The Uncoupling (25 page)

In a quiet stage voice, Willa read aloud:

Then she heard a slap, and then another and another, at her window. At first it seemed branchlike, or even like hail, but then it was too rhythmic for that. Willa went to the window as a big clod of ice and snow and dirt hit the pane and made her jump back. Stepping forward, she looked out and saw Eli standing below, lit up by the outside light over the back door. Looking down at the top of his hair and his unmittened hands, she was reminded again that he would not be hers forever, that he was not hers now, and that her decision had been harsh but correct.

Willa unfastened the window and leaned out. “Eli,” she said. “What are you doing? Go home.”

“I wanted you to see what’s going on with me,” he said. “What you
did.
You see me at school since we broke up, and you think I’m doing okay, right? You think I must be
managing
because I’m not lying down dead in the hallway, and I’m not spray-painting things about you on the overpass. Well, I’m not doing okay, for your information
.
” He pulled a whiskey bottle from his pocket, unscrewed the top, and dramatically flipped his head back to drink. When he was done, he said, “I’ve had a lot to drink tonight, Willa, and that’s not all I had.”

“What?”

“I had some J Juice,” he said in a slightly bragging tone. “I bought it from Doug Zwern.”

“Oh, you did not.” Eli wasn’t the type; only once, the two of them had smoked weed together, and another time they’d shared a bottle of wine stolen from the Langs’ basement, where there was a whole case left over from her parents’ faculty potluck. In both instances, Eli had said he disliked the feeling of being off-balance. But here he was now, defiantly staring up at her in the middle of the night, and with his other hand he took a tiny bottle from his pocket and held it up as evidence. He was agitated and inebriated and tripping, and also probably freezing. She couldn’t leave him there. “I’ll come down and walk you home,” she said.

“Will you go out with me again?”

“What?
No
.”

“Then don’t do me any fucking favors,” he said. “I mean, really, Willa. Walking me home like you’re the big chaperone. You’re not in charge, Willa.”

But the one who loved less—or acted as if they did—was always in charge, and that was the way the world went. She was in charge, and he couldn’t do anything besides get drunk and take J Juice and have a freak-out in her backyard in the middle of the night.

“I didn’t even
like
your flute playing, by the way,” he called up to her. “It was mediocre. And what we did together? On the couch in my basement all those times? Totally mediocre too.”

“Eli, stop talking,” she said, raising her voice. “Just stop already.”

“Wow, your voice projects really well. No wonder my mother picked you for the lead.”

“Whatever reason she picked me, it was a mistake,” Willa said, and then she added, “I thought she hated me.”

“No one hates you. I don’t even hate you,” said Eli, and then he lurched away from the window, collapsing a few yards away in the snow, facedown.

“Oh
shit,
” Willa said, and she slammed the window shut and made her way downstairs in the dark. At the back door she slipped into a pair of boots waiting there—her father’s enormous boots—and clomped out into the yard. Somehow she got Eli up and he leaned on her and she brought him inside. He smelled ridiculously bad, and he had cut his lip when he fell. She put him in the easy chair in the living room, and almost immediately her mother appeared from upstairs, and then her father appeared from the den; what had he been doing in the den so late at night? Everyone in her family was
off,
Willa thought. Eli belched and closed his eyes now, and said to her parents, “Oh, Mr. and Ms. L, I can’t believe you’re seeing me like this,” and then he belched again and turned his head away, as if by doing this he might become invisible to them.

Willa’s mother got on the phone, and within ten minutes the drama teacher was at their door. Her son was sick-drunk and high, but all three parents decided that he didn’t seem so far gone that he would need to go to the ER, like those teenagers over in Woodvale. Eli turned to look at Willa as he leaned against his mother on the way out. It was humiliating to have to be taken home by your mother, by your mommy. To have to be seen this way by the girl you loved, who had been your lover. He was a big, broad-shouldered boy, and his mother was small, but she could have held up a building right now. Eli’s expression was dog-eyed, full of longing, and on the way out the Langs’ front door he said to Willa, “Take me back.” She said nothing. It was the night before the play, and yet all of them were wide awake. “You’ll do great tomorrow,” he added, as his mother led him away.

15
.

W
inter, not enchantment, conjured the wind that swung the heavy blue metal doors back on their hinges during the evening of the performance of
Lysistrata
. Winter, with its strong wind, sent parents, teachers, and children flying inside Elro, grateful to be indoors, though actually, they noticed, it was not very warm in the building either. Still, many of the females who flowed through the doors on that clear, dead-cold February night had already fallen under the enchantment of the spell. The uncoupling had been cumulative over all these many weeks, and impressive in its reach. As the Langs walked in, Dory heard pieces of conversations—beginnings, middles, and ends that highlighted unhappiness and restlessness and unease. She heard, “Fine, I’ll sit elsewhere,” and, “I said we’ll talk about this
later,
” and, “Not in front of the kids,” and, from a teenaged girl, “Oh, fuck you, Bryce, I mean really, fuck you.” Dory heard it and took note of it, but she and Robby walked on in, opening their coats, standing with the others in the well-lit and slightly underheated lobby. The crowd tonight was on edge, though also muted and cautious.

But those involved with the play—despite the personal relationship unhappiness that many of them felt—had fallen into the state of typical, suppressed hysteria often seen right before high school plays. A few girls darted back and forth across the lobby, giving each other urgent messages about blocks of reserved seats (“Señor Mandelbaum is bringing his paraplegic sister; they
must—have—an—aisle
!”), and whether they could find a third parent to help out with Lysistrata’s lightning-fast costume change. One boy needed more paper napkins for the red velvet cupcakes that would be sold during intermission.

Backstage, Ms. Heller gathered the cast together and motioned for them to stand in a large circle and hold hands. They did so with extreme self-consciousness; some hands were wet or sticky, others were cold, and still others seemed as if they were burning hot. After a few moments of giggling, or glaring, or extreme discomfort, the cast members calmed down and stood silently in formation in their chitons and sandals, looking for all the world like the participants in the first Olympics.

“Good evening, everyone,” Ms. Heller said in the quietest voice they’d ever heard her use. “I am so glad all of you decided to make it.” There was light laughter, as they realized this was a jabbing reference to Marissa’s absence. “Tonight is going to be amazing,” she said. “I can just feel it. You’ve worked very hard, and this will be the payoff. And it will be worth it. Now I’d like everyone to close their eyes, and I’m going to start sending an electrical charge around the circle. When you feel it, please send it to the next person, and when it’s gone all the way around, you may let it go.” She squeezed the hand of one of the Chorus of Old Men, her artisanal rings digging into his hand so that he jolted to painful attention and squeezed the hand of the girl beside him, and around went the electrical charge, and everyone felt themselves invigorated, and finally they flung their hands apart in astonishment, asking one another, “Did you feel it?
I
did.”

But a little while later, pacing in the cafeteria with the stage makeup thick and orange on her face, her eyes ringed and accentuated, Willa had a failure of nerve, and she said to Carrie Petito and the two Lucys in a low, sick voice, “They should’ve canceled the play. How can I go out there? I’m a wreck about it. About Eli. About
everything
. ” Her friends told her that she just had to walk out there and think about whatever it was actors think about when they are trying to give the performance of their lives.

“Here’s the thing,” said Carrie. “Everyone in that audience is going to know how hard this is, what you’re doing; and everyone in the cast and crew is going to be sending you amazing-acting vibes.”

“That is totally true,” said Lucy Neels.

“No, I am screwed,” said Willa. “I should never have said yes.”

“Look,” said Carrie. “Remember in eighth grade when I had that eating disorder and my parents made me join that support group in the basement of the synagogue? I hated it more than anything ; I told them I was going to get nothing out of it. But I went to it, and I did get a lot out of it. It did something to me, and then I didn’t need it anymore. And this,” she said with authority, “will do something to you.”

“It’ll kill me.”

“No it won’t.”

Carrie Petito hugged her friend, and then the two Lucys did too, their narrow bodies pressed into her as hard as girls’ bodies could ever press, sending yet more electrical charges of luck and love.

By ten minutes to seven the auditorium was filled. Dory and Robby Lang headed down the aisle toward their reserved seats in the sixth row. Earlier tonight, when they were about to leave the house, he’d said, “Tonight everyone’s going to say how proud we must be.”

“And we will be.”

“Of course. But one of the things I always liked about us,” Robby said, “is that we weren’t one of those couples who only think and talk about their kids. But now maybe we’re heading there.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She was worn out from her own insistence on busting up what had been good and solid. Tonight would be about Willa, and that was appropriate. Let it be about Willa so it did not have to be about them.

Robby led the way to their seats; he slapped hands with a few boys and shook hands with a few fathers and mothers. Dory was stopped by students who still got a kick out of seeing their teachers after hours. She waved to the shy exchange student from Mexico. There was Marissa Clayborn’s family; her father was studying the stage bill with an intense focus, and he barely looked up. Marissa’s mother, Paula, quietly explained to Dory that even though Marissa had made “a radical choice,” the Clayborns wanted to show their support of the play, and of Willa.

Around them, other families and kids were waving and wanting to say hello to Mr. and Ms. L. There, Dory saw, was Paige Straub, of course not sitting with Dylan Maleska. The teenaged part of the audience appeared partly sex-segregated, Dory noticed. There had apparently been quite a few breakups, Leanne had told her, and everyone had drawn ranks around their friends. Boys protected wounded boys; girls used other girls for justification of their actions.

The house lights dimmed now, and Dory Lang slipped into her seat beside Robby. Their arms lay side by side on the shared armrest. In a moment, Ms. Heller’s distinctive voice warned the audience from somewhere about their cell phones, and dutifully, around the room, came compliant trills and flutters.

Please,
Dory thought,
let this go okay.
At last the heavy stage curtains shooshed open upon ancient Greece, with a house and some columns and a gateway leading to the Acropolis. Fran Heller had wanted only one set; she thought the Acropolis was too fragile to be moved, so the whole thing sat there from the start. Dory was paying scrupulous, wild attention; beside her, Robby stared straight ahead, and she wanted to take his hand and hold it, but somehow she worried that the gesture would seem like a consolation prize. They sat waiting and watching as their daughter came onstage. When she appeared at last, she was beautiful.

“Oh,” Dory whispered.

That chiton was pitifully thin; it was made from Bev Cutler’s children’s bedsheets, and it must have made Willa feel so naked up there on that big, wide stage, in front of hundreds of people she’d known all her life. Dory wished she could throw a cardigan over her shoulders. Willa stood center stage, and she looked out over the room. Dory strained to catch her eye, but she knew that Willa couldn’t see her, and shouldn’t see her anyway.

Willa gazed straight out and began to speak, her voice flat and quavering, and at one point even sounding as though she were suppressing something digestive:

At this point, the girl known to Dory mostly as Slut I appeared. Playing Calonicé, she began a conversation with Lysistrata about why Lysistrata had arranged for a gathering of the women. Calonicé, Dory realized with a little relief, was not so much better onstage than Willa. It was true that Willa sounded more nervous, but the other girl could barely project. The opening was stiff, certainly, but it was not humiliating, Dory thought; that was much too strong a word.

Then, as the play struggled along, something else began to happen, unknown to Dory and the audience: from an infinitesimal space between the vacuum-closed doors, a curl of cold wind found its way into the auditorium and fanned out through the rows. It was the spell, of course, which now entranced every relevant person whom it had previously missed. Here it was in its final visit, this spell that made women turn away from men, and which only began to appear during the lead-up to a high school production of
Lysistrata
.