Undercover (3 page)

I
N DR. CHARMIN’S class I still could not guess if Rostand’s play was tragic or funny. I mean, it is funny—isn’t it?—that Cyrano, the one with the monstrous nose, composes ballads during swordfights and odes in pastry shops. And it’s funny too how dimwitted Roxane’s lover Christian is, as if God had spent so much time fashioning the guy’s precious looks that He never got around to his brain.

But playing Roxane made me feel uncomfortable. For there is Cyrano, writing letters to Roxane on behalf of the local pretty boy, and there is
Roxane, buying every bit of it, hook, line, and sinker. Why can’t she see that it is Cyrano’s heart and head inside those letters? Why can’t she tell how much he loves her? And what does this say about people in general, that they can’t see what is standing before them? Beauty rules, every single time. Beauty is the password.

We had reached Act IV, the battle scene in which Roxane appears at the battlefront overflowing with her passion for Christian, going on about the letters she so loves, letters he didn’t write. “Read it with emotion, Elisa,” Dr. Charmin instructed, and at first I really did do my best while Jimmy Dowell, aka Lurch, stumbled through the words written for Christian.

Lurch would read:

And I would say:

To which Lurch would say (loud and insistent, the way Lurch always says it):

To which I was to answer:

And I did say that, I got myself through “beauty into beauty,” but beauty is a hard enough word to own when you look the way I do, a hard
enough word to deliver in such a way that your classmates to the front of you and your classmates to the left of you will hear it and be persuaded.

“Again, Elisa,” Dr. Charmin interrupted. “You’re mumbling.”

Lord, I thought. And sucking in enough air to blow a grandparent’s birthday candles out, I repeated. And now Lurch, bizarrely eager, read on, his voice so loud it was as if he were performing through a megaphone. As if he were daring me to answer him with equally enthusing declarations:

The first moment I let pass might have been read as a dramatic pause. The second moment was strange. The third roused Dr. Charmin to high impatience. “Plays are like conversations, Elisa. Conversations are about listening and responding. Every time you pause or mumble, you take us outside the story; you
interfere with its meaning.” I felt the eyes of some of my classmates turning my way. I didn’t want to make a scene. I just wanted to be excused from one. I clamped my mouth hard around the words, loudly enough, but without any apparent feeling:

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m sorry.” Cutting it off right there, unable to read the next line, unwilling to contribute any further to the farce. Tragic? Funny? What is the word for a rhyming five-act play that little by little leaves you feeling so exposed, so cataclysmically stupid? So ashamed.

“Elisa? asked Dr. Charmin.

“There’s something in my throat,” I said. “I can’t.”

“But you are Roxane, Elisa.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Charmin.” I coughed. I felt my face flare, a red-hot, stoked-up fire. Whoever hadn’t already turned to stare at me just did, so that I was suddenly, awfully visible. No undercover operative now. I stared at my shoes and then I raised my eyes to three rows up and two seats over, where Theo was looking back at me with a look I might have almost called concerned, or sympathetic. His eyes seemed bluer than I’d remembered, his hair not so spiky.

“Margie,” Dr. Charmin called, hands on her hips, her mouth tight. “Will you please assume our heroine’s part? Elisa, go get a drink of water, will you? And then come back to class.”

I pushed out to stand up, and the little nubs on the chair legs made their protesting squeal. I left the class and went down the hall toward the silver water fountain. I drank and drank until my eyes got wet. And then my eyes were so wet I couldn’t see.

T
HAT AFTERNOON I went straight to the pond. I threw my backpack through the porch door and I went off through the cul-de-sac, past the Gunns’, and into the woods, between the mass of old burned-out rhododenrons and the naked oaks and tulip trees, down to the stream that was, this time of year, just creeping along, all congested with old leaves. The sun was already falling out of the sky, and my parka wasn’t thick enough for the wind that was blowing so hard that sometimes the ravens in the trees seemed tossed off their limbs. Snow, I thought, because the clouds were
overwrought, because whenever I exhaled I saw my white breath.

When I finally reached the pond, I saw that changes were afoot. That the water had started becoming crystalline and the marble girl was freezing in. All around her and above her was the stuff of early ice, and suddenly all I wanted was to relieve her of her trap. She wouldn’t be able to breathe, I feared. She wouldn’t be able to disappear, either.

I try, as hard as I can, to be my dad’s best girl—reliable and solid. I try to take each thing as it comes and to forsake the sentimental. But that afternoon the cold and the wind and the poor girl’s condition made my eyes swell up with tears. Made my throat hurt again until I had to yell, and my yell was a boom, it was a thunderclap, it was what I didn’t know I had inside me. I was the only one around, save for the ravens. They took to the skies in a black swirl.

B
EFORE JILLY became the world’s most accomplished couch potato, she used to go ice-skating with my mom. Just the two of them, down at the Border Road Rink on Saturday afternoons at five. I always thought it was mostly about the fashions—Mom with her little fur-collared coats and Jilly with her white, puffy muffler. I couldn’t really picture them doing the stroking or twirling you see on TV—couldn’t imagine either one of them losing, even for one moment, her breath. And falling down? Forget about it. They had too much loveliness for that.

We’d have pizza on those skating nights, and if Dad was home, he’d light us all a fire. A big, roaring, marshmallow-roasting fire, though only Dad and I ever ate the marshmallows; Mom called them sugar pills. I liked those nights, sitting by the fire next to Dad, our two sticks side by side in the flame, but those nights are long gone. Now Mom’s and Jilly’s skates hung by a nail on our basement wall, beside a lot of other junk no one remembers, but whenever skating is on, that’s what they watch, with me watching too. Measuring all those complicated moves, cheering whenever big stuff gets done—the double axels and triple lutzes, the laybacks and camel spins, the triple-toe-loop combinations that it’d take years of sacrifice and some kind of genius to learn.

One day after the early freeze had settled in, and floating things had become static, I dared to walk across the entire pond, and the ice hissed and snapped but held. One day I ran halfway across it, then slid to the opposite bank. One day
I sat on the dock and stared out over the gleam, and that was when I remembered my mother’s skates and all that I’d seen on TV. The next day I carried those skates with me, under my jacket, so no one could see. I sat at the edge of the dock and laced them on. They fit me like a glove.

When a pond freezes over, it’s not just ice and gleam. It’s frozen twigs and old gum wrappers, insect wings and gray fish tails and any number of things you could take for bug eyes or buttons or coins. It’s like the whole history of the pond pushed up and stuck hard on itself, except for the marble girl, who stayed where she was, anchored to the bottom. I could hardly see her, but I knew she was there, and when I started skating, when I first pushed out onto that ice in my mother’s skates, I skated for her, because, no matter how bad you are, no matter how awkward, freakishly earlobed, ungraced, you need an audience.

It was like walking at first, walking badly with my arms out at my sides and my knees sputtering
forward, and if I didn’t avoid the biggest frozen-in twigs or the bronze spots that looked like bug eyes, I’d bump up like I was letting loose with some gigantic hiccup, and one foot would go east and the other would go south, and I’d be down on my knees, but soon I was up again, and soon after that I was gliding. Not pushing straight back now, but pushing out side to side, and in this way I learned about edges and speed.

Sometimes I’d look up and I’d see the ravens watching. Sometimes I’d take my parka off and
S
one arm into an arabesque, the way a pretty girl might do. Sometimes I’d clap my hands to make an echo, and when I did that the ravens all took to the skies, turned themselves into acrobats, faked like they were falling and caught themselves before they crashed. Or they started dueling in midair with a twig, or playing raven catch with some odd brown thing, and then, afterward, they’d settle back into the trees and hunch their shoulders and crank their heads and look at me with their accusing eyes.

“I’m skating now,” I’d call to them, and they’d call back:
Kirrk, kirrk, kirrk, nuh nuh; caw caw caw; nuk nuk.
Which is poetry in raven speak. Which is another metaphor.

But Lila wouldn’t let me forget about words. Not even for a moment. Lila wouldn’t let me forget that I was too much like Cyrano. “See! how the poor heart can mock its own emptiness,” said Cyrano. Said I.

I
T SNOWED, and it snowed. I could hear the crystal flakes knocking around inside the whistle of the wind. Downstairs Jilly was warming herself by the glow of the TV and Mom was on the phone nearby. She’d gone five steps up in the stairwell so that she could speak in so-called private, forgetting—it was just so like her—that I was lying on my bed, eight straight-up steps above her, my bedroom door flung wide enough to hear.

“Old dresser lifts up with the wind and flies out of the pickup truck ahead, and before there’s anything to do it’s through Carrie’s windshield. That’s
the way I heard it. At least that’s what Walter said,” my mother was telling Mrs. Garland from across the street. “Or maybe it was a spare tire. A big one off the back of some diesel.” Mrs. Garland is my mother’s best neighborhood friend. She sleeps in her pearls and makes fruited Jell-O and is so proud of her arms that she goes sleeveless in winter, and besides all that, she holds the
Guinness Book of Records
record for gossip.

“Anyway,” my mother continued, “dresser or spare. It doesn’t make much of a difference. Nobody should ever live through that.”

“
Should
is what I said,” my mother insisted after a pause. “I said nobody
should
.”

“Of course I’m going to the funeral,” she said after some silence. “Everybody’s going. Aren’t you?”

I was trying to write my Cyrano paper. I started humming to myself like bad TV actors sometimes do. Hmmmm. Hmmnh. MMM. Hmmmm. Hmmnh. MMM. Turning my own noise into brain silence. I had come down squarely on the side of
tragedy, because there’s nothing remotely funny about unrequited love, nothing even possibly ha-ha about talent such as Cyrano’s going to the sole and exclusive use of promoting someone else’s love affair. Cyrano is a tragedy made more tragic by the humor, was my thesis. And now—hmmmm. Hmmnh. MMM. Hmmmm. Hmmnh. MMM—I was trying to turn my argument to art. I was trying not to think of Theo and Lila. I was trying to remember the too many rules and wherefores of citations.

When I came up for brain air, my mom was still nibbling away with Mrs. Garland.

“I miss him,” I heard her saying. “And then I get angry about missing him. And then I feel like the worst wife on the planet. But why should Robert assume that I’m just going to lie around here and wait? It’s that assumption that I mind most of all. His client
needs
him, he says.
Needs
him? But isn’t he needed at home?”

Outside, the snow was coming down harder, as if
there were bits of stone inside each flake. All the way across the country was San Francisco, wrapped, I imagined, in a deep and baffling fog. I rolled off my bed and peeled my curtains back, and it was clear, even in the dark, that the whole east coast was going under. The flood lamps in the neighbor’s yard were heavy with ice. The old brown ornamental grass along the hedge was cracked and scary. The deck had an unnatural look to it, and the branches of the trees had a diamond’s glare; limb after brittle limb seemed sure to snap. I could feel the cold on the opposite side of the glass.