***

On many second dates, I am sitting in a noisy restaurant in New York City. The restaurant, of course, is never the same, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is the inevitable questions about what my date and I see in our theoretical future. Before making any decision, I go through calculated, analytical steps, so the idea of planning for a life with someone comforts me. I’m not afraid to answer questions like where I see myself in ten years. But the question that unnerves me and, in turn, unsettles my date, is Do you see yourself having children? After learning from a few oversharing moments, I have formulated an answer that allows me to stay relaxed: If ever I was dumb enough to get pregnant, then yes, I could see myself having children. It’s not that I’m trying to be funny, or maybe I am, but because so many men expect my answer to be an unequivocal yes, they laugh. Others might be horrified, but it’s still the only genuine answer I can offer. It’s an answer that deflects the question without revealing my fear of having to hold my potentially dead newborn.

***

When my cousin Kelley, Michael’s younger sister, was five, Michael gave her a book after she had a nightmare. He said that whenever she woke up terrified, if no one was awake to console her, she could read the book to calm down, which was something he did as a child whenever he had a nightmare. Before the baby shower in the summer of 2009, before Sarah unwrapped gifts one by one, pausing every few minutes to rub her inflated belly, Kelley and I sat in a parked car at the end of a neighborhood cul-de-sac in Westchester. Kelley was going to pass Michael’s book down to River. She opened the book and read aloud the inscription she wrote earlier that morning, which she had waited to sign. Would she write Love your Godmother, “Aunt Kelley, Aunt Kel, or Aunt K?” We didn’t know what River would end up calling her. The two of us went back and forth for fifteen minutes until we decided on “Aunt K.”

***

My father’s family had a tradition where they spent part of their summer camping at Baxter State Park. In the mid-1950s, they started a message box that held journal entries, notes, poems, and letters that were written over the course of the trip. They placed them in a metal tackle box wrapped in plastic tarp and buried it near a tree by Kidney Pond. Almost forty years later, a family found the box after a heavy storm washed it up. They read each note, poem, and journal entry that members of my family had left and were so taken with the history that they made copies of each paper and left a bound folder with copies buried under the tree. Michael and Sarah had made the trip every year together since they started dating, but in the summer of 2009, before River was born, they stayed home, concerned about Sarah’s and the baby’s health. My family left notes anticipating the arrival of a new family member. Uncle Peter and Aunt Kate left notes about their excitement at becoming grandparents and at Michael and Sarah having a baby.

***

I sat hand –in hand beside my sister at Michael and Sarah’s reception, our eyes on Michael’s brothers while they made their toast to the newly married couple. It was three years before Sarah would get pregnant, and I couldn’t imagine a happier moment as they pushed through tears to describe how Sarah was the angel that pulled Michael from the rubble. At a wedding, it seemed cliché to most, but not everyone knew the battle with mental illness our family had endured. When Michael’s brothers called Sarah an angel, my sister squeezed my hand, as if in a silent prayer of gratitude for the joy that we were witnessing, which had seemed impossible for so long. In that moment, I naively believed the love between Michael and Sarah had cheated disease, that the fear and desperation from their past had suddenly lifted, and that their future would be clear.

****

The doctors said it helps for grieving families to spend time with the baby. In my mind, I am always entering this room for the first time:

A nurse leads Kelley and me into a private room, with bare walls painted the color of eggshells. There is one small window, with cheap plastic blinds shut three quarters of the way and pointing downward. It is always afternoon, always after River has died and the sun burns too brightly through the blinds, dousing the room in a soft haze. The nurse enters the room and Kelley drops my hand. She inhales, settling her breath as she opens her arms to the baby cocooned in a teal blanket. It seems like a cruel joke to be holding a dead baby. River becomes a Cabbage Patch doll. The nurse places the doll in Kelley’s arms with such care, as if he would crack if she dropped him. Kelley cradles him, slides off his thin knit hat to rub his head. Bent over, she presses lips near his ear, and tells him how she loves him; how he is the most beautiful boy she has seen. Before passing him to me, she whispers, lips touching ear, I wish I could have spent more time with you.

I look down at River, dead and heavier than I thought, in my arms. His forehead is frozen crinkled at the top, just like Michael’s I think. It gives him the strange appearance of being alive, but then I imagine a live baby—how the forehead crinkles when a baby yawns. Or when a baby cries. I picture River as he dies, mouth opened for air, screaming, tightened eye slits—the permanent wrinkle in his forehead, evidence. I trace my fingers over his pale arm, cold, lifeless to the touch; his skin tinted yellow with seeping stains, patched green like clumped algae. Bruising, I wonder, but will not confirm. His hair is wispy and brown like Sarah’s. His arm skin folds near the shoulder and elbows. I want to kiss him, but when I get close he smells clean and he disappears like a ripple in water; much too clean, like the smell of fluoride at a dentist’s office. Is this what he would taste like if I pressed my lips to his skin? I pass the dead baby back to Kelley.

***

On October 3, 2009, after hearing the news that River has died, I imagine Sarah in a hospital bed, eyes closed, blankets gathered in a hump around her belly—now empty but still protruding. I imagine how her insides feel with no extra heartbeat, no kick, no tumbling. Her breasts are swollen still with milk. What will happen to her milk?

I recall reading a memoir about a woman who was forced at sixteen to give her baby up for adoption. She wrote that afterward she did not internalize the tragedy of her loss until the moment when she had to squeeze her breasts and squirt her milk into a sink. I imagine, over and over, Sarah bent above a sink, her belly like a loose sack rolling over itself with so much skin in the way, Sarah squeezing her hardened breasts into a sink basin, no suckling, no teeth.

I can’t stand the image. Can’t stand the sight of Sarah, the bump in the sheets and her full breasts.

***

In my mind, I am always holding onto something, grasping at a shirtsleeve, trying to pull someone close. This is how I want to save Sarah.

My legs move as if I’m wading through tar-laden water as I search for someone in white. My legs are slow and my knees buckle and click with each step in the hospital hallway. I grab at a nurse and watch her face move from surprise to horror as I dig my fingernails into her forearm.

“What are you doing about her milk?”

“What?”

I tighten my grip around her arm. I can only make out the blurred edges of a face: peach, blonde hair, a smeared red lip, and maybe two dark spots for eyes.

“Her milk. Do something. She has no baby to drink it.”

“Calm down. It will be fine.”

“Her baby is dead. She still has milk in her breasts. You have to…”

“Calm down.”

“Just get it out! You need to do it before she wakes up! Just get rid of her milk!”

I can hear shuffling, feel the ground move below me. An arm tugs at my waist, walks me over to sit down somewhere, a cushioned chair beneath me. I tremble in arms, bury my head in a folded elbow that cradles and rocks me back and forth.

***

On the night before my twenty-sixth birthday, nearly two years after River’s death, I dreamed that I was caring for the Boliver children, who I used to babysit. They were two little girls, Louisa and Charlotte. In the dream I bathed them in a tub and took them out, one by one, wrapped up in pink terrycloth towels. I rubbed my hands frantically across their shoulders with a towel, drying them off as they giggled back at me. I smoothed my hands over their slicked-back hair, and braided it while they sat on the lid of the toilet. I pressed my lips against the tops of their heads, smelling their freshly shampooed hair, before leading them back to their bedroom. Before tucking them into bed, we had a pillow fight. At some point, and it may have been Charlotte’s idea, they asked me to stand on the floor and throw them onto the mattress, into their pillows. We piled pillows and stuffed animals into the center of their beds. When I picked each girl up to throw her, she landed on her feet, cracking her bony legs. The girls started crying and I could hear their bones cracking, but I kept throwing them on the bed, hoping their cries would turn into laughter. I didn’t stop until the comforter pooled with their blood and bones stuck sideways through broken skin. I woke up in a sweat, sure that I had killed them, sure that I had heard the crunch of their little bones.

***

On the first anniversary of River’s death, there was no tombstone to visit. Michael and Sarah had spread River’s ashes across a river near Kidney Pond at Baxter State Park. I imagined them driving in a 1994 navy Volvo, the backseat littered with pretzels and sandwich wrappers, Michael’s eyes fixed straight on the highway, Sarah gazing out the passenger window. When they approached the entrance to the park, they would pause. They would stop and read the inscription before entering the park and they would think of River: Man is born to Die, His Works are Short-lived, Buildings Crumble, Monuments Decay, Wealth Vanishes But Katahdin in All Its Glory Forever Shall Remain. They would get back in their car and think about their precious boy. They would camp out by the river near Kidney Pond, where his ashes had long settled into the sediment; had washed downstream, cupped the banks, flat shouldered against earth, and risen to the water’s surface, pressing palm to river.

—

Courtney Cullinan Robb

Courtney Cullinan Robb worked in finance for three years while living in New York City. Her work appears in Shadowbox and Linger Fiction, and is forthcoming in Apt. She is also the recipient of the Melanie Hook Rice Award in Creative Writing for work on her novel, and was nominated for the AWP Intro Journal Awards in nonfiction by Hollins University, where she attends the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing.

Many years ago, Medicine Show Theater Ensemble was performing a piece based on Aristophanes’ FROGS. We were six characters on crisscrossing paths, exploring our psychic underworlds. When two or more characters met, a scene ensued, and when we reached an individual or collective impasse we transformed into frogs, since Aristophanes’ frogs can live on either side of the river Styx. We had been invited to present the piece as part of a festival at the University of Pittsburgh. Our performance venue was half a basketball court, and the audience was composed about equally of university people and inner-city high school students. The mostly white college crowd knew what to expect from theater and behaved accordingly, in spite of not being in a theater at all. The mostly black high school kids didn’t know what to expect, and as they caught the drift of the play, they began to comment on it, just as if they’d been at a movie. Actor Barbara Vann was the first to talk back to them, then others began to do so. The kids were first surprised to get a response, then vocally delighted. The other half of the audience was also surprised, and some members were also delighted. A few even joined in. There was never so much repartee that it overwhelmed the play: the comments were mostly germane, and our responses came out of our characters and actions, so the space between the audience and us became audible. That communication‑carrying space is always there in theater, but seldom does it become so concrete. I, for one, did not want that performance to end.

The experience of that performance of FROGS could not have happened in the movies. An obvious statement perhaps, but it has led me to ask, What are the real differences between the two? What is it we need and expect from each? All too often it is assumed that movies either have replaced, or can or will replace, theater, but this assumption cries out for exploration, for if we simply let it stand, and movie going completely usurps theater going as a social activity, we may lose a form of artistic expression vital not only to the artists who make it happen, but to our entire culture.

Realities

If we ask ourselves one question, imagining we are sitting first in a theater and then in a movie house, we shall find out how great this difference is: Do we think movies are real and theater fake? Even if we don’t really think this, we act as if we do. Does it happen this way: a theater production depends to an enormous degree on pretense. The scenery is clearly not “real”—we all know that behind the stage left door is backstage and not the splendid gardens of an English country house or the dirt yard of a rural shack. We also know we have a dinner date after the show, or an early day tomorrow—we have not planned to be so deeply affected by what we see tonight that we will be incapable of carrying on. So it is easy to say, “Well, that was just a play.”

What about a movie? The western town in the horse opera is made of painted flats just as the stage drawing room is, and there’s a painted cyclorama of the desert behind it just as there’s one of a garden on stage. When a movie shoots on location, it is really that place that is photographed. But we are not in that place any more than the actors of the movie are in the theater with us. What the camera does is treat all it sees the same. Person, place, background——once each image has been recorded on film its visual reality is the same as all the other images recorded on that film, and when they are projected on the screen they all appear equally real. Which is to say they are all equally unreal, all images on a screen. Early movies, especially the silents, did play around with “realities,” from The Keystone Kops to the Marx Brothers, and an occasional maverick like Tati still does, but The Movies have gone mostly for “production values” because that’s where the money is. They sell us their “reality” lavishly packaged, hoping we won’t notice there’s nothing there but image. But we would not go to the movies at all if we saw them in this way, so there must be something more to the experience.

A movie is seamless—it does the “real‑izing” for us, where in the theater the balance of illusion is fragile and requires a good deal of concentration from us. That is why most anyone does not talk back to the actors in a theater, but in a movie anyone can. Movies don’t listen/interact. Even if everyone got up and walked out, the movie could go on. Not so the play.

Time (and Money)

“Movies are not as tough as theater,” says Susan Sarandon. “You only have to get it right once or twice with a film.”¹ Movie‑making is also stop and go, and nonsequential, and the actor is not responsible for the final rhythm or shape of the piece. The director and producer and editor have that job. In theater, the director works with the actors to shape flow and sequence, but in any performance those are, at last, the actors’ responsibility. And any actor will tell you how variable they are, how dependent on the vagaries of the day and the audience and the teamwork and chemistry of that particular night.

By the time the editor, director, and producer of a movie have achieved flow and sequence, the actors are long gone. Theater does not exist at all without the actors. Theater has no shelf life, but put a movie in a can, even if it is never shown to the public, and twenty‑five years later it will still be there.

Movies and plays use time in very different ways. Movies must be made in a severely restricted time span, and pressure to finish a shot within a given allotment of minutes intensifies with adverse light conditions or technical snafus or actors’ tantrums, because a shooting schedule is a pretty tight affair—locations and light are not available indefinitely. Money owns time, in the making of commercial movies at least, and that means time is commodifiable. That in turn shows up in many ways in the content of the films. The assumption that money is the proper measure of both time and value permeates American life, but it is reflected and heightened in the movies and the movie business. Movies are in a hurry. They have to be if they are going to make money. So what is rewarded in Hollywood is speed. The trouble with this, though, is that art will not be hurried. A great actor often has to try out many possible choices before settling on one, because she sees many more possibilities than a mediocre actor, because she understands that each choice must form part of a whole, and because she is, like any great artist, not satisfied with good enough—it’s got to be right. But movies are ruled, like all high‑stakes sectors of American life, by time and money, perhaps even more than most, and rare the movie that seriously challenges or even questions that. Theater does. It, too, is overly ruled by time and money, but theater has more time and less money, so its practitioners are readier to take exception.

Movies are a business, by and large, that shows a profit. (Or hides it, if the numbers crunchers have their way.) Theater is a business, by and large, that loses money. There’s big-time show biz, of course, where there’s also an intense money‑time ratio, but theater as a whole has always needed angels or noble patrons or government grants or quasi‑religious status just to survive. There are of course actors who think their work is done on opening night and from then on everything should stay the same, but they are not the good ones.

Movies control time. Theater frees it. A movie will always take precisely the same amount of time to run. A theater piece can vary enormously from night to night, and especially from the beginning of a run, when things are still a little loose, to the end when every cue is picked up and the fast sections have become as fast as can be. But it’s not just that a scene in the theater can crash through the underbrush one night and float or fly the next. It’s that actors and then actors and audience play ever subtler riffs and rhythms on each others’ sensibilities.

In the days of vaudeville it was not unusual for an act to perform three, four, five, or more times a day, perhaps twenty to thirty times a week for a twelve-week tour. The extraordinary daring and spontaneity of the vaudeville stars’ improvised interpolations (which often became part of the act) was built on the bedrock of countless repetitions. Where every minute counts, that luxury simply does not exist.

Further, from the audience point of view, movies take us out of time—nothing of what is shown us on the screen is actually happening. It all happened but it doesn’t happen. Theater plunges us into time, into historic or mythic or heightened or musical time, but also, insistently, into the present. Theater is always happening right now. The novel demands an enormous amount of imaginative activity from its readers, and a movie does most of the imagining for us, but the movies take us out of the present in much the same way as a novel does.

Space

Movies direct your eye. Theater leaves it up to you where you look. You can always see the whole stage, but you can never truly see all that is happening on it. The camera is capable of showing an expanse far greater than a stage, but you have to look where the camera looks.

There’s another spatial aspect to the movies, at least in my experience, which points up another of their particularities. When I was growing up in Colorado Springs, almost every time I came out of the movies I would start walking in the wrong direction. It didn’t matter whether the movie had been shown at the Chief, which glowed southward under its neon war bonnet across Colorado Boulevard, or at the Bijou, which twinkled back from the south side of the street. I’d always walk east if my destination was west, and vice‑versa, in spite of the fact that east and west in Colorado Springs could not possibly be mistaken one for the other. Eastward were the blank story‑and‑a‑half of the Greyhound Depot, then about a thousand miles before a hill of any consequence; westwards rose the bulk of the Perkins Hotel and seven thousand feet of Rocky Mountain Front Range capped by the stone and snow of Pikes Peak. Brothers and friends found my habit amusing, the more so because I would move in the style of the movie we’d just seen—I’d swagger oozing sass (a Lee Marvin bad guy), step with quiet purpose (a cowpoke by Gary Cooper), sashay full of mischief (Maurice Chevalier on a Marseilles quay), or stumble in a cloud of love (any number of young leading men.) Striding thoughtfully or walking on air, smirking along sardonically or checking every doorway for hidden threats, after a few steps or a burst of giggles, I’d find I was lost—nothing would I recognize. Then abruptly I’d be back, blushing till my scalp tingled. Even today that rush of confusion comes over me sometimes, leaving the movies.

But I have never felt this sort of disorientation upon emerging from a theater after seeing a play. Why? The two experiences are so similar in so many ways, and plays like movies can take us out of ourselves. No doubt the applause and curtain calls of live theater break the spell for us before we go outside. Then again, theater has an outside. Movies do not. They are not specific to any place; they can be shown anywhere there is a projector and a blank wall or screen. Movies bring the outside inside; perhaps they also allow us to take the inside outside in ways we cannot from a theater.

Purpose

Theater is a means. It came from ritual, and it retains the nature and purpose of ritual—to ensure good harvest, to make the sun come back again, to charm forth the love and laughter of life, to educate (which used to be called pleasing god), to focus the attention of the community or the nation on its essence so as to gain strength for a compelling undertaking, to examine myth and memory. The movie is an end, a product. From the first, it was the fascination with the movie itself, not with its subject matter, that made it such a draw. It was magic, and the quality of the early prints didn’t matter, the magic held. As techniques of movie making got more and more refined, we were by each new development, then came to take it for granted. This is not to say that a movie can’t be a work of substance, provocative, stimulating, intensely meaningful. Everyone has seen movies that are. And anyone can imagine that movies could function that way as a rule rather than an exception. But movies are a product, like a car or a TV or a stove or a book, and there’s no getting away from that.

Americans have a hunger for celebrities. Some are people of genuine accomplishment, but accomplishment has little to do with our celebration of them. The image is the thing, and often enough the image obscures the person, as when we turn it into a fantasy surrogate for our own lives. Athletes, retired political criminals, and scions of wealth are all prime meat for celebritization, but none more so than movie stars. They are constantly in the public eye, there is an inexhaustible supply of them, and their celebrity status is renewed as often as needed to sell their films or so the gossip rags can wring sensation out of their real or rumored amours, tantrums, causes, or home decor. There is, I suppose, nothing intrinsically evil in all this—no one forces people to become movie stars, and the acting they do will outlast them and finally be judged on its own merits. The danger here lies not with the nature of movies or their stars; it lies in our national habit of allowing packaged proximity to celebrated images or imagined celebrities to substitute for genuine knowledge and appreciation of their, and our own, real achievements.

Theater is much more difficult to commodify in this way as well as economically. Stage actors, as a rule, no longer become celebrities until they make a hit movie. Then their status as someone apart can be used to convince people to come see a play. But once we are inside a theater we damn near have to take the stage experience (as distinct from the stage personalities) seriously in relation to our own. Those are real people up there.

This is not to say that all theater is pure and deeply concerned with advancing human consciousness and understanding. Anyone has seen plenty of theater whose main object is the buck and which goes about that business in every bit as cynically stupid a way as the crassest of Hollywood productions. But any theater piece, from the silliest Cole Porter musical to the masterworks of the literature, unites audience and performers in a shared undertaking at a particular moment. The essence of theater is the fluid space between actors and audience. When an actor performs live in a play in front of a live audience, the thing will simply not work unless he and the audience and her fellow actors establish that rapport. The film actor’s business is with the camera, and the rapport is with the other actor(s) in the scene, with the director, the cinematographer, and the crew members. Any immediate connection or communication the movie makes with its audience is one way. Two‑way communication is indirect, through the box office receipts, mostly.

Politics

We have taken it without much critical examination in this country that movies are popular or mass art, and theater is elite. A few experiments in communal and collaborative theater in the sixties challenged this view, but by and large even the left assumes without examining the thought, that movies are mass and theater ain’t. If you doubt this, just look at the back of the book in any lefty rag—plenty of movie reviews there, but seldom a notice of theater at all, not to mention anything outside New York.

It is understandable enough why this assumption is made. A movie, if it gets distributed at all, is seen by a great many more people than ever see the most popular play. A movie can be seen by millions in a weekend. A theatrical production could sell out its house for two years and still be seen by fewer than half a million. But if masses of people see the piece, does that automatically make it mass art (or art of the masses, as it used to be called)? We can look at this question two ways: who can make each, and second, how does each affect its audience?

Who can make theater? Anyone. Not anyone can make interesting theater, and it takes a lot of practice to get good at it, but anyone can make it. A production staged for practically nothing can be illuminating, inspiring, deeply moving. Movies on the other hand cannot be made without an extremely elaborate and costly support system. The cheapest movie made today is bound to cost in the area of a quarter million dollars by the time it is done. And then there’s getting it seen. A fairly elaborate theater production can be staged for under three thousand. So theater is economically within reach of anyone, while movie‑making is not. (This is changing now, with the advent of high‑resolution video, innovative financing schemes by small independent producers, and the increasing role of film schools in providing equipment and technical help. But as movie‑making becomes more accessible, in what direction shall it go?)

Our second question is how each form affects an audience. Movies from a distance, theater immediately and intimately—we are there. We see the actors and feel them going through their changes.

A wonderful—and horrible—example of theater’s commonality: the same FROGS piece I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, though with a different cast, played once for the inmates of the King’s County Psychiatric Hospital in Brooklyn. Now we frogs did not shy away from the psychic depths in our journeys of exploration. There were encounters of intense emotion, of violence, and of the disintegration of psychic boundaries. Strong stuff. Oddly, though, in this place where we knew the patients were going through the same kinds of journeys we had made into a play, it felt as though we were speaking into a wad of cotton or trying to see in a dense fog. The faces of the audience were immobile, impassive, and silent. Nothing was coming back to us, and we had to raise our energy level to keep the show alive. After about twenty minutes or half an hour a woman got up, in her loose hospital gown, and began to dance in the large space that had been left between the inmate audience and the stage. Someone else began to sing. A man with his hands in leather cuffs tied to the chair he sat in started struggling to get up. The strangest aspect of this sudden and escalating activity was that almost none of it seemed to be in response to what was happening on stage at the moment, but rather to what had happened ten or five or fifteen minutes earlier. As we began to understand this and respond to the audience responding to us, the performance began to change. Who knows what it might have become? But the attendants got scared—there was too much response—and cut the performance short. We hurriedly discussed backstage the possibility of defying the “authorities.” We chose instead to do the final scene, in which the six journeyers came together, changed by our discoveries, and sang what we called the “Graduation” song. We did it this time with rage and grief in our eyes and voices. The patients didn’t know exactly how, but they knew they’d been robbed, and they became very agitated. The attendants had indeed created the very situation they feared. The consequences were healthy in the end—protests to the hospital directors helped change hospital policy. What is interesting here, though, is the fact that these severely isolated people, isolated from the world and from one another by their own insanities and by the drugs they were fed, had begun to create, with us, the beginnings of a community, however inchoate.

Movies move in the other direction. As Lewis Lapham has pointed out, “Sooner or later [visual] technology will make it possible to divide the American public into audiences of one.”² There’s another big political difference. Once you have an image on film, you can control it, control where and when it’s seen, and how often, and you know it won’t change on you, have an attack of conscience or be bought off or suddenly spout nonsense. If you wanted to use a theater production for propaganda you’d have huge logistical, psychological, and moral problems but not so with film—it’s only celluloid. And film is far more useful as propaganda than theater is. Theater has been around for ages but it’s never really been used for propaganda. The medieval church tried, but it backfired and had to be banned, and nowadays we have the odd USO show or convention entertainment, but for propaganda theater is nothing like radio, TV, and movies—precisely because it cannot reach nearly as many people. But films! Think of Riefenstahl’s, Capra’s, Huston’s in WWII, and all the prepackaged, DOD‑produced footage used during Desert Slaughter and the “War on Terror” to convince us that our bombs were “smart” and our Patriots and Hellfires accurate. Which afterward, too long afterward, turned out to be just so much eyewash. But because film reduces every image to the same degree of (un)reality, if any part of it is accepted or touted or trumpeted as real, all of it becomes acceptable as real. Even if that is ludicrous.

What can be done?

Theater always needs funds, so if you control large sums, give some to a theater you love, knowing the profit that will be gained from your investment will not be measurable, certainly not in dollars. If you do not control any money but your own, but you do work for a corporation, find out if it has a gift‑matching plan, and if it does, give a gift to a theater and have the corporation match it. Volunteer to do tech work, marketing, or administration for a small theater—it will help the artists to concentrate on their art where they can’t afford to hire a staff. But above all, go to the theater. Experiment. Try different ones, and when you find one you like, go back again. Invite friends to share your adventure. Remember the play’s the thing, and it doesn’t even exist without us.

Notes

¹ Susan Sarandon, interview, Boston Globe Magazine, 2/14/93

² Lewis Lapham, Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siecle (Verso, 1995), 309.

—

Chris Brandt

Chris Brandt is a writer, activist, translator, carpenter, furniture designer, theatre worker.  He teaches in Fordham’s Peace and Justice Program and English Department.  Poems and essays have been published in Spain, France, Mexico and the US; translations in The New Yorker and by Seven Stories Press, UC Berkeley, and the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena.

Ever since I was old enough to hold playing cards in my chubby little hands, I have been obsessed with any card game: Goldfish, War, Hearts, Rummy—it didn’t matter. After my sister was old enough, we broke into our respective teams and have not changed them: Dad and I always play against Mom and Bekah. These partnerships were inevitable. I’ve always been a Daddy’s girl, following him around to his shop, watching him work on cars, reloading bullets and shells for his pistols and shotguns. Bekah would trail Mom in the kitchen, strewing pots and pans over the floor along with flour and meal. Bekah and I were barely able to see over the table and our feet didn’t touch the floor, but we could throw cards onto the table like pros.

After I’d been in college a year or so, I started to come home every weekend for Sunday dinner. Soon this evolved into an all-day card competition that ended with a feast of cubed steak and gravy, green beans, fried green tomatoes, fried okra, and homemade biscuits with peach jelly. While all my friends were sobering up from Saturday night’s events and doing last-minute homework, I discovered myself with each card that fell from my fingertips.

The porch is small and screened-in, and it comes off the living room. There’s only enough room for a patio table, four chairs, and the old, weathered wooden swing hanging from the ceiling. From our chairs we can see the road, the remains of the house next door that burned down, and an array of trees. A lot of days we watch rabbits, birds, squirrels, and chipmunks fight over birdseed that dropped from the lighthouse feeder hanging in an old oak tree. The sun sets directly in line with the screens, so Dad hung two shades that can be lowered to block out the light. Mom placed about six potted plants on the floor while three hang from hooks around the top of the screens.

It’s always the same. Dad sits across from me in overalls and a T-shirt, wiping at his bushy beard while his large green mug, filled with caffeine-free Diet Coke, sweats on the table. Bekah is to my right, her long hair falling into her lap as she pops yet another Jolly Rancher into her mouth and doodles on the score pad. Mom sits to my left and applies lotion, face cream, and baby oil in between smoking cigarettes and brushing her hair. We play until one team makes 500 and then start over again. Some days Dad and I prevail, getting hands full of spades and aces; other days it seems the card gods have left us with nothing but red cards and single digits. Mom always underbids, Dad and I generally overbid, and Bekah drives Dad mad by always spading higher. The rules come naturally to us. We don’t have to think about the game. Our hands automatically reach for the right card while our brain subconsciously counts cards and files away what’s been played and who’s out of what suit.

The cards are old and worn out. We play with the same two decks, blue and red Bicycle decks. The two of spades is bent in the corner, the back of the queen of diamonds has rubbed off from where Bekah spilled her juice, and all the edges are frayed. Mom always keeps powder on the porch to sprinkle over the cards when they start sticking and won’t deal out properly.

For years we sat at an old white, rusted metal table with a tablecloth thrown over to cover its imperfections. The chairs were a shade of weathered gray from one too many days in the rain and sun. The arms and backs were broken in various places, but we sat in them anyway. Mom placed pillows in each chair, but Dad hated his and gave it to me. I then had the most comfortable seat on the porch. Mom and Dad would wander around Wal-Mart and Home Depot garden sections and dream of buying nice patio furniture with matching cushioned chairs and an umbrella, but they were always too expensive for our tight budget. But at the beginning of one summer, they lucked up and found a patio set for under $100 – cushioned chairs and umbrella included. The metal table and broken plastic chairs were moved off the porch and replaced with the new, shiny furniture. Now we throw cards across a glass surface and sink our bodies into fluffy, floral print cushioned chairs. It is perfect.

In between trying to win tricks, we talk. Movies, music, religion, politics—nothing is too stupid or too controversial. Mom and Dad reassure Bekah by saying, “College is only a year off, then you can find new and better friends.” We commiserate with Mom and tell her, “You do the work of five people and don’t get paid for it. We know you can find a better job,” when she is in tears. I tell Dad that one day he will have another Harley Davidson and his mountain home he’s always dreamed of. And they all tell me, “Rachel, you were destined for great things, but you’re only 21. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Just be patient,” when I feel like I’m a total failure.

And we eat. Eat more than we’ve eaten all week long. Mom gets up and pops a bag of popcorn, passing it around until there’s nothing left in the large green bowl except kernels and salt. Dad returns to the table with cheese, crackers, and a glass of milk. Bekah brings back iced oatmeal cookies while I choose ice cream, usually Mayfield or Edys or whatever brand was on sale that week. By the end of the day, we realize we’ve consumed more calories than we’d like to think about, but that doesn’t matter.

For years, Dad talked about putting up a ceiling fan out on the porch. He hates muggy, hot weather, but playing cards inside on a nice Georgia summer day is out of the question. Over countless Saturdays of getting up at 7 to go to yard sales with Mom, Bekah, and me, Dad collected enough random ceiling fan parts to put one together. It took him an entire weekend to get everything together—the wiring, the fan itself, the braces in the ceiling. Then finally, late one Sunday afternoon, the ceiling fan was spinning around above our heads, and we sat down for a short game of spades to celebrate. Dad was happy because enough air was moving to disguise the sticky heat, and he could finally comfortably sit on the porch and play cards.

None of my friends quite see why I stay at home with my parents every Sunday, why I choose to miss out on a party or some other exciting outing. The answer’s simple: I enjoy it. I get to play cards, something I could happily do all the time, and figure out what is going on inside my head. Sharing my troubles and playing spades with my family gives me a sense of peace that nothing else could. Over those diamonds, clubs, spades, and hearts we have grown to know one another. We are no longer just parents and kids, we are people who understand where each other is coming from.

But to any normal person, we’re just playing cards.

—

Rachel Scoggins

Rachel Scoggins holds a degree in creative writing from Agnes Scott College. She taught high school English for three years, and is now teaching college English while pursuing a doctorate in Medieval literature. Her work has appeared in Pens on Fire and the Kitchen Drawer magazine. She lives in Georgia and is working on her first novel.

I learned fear at the age of 4. When we, as a family of a Soviet diplomat, moved from Norway to Moscow.

The chaotic and intense Moscow frightened me. What a contrast with the orderly, hospitable, and much smaller Oslo! Apprehensive and gloomy people, just five years after the end of World War II. The scarcity of the most common necessities—bread, milk, sugar, salt, potatoes, rice, fruits, and vegetables. I could not any longer walk freely on the streets—my parents never let my hand go. I could not leave anything outside our room—it would be stolen.

I demanded we go home. My parents never managed to legitimately prove to me that we had come home. I started to stutter and then stopped talking altogether. In six months when I did begin to talk again, I could speak only Russian, but not my native Norwegian.

I began the learning process of an elaborate system by which the Soviet totalitarian regime installed fear into the souls and bodies of its vassals.

Our communal apartment felt like a prison, where my younger brother and I could not talk in full voice, or play in full view. Our parents were afraid that we would say or do something that could be construed as the reflection of their critical opinion of the communist order. I felt restrained and suffocated, as if I was wearing clothes several sizes smaller than I needed.

The same feeling I had in a day care center, where I was exposed for the first time to all those rules and regulations that limited my freedom in any possible way. It also was my first initiation into conformism and propaganda, although I did not know those terms at that time.

But it was the hidden, subtle ways that truly injected fear into my displaced and wounded emotional and mental bodies. My sensitive inner self immediately picked up on my parents’ fear and discomfort. They abruptly stopped speaking Norwegian, German, or English in fear of being misinterpreted and informed on by their neighbors, colleagues, and fellow citizens. During a May Day parade and demonstration that we all watched from a sidewalk, I exclaimed, “Hip hip hurrah!,” as I had in Oslo, instead of the Russian “Ura(h).” My mother shushed me so forcefully that I could not make myself talk the entire day. I remember she cried that evening while talking to my father.

Government-imposed bans and limitations permeated even the most trivial aspects of life. If your life’s purpose was some kind of progress, you could not help but violate those rules. You would always feel guilty and fearful of the retribution of an omnipresent and omnipotent authority. This fear kills your personal willpower and bravery and wastes away your critical mind and sense of self-worth. Only collective bravery and group dependence are left. As a child, you first resist and then adapt. I adapted, but I never resigned to that fear, anxiety, and panic. I never lost my critical mind. A stranger, I never fitted in. As a thinking adult, I began to question the established order and eventually resist it again. I went beyond that order by turning my sight into my inner world, investigating all available spiritual practices.

People’s response to the strict system of group dependence was the creation of a parallel system of personal interdependency—the network of like-minded friends and friends of friends. That was how one would survive the oppressive regime and go around the rules and limitations. The negative side of that network was that it could burn you. I remember a Soviet-time joke about two men talking to each other while riding on a Moscow bus. One says, “Do you know the difference between our government and our bus driver? Our driver knows the point of destination, but our government has no idea.” Another man comes up to them, shows his KGB badge and says to the man who just talked about the difference, “Do you know the difference between you and your friend? Your friend will continue riding, but you’ll go with me.” The man replies, “Do you know the difference between you and me?” Then he shows his KGB badge and says, “No difference.”

We all there lived with a constant risk of inevitable exposure. The risk that created both fear and courage. A very specific type of courage—the courage of an inner dissident.

It is not easy for those who have never experienced life under a totalitarian regime to understand that people can be cowardly and courageous at the same time, and that many courageous actions took place in private. This dichotomy was the way of life and survival.

Nobody was an open dissident during the Kafkaesque time of Stalinism. If they say otherwise, they are either lying or dead. Very few were during the Brezhnev era. Yet, practically anyone who had retained their power of observation and critical mind was an inner dissident to a larger or smaller degree. Most of them were “invisible” people, whose courage was simply knowing and dreaming about the eventual end of the dictatorship’s nightmare, or just keeping alive that power of critical mind. Even if they had done actually nothing to destroy the regime, they would consider themselves inner dissidents.

Only some of those inner dissidents were disturbing for the government. They usually were great thinkers, scientists, writers, and artists of the era, such as Pasternak and Shostakovich. Neither was an open dissident. But they both projected a humanistic philosophy and recurrent faith in the creative miracle of life itself, reaching beyond political matters to universal human values in their works. And both survived Stalin’s repressions by accident.

But an inner dissident is, by definition, a hypocrite. He has an army of external lies and deceptions at his disposal. He has to be a sycophant, a briber, a flatterer.

He has to ingratiate himself to all those who are above him on the pecking order and who use their power for material enrichment or emotional satisfaction of feeling their superiority. The more fraudulent that superiority is, the more sycophantic proof its holders demand from their subordinates. For them, it is both a survival technique and entertainment. For the rest, it is a balancing act between fear and bravery—the act that can destroy your psyche and body.

Contrary to a popular belief, constant exposure to fear does not immunize you against it. No matter how much you progressed in a spiritual direction, you still have to live and work in your physical manifestation of that moment. In this aspect, I had never managed to get rid of the feelings of fear, dis-liberty, dis-independence, dis-comfort and dis-ease.

I just did not want to waste my life on fighting that system of fear any more. I had to get out. I had to be born to freedom again.

“To Freedom” is an excerpt from “Between Two Halves of a Journey,” Prokhorov’s unpublished memoir.

—

Vadim Prokhorov

Vadim Prokhorov is a writer, artist, and composer as well as a concert pianist and choral director. He is an author of Russian Folk Songs: Musical Genres and History (Scarecrow Press, 2001) and author and illustrator of Little Red Riding Hood (to be published next year). He has written numerous articles on classical music for the Encyclopedia Americana, for which he served as associate editor. He has contributed cover and feature articles to The Guardian (London), Parade Magazine, Air&Space/Smithsonian, The Moscow Times, and Gramophone Online Magazine, among others. He was a features writer and classical music critic for various daily and weekly newspapers in Connecticut, where he lived before moving to New York. As an artist, he had numerous solo and group exhibitions. He recent solo exhibition, “Visual Music,” was in November 2008 at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. His paintings sold to private collectors in New York, Washington, D.C., and Connecticut. His choral compositions and arrangements of Russian vocal compositions and folk songs have been published by Oxford University Press, Hal Leonard, EC Schirmer, and Musica Russica. He is a member of the Authors Guild and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

He has given lectures on Russian music at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Wesleyan, and Boston Universities, among others.

“Are you still living in New York?” Noboru asked me.  I told him yes.  “I’ll never go back there,” he said.   Before Noboru lived alone in Maine, he was in New York.  He worked as an architectural designer, subject to a fast-pace, stressful life.  He developed cancer.  Attributing the disease to his lifestyle, he moved to Maine, and recovered.  Morning walks, a macrobiotic diet, and making birdhouses were part of that process.

Noboru told my father and me he hadn’t been making birdhouses lately because not enough people were buying them.  But he agreed to show them to us anyway.  Gingerly he turned the door handle of the bright red shed, giving it a gentle push.  The door made a high-pitched squeaking noise, as if caught by surprise.  The birdhouses had a layer of dust over them, and cobwebs had begun to envelope them like fishnets.

Noboru makes his birdhouses with all “found” materials— door hinges and tiny pieces of tin roofs and driftwood.  Many of his birdhouses have branches extending from, or even enshrouding them like vines.  One birdhouse is a triptych—a red house, a blue house and a white house, stacked one on top of the other, and secured by thin iron rods.  Another is made from layers of birch bark.  The word “peace” is inscribed on a number of the houses, written sideways in white paint, and engraved on a square of bronze hidden behind a tiny wooden door that opens like a mailbox.

As we admired the birdhouses, a van pulled up into the driveway.  No one ever comes to visit Noboru.  The van door slid open and a woman in her late fifties emerged.  She wore glasses, a black shirt, and a long skirt with streaks of blue and pink across it.  Her light brown hair moved buoyantly around her head.  She walked towards the house, carrying a blue pocket-sized Bible and a folder that said “The Watchtower” on the front.

“Good morning,” the woman said cheerfully, like a neighbor delivering banana bread.  “Do you live here?” she asked Noboru.

“Yes.”

“I’m visiting folks around these parts this morning, and thought I’d stop by.”  She paused.  Noboru made no reaction.  “May I ask if you belong to any religion?”

“Yes I do.”

“Which one?”

“Buddhism.”

The woman smiled.  Noboru’s face was motionless, as if he were wearing a Japanese mask.

“Do you believe in God?” asked the woman.

“I’d rather not talk about that.”  Now, he looked a bit disturbed.

“And how about you?” she turned to my father, whose forehead was covered in small beads of sweat from our earlier jog.

“I am an atheist,” he said, with an audible leftover accent from his Southern upbringing.

“Oh, right…what is that, that you don’t believe in God? Or that you’re not sure?”

“I’m 90% sure that God doesn’t exist, and 10% unsure.”

The woman nodded her head up and down, up and down, curls bouncing.

“Have you felt that way since you were a little boy or did something happen to make you feel this way? Or is it the wickedness argument?”

“I am a scientist.” The room was still.  “I believe that all natural phenomena can be explained by science.  And yes, I do also believe that if there were a God, he or she would not allow all the wicked things that happen in our world to take place.”

“Uh huh. Well I tell people the God we believe in is one who is working to make things better real soon.”

The room breathed out a musty, damp wood smell.  I studied the intricate patterns on the floorboards.   Noboru looked out the screened window, towards the street.  The woman looked at Noboru, and my father looked at the birdhouses, which suddenly felt like human presences that had been intruded upon.

“I think that if God were to exist, he or she would live in these birdhouses,” said my father, gesturing in their direction.

“Yes, I think God encourages everyone to find his or her own creativity.”  The woman looked at Noboru.  “He doesn’t want to talk about what he believes in, does he,” she said, with a smile that bordered on sadness.

“Thank you for coming this morning,” said my father.  “I know you are committed to what you do.”

“Thank you,” she said, still smiling.  “Enjoy the day.”  She turned from her spot in the doorway and got back into her car, joining the group waiting for her.  The door slid closed, clicking with a certain finality.

Noboru absentmindedly ran his hand across the roof of a birdhouse.  We all faced the birdhouses now, which stood silently like upright monks.

—

Photo: Anthony Rhoades

Elyse Lightman holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the School of the Arts at Columbia. When she is not writing about Maine she writes about Cambodia, which is where she helps run a non-profit to empower a new generation of women leaders. She lives in Brooklyn.

Illustrations by John Dermot Woods

That’s why we talked legacies. Mine, hers. For me, literary prowess or fame? For her, a husband and child? I was in love with her brother; she had just moved back into her parents’ house in Pennsylvania, and had decided to stay. It takes an editor to bind us back together—stop and start, when what happened, happened, there was the first, and then only the last.

It wasn’t like before, in the summers, when I would visit, and we’d cut thick tomato slices and fry bacon, layering the new lettuces between nutty breads and French mayonnaise. We’d put our toes in the grass, and we’d eat, me finishing her sandwich. When her parents left, we’d break out the wine, the firecrackers. We lit them, and they exploded all over the brick patio, and we screamed in delight before elbowing each other, arguing about whose fault it was because they had permanently scarred the walkway. That was a long time ago by now.

So long I can’t remember what I looked like, so long that I look at pictures from that time and can’t recall the voice of the person whose arm mine is slung around; I know it’s her but I don’t see her face that way—shiny, blonde, smiling. Khaki shorts, stupid-looking hats. We were in Nice, she had a French boyfriend, and we stood on the rocks as the bathtub-colored water rushed over us, over our feet, and we wore scarves because the wind was strong though the day was hot.

After vacation, back to our separate corners, we had a discussion about our plights. I posted an open letter online to myself and to her, a girl who, by now, always had time enough to read. My letter was about fame, about writing, two things I knew nothing about but lusted after. I asked. I pointed to the sky with an alias. If I wrote something wonderful, and nobody saw it, would it truly exist? Would it mean anything if it did not change anyone else but me? Would I be doing a service, the way I really wanted to?

“It’s the fame motive,” Alexis wrote in the comment section. “You want to be famous.”

“No,” I retorted. “I want to be good.”

“Same thing,” she wrote. I didn’t have time enough to fight. The window closed and she went offline. I deleted her comment, not because it wasn’t absolutely true, but because she had used my name, my real life name, and I was scared my boss would see what I had been doing on my lunch hour—perpetual navel gazing and social networking. I deleted her answer because it might outlive my question.

“I think that as writers, we say we want truth in return, but really we want our egos massaged,” I said explaining why I took it down, the last time I visited. We laughed in her parents’ kitchen as we dried off on a Sunday afternoon. “I feel like one of those masked magicians on cable, revealing the secrets behind the world’s greatest illusions.”

She looked at me like she was waiting for me to tear off the mask, to show my face along with my bad intentions. I was wicked. I threw a wet towel and she ducked, and it slopped to the floor.

“I know you’ll be famous, simply because of that instinct. To show us the truth.” She sounded so sure, so matter-of-fact. “You’re brilliant.”

But I am not capable of being brilliant. Only of pretending. Afterward, I shied from exposing myself more, I sent her book recommendations from afar to thumb through. I imagined her floating in the navy-bottomed pool at the edge of her parents’ vegetable patch, her small dog chasing the groundhogs terrorizing the tomato stalks.

So much had happened by the time it happened. All those clichés come from something, don’t they? We nod. Burn brightly and leave in an engulfing flame, fade out and those who know you now have forgotten who you were then. Let’s all join in, this is high school and we’ve got some angst to sell. Was that when we talked about when we talked?

Wait no, this.

Is after that.

Silly how I forgot. This is not that any more. We don’t hide on the mountain, sneaking cigarettes while the prep school police in the form of Mrs. P—old maid, adviser, science teacher, who made the same lame joke about a flux capacitor every freaking year (it’s famous in its clunky delivery) when instructing a class on electricity—looks for a flame in the dark, to nail us to the headmaster’s wall. That was a detention offense, and that was a long time ago by now.

Longer even than the pool of that house, the trading of magazines, the look in everyone’s eyes when we talked about books. Small dogs and summer cocktails, lame jokes and Christmas plans. The walk around the lake. That first day we met, as I walked with her brother, trying to win them both over. The last few e-mails that ever transpired. The scar faded faster; it can barely be seen on the bricks. That was a long time ago, by now. I’m mixed up, I spread my fingers to radiate what’s left inside me and I try, I try. Alexis was older, always older: I had nothing to teach her then, only her favor to curry, only her laugh to provoke. To win her was the ultimate prize. The things we didn’t talk about, what we knew. Alexis could teach me; I could never teach her.

I can’t remember feeling so small, but I was. I had dreams and habits that made me someone else, and I can’t recall them. It was so long ago that I say to myself now, I was a kid. And I knew nothing. Now I am not. And yet. We fell away on my watch. I look out the window. When we come together for the reunion, what will I say? Who will I have become?

No, this is not that time.

This is not the time to talk of my fame motive. That’s slipped away into another portal; how funny, how fast. The time, Alexis’s time, her wants, and now mine. I’ve caught up to Alexis in age, motives, and motivation. Now for me, this is the marrying time, this is the making-a-family time, this is the passing it on to the next generation because we forgot to do something with our own time. The What Would We Do With Our Twenties If Only We Stopped Time. I still had my twenties left, I said. Alexis’s were long gone. I spread my fingers a little more, as if that would share our cup, as if that would build a bridge, a swing, where we could meet in the middle. No, not that. Love is fickle and destructive before it’s everlasting, small talk is the only talk I know, and flowers are sent as contrition. Memories are null and void.

The last few years were spent in a basement party in another state; I stopped going to the house in summer, the fall. The rift between her brother and me was explosive, we broke up never wanting to remember what we had, and an ocean rushed between us all. He had brought us together, and now it seemed inappropriate to continue our friendship, our reading lists, our discussions, our glasses of wine. When you love two siblings, one through the other, one more than the other, you lose one and you lose them both.

I woke up one day feeling tricked. It’s not fair that I’ve been tricked, I hissed. Where was I—Vegas? No clocks on the walls, no windows? I didn’t even see it pass, didn’t remember to call. I know. I know. I could have stepped outside, I could have checked, but my eyes were fixed, flickering on the monitor, my fingertips couldn’t find a notebook, I was feeling sorry for myself because I had lost, and I had nothing to make it go away.

This is not that time, I said. I’ll say it again. Years from now. When more of us are gone. But today, it’s just you. You are gone and I remember, the time we had and now, more than ever, the time we had not enough of. The faded paper on which you exist—the only good deed that I do for you, before I delete your comment, I print it out. How I folded it up and put it away, because I didn’t think this time would come. Not really.

I will be in the backseat, because when you return home, you return to your place and position, and I will be moving away from the drive, closing my eyes, furious, running away from that moment, our first, our last, and now this. You’ve taught me, sure. Too bad I don’t want to learn.

Rest in peace, Alexis. I am sorry I took down your comment for the world to see. I am sorry for many, many things.

—–

Photo: Anthony Rhoades

Hillary Kaylor’s work has appeared in Food & Wine, New York magazine, Fader, Travel + Leisure and online at Gawker and RCRD LBL. She is working on her first novel.