Eleven
As soon as Sunday lunch was over and Clara was back in her bedroom, she started thinking about how to pitch her audition idea to Dune.
She’d popped awake at dawn and couldn’t go back to sleep because she’d experienced her first authentic creative impulse.
Her drama teacher, Mr. Goodwin, was always talking about the human urge to create and the importance of channeling the inner self.
He went on and on about Carl Jung and something about connecting to the conscious self or the unconscious self.
Both? “Stop trying to figure out what other people want to see—including me, by the way,” Mr. Goodwin would lecture them, tugging a little on his beard near the bottom of his chin, a nervous tic.
“Feel what’s right. Feel what’s essential and authentic for you.
Get out of your own way! Occupy your body,” he’d say and then point to someone and tell them to take a lap.
Taking a lap meant walking around the perimeter of the theater and trying not to think, trying to feel.
“Let me guess,” Mr. Goodwin said to Clara one afternoon while particularly frustrated by her inability to memorize a series of dance steps for a scene they were doing in drama class, “you’re a reader.
” He said reader pityingly, like he was saying, let me guess, you’re a stoner or let me guess, you’re a Republican, because Mr. Goodwin was extremely vocal about his hatred of the Republican Party and what they’d done to his country, a country he no longer recognized as his, he told them, shaking his head in sorrow.
“Reading isn’t a bad thing exactly.” He raised his voice a little, nodding at his own insight.
“But it tends to put you all up here.” He patted the back of Clara’s head.
“You need to work from here.” He moved behind her and put his arm around her midsection, hand on her abdomen.
She had her period and felt bloated and so she flinched a little.
“Oh, she reacts. She retracts!” Mr. Goodwin said. “Message received.” He backed up, hands raised.
“No, no,” she said, not wanting to fall out of hard-earned attention so quickly. “I liked it!”
“She liked it,” he said to the rest of the class, taking an imaginary cigar out of his mouth and twirling it while he sent his eyebrows up and down, imitating Groucho Marx.
“I didn’t mean it like that!”
“Don’t worry, Larkin. I’m teasing you. Sit down.
But remember what Priscilla taught us.” Priscilla was Mr. Goodwin’s yoga instructor girlfriend, who’d invited the drama class to her apartment a few weeks ago to teach the students how to breathe.
He demonstrated now, inhaling slowly through his nose, hand on stomach, feeling it distend with breath and after holding for a few seconds, blowing the air out in a steady stream through his mouth.
“From here,” he said, patting his slim middle as it settled back into place. “From here.”
“You realize he’s a total creep, right?” Fern said later while they were packing up their things for the day.
Fern had no real interest in drama; she took the elective for the theater tech part and because she thought it would be an easy grade and complained constantly because building sets was very time-consuming.
“He’s not a creep. He’s a creative.”
“What’s the difference?”
“He’s an actor. He’s not as uptight as everyone else we know. He operates on a completely different level, Fern.”
“Really? Then why is he teaching here? Because Our Lady of Good Counsel is a hotbed of theatrical talent?”
Clara felt herself getting blotchy on her chest and neck. “He’s in A Christmas Carol this year at Geva. And community theater is legit.”
“What part?”
“The Ghost of Christmas Future.”
“The one who wears a hood over its face and gestures with one finger? The nonverbal one? Sounds right.”
Was this true? Clara’d only seen the movie once. “Lots of actors start at a small regional theater before they make it big.”
Fern sighed and rolled her eyes, which was happening more and more lately.
Clara and Bridie and Fern used to be joined at the hip, but things had been tense lately.
All Fern wanted to do was talk to Bridie about college (they were only juniors!) and all Clara wanted to do was think about Dune, something she could not, under any circumstances, tell Fern or Bridie about. Not yet.
“I can’t decide what to do for my Godspell audition,” Clara said.
“Is there a worse musical on the face of the earth? Jesus Christ Superstar at least has something a little subversive in it,” Fern said, slamming her locker door shut and turning to Clara. “Okay, what are your options?”
Clara had been in all the school plays since freshman year and almost always landed in the chorus, maybe with a featured line or two.
She’d sung “Who will buy my sweet red roses?” in Oliver!
(she would have brought down the house as Nancy) and was Gertie-with-the-annoying-laugh in Oklahoma!
(she’d wanted Ado Annie) and though she’d been called back for Golde and Hodel in Fiddler last year, she wound up as the dead butcher’s wife, Fruma-Sarah, who yells more than sings in a dream sequence from beyond the grave.
Her voice wasn’t powerful, but it was solid, she could sing on pitch, and she’d improved.
“As an avowed atheist, I’m not thrilled with doing Godspell,” Mr. Goodwin, new to the school in September, had said while rocking back and forth in his Converse high-tops.
Two girls in the back of the class angrily packed up their backpacks in protest and stormed out through the auditorium’s swinging doors.
“My right, ladies,” he yelled at their receding backs.
“My constitutional right!” He laughed and surveyed the rest of the group, half of them giggling (Would he go to hell?), a quarter clapping raucously in agreement, and the rest—like Clara—confused.
“Anyone else need to leave? Go running to Mommy and Daddy and talk about the big bad unbeliever?” He waited and nobody spoke.
“Okay, then! Godspell? Not my first choice. Not even my fiftieth choice. But let’s look at this as an opportunity to step away from the rigid hierarchical structure of so many plays and explore what theater has to offer us in the form of the ensemble.
Let’s try to break free of lead and supporting and chorus. ”
“How many parts for girls?” Deirdre Connelly asked, raising her hand and speaking at the same time.
As always, their all-girls school would join forces with the all-boys school right down the street for theater productions.
As always, Deirdre would complain about how many of the leading roles went to boys instead of girls.
Everyone in the drama club had many theories about Deirdre: Feminist? Lesbian? Plain old stage hog?
“Every part in this production is open to both sexes,” Mr. Goodwin said. Deirdre Connelly clapped her hands and let out a little “Woo-hoo!”
“Even Jesus?” Greta Crane asked, hand to heart.
“Even the son of God. May the best human win the chance to be divine.”
A female Jesus was all anyone talked about for days.
Who could do it? What would the parents think?
Some cheered. Some vociferously objected.
Deirdre started wearing rainbow suspenders to rehearsal, and every time Clara walked past the practice rooms, she could hear her singing “Day by Day” at the top of her lungs.
All the noise was for nought because it was crystal clear who would get the part, and that the messiah wouldn’t be wearing a bra. Dune Finnegan was the Jesus to beat.
“Well, look what happened there,” Clara’s mother had said some weeks ago when they were pulling out of the driveway right after Labor Day and Dune was riding his bike home from his after-school shift at Finnegan’s. “Dune Finnegan got almost handsome.”
Dune, who’d been named after Finn and called Junior until Fern began to talk and could only pronounce his name as Dune, had spent the summer living at the family lake house while working for a local landscaper, and in the span of three months he’d transformed.
He’d grown a few inches and acquired some musculature in his arms and back, his legs.
He hadn’t had a haircut since spring, and the longer length suited his blond hair, lighter from a summer of outdoor work.
He wasn’t exactly tall but was no longer short.
“That’s Dune?” Clara said, gawking at the boy on the bike whom she’d known since second grade.
Dune Finnegan with the constant runny nose until they figured out he was allergic to the family dog and banished it to the backyard.
Dune Finnegan, who’d sung “Ave Maria” at the eighth-grade Christmas pageant and brought most of the parents to tears.
Dune Finnegan, who’d won every spelling bee from second to eighth grade and had Coke-bottle glasses and ate a bologna sandwich on white bread with mustard and mayonnaise and one hard-boiled egg for lunch for as long as anyone could remember.
“If it ain’t broke!” he’d say cheerfully when mocked for the sulfur stink of the egg.
That Dune had disappeared, and this Dune—who’d also gotten contacts and had his braces removed—was a different creature entirely.
And yet his youthful sweetness somehow shined through.
He serpentined down the street, whistling as he waved at Nina and Fern, slowed the bike, bent to the curb, and picked up a piece of trash.
The inside remained, but the packaging had been upgraded. New and improved Dune!