Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (8 page)

DESPERATE MEASURES FOR DESPERATE TIMES

“Maybe moving’s not such a bad idea,” said Ella on the phone that afternoon. “I mean, unless Carla suddenly contracts some rare but fatal disease and dies, there really isn’t any other solution.”

My mother was in her studio, working on a rush order, and the twins were over at a friend’s for supper, so for a change I had a little privacy while I conversed.

“Of course there’s another solution,” I said with a certain amount of exasperation.

“Murder’s out of the question,” said Ella primly. “I don’t like blood.”

I laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to jail for Carla Santini. All we have to do is what I’ve been saying all along; beat her at her own game.”

Ella’s voice flattened. “You mean go to the party.”

“Well, of course I mean go to the party,” I shrieked. “You seemed to agree with me at lunch.”

“I was acting,” said Ella. “Remember acting?”

“We have to go,” I insisted. “This clinches it.”

“We can’t go,” replied Ella. “You’re just going to have to live with that fact.”

But I didn’t want to live with that fact.

“Don’t you see?” I pleaded. “I can’t let Carla Santini get the better of me, El. Not now. Not when she’s finally on the run.”

“Carla doesn’t run anywhere,” said Ella. “She drives.”

“Ella, be reasonable. If she’s decided to be all nice again it’s because she’s planning to wipe the courtyard with us later. You’re the one who’s always saying how dangerous she is. Well, if she’s that dangerous, we have to stop her.”

“So what are you going to do?” Ella demanded. “You heard Carla, the tickets go on sale next week.”

I stared at the bowl of fruit on the kitchen table, like a pagan priest staring at a steaming heap of sheep intestine, looking for the answer. And it worked. Just as the priest would see the future in the bleeding innards, I saw the future in the dusty apples and bananas. I smiled to myself.
Desperate measures for desperate times…

“I’m going to go on a hunger strike.”

“You really are crazy,” said Ella. “You really and truly are.”

“No I’m not. Passive resistance works, El. Look at Gandhi. Look at Martin Luther King.”

“They were both assassinated,” said Ella.

I sighed. Sometimes she can be as stubborn as my mother.

“That was afterwards. After their methods had worked.”

“OK,” said Ella. “What about Bobby Sands?”

I knew this was a trick question, but I said, “Who?” anyway.

“Bobby Sands,” Ella repeated. “He was in prison for IRA activities and he went on a hunger strike against the British Government.”

I took a wild guess. “It didn’t work?”

“Not exactly,” said Ella. “He starved to death.”

Even though she couldn’t see me, I threw up my arms.

“Well that’s not going to happen to me, is it?” I demanded.

“You mean because your mother will put you in hospital and have you force-fed?”

I laughed heartily. “Of course not. Because I’m not going to stop eating. I’m just going to make her think that I have.”

My mother doesn’t alphabetize the canned and packaged foods the way Ella’s mother does, and our refrigerator doesn’t look like a display model when you open it up, with an orderly and attractive assortment of fruits, vegetables and juices inside. Our fridge is filled with spoonfuls of this and dollops of that in bowls my mother couldn’t sell, a few bendable carrots and a couple of bottles of juice with bits of food floating in them because the twins never bother using glasses. But I knew my mother would still know if anything was missing. I blame her occupation. She has an eye for detail.

So the next afternoon after rehearsal, I stopped at the supermarket and filled my book bag with supplies: cheese, apples, crackers, a couple of containers of salads and juices, a jar of pickles and a box of doughnuts. I figured that should get me through supper and breakfast.

I hid everything in different places in my room, just to be on the safe side. In her one-woman war on dirt and disorder, Ella’s mother goes through Ella’s room with the thoroughness of a policeman searching for evidence, but my mother doesn’t mind a little dirt and disorder, especially if it isn’t hers and the door is kept shut. On the other hand, although my father would believe I was doing what I’d said I was doing – fasting – my mother was almost certain to be suspicious. This was partly because she’s been feeding me since I was born and knows how much I like food, and partly because she has a sceptical nature. I think this is because she’s a woman. In my experience, women are a lot less trusting than men.

I hid the cheese under the pile of shoes on the floor of my closet; the fruit under my papier mâché bust of Shakespeare; the crackers behind my dresser; the pickles at the bottom of my dirty clothes basket; the salads behind my bookcase; and the juices under my bed. Then I put on a Sidartha album, lit some candles and lay down to wait for the clarion cry that signified supper.

It was Paula who called me.

“Mary!” she shrieked through the door. “Mary, Mom says to come and eat!”

“Tell her, if I can’t go to the Sidartha concert, I’m never eating again,” I shouted back.

She returned in under a minute.

“Mom says to come out now,” bellowed Paula.

“I told you,” I screamed. “I’m not eating. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever!”

“If you’re not eating, can I have your dessert?” asked Paula.

“Have my dessert, have my supper, have anything you want.”

I could hear Paula shouting as she went back to the kitchen, “Mary says I can have her dessert.”

The next person at my door was Karen Kapok herself. Banging.

“What’s going on?” demanded my mother.

“I’m on a hunger strike,” I screamed back over Stu Wolff singing
No more … no more… I’ve found the door…
, “I’m like Gandhi, driven to desperate measures by the insensitivity of the British Government. Not one morsel will pass my lips until you say I can go see Sidartha.”

“You have two minutes to get to the table,” said my mother. “If you don’t, the insensitive British Government is going to take your door off its hinges and drag you out.”

You have to appreciate the way an unimaginative, practical mind like my mother’s works. She thought that if I was forced to sit at the table and watch the rest of them feeding, hunger would overcome my iron resolve and I would give in.

Ignoring my pale skin and the dark circles under my eyes, she made me sit through every meal.

At first my mother kept asking me to pass her stuff: “Mary, could you please pass the salad?”; “Mary, would you please pass the salt?”; “Would you mind passing the vegetables, Mary?”

When my mother wasn’t asking me to hand her every edible item on the table, she was oohing and ahhing over every atom that touched her lips.

The twins were even less subtle. They kept waving pieces of food in my face and shrieking, “Don’t you want some, Mare? It’s
really
good.”

Recalling my Joan of Arc phase, I refused to be tempted, responding to the crass coercion of my family with stoic dignity and grace.

“Of course,” I’d say every time my mother asked for something. I’d smile gently as though it pleased me that her appetite was so healthy. “No thank you,” I’d whisper whenever Pam or Paula shoved a piece of garlic bread or a cookie in my nose.

On Friday, my mother brought in the heavy artillery: she made lasagne, my most favourite dish in the entire universe. Just the smell of it nearly made me swoon. But I was strong and resolute, and full of doughnuts, so her strategy didn’t work.

Great actors know what real determination and dedication are. Ordinary people, however, do not. They give up easily. By breakfast on Saturday my family had gone back to totally ignoring me as usual. They munched away at their pancakes, all three of them talking at the same time, as if a victim of oppression and injustice weren’t sitting among them, staring at her empty plate, as isolated from their food and trivial chit-chat as a prisoner in a Mexican jail.

I took this, of course, as a good sign. The twins were already bored with the game, and my mother, also bored with the game, had obviously decided that I’d give up if I didn’t get any attention. My mother’s understanding of the psychology of the gifted is pretty limited.

I wouldn’t give up. I would step up my resistance instead.

I sipped my glass of water and smiled at them wanly all through the meal, and when it was over I said I was going back to bed because I was feeling so tired.

I spent Saturday languishing in my room. I managed to stagger out to sip my water while they stuffed their faces with supper, but a sudden wave of dizziness forced me to leave the table halfway through. “I’m sorry,” I whispered apologetically, “but I’m too weak to sit here. I have to lie down.”

I was still languishing on Sunday. By then, of course, I was too weak and exhausted to come out to watch them eat breakfast.

“I can’t,” I called hoarsely through my closed bedroom door. “The room spins whenever I stand up.”

My mother was her usual cynical self.

“Why don’t you just crawl out, then?” she shouted back.

My father called that afternoon, but I was too weak to make it to the phone. By putting a glass to my door and my ear to the glass, I could just make out my mother explaining to my father that she was starving me to death.

“She’s doing Gandhi this week,” said my mother. “She’s on a hunger strike until I say she can go to some concert at the Garden.”

There were a few minutes of silence then while my father talked.

Although my father’s speciality is adorable rabbits, he is technically an artist. This makes him more sensitive and compassionate than my mother, the pot maker. My father would never be able to watch me waste away before his eyes the way my mother was. I had my hopes pinned on him.

Finally, my mother spoke.

“I’ll ask her,” she said. I could tell from her voice that she thought my father was being too soft. She always thinks my father’s being too soft. Attila the Hun would have seemed soft to my mother. “Mary!” she called. She put down the receiver and started walking towards my door.

I flung myself back into bed, jamming the glass under the pillow.

“Mary!” my mother called again. “Mary, your dad has an idea…”

My dad’s idea was that he take me to the concert and I spend the night with him.

This wasn’t the idea I wanted him to have. I wanted him to have the idea that I was mature and responsible enough to go by myself.

“Oh, ye gods!…” I moaned. “Isn’t it enough that you’ve practically killed me, now you want to humiliate me, too?”

“Well, what about this?” asked my mother. “What if Cal takes you to the Garden and then picks you up when the concert’s over?”

“What?” I shrieked. “Like a little kid being picked up from the daycare centre? Is there no end to the shame you want to heap on me?”

“Suit yourself,” said my mother. She went back to the phone. She told my dad that I’d rejected his offer.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Cal,” snapped my mother. “It’s been a couple of days, not six months. She’s fine.” She was silent for a few minutes and then she screamed, “Mary! Your father wants to talk to you!”

“I told you!” I rasped back. “I can’t get out of bed. My legs are too weak to hold me up.”

“She’s dying,” said my mother. “She can’t come to the phone right now.”

My father called at least two more times that afternoon. He must have gotten my mother worried, though, because when I didn’t come out for supper she finally cracked.

She marched into my room with a plate of food in her hands. I didn’t even try to lift my head from the pillow. A person melting away from hunger loses her natural curiosity.

“This has gone far enough,” announced my mother. “I want to talk to you.”

My mother said that she couldn’t stand by and watch me fade away before her eyes. What kind of mother was she, if she let one of her children make herself ill? She would never be able to live with herself if something happened to me. And there was also my father to consider. He was very upset. I knew how emotional he was, how stressed and pressured he was with work and everything. What was I trying to do, push him into an early crematorium?

“You’re going to eat tonight, or I’m going to know the reason why,” my mother concluded.

The long days of starvation made it hard for me to speak.

“The reason why,” I croaked, “is because I’m on a hunger strike.” I turned my haunted eyes on her. “Passive resistance,” I whispered. My mother is big on passive resistance; her brother spent the Vietnam War in jail.

“A rock concert is not worth starvation,” said my mother. She put the plate on the bed and helped me to sit up. Then she picked up the plate again, and put it in front of me. “Now, eat,” she ordered.

“I can’t,” I said in a choked voice.

My mother folded her arms. “Oh, yes you can.”

I glanced behind her. The twins were hovering in the doorway, devouring cornbread and giggling in their usual childish manner.

“Make them go away,” I begged.

My mother looked over her shoulder. “Go back to the table!” she commanded.

Pam spat a mouthful of cornbread down her shirt, but otherwise my sisters didn’t move.

I picked up my fork. Hesitatingly, as though I’d forgotten how to use cutlery. I slipped my fork into the mashed potato on my plate. I raised a small morsel to my lips. I paused.

“Eat it!” my mother commanded.

I slid the fork into my mouth. But my poor, frail body was unused to rich things like mashed potato with mushroom gravy – I immediately started to gag.

“Mary’s throwing up!” shrieked Pam. “Mary’s throwing up on her bed!”

“Oh, how gross…” squealed Paula.

My mother lost a little of her compassionate manner.

“Mary can’t be throwing up,” she assured them. “She hasn’t eaten anything in nearly three days. Remember?”

“Mom’s right,” I gasped. I figured that since I had an audience, I might as well play to them. “I’m just tearing my empty stomach apart.” Choking so much I was turning red, I spat the potato back on my plate.