"Tell your boss I want to speak with him," Walker went on. "I'm tired of the crap they're sending me for custodians. You're worse than the last guy."
The custodian took a step back. "Yes, sir, I'll tell 'im. And maybe he'll climb up those rungs," he added. "You and him together."
I fought a smile. Arthur was tougher than he looked.
He walked away, his pale blue eyes glancing at me as he passed.
"Miss Baird," Walker said, "we don't meet till eight-thirty."
"I wanted to talk to you about the casting. I can't play Puck-you know I can't and you know why."
He cocked his head. "I'm afraid I don't. You do gymnastics."
"Yes, but-" "Don't you ever compete?"
I shifted my weight from foot to foot. "Well, yes, I'm on the school team, but-" "Performance is performance," he said. "If you can do one, you can do the other." He turned to go back in his office. "Now, if you don't mind, I-" "I do mind," I said, following him in. "I need you to listen."
He sat in his chair and checked notes on his desk. He didn't look too interested in listening.
"We are talking about two different things," I explained. "When I compete in gymnastics, the performance is on a gym floor, not up on a stage. I don't see a sea of strange faces looking up at me. I'm not in a spotlight-the gym is fully lit. And any butterflies I get are over as soon as I start, because I can shut everyone out.
Now he was attentive.
"I don't have to interact with other actors. I'm not supposed to respond to the audience. I seal them out and concentrate on my routine."
"Concentration is essential in theater as well," Walker said. "You already have tremendous energy and instinctive stage presence. I am going to teach you to transfer your ability from gymnasium to theater. You'll be doing your gymnastics as Puck, giving Puck quickness and strength, making him lighter than air. Oh, yes, you'll do well."
"Maybe in rehearsal," I argued. "But I told you-" "You mystify me, Miss Baird," he interrupted. "I checked your application last night. Unlike my friend Tomas, you listed no specific skills in set design, costume, makeup, lighting, or sound. What on earth did you plan to do here?"
I felt caught. "I, uh, I guess I thought I could overcome my stage fright, but when I saw how good everyone was, I figured this wasn't the place to do it. I don't want to sink the production."
"But you're not going to. You're going to pull this off."
"You're taking a big risk," I warned him.
"I've always been a director who takes risks. That's why I didn't make it in New York, where bottom-line mentality rules."
It was the usual artistic gripe, but I was surprised by the bitterness in his voice.
"You will discover, Jenny, that my shows, cast with a bunch of kids and produced in the boonies, are better theater, more imaginative and compelling fare than Broadway shows in which people pay to see Lee Montgomery play himself over and over again."
"Really."
"You're not a fan of his, I hope."
I wondered if my face had given me away. "I've seen him perform," I replied, "in Hamlet."
"Ah, yes, he played that role a good fifteen years longer than he should have. I began to think it was a play about a man in midlife crisis."
Tell that to the people who flocked to see him, I thought, but I couldn't defend my father aloud.
"So, Puck, we understand each other," Walker said, his eyes dropping down again to the notes in front of him.
Hardly, I mused, and left.
We spent Wednesday morning reading the play aloud as a cast. A few kids sulked about not getting the parts they wanted, but most were pretty excited. Brian worked with Tomas and two other tech directors-heads of lighting and sound-putting down colored tape on the stage, mapping the set we would soon be building. In the afternoon we began blocking the play.
My part was blocked sketchily. It was decided that I'd be given certain parameters-where I had to be, by when-and that over the next few days Maggie and I would work on the gymnastic details. She had also volunteered to help with my stage fright, teaching me relaxation exercises and pacing me through extra rehearsals in which she'd expose me to increments of stage lighting in a gradually darkened theater.
Rehearsal ran late that day and was followed quickly by dinner, then a showing of The Tempest. Each Wednesday evening was Movie Night during which we'd watch and discuss a film of a Shakespearean production.
After the movie I hung out with Shawna and two other new girls in her cozy room beneath the eaves. Everything was fine until ten o'clock, when I returned to my room.
For the first time since early in the day I was alone and had the opportunity to think about the strange visions I'd had the last two nights. I found myself glancing around anxiously and turning on lights, not just the bedside one, but the overhead and the desk lamp as well. I didn't want any blue shadows tonight.
I pulled down the shades, then drew the curtains over them. It made the room stuffy, but I felt less vulnerable with the windows covered, as if I could seal the opening through which thoughts of Liza entered my mind. It was eerie the way the visions occurred when I sat in the window where she would have sat and stood on the stage where she would have stood.
I walked restlessly about my room, then tried to read. At ten-twenty I knocked on Maggie's door.
"Jenny. Hello," Maggie said, quickly checking me over the way my own mother would have, making sure there was no physical emergency. "Is anything wrong?"
"No, but I'm feeling kind of jumpy. May I go out for a walk? I know it's past curfew, but I'll stay close."
"Come in a moment," Maggie said, stepping aside.
I was reluctant. Come on.
I entered the room. It was extremely neat, her bedspread turned down just so, the curtains pulled back the exact same width at each window, all the pencils on her desk sharpened and lined up. But Maggie's pink robe was a bit ratty, the way my mother's always was, making me feel more comfortable with her. She gestured to a desk chair, then seated herself on the bed a few feet away.
"Are you worried about your role in the play?" she asked.
What could I say? No, I'm worried about my dead sister haunting me. "Sort of."
"Well get you over the stage fright, Jenny, truly we will. Tell me, do you remember how it started?"
"How?" I repeated.
"Or maybe when," she suggested.
"I don't know-l just always had it, at least as far back as kindergarten. I was supposed to recite a nursery rhyme for graduation, 'Little Bo Peep.' We have a video of me standing silently on stage, my mortarboard crooked, the tassel hanging in my face, my eyes like those of a deer caught in headlights."
She laughed. "Oh, my!"
"Why do you ask?"
"I was looking for a clue as to why stage fright happens to you. Psychologists say that performance anxiety is often rooted in unhappy childhood experiences, such as rejection by one's parents, or perhaps physical or verbal abuse by those who are close to the child."
"I wasn't rejected or abused," I said quickly. "Nothing terrible has ever happened to me." Till last summer, I added silently.
She smoothed the bedcover with her hand. "Sometimes memories of traumatic events can be repressed, so that the individual doesn't consciously remember those events, and therefore doesn't know why she is reacting to a situation that is similar in some way."
"I don't think that's it," I said politely.
"Let me give you an example," Maggie continued. "A child is wearing a certain kind of suntan lotion. That day she watches someone drown at the beach. Years later she happens to buy the same brand of lotion. She puts it on and finds herself paralyzed with fear. She doesn't know why, but she can't go on with whatever she planned to do at that moment. The smell has triggered the feelings of the traumatic event she has long since repressed. Only by remembering the event, understanding what has triggered such an extreme response, can she overcome it."