Chapter One.
Jesse - A Thursday in October
The bell rings, signifying that passing time is over, and the library noise dwindles by the minute as everyone settles down to murmurs, if not complete silence.
The library dragon, Mrs. Reichert, breathes fire if her domain rises above a certain decibel, and we respect that as most of us have a metric shit-ton of work to do on the daily.
I slide into my unofficial assigned seat. “Hey, Lyrical,” I whisper.
She glances up, offers me a smile, and turns her attention back to her sacred planner, consulting the plan for today’s work on our English project. Shrugging out of my backpack, I dive into it, hunting for my notebook and battered copy of The Taming of the Shrew.
“Monologue analysis today,” she reads off the list. As usual, she starts by reminding me of our overarching topic. “Question: Does Kate succumb to the gender roles of her society, or does she select to submit to them. Sub-question: Is happiness predetermined, or do we make our own?”
Nodding, I open to the monologue and the annotations I made last night to prepare for today. If I’m going to impress this girl, I’ve got to be on my game.
“Well, on the surface, it seems like she’s giving in to the stereotype of what a woman’s place is in her society.”
Lyrical tilts her head, her expression thoughtful. “But?”
And there’s one reason I like this girl. She doesn’t just agree with me. She genuinely wants to hear what others—what I—have to say.
“It’s an issue of context,” I told her. “If you read the monologue separately from the rest of the scene, I’d agree she’s been ‘tamed.’ But if you look at the scene—and in the greater picture, the play—she’s learned that until now, she’s been beating her head against the wall senselessly.
Screaming into the void will not help her cause to be taken seriously.
I mean, that’s really all she wants. To be given some choice.
She recognizes that her world doesn’t see her as capable of making decisions, surviving without a man, etcetera.
She’s not separate from her father, and eventually her husband, but if she’s given some agency within the role of daughter/wife, she can work with that. ”
“And?”
“And that makes for a happy, healthy relationship. Being a raging bitch is just going to make everyone unhappy. Most importantly, she’ll be miserable.
Petruchio offers her a choice. He tells her, you can be the way you’ve always been and continue to be unhappy, but if you can meet me part way, it can be like this, and you’ll be happy.
He doesn’t need it all his way, just a compromise, because her spirit actually gets his motor going. ”
The beaming smile coming from her face is worth the two-and-a-half hours of torture reading this gobbledygook.
“And you said you hate Shakespeare,” she teased.
“I do hate Shakespeare,” I grumbled. “Why can’t he write in plain English?”
She ducked her blonde head back down into her book to look at the next item on her list, and I studied her while she worked.
Here I was, almost eighteen years old, and I’d never really given girls a second thought.
Never been on a date. Never even taken a girl to a dance.
It didn’t interest me, mostly because my schedule of never-ending activities kept me from having time to date.
My parents were constantly pushing the college resume—sports, grades, volunteering, National Honor Society, Student Council. It never stopped.
So why did she catch my eye when no one else did?
I had to admit; she was pretty. Very girl-next-door. Didn’t wear makeup. Didn’t wear designer clothes. Long, blonde hair she usually wore in a ponytail. Deep brown eyes that felt warm and welcoming. Thin. Maybe a little too thin, but some of that was likely because of her family circumstances.
But, pretty aside, there was something else about her that made me want to know her better. She was kind, smart, and worked hard. I admired her, and being in her orbit made me want to be a better person.
I sighed. It was a mystery.
“What if we did a reenactment of the scene?” I asked out of the blue.
Owlishly, she looked at me and blinked slowly.
“I mean,” I continued. “We need to do some sort of presentation, according to the assignment sheet. We could modernize it. Maybe fishbowl it.” I ramped up speed as ideas flashed through my brain.
“We could ask a couple of our classmates to read the extra parts, and you and I could do Katherine and Petruchio. Run it once. Ask people what they think she’s saying.
Present some discussion questions, break off into groups, come back, and discuss as a class.
Then we run it again to show how a different context changes things. ”
“That’s… ambitious,” she said. She bit her lip as she considered my proposal. “It has merit, but honestly? I’m not sure I’m up for that sort of scrutiny.”
The subtext was, “I don’t want people laughing at me behind my back.”
Lyrical came from “the other side of the tracks,” as the saying went.
Most of the students at our school came from money—lawyers, doctors, CEOs.
There were many people who made fun of her, if they recognized she existed at all, because her family was poor.
She tried to hide in plain sight a lot, which I hated.
Teachers rarely allowed her to do it, which sometimes made things worse for her.
“Stretch your wings a little,” I encouraged her. “Be brave. No one else will do something like this, so it’ll be original, and Mr. Young eats that shit right up. Who cares what everyone else thinks? It only matters what we want.”
She wanted to give in. I could see it. “Let me think about it,” she hedged. “Tomorrow we can talk about it.”
I’d take it. She’d come around. I’d apply some of my newfound Petruchio knowledge and get her to see I had a good idea going.