“How about this?” I began. “Ifyou and Nick can make it a year together…”
“Oh, stop.”
“If you do, I’ll think about moving closer, but right now, I’m pretty serious about Canada.”
“Because you’re that sure Nick and I will break up.”
“Why couldn’t he come to New York? And why doesn’t he pay the child support he owes you before he started talking about buying a home? Isn’t it up to like four thousand dollars?”
“This is none of your?—”
“And I assume he wants you to put in some money for this home he wants to buy.”
“Enough, okay.” Which meant yes, of course.
“What?” My attempts at calm were fully out the window. “You guys left me, okay. You moved away from me, and I’m supposed to follow you at the snap of your fingers?”
“So Newfoundland is your life now? And improv comedy?”
“As much as Georgia is yours.”
“And your new improv friends are more important to you than your niece?”
“It’s not me who moved away, Laura. You left.”
“You know what? I’m going to go.”
“Fine. Bye.”
“Bye.”
I regretted my tone as soon as I hung up. Okay, I regretted it an hour or two after I hung up. I knew I’d been sarcastic and unsupportive, but the fight had made one thing clear: deep down, Laura really had been expecting me to follow her down there. She still was. If she and Nick worked it out, then I was going to have a decision to make. I missed Hannah, but I wasn’t sure I wanted Laura’s life to be my entire life. Not anymore.
Paul wasright about the improv books. They were surprisingly good. I spent my Saturday wandering the city while reading most ofImpro. I had a good reading system that I’d developed for my literature courses in college: read one chapter and then change your locale. Coffee shop, hillside park, brick wall with a decent view, different coffee shop, living room, bed. You could get a lot of pages covered that way and flatter yourself that you were getting exercise in the process—a form of interval training where the intervals were croissants.
The author of the first book seemed to have been raised in a really repressed British education system, and it made him want to explode all the little boxes that people put themselves in. For him, improvisation was about reconnecting with the rule-breaker within. One of the improvisational exercises he used to do was having people imagine that they had taken a book off a shelf, and then they opened it to a page, and he would tell them to pretend to ‘read aloud’ what they saw there. He had examples in his book where people had come up with whole poems, beautiful stories, just by pretending that somebody else had written them.
That struck me, the idea that we can be more creative and imaginative when we pretend we are reading from someone else’s work. I wondered if I could believe I was more capable if I was channeling someone else.
Lying in bed that night, I had a distinct memory of Laura and me putting on a play for our mother as children. It was one of those recollections that came back to me in pieces, jigsaw memories that didn’t quite fit into a whole picture. I remembered that we wore costume dresses from a past Halloween that were way too small for us, and that we were acting a scene where we were princesses, and that our mother spilled her wine midway through, and we stopped whatever we were doing to help clean up the mess. We were so happy to have the chance to help her. It made us feel useful and important, and we pretended we were princesses scrubbing the floors, and she said, “Oh, thank you, princesses, your fairy godmother needed help,” and I remember feeling panicked that she was pretending to be my godmother instead my mother.
“You’re the Queen!” I said. “You’re the Queen!”
Then Laura took over the play and insisted on putting Mom to bed on the sofa with a blanket while our mother told us how pretty we looked.
“This is a high-class establishment,” our mother drawled as we pulled the cover up to her neck. “I’m getting the fancy treatment!”
“Because you’re the Queen!” I cried once again.
When our mother was asleep, I told Laura that I still wanted to do our play for nobody, and Laura flatly refused. I was heartbroken, but I could see that the moment was gone for Laura. I was young—maybe seven—but intuitively I realized that Laura had concocted this whole play as a gambit to win our mother’s attention, to be the center of the room for once, instead of all the attention being on our mother, and perhaps on me as the baby of the family. Maybe that’s why Laura turned into a drinker during college: because in our house, the drinker always got to be the one everything revolved around. It hadbeen different for me. I hadn’t done the play for attention. I had actually wanted to be a princess—safe, loved, well cared for.
I never wanted to be the person spilling my drink, the messy one who took attention away from others. Instead, I wanted to be the one in control, the one to make the rules. I stopped playing dress-up around that time.
Doing improv brought me back to the seven-year-old kid who liked to pretend things. I hadn’t been—and wasn’t now—someone who wanted to bask in the heat of stage lights, absorbing the anonymous applause of a huge audience. I just wanted to get back the part of me that knew how to play, the part that wasn’t already a responsible adult by the age of fourteen, spouting my bitter wisdom at the freshman lunch table.
That night I wrote silly nonsense in a journal—poems, daydreams, word associations—just to practice what it felt like. I was in such a good mood that I made a renewed effort to connect with Mrs. Mahoney downstairs as well, bringing her cookies that Lisette had given me as extras.
“I don’t eat stuff like that,” she said. “Sugary stuff.”
