Hummingbirds (5 page)

W
hen the last bell of the day rings, there is not, as might be expected, the chaotic din of anarchy set loose in the halls. In fact, Carmine-Casey is a much quieter place in the minutes immediately after the end of school than it is, say, during lunch or between classes, when the girls’ voices can be heard wailing with banshee raggedness from one end of the hall to the other. For all their day-long chafing against the confines of their uniforms, their desks, and their classrooms, these captive girls are reluctant to vacate the school when it is over, frequently lingering in front of their lockers and staring into the darkened textbook miasma that holds, they know, essential corners of their identities.

Some of them bolt, like horses at a starting gate, only to stumble over their own feet when they hit the afternoon daylight. Standing bewildered on the sidewalk outside, they look about and wonder what they should do now. Then they gaze broodingly back into the antique gloom of the school.

Some of them huddle in small groups on the front steps of the building. One girl says today, “I’m
bored.
Why doesn’t anything ever
happen?”

Inside, down the hall and toward the back of the building, the auditorium echoes like a huge coffin of waxed wood. Here, in particular, it seems as though the final bell never rang, and the voices of twenty girls bounce like tiny rubber balls over the hardwood floors. There are chairs set up in rows near the stage, and some girls have taken these and formed small circles that look like spontaneous séances, all their faces leaned in to the
whispering centers. Some girls are in the corner, pretending to pirouette, while others are sitting by themselves, hunched over notebooks spread across their laps and using pencils to twist their hair into stringy buns on the backs of their heads.

“I have things to do,” Dixie Doyle says as she sits on the edge of the stage and gazes contemptuously at a group of sophomore girls. Then she looks at her friends, who are lying side by side on the stage beside her, looking up into the transom of stage lighting hung above. Caroline is imagining what it would be like to walk on the ceiling. “Can’t we go?” Dixie asks them.

“Dixie, we can’t go yet,” Caroline says, sitting up. “Don’t you want to know if you made the lead or not?”

Dixie always knows exactly what Caroline is going to say. Caroline surprises nobody. She stumbles from place to place with a sloppy grin on her face, and all the boys like her. Right now she scoots over to Beth, who has her eyes closed, and starts pulling her friend’s hair into little braids between her fingers, as she often does.

“Andie,” Dixie says, “do you want to draw my picture? I’m engrossing today. Don’t you think I’m engrossing?”

“Sure, Dix,” Andie says, sitting up and pulling from her backpack a wide black book in which she puts all of her drawings. Andie has artistic promise, everyone says so. She’s tall and bony and hunches over when she walks—as though she wants to turn herself inside out, starting with her chest—but she knows how to draw. Dixie likes the way Andie draws her; her eyes always come out looking like they are glistening, as if her lashes are wet with dew or tears. “Raise your chin. I’m going to do your profile.”

Dixie juts her chin out belligerently.

Earlier that day Dixie was one of fifteen girls who auditioned for various parts in the new school play. Now, in the small room behind the stage, Mr. Pratt and his student director are poring over the finalists. Dixie has had a starring role in many of the school productions over the course of her three years at Carmine-Casey. Among her dramatic talents is the ability to swoon on command.

“I don’t even know what the play is,” Dixie says. “Does anybody know what the play is?”

“It’s an original Liz Warren,” Andie says, her eyes unfocused and glancing between her drawing and the features in Dixie’s profile.

“Ugh,” Dixie says, deflating. “Not Liz. Why doesn’t anybody stop her? She can’t be the only one writing plays around here.”

“Well,” Andie says, “she is.”

“Why don’t we write a play, Dix?” Caroline offers.

Dixie frowns. She has been in two of Liz Warren’s plays already. There was a lot of staring in both. As an actress, it isn’t very fulfilling to spend all your time staring into corners with “near grief.” In one of the productions the crew had to put a little piece of iridescent tape on the wall because the director said Dixie kept staring in the wrong direction.

She practices her staring now. But her attention is distracted by a freshman girl trying to do a cartwheel. She scowls.

“And,” Andie continues, “she’s
directing
this one, too.”

“No,” Dixie says, shaking her head resolutely. “Huh-uh. No way. It’s bad enough I have to read her words. I’m not going to act the way she tells me, too. Forget the whole thing.” But she doesn’t make any move to leave. In fact, she glances over at Andie to make sure she’s still drawing and raises her chin again, the stick of the lollipop poking up at an angle like a flagless pole.

The four girls are quiet for a while. Then lethargic Beth, who has been napping, finally sits up and rubs her eyes.

“I was having a strange dream,” she says, yawning. “Do you want to know what it was? I was dreaming that I was shaving my legs, right? Except that when I got to the tops of my legs I kept shaving because I had hair all over my stomach. Gross, isn’t it?”

“You’re an animal,” Dixie says, taking the lollipop from her mouth and pointing it meaningfully at Beth. “That’s what that means. You’re like a wolf or something. Now I bet you want to take a big bite out of Caroline.”

Caroline laughs and tumbles off the edge of the stage, pretending to run away even though no one is chasing her. She goes a few yards, and then she comes back.

“So anyway, what’s this play called?” Dixie asks.

“Salmonburger,”
Andie says.

“Salmon what?”

“Salmonburger.
It’s based on the
Oresteia.”

“The
what?”

“It’s a Greek tragedy.”

“Oh god.”

“Something about women. Or birds. I don’t remember.”

To anyone who might be watching her, Dixie looks as though she’s just been asked to hold a stranger’s baby—her face is twisted in confusion, her palms facing up, her shoulders frozen in mid-shrug.

“Salmonburger?”
she says.

“Salmonburger,”
Andie says.

“Salmonburger,”
Beth repeats to the rafters.

“I don’t like salmon,” Caroline says absently. “My mother makes salmon loaf. It’s like meatloaf but with salmon in it instead.”

She bends over to fish a pebble out of her shoe. When she does so, you can see the trim of her underwear beneath her skirt. The girl, Dixie thinks, is a disaster full of sexuality.

“What monologue did you do anyway?” Beth asks disinterestedly. “For the audition, I mean.”

“I did Cleopatra,” Dixie says. Then, closing her eyes and raising the back of her hand to her forehead: “Oh, my oblivion is a very Antony. And I am all forgotten.”

Caroline giggles, and Dixie remembers to raise her chin again for Andie’s drawing.

“Mr. Pratt said I was engrossing. That’s what he said.” Then she lowers her voice and crinkles up her face in imitation of the drama teacher. “Dixie,’ he said to me, ‘that performance was really quite engrossing.’”

“That’s a good sign, isn’t it, Dix?” Caroline asks.

At that, all four girls look toward the door of Mr. Pratt’s office, which remains stubbornly closed.

The door has been closed for almost an hour now—since well before the last bell of the day. Liz Warren got out of her last class by telling her biology teacher, Ms. Doone, that she had important school play business to attend to. Ms. Doone simply nodded and smiled. Now, in her senior year, her teachers no longer question anything she does—she has gotten straight As in almost every single class at Carmine-Casey. Because her teachers believe that seriousness is a quality built into her basic circuitry, she is above reproach. If she is not in class, there is no doubt that her reasons are entirely valid.

Now she sits opposite Mr. Pratt, hunched over his desk where a list of names lies between them. She has her forefinger planted like a carpenter’s nail on one of the names, and she is waiting for him to say something.

“I don’t know, Liz,” Mr. Pratt says finally. He is a thin wisp of a man, his spectacles sitting low on his nose and his hair, what remains of it, like a feathery circlet from temple to temple around the back of his head. He looks pained much of the time—not so much physically as spiritually, as though he is carrying the grief of some distant history in the creases of his face. The girls have heard from reliable sources that he’s never been married, and the popular belief around school is that he’s gay.

“I don’t know,” he says again, looking at the name under Liz’s finger. “Martha is a wonderful girl. She
understands
the play, maybe in a way that the others don’t….”

“But?” Liz asks.

“But don’t you think her performance…lacks something?”

“Like what?”

“She’s too…self-conscious. Too afraid to be dramatic. It’s as though she’s embarrassed of drama. Too worried that she’s going to be…
sincere.”

He looks up at Liz, his face seemingly in pain—suffering in the hope that Liz will agree.

She can’t bear to hurt him. Besides, she knows what he’s saying is true. This is why none of her friends has ever been able to break into the school productions. They resent having to take the performance seriously.

“Okay,” she says, lifting her finger and sitting back in her chair. They look at each other across the table. “Okay. But
Dixie Doyle?
What about Lauren Schaffer?”

“Dixie can do it.”

“But all she wants—” She stops herself. When talking to Mr. Pratt, she sometimes forgets she’s talking to a teacher. She lowers her voice and starts again. “Don’t you think she’s just interested in getting attention?”

He smiles. “That’s what we used to call charisma. And no matter how scintillating the writing is, you’ve got to have somebody delivering the lines who can…”

He doesn’t finish his thought. He doesn’t have to.

Liz wants to make him understand. She wants to make sure he knows this isn’t just some petty personality clash—that Dixie Doyle really isn’t the right person for the lines she’s written. She’s willing to go over it again and again until he’s convinced that she’s seeing things straight where this is concerned. But it already feels like she’s said too much. She can see herself from the outside, and she looks an awful lot like a whining schoolgirl. So she determines not to argue anymore.

Instead, she says, “Dixie probably won’t take it anyway. Does she know I’m directing?”

“Look,” Mr. Pratt says, and now he’s the one leaning forward—the conciliatory comfort of the modest victor. “I know you two don’t get along. But…”

She knows what’s coming next. She is going to have to learn how to work with people she doesn’t always like. The only concern of the director is the production itself. If she wants to be a successful director, she has to figure out how to compromise. Et cetera. She doesn’t like to be lectured to. Even more specifically, she doesn’t like to be someone who
needs
to be lectured to. She wants to tell him it’s okay, she gets it, he doesn’t have
to continue—but she doesn’t know how to stop him without sounding like a poor loser.

Instead her mind abstracts itself. She begins to think about what it will be like to direct a show. She remembers something her older brother once told her before she went off to camp in the eighth grade. There was a trick she could do, something to test her mettle. (The phrase still calls to mind what it did for her back then: a malleable piece of metal being bent until it snaps.) During the sing-alongs, when everybody is clapping, she should clap in the same rhythm but on the offbeat, in the spaces between the clapping of everybody else. If you did it loudly and consistently enough, he explained, everyone else would be thrown off. And then you might hear a smattering of confused rhythms for a second or two while everyone readjusts to
your
clapping. That’s the point at which your offbeat becomes the
on
beat. And nobody in the room, he said, would know what happened. Nobody would know that you were the one controlling their clapping.

When she thinks of directing, that’s what she thinks of: everyone clapping to her rhythm without even knowing they are doing it.

“You know, Liz,” Mr. Pratt is saying, “I’m really looking forward to seeing what you do with this production. I really believe you can accomplish great things with it. That’s one hell of a script you wrote. You’re a very talented young woman.”

“Thanks, Mr. Pratt.” She knows that these compliments are meaningless. She has heard them before. They are code for
I recognize you as one of those fragile students who needs a lot of positive reinforcement to stay afloat.
Sometimes the praise from her teachers seems almost sincere. But mostly it makes her cringe. She’s smart—okay—but whatever success she may have, she believes it will only lead to higher expectations, expectations that, at some point, she will not be able to fulfill. Then what will she do with all their disappointment? Tote it around in her knapsack? She would prefer if people just wouldn’t compliment her at all.

Mr. Pratt takes a ballpoint pen and puts a little arrow by Dixie Doyle’s name, and now the cast list is complete.

He rotates in his chair to the computer keyboard and begins typing up the finalized list. While he does so, he can feel Liz’s eyes on him. She is sitting there taut as a ball of rubber bands. She has always been a high-strung girl, he thinks to himself, but this process is pushing her to the precipice of her own abysmal anxieties. He knows that she is not used to relying on other people for her success. She hates having to put the fate of her play in the hands of someone like Dixie Doyle. Which is why, deep in his chest, he feels a tingle of joy at forcing the issue. It will be good for her to be relieved of a little control.