This is boring. Hannah’s making it boring. She’s making them talk about the practical details of their performance. She says Winter Concert is a week away and they don’t know what the hell they’re doing yet. Blah, blah, blah. Ann might fall asleep from boredom if she weren’t so awake from Malcolm’s presence. He and she are lying at opposite ends of the couch in the faculty room, which they found empty and decided to use for their meeting. Suddenly secrecy seems to have become an important component of their act.
Hannah, in the faculty-room version of an easy chair, which is to say institutional and upright, is talking about Ann’s costume, which Ann is supposed to stitch herself from an old ripped parachute she found at the flea market. She’ll be in this luminous white nylon stuff from her waist to the floor, twelve feet, and layered over that an old nightgown of Hannah’s that is big on her and ruched and Grecian-looking. (“You wore this?” she’d asked. “Oh yes. I picked it out myself,” Hannah had replied. “Not.”) And she will have, maybe—this is Malcolm’s idea, and they’re not yet sure they’ll put it off—a cluster of white helium balloons tied around her waist and sprouting up behind her, over her head.
“Balloons are so Ringling Brothers,” objects Hannah.
“Each balloon will have white feathers glued to it,” he counters in his serene way.
“Choy. I have one word for you.” Hannah makes her hands into a megaphone. “Logistics.”
“It’s a visual thing,” he insists, undeterred. “Wait’ll you see it.”
Hannah gives him a look with her heavy, black-rimmed eyes. She has a way of making the whites show under her pupils so that she looks something like a Goth bulldog.
“I’ll do it,” says Malcolm. “Put that on my list.”
“MALCOLM: BALLOONS/FEATHERS,” writes Hannah. She alone among all those Ann has met has the extraordinary talent of being able to make the sound of pencil on paper sarcastic. Hannah is in full General Secretary mode. She has brought with her a legal pad, a mechanical pencil, a calculator, a calendar, a cell phone, a pager, an orange, a lipstick called Buck Naked, another called Fuckin’ Red, a pack of Marlboro Lights with one bent cigarette in it, some Jolly Ranchers, some tampons, a—
“Hello!” Hannah exclaims, snatching her green army knapsack away from Ann. “Can I get you something?”
“Oh. No. Just prying. I’m done. Actually, I’ll have a Jolly Rancher.”
Hannah tosses the bag back to Ann, who gets herself a candy.
“Anyone else?”
Hannah and Malcolm both accept, and they all sit there with sweet lumps in their cheeks. The meeting continues, with Hannah playing the role of beleaguered pragmatist to the hilt, and Malcolm rather exploiting the role of incorrigible visionary fruitcake. For her part, Ann finds it delicious to fall into the role of the child, acquiescent, blameless, floating along in the back seat of the car. How delicious, too, that they are meeting in the faculty room; Ann never would have had the balls, but Hannah, finding it unoccupied, set up camp here as though it were her birthright, and Malcolm followed with his natural ascetic grace. There’s enough daylight coming through the courtyard window for Hannah to write, though it’s gone considerably grayer since they started, but no one gets up to switch on a light, and Ann has a feeling it’s because they don’t want to be detected.
“So, Ann.” Hannah refers to her lists. “You’re sewing your skirt-thing, and you’re bringing matches and a pan of water.” They have decided to place a pan of water at the foot of the ladder for the lit matches to fall into. (“Lest anyone call us irresponsible,” Hannah said.) “Malcolm, you’re setting up the ladder for Ann. Oh, Ann, you’re also buying and putting down glow tape. Okay, Malcolm: ladder for Ann, your drums, whatever you’re wearing, you’re going to ask your mother if she has that Itty Bitty Book Light, oh yeah, and whatever you want to do about balloons and feathers; you’re on your own, sucka, with that one. I’m getting a dictionary, attaché case, slide projector, I’m picking up the slides on Monday, I’m getting the sack of sugar, an extension cord, and my costume from the dry cleaners on Tuesday. Is that everything, guys?”
“Think it’s enough?” asks Ann. She is lolling. She is lolling as she has never lolled. Actually, she smoked a little pot this afternoon. Actually, she smoked a little pot this afternoon with Malcolm Choy. A few puffs—tokes. It didn’t really do anything. It’s just making the watermelon in her mouth so bright.
“Think it’s thing-enough?” asks Malcolm. His feet are on the outside. Hers are tucked between the back cushion and his ribs. The balance of light in the room has shifted; gray washes over them obscuringly, like a houndstooth pattern of winter afternoon.
“Yo,” says Hannah. “Fuck you.”
“Isn’t that the name of your lipstick?” queries Ann innocently.
She gets the pencil chucked at her. It stabs her lightly on the cheek, like a pointy fairy-kiss. She smiles.
Their piece for Winter Concert has grown more elaborate and cryptic over the weeks. Now there is a part where Hannah will project slides of text on various segments of the audience, and another part where she will tear open a sack of sugar and drag it along the floor to make horizontal lines, and then vertical ones. Ann is still basically clueless about what any of this means, although Malcolm seems to get it. Something about language and logic and processed sugar grids. She knows her part, anyway, which has morphed: now she represents the antithesis of Hannah, who will be wearing a black suit and black-rimmed glasses, austere purveyor of prepared text and grid. Ann is now something like an angel of speechlessness, a goddess of chaos, and every time she drops one of her lighted matches Hannah will go mute, and still, and Malcolm will drum and she will sing, slowly, on an open vowel, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” Really, it all seems stupid to her, but cool. Stupid but cool.
“That’s what we should call this,” she says out loud. They still have not given Buddy a name for their act. After making it abundantly clear that, every day they fail to do so, his back pain increases exponentially, he finally told them this morning that it would go in the program as “Untitled,” upon which Malcolm had begun lobbying for “Not Untitled.” Now, too late, Ann tries, “Stupid but Cool.”
“That sounds like a jazz standard,” says Malcolm, which naturally sets him drumming with his fingers on the wooden part of the couch. The vibration shoots straight through Ann. She is mesmerized. She feels like someone’s speaking to her in Morse code, from inside her body.
“Do we really think it’s stupid?” says Hannah.
“No, no!” protests Ann. “Yes. But cool!”
“Wicked cool.”
“Because I don’t want to do it if it’s stupid.”
“It’s not, I was kidding. It’s really, really . . . unstupid.”
Hannah looks to Malcolm.
“Yes. It’s unstupid,” he repeats. “And there’s our title.”
Ann launches the pencil at him like a dart. His hand shoots out and snatches it from the air. Swoon material.
“Actually, I meant it,” says Malcolm, tucking the pencil behind his ear. “Kind of Zen, don’t you think? ‘Unstupid.’”
“Hello, that’s my pencil,” says Hannah. Ann is not sure her testiness is still all act.
Malcolm holds it out to her. “We love you, Hannah. You are the sunshine of our lives.”
“‘We’? You’re speaking for two?” Eyes flick to Ann and back to Malcolm.
“I speak for everybody.”
“Aren’t you cute.”
Malcolm says nothing in reply, and Ann is aware of how bulky Hannah is in her chair, how black and white and red and heavy. She’s aware of being tired of Hannah. Or maybe of Hannah’s being tired of them.
“Why are you being a spinster?” asks Ann. “I mean, not a spinster, what’s the word? A meter maid. Is that what I mean?”
“A meter maid,” repeats Malcolm, and he laughs not quite silently.
Hannah leaves the room.
“Wait, Hannah,” says Ann, but Hannah is gone. What the fuck was that? “What just happened?” she says out loud, and Malcolm, male and all, has no comment. Hannah is the one who wanted to set them up in the first place. A minute ago she was the child floating in the back seat listening while the big two created their act, and now she has done something wrong and everything is upended, the whole vehicle has tipped alarmingly; passengers have fallen out. But the most alarming thing is, although she ought to be trotting down the hall after Hannah, being spacily contrite, omitting her cannier sense of what may have just happened, going out on the steps to share that last bent cigarette, which Hannah would light for them under the metal bird, and shivering, letting herself grow cold and shivery on the stone steps, until Hannah makes a protective gesture—although she should be doing those things, she doesn’t; she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to: that’s the alarming part, the exciting part, realizing she does not, in fact, want to do any of that.
“Aren’t you hungry?” she says instead.
“What’s in the fridge?” says Malcolm, and they both get up and go to raid the little faculty-room fridge—the balls! Ann is amazed, intoxicated by their temerity; she wants to roll in it, come up all pulsing and mighty—and they are therefore tucked around the corner out of sight when Esker comes in and, without switching on the lights, sinks onto the couch where they have just lain.
Esker is holding a hand over her mouth and staring out the narrow window, which has just begun to take on the deeper glow of evening. For whole seconds in the shadowy corner Ann and Malcolm are garden ornaments, a stone sylph and satyr, with only the whites of their eyes to betray them. Ann realizes their chance to announce their presence without its being something far more awkward and even ominous is fast disappearing. Now is when they must step out from the corner and say sheepish hi’s, make some excuse about what they’re doing in the faculty room, and bolt. Esker’s hand moves up to cover her eyes. Her back looks surprisingly slender, curved like that in its white shirt. You wouldn’t know she was a math teacher, thinks Ann. Suddenly Esker throws something—what? something she’d been holding?—at the window, and whatever it was it was solid, because the window cracks with a sound like a shot and Malcolm grabs Ann’s wrist and they are out of there.