TAKE HEART
Written and performed by Julia May Jonas
This piece premiered at Performance Space122 in NYC as part of the soloNOVA festival in June, 2008, directed by Jess Barbagallo.
JULIA’S NOTES ON PERFORMANCE:
Throughout the piece I accompany myself on the autoharp, which is attached to a microphone and looping device. Besides looping melodies as I create them to create underscoring, the looping device stores any sound effects not attributed to the autoharp. The set consisted of a round kitchen-esque table, a hanging lamp, a bookstand and any other props that are mentioned in the script).
TAKE HEART.
Lights up.
(Accompanying herself on the autoharp, she sings a song)
I attempt from love’s sickness to fly In vain.
Since I am myself, my own fever
Since I am myself my own fever and pain
I attempt from love’s sickness to fly In vain
Since I am myself, my own fever
Since I am myself my own fever and pain.
(She faces the audience)
Once, when the rope swing behind my house still existed,
which means I must have been under 11,
and it must have been prior to 5th grade,
because the rope swing left when we redid the backyard
in that early 90’s style of vast wooden decking,
and I know that must have happened before 5th grade
because in fifth grade I created an autobiography.
The autobiography was the catalyst to learning that my mother and father had previously married other people. (no children)
Which I cried cried cried about
in the parking lot
outside of the old K-Mart in Parsippany
that we went to
as an errand
after my mother read a statement
(in aforementioned autobiography I wrote in fifth grade)
that said my parent’s had never been married before
and felt she needed to correct me
and then tell me the tragic details
Of her first marriage
and my plump little self cried both because
the image of perfect love between my mother and my father had been ruined
but also because even in fifth grade I had a keen sense for drama,
and more fun than hearing about the cinematic suffering
of my small-framed and martyred mother
was weeping about it while staring at a lonesome shopping cart
in the midst of a winter evening
in a New Jersey K-Mart parking lot.
And in the autobiography that brought on her confession
and my realization that the suffering of your mother is titillating
and happiness has more to do with survival of challenges
Rather than the perfection of a picture,
In that autobiography were proud snapshots of myself and dog Lisa
(who I wanted to call Isabel but came with her name)
standing on our new deck.
Photo: Dog Lisa. Myself. On deck.
(Autobiographical caption: my new deck!)
That’s all to say I must have been nine
The rope swing was there and so was the dog
A Recitative: (she plays the autoharp: A Faulknarian burst of memory)
The driveway’s an hourglass
To a mountain lake.
A tree back Is a husband for a child.
She spreads a blanket,
And the cars drive wild, they drive wild.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
(She reaches for the bottle of wine, the corkscrew, and approaches a handsome man in the audience)
Do you think you could help me with this?
It’s delicious.
It’s organic. (explaining) Less than 75 miles. Upstate.
They had a bad year this year. Drought-y or Rainy or something.
(in an accent) the cause that will not be named.
I can’t ever remember the weather year to year.
(The bottle is opened. She takes it flirtatiously).
Thank you.
(She returns to the table. A private moment of reckoning. She addresses the audience)
My first high school play, was, um Rumors.
The Neil Simon play.
Fourteen, embarrassed yet egotistical, I played Cassie,
the irritating (they’re all irritating but she’s actually supposed to be),
Superstitious wife of state politician Chris
(part of my role was to cry about somebody touching my crystals).
Opening night I was dressing in my costume, a blue Chinese silk dress thing.
The dress was a bit rigid at the top,
And while I could probably have gotten the zipper up myself,
I decided to venture out of the olive-tiled fluorescent-lit bathroom
onto the stage and request someone, hopefully male,
To zip me.
Overconfident in the tantalizing appeal of my task, imagining myself somewhat like a young Hortense in Cousin Bette, whose flirtation becomes apparent when she allows lover X to estatically brush her hair,
I called out loudly that I needed to be zipped.
The boys responded with agitated silence, and I called for the zipping of my dress once more, making tramping strides upon the broad yellow paneled high school auditorium stage,
It was then that Barbara Brenn, the very tall and angular blonde who played the lead female part, (and who used to practice tantric partner yoga in the high school cafeteria during lunch with her sensitive boyfriend Ivan before becoming a lesbian for the last six weeks of school)
It was then that Barbara Brenn pounced, yanked my zipper up, and recited, in as showy a voice as I had used for my request;
“It’s so annoying when women (she was the type of girl who called thirteen year olds “women”) “Pretend they can’t do things just so they can flirt with men.”
I was mortified by her uncompassionate insistence to expose my exhibitionist intention, but she achieved her aim in giving me many years aversion to requesting men do things for me,
Until I realized for myself that service is a very gratifying form of flirtation,
That flirtation is a very gratifying form of communication.
(She rolls a cigarette)
This tobacco is pretty good.
The problem is that you really have to go to a decent tobacco store for your papers.
The one’s that come in the pack are sprayed with chemicals.
You might as well be smoking a Marlboro light.
So you have to get these – they’re good and they’re not dipped in gasoline like the rest of them.
I know smoking’s bad for you anyway, but I think even if you have a bad habit, you should do what you can to make it better.
You know if you have to pick a scab than don’t …..eat it.
(she stares at the cigarette)
I’m actually not allowed to smoke this in here.
(she gathers herself)
Baking was not necessarily a contentious
But certainly an ambivalent subject in my household
(we will be talking about baking)
The frazzled energetic caretaker I called mother
Seemed to appreciate my baking occasionally.
It was a sign of domesticity she did not have time for
And honestly, didn’t care about,
But felt as though her lack of baking signified her
Inferiority to her mother
Who baked for every occasion and worked and sewed their clothes.
Today I would say to her
Oh Jesus Christ, Fuck it Mom!
(but I’d probably - on my better days I wouldn’t say
Jesus Christ or Fuck it.)
I hope I’d say,
Please Mom!
You don’t care about baking or sewing
You’re interested in other things!
And domesticity is an affect these days
Not a required reality.
(she plays the autoharp)
But in those days, I believed her
To be inferior.
She perpetuated it.
I’m not sure why. Because she loved her daughter, I guess.
Because I was already play-acting at responsibility
and good behavior by the time I was six.
Because I knew the meaning of the word precocious.
(she is struck by a thought)
I know so many malfunctions who spent their childhoods trying to appear like adults, don’t you?
The kids who had the ability to live in childhood as children, with all the confusion, doubts, passions, excitements, misbehaviors and non-questioned desires,
They’re often much more adult now than those who were mini adults are.
At least some of them are. The mini adults are either still play acting as adults or they’ve grown tired of the play acting and
want to revisit childhood, revisit irresponsibility and desire.
I spoke to a woman last night about how she left town at twenty eight
to have a second adolescence. She amended herself – first. First adolescence.
I have another friend who just automatically asks, out of, like, real curiosity, the definition of a word she doesn’t know.
She’s very successful.
Sometimes I think we should revert back to the era of really discriminating against children.
Put them at the kids table, give them hot dogs and ketchup and peanut butter and white bread.
Tell them to go away and amuse themselves and stop interrupting important adult discussions with their silly pretend games.
Let them really feel that our worlds are not the same. Let them understand that they live in child world and we live in adult world and ne’re the twain shall meet.
No matter how smart or creative they are, child world is for playing and obeying and learning, not expressing opinions or preferences.
Then they can put all that aggression that they don’t get to get out with their parents into writing stories and painting watercolors, practicing their pianos and learning how to be subversively creative with their peers.
I once looked after this girl who was petrified about turning eight.
Turning eight meant she was getting older, and the older she got,
The less cute people would think she was.
She would say, “I wish to stay a child. People love children.”
I would say, “Girl, being a child stinks!
You have to follow orders all the time!
You have to practice your flute 30 minutes a day!
Being an adult is great. I do whatever I want!
I can have ice cream for breakfast and if I don’t want to practice my violin I don’t got to!”
She would say: “No no, it’s just going to get worse from now on.
Noone will pay attention to me anymore.”
She didn’t buy my argument, and I understood where she was coming from.
Even at the age of seven she knew that her life was an endless parade of compliments and people clearing her plate for her.
She knew the older she grew, the more the fantasy elements of her life would start to - fade away.
I grew up hearing all that “she’s 7 years old going on thirty” rhetoric,
(I think this was five or ten years before thirty was anything but adult)
People should stop saying that to small girls – 6 going on forty, etc. It’s not healthy.
I don’t think my mother said that, but she did insist that while she was average, I was extraordinary.
I imagine even if your mother is telling you she’s inferior,
You believe what she’s saying, because she’s your mother, and superior,
So I believed her superior claim to being inferior.
And I was stirred by a standard desire to eclipse one’s mother –
The first bound onto that tricky racetrack of female competition.
(she plays a sinister loop)
I can’t remember the specific name
For the condition of wanting to do away with one’s mother.
Mary Ann Lamb killed her mother
Bludgeoned her to death.
There are those crazy friends from New Zealand,
That movie was made about them.
Teenagers, they became so swept up in their fantasy worlds
Enhanced by hormones and disenfranchisement that they imagined
One of their mothers to be evil. And they killed her with a stone.
Swept up in the fever of adolescence.
I hope the daughter stayed crazy, because if she became sane in her adulthood,
Well then she must sit every day, knowing that her intense, yet essentially playful fantasy
Led to the real live death of a real live, breathing, eating, aspiring towards happiness woman. Who had given her real, live breathing eating aspiring towards happiness daughter life to begin with.
(she dismisses)
But all I’m trying to say is that I wanted to be better than my mother,
In order to fulfill the expectations she herself was setting out for me
So I developed a propensity for baking.
Which was somewhat encouraged
For the aforementioned reasons
but mostly discouraged
as I was a gluttonous and rotund child
With a tendency for stealing sticks of butter
packs of Pecan Sandies,
And stashing them in the filing drawer of my bedroom desk
For a few blissful hours of reading
And indulgence.
My ex boyfriend used to do this funny joke
Where he would pretend to cry
And then run into the kitchen for a stick of butter to suck on.
We connected on issues of shame.
This all leads to the fact that I’ll never trust a child
I was nine at the time
The rope swing was there
so was the dog
And I was baking a cake.
(she plays the autoharp)
Recitative (Haunted):
The gray road dips to the right of the highway,
The ragged backs of apartment buildings
Look to an overflowing gorge.
She orders her to take off my shoes,
I refuse, the wet day closing in upon me.
(She addresses the audience)
I think I like the feeling of a job well done
But I think I like being absent more.
I’ve never not wanted to miss a day of school
A day of work
Or a deadline.
I have called in / phoned in / pleaded sickness so many times
I don’t even believe myself when I’m actually sick now.
The truth is is that I’m never really sick.
I’ve got an abnormally healthy constitution,
Barring the occasional migraine I’m so healthy that the minute I feel the slightest twinge in my throat or nose,
I’ll call out of work, grateful for the chance to justify absence, only to be disappointed, lying on my couch feeling perfectly healthy and irritated with my inactivity.
I’ve never played sick in order to do something fun.
That is an impulse I do not understand.
Fun is not the quality of experience I pursue.
I’ll go along, because I feel like its good for my development to go to a parade,
Or the aquarium, to a concert, Philadelphia or a picnic.
I am playing a role that I’m a less uptight person than I actually am.
I treat it like a task, but I don’t have fun like other people do.
I’m sure many of you are like this.
Fun. Carnivals. Snorkeling. Pressure.
No, I’ve always played sick solely for the opportunity to retreat.
Existence can be such a burden
Endlessly participating in the world
Day after day with no exception or interruption.
(she plays a nostalgic autoharp riff of “Good Night Irene”)
You know when you look at those pictures of the city from that early time, around 1911 and you can see those incredible scenes with what seems like an overwhelming amount of people thronging the streets?
Like that great scene in Age of Innocence when Daniel Day Lewis is walking down Broadway in a bowler hat and he’s just one amidst a wide-street-ed sea of other bowler hats. And the truth becomes apparent: he’s the only obstruction to his own happiness.
It’s really crowded.
There are so many more buildings for us to be tucked up into now, boxes upon boxes extending towards an infinite sky. Room after unseen room of coworkers and crushes and copy machines.
So many more underground pods for us to empty and fill, as they shoot obscenely back and forth without end.
(She concludes the riff)
Interruptions are essential. Otherwise your life can feel like a book that’s already been written.
I was staying home from school this day
That I was baking a cake
Due to an ingenious and foolproof ability
I had recently discovered
To ensure being sick
(better than playing sick
As I’ve always had a guilty conscience
And a baby’s hair of a tendency towards masochism)
Before I go on
You’re still with me?
Then, before I go on
I want everyone in this room,
And this is not performance trick
I want everyone in this room
To repeat after me:
I PROMISE PROMISE PROMISE
THAT I WILL NEVER EVER EVER
TELL JULIA’S PARENTS WHAT I’M ABOUT TO HEAR
Good.
I’m serious.
(She gets distracted)
This Manchego (she lifts it up) is fucking delicious.
It’s been aged in a cave for like, twelve, like seventeen years
Sometimes I spread it with quince jelly?
It’s like, practically arousing.
That wasn’t what I was going to tell you.
I was going to tell you that from the age of eight to the age of thirteen
I was able to miss approximately 4 days of school
Per month
By giving myself an ear infection.
I did not give myself a mild ear infection.
I would give myself an ear infection
That would shock every doctor
That peered into my ear
Into pity and a recommendation
For at least two days off of school,
Citing this was one of the worst
Ear infections that they’d ever seen
And how odd for a person my age
Too old for chronic ear infections.
I remember taking this strange test at Dr. Nejat’s
(my pediatrician, he worked in a blue clapboard office that looked like a home)
I believe the test, was to measure the infected fluid levels in your ears.
I would go into a very seventies, dark, den-like room with plaid furniture and don a pair of earphones. Headphones.
The earphones would connect to this device that, like a polygraph, would track your results onto a spool of paper.
If your ears were functioning normally than the graph would swoop up and down, like so, above the edge of the paper, yes?
If they were not, then the swoops would be small and along the edge.
Every time I had given myself an ear infection, I would visit Dr. Nejat and he would test my ears.
Every time I would hold my breath in agitated anticipation: what if this time, the results were different? If in some way the machine could discern my foul truth?
(She plays a long machine beep)
Dr. Nejat would reenter, pull the paper from the feeder
And stoically (as was his manner) address my mother and me:
(she exits the stage, grabs a book with ear charts in it, and shows the audience)
“You see normal ear? It’s like this.” (he was foreign)
(She shows a normal ear chart)
“You see infected ear? It’s like this”
(She shows an infected ear chart)
You see Her ear? It’s like this.
(She shows her ear chart, which is grossly, perversely infected. Bach’s “Ode to Joy” resounds)
I had really figured something out.
Something foolproof
No more manufactured fevers.
No more fake vomit.
Authentically, verifiably, totally in-pain sick!
A triumph!
(“Ode to Joy” concludes)
I don’t remember the first time I figured it out.
I can’t.
I wish I remembered.
I do remember once driving in the Dodge Caravan,
Black cherry with wood paneled siding, listening to public radio
Passing the IGA on the right as the rain streamed down the window shield,
Gleefully knowing that when I went home I would not do my homework.
I would not have to. Instead I would complain about the pain in my ears.
Interrupt the tedious repetition of my day to day existence.
Here’s how to give yourself a real raging ear infection:
Firstly find an occasion akin to a day of school when you’re nine,
That is, an occasion so heart-wrenching
That extreme physical pain and eventual hearing loss
Seem bearable in comparison
Actually, lemme disclaim:
Sure I had my social problems as a pre-pubescent child,
I was a cryer and I once in a fit of resentment told my mother
That Jessica Tenna took my desert - but the truth was I would give it to her to attempt win her favor – and she called Jessica and admonished her and I went through what seemed like a year of exile,
but I certainly didn’t have other kids throwing rocks at me or anything.
I just hated school, like most kids hate school.
I loved to read but had no ethic for homework. Any work.
I liked singing and dancing when it wasn’t hard.
I liked learning lines and acting in plays.
(she abashedly confesses)
I guess I liked theater.
That’s the only thing that could get me to work.
I would actually plan my ear infections to avoid conflicting with rehearsals
For the community theater school I was involved with from age 7 to fifteen.
Marilyn, the grand-madame (because that’s the most appropriate term for her) was an ex-Broadway chorus girl,
And she wore the heavy heavy eye liner,
And the bangs, you know a super sharp bob,
She would wear - she really loved shirts with lots of flashy things on them, but like, real flashy thinks that required a battery pack on the inside,
She thought that was fabulous.
She was brassiness incarnate and we loved each other.
I had my entire part memorized by the second rehearsal.
She made me dance captain and gave me the solos.
So Marilyn had a pension for totally obscure musicals.
Weird musicals. You might say bad musicals.
She didn’t want to see Carousel or West Side Story again and again, featuring yet another mealy-mouthed, self-righteous and virginal ingénue,
Oh No, Marilyn had something else in mind.
70 girls 70 / Little Me / Dear World / Anyone Can Whistle /Baby
These untapped gems featured the modern woman. The divorced woman. The woman with an analyst. The trying to get pregnant or experiencing a late life sexual awakening woman.
And, as Marilyn firmly believed in getting her pre-adolescent minions to play adults
(She said we were never going to get any younger,
So we should learn how to play older)
We portrayed these Erica-Jong-esque roles with titillated enthusiasm.
So, at the age of nine, I made manifest this “single digit”-going-on-thirty-rhetoric in a multitude of delightfully inappropriate musicals numbers.
I’m going to do a musical medley for you, do you think I can?
(The following section, other than the songs, should be ad-libbed)
Okay – this first number is a sensitive ballad from A My Name Is Alice – an off-broadway review popular in communities in which males doing theater are in short supply. The song’s called “the Portrait.”
(The piano accompaniment plays)
It’s been years now, since I’ve seen her face,
And I wonder, does she see
She was a lady, lace and cameos
Not a gypsy, that was me.
She spent her evenings, reading poetry
I spend my nights, making time,
And I wonder am I living, partly her dream, Partly mine.
What would she think of the too many men
The lies I get lost in, again and again,
The tears in the morning and the booze and the blues in the night
Because obviously I was doing lots of boozing and bluesing with my American Girl Doll collection.
This next song is an upbeat number from Closer Than Ever. For some reason there were always a lot of songs about frustrated secretaries. Maybe because there’s something about being a secretary that’s inherently sad? I don’t know.
They say that I’m Miss Bird, And noone knows,
That twenty minutes ago I was not wearing clothes,
I was in someone’s arms, in someone’s bed,
Oh what the thought of it does to my head,
If it’s true the loudest songbirds, come alive in spring,
This bird is singing, Miss Bird is singing,
I’m singing I’m on fire. But I’m not saying a thing.
And finally, my favorite, the opening number, this is a group number, (so I want you to think 10 8-12ers dressed in career casuals) This is from the musical Personals, which was all about personal ads, which makes internet dating seem like the most personal thing in the world in comparison.
15 words.
2 Lines.
Waiting for.
Three weeks,
This has nothing to do with love.
This has everything to do, with blind dates,
Lonely nights, blind dates,
Singles bingo. TV Dinner,
blind dates My ex husband.
My mother’s nagging
And push finally coming to shove.
This has nothing to do with
Everything to do with
Nothing to do with
Everything to do with
Nothing to do with … LOVE ! (Nothing to do with love.)
Of course that’s what I looked forward to doing!
(she takes a drink)
Until I started drinking. Then I looked forward to drinking.
It’s so odd, you know?
I really enjoyed that just then.
I enjoyed it so much that I think to myself,
Why am I trying to act more intelligent than I am, you know?
Why not just stop thinking I’m so smart and so tasteful
And start auditioning for Mama Mia?
Who do I think I’m better than?
Oh - Remember how I said I never got rocks thrown at me?
That’s not true. Once I did get rocks thrown at me by a boy at my bus stop, but he was an outcast.
His name was Mike and he used to eat dirt in middle school for money. when he got to high school he took to selling drugs
And shaving a B into his chest hair (his last name started with a B).
Two years ago he went into Newark with his girlfriend to refresh
his supply of marijuana
To peddle to the bored adolescents of suburban New Jersey
And he was shot 24 times. His girlfriend, who lived, was shot 10 times.
I told this to a guy I was dating at the time I heard this.
He said, wow. He threw rocks and then was killed with rocks.
(she gives the audience a look and returns to the table)
That didn’t last long.
(She takes a drink)
Anyway I’m talking about how to give yourself an ear infection:
Two days before the occasion you want to miss
(You can try one, but one is risky)
You start sucking in.
You know how on a plane your ears begin
To fill up with pressure,
And to rid yourself of that pressure,
You hold your nose and blow out?
Well, you do the same thing
To give yourself an ear infection
Except you suck in.
So you’re creating that pressure.
1. Over the next day or two,
You keep sucking in.
Never ever popping that pressure out.
(this is one of the most foolproof things
about giving yourself an ear infection
because, people will ask you,
you know, what are doing? And you can
say, oh, my ears feel funny, I’m trying to
pop them out. Then, infection time rolls around
And nobody’s surprised)
Maybe I remember when I first started to do it.
It might have been in ballet class.
(Ballet track plays)
I hated ballet class but pretended to like it because it was classy.
Ballet was hard. I wasn’t that flexible, I was voluptuous at ten years old
and not particularly good at jumps.
I only liked the combination part where you actually got to dance,
Inexactly and messily.
(She demonstrates)
Pique, pot a bourre, glissade et batemant.
Joyfully enmeshed in an imagination that I am a prima ballarina,
That I am Cathy, from VC Andrew’s Flowers in the Attic
Strengthening my sinews while living in an attic,
Then seducing the middle aged doctor who takes my family in as refugees
And learning, for the first time, how to come from him,
After we’ve escaped our murderous mother and grandmother,
(the ballet track stops)
But the across the floor dancing was only fifteen minutes out of an hour and a half class.
Maybe it in line for that pique combination,
Panicking about how I wouldn’t get any time between today and tomorrow
To be by myself.
I require time by myself.
I have an inconveniently obsessive quest for solitude.
To an extent, I don’t care where I am or what I do as long as I can spend solitary time pondering the intimate realizations of interior world.
And masturbating.
Anyway. How you do it:
You’re building up the pressure, in your ears, that is,
And you will get to the point, where if you do a little test
And try to pop out,
You won’t be able to.
Another good sign is if while sucking in
(which you’re doing habitually)
You’ll feel bubbles in the fluid of your inner ear.
Because the pressure is about fluid,
And you’re trying to trap
The Fluid in your inner ear
so that it will fester until it infects.
The best sign is of course, the searing, knife like pain.
This is not for the fainthearted, it hurts like hell.
Which is why I was successfully able to garner sympathy
From all the doctors.
(After a couple of years I moved on from Dr. Nejat
to an exhaustive series of austere and expensive specialists)
and treatment became increasingly serious.
I had my eardrums punctured with a long thick needle on at least 3 separate occasions
before eventually undergoing surgery.
(You understand why I can’t tell my parents)
But for the first few years
The doctors would just give me antibiotics
Which would eradicate the infection
In about two days.
Two pain-ridden but blissful days
Of Love Connection, Divorce Court
unlimited pretzels and most importantly, solitude.
This all leads to the fact that I’ll never trust a child
I was nine at the time
(but thought I should be thirty)
The rope swing was there
And so was the dog
I was baking a cake
As a secretive act.
While home alone and sick
With an ear infection
I had given myself.
Baking the cake was a secretive act
because I was supposed to be sick.
Sick, as a child
Means you’re supposed stay in bed
Or at least on the couch
Because you can’t do anything else.
Grown ups treat being sick differently,
but that’s okay, because they make the money.
And also, because baking was, as we’ve discussed, ambivalent.
This child I used to watch, the one who was scared about turning eight,
she was neurotic, but she had no deceit within her.
She never told me she was allowed to have something when she wasn’t
And when I would suggest that it was okay that we watched a video even though
She had already watched her maximum of two hours a week,
She would cry and in so many words beg me not to ask her to compromise her morality.
Maybe she was deceitful when she was alone, but I doubt so.
I, on the other hand,
Lied, stole, hid and concealed with grace, ease, finesse and aplomb
Have you been watching TV? No.
Are you wearing socks with those shoes? Yes.
Did you do your homework? Yes.
Did you practice your violin? Yes.
How many have you had? Um, one?
Did you hide ice cream in the closet? No.
Then what’s melting over the carpet? I don’t know
Are you lying to me? NO! uh. No.
Due to a lie that manifested into a physical ailment,
I was baking a cake from scratch
Because I was interested In authenticity.
Because I loved old things, loved old stories of cooking,
Loved any novel with good food in it.
Loved Anne of Greene Gables with her cherry cordial,
The Five Peppers with their plum puddings,
Those Jewish girls with their sautéed chick peas,
Pollyanna and her calves foot jelly.
Oliver Twist and his gruel.
I loved the concept of meat pies, like Pip had in Great Expectations,
And mutton, and homemade bread spread with sweet cream butter.
Cold chicken drumsticks and chowders and lemon pies.
I loved the romance of food.
AND I wanted to eclipse my mother
With really good deceitful secret baking skills.
So at one in the afternoon of a mid-winter day in suburban New Jersey,
After Divorce Court, the Price is Right and the ritual trying on of my mother’s wedding dress,
I decided to do some baking.
(she speaks rhythmically with concentration)
I measured the flour
Out of the largest blue glass canister
And used the white plastic measuring spoons
For the baking powder and salt
And sifted the dry goods together
With the metal sifter into the medium sized stainless steel bowl.
Then I cut the butter with the eggs and the sugar from the second largest blue glass canister
In the large white ceramic bowl with blue and pink stripes.
then folded the dry goods into the butter eggs and sugar
With the yellow plastic spatula
Whose handle had accidentally melted
Many years before
But remained the best spatula in the house
Then used the handheld electric beaters
To beat the batter.
Then I poured the batter in two nine-inch cake pans and put the cakes into the oven preheated to 350 degrees.
Then while the layers were baking I laid down on the living room couch
And reread over and over my favorite part
In “Heaven,” (she shows the book to the audience) in which
Heaven (a beautiful Appalachian girl with cornflower blue eyes and a 22-inch waist)
Gets molested by Cal, her adopted father
But she thinks he’s hot and she likes it.
(she opens and reads)
It wasn’t wrong, was it, this sweet tenderness he showed when he brushed his lips over mine, gently touching me as if afraid he’d frighten me with too bold an approach. “I wish you weren’t just a beautiful child, I wish you were older” I whispered, “Noooo,” but it didn’t stop him from kissing where he wanted to kiss, or fondling where he wanted to fondle. I quivered all over, as if God above were looking down and condemning me to eternal hell. “How sweet and soft you are,” he murmured as he kissed my bared breasts. My body betrayed me.
(titillated, she slams the book shut)
The timer bell rang and I pulled out the pans
and cooled the layers on cooling racks,
While I made my Grandmother’s fudge icing recipe,
Melting butter and unsweetened chocolate
In an upright saucepan over the stove,
Adding confectioners sugar and 2 tablespoons of water.
I understood how to make the icing
After a mishap earlier that year
In which I tried to make a cake for my mother’s
Birthday and added too much water
Leading to tears, a shaken sense of self and my father’s rescue.
This time the icing came out perfectly,
Spreadable yet edgy with granulation.
I slid a butter knife along the edges of the nine inch pans
And turned them over onto heavy ceramic plates.
They slid out perfectly,
Like I was a professional cake maker,
I severed the bump from what was to be
The bottom layer of the cake
With a serrated knife
In the manner that I had seen them do
On the cooking shows
So you get a perfect layer cake
And I dipped another butter knife in icy water
Also seen on cooking shows
And frosted the cake with the warm
Fudge icing.
My creation sat proudly on a plate,
Rivaling any cake made by any old-fashioned heroine.
Even, symmetrical.
Authentic.
(she strums the autoharp in triumph)
But lo, the hours drew fast upon me,
And the stovetop clock shone three o’clock.
Three o’clock! She thought. (I thought) She Thought.
Haste! Mother will be home in but two hours.
(she gathers the props (which are not cooking props) on her table, and puts them in the picnic basket, leaving only the autoharp)
So I hurriedly cleaned the ceramic bowl
The stainless steel bowl
The sifter
The measuring spoons and the spatula.
I cleaned the nine inch-ers
The cooling rack
The saucepan
The serrated knife
the butter knife
The beaters
And anything else that was involved
I dried them all thoroughly
And I put them away carefully
So that the handles all faced
How they had faced before I had
Removed them.
I wiped the counters and I swept the floor.
Then I took all the trash
That I had accumulated
While making the cake
Down to my garage,
And I lifted the trash out
Of one of the cans
And put my dross in the middle,
Between two bags.
(she takes the props off stage, then returns to address the audience)
I’m not sure why I didn’t eat a bite.
I think I was sick of the entire endeavor.
I was finished. Besides there was no time to eat,
I had to hide the evidence.
I don’t know why I felt like I couldn’t be discovered,
I only know I preferred my interior world and I refused to have it probed by my well-meaning, yet terrifying, parents.
My secret day at home was made possible by a lie,
So everything I did, I suppose, felt like a lie.
So no, I didn’t eat a bite.
Nor did I present it for the evening’s desert.
Instead I took the cake in my arms and
climbed the hill in my backyard
That led up to the woods in which
The rope swing hung
(so you could swing from the top of the hill
Over the mild cliff of my backyard)
And I deposited that beautiful, fully baked cake
Behind the trunk of that large tree
From which the rope swing hung
I walked back into the house,
And Carefully washed and returned
The cake plate to its place in the lazy Susan cabinet on the right of the sink.
This all leads to the fact that I’ll never trust a child,
Much less understand one.
I was nine at the time,
(Nine going on thirty) ,
I baked a cake as a secretive, authentic,
mother-eclipsing act,
and hid it under the ropeswing,
Supervised only by the dog named Lisa
(Who I wanted to call Isabel but came with her name)
(She plays the autoharp, a refrain of her opening musical interlude. It loops while she pulls a Kit Kat bar from her pocket.)
I’ve been saving this.
(she eats it)
I remember a psychological moment, when I was six,
Separated from my mother in the supermarket.
I wandered into the cookie aisle, to stare with fervor at “the little schoolboys”
The cookies I longed for but was never allowed to get. (Les petite ecolier)
I was staring at those cookies when I saw two young men walking towards me.
They were out of a movie, Long hair, ripped jeans, leather jackets with studs,
They seemed like grownups.
I pretended to read the packages
With absorption, as my pulse quickened and my palms started to sweat.
They walked past me and gave me a smile,
As nice older people will do with cute children
Made a right out of the aisle and disappeared forever.
And I remember I thought, my body overcome with tingling joy
I thought, and treasured this thought
For years and years and years
Until I learned to become ashamed of it,
I thought,
“I know what they’re thinking,
I can see it in their faces
They’re thinking, ‘What a beautiful girl.
I think I’m in love
If only - If only she was a little bit older’”
(she stops the loop and returns to the story)
When my mother came home from work, that day
That I had baked a cake as a secretive act,
she stroked my hair sweetly and
Put in the video of “Porgy and Bess” she rented for me
Because she knew I liked it.
We watched the overture
Through the crowd scene to the entrance of Bess,
Whose trying to shake herself of a drug problem and her no good but really hot dealer named King,
We watched Porgy and Bess getting together even though he’s a cripple,
up to his rendition of
“Ive Got Plenty Of Nothin”
You know,
(she sings and plays, insouciantly)
I’ve got plenty of nothing,
And nothin’s plenty for me.
When the song was finished my mother went to the kitchen
to prepare dinner while Lisa, pressing down on the living room door handle to enter,
joined me to watch as the events in Porgy and Bess’s small town turn tragic.
(she sings and plays, mournfully)
My man’s gone now
Ain’t no use in listenin’
For his tired footsteps
Comin’ up my walk.
My dog Lisa has always been able to open doors
She can’t do the doors with the round handles, the knobs
But sliding doors and push handles, which were prevalent in my house
Were no obstacles to her freedom.
For the first month I think we tried to prevent her
But then we realized that Lisa always came back
So why not let her roam the neighborhood.
We’ve never been worriers.
And in the course of her travels
She would often find presents for us.
Rolls or Bagels
Once she put a dead bird on my pillow.
Possums, rats, the usual love tokens.
It happened at six on a dark winter evening
I was joyously sobbing
While Sidney Portier sang (He played Porgy) “Bess, oh Where is my Bess”
(because she left him, having given in to the drugs and the hotness of her dealer)
And so he sang that dirge (Bess Oh Where Is My Bess).
I was sobbing at his pain (Bess, Oh Where is My Bess) when my Aristotelian catharsis was interrupted.
(in her mother’s voice)
“JULIA!”
(she confides in the audience)
When I was a child my mother’s voice filled me with fear.
Regardless of day, time or situation,
Hearing “JULIA” would send chills up my spine.
It could have been because she, although a warm woman, had a coldish voice tinged with the exhaustion and anxiety of an overworked young mother.
But it was really because I think I believed I was inherently evil.
I was constantly afraid that evil getting recognized.
I had so many things to hide: from my collection of smutty novels
To the food stashed in my bedroom desk drawer
To homework undone and, of course, the ear infections.
I was not the always getting into trouble but feckless heroines I adored,
I was the twit with secret mean side and the bouncy black hair, whose cute and plump now, but destined for obesity and pockmarks in the sequel.
I was a liar, a stealer, sloppy, lazy and I cleaned my room by pushing clothes under my bed.
I was selfish.
I thought my parents annoying and my peers inferior.
My bad-person-ness exposable at any moment,
I lived with the Sword of Damocles poised over my head.
“JULIA!”
“WHAT?”
“JULIA, WILL YOU COME HERE?”
(Warily)
I walked from the living room through the dining room to the kitchen.
On the countertop to my left sat a wide white dish of romaine lettuce and cherry tomatoes.
On the stove sat a pan of raw chicken legs and thighs
With pimpled yellow skin and protruding blue gray bones
That needed to be separated with kitchen scissors
(which were seen as a new gadget back then)
Before being skinned, baked and served with potatoes.
Warm light filled the kitchen and shone against the window panes.
My mother stood in front of me. Her lips were tight.
"Julia," she said, "Julia, What is this?"
She led me to the kitchen door.
Sitting at the foot of the doorway was a nearly intact
Beautiful, authentic looking and fully frosted
cake.
It seemed as though Lisa had pushed it all the way
(why she didn’t eat it I’ll never know)
from the rope swing to the kitchen door.
“Did you bake that cake Julia?”
“No!”
She clutched the kitchen scissors with trembling hands.
In the background public radio’s All Things Considered paused for a station identification.
(the theme song plays)
Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do –
And a soft—voiced, intelligent woman relayed the time and the weather in central park.
“Julia, I’m going to ask you again. Did you bake that cake?”
…
“Yes. I baked that cake.”
I prepared in what I felt like was the calm before the storm.
Passionate and excitable, Christina Mordhorst Jonas could throw down with the best of them and my duplicity set her off more than anything.
She often said my father was the first man she felt she didn’t have to deceive.
There’s no wrath worse than that of the recently reformed.
My friend once reminded me that to kids,
Adults are monsters.
They’re huge and they’ve got all the power.
My monster stared at me incredulously for what seemed like a small eternity, before she turned, walked back to the stove, snipped a leg from a thigh, and from over her shoulder said:
“You didn’t need to throw it out, Julia.
We would have eaten it.”
I stood there awkwardly, unsure of my feet on the tile floor.
Lisa slept on the dog bed in the nook by the bay window.
I regarded her slumber, not knowing if I was allowed to go.
My mother pushed the chicken into the oven, and as she turned to scrub the potatoes, I saw her back release its tension.
So - leaving Porgy, paused on the living room television in the midst of his mournful dirge,
I absconded to my room,
And re-read the scene in Gone With the Wind
In which Rhett rapes Scarlett but
He’s hot and she likes it
While sucking cream cheese straight out of the foil package.
Until my father came home and dinner was served
In the fog of our evasive silence.
(She plays and sings a final song)
Poor wand’ring one
Though thou hast surely strayed
Take heart from grace
Thy steps retrace
Poor wand’ring one.
Take Heart, fair days will shine
Take any heart, take mine
Take Heart, fair days will shine,
take any heart, take mine.
Take Heart, Fair days will shine
Take any heart, take mine
Take Heart, fair days will shine,
Take any heart, take mine.
THE END
(c) Julia May Jonas, June 27th, 2008
Written and performed by Julia May Jonas
This piece premiered at Performance Space122 in NYC as part of the soloNOVA festival in June, 2008, directed by Jess Barbagallo.
JULIA’S NOTES ON PERFORMANCE:
Throughout the piece I accompany myself on the autoharp, which is attached to a microphone and looping device. Besides looping melodies as I create them to create underscoring, the looping device stores any sound effects not attributed to the autoharp. The set consisted of a round kitchen-esque table, a hanging lamp, a bookstand and any other props that are mentioned in the script).
TAKE HEART.
Lights up.
(Accompanying herself on the autoharp, she sings a song)
I attempt from love’s sickness to fly In vain.
Since I am myself, my own fever
Since I am myself my own fever and pain
I attempt from love’s sickness to fly In vain
Since I am myself, my own fever
Since I am myself my own fever and pain.
(She faces the audience)
Once, when the rope swing behind my house still existed,
which means I must have been under 11,
and it must have been prior to 5th grade,
because the rope swing left when we redid the backyard
in that early 90’s style of vast wooden decking,
and I know that must have happened before 5th grade
because in fifth grade I created an autobiography.
The autobiography was the catalyst to learning that my mother and father had previously married other people. (no children)
Which I cried cried cried about
in the parking lot
outside of the old K-Mart in Parsippany
that we went to
as an errand
after my mother read a statement
(in aforementioned autobiography I wrote in fifth grade)
that said my parent’s had never been married before
and felt she needed to correct me
and then tell me the tragic details
Of her first marriage
and my plump little self cried both because
the image of perfect love between my mother and my father had been ruined
but also because even in fifth grade I had a keen sense for drama,
and more fun than hearing about the cinematic suffering
of my small-framed and martyred mother
was weeping about it while staring at a lonesome shopping cart
in the midst of a winter evening
in a New Jersey K-Mart parking lot.
And in the autobiography that brought on her confession
and my realization that the suffering of your mother is titillating
and happiness has more to do with survival of challenges
Rather than the perfection of a picture,
In that autobiography were proud snapshots of myself and dog Lisa
(who I wanted to call Isabel but came with her name)
standing on our new deck.
Photo: Dog Lisa. Myself. On deck.
(Autobiographical caption: my new deck!)
That’s all to say I must have been nine
The rope swing was there and so was the dog
A Recitative: (she plays the autoharp: A Faulknarian burst of memory)
The driveway’s an hourglass
To a mountain lake.
A tree back Is a husband for a child.
She spreads a blanket,
And the cars drive wild, they drive wild.
MUSICAL INTERLUDE
(She reaches for the bottle of wine, the corkscrew, and approaches a handsome man in the audience)
Do you think you could help me with this?
It’s delicious.
It’s organic. (explaining) Less than 75 miles. Upstate.
They had a bad year this year. Drought-y or Rainy or something.
(in an accent) the cause that will not be named.
I can’t ever remember the weather year to year.
(The bottle is opened. She takes it flirtatiously).
Thank you.
(She returns to the table. A private moment of reckoning. She addresses the audience)
My first high school play, was, um Rumors.
The Neil Simon play.
Fourteen, embarrassed yet egotistical, I played Cassie,
the irritating (they’re all irritating but she’s actually supposed to be),
Superstitious wife of state politician Chris
(part of my role was to cry about somebody touching my crystals).
Opening night I was dressing in my costume, a blue Chinese silk dress thing.
The dress was a bit rigid at the top,
And while I could probably have gotten the zipper up myself,
I decided to venture out of the olive-tiled fluorescent-lit bathroom
onto the stage and request someone, hopefully male,
To zip me.
Overconfident in the tantalizing appeal of my task, imagining myself somewhat like a young Hortense in Cousin Bette, whose flirtation becomes apparent when she allows lover X to estatically brush her hair,
I called out loudly that I needed to be zipped.
The boys responded with agitated silence, and I called for the zipping of my dress once more, making tramping strides upon the broad yellow paneled high school auditorium stage,
It was then that Barbara Brenn, the very tall and angular blonde who played the lead female part, (and who used to practice tantric partner yoga in the high school cafeteria during lunch with her sensitive boyfriend Ivan before becoming a lesbian for the last six weeks of school)
It was then that Barbara Brenn pounced, yanked my zipper up, and recited, in as showy a voice as I had used for my request;
“It’s so annoying when women (she was the type of girl who called thirteen year olds “women”) “Pretend they can’t do things just so they can flirt with men.”
I was mortified by her uncompassionate insistence to expose my exhibitionist intention, but she achieved her aim in giving me many years aversion to requesting men do things for me,
Until I realized for myself that service is a very gratifying form of flirtation,
That flirtation is a very gratifying form of communication.
(She rolls a cigarette)
This tobacco is pretty good.
The problem is that you really have to go to a decent tobacco store for your papers.
The one’s that come in the pack are sprayed with chemicals.
You might as well be smoking a Marlboro light.
So you have to get these – they’re good and they’re not dipped in gasoline like the rest of them.
I know smoking’s bad for you anyway, but I think even if you have a bad habit, you should do what you can to make it better.
You know if you have to pick a scab than don’t …..eat it.
(she stares at the cigarette)
I’m actually not allowed to smoke this in here.
(she gathers herself)
Baking was not necessarily a contentious
But certainly an ambivalent subject in my household
(we will be talking about baking)
The frazzled energetic caretaker I called mother
Seemed to appreciate my baking occasionally.
It was a sign of domesticity she did not have time for
And honestly, didn’t care about,
But felt as though her lack of baking signified her
Inferiority to her mother
Who baked for every occasion and worked and sewed their clothes.
Today I would say to her
Oh Jesus Christ, Fuck it Mom!
(but I’d probably - on my better days I wouldn’t say
Jesus Christ or Fuck it.)
I hope I’d say,
Please Mom!
You don’t care about baking or sewing
You’re interested in other things!
And domesticity is an affect these days
Not a required reality.
(she plays the autoharp)
But in those days, I believed her
To be inferior.
She perpetuated it.
I’m not sure why. Because she loved her daughter, I guess.
Because I was already play-acting at responsibility
and good behavior by the time I was six.
Because I knew the meaning of the word precocious.
(she is struck by a thought)
I know so many malfunctions who spent their childhoods trying to appear like adults, don’t you?
The kids who had the ability to live in childhood as children, with all the confusion, doubts, passions, excitements, misbehaviors and non-questioned desires,
They’re often much more adult now than those who were mini adults are.
At least some of them are. The mini adults are either still play acting as adults or they’ve grown tired of the play acting and
want to revisit childhood, revisit irresponsibility and desire.
I spoke to a woman last night about how she left town at twenty eight
to have a second adolescence. She amended herself – first. First adolescence.
I have another friend who just automatically asks, out of, like, real curiosity, the definition of a word she doesn’t know.
She’s very successful.
Sometimes I think we should revert back to the era of really discriminating against children.
Put them at the kids table, give them hot dogs and ketchup and peanut butter and white bread.
Tell them to go away and amuse themselves and stop interrupting important adult discussions with their silly pretend games.
Let them really feel that our worlds are not the same. Let them understand that they live in child world and we live in adult world and ne’re the twain shall meet.
No matter how smart or creative they are, child world is for playing and obeying and learning, not expressing opinions or preferences.
Then they can put all that aggression that they don’t get to get out with their parents into writing stories and painting watercolors, practicing their pianos and learning how to be subversively creative with their peers.
I once looked after this girl who was petrified about turning eight.
Turning eight meant she was getting older, and the older she got,
The less cute people would think she was.
She would say, “I wish to stay a child. People love children.”
I would say, “Girl, being a child stinks!
You have to follow orders all the time!
You have to practice your flute 30 minutes a day!
Being an adult is great. I do whatever I want!
I can have ice cream for breakfast and if I don’t want to practice my violin I don’t got to!”
She would say: “No no, it’s just going to get worse from now on.
Noone will pay attention to me anymore.”
She didn’t buy my argument, and I understood where she was coming from.
Even at the age of seven she knew that her life was an endless parade of compliments and people clearing her plate for her.
She knew the older she grew, the more the fantasy elements of her life would start to - fade away.
I grew up hearing all that “she’s 7 years old going on thirty” rhetoric,
(I think this was five or ten years before thirty was anything but adult)
People should stop saying that to small girls – 6 going on forty, etc. It’s not healthy.
I don’t think my mother said that, but she did insist that while she was average, I was extraordinary.
I imagine even if your mother is telling you she’s inferior,
You believe what she’s saying, because she’s your mother, and superior,
So I believed her superior claim to being inferior.
And I was stirred by a standard desire to eclipse one’s mother –
The first bound onto that tricky racetrack of female competition.
(she plays a sinister loop)
I can’t remember the specific name
For the condition of wanting to do away with one’s mother.
Mary Ann Lamb killed her mother
Bludgeoned her to death.
There are those crazy friends from New Zealand,
That movie was made about them.
Teenagers, they became so swept up in their fantasy worlds
Enhanced by hormones and disenfranchisement that they imagined
One of their mothers to be evil. And they killed her with a stone.
Swept up in the fever of adolescence.
I hope the daughter stayed crazy, because if she became sane in her adulthood,
Well then she must sit every day, knowing that her intense, yet essentially playful fantasy
Led to the real live death of a real live, breathing, eating, aspiring towards happiness woman. Who had given her real, live breathing eating aspiring towards happiness daughter life to begin with.
(she dismisses)
But all I’m trying to say is that I wanted to be better than my mother,
In order to fulfill the expectations she herself was setting out for me
So I developed a propensity for baking.
Which was somewhat encouraged
For the aforementioned reasons
but mostly discouraged
as I was a gluttonous and rotund child
With a tendency for stealing sticks of butter
packs of Pecan Sandies,
And stashing them in the filing drawer of my bedroom desk
For a few blissful hours of reading
And indulgence.
My ex boyfriend used to do this funny joke
Where he would pretend to cry
And then run into the kitchen for a stick of butter to suck on.
We connected on issues of shame.
This all leads to the fact that I’ll never trust a child
I was nine at the time
The rope swing was there
so was the dog
And I was baking a cake.
(she plays the autoharp)
Recitative (Haunted):
The gray road dips to the right of the highway,
The ragged backs of apartment buildings
Look to an overflowing gorge.
She orders her to take off my shoes,
I refuse, the wet day closing in upon me.
(She addresses the audience)
I think I like the feeling of a job well done
But I think I like being absent more.
I’ve never not wanted to miss a day of school
A day of work
Or a deadline.
I have called in / phoned in / pleaded sickness so many times
I don’t even believe myself when I’m actually sick now.
The truth is is that I’m never really sick.
I’ve got an abnormally healthy constitution,
Barring the occasional migraine I’m so healthy that the minute I feel the slightest twinge in my throat or nose,
I’ll call out of work, grateful for the chance to justify absence, only to be disappointed, lying on my couch feeling perfectly healthy and irritated with my inactivity.
I’ve never played sick in order to do something fun.
That is an impulse I do not understand.
Fun is not the quality of experience I pursue.
I’ll go along, because I feel like its good for my development to go to a parade,
Or the aquarium, to a concert, Philadelphia or a picnic.
I am playing a role that I’m a less uptight person than I actually am.
I treat it like a task, but I don’t have fun like other people do.
I’m sure many of you are like this.
Fun. Carnivals. Snorkeling. Pressure.
No, I’ve always played sick solely for the opportunity to retreat.
Existence can be such a burden
Endlessly participating in the world
Day after day with no exception or interruption.
(she plays a nostalgic autoharp riff of “Good Night Irene”)
You know when you look at those pictures of the city from that early time, around 1911 and you can see those incredible scenes with what seems like an overwhelming amount of people thronging the streets?
Like that great scene in Age of Innocence when Daniel Day Lewis is walking down Broadway in a bowler hat and he’s just one amidst a wide-street-ed sea of other bowler hats. And the truth becomes apparent: he’s the only obstruction to his own happiness.
It’s really crowded.
There are so many more buildings for us to be tucked up into now, boxes upon boxes extending towards an infinite sky. Room after unseen room of coworkers and crushes and copy machines.
So many more underground pods for us to empty and fill, as they shoot obscenely back and forth without end.
(She concludes the riff)
Interruptions are essential. Otherwise your life can feel like a book that’s already been written.
I was staying home from school this day
That I was baking a cake
Due to an ingenious and foolproof ability
I had recently discovered
To ensure being sick
(better than playing sick
As I’ve always had a guilty conscience
And a baby’s hair of a tendency towards masochism)
Before I go on
You’re still with me?
Then, before I go on
I want everyone in this room,
And this is not performance trick
I want everyone in this room
To repeat after me:
I PROMISE PROMISE PROMISE
THAT I WILL NEVER EVER EVER
TELL JULIA’S PARENTS WHAT I’M ABOUT TO HEAR
Good.
I’m serious.
(She gets distracted)
This Manchego (she lifts it up) is fucking delicious.
It’s been aged in a cave for like, twelve, like seventeen years
Sometimes I spread it with quince jelly?
It’s like, practically arousing.
That wasn’t what I was going to tell you.
I was going to tell you that from the age of eight to the age of thirteen
I was able to miss approximately 4 days of school
Per month
By giving myself an ear infection.
I did not give myself a mild ear infection.
I would give myself an ear infection
That would shock every doctor
That peered into my ear
Into pity and a recommendation
For at least two days off of school,
Citing this was one of the worst
Ear infections that they’d ever seen
And how odd for a person my age
Too old for chronic ear infections.
I remember taking this strange test at Dr. Nejat’s
(my pediatrician, he worked in a blue clapboard office that looked like a home)
I believe the test, was to measure the infected fluid levels in your ears.
I would go into a very seventies, dark, den-like room with plaid furniture and don a pair of earphones. Headphones.
The earphones would connect to this device that, like a polygraph, would track your results onto a spool of paper.
If your ears were functioning normally than the graph would swoop up and down, like so, above the edge of the paper, yes?
If they were not, then the swoops would be small and along the edge.
Every time I had given myself an ear infection, I would visit Dr. Nejat and he would test my ears.
Every time I would hold my breath in agitated anticipation: what if this time, the results were different? If in some way the machine could discern my foul truth?
(She plays a long machine beep)
Dr. Nejat would reenter, pull the paper from the feeder
And stoically (as was his manner) address my mother and me:
(she exits the stage, grabs a book with ear charts in it, and shows the audience)
“You see normal ear? It’s like this.” (he was foreign)
(She shows a normal ear chart)
“You see infected ear? It’s like this”
(She shows an infected ear chart)
You see Her ear? It’s like this.
(She shows her ear chart, which is grossly, perversely infected. Bach’s “Ode to Joy” resounds)
I had really figured something out.
Something foolproof
No more manufactured fevers.
No more fake vomit.
Authentically, verifiably, totally in-pain sick!
A triumph!
(“Ode to Joy” concludes)
I don’t remember the first time I figured it out.
I can’t.
I wish I remembered.
I do remember once driving in the Dodge Caravan,
Black cherry with wood paneled siding, listening to public radio
Passing the IGA on the right as the rain streamed down the window shield,
Gleefully knowing that when I went home I would not do my homework.
I would not have to. Instead I would complain about the pain in my ears.
Interrupt the tedious repetition of my day to day existence.
Here’s how to give yourself a real raging ear infection:
Firstly find an occasion akin to a day of school when you’re nine,
That is, an occasion so heart-wrenching
That extreme physical pain and eventual hearing loss
Seem bearable in comparison
Actually, lemme disclaim:
Sure I had my social problems as a pre-pubescent child,
I was a cryer and I once in a fit of resentment told my mother
That Jessica Tenna took my desert - but the truth was I would give it to her to attempt win her favor – and she called Jessica and admonished her and I went through what seemed like a year of exile,
but I certainly didn’t have other kids throwing rocks at me or anything.
I just hated school, like most kids hate school.
I loved to read but had no ethic for homework. Any work.
I liked singing and dancing when it wasn’t hard.
I liked learning lines and acting in plays.
(she abashedly confesses)
I guess I liked theater.
That’s the only thing that could get me to work.
I would actually plan my ear infections to avoid conflicting with rehearsals
For the community theater school I was involved with from age 7 to fifteen.
Marilyn, the grand-madame (because that’s the most appropriate term for her) was an ex-Broadway chorus girl,
And she wore the heavy heavy eye liner,
And the bangs, you know a super sharp bob,
She would wear - she really loved shirts with lots of flashy things on them, but like, real flashy thinks that required a battery pack on the inside,
She thought that was fabulous.
She was brassiness incarnate and we loved each other.
I had my entire part memorized by the second rehearsal.
She made me dance captain and gave me the solos.
So Marilyn had a pension for totally obscure musicals.
Weird musicals. You might say bad musicals.
She didn’t want to see Carousel or West Side Story again and again, featuring yet another mealy-mouthed, self-righteous and virginal ingénue,
Oh No, Marilyn had something else in mind.
70 girls 70 / Little Me / Dear World / Anyone Can Whistle /Baby
These untapped gems featured the modern woman. The divorced woman. The woman with an analyst. The trying to get pregnant or experiencing a late life sexual awakening woman.
And, as Marilyn firmly believed in getting her pre-adolescent minions to play adults
(She said we were never going to get any younger,
So we should learn how to play older)
We portrayed these Erica-Jong-esque roles with titillated enthusiasm.
So, at the age of nine, I made manifest this “single digit”-going-on-thirty-rhetoric in a multitude of delightfully inappropriate musicals numbers.
I’m going to do a musical medley for you, do you think I can?
(The following section, other than the songs, should be ad-libbed)
Okay – this first number is a sensitive ballad from A My Name Is Alice – an off-broadway review popular in communities in which males doing theater are in short supply. The song’s called “the Portrait.”
(The piano accompaniment plays)
It’s been years now, since I’ve seen her face,
And I wonder, does she see
She was a lady, lace and cameos
Not a gypsy, that was me.
She spent her evenings, reading poetry
I spend my nights, making time,
And I wonder am I living, partly her dream, Partly mine.
What would she think of the too many men
The lies I get lost in, again and again,
The tears in the morning and the booze and the blues in the night
Because obviously I was doing lots of boozing and bluesing with my American Girl Doll collection.
This next song is an upbeat number from Closer Than Ever. For some reason there were always a lot of songs about frustrated secretaries. Maybe because there’s something about being a secretary that’s inherently sad? I don’t know.
They say that I’m Miss Bird, And noone knows,
That twenty minutes ago I was not wearing clothes,
I was in someone’s arms, in someone’s bed,
Oh what the thought of it does to my head,
If it’s true the loudest songbirds, come alive in spring,
This bird is singing, Miss Bird is singing,
I’m singing I’m on fire. But I’m not saying a thing.
And finally, my favorite, the opening number, this is a group number, (so I want you to think 10 8-12ers dressed in career casuals) This is from the musical Personals, which was all about personal ads, which makes internet dating seem like the most personal thing in the world in comparison.
15 words.
2 Lines.
Waiting for.
Three weeks,
This has nothing to do with love.
This has everything to do, with blind dates,
Lonely nights, blind dates,
Singles bingo. TV Dinner,
blind dates My ex husband.
My mother’s nagging
And push finally coming to shove.
This has nothing to do with
Everything to do with
Nothing to do with
Everything to do with
Nothing to do with … LOVE ! (Nothing to do with love.)
Of course that’s what I looked forward to doing!
(she takes a drink)
Until I started drinking. Then I looked forward to drinking.
It’s so odd, you know?
I really enjoyed that just then.
I enjoyed it so much that I think to myself,
Why am I trying to act more intelligent than I am, you know?
Why not just stop thinking I’m so smart and so tasteful
And start auditioning for Mama Mia?
Who do I think I’m better than?
Oh - Remember how I said I never got rocks thrown at me?
That’s not true. Once I did get rocks thrown at me by a boy at my bus stop, but he was an outcast.
His name was Mike and he used to eat dirt in middle school for money. when he got to high school he took to selling drugs
And shaving a B into his chest hair (his last name started with a B).
Two years ago he went into Newark with his girlfriend to refresh
his supply of marijuana
To peddle to the bored adolescents of suburban New Jersey
And he was shot 24 times. His girlfriend, who lived, was shot 10 times.
I told this to a guy I was dating at the time I heard this.
He said, wow. He threw rocks and then was killed with rocks.
(she gives the audience a look and returns to the table)
That didn’t last long.
(She takes a drink)
Anyway I’m talking about how to give yourself an ear infection:
Two days before the occasion you want to miss
(You can try one, but one is risky)
You start sucking in.
You know how on a plane your ears begin
To fill up with pressure,
And to rid yourself of that pressure,
You hold your nose and blow out?
Well, you do the same thing
To give yourself an ear infection
Except you suck in.
So you’re creating that pressure.
1. Over the next day or two,
You keep sucking in.
Never ever popping that pressure out.
(this is one of the most foolproof things
about giving yourself an ear infection
because, people will ask you,
you know, what are doing? And you can
say, oh, my ears feel funny, I’m trying to
pop them out. Then, infection time rolls around
And nobody’s surprised)
Maybe I remember when I first started to do it.
It might have been in ballet class.
(Ballet track plays)
I hated ballet class but pretended to like it because it was classy.
Ballet was hard. I wasn’t that flexible, I was voluptuous at ten years old
and not particularly good at jumps.
I only liked the combination part where you actually got to dance,
Inexactly and messily.
(She demonstrates)
Pique, pot a bourre, glissade et batemant.
Joyfully enmeshed in an imagination that I am a prima ballarina,
That I am Cathy, from VC Andrew’s Flowers in the Attic
Strengthening my sinews while living in an attic,
Then seducing the middle aged doctor who takes my family in as refugees
And learning, for the first time, how to come from him,
After we’ve escaped our murderous mother and grandmother,
(the ballet track stops)
But the across the floor dancing was only fifteen minutes out of an hour and a half class.
Maybe it in line for that pique combination,
Panicking about how I wouldn’t get any time between today and tomorrow
To be by myself.
I require time by myself.
I have an inconveniently obsessive quest for solitude.
To an extent, I don’t care where I am or what I do as long as I can spend solitary time pondering the intimate realizations of interior world.
And masturbating.
Anyway. How you do it:
You’re building up the pressure, in your ears, that is,
And you will get to the point, where if you do a little test
And try to pop out,
You won’t be able to.
Another good sign is if while sucking in
(which you’re doing habitually)
You’ll feel bubbles in the fluid of your inner ear.
Because the pressure is about fluid,
And you’re trying to trap
The Fluid in your inner ear
so that it will fester until it infects.
The best sign is of course, the searing, knife like pain.
This is not for the fainthearted, it hurts like hell.
Which is why I was successfully able to garner sympathy
From all the doctors.
(After a couple of years I moved on from Dr. Nejat
to an exhaustive series of austere and expensive specialists)
and treatment became increasingly serious.
I had my eardrums punctured with a long thick needle on at least 3 separate occasions
before eventually undergoing surgery.
(You understand why I can’t tell my parents)
But for the first few years
The doctors would just give me antibiotics
Which would eradicate the infection
In about two days.
Two pain-ridden but blissful days
Of Love Connection, Divorce Court
unlimited pretzels and most importantly, solitude.
This all leads to the fact that I’ll never trust a child
I was nine at the time
(but thought I should be thirty)
The rope swing was there
And so was the dog
I was baking a cake
As a secretive act.
While home alone and sick
With an ear infection
I had given myself.
Baking the cake was a secretive act
because I was supposed to be sick.
Sick, as a child
Means you’re supposed stay in bed
Or at least on the couch
Because you can’t do anything else.
Grown ups treat being sick differently,
but that’s okay, because they make the money.
And also, because baking was, as we’ve discussed, ambivalent.
This child I used to watch, the one who was scared about turning eight,
she was neurotic, but she had no deceit within her.
She never told me she was allowed to have something when she wasn’t
And when I would suggest that it was okay that we watched a video even though
She had already watched her maximum of two hours a week,
She would cry and in so many words beg me not to ask her to compromise her morality.
Maybe she was deceitful when she was alone, but I doubt so.
I, on the other hand,
Lied, stole, hid and concealed with grace, ease, finesse and aplomb
Have you been watching TV? No.
Are you wearing socks with those shoes? Yes.
Did you do your homework? Yes.
Did you practice your violin? Yes.
How many have you had? Um, one?
Did you hide ice cream in the closet? No.
Then what’s melting over the carpet? I don’t know
Are you lying to me? NO! uh. No.
Due to a lie that manifested into a physical ailment,
I was baking a cake from scratch
Because I was interested In authenticity.
Because I loved old things, loved old stories of cooking,
Loved any novel with good food in it.
Loved Anne of Greene Gables with her cherry cordial,
The Five Peppers with their plum puddings,
Those Jewish girls with their sautéed chick peas,
Pollyanna and her calves foot jelly.
Oliver Twist and his gruel.
I loved the concept of meat pies, like Pip had in Great Expectations,
And mutton, and homemade bread spread with sweet cream butter.
Cold chicken drumsticks and chowders and lemon pies.
I loved the romance of food.
AND I wanted to eclipse my mother
With really good deceitful secret baking skills.
So at one in the afternoon of a mid-winter day in suburban New Jersey,
After Divorce Court, the Price is Right and the ritual trying on of my mother’s wedding dress,
I decided to do some baking.
(she speaks rhythmically with concentration)
I measured the flour
Out of the largest blue glass canister
And used the white plastic measuring spoons
For the baking powder and salt
And sifted the dry goods together
With the metal sifter into the medium sized stainless steel bowl.
Then I cut the butter with the eggs and the sugar from the second largest blue glass canister
In the large white ceramic bowl with blue and pink stripes.
then folded the dry goods into the butter eggs and sugar
With the yellow plastic spatula
Whose handle had accidentally melted
Many years before
But remained the best spatula in the house
Then used the handheld electric beaters
To beat the batter.
Then I poured the batter in two nine-inch cake pans and put the cakes into the oven preheated to 350 degrees.
Then while the layers were baking I laid down on the living room couch
And reread over and over my favorite part
In “Heaven,” (she shows the book to the audience) in which
Heaven (a beautiful Appalachian girl with cornflower blue eyes and a 22-inch waist)
Gets molested by Cal, her adopted father
But she thinks he’s hot and she likes it.
(she opens and reads)
It wasn’t wrong, was it, this sweet tenderness he showed when he brushed his lips over mine, gently touching me as if afraid he’d frighten me with too bold an approach. “I wish you weren’t just a beautiful child, I wish you were older” I whispered, “Noooo,” but it didn’t stop him from kissing where he wanted to kiss, or fondling where he wanted to fondle. I quivered all over, as if God above were looking down and condemning me to eternal hell. “How sweet and soft you are,” he murmured as he kissed my bared breasts. My body betrayed me.
(titillated, she slams the book shut)
The timer bell rang and I pulled out the pans
and cooled the layers on cooling racks,
While I made my Grandmother’s fudge icing recipe,
Melting butter and unsweetened chocolate
In an upright saucepan over the stove,
Adding confectioners sugar and 2 tablespoons of water.
I understood how to make the icing
After a mishap earlier that year
In which I tried to make a cake for my mother’s
Birthday and added too much water
Leading to tears, a shaken sense of self and my father’s rescue.
This time the icing came out perfectly,
Spreadable yet edgy with granulation.
I slid a butter knife along the edges of the nine inch pans
And turned them over onto heavy ceramic plates.
They slid out perfectly,
Like I was a professional cake maker,
I severed the bump from what was to be
The bottom layer of the cake
With a serrated knife
In the manner that I had seen them do
On the cooking shows
So you get a perfect layer cake
And I dipped another butter knife in icy water
Also seen on cooking shows
And frosted the cake with the warm
Fudge icing.
My creation sat proudly on a plate,
Rivaling any cake made by any old-fashioned heroine.
Even, symmetrical.
Authentic.
(she strums the autoharp in triumph)
But lo, the hours drew fast upon me,
And the stovetop clock shone three o’clock.
Three o’clock! She thought. (I thought) She Thought.
Haste! Mother will be home in but two hours.
(she gathers the props (which are not cooking props) on her table, and puts them in the picnic basket, leaving only the autoharp)
So I hurriedly cleaned the ceramic bowl
The stainless steel bowl
The sifter
The measuring spoons and the spatula.
I cleaned the nine inch-ers
The cooling rack
The saucepan
The serrated knife
the butter knife
The beaters
And anything else that was involved
I dried them all thoroughly
And I put them away carefully
So that the handles all faced
How they had faced before I had
Removed them.
I wiped the counters and I swept the floor.
Then I took all the trash
That I had accumulated
While making the cake
Down to my garage,
And I lifted the trash out
Of one of the cans
And put my dross in the middle,
Between two bags.
(she takes the props off stage, then returns to address the audience)
I’m not sure why I didn’t eat a bite.
I think I was sick of the entire endeavor.
I was finished. Besides there was no time to eat,
I had to hide the evidence.
I don’t know why I felt like I couldn’t be discovered,
I only know I preferred my interior world and I refused to have it probed by my well-meaning, yet terrifying, parents.
My secret day at home was made possible by a lie,
So everything I did, I suppose, felt like a lie.
So no, I didn’t eat a bite.
Nor did I present it for the evening’s desert.
Instead I took the cake in my arms and
climbed the hill in my backyard
That led up to the woods in which
The rope swing hung
(so you could swing from the top of the hill
Over the mild cliff of my backyard)
And I deposited that beautiful, fully baked cake
Behind the trunk of that large tree
From which the rope swing hung
I walked back into the house,
And Carefully washed and returned
The cake plate to its place in the lazy Susan cabinet on the right of the sink.
This all leads to the fact that I’ll never trust a child,
Much less understand one.
I was nine at the time,
(Nine going on thirty) ,
I baked a cake as a secretive, authentic,
mother-eclipsing act,
and hid it under the ropeswing,
Supervised only by the dog named Lisa
(Who I wanted to call Isabel but came with her name)
(She plays the autoharp, a refrain of her opening musical interlude. It loops while she pulls a Kit Kat bar from her pocket.)
I’ve been saving this.
(she eats it)
I remember a psychological moment, when I was six,
Separated from my mother in the supermarket.
I wandered into the cookie aisle, to stare with fervor at “the little schoolboys”
The cookies I longed for but was never allowed to get. (Les petite ecolier)
I was staring at those cookies when I saw two young men walking towards me.
They were out of a movie, Long hair, ripped jeans, leather jackets with studs,
They seemed like grownups.
I pretended to read the packages
With absorption, as my pulse quickened and my palms started to sweat.
They walked past me and gave me a smile,
As nice older people will do with cute children
Made a right out of the aisle and disappeared forever.
And I remember I thought, my body overcome with tingling joy
I thought, and treasured this thought
For years and years and years
Until I learned to become ashamed of it,
I thought,
“I know what they’re thinking,
I can see it in their faces
They’re thinking, ‘What a beautiful girl.
I think I’m in love
If only - If only she was a little bit older’”
(she stops the loop and returns to the story)
When my mother came home from work, that day
That I had baked a cake as a secretive act,
she stroked my hair sweetly and
Put in the video of “Porgy and Bess” she rented for me
Because she knew I liked it.
We watched the overture
Through the crowd scene to the entrance of Bess,
Whose trying to shake herself of a drug problem and her no good but really hot dealer named King,
We watched Porgy and Bess getting together even though he’s a cripple,
up to his rendition of
“Ive Got Plenty Of Nothin”
You know,
(she sings and plays, insouciantly)
I’ve got plenty of nothing,
And nothin’s plenty for me.
When the song was finished my mother went to the kitchen
to prepare dinner while Lisa, pressing down on the living room door handle to enter,
joined me to watch as the events in Porgy and Bess’s small town turn tragic.
(she sings and plays, mournfully)
My man’s gone now
Ain’t no use in listenin’
For his tired footsteps
Comin’ up my walk.
My dog Lisa has always been able to open doors
She can’t do the doors with the round handles, the knobs
But sliding doors and push handles, which were prevalent in my house
Were no obstacles to her freedom.
For the first month I think we tried to prevent her
But then we realized that Lisa always came back
So why not let her roam the neighborhood.
We’ve never been worriers.
And in the course of her travels
She would often find presents for us.
Rolls or Bagels
Once she put a dead bird on my pillow.
Possums, rats, the usual love tokens.
It happened at six on a dark winter evening
I was joyously sobbing
While Sidney Portier sang (He played Porgy) “Bess, oh Where is my Bess”
(because she left him, having given in to the drugs and the hotness of her dealer)
And so he sang that dirge (Bess Oh Where Is My Bess).
I was sobbing at his pain (Bess, Oh Where is My Bess) when my Aristotelian catharsis was interrupted.
(in her mother’s voice)
“JULIA!”
(she confides in the audience)
When I was a child my mother’s voice filled me with fear.
Regardless of day, time or situation,
Hearing “JULIA” would send chills up my spine.
It could have been because she, although a warm woman, had a coldish voice tinged with the exhaustion and anxiety of an overworked young mother.
But it was really because I think I believed I was inherently evil.
I was constantly afraid that evil getting recognized.
I had so many things to hide: from my collection of smutty novels
To the food stashed in my bedroom desk drawer
To homework undone and, of course, the ear infections.
I was not the always getting into trouble but feckless heroines I adored,
I was the twit with secret mean side and the bouncy black hair, whose cute and plump now, but destined for obesity and pockmarks in the sequel.
I was a liar, a stealer, sloppy, lazy and I cleaned my room by pushing clothes under my bed.
I was selfish.
I thought my parents annoying and my peers inferior.
My bad-person-ness exposable at any moment,
I lived with the Sword of Damocles poised over my head.
“JULIA!”
“WHAT?”
“JULIA, WILL YOU COME HERE?”
(Warily)
I walked from the living room through the dining room to the kitchen.
On the countertop to my left sat a wide white dish of romaine lettuce and cherry tomatoes.
On the stove sat a pan of raw chicken legs and thighs
With pimpled yellow skin and protruding blue gray bones
That needed to be separated with kitchen scissors
(which were seen as a new gadget back then)
Before being skinned, baked and served with potatoes.
Warm light filled the kitchen and shone against the window panes.
My mother stood in front of me. Her lips were tight.
"Julia," she said, "Julia, What is this?"
She led me to the kitchen door.
Sitting at the foot of the doorway was a nearly intact
Beautiful, authentic looking and fully frosted
cake.
It seemed as though Lisa had pushed it all the way
(why she didn’t eat it I’ll never know)
from the rope swing to the kitchen door.
“Did you bake that cake Julia?”
“No!”
She clutched the kitchen scissors with trembling hands.
In the background public radio’s All Things Considered paused for a station identification.
(the theme song plays)
Do Do Do Do Do Do Do Do –
And a soft—voiced, intelligent woman relayed the time and the weather in central park.
“Julia, I’m going to ask you again. Did you bake that cake?”
…
“Yes. I baked that cake.”
I prepared in what I felt like was the calm before the storm.
Passionate and excitable, Christina Mordhorst Jonas could throw down with the best of them and my duplicity set her off more than anything.
She often said my father was the first man she felt she didn’t have to deceive.
There’s no wrath worse than that of the recently reformed.
My friend once reminded me that to kids,
Adults are monsters.
They’re huge and they’ve got all the power.
My monster stared at me incredulously for what seemed like a small eternity, before she turned, walked back to the stove, snipped a leg from a thigh, and from over her shoulder said:
“You didn’t need to throw it out, Julia.
We would have eaten it.”
I stood there awkwardly, unsure of my feet on the tile floor.
Lisa slept on the dog bed in the nook by the bay window.
I regarded her slumber, not knowing if I was allowed to go.
My mother pushed the chicken into the oven, and as she turned to scrub the potatoes, I saw her back release its tension.
So - leaving Porgy, paused on the living room television in the midst of his mournful dirge,
I absconded to my room,
And re-read the scene in Gone With the Wind
In which Rhett rapes Scarlett but
He’s hot and she likes it
While sucking cream cheese straight out of the foil package.
Until my father came home and dinner was served
In the fog of our evasive silence.
(She plays and sings a final song)
Poor wand’ring one
Though thou hast surely strayed
Take heart from grace
Thy steps retrace
Poor wand’ring one.
Take Heart, fair days will shine
Take any heart, take mine
Take Heart, fair days will shine,
take any heart, take mine.
Take Heart, Fair days will shine
Take any heart, take mine
Take Heart, fair days will shine,
Take any heart, take mine.
THE END
(c) Julia May Jonas, June 27th, 2008
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