The Great Actress
“Sarah!” shrieked her mother from the bedroom door. “Throw that thing away!”
The Great Actress regarded her mother with cool annoyance. “It’s only a prop cigarette, Mother,” she drawled. “It is imaginary. I have told you this on many occasions.”
“And I’ve told you, imaginary or no, that I will not have those nauseating objects in my house! What kind of example are you setting for your little brother?” From his secure position behind his mother’s legs, Ferdinand leered up at the actress with his customary expression of chuckleheaded hilarity. An amiable child, and harmless enough, one supposed, but fundamentally an irritant.
“And start your homework now!”
The Actress sighed wearily, and snubbed out her imaginary cigarette in an imaginary ashtray. What a ghastly day it had been! She had chosen a chic black outfit for school wear; her mother had insisted on an appallingly sunny concoction of white and yellow poplin. She, with an actor’s care for her figure, requested 8 oz. of distilled water (with perhaps a teaspoon or two of honey) for breakfast; her mother handed her a heaping bowl of steaming milky oat bran.
Nor had the day improved when she got to school. There was, for starters, that rather sharp exchange with Ms. Amato in second period. Well, the assignment was to write a poem: if the woman did not want the poem to be in French, she should have specified that the poem not be in French! And was she, Sarah, forever required to conform to the general intelligence? As things developed, she was not two stanzas into the recitation of le oiseau est bleu, a poignant original work, when she was shrilly interrupted, to the vast amusement of Alfred Cotton and his crew of fellow bumpkins in the back row.
And then there was Brittany. Brittany, her heart’s blood, her boon companion! Together they rode the bus each afternoon, two serious students of the theatre, breathlessly analyzing the day-to-day state of the profession and doing their best to ignore the taunts of Alfred Cotton and his Flying Moron Squad, giggling and snorting just behind. Today there were pressing matters to discuss. The so-called educator Amato had actually issued an interesting assignment: to memorize, by Tuesday next, a short scene or soliloquy from a play of their choice. This choice, as the Actress informed Brittany, was worthy of their highest attentions.
“Because you never know who might see you, Darling,” she explained knowingly.
Brittany was in agreement; in fact, she had spent the better part of the afternoon in the school library, researching properties. Hesitantly she offered her leader a tattered mauve volume, thumbed and dogeared by generations of sticky eager fingers, with the gossamer title of Seven Little Plays for Budding Thespians. The Actress looked over this manuscript with ill-concealed scorn, Dripping with sentiment, it was just the sort of treacle that the Amato would adore. But a professional debut required something with more heft, more substance; in fact only one playwright could possibly fit the bill.
“Listen to this,” she said, and drew from her knapsack the work that she had selected, a favorite of Dear Father’s. "WHAT’S HE that wishes so?” she hissed abruptly, narrowing her eyes and grasping Brittany’s wrist very hard. Brittany jumped involuntarily, startled.
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honor.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
"This day,” she said in her clear strong voice, “is called the feast of Crispian.”
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
And say ‘Tomorrow is Saint Crispian’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.’
“Weird!” tittered someone behind her. Alfred Cotton leaned across the back of the seat, making apelike disgusting noises. Brittany sank lower into the cushions.
Deep now into her material, the Actress paid them scant attention. “Old men forget,” she said sadly,
Yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day.
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester.
O treachery! The actress felt the blade twist deep into her heart, but a professional never fails to complete a performance. Voice stung with righteous pain, she pushed on to the climax:
Shall be my brother; be ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispian’s day.
“Dark and bloody treachery!” moaned the Actress, staring down at the unread pages of her science homework.
Dinner was a subdued affair. Ferdinand rocked back and forth in his booster chair, overcome by great waves of silent hilarity at a joke that only he could understand. The Actress swirled her food moodily with her fork.
“Stop that moaning!” her mother commanded. The Actress eyed her evilly, and commenced to squash her peas onto the ceramic surface of the plate in an interesting bug-on-the-windshield sort of configuration.
“And eat your peas!” her mother added. “This is dinner, not a Jackson Pollock exhibition. “
The Actress flared at such unwarranted sarcasm. “You wouldn’t dare to treat us so,” she declared hotly, “if Dear Father could be here among us!”
“What are you talking about?” her mother asked. “Your father will be home after his six o-clock class.”
Choking down the lurid green pulp in front of her, the Actress held up a shining plate for her mother’s inspection, and made her escape through the carport door. Out there, at the end of the long gravel driveway, a person could find some privacy, a breathing space, to sit and ruminate upon the dismal paths down which life could suddenly propel one. Mounting her creaky old bicycle, she plowed through the deep gravel, standing hard on the pedals, an imaginary cigarette dangling meditatively from the corner of her lips. At the end of the driveway a solitary cyclist waited in the gathering dusk. Brittany.
“Hi!” she said shyly, hopefully.
“Oh,” said the Actress, dripping with icy hauteur. “Hi.”
“Did you see Entertainment Tonight?” ventured Brittany. “Winona is on Broadway for six weeks in a revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
The Actress circled, ignoring her.
“She was wearing like, this teensy black slip,” Brittany gushed on desperately, “and she looked so pale, you know, like waxy, like she was a ghost or something!” Please, her eyes said, please oh please please please.
The Actress relented. “I don’t think Winona is right for serious drama,” she said, flicking away imaginary ashes. “She should stick to comedy, or light period pieces.”
“Like Little Women!” Brittany almost shouted.
“Like Little Women,” affirmed the Actress. “Winona is…” she paused, searching for the right word, “the definitive Jo.”
“Definitive!” echoed Brittany passionately, and they were off, completing each other’s thoughts, spraying gravel joyously under the fat tires, breathlessly reviewing a thousand items of great and little moment until a glare of headlights froze them in mid-babble, and a mud-spattered Volvo crunched by on the gravel with a cheery Scandinavian beep of the horn. It was Dear Father, returned home at last.
“See ya,” said the Actress. “Gotta jet.”
“At the bus stop?” asked Brittany. Please, her eyes said, please oh please please please. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” said the Actress.
In the living room, a cool trumpet riff wafted softly from the stereo speakers. Her mother sat cross-legged in the corner of the sofa, cradling a drowsing Ferdinand and chatting with her father as he unloaded a great pile of books from his briefcase. His face lit as he spotted the Actress.
“Darling!” he cried. “How was your day?”
“Wretched,” she replied, plopping heavily into an overstuffed armchair. “Absolutely wretched.”
Her mother sighed, rolling her eyes helplessly, and continued to rub Ferdinand’s fat little belly in a gentle circular motion.
“Would you care for a drink, Darling?” the Actress asked her father. Crossing over to the little table that served as their bar, she took out three wine glasses, filling the first two with generous portions of a very nice Merlot. Under the vigilant eye of her mother, she filled the third with sparkling soda water, topping it off with just enough Merlot to give the soda a pleasant pink glow. Cradling the glasses, she returned to the sofa, nestling down contentedly between her parents.
“Ah,” declaimed her father expansively, sipping his wine. “We few…”
“We happy few…” chimed in the Actress.
“We band of brothers…”
In silence they sat, the three of them, listening to Ferdinand’s soft snores rising and falling in perfect rhythm with the silvery riffs of the trumpet.