Chapter Twenty-One #2
The theater was small, only about a hundred seats, most of them empty.
The stage was no bigger than Danny’s living room, with a yellowing screen mounted on the back wall.
A couple who looked to be in their forties sat in the front row with a mammoth camcorder mounted to a tripod.
These had to be Astoria’s parents, looking like they’d just come from a high-stakes business meeting at Trump Tower—odd, given that their daughter dressed like she’d raided a thrift store during a blackout.
Danny tried to scan the room for his friends, but before he could locate them, the lights dimmed, forcing Danny and Valerie to slide into a row in the back.
From the darkness, a distorted electric organ blared from a woofing speaker right by Danny’s head, making him wince.
When the lights came back on, Astoria was standing center stage in a Girl Scout uniform—white blouse with a butterfly collar, green knee socks, green miniskirt, brown penny loafers, and a green sash across her chest. She was wearing a synthetic blond wig and had traded her usual black lipstick and eyeliner for rosy cheeks and bubblegum-pink lip gloss. Danny almost didn’t recognize her.
For ten long seconds, Astoria just stood there, glaring out at the audience with a mischievous grin. Danny shifted in his seat, uncomfortable in the silence. Finally, Astoria opened her mouth and began speaking in a perky, childlike voice.
“The year…1990,” she said with a smirk. “The crime…,” she paused for dramatic effect, “…conformity.”
What followed was a rambling monologue, vacillating between a first-person direct address and a kind of spoken-word poetry told from unclear perspectives in a variety of tenses.
Danny tried his best to follow, but could only do so much.
Valerie, for her part, seemed to be understanding perfectly, emitting the occasional hmm or huh.
“Daddy?” Astoria whined in a cloying voice. “Pwetty, pwetty please may I pierce my ears?”
“Mommy,” she said, clasping her hands together. “Pwetty, pwetty please can I have breast-e-ses as big as yours?”
Danny crossed his legs uncomfortably, staring at Astoria’s folks in the front row.
They were (perhaps intentionally) semi-illuminated by the stage lights, which made them (perhaps intentionally) completely on display to the entire audience.
The whole thing made Danny itch with discomfort, but Astoria’s parents seemed unfazed.
As their daughter overshared family anecdotes and bluntly discussed bodily functions, they politely nodded along.
After sixteen years with Astoria, Danny guessed, it’d take more than a monologue to rattle them.
“Daddy?” Astoria said. “Why can’t I stand up like you when I’m using the potty?”
At the end of Astoria’s unending monologue, the lights dimmed to a cool blue and Danny watched as a figure dressed in all black stepped out from the wings, dragging what looked to be a pink kiddie pool.
Christian! Danny’s heart whispered, clocking the unmistakably short but spry frame.
Christian positioned the pool at the lip of the stage, handed Astoria a pair of children’s inflatable water wings, and scurried back into the wings.
The lights gleamed back up and a song began to play through the speakers.
It was “The Entertainer,” Danny thought, or one of those ice cream truck tunes.
Astoria slipped into the water wings and grinned wildly at the audience, kicking off her loafers and miming a cartoonish shiver as she dipped a toe in the pool.
For someone so dry in her everyday life, Danny couldn’t help but be amused by Astoria’s broad, over-the-top acting.
Astoria knelt in the kiddie pool with a crunch, reaching down and pulling out a crumbly cookie with a delighted squeal, nibbling it and moaning theatrically.
The music warped, speeding up as out popped another cookie, this one a Thin Mint, followed by more, each devoured with a gleeful shriek.
Soon, Astoria was splashing in the pool, grabbing cookies by the handful and crunching them messily into her mouth like a blue monster puppet.
Covered in chocolate crumbs, she grew more crazed, smashing cookies against her head, sending shards of shortbread flying into the audience.
As the music sped up again, she hurled cookies into the air and into her mouth, delighting everyone in the room, especially Valerie Toxin, who waved her pointer finger in the air with approval.
When the song ended, Astoria collapsed in the pool, panting, cookie bits stuck to her clothes and wig.
With a trembling hand, she pulled out an unlit cigarette and mimed smoking it lazily, as if in a post-sex ritual.
It was all, Danny thought, extremely weird. But not not entertaining.
The stage went black and Christian appeared again with the push broom, gracefully sweeping away the crumbs and whisking the kiddie pool offstage in a single pass. When the lights came up, Astoria stood disheveled in the spotlight, covered in crumbs and glowering at the audience.
“When I grow up,” she said in her cutesy, baby voice, “I want to be just like you. I want to have long wavy hair and big spawkly jewelry and a big pair of round squishy breast-e-ses.”
She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a pair of scissors that glinted in the spotlight.
“I want to get a job and marry a man who treats me like a pwetty, pwetty princess.”
She lifted the scissors into the air, snipping a chunk out of the wig and letting it fall to the ground.
“I want to grow hair on my legs and armpits and learn how to shave them and hate their smell.”
She reached for another lock of blond hair and snipped it off.
“I want to get a tattoo of the Chrysler Building.”
Another snip.
“And swim in every ocean.”
Snip.
“And race a train on horseback.”
Snip.
Astoria was now standing in a pile of peroxide blond hair, a patchy wig scalp sitting lopsided on her head.
“When I grow up,” she said in an alto husk that Danny recognized as his friend’s everyday speaking voice, “I want to be an avalanche.”
She reached up and grabbed the seam of the ratty blond wig and slid it off her head, revealing her signature buzz cut underneath.
“I want to start as a whisper, as something barely felt.”
Danny couldn’t have been certain, but it looked like Astoria was now staring directly at him.
“I want to tumble freely with no idea of what lies ahead.”
The room began to peel away, melting the walls of the basement and the water-damaged posters and the bleach smell and the proud parents. And then it was just Astoria and Danny, standing inches apart, peering deep into each other’s eyes.
“I want to roar down the mountainside,” she said, breathing the words into his lungs. “Splintering the air, swallowing everything that dares to stand still.
“I want to carry pieces of the sky in my hands.
“I want to level cities.
“I want to reshape the ground.
“I want to be both the chaos and the creation.
“And when I finally come to rest,” she whispered, her hand hovering as if pressing the words into his chest. “I want to look back and see the shattered landscape that I’ve rewritten.”
A single clap broke through the silence, then another, until the applause swelled, jolting Danny back to the basement.
The walls tipped back into place, the bleach smell returned, and the parents were back to adjusting the focus on their video camera.
Danny joined in the applause, his hands moving on their own, but something had shifted, as if the ground beneath them had been quietly rearranged.
The first person Danny needed to see after the show was Nina, who he found out on the street, wearing her aunt’s fur coat and checking the voicemails on an enormous cellular phone.
“Hey,” Danny said, approaching cautiously. “Can I talk to you?”
Nina looked startled, stepping back, eyeing the crowd that had gathered around Astoria.
“It’ll just take a second,” Danny said. “Then I’ll leave you alone.”
“Okay,” she said softly, tucking her phone into her fuzzy pocket, her expression changing to one of indifference. “But make it quick. Astoria’s parents are taking us to Serendipity for frozen hot chocolate.”
“I’ll be fast,” Danny said.
He’d rehearsed this part already, in the shower, on the subway platform, in bed, like a hundred times in the past week.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me, but it wasn’t okay.”
Nina stared down at the sidewalk, her eyes hardening slightly, perhaps having to remember the moment in her room.
“You are a nice girl and a good friend and you didn’t deserve any of that. I think I was just really drunk and I kind of freaked.”
Nina crossed her big furry white arms, which to Danny meant that he still had more explaining to do.
“But that’s no excuse,” Danny said. “I know I made you feel unsafe. And I’m really, really sorry.”
Nina gazed at the passing cars and bike messengers on Second Avenue, her face a frozen mask.
“You really scared me, Danny,” she said after a moment, her voice fragile, like a trembling hand holding a clattering teacup on a saucer.
“I know,” Danny said, looking up at the sky. Faces flashed in his mind: his dad, the priests at St. Pete’s, the lifeguards at Midland Beach. All of them puffing themselves up to look strong. All of them hurting someone who couldn’t fight back to prove it.
“I think…I think I got angry because that’s…what I know how to do. Like, if I could make someone else feel small, then maybe I wouldn’t feel so…” He trailed off and shook his head.
“I don’t want to be that guy,” Danny said, his jaw tight and his voice low. “Who makes someone feel scared, just to feel like he’s not.”
Danny could feel his hands trembling at his side. He shoved them into his coat pockets, clenching them into fists for a split second before he remembered where that impulse came from, and what it could do.
“But I was so scared, and angry, and like, trapped, and I just did what I’ve always seen…what I told myself I’d never do.”
He let out a shaky breath, thin little puffs barely visible in the December air. “I’m so scared of turning into my dad. But the thing that scares me the most is the idea that I’ll hurt someone I care about. And I did. I never wanted to be that guy. But I am.”
Danny looked down from the sky and into Nina’s eyes.
“I am so sorry, Nina.”
Nina shifted her weight, her arms still crossed tight over her chest. Her expression was still inscrutable. But there was something in the way that her eyes met his—not forgiveness, exactly, but maybe understanding.
“My father has this dumb expression,” she said, her voice softening, her posture still guarded.
“He’s not the best with metaphors, as you can probably imagine, but he says that if everyone could bring their parents to a flea market—like, trade them with anyone else’s, no questions asked—that we would all leave with the same parents we brought. ”
Danny furrowed his brow, not following.
“The point is, Danny…” Nina let out a long breath. “I don’t know what you’ve ‘always seen,’ or what kind of man your father is. Partly because you work so hard to keep so much from me. From everyone.”
She reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder, so lightly that Danny didn’t even feel it.
“But you’re the only person who can turn you into your dad. And you’re the only person who can turn you into someone better.”
She gave his shoulder the tiniest squeeze.
“Anyway.” She inhaled sharply through her nose and shook out her hands, like she was waving away smoke from an extinguished candle.
“Enough of me weaponizing my analyst’s insights against you.
Next time, just don’t lead someone on. If I’d known you weren’t interested, I probably would have tried to hook up with Demetrius.
He was looking hot as hell that night and didn’t even break my doorframe. ”
“Right.” Danny kind of half laughed, relieved to be talking about anything other than his raised fist. “He should be so lucky.”
The block of ice between the two of them was far from melting, but Danny hoped that at the very least, he’d been able to put a crack in it.
“Well, mad props for bringing Valerie Toxin,” Nina said, glancing at Astoria, deep in conversation with her idol. “How’d you pull that off?”
“Long story,” Danny said, figuring it was better to avoid the topic of raised fists, even if they’d been used for good. “Only in New York.”
The two of them watched as Astoria’s gushing parents pushed in for a strangled hug.
“So,” Nina said, turning back to Danny. “What are you going to do about Christian?”
Christian. The name shivered in his shoulders.
“He…uh,” Danny muttered. “He told you about the flowers?”
“Flowers?” Nina grunted. “What flowers?”
“The flowers for opening.”
Nina’s face twisted in a lack of recognition.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Danny. I meant him being, like, in love with you.”
Danny felt the jar of lightning bugs that lived in his chest twist open.
“What?” he breathed, like saying it too loud would make it true—or worse, not true at all.
“Honestly, I should have known,” Nina said, rolling her eyes. “Him leaving the cast party early—he was obviously mad at me for kissing you.”
The bugs whizzed out of the jar, circling his head and joining the wind that whipped down East Fourth Street.
“Is he here?” Danny blurted. “Is Christian still here?”
“No, he dipped out right after the show,” Nina said, swatting a firefly out of her face. “I think he’s still mad at me.”
“I don’t think he’s mad at you,” Danny said, his sneakers peeling off the pavement and tugging him toward the nearest subway, barely giving the rest of his body a chance to catch up.
“Hey!” Nina called after him. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” Danny shouted back. “I have to call him. Tell Astoria I said she was amazing!”