Chapter Two
Two
It was a tradition in Greensbury, as in many a jurisdiction across America, for the third-grade class to perform a Shakespeare play.
In Greensbury this was not only for the other children and their families, but—given the limited nightlife—the entire community.
Each year there was suspense around which play would be selected, and each year it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
As Miranda explained, every few years, Mrs. Littlejohn, the former drama teacher, besieged by parents who could recite the play from memory, had relented and tried another.
But these same parents said that Romeo and Juliet was too suggestive, Hamlet too tormented, and King Lear had the nudity on the heath.
But that didn’t stop them from nagging. So Mrs. Littlejohn put on Titus Andronicus, after which they didn’t nag her anymore.
“Oh dear,” said Kate.
“Isn’t Titus the one where the empress eats a pie made of her children?” asked Miles.
Fortunately, said Miranda, someone had turned off the power before that happened. The next year, they were back to Midsummer. Still, the school kept the ritual of the announcement, the suspense, and still the town waited with bated breath.
This year, they were performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Or, as it was variously described in the school emails, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, or, even more evocatively, Midsummer Night Dreams, which sounded like the series Miles’s friend Frank used to record for them surreptitiously on VHS, late nights on Cinemax.
Miles had signed up to be a parent helper for the school play back in September.
So much time had passed, and so many adventures, that he had almost forgotten his commitment.
There’d been many opportunities, and over the school year, he had watched them come and go, appearing and disappearing in enthusiastic emails, groveling school apologies, and Olive’s nightly summaries.
Dr. Anita taught sex ed; Candy taught painting; Andrei taught apple grafting, apple pruning, and borer removal.
And if Miles didn’t have such elaborate plans—no heirloom trees, no watercolor portraits, no pipe-cleaner models of the male and female reproductive systems—nevertheless, he had ambitions for the play, which he had acted in when he was in third grade, and fifth grade, and summer drama camp.
Oberon, Lysander, Puck.
He had yet to be inside the school since parent-teacher night, and after making it past the security camera, intercom, and locked double doors that guarded even this remote American outpost, he presented himself at the front desk, where the school principal was busy stapling a pile of flyers.
Despite her youth, Principal Tanner carried about her that indisputable air of authority that comes with mastery over hundreds of children.
Miles introduced himself as Olive’s father, and was a little disappointed by the matter-of-fact manner with which she received this, as if he had expected that his daughter, such a star in his own eyes, would be the same in hers.
The principal, a local girl, pronounced “Olive” as something between “Ahlive” and “Awhlive,” dropped the “t” when she showed Miles where to wait, and ended her sentences with a little puff of air.
So great you can help with the play, she told him.
Then she paused for a moment. “You’re the family from California?
” Miles nodded, and she told him her sister lived in San Diego, as if to say she knew his tricks.
Then she picked up the phone, dialed a single number, and told the voice on the end of the line that Mr. K. , the parent helper, had arrived.
Miles took a seat beneath a giant felt board, with little cutout felt children—apparently, the likenesses of actual schoolchildren—playing with little felt balls, chasing felt animals, flying felt balloons, and otherwise engaging in a world of such innocence and beauty that part of him believed, for a fleeting moment, that it might be possible.
He had just found Olive, a little felt artist before a little felt painting of the mountains, when he became aware of a presence to his right and looked up to see a young woman in knee-high black boots, black stockings, very short, very puffy velvet pumpkin breeches, and a loose satin Red Sox bomber jacket over a form-fitting doublet, laced tightly across a frilly blouse.
“Nausica?,” she said, though it would be days before he learned about the umlaut. She held out her hand. “You must be Mr. K. The theater’s this way. Come.”
—
Nausica? Torres-Lakeman had arrived in Greensbury two weeks before, after the departure of Mrs. Littlejohn, broken by so much Shakespeare, so many Pucks.
Greensbury was but the most recent stop in the itinerant, marginally employed life of a drama-school graduate, she said.
Before this: Denver, directing a musical of Death Comes for the Archbishop; Seattle, for an audience-participation production of No Exit; and Chicago, where she’d served as summer musical director of Camp Samuel Beckett.
It was her first time in Vermont. Her mom was originally from Western Massachusetts—in fact, the Red Sox jacket once was her grandpa Morris’s.
So far, she loved it here. Except there wasn’t anyone her age, and she hadn’t thought that it would be so cold.
Generally, people wear pants, thought Miles, though he stopped short of telling her, correctly reasoning that, given how his eyes had unintentionally lingered on the stockings, it wasn’t the best way to start off what was going to be a two-month-long collaboration.
Eventually, he thought, she’d learn the customs of the locals and adjust.
In any case, he hardly had any time to offer his advice, or connect with her over Archbishop, the manuscript of which had been on display at the National Willa Cather Center when they’d stopped there that August, after choosing a route that added four hours to their transcontinental journey, only to discover it was closed on Thursdays, so the truth was that he had only seen it through the window.
Because by then they’d reached the drama room, and Nausica?, after turning on the lights, took off the jacket, plopped herself down on a couch, and motioned to Miles to take a seat as well.
The only seat available was on the same couch. Miles, aware now that the pumpkin breeches covered much less of the legs sitting than standing, settled as far in the corner as possible, primly picking up the nearest prop, which was a donkey’s head.
“And what is your story?” she asked.
Miles told the short, dry version, which was that they had come so his wife could teach at the college, that he was working on his dissertation, which, he lied, for reasons then unclear to him, was near completion. It was, he said, now feeling unexpectedly flustered, about Tolstoy and rural life.
Huh? Tolstoy? But he had answered so quickly that he didn’t know why he’d chosen this answer, his previous dissertation topic.
Except that there was something about a folktale, with its shape-shifting enchantresses, that seemed risky in that moment.
Tolstoy felt more like the topic of an older, more domestic man, and not an individual in possession of the thoughts that he was currently having.
Yes, he had enough experience to know the effect that talking about his Tolstoy dissertation had on most women, which was to put them to sleep, and not a contented, sexy sleep, more like something medicinal.
So that was probably why he’d lied, a little.
And he had every reason to believe that this topic would have the same effect on this girl as it had on others.
Thus he greatly misunderstood his newest audience, who put her hand to her breast and told him how much she loved Russian literature, that she was wild for Chekhov, having once performed as Nina in The Seagull, Irina Arkadina in The Seagull, Konstantin Treplev in a gender-neutral Seagull, all three sisters in Three Sisters, and everyone, even the orchard, in a one-woman rendition of The Cherry Orchard.
This was not to say she didn’t love Tolstoy, too! Yes, what a coincidence: she’d even written a feminist adaptation of Anna Karenina, in which Vronsky is the married character, and Anna the seductress. One day, she could show him the script, if he liked.
Anyway, she said, the students would be coming in soon, she and Miles had better talk about their plan.
Honestly—she leaned toward him, and lowered her voice conspiratorially, although they were alone—at first she had been reluctant to take the offer, especially when she heard the play would be A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was pretty fucking unoriginal.
But she’d heard of what had happened with Titus, and a job was a job these days, and, of course, the text offered all sorts of possibilities.
Her goal, she said—and she very much wanted to hear Miles’s opinion also—was to leave the bowdlerized elementary-school adaptations behind and return to Shakespeare’s original, with the attendant darkness of its oneiric depths.
“Okay,” said Miles.
The truth, continued Nausica?, was that Midsummer Night’s reputation as a safe text was really based on the sanitized school-versions. But this couldn’t be further from Shakespeare. Last week, when she reread it, she’d been reminded how rich it was, how subversive, how thick with eros.
Miles said he didn’t know this.
“Really? I serve the Fairy Queen / To dew her orbs?…The female ivy so / Enrings the barky fingers of the elm?…Use me as your spaniel?”
“I’m guessing that those are lines from the play,” said Miles.
“You bet they’re lines from the play,” said Nausica?. Her eyes flashed. “Against her lips I bob / And on her dewlap pour the ale. God, there are so many places that we can take this.”