The upper school play this year is called A Voice of My Own. It’s an ensemble, which means everyone gets the same number of lines, which is boring. The play is about women writers throughout history. I play Jane Austen reciting a letter to her sister. “Pray remember me to everybody who does not inquire after me,” and other lines like that. It is not the kind of role you can sink your teeth into.
There are other parts: Mary Shelley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Sand, Lillian Hellman, Sappho, Aphra Behn, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. The girl who is playing Virginia Woolf is two years older than me and her earnestness and warm, almond eyes remind me of my sister. Before every rehearsal she says “unique New York” to herself over and over again, flapping her tongue and spreading her lips flat across her teeth. Then she makes enthusiastic oohs and ahhs with her mouth. “It loosens up your face,” she says. I’m embarrassed for her.
She learned this from our drama teacher. She feeds her cats. Careful, I want to tell her.
My hair is blow-dried, curled into ringlets, and shellacked with hair spray. After Virginia Woolf puts the bonnet on my head with the loving maternity of a child dressing her favorite Cabbage Patch Kid, she cups my cheeks lightly in her hands and says I look just like Jane Austen. What did Jane Austen even look like? I must have seen a portrait of her before, but all I can picture is the folded, prim gaze of the Mona Lisa. What do I look like? I want to ask Virginia Woolf, but now is not the time.
George, Jane, Virginia, Sappho, Mary—the whole lot of us hold hands in a circle before the play starts and the drama teacher leads us in a nondenominational prayer to the goddess of school plays. We are wearing shawls and dresses with puffy sleeves, and blouses that button to the top of the neck and itch. The bonnet tie is too tight under my chin, but my hands are occupied by other sweaty hands. With heads bowed, I stare at George Sand’s boots and the bottom of her pants cuff. I wish I were George Sand.
The lights go up on a group of girls frozen in midactivity. I wait for my lines. I say my lines. I stand up from the desk where I was once frozen and walk across the stage as I say my lines.
The drama teacher stands in the back of the room mouthing words. She wears her usually pinned-back hair down for the occasion. It billows around her face, all oily, black, and luscious. There is something obscene about it.
I return to the desk and say more lines before I freeze, holding a pen over an imaginary piece of paper as the spotlight goes from me to George Sand. When all of my lines are done, I want the play to be over. I can hear my dad breathing through his mouth in the front row. I look over at him, his eyelids heavy. Beside him, my mother sits with her arms folded over her purse. Her shiny black bob is motionless even when her head moves. She’s knotted a scarf at her breastbone. I can smell the perfume she spritzed on it. She is looking at George Sand with the same fiercely warm intensity she shines on everyone she meets. I wonder how it doesn’t exhaust her. I wonder if she feels me watching her. I wonder if she thinks I was good.
Last year I played Feste the fool in Twelfth Night—the biggest part of any eighth grader cast in the upper school production. One of the biggest parts in the whole play. I know because I counted my lines and then those of the other major characters.
You’re supposed to want to play Viola, the play’s heroine, or Olivia, the girl everyone is in love with. But I found that Feste suited me. I didn’t mind being called a fool, because the fool opened and closed the show. He was never entwined in the actual drama, never pivoted the plot, but observed it all—the theatrics and the audience observing those theatrics. His purpose was to remind the audience and the actors that it was all a play, and with his ironic dirge about death, that none of it mattered anyway.
Feste gives meaning to all the nights I’ve spent waiting as Bianca and Sarah played out romantic entanglements, or listening from the bedroom doorway as my sister recapped an evening with a boyfriend. I have always believed my failure to be a main character, the heroine, the object of desire, makes me, by default, the villain. But Feste provides a third option. The fool is off to the side, but always onstage. He doesn’t break the fourth wall, he is the wall—a fictional embodiment of the author, there to remind the audience that all this drama will eventually end.
He is the only character who doesn’t covet a romantic partner. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t need one, I think. Then I try to imagine which character he’d date if he had to pick one. Who’s left? The fumbling suitor. The drunk and his cohort. “And the fool shall look to the madman.” Someone says that. I wish I remembered who it was. I wish I was in that play right now and not this one.
I make out Bianca’s outline in the second row of the audience. Sarah is beside her. When we catch each other’s eyes, I remember I’m wearing a bonnet. She sucks in her lips to keep from laughing. Fair enough.
They must have seen my parents before the show and said hello in their polite talking-to-grown-ups voices. My dad probably mixed up their names, and my mother probably smiled that pursed way she does for pictures, examining Bianca’s outfit to see if she’s wearing anything I lent her.
I study my mother sitting in the front row. She is lit warmly by the soft edge of the spotlight. When she catches me staring, she sparkles in my direction and fans three fingers in a secret wave. I look away, poker-faced, relieved. I did good.
“Are you proud of me?” I asked my mother after Twelfth Night ended and she handed me a bouquet of flowers. She beamed in that beautiful way that she did when we left the bone doctor’s office. “So proud,” she said, because she was.
“I’m always proud of you” is what she says when there’s nothing much to be proud of, like for example tonight’s performance. Or in first grade, when I was selected to introduce an A. A. Milne poem our class recited during prayers, and I spoke the words into the shoulder of another classmate, because my nose was running and I didn’t want to use my hands to wipe it.
At home, she showed me how I should have announced the poem—chin up high, legs and arms together like a soldier, but more radiant.
“A. A. MILNE,” she said, her voice booming and directed toward a picture high on the wall. It was one she had painted, of my sister and me, in matching star-spangled swimsuits on a beach somewhere. She copied the image from a photograph, though loosely. In the painting I’m looking up into the camera and not down at my shadow in the sand.
“This is just how I look,” I say when she asks why I’m so gloomy, or when she pauses before taking a group picture to raise my chin with her hand. She wants me to be proud of myself or, barring that, to appear proud to others. But I am not a main character, I want to tell her. I’m the fool.