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ACT 1
Scene 1
SETTING: A small apartment.
AT RISE: Spotlight falls on a young woman sitting in front of a huge cardboard box. She is heavy set, dumpy. Her hair is dark, reddish, and pulled into a bun on the top of her head. Some of the contents of the box are strewn on stage, visible to the audience: New Age audio tapes; a large framed oil painting; books like Seth Speaks, The Greek Heroes, Numerology Made Easy, The Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom, and a copy of Art Through the Ages with color plates. There are boxes and boxes of incense.
(The young woman picks through the items on the apartment floor.
She shows some of the books to the audience, and reads their titles aloud.)
CASSIE
Seth Speaks. Numerology Made Easy. Art Through The Ages with color plates.
(She makes a fan of the boxes of incense and shows these to the audience too.)
Incense.
(She gestures toward the large cardboard box)
It’s a care package from my mother.
If you ask me, people live inside their own little theaters. They invent stories and concoct explanations without even knowing it. It makes them feel lots safer, and more important than they really are. My mother is a prime example.
(Holding up a box of incense)
My dad got together with my mom partly because she liked to burn incense all the time. He thought it meant she smoked dope, or at least would tolerate his love of drugs. That’s the kind of classy guy women like my mom attract.
She didn’t do drugs. She just liked incense—burning it to whatever gods might be available.
Mom always depicted her life as though it were a mythic event—and she’d drag me into it, too. When I was a kid, she’d exaggerate every little achievement of mine, and predict my greatness continually. It was embarrassing. The year I turned fifteen, she started describing our past lives to everyone. I finally hit the roof. I told her to leave me out of it; that it made no sense for a Mayan priestess to pass through time into this particular condo complex in Southern California. I told her to face it! She dreamed up a past life for me because in this life I’m just dull and fat! Her response was the usual: "If you see yourself as trivial, that’s just what you’ll be. Whatever you imagine, Cassie, that’s what the cosmos will bring to you." I stomped out and slammed the door behind me. But she only toned it down a little after that.
(Imitating her mother’s voice)
"Take that coat off, Cassie!"
"Be proud of your figure! If we were living a hundred years ago, you’d
have been idolized."
She’d point to the women in that painting, The Rape of the daughters of Leucippus and say, "You have substance like that! You’re Rubenesque."
"Let your hair flow free, Cassie! Most women would die for hair that shiny, and that color! Do you know how rare real auburn hair is?"
People always think I was named after Cassandra, probably because my mom is so fond of fleshy Greek characters, or because they think I’m gloomy. But I wasn’t named after Cassandra. My real name is Cassatt. My mother named me after Mary Cassatt, another of her favorite artists. She always had that painting of the woman bathing her pink-skinned daughter hanging somewhere in the house, wherever we lived.
She still likes all the Impressionists. If you ask me, most of them suffered from astigmatism, actual or metaphorical. They either couldn’t or wouldn’t take a hard look at the truth.
(Looking upward, raising her voice)
Hate to tell you, Mom. We’re just like the women in Pieter Breugel’s paintings: square and stumpy –just part of the peasant rabble.
Anyway, as I was saying, Mom likes to think that there are gods everywhere, in living and non-living things. She’ll accept them from any myth, from any era, and from any culture. She talks as though she really believes you might see deities passing you in the street. Growing up with a mother like that, it’s hard NOT to have some of that thinking rub off on you. I guess that’s why even recently I let my imagination run away with me for awhile.
(Cassie moves around the large box toward the audience.
Spotlight closes in on Cassie, so that the apartment and the box are in shadow.)
It started with the doctor who had the office down the hall from where my mother had her tests done. We’d see him in the elevator or hallway. He was towheaded. Even his eyelashes were almost white. So he stood out from the other doctors right away. And he always greeted us both warmly.
I started to imagine that he would swoop in where my mother’s doctor failed and bring the cure. The magic cure.
One time I left the waiting room to get coffee in the cafeteria. He was just returning to his office, glasses on his head, charts in his hands. He looked straight at me with eyes that I swear were cornflower blue, and said, "Hi there, Cassie." I’m sure he called me by name. And I let myself think he had some special knowledge of me.
When I came back from the cafeteria, I checked out the name on his office door. Get this: Dr. Lars Thorsen. Can you believe that? He had a god’s name right there inside his own. If I had told her, my mother would have chuckled and said, "See? How obvious can the universe get?"
Then there was the guy in the library between classes. I was studying and he was up at the counter asking the librarian something. I knew it wasn’t Dr. Thorsen, but then, gods can take on many guises. He had the same white-blond hair, and he was wearing a light blue shirt. He glanced right at me and smiled. He really smiled. Right at me, of all people he could have smiled at in that room. After that, I would see him around campus –just the top of his head in a crowd, his blue shirt disappearing around a corner a few yards away. It was like he was beckoning me.
I looked for him every day in the library. I went there on weekends in case he might show up. I would imagine that a student leaning against a building in the distance was my own blond god watching over me. Any blue shirt would serve as a sign. And of course he would sing to me in songs from the car radio, --songs played at the precise hour I drove from Dr. Lowe’s office down Torrey Pines Road to Highway 5 and the Tecolote Canyon exit. This is my mother’s favorite short cut, a route that leads around the worst of the blight and allows her to conceive of her neighborhood as an artsy area. Before she got sick, I admit I drove right through the slummy section sometimes, just to make a point.
When the quarter ended, Mom checked into Scripps Hospital. I didn’t see Dr. Thorsen or the library guy any more, so I started taking different routes home each day, watching for Him. I let myself think, as my mother would, that there might be meaning in the hot smell of the sage and chemise along the roadsides, in the occasional squawk of jays in the Jacarandas on the median.
And then there was the guy in the sky-blue convertible. Not that common metallic blue. A creamy blue I’ve never seen on a car before. It was almost the same color as the shirt on the guy in the library, almost that cornflower blue of Dr. Thorsen’s eyes. Too close to be coincidental, I thought.
The first time I saw him, he was driving the wrong way down Friar’s Road, blond hair blowing in the wind, moving through the world on his own terms, as if he had created it. It’s true his hair wasn’t that light blond of Dr. Thorsen and the library guy. Most people would call it dirty blond, but it was streaked with that Nordic color from riding all summer with the top down, I’d guess.
I saw him again a week or so later. What were the odds on that? This time, he sailed up the long curve of Ulric to Linda Vista, doing an easy reverse slolum between the oncoming cars, causing honking and the squealing of brakes, filling the air with the smell of burning rubber, but emerging unscathed and unruffled at the top. I imagined him floating down Linda Vista Road, past the shops with the Cambodian graffiti, disappearing in a veil of mist.
I almost told Mom about it, about Jove himself circling, flying in to intervene, to change the course of our lives. I thought at least she’d get a kick out of my telling such a story. But she was too sick that day, so I just sat with her.
In the end, Dr. Thorsen didn’t have to come through with his miracle cure. Plain old Dr, Lowe made her well with the third on his list of usual remedies for her condition, and Mom came bouncing back, claiming her illness had been a gentle message from the universe.
But just before she was ready to leave the hospital, I was driving home once more along one of my new routes, in the far right of three eastbound lanes on Friars Road. Believe it or not, it’s partly my mom’s influence that accounts for my habit of driving slowly in the right lane. She would say, "Watch everywhere, Cassie. Stay close to the exits. The gods can be capricious." I say, we’re living in chaos and it’s a crap shoot out here. It’s dumb luck if we make it down the road in one piece on any given day.
At any rate, on this day, the sage on the hills smelled particularly pungent, and I wanted to see spirits in all things, the way Mom would. Out of nowhere, he appeared again in my rearview mirror. He was less than two feet from my bumper and closing in. I could see his frown, his flushed cheeks. I turned on my blinker and started to move to the middle lane, giving him room to pass. But as I moved to the left, so did he. When I corrected to the right, he did the same. It was a dance. Right, left, right, left, we two-stepped down the road for miles.
Suddenly, he wasn’t in my rearview any more. He was beside me, in the middle lane now, matching my speed exactly. He didn’t even glance my way. I could see his profile, chinless, stubbly, nose flat and raw with sunburn. Without looking, he raised his left hand over his head and flipped me the bird. He sped forward, swerving in front of me. He showed me the back of his tail pipe, the sooty blue paint of his trunk. He raced away in a swirling cloud of exhaust.
I could see him far down the road pulling in behind another driver, moving left, moving right, cruising up beside him, speeding ahead. I can only suppose he repeated this game up and down the road as long as it entertained him.
I took Mom back to Dr, Lowe’s building for a check up a few weeks later. Walking up the hall, I finally noticed that under his name on the door, Dr. Thorsen’s specialty was listed: Proctology.
He wouldn’t have been able to cure Mom even if she had needed it, and I knew that if I saw Dr, Thorsen again, he wouldn’t remember my name. The guy in the library would be with a slim girl in hip huggers. He wouldn’t care what color her hair was. Hate to tell you, Mom, but in this lifetime, even drunken loser gods aren’t interested in making my acquaintance.
Before I packed up and moved east, she looked at me, and for a minute, I think she really saw me as I am. She looked sorry that it had turned out this way for me. I appreciated her stepping out of character to give me that moment.
I drove all the way here in the right lane –of course. I counted five fender benders, three full-blown car crashes and 62 animal carcasses on the road. But I made it. I guess sometimes dumb luck is on your side. …Or maybe it’s fate. Tyche, perhaps, or Morta working their spells.
(Cassie moves back to the large cardboard box and sits again. A soft spotlightcomes up at the same time, revealing Cassie on the floor, right where we were in the beginning. But the light also falls on a dresser that had been in the shadows behind her at rise. On the dresser, the audience can see a photo of Cassie’s mom, a short, wide woman, smiling. Incense is burning on the dresser. A thin trail of its smoke winds into the dark. The framed oil paining is now turned at an angle. The audience can see that it is La Toilette, by Mary Cassatt.)
CURTAIN
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