The empty stage was full of pre-lived and pre-imagined possibilities. She stepped out on that blank page and thought about whom she would be. Tonight--Ophelia. A dream role. Of course, the true dream role was Hamlet, but her gender disallowed that part. Ophelia was nearly as good, if performed well, and she knew she performed it well. She knew with an ego-less knowledge that she was a good actress--like she knew she was a 23-year-old female.
The stage itself was pervaded with a quiet, tense excitement. The sense of it hovered over the black planks of wood like the wisps from the fog machine. Hannah stepped onstage before the others. She made it a point to finish her makeup early and walk across this stage while everyone else was still in the throes of prepatory chaos. The stage was distinctly hers, and had always been, if only inside her mind.
She stepped carefully across it, holding her head still to keep the water in her mind unlined by memories of the past week. Her bare feet walked gently, heel-toe, across the smooth stage. Her white, ankle-length sheath billowed softly against her skin, and she felt bare. Her thin fingers reached up to push an auburn strand away from her eyes. She’d finished her make-up and was all ready, except for her slippers, which she’d kicked off in the wings. They lay askew and in waiting.
The auditorium of the community theatre was dark. The house lights were dim and the runners glowed in patches along the aisles. If she half-closed her eyes and stood still on center stage, she could feel and see the shimmery outlines of the other characters in the play. Hamlet stood downstage, tormented. Claudius knelt up-right (the dark, evil section of the stage), praying futilely. Gertrude lay center-left, choking on that last bad drink. Characters with fatal flaws, all of them. None very different from people she knew today, with their lust for power, their need to be loved, their desire, grief, passion. They needed to be named and understood, in order to name and understand themselves. All the typical emotions of a typical lifetime. The images faded suddenly as her eyelids flew open. Had she, with the slammed car door, lost her chance at that "typical" life?
The water in her mind had been poked. Waves emanated in a circular pattern from the point of remembrance. She felt she was confusing the falling in love with the breaking up. What was said, where they said them, the emotions, all were being jumbled and switched, the first was being made last and vice versa. Her hand clutched at the air and finding nothing tangible, grabbed her dress at her hip, bunching up the soft material into a wrinkled ball.
She remembered then the end, with only flashes of the middle. They were inseparable: Hannah-and-Dave, Dave-and-Hannah. There was no her without him. But then the end. His words created a loop in her mind, but she didn’t hear them--she read them. She could barely remember how his voice sounded. She started to try but decided against it. The words printed themselves instead, on a gray screen within her head. "I just can’t take it anymore, Hannah. I don’t want the responsibility of making you feel good about yourself. I don’t want you to depend on me to be a whole person." He loved her, he said, and that was why he had to do this. To let her grow. Funny--at 23 she thought she’d already grown and was through with it all.
The performance would begin soon. She shook off the memories the only way she knew how--by becoming another. She laid down carefully on her back in the very middle of the stage, and closed her eyes. She felt her mind sinking down as she breathed. Her mind’s fingers dipped into the character, and explored the regions of this imaginary mind. She began giving up pieces of herself--a self she was not sure she really knew--and discovering this other self, effortlessly. It was much simpler to imagine how Ophelia was feeling, what her hopes were, what she felt for the uncertain Hamlet. Ophelia’s psyche was written hundreds of years ago. Hannah’s self was unwritten, unexamined, even by herself. It slipped away like a silent shadow, and she became Ophelia.
The performance ended too soon, before she was ready. She held the applause between her ears as a place-holder, barring room for any other thoughts. She was reluctant to finish taking off the costume and make-up, and lingered afterwards to help count ticket money and put everything away for the next night. Margaret, the short-haired, squat director, shot Hannah a rare motherly look and said, "Go home, darling. Get some rest, for God’s sake."
So Hannah trudged through the gravel parking lot, over its fallen and decaying leaves, to her old Cadillac--which Dave called "the road yacht." She stepped in wearily, pulled the heavy door shut with a slam, and leaned her head on the cool steering wheel. Her slammed door brought that memory back in a flood, and she shut her eyes to dam up tears. She wouldn’t cry, she convinced herself. She would pretend she was someone else. Blanche. Blanche DuBois. That’s who she was. She started the protesting engine, turned on the radio and spun the dial wildly. The voices and songs mixed in a mad, senseless symphony, and she remembered Ophelia’s song about her dead father, after the madness had set in. She found a jazz station and swayed a little before shifting into drive. Blanche. New Orleans. Jazz music wafting through the humid air. Behind every door lured strange people--terrifying and exciting people, uncivilized and ill-bred people. People who could befriend her or harm her in terrible ways.
The reverie continued until Hannah reached her apartment. She opened the creaking door and fumbled for the light switch. Antigone, her cat, stretched her pale lithe body on the sofa. Hannah crossed the room and sat next to the cat, who gazed at her human belonging with startling blue eyes. Hannah felt the sudden but familiar feeling of fear towards the creature. She suspected Antigone felt no real bond--that her loyalty was only based on the food she was given. The cat possessed an air of frightening and distinctly feminine independence. Besides that, Antigone had a habit of pressing her little face next to Hannah’s sleeping one at three in the morning, waking Hannah with a start. As a result, Hannah loved her cat with a Jehovah-like love--devotion mixed with and based upon fear.
Hannah politely excused herself from the cat’s presence and wandered into the bathroom, passing the hallway clock, which proclaimed "1:24." She turned on the light and stared at her face in the streaked mirror. Her own face pained her, for she saw herself through Dave’s eyes. She noticed the things he noticed, and remembered his compliments. Her own face was not her own, she dimly realized. She stared at it harder as the realization grew within her, filling her with jagged light. She tried to see her face for what it was, for what a stranger would see it as--not a character in a play, or someone’s girlfriend or daughter--as simply a young woman. Minutes ticked by as she stared into the deep brown eyes in the mirror. She remembered a restaurant she had been to as a girl. The dining area had mirrors on opposite walls, each mirroring the other infinitely. If she stared into one she saw dozens of reflections of the other mirror reflecting that mirror reflecting the other, and so on--smaller and smaller images until a central tiny outline of a mirror whose contents were too small to see.
She stared at herself--at her first reflection--until the spell broke. Then she washed her own face and put herself to bed.