The Uncoupling (22 page)

Her voice was a little too urgent, like always, but Marissa reluctantly agreed that she would stay in bed until the dress rehearsal, at which point she would leave it until after the performance, and then she would immediately return to the bed.

“Good,” said Ms. Heller. “Thank you.”

The drama teacher went back inside the school, and the two Lucys appeared, and so did Julie Zorn and Carrie Petito, everyone showing support even as they looked at her as if she had lost her mind. In the background, Marissa noticed a boy named Alex taking pictures with his cell phone. He was on the staff of the high school paper,
The Campobello Courier.
The paper usually only published sports pictures of athletes with long torsos and arms that reached up toward something just out of frame. Marissa was calmly talking to Willa and Carrie, when suddenly the whole bed was shoved forward as if it had been hit by something, and Marissa felt her head slam against the headboard. She looked up and saw Max Holleran and Dylan Maleska pushing the bed.

“Stop that!” Marissa shouted, but they wouldn’t. Because the parking lot was icy, the bed moved in long and short bursts like a sleigh. The boys were laughing, but their faces were unfriendly. That asshole Doug Zwern joined them, all of them trying to push her bed around, making it move a foot or so at a time, stopping and starting.

“Stop!” Marissa heard Willa cry too, and Willa swung an arm at Dylan and Max and Doug, who just ignored her. They would have overturned this bed if they could, tipping Marissa headfirst onto the parking lot. She wanted to say,
Look at yourselves,
and
Now you see why I have to do this.
Marissa reached backward and grabbed onto the headboard, holding on for dear life.

13
.

D
ory Lang didn’t even notice the commotion when they first arrived at school, because she was still talking to Willa in the mirror over the passenger seat. “So you’ll come home right after rehearsal?” she was saying. “And feel free to bring one of your friends to dinner.”

“Why would I bring someone home to dinner?” Willa said irritably. “I’ve got homework and everything. God, Mom, you think I’m so upset that I can’t be on my own for two minutes. Don’t you remember?
I
broke up with
him.
”

“Leave her alone, Dory,” Robby murmured from the wheel, but he was an outsider in this drama. In recent days, he’d retreated increasingly into himself, puttering aimlessly and eating more than usual. He had begun to develop a sad middle-aged gut, which he’d never had before in his life. It looked strange on his long, thin body, as if he were smuggling something across a border.

Robby seemed to have very little awareness of Willa’s despair over her recent breakup with Eli. He knew that it was over between them, but the specifics of his teenaged daughter’s unhappiness were lost on him. Much was lost on Dory as well, despite her efforts to understand. Since Willa had fallen under the spell and told Eli that they were done, she did not want to talk. Not at all. It was worse than when she and Eli were in love. It didn’t matter that Willa had been the one to break up with him; teenaged breakups practically killed both parties involved. Dory had only even learned about it when Fran Heller had told her at school on the Monday after it happened. Over that weekend, Willa had merely seemed moodier than usual, but she still hadn’t told her mother anything.

“Your daughter’s a heartbreaker,” Fran had said in the teachers’ room with a shake of her head.

“What do you mean?”

“Willa called it off,” said Fran. “It’s over, just like that. She stormed out of our house on Saturday night. He’s pretty crushed, poor kid.”

“Are you positive? It doesn’t sound like her,” Dory said. She knew of parents who suddenly found out that their kids were taking meth, their kids were pregnant, their kids were in trouble, and she’d always thought that she would be the kind of parent who would know what was going on, but she knew now that she would have known nothing; that she did know nothing. Even Carrie Petito’s home-pierced navel had festered for a long time before her parents had learned about it. The paradox was that so much information was out there and available to everyone now. You could learn everything about any topic imaginable, and you could stuff a paper for school with all the details that you could find, but you could not learn that Willa Lang had broken up with Eli Heller, until his mother happened to let you know.

The night after she’d heard the news, Dory cornered Willa at home, outside the upstairs bathroom; Willa nodded wearily and said yes, it was true, it was over between them, but she didn’t want to discuss it. “Are you sure?” Dory asked. “I just mean, isn’t there anything Dad or I can do to help you?” Willa regarded her with an expression of exaggerated incredulity.

They lived in a time in which it was tremendously difficult, as parents, to let children endure any pain. If you sensed their despair, you took it on as if it were your own. You let it ruin you, imagining that they, somehow, would be spared. They would live, and thrive, while you would die of their transferred misery. Lately, more than ever at the high school, Dory received e-mails from mothers when their children were having difficulties. They wrote:

Parents stepped in whenever they could, because they could not bear to see their children suffer. Dory Lang knew she was no different. But Willa wouldn’t let her in; in the hallway of the house, she had walked past Dory to the bathroom, and run the water for a long time, and probably cried, but Dory couldn’t do anything. “Would you look at that,” Robby said now as their car pulled into the parking lot. Willa and Dory turned away from their mirror stare-off and looked.

A canopy bed was wedged sideways across two spaces. It was a girl’s bed, big and white. The canopy was arched and scalloped, and various people stood around it, taking pictures with their cell phones. A van from News 8 was parked near the bed, and a cameraman was trying to find the best angle to shoot from. None of the Langs understood what was happening. Willa’s irritated gloom gave way to interest, and she said suddenly, “It’s
Marissa.
”

“It is?”

“Yes, that’s her bed,” said Willa, who had lain across the foot of her friend’s bed for many hours over the years and knew it well. “I’m positive, Mom. Dad, let me out, let me out,” she said, and Robby stopped the car and she unbelted herself and ran. Robby circled the lot, getting as close as he could, and they all saw that yes, it was Marissa Clayborn under the covers of the bed. Teachers and students surrounded her as if they were all at some sort of carnival and she was a centerpiece—say, the woman in a dunking booth.

“What do you think this is?” Robby asked.

They both agreed that they had no idea.

Marissa would not go back to school, she had apparently announced. “I’m going to stay in this bed, even if it’s moved from the school grounds, which I have been told it soon will be,” she told the reporter from News 8. “I will stay in my bed alone for as long as it takes, day and night. I’d like to be a symbol, and I’d like to encourage all other women to lie alone in their own beds, so to speak—to turn down sex with men until the war in Afghanistan is over. I am well aware that this will be considered a political stunt. But I’ll do whatever it takes. No more sex,” she said. “No more Lioness on the Cheese Grater.”

“What?” said the reporter. “What are you talking about?”

Dory had seen politically active kids before, over her years at the school. They wore armbands whenever it was called for, and once in a while they even lay down on their backs in the road. Some days at the entrance to the school, these same kids sold slices of a damp marble pound cake that a couple of girls had baked; other days they sold T-shirts. She used to give money to the kids who were protesting the war in Iraq; every day they sat there before classes started, and she thought they’d be there as long as the war went on. But one morning the folding table was gone, and a few days after that, the table was back, but with different students behind it. The two girls in the folding chairs wore cheerleading sweaters and skirts; one of the girls was pointy-nosed, haughty. There was a new sign up announcing that tickets were “onsale” for the Booster Gurlz Pep Rally. “Please help our cause,” the girls called when anyone walked by.

Back inside the school now, the hallways were loud with chatter. Dory Lang swung into the teachers’ room, Robby right behind her. Several teachers were already in there discussing Marissa and her bed. “Yeah, I get that she’s protesting the war in Afghanistan,” Mandelbaum was saying hotly to Abby Means, “and I agree that we should probably pull out all our troops as fast as we can and just focus on eliminating terrorists. But as far as I’ve heard, she has never once shown a political side. Why now, all of a sudden? It’s a legitimate question.”

“Very few of them are political,” said Bev Cutler.

“That isn’t true,” Robby put in. “Some are political online. I’ve got a couple of environmentalists in my class. They don’t do it in person in the way we’re used to. They have their blogs, and their urgent one-line messages, and they send mass e-mails. They organize.”

“I just don’t want her to lose her concentration,” said Fran Heller, pacing. “I went out there and got her to promise that she will be at the dress rehearsal and the performance; I told her that one of her friends could replace her in the bed when she came to the theater. That some other girl could be a ‘bed proxy.’ I made it sound like it was a real phrase. Anyway, all that matters is that she agreed she’d be there. The play will go on.”

“I heard,” said Abby Means, “that the actor who played Sherlock Holmes really began to believe he was Sherlock Holmes. He wore those clothes even off set. They say that he eventually went mad.”

There was silence; no one knew quite what to say, as usual, to Abby. Marissa Clayborn was not mentally ill. She was stronger and more clearheaded than almost all of the kids at school. The teachers dispersed; Dory went and stood before her first-period class, looking at their needy faces. Most of them were excited about Marissa and her bed. One girl said that it was clear that Marissa was angering the boys; a few of them had tried to push the bed around, the girl said, until the teachers had broken it up and made them go inside. There was definitely tension between people lately, observed the girl who juggled oranges and recited the Declaration of Independence on Friday nights at Just Chillin’. She added that, at this rate, by the end of the year no one would be involved with anyone. “We’re going to be
nuns
,” she said. Jen Heplauer, who had been dozing in the back of the room, her chin lowering then snapping up, suddenly awoke and nodded in agreement.

In the middle of class a boy said,
“Look,”
and they watched from the window as four men in maintenance uniforms gently lifted the bed, with Marissa still in it, and began to carry it off school grounds. She would continue her bed strike in her own bedroom; she would tell everyone that it didn’t matter where the bed was, just as long as she was in it and other people knew about it. Marissa looked up toward the window as the bed went by, and though it was hard to tell for sure, it seemed to Dory Lang as if she was making eye contact with her alone.

 

 

 

O
ccasionally, during the remaining hours of the school day, Dory thought about how Marissa Clayborn had looked at her from the moving bed. Marissa knew nothing of the Langs’ sexual impasse, of course. But Dory kept thinking about it. Between classes, she texted Leanne and asked her if she wanted to go to Peppercorns at the end of the day. “yes please,” Leanne wrote back. So there they were in the darkened interior at three thirty. It was probably too early to drink, but this was the hour of their liberation.

At the booth in the quiet, dead restaurant, the waitress dropped a couple of tabletlike menus. Soon the two women, their faces still cold and slapped-looking, gratefully swiped rounds of bread through the warm glue of a spinach-artichoke dip. “What a strange thing it was today, that bed,” said Leanne.

“But I almost understand it,” said Dory. “It’s dramatic more than political. It shakes everything up. I like that idea.”

“Oh, you and destroying things. That’s your theme, right?”

“What?”

“You said something about it at the potluck.”

“Right,” said Dory, “I did say that.” She looked down at her hands, her pioneer’s hands. “I have the nicest husband in the world,” she said, “and I’ve wrecked things. I’ve made him unhappy.”

“This was what you were talking about?” asked Leanne.

“Yeah. I basically gave up on the whole sleeping-together thing. I just stopped it. It’s been a while.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” said Leanne. “I wish I’d asked you more about it. I wish I hadn’t been so self-absorbed that night. But Gavin showed up with his wife, and since then it’s all been so strange. The car dealer keeps driving in circles around my condo. See? I’m still self-absorbed.”

“No,” said Dory. “You’re a good friend. I wasn’t ready to say anything at the time, really. I had no idea it was going to become a permanent thing. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Here’s my question to you,” Leanne said, putting down her water glass. “Is the choice in life to either have some overly intense and basically impractical relationships with men or else to settle down? Are those our only options? And if so, how depressing is that?”

What was there to tell her? Yes, Leanne, you can be either excited or bored. And you can choose excited, but even so, if you decide to settle down with one of the people who excites you, for a while it will be like living inside a magical cupboard together, and then one day you will realize that the excitement you used to feel has diminished. And then, another day, that it is gone, and your heart will break.