The Uncoupling Read online

  Willa was afraid, at first, that they would think he was weird. But then, even worse, she was afraid that they wouldn’t; that Marissa would remark, “Oh no, Eli isn’t weird at all. In fact, I would have to say that he’s pretty fascinating.” And that then Marissa would turn her gaze to Eli, who would see that she had so much more to offer him—emotionally, sexually, intellectually, you name it—than Willa did.

  As they sat together on the dumpster, the light of the sky began to deepen and Willa said something about having to leave soon in order to be home for dinner. “Ah yes, the family dinner,” said Eli. “That sacred event. Everyone idealizes the family dinner, even my mom. She wants us to sit there together. It’s like some study was done, and they found out that people who eat dinner with their family don’t do drugs, or something like that.”

  “People who eat dinner with their family become angels in heaven when they die,” said Willa. “Or even before they die.”

  “People who eat dinner with their family have the power of invisibility,” he said. “Or they wish they did, so they wouldn’t have to sit there at that table.”

  “My parents make it into such a big ritualized event,” Willa said. Suddenly family dinner felt like the biggest injustice. “It’s like a goddamn Japanese tea ceremony or something,” she said. “I mean,” she added nervily, working herself up, “who are they to think it’s the most important thing in the world. To think that I have nothing better to do than sit there with them.” She pictured her father’s long and handsome but slightly faded face, and her mother’s pretty, rabbity features, and then she thought of all they had done for her, and she felt guilty. But not too guilty.

  They walked in silence back to Tam o’ Shanter, entered their separate homes, said cursory hellos to parents—“Hey,” Willa said, uninflected, not waiting for them to reply—then she and Eli met up again on Farrest. Though other creatures were in their midst, it seemed as if nobody paid Eli and Willa much attention, and so they were able to be alone together. A hawk flew overhead; this was Marissa Clayborn. She often took the form of this graceful, commanding flying animal, and Willa looked up and watched her circle and dip. Luckily, Marissa didn’t seem to want to come in for a landing.

  As the days passed and Eli and Willa grew closer, he continued to repeat the remark about wanting to see her with her shirt off. Would she, Willa Lang, a very undaring sophomore who behaved more like a seventh-grader in certain respects, actually take her shirt off for the new boy? Finally, as though an elaborate deal had been brokered between their representatives, it was established that, yes, she would.

  One afternoon, when his mother would be staying late after school for some planning meeting about the play, Willa and Eli went to his house. It was there, they both understood, that the removal of the shirt would take place, for a start—the unveiling, the grand moment, the beginning. The living room of the Hellers’ house was fairly conventional, Willa was relieved to see when they went inside. The furniture was puffy and swollen and modern, and there were art prints on the walls, and an unflattering childhood photo of Eli in a shirt with a huge, winged collar. On the far wall of the living room hung the masks of tragedy and comedy, one red and one blue, both of them kiln-glazed and shining. “Those are neat,” Willa said, feeling so strongly that they were actually ugly and almost grotesque that she had automatically thought to say the opposite of what she felt.

  “They sort of creep me out a little,” said Eli. “They were given to my mom by the theater department in Cobalt when she left.” He grabbed a gallon of milk and two glasses and a couple of packaged doughnuts. “Come on,” he instructed, and she followed him up the stairs. Only when they were inside the cool blue of his bedroom—a blue version of Farrest, she thought—did Willa Lang feel relief. They sat on his bed, which he had carefully made that morning. Eli was a neat boy, and a pair of pajamas lay folded on his pillow. In the blue light Eli and Willa faced each other, and he poured her a glass of milk and held it out. “My special concoction,” he said. “It’s called Shirt-Be-Gone.”

  She drank, then bit into a doughnut, and he did the same, after which they put glasses and plates aside. Willa reached up with a tentative hand and unbuttoned the top button of her pale yellow blouse. She kept unbuttoning until she was done, and then she swiftly opened her bra, which was one of those front-clasp kinds. The two pieces of it just fell away; she had planned this, of course, had wanted the bra to break apart like the sections of an orange, and so it did.

  Eli took in a hard breath. “You are so beautiful,” he said in a low, new voice; then, of course, he couldn’t help but kiss her and touch her shoulders, and finally, of course, one of her breasts, which all at once changed texture, and so did the other one. It was as though they were corresponding with each other in some secret, unknowable way, like quarks, and then, to her shock, her vagina became part of it all; yes, “vagina” was the only word for it at this moment, for you couldn’t say “down there” anymore, which was too dumb and vague. Specificity was required now; precision.

  She felt as if she were unfolding, unclasping, being saturated, falling to bits, intensely whirled around like someone blindfolded and about to smack a piñata. Truthfully? It was exceptionally great, though there wasn’t a free moment in which you could even reflect upon the greatness, for you were too busy. Your body just kept experiencing. It was no wonder that people not only liked to do sexual things, but also made entire multimedia presentations of themselves doing them. It was all fun in the way she used to think a water park was fun, or cawing with laughter with her friends at a joke that would have been hilarious to no one else.

  Willa was a shy girl, easily startled, and now she saw that apparently she was easily excited as well, given the right circumstances. Eli was more than the intense new boy, the drama teacher’s son, her father’s favorite student, a boy who loved books. He also apparently loved breasts, or anyway, he loved hers. He had called them—her—beautiful. “This feels really good,” she said.

  “Intensely good,” he whispered into her neck, beneath the ledge of her hair, and she noticed that he smelled of doughnut and milk, which was exactly the way she smelled too. Willa lay back against his narrow bed and felt the lump of folded pajamas beneath her head as Eli loomed over her. Pleasure and dread fought for primacy inside her crowded, pickled brain, but then dread lost out to pleasure—dread just became inert, and disappeared, and then Willa was oddly fearless, wanting to know what would happen next. Eli took off his shirt, too, lying beside her so they faced each other. His chest was broad and pale with a light scatter of freckles and, again, some fur. She knew that soon they would be making all kinds of leaps: they had already gone from no kissing to kissing ; soon they would go from kissing to touching, then one day in the near future from touching to “going the distance,” as Marissa Clayborn had referred to her own involvement with two different boys. “Going the distance” seemed a good way to think of what it would be like. It—sex, actual sex—created a distance between you and everyone except the other person. You were in a hot-air balloon, and you waved goodbye to your sweet but clueless mother and father, and even your dazed and innocent old dog. Goodbye, goodbye, you called as you went the distance.

  For now, though, there was only kissing. Eli cupped and held her small breasts, and put his mouth on each of them too, and Willa knew that there was no one in the world she could tell about this, no one at all. It seemed inappropriate to tell Marissa, and definitely inappropriate to tell her mother. But then she thought: I can tell him. I can talk to him! Somehow, she had forgotten.

  6.

  Ms. Heller told her drama class the name of this year’s play, and then Marissa told me what it is, but it went out of my head,” Willa said to her parents after school one extremely cold day. She’d wandered home late, as she often did since she’d been seeing Eli. Seeing. Dory Lang disliked that word, though it was accurate. Willa and Eli did in fact see each other, and they saw almost no one and nothing else. Willa often lo
oked past Robby and Dory at home; she seemed impatient with their slowness, their literalness, their demands on her time. So now, whenever Willa was willing to initiate a conversation with them, to engage fully, Dory was overly happy.

  “You don’t have any idea what it is?” she asked Willa.

  “It’s definitely something Greek.”

  “Well, that narrows it,” Robby said.

  The play, they learned after Willa texted Marissa to find out, was Lysistrata, the Aristophanes comedy, first performed in 411 B.C., about a woman who leads the women of Greece in a sex strike in order to put an end to the drawn-out Peloponnesian War. Dory had seen a version of the play performed back when she and Robby lived in Brooklyn, and she remembered it not only as an antiwar piece, but also an outright sex comedy—a sometimes supremely dirty work in which the women were urged by their leader, Lysistrata, to abstain from having sex with men until all fighting ceased.

  “Remember, in the version we saw, that one position they were told to stop doing? I can almost think of the name. . . . Wait, yes, I actually remember. It was called ‘The Lioness on the Cheese Grater,’ ” Dory said. “Whatever that possibly was.”

  “It sounds painful,” Robby said, and Dory agreed, and Willa just looked embarrassed by the whole conversation. The play itself would likely be embarrassing, Dory feared. Men walked around with gigantic erections onstage (“Also painful,” Robby remarked later), and there were many explicit sexual references and a winkwink quality that made it a surprising choice for a high school play.

  “What’s Fran thinking?” Dory asked. “A play about women turning down men sexually? Parents will complain, even in our town.”

  “That would have been a good choice,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Our Town,” said Robby. “But I think this’ll be fine too.” He was certain that, in Fran Heller’s version of Lysistrata, “sex” would somehow be reframed as “embracing.” There would be no lioness, and no cheese grater for the lioness to lie upon, grating, gyrating, humping, shredding, doing whatever was meant to be done in that unlikely sounding position. Or, if the lioness and the cheese grater were allowed to remain, they would be benign and whimsical. The play would be a cheerful parable about political activism and men and women and love and war, and the principal would send a reassuring e-mail to all parents, letting them know this in advance of auditions. “I applaud our new drama teacher for making such a great and innovative choice,” Gavin McCleary would probably write. He wouldn’t know, or be able to warn them, that the spell would imminently arrive, and that unhappiness would descend upon them.

  “As I think about it more,” said Robby, “I suspect the play itself will be pretty easy to do. All you need are a bunch of Styrofoam columns and a frieze and a cornice for a decent-looking Acropolis, which I seem to remember that the Chorus of Women are supposed to storm, because the treasury is kept there or something . The stage lighting can be just a series of simple blue and white spots. At the end, there won’t be a lot of set to strike. You can clean up and go home. And wait, just watch,” he added. “Many parents are actually going to like the choice.”

  “Why do you think that?” Dory asked.

  “Because there are a lot of female parts in the play.”

  “Indeed there are,” she said. They often made jokes like this, back and forth; having lived together so long, they found that their humor was interchangeable. Like most couples, they were funny mostly to themselves and each other.

  He was right about the play; there were plenty of roles in which girls could be cast. At a school like Elro, regardless of your talent or lack of it, if you simply showed up to audition you would be put to some sort of use. In addition to the individual speaking parts, there were two choruses in Lysistrata, male and female. Casually, Willa told her parents that despite what she’d said at an earlier point, she had decided to try out for the play after all, though she didn’t hold out much hope of actually getting a speaking part. Because of her relationship with Eli, she knew it would be nepotism if Fran cast her in a real role. Her parents certainly understood that a starring role would never go to the recessive Willa Lang. It would go, as usual, to Marissa Clayborn, who deserved it.

  Two days later, after one intense afternoon of auditions, the cast list was posted. Dory had tried to stay uninvolved, but she couldn’t do that. She was pretty sure that Willa would get some sort of nominal part, even though Willa wasn’t an actor and likely had no natural ability. Over the years, when Dory had come to watch Willa perform in small classroom presentations, she had worn a mother’s bright, excited expression as she observed her daughter’s stiffness and listened to her muted speech, whether Willa was a Navajo woman, or Turkey-Lurkey, or, once, a hydrogen atom. Now, Dory just wanted to see Willa’s name printed on the cast list. It seemed important that Willa’s name be there, and even though Dory felt it would, she still worried in a slightly sickened way that somehow it would not.

  Carrying her coffee down the hall toward the teachers’ room that morning, walking past the glass showcase and the exit sign, she heard shouts up ahead. Girls and a few boys were collected by the bulletin board outside the auditorium, and Willa was somewhere in that cluster. “Oh my God,” one girl said to another. “I knew you’d get it.” Dory walked over, and the girls parted so that the teacher could get a glimpse too. At the top of the sheet, she saw:LYSISTRATA . . . . . . Marissa Clayborn

  Marissa, coolheaded and straight-backed, was allowing herself to be hugged by her friends. Of course she was Lysistrata; it was a good fit. Fran Heller had explained that there wouldn’t be any understudies. She’d never needed them in her entire career in high school theater; probably, Dory thought, this was because the actors would be too daunted at the idea of telling Ms. Heller they were sick and couldn’t make a performance. It would be easier to perform with a fever, delirious. Well below Marissa’s name, somewhere near the bottom in a heap of the willing, were the names of the others—kids who just wanted to be in a play, any play, and didn’t need the glory of a big part:CHORUS OF WOMEN . . . . . .

  Lucy Neels

  Carrie Petito

  Julie Zorn

  Jade Stills

  Willa Lang

  Willa. Yes! thought her mother. Willa had made it. It wasn’t much, but she was in, and that was enough. Rehearsals would start that afternoon. It had been snowing all day, and when the bell rang, Dory found herself in coat and scarf, returning to the hallway by the auditorium. She stood beside the showcase, which held old framed photos of previous theatrical productions and a big silver loving cup that had been given by a long-gone graduating class to the cast and crew of You Can’t Take It with You. The inscription read, “With our heartfelt thanks, from the class of 1969.” The silver was tarnished, but the words were still legible. Dory sometimes saw that loving cup behind the glass and thought of all the kids who had been in the plays here at the school, then left, getting older and older. A high school play was a time of high emotion and meaning; if you were in a play, you felt as if the play mattered. The success or failure of any production seemed like a real reflection on you personally. Dory had wanted Willa to be part of such an experience, and now it looked as if she would.

  Dory walked toward the auditorium, and when she got close, one of the doors was suddenly pushed open from inside, and all at once Dory was like one of the students who were always dying to get a look into the teachers’ room. She stopped right where she was and swung her head to see inside, though from here all she could see was dimness, with shapes moving distantly. There came the sound of girls laughing; was that Willa in there already? Even though Dory’s coat was on and Robby expected to meet her at the exit near the parking lot so they could drive home together, she very much wanted to go in. If she was really late, he would assume that something had come up, and he’d just go home on his own; this was how it worked between them. So now she grabbed the door before it shut again, and she slipped inside.

  Fran Heller sto
od onstage in front of the cast, which was made up mostly of girls, and a handful of boys, all of them sitting in the first few rows. Many of them didn’t yet know Fran Heller well, but the students in her classes thought she was an exciting teacher, if a bit of a loose cannon. They already called her “Ms. H.” Apparently, she might say anything, kids warned one another. She might lose her temper in front of her class, but it was only because she was excited about theater, and wanted everyone to do their best. Some of the students knew that they would probably have to be publicly humiliated by Ms. Heller once in a while in order to reap the benefits of being in her class, or in her play, but they didn’t seem to mind. Dory Lang, watching Fran conduct the first rehearsal, felt irritated, even a little jealous.

  “Welcome, everyone, to the first day of hell,” said Fran. “No, seriously, I am definitely going to work you hard, but I expect that we’ll all have a great time along the way. The performance—and it’s going to be one performance only, opening night and closing night, because that’s the way I like to do things—will be on the first Friday in February, which gives us over two months to get it right. I like to take a leisurely time with my rehearsals. We’ll work during vacation, so nobody plan to fly somewhere to visit Grandma and Grandpa for Christmas, okay?” There was silence. “Okay?” she asked again, and they understood that the question wasn’t rhetorical, and around the room the kids raggedly replied, “Okay.”

  “Do you know what the name ‘Lysistrata’ means?” Ms. Heller asked. There were murmurs again, but no one gave an actual answer. It was as if she knew this would be their response, and she looked out at them with her hand shielding her eyes as she articulated, “ ‘She Who Disbands Armies.’ ” She gazed directly at Marissa Clayborn, then said, “And throughout the rehearsals, Lysistrata, that will be your job. To disband armies. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of practice.” The room was puzzled. “A joke,” added the drama teacher, and some of the kids laughed politely. “Okay, let me give you all my sense of the play.” Fran lowered herself to sit on the edge of the stage.