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  “You’re not quitting,” she said.

  Her hair was down and she chewed carelessly on a strand.

  “I don’t have a choice,” I said. “I don’t know how to prepare a song. I don’t know how to sing a song. Let alone prepare one.”

  “Relax,” she said. “Just listen to a song on YouTube and sing along until it’s memorized.”

  “I’m not sure that’s gonna do it.”

  She looked at me directly then, her eyes blinking in confusion.

  “Good God, man! Do I have to spell this out for you?”

  I stared at her, slack-jawed.

  “If you didn’t notice, there were like two other boys in that whole room today. Two. Total. You’re statistically guaranteed a part. You could whistle a song out your ass. All you have to do is show up.”

  Parents were pulling into the lot now, jockeying for position in the narrow lanes. I saw my mom in our rusty Volvo, searching me out. She could never find me in situations like these, which only confirmed to me that I was the type of person who was not meant for the spotlight.

  “But if I get a part,” I said, “I’ll have to perform it in public.”

  “True,” she said. “That’s what acting is.”

  “I don’t like doing things in public,” I said. “I don’t like doing most things in private.”

  Raina scanned the row of cars for her ride. She looked at me again and sighed.

  “Listen,” she said. “We used to play games on the playground, right? When we were in school?”

  I nodded. I was surprised that she remembered.

  “And you were always down for that. I could get you to do anything. Even if no one else wanted to play.”

  I had never thought of it that way, that she might have needed me at times. I tried not to get distracted.

  “I was a kid,” I said.

  She closed her eyes and took a breath.

  “You still are.”

  I felt an irrational jump of anger. I knew she was trying to make a point, but I didn’t want her to see me as a kid.

  “Why do you care so much about this?” I said. “I don’t need you to babysit me.”

  A lie.

  She looked at me for a moment. And I thought, temporarily, that she might be deciding whether or not to hit me. Then she took a breath.

  “Look, Ethan. I’m not trying to babysit you. I just thought it would be fun to do this with you. Okay? That’s why I asked.”

  I was silent now. She was not.

  “I asked you to come so we could hang out. So I could have a friend here. Do you understand?”

  My heart was in my throat now, and I could feel my face flush. To avoid meeting Raina’s eyes, I looked around at the other kids leaving.

  “These people aren’t your friends?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said. “They never talk to me. I’m pretty sure they go to fancy theater camp in the summer together. So, could you please go home and figure out how to sing so I can have someone to talk to here.”

  A beep came from the car line, and Raina started to walk off toward a Volkswagen van. Her mom was smoking out the window, giving her a disinterested wave. It didn’t look like the nicest greeting.

  I thought about Raina walking into the theater earlier. No one had said hi to her. She hadn’t smiled at anyone, and no one had smiled at her. In my mind, she was so comfortable with herself, but she didn’t look that way right now. She looked a little uncertain, standing there outside her mom’s van.

  Before she got in, Raina turned back just once.

  “You can’t just be invisible all the time,” she said.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because then the bad guys win.”

  She got in the backseat of her mom’s van, and waved away some cigarette smoke. She slumped back in her seat. And as the van passed by, she didn’t look my way again. She was back in her own mind. My mom was nearly up to where I was standing now, but she still couldn’t see me.

  Maybe I was invisible.

  I looked down at my script.

  “Well . . . shit,” I said.

  * * *

  • • •

  A week later I was cast as Oliver.

  And before you think I pulled off some miraculous audition the way Raina did in New York, let me be clear: There were two very basic reasons for this casting choice, and neither of them had to do with acting or singing. The real reasons were:

  I hadn’t really gone through puberty yet.

  And:

  My singing voice was incredibly high (see Reason 1).

  As Raina had predicted, human males were a pretty hot commodity in the world of children’s community theater. And the other boys who showed up were both substantially larger than me. One even had stubble. He was obviously cast as Bill Sikes. The other one was kind of weasely looking, so, of course, he was Fagin. The rest of the orphans would be played by girls. Which left me and my glorious (unintentional) falsetto to play Oliver.

  There was only one saving grace to the whole disaster, which was that Raina was cast as Nancy. And while I certainly wasn’t her love interest, we did have scenes together, and we did engage in many a chaste motherly hug. We even had a song. The aptly named “I’d Do Anything.” And it was going to require a lot of practice.

  And so it began: the golden era of Raina and Ethan.

  For the next month or so, I went over to her house every day after school and danced with her in an unfinished basement while her distracted, arty mom worked on her sculptures in her studio above us.

  Prior to this point in time, I had been a strict non-dancer. And as far as I was concerned, singing was reserved for birthdays and the one time a year my family went to church. But in Raina’s basement, which was damp and cool and smelled like fabric softener and cat litter, I felt safe enough to hop around like a fool, singing in a bad British accent.

  Raina, too, was back in her element, bossing me around like we were on the playground again. “No, no, no, don’t turn like that.” “Ethan, stage right! You’re killing me here.” She had a bit more patience this time around. It helped that she knew I was bad from the beginning. And since I was at rock bottom, I could only get better. She seemed to take a genuine interest in making me “not horrible,” maybe just so her scene wouldn’t suck. But maybe, I hoped, because she was starting to care about me.

  Rehearsals were the official reason I was at her house, but if it hadn’t been for the downtime, I might still have quit. The dancing and singing were an endurance test for the most part, something to get through so we could sit talking on the ugly orange couch in her basement. Usually, we just joked about the scene—trading inappropriate lines in exaggerated accents—but eventually things got a bit more personal. In that last half hour before I headed home to dinner, we talked about anything that was on our minds. Which is how I first heard about Raina’s mom.

  “Have you ever wondered why she doesn’t talk to me?” she said one day.

  We were at opposite ends of the orange couch, drinking the juice boxes that Raina’s mom still bought for her.

  “Who?”

  I knew immediately who she was talking about, but I didn’t want her to think it was so obvious.

  Raina pointed upstairs.

  “She talks to you,” I said.

  “Not really. I mean, she says stuff to me. Raina, you got your lunch? Is that thing today? But we don’t talk. I can’t remember the last time we actually had a conversation about something real. We talked about her and my dad’s separation like six months ago maybe, but when I asked her why she married him in the first place, she called me judgmental and went to bed.”

  “So, what’s the deal?” I asked.

  I was a little surprised that the conversation had taken this turn. Only minutes before, we h
ad been talking about Mrs. Salazar’s stretch pants.

  “She’s in hibernation,” she said.

  “Hibernation?”

  “Basically, she forgets that other people exist. She just goes in her cave and makes stuff all day and resents everyone who bothers her. She told me once that she probably could have been famous if she didn’t have me so young.”

  “That’s kind of harsh.”

  Raina shrugged.

  “I know. You’re not supposed to say that to your kid. But she’s probably right. She basically gave everything up until I was ten. Then, I guess all her gallery contacts were shot or her work felt old-fashioned. I don’t know. Mostly she blames my dad. But he’s not here anymore. So, now she blames me.”

  “And, she just ignores you?”

  “When she’s in hibernation.”

  “How long has she been in hibernation?”

  “Five years, more or less.”

  Raina didn’t speak for a moment. She took a sip out of her tiny straw.

  “I think she hates me, Ethan.”

  “That can’t be true,” I said.

  Raina got up and listened at the stairs to make sure her mom wasn’t in earshot.

  “Fine. She loves me. In the way that she has to. She gave birth to me. But if she didn’t have to love me that way, she would hate me.”

  “But I don’t . . .”

  “Just for being here. That’s why. And because I’m young and I have everything in front of me. Maybe that. Or because I look like my dad. Or because I’m kind of a weirdo and a pain in the ass. Could be any or all of that.”

  She sat back on the couch and stared at the box of juice in her hand. There was a drawing of a dancing apple on the carton, a big smile on its face.

  “Either way, my mom doesn’t talk to me. And it’s really goddamn lonely around here.”

  From upstairs, we could hear her mom tromping around. She turned up her music, and a classical piano piece hammered through the floorboards.

  “I just don’t understand,” I said.

  “Well, that’s how it is! I should know,” said Raina.

  “No,” I said. “I totally believe you. I just don’t know how anyone could . . .”

  “Could what?” she snapped.

  “Ignore you.”

  The low keys of the piano piece thundered above.

  “Oh,” she said.

  I stayed still on my end of the couch. We listened to the end of a piece from a grumpy old composer. Each note sounded like an indictment of life itself.

  “Have you ever been to the Green Street Cinema?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “We should go sometime.”

  “I’m not allowed to go on dates,” she said. “My mom doesn’t want me making her same mistake.”

  “Jesus, Nancy,” I said in my awful British accent. “Who said it was a date? I’m half your age!”

  She smiled.

  “It’s a weird place,” I said. “I just think you might like it.”

  10

  I should have known the Green Street was doomed the day I discovered the Styrofoam beam. It happened last fall when we were doing a “Westerns on Wednesdays” series. I think Randy hoped retirees might show up to watch their childhood heroes act overly masculine in a dusty landscape. Anyway, Lucas and Griffin were tying licorice ropes into lassos and swapping John Wayne quotes like imbeciles.

  “I never apologize,” shouted Lucas. “It’s a sign of weakness!”

  He swung his red rope over his head.

  “Courage is being scared to death,” yelled Griffin, “but saddling up anyway!”

  Lucas was making me film all this on his phone. He was always talking about making a movie, but he never showed us anything he’d actually cut together. He just had endless amounts of footage, mostly on his phone, that he never did anything with. He’d come in with pep in his step some days, talking about an epic he was envisioning.

  “It’s going to be a neo-realist thing,” he’d say, “like De Sica, Only about my life. The life of a movie theater worker. Working-class cinema, you know? The plight of an immigrant artist trying to make it in an indifferent capitalist world.”

  Other days, he’d look totally dejected and when we’d ask him why, he’d say:

  “Frank Capra was right. The cardinal sin of filmmaking is dullness.” Then, he’d sulk off to replace the hand soap in the restrooms.

  The day I found the beam, he was aiming a licorice lasso at Griffin’s head. I didn’t have the heart to ask him how this fit in with his movie. But I was filming it dutifully.

  “If you’ve got ’em by the balls,” he said, “their hearts and minds will follow. Hiya, Cowpoke!”

  He let go of his rope and it soared over Griffin’s head and hit a wooden beam on the ceiling. I followed the flight of the rope with the camera, and so I saw clearly that instead of slamming against the beam and falling back down, there was an explosion of white dust, and the entire beam wobbled and dropped down where it landed, without much sound at all.

  “Oh shit,” said Griffin, speaking for all of us.

  We all walked over to the fallen beam. There was a healthy chunk missing from it, and inside was pure Styrofoam. The whole beam was painted to look like wood. It was a decorative beam.

  “That can’t be good,” said Lucas.

  He motioned for me to turn off the camera.

  “Styrofoam is really terrible for the environment,” said Griffin.

  We all agreed that this was true. And that the best thing to do was to get on a ladder, put it back, and pretend we had never seen just how fragile the bones of our temple really were.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was staring up at this secret beam when Sweet Lou stepped out of the ladies’ restroom and walked past me. Her dyed red bangs hung over her eyes, and her cane dug into the carpet with each stride. She put a hand to her head and looked out into the fading sunlight then she croaked over her shoulder.

  “That asshole’s back.”

  And before I had time to respond, she was gone. When I faced the door, there was the squinty man again, outside with a bunch of other men in matching gray suits. He was gesticulating and pointing wildly at things in the neighborhood. A few regular customers had to dodge the group to find their way inside the building for the evening film. At one point, squinty man himself was actually blocking the door.

  “Ugh. Ron Marsh,” came a voice from behind me.

  I turned around and found Griffin refilling the soda machine with Coke syrup. More than a couple of times in my tenure as manager, I’d caught him syphoning off the syrup into a cup and drinking it straight, which I don’t recommend. It tastes a little like how I imagine sugar would taste if someone scraped the skin off your tongue right before you ate a spoonful.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  “Ron Marsh,” he pointed outside. “I can’t stand that dude.”

  “How do you know his name?”

  He blinked.

  “Oh, I went to his office, yesterday.”

  I nearly fell over.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I was going to give him a piece of my mind, but then when I showed up, the secretary was really nice to me, and he wasn’t around. I didn’t think it would be fair to yell at her just because she works for a dildo, so I just came back here.”

  Outside, Ron Marsh was laughing at what appeared to be his own joke. The men in suits were also laughing. Griffin watched them.

  “I’m sorry, Griffin. What are you saying?”

  “Nothing really. The whole thing was kind of a waste of time if you want the honest truth. But yeah, anyway, his name is Ron Marsh and he has a pretty fancy office. There were M&Ms with his initials on them in the waiting room. I ate a green one. It was
delicious.”

  We both looked out at Ron again.

  “Well, he’s standing out there right now,” I said. “If you want to go tackle him or something.”

  “No thanks,” he said. “I think my natural state might be pacifism. An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind, you know?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Gandhi said that.”

  I started walking toward the door, picking up speed as I went.

  “Mahatma Gandhi,” he said.

  “I know who Gandhi is!” I said.

  I swung the door open, and it breezed right past the back of Ron Marsh’s head, sending his hair straight up in a gust of man-made wind. The group of men in suits took a step back. Ron wheeled around and frowned.

  “Can I help you with something, Wendy?” he asked.

  I stood looking at him for a moment. Whatever sense of righteous indignation had sent me out there was already wearing off.

  “Yes, Ron Marsh,” I said slowly. “As a matter of fact you can. You are blocking the main entrance to my theater, making it difficult for my customers to come inside and watch awesome movies. . . .”

  “Your theater?” he said.

  I just stared back at him. He did not back down.

  “Did you just say this was your theater?”

  “Well,” I said. “I mean . . .”

  “Oh, no. I’m afraid this is not your theater, Wendy,” he said. “It is the university’s theater. Randy Frick was renting it for a while, but he forfeited that privilege when he stopped paying his bills. And the only reason it’s still open as we speak is because of the capital market.”

  “The capital market?” I said. The words tasted unfamiliar in my mouth.

  There were a few nods from the suits. Ron exhaled.

  “Eventually, you’ll come to realize that there are bigger forces in the world than what you want. In this case, capital. The market wasn’t so great the last few years, so the university took our foot off the gas pedal when it comes to real estate projects. But now the market’s back! So, here we are.”

  He winked at the guy next to him.