Dana Spiotta: Stone Arabia

Except, of course, when they watched me.

Or even worse, when they had to perform with me. I embodied their rediscovered fear. As the class continued, my bad acting became more and more elaborated and intricate. I have to be exact about this — if there is any possible accomplishment in these sentences, it dwells in exactitude. So here is not just how bad I was but how I was bad: I wasn’t lazy. I memorized my lines (by rote and repetition, by groping, by blind will). I wrote notes in the margins. I thought of Motivations. Objectives. Actions. As-ifs. I dutifully penciled them in. I had, I believe, deep insight into the characters I was assigned. I would go to the library and do research. When I was supposed to have pleurisy, I read every detail of what pleurisy does to you (it creates a heaviness in your lungs, labored breathing, and knifelike cutting pain in your chest). I read about the Depression. I read about St. Louis. I worked hard at my acting. I am, if nothing else, an extremely hard worker. I have always worked hard because I have always had to.

You must understand something: Nik and I went to crowded urban public schools. We lacked supervision, parental or any other kind. Necessarily, our education was an act of autocarpy. We didn’t know a thing we didn’t teach ourselves. Nik found a way to revel in his self-conjured education and even saw it as his strength. As the twelfth-century literary genius Abu Jaafar Ebn Tophail wrote in his primordial epic novel, Philosophus Autodidactus: “The feral child will develop the purest form of creativity.” But for me it was different: my feral childhood left me hounded by doubt. When you are self-taught, you get a lot of things wrong. You mispronounce words because you never actually heard anyone speak those words aloud. You use what linguists call hypercorrect language that is in fact not correct, like sticking whom all over the place. Or you use the first-person subjective pronoun I even when you should use the first-person objective pronoun me because you think the word me is only for selfish children. You try to never say the word like, because you can’t be sure how to do it without thinking about it. You learn to second- and triple-guess your instincts, which can really change how you make your way through the world. You are slow because you have to take the long way around to everything. No utterance comes without labored preparations. None of this weighed on Nik, but I always found it humiliating that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. So my hard work, unlike Nik’s, was underwritten by a kind of despair. I worked desperately hard, you see? I couldn’t give up. I was determined to at least be a rigorous failure.

Herbert did try his best with me. He patiently and clearly expounded the techniques of controlling your body as an actor. I did his Movement exercises. I did his Breathing exercises. I did Sense-Memory exercises. I hummed, I shook out my limbs, I pliéd.

But.

Nothing could override my continuing and enduring awfulness. For all of my efforts and Herbert’s efforts, I actually started to get worse. But that isn’t exactly true. I couldn’t have gotten worse, that wasn’t possible; it was just the longer my attempts at acting went on, the more hopeless it felt to do it. My actual performances were strikingly consistent and uniform: I would get on stage with all of my hard work behind me. I would carry it all out there. I didn’t go blank or anything like that. Here is precisely what happened every time: nothing. I couldn’t take all that underlife, all that between-the-lines annotation, all that hard-willed work and alchemize it into any felt thing. I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t make anyone else feel. As Herbert said once, in exasperation (in bed, actually, after we had had perfectly fine sex), “It is make-believe, don’t you get it? You just have to make me believe. You can get away with whatever you want if you can make me believe it.” Which I couldn’t do, and Herbert could not teach me. I thought of it all, I even thought of not thinking, but I felt nothing, convinced no one. At last I quit. When I finally told him I was done with it, I didn’t just feel relief, I felt a deep release, a reprieve from being so horribly bad.

But now I understand that I had it all wrong. The issue isn’t, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don’t matter. Ability doesn’t matter. Need is the only thing that matters. I need to do this.

Enough, Ada darling. I’m way off subject and I don’t seem to have managed my task very well. You will say, You haven’t explained, why didn’t you do something if you knew? And you are right, I did know. And you are wrong, I shouldn’t and couldn’t have stopped anything. I will try to make you see that. I will try again after I sort things out. And Ada, despite my rambling and middling self-recriminations, don’t — please don’t — pity me. Or Nik. As Gloria Steinem once said, “Pity is simply hate without the respect.”

Yours always,

Ma

Denise stuck the letter back in the envelope glued to the page under the taped-in, cut-out typed heading July 1, 2004. This was not a letter from Denise to her daughter, Ada. It was a sham, a hoax, a put-on. This document was from Nik’s Chronicles. Denise found it there, as she was meant to. This was a letter, written by her brother, in her style — or his conjured style of her — for his Chronicles. He did a rather fascinating and painful facsimile of Denise, a witty, brutal parody of her. For her, actually, because Denise was pretty much the main audience for the Chronicles (besides Nik himself, of course). He exaggerated her pretensions, her diction, her grating trebly qualities. He made fun of her memory skills. (Denise took supplements to aid memory. She did brain exercises. She convinced herself that her ability to remember was speedily evaporating.) She pressed her hand against the open binder. She smoothed the page and could feel the weight and chunked thickness of all the pasted-in entries. The sun had come up, she could see a faint glow at the seams of the garage door and in the small row of windowpanes. She should call someone. What would she say? She tucked the open binder under her arm and climbed up the ladder through the trapdoor to Nik’s apartment. She made a cup of coffee with Nik’s plug-in percolator. She pulled back the black curtain on one of the east-facing windows. The pink edges of the dawn made the scrubby desert oaks look carved in light. It was very quiet. No coyotes or cars. She sat down at his desk with her cup of coffee and pulled the volume of the Chronicles toward her. She took the faux letter out and read it again.

He didn’t really exaggerate her digressive tendencies, she couldn’t argue with that. All that ridiculous acting stuff. She had taken one acting class and she wasn’t that bad. She was commonplace bad. She was much more commonplace in all respects than this Denise-on-steroids that Nik created for the Chronicles, which she knew was never meant to be about the facts or actual life out in the world.

As for the fake quotes, she got a kick out of those. That was Nik’s signature affectation for her, his marker of anything rendered in her voice. The made-up quotes were her attributes, like Saint Lucy always appearing with her eyes on a plate, but the reference was only understood by Denise, only really understood in the context of the entire Chronicles, and so, finally, a profoundly elaborated private joke between them.

What was he getting at with some of this? Nik threw little pebbles and they pinged against the glass; his versions of the two of them kept very close in their own weird-logic way. There was no question that she would have to call Ada next. She would have to account for her actions — or lack thereof — to Ada. She must delineate, with some exactitude — as he ironically put it in his fake letter — the truth of their sadness and troubles.