A Play on Gratitude

The lights go up and they warm my face. Blank as always, I measure a moment to let my heart exhaust itself of its beating. I’m not a nervous person. When I perform, it takes only a few seconds to feel the rehearsal leave me, to fall beyond memory into motion. Part of it is lying artfully, part of it is simply overfeeling—enacting drama– like waking up in the morning, milking the dread, burying it under obligation in the end. Contain yourself. A motto I’ve inherited and lived with. The lights go up and all that falls away.

And I stand in front of the crowd and tell the biggest lie of my life. There I am, apron around my waist, stitched hem, bleeding patterned marigolds around the swell of my belly. My hair done up. Red lipstick underscoring the thin lines of my face. Humectant–sweat beading up the sulci on my neck. Two seconds of that stillness, of the lights still warming my face, and a smile stretches those blood red lines. So 1950s, I can practically taste the benzodiazepines and dulled hysteria floating just below the surface, drowning with the sun in sight.

I don’t sing on stage. I was never into musicals like that. I say I love the theater, I love it, I want to be it, be absorbed by it. But, to me, the best theater lives in silence, in concealment. The way a face dances when it knows it cannot cry and the way a scream bubbles, resists its own freedom. Musicals are too literal. And I hate that kind of sincerity. I became an actress because I wanted to play, but really I wanted to lie. Contain yourself. I want to pretend I can. And I want to show I can’t. I don’t sing on stage. I resist.

Instead I glow and I say my first lines, pausing before the “Honey I’m Home!” He is coming, but for now I am alone, whisking myself about the space, catching the echo of my steps. Graceful as learned and practiced. I think about making love to him on the kitchen counter. Stage center, the island, right by the mixing bowl and the flour abandoned by a stray flick of the wrist, outsmarting the kitchen rag. I take in feminine air. He’ll come home now, and I’ll play my part and the audience will know who I am, will know the year, the president, the context of my parroting about the house in agitation, anticipation, prolepsis. I know how to tell them who I am.

Now I am thawed and the emotions bend my eyebrows. A burning in my gut like a spot of whiskey on an empty stomach. I walk to the bubblegum fridge, pull out a wax mold of aspic, place it on the island. I check the clock, a set piece donated by a friend of the theater– it was an antique found in a house of one of his tenants, has to be from 1954 or even earlier. It flaunts above the fake sink. We had it fixed and turn it back to 5 o’clock each run of the show, matinee and evening. When the house opens and the first spectator enters, they see the minutes run from 5 pm. I spot it. Five forty-nine. Plausible. I wait and wait then:

He enters stage right straight into the kitchen, straight into me by the island. Honey I’m Home! I meet him as my skirt swishes between my bow legs. A melody plays, I know it as Claire De Lune, though it must be dusk now and unromantic as ever. The romance finds itself in the kiss I plant on his cheek. He removes his hat, waits for me to take it. And I imagine myself burning, if I was Her. So I lift my eyelashes and scan over his face and settle myself a flat inch width away from him, urging my chest to heave as it would if I wanted him on me.

“Tough day at the office?”

I can tell by the way he turns his cheek to me when my kiss lands as it normally would on his lips.

“What’s for dinner?”

When he rehearses he says it differently each time. Sometimes I pass over the dismissal, sometimes the line tastes saccharine. This time, he bites and a cord snaps. He strides past me, leaving me at the door, my arms caging the apron. It’s clean. In this universe, I wouldn't meet my husband in a dirty apron. The soiled one is already in the sink, half laundered. I swim after him as his eyes glaze over, nose selecting the aspic with pointed disgust.

“I think I’ll take dinner at the Sierra.”

In this play, the scene dies short. The playwright kept it. I’d wondered before, while reading the script, whether there was more to be done in the kitchen. Whether the moment seemed wasted if He just walked out right then without his hat. His displeasure removed from the space too soon to land. But I thought of myself as a child and of my father’s curtness and I agreed. The short confrontations were the ones I remembered. All the times, after the line was cut, that I stood in my own stillness, slighted by blunt absence and shivering.

He exits stage right to go to the Sierra. Leaving me there to cry. Abandoning me to shame and inadequacy, wringing my hands before the wave overcomes. There is dust in the coruscating light adding to the stuffiness of the aging theater. Dust mixing into my edematous tear. I am alone in the kitchen again. Stage center.

But here is my lie. Here is the play:

I could not know the wound of a man when, after I leave this stage, I come home to a woman. At forty nine minutes past ten I am in arms, tv playing in the bedroom. We keep the fridge stocked, but I pick up an item or two for dinner. I think about taking my clothes off a block from our apartment. Breathe in the scent on her neck in the doorway, bag falling to the floor. Tough day, sure, but it vaporizes and stays in the hall. Her kiss falls on my lips, dewy and sweet. And I do not wait. Sometimes it’s the other way around. I lay in bed, checking the time on my phone every quarter hour, charting her journey back to me. And when I hear her steps coming up, I exhale, clearing my lungs so I can fill them with her air.

We play music when we cook. She feeds me slices of tomato and brushes up against me by the stove. When we eat, I fit the spoon into my mouth and think of her fingers there on my tongue. I know she’ll oblige. I think about what it would be like coming home to myself, Me seeing myself, knowing what I want, what I need, how to recover. But I come home to her and I don’t have to imagine.

I stand on stage, in front of this crowd, and question everything I know about my character. So, I play my part deceitfully. I tell the biggest lie of my life. The lie that I am defined and held together by my apron. The lie that I shed for a man, that I live in his laundry and greet him by the door ready to be taken and consumed and decided upon.

In this short first scene, a violent laugh rips from my diaphragm. I ripple and double, having convinced my audience so well that my heart aches, when it swells with relieving gratitude.