Juno's Daughters (15 page)

Jenny had to smile. It was exactly how Dale had described her. Apparently it didn't take ten years living with Lilly on the island to figure her out.

Trinculo caught her smiling and his eyes flashed. He bowed low. “As you wish, goddess.”

Peg stood on a bench and put her hands on her hips. “Hurry up, you two!”

A number of other stragglers looked for misplaced articles of clothing, topped off water bottles, took last-minute trips to the bathroom, and generally spent more time than could be anticipated preparing to depart for a twenty-minute hop from one island to another. Trinculo bounded toward Prospero, calling him Skipper in the way of Gilligan and lamented that neither Mary Ann, nor Ginger for that matter, was joining them (like the Waldron trip, this journey was only for the actors and Peg). Caliban popped a Dramamine and offered one to Miranda, who, busy smearing sunscreen on her face, declined. Sally the Ship-Master, who actually did know her way around a ship, caught the rope that the captain tossed to her and tied it to the dock. Finally they were all on the craft, crammed into the cabin, sitting on the benches and coolers in the back, standing at the railing, and, in the case of Lilly and Frankie, sitting with their legs stretched out in front of them on the bow.

This was the first time they had gone anywhere together, and the sound of excited chatter was audible over the engine until they hit the open water and the captain pushed down the throttle. The wind picked up their hair and whipped it around their faces and they leaned into each other and shouted in each other's ears, all except for Lilly and Frankie, who were visible through the windscreen laughing in the spray and holding tight to the metal railing. Peg stood inside next to the captain, looking pleased, and Jenny thought, okay, so maybe this togetherness before the first performance is a good idea, but why do we have to be
naked
?

It soon became obvious to the islanders where they were heading. Stuart Island loomed ahead of them. The boat slowed into Reid Cove and they began telling the newcomers about the lighthouse and lovers' leap and the dangerous rocks in the channel. The company was quicker getting off than it had been getting on, and before long they were standing on the shore watching the boat chug back out the way it had come.

“See you this evening,” the captain called.

Peg waved back and the actors stood around her in a windblown group, clutching their sweaters and water bottles and hiking boots.

Jenny stood near enough to see the face of Caliban's watch when he turned his arm to look at it. It was ten-thirty in the morning. The boat disappeared and they all looked at one another and then Peg with the same question on their faces: What now?

“This way,” said Peg. She turned and began walking.

Suddenly much quieter, the company followed.

“Down with the topmast! Yare! Lower, lower! Bring her to try with main course.”

“Ahhhhhh.”

“A plague upon this howling! They are louder than the weather, or our office.”

Tossed about on their imaginary boat, the men formed a loosely linked amoeba of arms and hands. Crashing into each other on the pitching deck, they were naked as the day they were born. Poor Ferdinand's face had been as pink as the tip of his penis since he stepped out of his shorts and onto the sand. The wind rustled the tops of the trees and the rest of the actors stood in mortified silence on the sidelines. Frankie sat on a rock with her knees pulled up against her chest, peeking through her fingers.

“All lost! To prayers, to prayers. All lost!”

“Mercy on us!—We split, we split!”

“Fairwell, my wife and children!”

“Farwell, brother!—We split, we split, we split!”

“Wind!” called Peg.

Jenny and Lilly and Frankie almost missed their cue. The spirits, doubling as the gale, made the sound of the raging storm. In the play they would be wrapped loosely in torn sheets, dyed gray and blue. Their only lines might be “Woooo, wooooo, woooo,” at this point in the play, but they were lines nonetheless. According to Peg's rules, they were expected to perform. Naked.

Lilly had worn a sundress with nothing underneath, and she shed it easily, strolling forward like Venus emerging from the waves.

Frankie pulled the T-shirt over her head, and when Peg saw her suit she frowned but said nothing. Jenny wished she had declined more tortilla chips and done more sit-ups in the previous weeks, but there was no altering the past. She stepped out of her shorts and tossed her shirt on a rock, and before she made her first loud wail as the wind, she grabbed her younger daughter's hand and squeezed it tight. All she could do now, she figured, was do her best to model grace under pressure.

Lilly was already circling the men, woo-wooing in her scariest voice. She darted close to Trinculo, barely missing his arm with her shoulder, a lock of her hair whipping his cheek.

Jenny tried not to peep, but she couldn't help it. First his eyes. They locked into hers with a look that she had, in fact, exchanged with a naked man on occasion but in circumstances that were quite a bit more private than these. Then, his chest, as Lilly's hair, striking him, slid down his body like a snake, before falling away. His eyes followed Lilly's hair, and Jenny's eyes, though she tried, Lord how she tried not to let them, sunk lower on Trinculo's body. The flat stomach. The thin trail of hair pointing south. She flushed. Lilly was right. The body did not lie.

Jenny was happy that the scene called for her to make a loud and terrible noise. She obliged. It might be telling too much, that brown and agile body of his, but the specific thing that she wanted to know most it could not reveal. What exactly, or more pointedly,
who
, had produced the response that he, within the limits of his role, now tried to hide from the cast?

Jenny and Lilly and Frankie howled together like a pack of hungry wolves.

Gonzalo cried, “Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, long heath, brown, anything.” The imaginary boat split into pieces and sent them all flying in different directions, and he called out one last time, “The wills above be done! But I would fain die a dry death.”

The men fell into the sand or draped their bodies over the boulders and logs that littered the beach.

“Well done,” yelled Peg. She wore a lime green tunic over black leggings, and the hair that rose with each gust around her head was the color of a blood orange.

Down the beach a bit, Prospero stepped out of his robe for his first scene with Miranda, who, with her perfect breasts and carefully manicured pubic hair, looked like she had been waiting for just this moment for most of her life.

Without looking in Peg's direction, Trinculo, still naked, walked toward the sea. He waded waist deep into the water and let the cold do its work. Peg shifted her attention to the scene underway.

Jenny threw on her clothes and leaned against a gnarled Madrona tree watching Trinculo. Her stomach was churning. She could tell how furious he was from the set of his shoulders and the veins in his neck. Anger in men—even in gentle men—made her nervous.

Her first thought was that he was angry at Peg for putting him, and his manly lack of control, on display. But even Peg, with her love of drama and tendency to cling to a nostalgic flower-child sensibility, could not have predicted what had happened with Trinculo. Jenny glanced around to locate her children, one of whom crouched in as close to a fetal position as you could get without lying down, under several layers of borrowed clothing. The other basked in the sun on a rock, still nude.

“Lilly, get your clothes on, for God's sake!” Jenny hissed at her.

Lilly languidly reached for her dress and pulled it over her head.

Trinculo stood near the quietly lapping shore in his shorts, hands on his hips. She could feel his eyes on her, but she could not meet his gaze. What about that look he had given her on the beach? What about the fact that he had kissed Lilly? How in the world had she allowed herself to be in the ridiculous and appalling situation where it mattered to her who he had been thinking about when he got that erection? She glanced at Frankie, who had her legs drawn up to her chest. That's whom she
should
be worrying about, she told herself. She looked out toward the Sound, in the direction their boat had gone, and saw nothing but glittering water, distant sails, and the mountains beyond. For the first time that morning, she realized that they were on this island with no way off, until Peg said they were done. They were trapped.

The rest of the cast was standing in uncomfortable silence looking at the horizon, the woods, or the mixture of wave-polished rocks and seaweed around their feet. Looking anywhere but at each other. She turned her head again to see Peg, murmuring to Prospero and Miranda and pot-bellied Caliban, who was just off-stage but close enough to be audible to the watching cast when he spoke. From a distance she could appear to be a child among adults, but no one who knew Peg doubted for a moment that she was in charge.

Perhaps Peg had
wanted
them to feel trapped, thought Jenny, exactly as Ferdinand and his fellows had felt on
their
island. She had to acknowledge that there was genius in it, if it was true. Evil genius, perhaps, but genius nonetheless.

Prospero and Miranda were speaking, Jenny realized suddenly, and leaned her head against Frankie's to listen. Trinculo's feet made a crunching sound on the sand as he inched toward them from the shore. She remained firmly focused on the action of the play.

“Tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look on,” said Miranda, her hair long enough to cover all but the undersides of her breasts.

Dale-as-Prospero nodded and then looked off into the distance meaningfully, toward where Caliban stood, hunched and hairy, by a log. “But as tis, We cannot miss him. He does make our fire, Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices That profit us. What ho! Slave! Caliban! Thou earth, thou! Speak.”

Caliban, though off-stage, was visible to all. He leered in the direction of Prospero. The sweep of his gaze took in the rest of them, coming to rest on Trinculo. His line was familiar, but the emphasis, today, was new. He said, “There's wood enough within.”

Ariel stood in the wings behind him, preparing to be called by Prospero. “You can say that again,” he muttered.

Peg shot him a hard glance, and he pretended not to notice.

Prospero turned, ever so slightly, away from the audience. “Come forth, I say, there's other business for thee. Come, thou tortoise, when?”

Jenny was conscious of Trinculo breathing behind her and she stared resolutely forward.

Peg called out, “Actors! Get your clothes on and come to the beach. We need to process the scene.”

They picked up their jackets and water bottles and found somewhere to sit on the smooth driftwood logs and rocks that formed a half circle on the beach.

Ariel groaned, “Process, process, process. Why didn't I go into something less complicated? Like dentistry.”

Jenny sat on the sand between Sally and Frankie. Ariel perched nearby on a log. Lilly moved to find a spot next to Trinculo, but he got up to scratch a pretend itch, at least Jenny thought he was pretending, and plopped back down on the other side of Caliban. He sat cross-legged, with the straight back of a yogi, his eyes studiously fixed on the branch above Jenny's head.

Peg began, “We have had this naked rehearsal for ten years now. The purpose of it, as you may have guessed, is to allow you to inhabit the person of the role for one last time before you appear on the stage. Without your play costumes or even the costumes that you wear every day in the roles you call your regular lives. It is,” and here she looked around at each of the cast members in turn, “a
secret
that we keep among ourselves. Like any family, we have things that cannot be spoken of in public and those things tie us more tightly together.”

Ariel muttered under his breath, “As if we didn't all have enough family secrets already.”

Dale cleared his throat. “What Peg means to say,” he said, “is that our Ceres is a beautiful young woman, and it is very natural that a man would . . .”

Trinculo had been drawing lines in the sand with a stick. He looked up sharply. “Ceres . . . ?”

“What I
mean
to say,” Peg shot him a look, “is that the laws of nature are paramount in this, what the esteemed literary critic Northrop Frye referred to as the
green
world.” She waved her small pale hands around to encompass the beach, the water, and the sky. “We are not governed by the rules of the city here. This world is other, it is feminine, it is unbounded.”

As far as Jenny was concerned, the feminine world might have different rules than the masculine one, but
unbounded
was taking it a little too far. And it might have been natural for Trinculo to respond like a man when Lilly flipped her hair in his face, but that didn't mean she had to like it.