Watch Your Mouth (9 page)

I put it safely in my hand, opened the cover and read the chapter headings as Mimi returned to her work. “Mother as Degrader.” “Mother as Critic.” “Mother as Martyr.” “Mother as Champion.” “This sounds like a cast list,” I said.

“You can’t show him a cast list!” boomed the voice of a fat man
(baritone)
with stringy hair who walked into the Props Studio and shut the door behind him. On the back of the door was a poster I hadn’t noticed in these three weeks: KNOW YOUR ENEMY in black block letters, over a sneering line draw-

ing of an old man’s face with a large puffy nose and narrow slitted eyes. Soon they’d be all over town.

“Stan,” Mimi said with the patience of somebody who has a stupid boss, “I’m not showing him the cast list. I’m showing him a book I’m reading.”

“The daggers done?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “They’re in the dagger box.” “Chains?”

“In the chain box.” “Fists?”

“The clay hasn’t arrived yet.” “You ordered
more clay
?” “Yes, but it hasn’t come yet.”

“Why in the world would you order more clay? Last week you ordered more clay and the week before
that
you ordered more clay. You must be careful with the clay, Mimi. We’ve gone over budget already and clay costs money.”

“Not until they deliver it,” she said. She cleared her throat. “Remember, Stan, when you hired me you said I would have all the budgetary support I needed. You want clay fists, I need clay and lots of it. I don’t have to remind you about what hap- pened last summer, do I?”

“No,” Stan said quickly. He patted his coat pockets until his hand crinkled against something inside. With a smile of rec- ognition he pulled out a bag of individually wrapped carmels, unwrapped one and threw it into his mouth. “I’m just con- cerned about the budget, is all.”

“This season is going to be a
smash,
” she said.

“What happened last season?” I said, gathering I was never to be introduced.

“Who are you?” said Stan sternly. Until now.

“Stan, this is my daughter’s boyfriend, Joseph. Joseph, this is Stan, the General Director for the summer season.”

“Glad to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand. For a second Stan looked at my hand and clutched the bag of caramels closer to his body. Then he realized I wanted to shake, not take, and he shook.

“What happened last season?” I asked again, eager to keep him here rather than remaining alone with the Mother as Lover. The aria begins simply enough. “Well,” Stan said simply, “last season was the first summer opera season in Pittsburgh. We had a very small budget. We still do. All of Benedrum does. Pitts- burgh is a dying city and there’s no money for the arts. They call this town the Emerald City, but the color of Pittsburgh is a bitter black. The great lumbering steel industry has left a dark powder on a brick that once photogenically matched the color of the people driven out of Duquesne incline and Monogahela

Heights.” Bassoons bulge with bitterness. “But what happened last summer?”

“Last summer we put on Faussy’s
The Marble Statue,
which has, of course, a big statue in the middle of it. The middle of the stage, I mean. During all four acts. We were supposed to borrow one from Denver Opera but we were outbid at the last minute by a Miami
Aı¨da.
”

“Atlanta,” Mimi said.

“
Miami,
Mimi,” Stan insisted. “You didn’t work here.”

“In any case, the props department had to build a statue and they kept complaining that they didn’t have the budget. This was before Mimi worked here.”

“This is why Mimi works here,” Mimi said.

“They built the statue but they didn’t have any clay so they used papier-maˆche´, and they what-you-call-it, they did that thing to it to make it look like marble.”

“Marbelizing,” Mimi and I said in unison, but at major thirds. “Marbeling, right. But it didn’t shine, and you know the aria that the Prince sings,
Your eyes shine like the statue in the square.

It had to shine. So they put shellac on it.” He looked at me significantly.

The violins fill a pregnant pause with an eight-bar cadence before Joseph replies, “So?”

“So?”
Mimi says incredulously. “
So,
you can’t put shellac over marbelized papier-maˆche´. At least, not over whatever structure they had. It won’t hold.”

“So it didn’t hold?”

Stan shook his head. “Worse than that. It gave way when Mathilde was clinging to it in the finale. You know,
Statue, give me your strength?
”

“I don’t know the opera.”

Stan looked a little huffy. “Well, it’s very famous. Not that this town will ever do it again. ‘Statue, give me your strength!’ WHAM! The leg of the statue broke right in two, and the whole thing came apart and fell on Lucretia Allenza, who was singing Mathilde that summer. And she’s not a small woman.”

“She’s fat,” Mimi said.

Stan looked uncomfortable; he unpeeled another caramel. “I wouldn’t say
fat.
”

“You wouldn’t?” Mimi said. “She’s a
professional soprano,

Stan. She’s as big as a house.”

“The press had a field day,” Stan said. “I always thought it wasn’t coincidence that backlash is shellac spelled backwards.”

“It’s not,” I said.

“Yes it is,” Stan said. Another caramel. “Think about it.” I thought about it. C-A-L—“It’s not.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t mean backwards. I mean, one of those scrambled word things, where you switch all the letters around and it makes it backlash. Acronyms?”

“Anagrams,” Mimi and I said, with the same lilting melody of “marbelizing.”

“Right.”

“I don’t think it’s an anagram, either,” I said, the letters swim- ming in my head like alphabet soup. And it isn’t. Even years later I try it, and the best I can get out of “shellac” is “she call,” which she doesn’t.

“In any case,” Stan said, “that’s why Diva Allenza isn’t singing with the Pittsburgh Opera anytime soon, and that’s why we have a new propsmistress and a slightly larger budget. But even so the clay is overburdening us. I mean, why do you require so much clay, Mimi? The expense, the expense! Clay is always expensive, Mimi! Because clay comes from the earth, and there is a limited supply! Clay is the source of all life, Mimi! God breathed into the clay of the earth to create man—now you dare to order shipment after shipment of clay to create props! Unless you are hoarding the clay yourself for some nefarious purpose! Confess, propsmistress! Confess!” There, on the “fess” of that last “Confess!” is a high E flat—solid and strident like the French horns that back it up.

“Sheesh,” Mimi said. “I’ll try to be more careful, Stan, but you know we want to make opera that people will remember.” “That’s true,” Stan said. “I mean, once I heard some people talking in the lobby during intermission. They were talking

about how they always attend the opera in the same clothes they wore to work that day, because by the time they go home and jump in the shower and change their clothes they’d either be late or they’d be on time but so stressed out they couldn’t really enjoy it. And frankly, if people are going to pay that much for tickets what’s the use if they’re not really going to enjoy it. So what these people did is they wore slightly dressier work clothes to work and went right to the theater, locking the brief- case in the trunk and sometimes even having time for a cocktail or something, but not dinner because they hated, these people, to wolf down dinner and rush to the theater. It’s so stressful. They might as well go home and shower and change if they want to be stressed out before the show even starts. That’s what they said, what’s-your-name—”

“Joseph.”

“—and I never forgot it. And I never forgot to
repeat
it. Be- cause
that’s
our audience.
That’s
our audience, Joseph. Just reg- ular working folk. We have to create opera for them that’s not just interesting but
fascinating, mesmerizing.
So that they tran- scend all the stress about whether to change or where to have dinner or parking or whatever, and really
hear
the music. That’s what opera’s
for
. Do you have any more of those candies?”

“What candies?”

“Weren’t you holding a little box of candies?”

“No,” I said, holding up
When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother
. “It’s a book that Mrs. Glass—”

“Who?”
Mimi said sharply.

“It’s a book that
Mimi
is lending me,” I said. I handed it to him. “Sorry it’s not candies.”

“It’s O.K.,” he said. He looked at the spine. “Not your fault.

When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother,
huh? If you can’t be friends, what can you be? Eh?” He elbowed me and leaned in so I could see his caramel-coated teeth. From a dirty mouth comes a dirty joke.

“Please, Stan,” Mimi said. “Your tight-budgeted propsmis- tress has to get to work.”

“Anyway,” Stan said, “all I am trying to tell you, Joseph, is that we are really trying for maximum drama this summer.”

“I know the feeling,” I said.

“That’s why we’re making a whole box of daggers. When Abigail stabs Pinchas at the end of
Die Juden,
we are having her stab him furiously and repeatedly. We don’t care if the dagger crumbles after each performance, so long as Pinchas dies a hor- rible death. That’s why we are paying for a whole box of daggers. We want Pinchas to die as violently as possible.”

“As well he should,” Mimi said firmly as T.U.D. returns. “If I ever found out that my husband was sleeping with somebody else, I’d probably kill him and then go mad. The more violent the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

If this were a novel, the presence of Cassius the dog, kept in the back room on the days when Mimi would jog with the dog around some of the prettier lakeside territory, would have had to be established by now. You couldn’t just have him howl and mention, in the same paragraph, that sometimes Mimi brought her big black labrador Cassius to work with her and kept him in the back room. But this isn’t a novel. This is an opera, where motivation can strike at any moment. One love letter and an engagement ring is thrown back at the tenor. One thrown ring and a woman can throw herself down the stairs. One thrown woman and war can break out and the gardener can reveal

himself to be Zeus, in disguise. Or a woman, disguised as Zeus. Or somebody who came just a little too late to tell the woman not to throw herself down the stairs because he didn’t read the love letter after all. Or he did. Or when a dire prediction is made, a dog can howl offstage chilling the bones and lowering the curtain for a few minutes while the frantic stagehands carry the Props Studio away and lower the walls of the Carnegie Mellon Physics Department cafeteria. This is an opera, and you don’t need to know why the dog is there—you don’t need to know
that
the dog is there—you just need to know that when it howls it means that the remaining two and a half acts aren’t going to be happy.

ACT II, SCENE TWO

A simple chord from the oboes spotlights me and my bore- dom as I wait in the Carnegie Mellon Physics Department caf- eteria. Steven was fifteen minutes late. I’d already ordered a lemonade but wasn’t yet bored enough to read
When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother,
which I’d been dragging with me unopened for almost a week now. I was hot, hot and bored. I’d borrowed Cyn’s sputtering car, while she spent quality time with her father, to drive around the curves of the Color-Coded Wayfinder Signs with the windows down, until the university finally appeared in the horizon. Outside it was some triple digit of degrees and the cafeteria was windowless. It was three o’clock—
three-fifteen,
Steven was fifteen minutes late—so the lunch crowd, presumably, had returned to its experiments. The room was swathed in occasional coolness by a large rotating fan like those searchlights in prison break movies, that swing and

swing and finally find the felon with his homemade knife at the throat of the warden’s daughter. Don’t shoot, boys—he’s not bluffing. Every time the fan hit my face it chilled my sweat and dimmed the radio. “Bing Bing Bing,” the sound my heart makes when I see you babe, turned to a dull white noise every ten bars or so. The orchestra, of course, doesn’t duplicate this. It just keeps playing.

Steven finally arrived in a long white lab coat. Underneath, I hope, he was wearing shorts, but he looked like a flasher. I remembered seeing him without his shirt that first night I ar- rived on the set, and thanks to Mimi’s description I could pic- ture the rest.

“Hi,” he said. “Thanks for coming. Sorry I’m late. We had a problem with the gold.”

“The gold what?” I asked.

“Just gold,” he said, smiling faintly like somebody who’s working on experiments you can’t possibly understand. “We’re working with gold. Let me just grab some food and we can talk.” “Sure, sure,” I said, trying to sound careless. I couldn’t imag- ine why Steven wanted me to come here. I looked down at my sweaty tumbler and saw through the swirling rind and sugar to

the dull gloss of the wood of the table. It felt like a set.

Steven brought his plastic food to the table and sat down across from me. He didn’t say anything so I didn’t say anything either, just kept sipping. The radio kept playing and the search- light kept spinning. I was wishing this prisoner could escape. I couldn’t imagine why he’d wanted me to meet him for a late lunch, even when I said I couldn’t make it until after Goodbye. All summer long I hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words to Steven directly and that was on purpose. Steven, at a distance,

was a little desert island in Cyn’s wild sea of a family, the one who wasn’t interested in intergenerational sex but in whatever he had suddenly started babbling about in front of me now. Steven’s only aria is accompanied by a small, sputtering brass ensemble.

“. . . and we strip the wire with a pair of pliers, just an ordi- nary pair of pliers, we just rip it down the wire and, of course, the very tip of the wire, the very very tip, is just one molecule in width. One measly molecule wide. So we take the laser I was talking about before, and Cyn—”