’s not just about the sex.
Yes, their bond is so much stronger than
Tyrannosaurus rex!
All was forgiven. Our Second Official Quarrel was over.
Still, I think that was when I began to lose Demi.
* * *
IN ACTING one day, Morales separated us into four groups and gave each group a physical state we had to work with. “Abdominal pain” he said to one. “Alcohol stupor” to another. And “extreme exhaustion” to a third. But to my group of three girls, he said “pregnant.”
Now, I’ve had abdominal pain. I’ve been exhausted, though maybe not extremely. And I’m sad to say I’ve been in an alcohol stupor, thanks to Demi’s parents’ open wine cabinet and our dumb attempt to be cosmopolitan while watching Damn Yankees. But I have never been pregnant, or known anyone pregnant, and it seemed to me a bit unfair.
But hey, actors have to portray emotions and situations they’ve never experienced, right? And the point of the exercise must be (I said to myself as I tried to walk around the room eight months pregnant) that afterward, Morales is going to give us techniques for pushing ourselves into mental and physical spaces we’ve never experienced.
But he didn’t. Instead, he stopped us and made a few quick comments. “Demi, great commitment, but when we go next I’m going to ask you to pull it back a bit. A softer touch. Veronica, you’re acting with your face but not your body. I want you to bring the body into it. And. Let me see.” He walked over to me and snapped his fingers in my face. “What’s your name, again, what is it? Quickly.”
“Sadye,” I told him. “I was in your show. And I’m not Marlon Brando. Remember?”
“You are supposed to be what? What are you supposed to be?”
“Pregnant.”
“Then what are you giving me, this waddley thing you’re doing? Show everyone what you were doing.”
I did my pregnant lady walk as well as I could.
“Stop! Stop!” Morales cringed as if my acting were causing him physical pain. “Think about it from your feet. From your torso. Through your shoulders. Because right now, no one knows you are pregnant. The audience does not know she is pregnant!” he shouted. “Listen. Everyone, give me your complete attention, because this is important. When I am directing a play— when anyone is directing a play—it is your job as actors to give the director what he wants. You may not do it well, not yet. You may even do it badly, or he may want you to do it a different way than what you try at first. But you absolutely must deliver what he asks for. That is the skill of acting. If he wants you to be pregnant, give it to him. Then he can modify it, or ask you to go further, or ask you to take it in a new direction. But do not, do not, do not, give him a nothing little waddle. Because then, you know what you will be? You will be out of a job.”
He returned to his stool and held up his hands. “Okay, again. Same physical states, but deliver them. Deliver them up for your audience.”
After class I went up to Morales. “I don’t know anything about pregnancy,” I told him. “I mean, I know the basics, but I don’t know how it feels or what people go through. So I was wondering—”
“Yes?” He looked at me but his eyes were hard.
“I was wondering how you’re supposed to get to that point where you can deliver, like you said. How you get some place
when you’ve never been there.”
“What you do is you fake it,” he answered. “And then as soon as you’re out of rehearsal, you run to the bookstore. And you read. And you talk to pregnant women. And you make sure you know every detail there is to know about pregnancy before it’s time to go to work again. Because one day of weakness is understandable. But a second—that’s just irresponsible.”
“Isn’t there a craft involved?” I asked. “A way of doing it that you can teach us?”
Morales shouldered his bag. “I am teaching it to you. It seems to me you are making it more difficult than it has to be.”
“But how did you learn to do what you do?” I wanted to know. “I mean, the shifting actors on stage, seeing how to make scenes better—how did you learn it?”
He looked at his watch. “I’m a busy person,” Morales said. “Just come to class and listen, all right? I know you’re enthusiastic, but this isn’t a private tutorial.”
EVER SINCE Reanne’s scolding, I behaved myself in Midsummer rehearsals: I was off-book early, communed seriously with the forest spirits whenever I was on tree duty, and developed a macho walk and a nasal tone of voice for Peter Quince. I even tried to explain to the lamentable girl playing Titania that her character was in love with the donkey because of its prodigious male equipment. But it was all in vain. Midsummer established itself fully and probably permanently as a denizen of Suckville. A perfect sequel to Bedsheet Oedipus.
But here is something important to understand about Wildewood: even when I was feeling indignant, humiliated, talentless, dismayed about unitards, whatever—I wasn’t miserable. Far from it. I was alive there, not stuck in the razzle-dazzle–deprived silence of Ohio. Conversations mattered at Wildewood, people felt strongly, and the moments of despair or embarrassment were followed, always, by times of palpable excitement.
There was the day Nanette and I went to a gospel concert for evening rec—one of the few nights she wasn’t in Show Boat rehearsal, and we loved that big Jesus-y sound so much we stood up on our red velvet chairs, clapping and dancing and waving our hands in the air as the choir sang “When the Saints Go Marching In.” When we turned around (we were near the front) we saw that the whole audience was on their seats behind us, and we all sang with the choir on “Loves Me Like a Rock.”
Or when Iz and I went to dinner several nights in full Restoration Squash-your-boobs-up regalia— white powdered wigs, corsets, fake beauty marks, and all. Or when Jade and I grabbed brooms from a supply closet and reenacted the “Bushel and a Peck” dance, impromptu in the hall, while Demi and Lyle harmonized the song, Demi in full falsetto.
Or when I dared Candie, Iz, and Nanette to sing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” at top volume in the hallways at seven in the morning, banging on everyone’s doors, and they did it, and I had to buy them each a chocolate bar every day for five days. Or when we lay on the grass by the path, speaking in French accents to the boys who walked by.
Or this: one day, I took a bathroom break during Singing. Walking down the hall of the rehearsal building, I passed three other classes. Piano music thumped through the closed doors, and as I got closer I heard one group doing scales, one stumbling through harmonies to “What a Piece of Work Is Man,” and the other in gleeful chorus, soaring through the syncopations of “One” from A Chorus Line. Inside the next room, which had an open door, Tamar and her assistant were marking out steps for Cats, which would rehearse there in the afternoon. Just before the bathroom, the hall was clogged with a rack of Show Boat costumes: frilly gowns with huge skirts, brown sackcloth jackets, and a row of pink parasols hanging by their handles. I stopped and fingered the polyester sleeve of one of the dresses, touched the rhinestones on their necklines, listened to the rustle of fabrics, barely audible over the “Five, six, seven, eight” coming from the choreographer’s practice and the music from the classrooms. Even an ordinary hallway in need of a paint job was alive with glitter and sweat. Every single day at Wildewood was music, dance, comedy, drama.
So despite what happened later, remember this: I never, ever wanted to go home.
(click, shuffle, bang)
Sadye: Demi! Don’t drop it.
Demi: Darling, I already dropped it.
Sadye: You lose your microcassette privileges. I’m holding it.
Demi: Okay, but I’m in the middle. We’ll get better sound if I hold it.
Sadye: Okay, take it. But don’t drop it again. (shuffle, muffle)
Demi: It’s July eighteenth, we think, and we’re documenting the late-night stargazing ritual. Sadye, Lyle, Theo, Nanette, and I are currently on the roof of the boys’ dorm--
Lyle: As we are most nights--
Demi: --until Farrell comes up and kicks the girls out.
Theo: Well, Theo is new.
Sadye: It’s only his second night.
Lyle: We’re corrupting him. We expect it to be an easy task, however.
Nanette: Pounce!
Sadye: Shut up, Nanette!
Theo: What?
Nanette: Never mind. Theo, tell me something. Are you going with Bec?
Theo: What?
Lyle: Ooh, I didn’t know he might be attached when I invited him up here. Am I out of the loop?
Theo: No.
Nanette: I’ve seen you with her a lot, that’s all. I like to know things about people I share this roof with. And now that it looks like you’re going to be a regular, I need to find out your status. Will you be bringing your girl up?
Sadye: Nanette!
Theo: She’s not my girl. We--um. We’ve hung around together a couple times. She’s got a boyfriend back home.
Demi: If you’re having trouble with the ladies, Theo--Lyle and
I have some advice for you.
Lyle: (giggling)
Theo: What?
Demi: You need to wear some tighter pants.
Theo: Ha!
Demi: I’m serious! You have got to show your shape more.
Sadye: Ignore them, darling. They just want to see your buns for their own gay purposes.
Nanette: Okay, Theo. One more question. What’s your favorite kind of ice cream?
Sadye: Nanette!
Theo: Um--
Demi: I love all ice cream. I am an equal opportunity ice-cream lover.
Lyle: An ice-cream slut, that’s what you are.
Demi: It’s true. Peanut butter, coconut, rum raisin--even the nasty flavors, I still like them.
Lyle: I have a favorite flavor.
Demi: You do?
Lyle: Chocolate. Like you, baby.
Demi: Aw, that’s so sweet. Isn’t he sweet?
Nanette: Lover boys, I was asking Theo. Not you.
Sadye: Yeah, I want to hear what Theo says, actually.
Theo: I’m gonna go with mint chocolate chip.
Nanette: Ooh! I knew it!
Sadye: Shut up!
Demi: Oh, I get it now! He likes mint chocolate chip!
Sadye: Sorry, Theo. They’re being ridiculous. Do you want a beer?
Theo: Yeah, actually. Sure.
Demi: Me too.
Lyle: Me three.
(the sound of clinking bottles)
Theo: I’ve been meaning to ask you guys. Does Farrell turn a blind eye to the beer, or what?
Lyle: Exactly. A blind eye.
Theo: Do you pay him off?
Demi: (shocked) No!
Lyle: Ooh, maybe we should.
Demi: So far, he’s been cool.
Lyle: We could pay him off in beer.
Demi: He hasn’t seen the beer, Theo. Lyle is teasing you.
Lyle: It’s true. We hide the beer. But I doubt he’d do anything if he saw it.
Sadye: Where’s Iz? For documentation purposes, Iz and Candie are sometimes here as well.
Nanette: Iz was taking a shower and going to bed.
Demi: Morales is working her crazy hard in Birdie. She showed the “Spanish Rose” number tonight and he’s got her dancing on the tables and
doing counterpoint rhythms with those little clickety--what are they?
Sadye: Castanets.
Demi: Castanets. Yeah. It’s gonna be good.
Nanette: Candie’s not even out of rehearsal yet. Little Shop is having technical problems with the man-eating plant.
Sadye: Back to documenting.
Lyle: Do we have to document?
Sadye: It’s for posterity.
Theo: Why are you documenting? I mean it’s cool, obviously, but why?
Demi: We’re all gonna be famous some day.
Sadye: Well, speak for yourself.
Demi: We are, all of us. Isn’t it obvious?
Sadye: I’m just saying, the odds are against every single one of us being famous.
Demi: Not true. Look at John Cusack and Jeremy Piven and Joan Cusack. They all went to drama school together.
Theo: They did?
Demi: Absolute fact. And Steve Pink, too, who wrote High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank.
Lyle: I never heard of Steve Pink.
Demi: That’s because you’re an ignoramus.
Lyle: You call me an ignoramus because you’re jealous of my superior theater history knowledge.
Demi: If you haven’t heard of
Steve Pink, you’re at least a little bit of an ignoramus.
Lyle: That’s it. I’m going to the computer lab and Googling him tomorrow. I don’t think Steve Pink even exists. I think you made him up.
Demi: I did not!
Sadye: Okay, enough, you two. Everyone lie down on your backs and I’m going to make you serenade me in harmony.
Nanette: Excellent. What are we singing this time?
Sadye: “The Telephone Hour.” Does everyone know it?
Theo: Of course.
Nanette: Of course.
Lyle: Of course. Anyone who doesn’t know “The Telephone Hour” is an ignoramus.
(shuffle, click)
ON JULY 27TH, Nanette was scheduled to head off to her Secret Garden audition in Los Angeles. She got permission to miss a day in order to do it, and her father Fed-Ex’d her sheet music because she had to learn a new audition piece to show she could sing the difficult music in the play. She rehearsed a song from Into the Woods with the M-TAP teacher. She was taking an early morning cab to the airport, flying to California, and doing the audition that same afternoon.