Read an Excerpt
My Pulse Is an Earthquake
By Kristin FitzPatrick West Virginia University Press
Copyright © 2015 Kristin FitzPatrick
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-940425-74-0
CHAPTER 1
QUEEN CITY PLAYHOUSE
It's been three days since Mizz Duesler brought her husband here to die in dressing room 3. He's the reason we're putting on this play in a hurry. It's my job to finish the scenery murals for the Island of Magic. Everybody says that The Tempest is an impossible comedy to stage, so why bother, but I painted my way into the place, and now I believe.
Three nights ago, as play practice wrapped up, and I was smoothing on the darkest blue in the night sky, Mizz D came up to me.
"Tess," she said, "you take care of Mr. Duesler until he falls asleep."
I've been here at the Dueslers' place a year: three theater seasons. A year of free paint and canvases, muffins and juice at weekend practices. And the building's warm enough to sleep in.
"Yes, ma'am," I said. I was going to guard the king of the Queen City Playhouse.
Their daughter, Cara Duesler, I know her from school. We're not friends, but she caught me painting in the back of the art room when I should've been in my other classes, and she knew I wasn't about to do murals for the school drama club. She was the star in all her parents' plays, and she told her mom I could help.
Like I say, I'm scenery. There's the audio ladies, Skyboy on lights, and Joe. He's costumes — sometimes he helps me paint, and I help him sew. There's the cast: the king's men, the boat men, Caliban the monster, and then there's Miranda and her father, Prospero the magician, with his invisible spirits and nymphs and reapers. Mizz Duesler directs us all from her headset. I never know how to take her. One way is as lioness on the headset, roaring out stage directions, pawing at my pine forests or my London street scenes, my Emerald Cities. Another way is Sweet Mizz D.
Roy brings the muffins. He's a rich bachelor who plays the hero in most of the shows, burning under the lights while the female lead crosses her arms and schemes and offs with their heads. This play, he's Prospero. Cara plays Miranda, Prospero's daughter, stranded on the island and hypnotized by his tall tales about their royal heritage. But once Prospero takes off his magic robe, ladies and gentlemen, we see right through him. Only Miranda's quick marriage to some gullible prince will make her father a duke again. It takes a lot of tricks to pull it off.
Tonight at practice, we're T-minus two days till opening night. Skyboy rattles along the lighting catwalks. By the time I look up, I see the tail end of his shadow disappear behind a spotlight. Whoowee, would I like that post. Skygirl. How about that? Instead, I'm down on the stage, where I paint and listen to the actors. "Do you swear, in front of God and family?" they say, in their fake preacher's collars. "Do you come in the name of the king?" they shout to intruders. The cast's job is to promise, protect, or poison. Joe and Skyboy and me make it all look convincing.
I'm almost done touching up the sets. This here is where Prospero's slave, Ariel, will lay out bait for the drunken sailors, and over here, when Caliban is plotting to kill Prospero, he will get a little flighty and say this island is all sweet noises. When play practice begins tonight, the actors' voices start as very clear arrangements of words. By the middle of practice, once I am deep into the Island of Magic, the actors are a nest of buzzing bees. Then the only sound I hear is my brushes clinking against paint jars.
Jangling keys yank me out of my painting. I look behind me, where Mizz D holds her keys above her head and barks out one last order before she lets everyone go on break. Since last season, it's like she's been struck by lightning — her hair went from a mop of normal-person brown to a pad of white bristles. "Let. Me. Say. This. Once," she says. "And only once: Please please please put a name sticker on your cubby. At home, please sew your initials into each. Piece. Of. Your. Costume." She sighs, and her whole body deflates. "And be here on time tomorrow for dress rehearsal!"
Then Cara's voice comes through the speakers. She and Roy are backstage already, and she must not have switched off her microphone. "Oh, Father ... " she says. And then she slips off script. "Ooh, Prospero, may I pluck the magic garment from thee?"
Mizz Duesler's got another daughter, older than Cara. She knows how to shoo away dogs like Roy, but instead of scolding Cara for wandering off with a thirty-five-year-old amateur actor, Mizz D interrupts her own speech to the cast and listens to her daughter's lip smacks.
When rehearsal starts up again, Ferdinand, who is played by a total geezer, tells Miranda he will marry her. Their swift ceremony will make Miranda the next Queen of Naples, and it will pull her father, Prospero, the wronged Duke of Milan, back into royalty. Mizz D stops them and talks about the spectacle this act will need. She touches her headset and asks Skyboy if he's ready to create the invisible spirit effects. I don't hear him answer, but I know he's ready because he's got filters on some lights, cutout shapes on others, all wacked out to crazy angles. He controls the spectacle. Sometimes during practice he sits on the stretch of catwalk above the audio control desk, and I watch his dangling feet. I've never seen his face, but I've heard that he's older.
Mizz D's headset shorts out, and through the auditorium someone yells, "What?" and I realize it's Skyboy. I've never heard his voice before. It's higher than I imagined.
The audio ladies are still on break, so Mizz D says, "Tess! Fix me!"
I wrap some electrical tape around the wire. I play with the buttons. It works a while, and then the battery dies.
"Get it together, Mom!" Cara says.
During the next break, me and Joe go downstairs to check on Mr. D. Joe follows one step behind, babbling about how Shakespeare was a fool for writing such impossible plays and for gathering people into his theaters in the first place.
"All it did was spread the plague," he says.
I want to defend Shakespeare, but I won't fight Joe. I need to show my thanks to him. If he weren't here, I'd have split after the first week.
"I could run this show in my sleep," he says. "Any of us could." I want to pop him for saying this, but he's right. I've seen him stand backstage with sewing pins falling out of one side of his mouth and every character's lines streaming out the other side.
Even a good punch wouldn't change Joe. Once he gets an idea, it imprints itself on him for good, just like the actors' scripts.
When we enter dressing room 3, Mr. D's deck of cards waits on his table. He can't play games anymore, but he likes to touch the cards. He slides a four and an ace next to each other, and then he points to himself.
"Forty-one?" I say. "That's how old you are?"
He blinks. It is when he works this hard to hide the suffering that it shows most.
"No way, Mr. D," Joe says. "You look like Noah."
Mr. D shuffles the cards real slow and smiles. He is a little in love with Joe. We all are.
A stench tells us it's time to change the bedpan. I reach for Mr. D.
"I got it, Tess," Joe says. He lifts Mr. D out of the way. His strength surprises me, and I notice that his shoulders are starting to fill out his jacket. He's nineteen and still waiting for a growth spurt. Maybe it's finally here.
I don't want to embarrass Mr. D, so I look away, up to the photos on the wall that show the work of a bigger man: the old Mr. D. These snapshots of actors remind me that he staged plays nobody else in this part of Cincinnati would dare, like The Crucible and A Raisin in the Sun, not just Our Town and My Fair Lady. He helped actors much more talented than Cara rise up, all the way to Chicago theaters, some of them. Cara has no plans for herself. She will take over this playhouse, direct and star in her own productions until someone discovers her. Then she'll sell the place, or dump it onto some cousin, let it go to seed.
Joe's auburn curls bounce as he finishes the cleanup, and Mr. Duesler nods a little to thank him. He says he wants to take a turn giving Mr. D his meds. I okay it and let Joe find the right bottle from the cabinet. He helps the pills down the hatch, and Mr. D's eyelids droop.
Joe waves me outside. He looks at me square, his freckles blazing in the hall light. For the first time, I notice that he is taller than me.
"One of those pills, T," he says, "just one, is instant dynamite." He rubs imaginary money together between his fingers. "Thirty bucks a dose. What do you say? We could make a killing."
I walk away. This is his worst idea yet, and I cannot let it press into him. I want to find Prospero's magic staff and cast the demons out of Joe, but he grabs my arm. "Kids at school already pay thirty to keep a pipe full all night."
I try to shake out of his grip, but he's too strong. I'm no dummy. I've watched them pass it around at the parties I sneak into after Cara and her friends have crashed out, where I fill my pockets with smashed-up potato chips and drink from half-empty cups.
"We wait till he kicks," Joe says. "We sell the leftovers, give a cut to Mizz D. No harm."
"You. Are. Sick," I say.
Joe lets go and skips past me, up the stairs. "A killing!"
I go sit in the director's chair next to Mr. D's bed. He settles into the night's sleep: a snore, a wheeze, a twitching around the eye.
When the door opens, he doesn't wake. Mizz D walks in and kisses his forehead.
"Ice cold," she says. "Shouldn't be long now, Tess."
She usually looks dried up — a new wrinkle each night, like it's her brain swelling and contracting instead of his — but tonight her face is relaxed. She knows she can't control when or how the hero falls.
She takes a few grand strides around the room, her eyes scanning the photos.
"James has always wanted to put on The Tempest," she says. "This is our last chance. Do you think we can pull it off?"
"I think he'll know, even from down here, what we're doing up there on stage," I say.
I want to tell her he'll be there with us in spirit, because it might comfort her, but she's stopped listening. Instead, she's fixated on one particular photo, the one where Cara wears a red curly wig and belts out, "Tomorrow!"
"So you'll turn out the lights when you go?" she says.
"Course."
Mizz Duesler leaves. Just as the click of her heels fades down the hall, the volume on them creeps up again.
"Tess?" Her face is in the doorway now.
"Yeah?"
"You said your ride would be here by nine?"
"Yup. Quarter to."
Mizz D checks her watch. "Perfect. Mr. Duesler's usually out for good by eight-fifteen."
Since I started looking after Mr. D, Mizz D stopped jumping on my back about washing and cutting my hair and wearing proper all-black stage shoes, so I stopped stealing money from her purse for haircuts, and I painted black over the orange and yellow splatters on my shoes. But we still keep up this charade, as if I got somewhere else to go and somebody to take me there.
Now, with the hall light behind her, Mizz Duesler's white brush cut glows. If she'd let me, I'd do her portrait as a fresco on the wall right here next to Mr. D. It's been a while since Mizz D gave up asking me to make a small painting, maybe a still life of flowers, and go for a ride with her so I could hand it over to a guard during visiting hours or set it on a gravestone. It's what a good daughter should do, she said.
"You know, Tess," she says now, "once you get your rear end back in school, you could keep going, I mean past high school, and get a job in an old folks' home. That's the wave of the future."
Mr. D isn't old, I want to say, but I shouldn't remind her, so I say, "The future?"
She tries to smile and fails, so she leaves again, without a goodbye. She's too busy to talk to me. She pushed up the date of opening night, and folks all over town swore they'd come. They all know it's the last curtain call for James Duesler.
If I did show up at school again, I'd see Cara sitting in front of where I should be sitting during third period psych class. She'd pass quizzes behind her, over my empty seat and through my ghost to the stoner in the back who used to gnaw at the mats in my hair with his pocket knife. I know she's still going to psych class because her backpack, down in dressing room 4, is loaded with notes about synapses and biofeedback, tuning forks and drooling dogs.
Before I quit school I listened good enough in psych class to know that Cara was having some serious synapse activity every night in dressing room 4, way at the end of the hall, past the trapdoor, where the passage narrows and the ceiling stoops. In there with Roy, her pleasure centers must've lit right up, her primal cortex kicked into overdrive. All that sensory stimuli from Roy, with its positive reinforcement system in place, made her return each night through the maze of backstage prop room and light controls, past the decaying smell of her father in dressing room 3, which would have stimulated a negative response she'd have to suppress. Roy would help her with that. He makes the serotonin flow.
Around ten o'clock, Joe walks into Mr. D's room. He's been upstairs with Prospero's robe. He needs my help stitching up loose threads in the lining and around the collar, so we set to work on a big table out in the hall and listen to Cara argue with Roy in room 4. Something about going home. Once the robe is perfect again, me and Joe carry it to their door.
Roy invites us all the way in. He's just as wrinkled and balding as Mr. D, and even though Mr. D is the one dying faster, in this light Roy is all bone and shadow. I want to grab the makeup at the vanity and brighten him. When Joe slips the robe over Roy's shoulders, Roy stands straight as a show dog. He gives Joe a secret look. Joe's face lights up. Roy is working some kind of magic on him, too.
The robe is fine for now, so Roy keeps it on and returns to the couch. Cara lights a cigarette and hands it to me. Joe doesn't smoke, so she lights two more, carries one to Roy, and sits on his lap. Roy's free hand massages her thigh, so I watch his smoking hand. The nails are pointy and yellowed.
Cara leans away from him and gives me a wide-eyed expression she usually saves for the stage. Does she want protection from the monster?
"My mom's out to prove something," she says, "with all that invisible shit in Shakespeare's script that she's trying to bring to life." She falls back into Roy's arms. "No one can follow that." She runs her foot up Roy's leg, until it disappears under the robe. "Honestly, Tess, do you really think we can make spirits fly?"
Cara wants me to indulge her. She is starting this dumb conversation instead of talking about how her old man's ready to kick it, so I'll tell her what she wants to hear.
"I'm stupid about flying," I say.
Roy laughs. His free hand slides up Cara's leg, and then it touches her chin. "See? Tess agrees with you," he says. His job is to keep the illusion alive.
Cara rests her head on Roy's shoulder.
"You need a bath," he says. "You're burning up. Time to go home." He looks up at me and puts on his Prospero grin. "Our little life is rounded with a sleep."
Joe nudges me. "Yeah, T, our ride's probably here, too."
Everyone says goodnight, and I leave quick so they don't see me slip into room 3.
In the dark, Mr. D's fingertips glow white from bad circulation. He has finished the glass of water it takes him all day to drink. He rocks and sways in his bed. He must be under already, in a real deep sleep. After the treatments and the useless brain surgeries, his gray matter melted down into a dark sea, and now he's ready for the tidal wave.
When the doctors told Mizz D that her husband had two weeks left, she asked Cara to step down into a minor role in the play so she'd have more time to help out at home. But Cara's not the helping type. I will be the daughter Cara isn't. I will guide Mr. D into the night. After all Mr. and Mizz D have done for me — all the blankets and paints, the dinner invitations I turn down and the leftovers they always bring to the theater the next day, all the silence and space they offer me here — I owe it to them.
I take an inventory of the meds in the cabinet. There's the nausea stuff, the blood pressure stuff, and some drugs I had to memorize for the last psych test I took: pills for depression, for seizures, for pain. Mizz D has arranged them into two rows according to their sedation speed: fast, like the instant knockout tabs Joe wants to get his hands on, and slow pills, which don't do much unless you wash them all down at once. I count out what's left: ten days' worth of each one. I think of surrendering all of them to Joe. I wouldn't accept any of the money from him, but at least somebody would benefit from these things. They're not doing much good here. Besides, maybe Mr. D wants to stop taking his meds to make his death more tragic.
No. I stuff the pills into their bottles, shut the cabinet, and curl up on the floor at the foot of the bed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from My Pulse Is an Earthquake by Kristin FitzPatrick. Copyright © 2015 Kristin FitzPatrick. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
