While the City Slept (4 page)

—

She is in the ensemble for
Oklahoma!
as a freshman, then in the ensemble for
42nd Street
as a sophomore. In her junior year, she plays Fiona in
Brigadoon,
a leading role and one her soprano seems perfect for, the role of an ingenue. The performance is exceptional, but Ruben and Susan see something that concerns them. While Jennifer’s voice is Broadway caliber, her body is not what Broadway will want. “Her voice is an ingenue voice,” Susan says, “and her body is not an ingenue voice. Her body is a character voice. She does not fit—and unfortunately this is the case—in terms of visually, looking at her, her body does not fit the sound of her voice.” In the cookie-cutter world of professional musical theater, her body will likely get cast as an older matron, and Susan worries that on Broadway Jennifer will be “chewed up and spit out,” if it doesn’t happen on the way there. “I always worry for girls, because girls are judged so harshly,” Susan says. “Just like the quirk of the genetic gift of the voice, you’re given a body, and there’s only so much arguing you can do with the body you’ve been given.”

—

Jennifer is aware she’s larger than other girls at school, but this is not the difference on which she’s most focused. What strikes her is how, even
though she’s seen as talented, she feels invisible, alone, older than other students because of what she’s been through at home and, at the same time, younger than them because of what she’s lacked. Food soothes and also contributes to her being “a little chubbier than the average girl,” she says. “But I wasn’t huge by any means.”

In class, she has a hard time keeping anxiety at bay, but in the school’s theater she can focus, or helpfully lose focus, morphing pain into propellant. Susan has seen this before and since: “Those who have hard times at home early on are deeper, stronger. If they’re not smashed to smithereens or completely drugged out, which is often what happens, they are strong. There is a grounding and a strength and a depth that you can see onstage. They understand more the pain that they’re supposed to be acting out. And you don’t wish that on any kid, but you see the benefits.”

Classes remain a different matter, and Jennifer begins cutting them. She knows she’s smart enough, just hates the anxiety, the feeling of failure. Eventually, her grandmother catches wind, gets school counselors involved, explains Jennifer’s home situation. “It was amazing,” Jennifer says, “how every teacher sort of rose up to the occasion to try to get me through.” She’s already been accepted to the Boston Conservatory, known for training Broadway actors. She just needs to finish senior year.

—

In that year’s production of
Fiddler on the Roof,
Jennifer stars as the mother, Golde. In the spring, she skips the senior prom after a friend she’s going with backs out to go with someone he’s actually interested in romantically. She wonders why other guys aren’t asking her, is hurt, but doesn’t dwell. She’s headed elsewhere.

Susan and Ruben, seeing Jennifer closing in on graduation, hope that she’ll find her place in Boston. “One never knows,” Ruben says. “You have a person that’s great, but there are thousands and thousands of high schools, and they all have a person that’s great in their school as well,
so.”

C
ollege is a time of uneasy fits for Teresa. At first, she heads to Truman State University, set in rural northeastern Missouri, once described as “the Harvard of the Midwest” by an East Coast magazine. She doesn’t want to be there, but her father likes the in-state tuition and thinks the academic rigor suits her, and he’s the one paying.

She arrives in the fall of 1988 and, looking to make friends, decides she should join a sorority. “Butz, you’re not sorority material,” says Rachel, who’s attending the University of Missouri at Columbia, also known as Mizzou. Jean, who’s at the University of Kansas, agrees. They’re correct. Teresa doesn’t do well with a bunch of other young women sitting in judgment of her. At the same time, she’s crushed when they don’t let her in. Determined to get into the Greek life somehow, because it’s the heart of the school’s social scene, she discovers it’s possible to become a “little sister” to certain fraternities. It doesn’t go well. One night, Teresa, in her role as a fraternity’s little sister, is invited to a keg party. Plastic cups filled with beer, the whole classic thing. At some point, someone throws a cup of beer at someone else, and then suddenly everyone is throwing beer at everyone. Teresa is standing in the corner of the room when the drink-tossing crowd, as if with one mind, notices an opportunity to direct its energy outward. “She said, ‘It just became focused on me,’” Jean says. “She said, ‘All I could do was crouch down.’ Every time I think of this story, it makes me upset. She just crouched down in a corner next to a
wall, and they just pelted her with beers. That was kind of her experience at this place. Very soon after that, she transferred out of there.”

—

In the fall of 1990, Teresa arrives at Mizzou, where she’d wanted to go in the first place. Plays a lot of softball, parties a lot, tries to figure out what her major should be. Her dad thinks it should be business. She’s interested in psychology and criminal justice. She keeps trying to make it work with men, but her friends speak of an encounter around this time that sounded to them like a sexual assault. Soon, Teresa transfers out of Mizzou, too, and by the winter of 1991 she’s at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, closer to home. She stays, graduating three years later with a degree in business, as her father wanted. She finds work at an Olive Garden and does some housecleaning. It’s enough to pay rent on a small apartment where, on the mantel, she keeps her old Precious Moments collection. Jean laughs at this, threatening to smash the sentimental tchotchkes with a baseball bat.

She hears, through cousins, about work on the Clipper Cruise Line. It sounds like a great way to disappear. “Didn’t care what she was going to do for Clipper,” Tim says. “She just went.” The company is sailing boats out of Seattle up to Alaska, smaller vessels that look more like luxury yachts than cruise ships, and this becomes Teresa’s route, the family-like closeness of the crew drawing her right in. For a while, she keeps in touch with the outside world, sending Jean and Rachel ten-page letters about her escapades. She’s at a casino onshore, losing all her money. She’s trying out a new cruise route, headed for the Caribbean, or Peru, or Jamaica. Then, over time, she loses contact. Jean sends her a series of increasingly exasperated postcards, trying to get her attention. Nothing. Teresa is somewhere else. She’ll be back in touch when she’s ready.

S
eattle is a new city by American standards, founded as states along the Eastern Seaboard were headed toward civil war, and so when Jennifer arrives at the conservatory in Boston, one of her dominant senses is that the city seems old. Another sense is claustrophobia, brownstones that rise well above the height of Seattle’s single-family houses, a downtown more densely packed with tall buildings than the downtown she knows. In Seattle, she can see the sky. In Boston, she’s surrounded by brick, by large buildings and monuments, by a humidity she’s unfamiliar with, by smells of urine and dirty sidewalks. It’s exciting to her, step one on the way to Broadway. Even when winter comes, colder than anything she’s known, she tells herself, “This is where I’m supposed to be.”

She meets a conservatory student named Kerri Sanford, who’s drawn to Jennifer by her striking beauty, by the way she puts her heart right out there, and by her voice. “Amazing,” Kerri says. “One of the best voices I’ve heard in my life. As a singer, I was so taken with her.” But the conservatory, by design, is tough on everyone. There are classes in which students share their private fears, their family histories, their personal challenges. “You go around the room and talk about whatever abuse you had in your life,” Kerri says. “It was like an AA meeting or something, where we all had this code of silence. And then, I mean, they tear you down. Literally. When you’re performing, they say that you suck, that you’re not good enough, that you’re never going to be good enough. And then they tear you down mentally regarding your own childhood, all of it, and then they
sort of build you back up. That was my experience at least.” In one of these classes, Kerri talks about her own Mormon upbringing, then does a movement piece in which she tears pages from the Book of Mormon and stomps them. She’s never in a class like this with Jennifer, but when Jennifer privately shares stories of her own upbringing, they’re on a different level. “What happened to Jen,” Kerri says, “was far more traumatic than many of the stories that I heard.”

The self-exploration is all in the pursuit of better performances, the theory being that acting is the study of human behavior, and to understand human behavior, one must begin by better understanding oneself. In a movement class focused on authentic physical expression, Jennifer begins to see how much she’s holding inside out of habit. One day, during an exercise, she just screams. An angry scream, something she hasn’t accessed before. She’s surprised by the intensity. In acting classes, when she tries to connect to characters going through difficulty, she begins to notice she has easy routes to connection with them, realizes, as well, how much control she’s been exercising over her interior relationship to her own difficulties, walling off pain, developing an ability to talk “stone cold” or “clinical” to classmates about her life before the conservatory, in a way that sometimes surprises them. It takes her entire time at the conservatory, but she begins to become better at what her movement teacher is encouraging, better at having an authentic relationship with her own pain. “Actually letting it be you,” Jennifer says, “versus shoving it away. To have control over it, but actually allow it to get in.”

—

At the same time, she struggles with the competitiveness of the environment, doesn’t feel as if she plays the game very well. And then there’s the weight issue. “A lot of those girls are skinny-tiny,” Jennifer says. She’s not. There is a particular acting class she has to take, and the teacher seems to either ignore her completely or assign her sad, matronly roles. Anything the opposite of young, spirited, or sexy. She finds this odd but finds
the characters interesting. Over time, though, the pattern becomes something she wants to challenge. “I did a scene with a partner,” Jennifer says, “and I don’t remember the details, but the teacher just went on and on and gave so much feedback to the scene partner and got to me and just didn’t say anything. And to me, lack of feedback—you don’t necessarily want good feedback, you want bad feedback, too, because that’s how you get better.” It made her start to tear up in frustration, a reaction she’s long wished she could avoid so as not to appear weak. She told the teacher she was just hoping for feedback, and his reply made her go from tearing up to crying. “Then he threw a quarter at me,” she says, “and was like, ‘Oh, here’s a quarter, go call your mom.’”

—

She misses Seattle and her grandmother. She feels defeated. A number of people she’s met at the conservatory that first year are planning to work the
Spirit of Boston
cruises over the summer, singing for tourists taking a spin around the harbor, and Jennifer notices there’s a
Spirit of Seattle
cruise line. She heads home, where it’s cheaper, and becomes a singing waitress there.

It’s summer. She’s out on Elliott Bay all the time, cruising waters that are more familiar, more Pacific, cradled between the two mountain ranges she grew up with, peaks so high they poked up above the last glaciation, the Cascades to the east, Olympics to the west. At night, the sun sets behind the Olympics, and lights blink red atop the downtown skyscrapers, atop the football stadium to the south, and, farther south, atop the tall orange cranes at the dirty mouth of the Duwamish.

It’s a fun gig, a revue with a ridiculous mix of show tunes and Americana, songs from
The
Phantom of the Opera
and
South Pacific
merging into “God Bless the U.S.A.” She’s earning more money than she’s ever seen, minimum wage plus a couple hundred bucks a night in tips, and there’s a familial connection among the crew. To Jennifer, it’s the heartening opposite of the conservatory, where everything felt tenuous and
shallow.

I
n June of 1994, in Alaska, Teresa finds herself needing old friends. A gangway collapses while passengers are disembarking her boat in Juneau, and shortly afterward she writes to Jean, saying she’s just tried calling her in St. Louis “but to no avail.” She’s tried calling other friends, too. “Can’t reach a single soul.” A woman is dead, the mother of Teresa’s cabinmate. It’s on CNN.

During dinner service, Teresa fights tears. She feels anger rising when she tries to act as if nothing’s happened, “wearing this fake fucking smile trying to please all these damn passengers.” This is her regular route now, and the boat will be back in Juneau every Saturday. She can’t escape the memory.

One evening, after receiving a large tip from a passenger, Teresa decides to share it by buying all the crew members in sight drinks, which is not the way tips are supposed to be shared. When management finds out, she’s fired. She heads back to St. Louis and, at a dark Irish bar named McGurk’s, gets drinks with a friend who has an in at a different kind of cruise company. “You gotta hire me,” she says.

—

By the next year, Teresa, now twenty-six, is out on the Mississippi River, a maid aboard a steel-hulled paddleboat called the
American Queen
. One morning, she knocks on a cabin door to introduce herself to a new employee, and John Schuler, twenty-two, opens up. Like Teresa, he’s from
a river town, in his case Aurora, Indiana. Like Teresa, he’s from a strict Catholic family. He’s never had a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, ever.

They become fast friends, John training to be a purser, Teresa on her way to becoming head maid, two escapees floating together through the bayous and prairies and high plains. “It was a very isolated life,” John says. “Which was kind of nice.” They sit evenings on the top deck, unspooling their stories.

—

When the boat gets north of St. Louis, around the town of Hannibal, where Mark Twain lived, the river transitions from the dark colors of its more industrial southern stretches into an inviting green surrounded by cliffs and bluffs. During staff parties, crew members leap from the side of the boat, swim around the back, touch the stopped red paddle wheel.

This is a much larger vessel than those on Clipper’s Alaska run, close to five hundred feet long and carrying 180 crew—“I mean, the boat is huge,” John says—with 222 cabins to tend and, when the ship is full, more than four hundred passengers. Most of the crew are like John and Teresa, under thirty, in search of the next step, not in any particular hurry, earning around $10 a day and padding that with tips from the well-off clientele. “You have no bills, you have no car, you own no apartment, you owe nothing to nobody,” John says. “And the company’s buying all your food; they’re buying all your clothes.” Everything is covered, easily, “except for the damage we could do on our two weeks off,” John says. “Which—we could do some substantial damage.”

When they work the outer decks, they hear the sound of water rushing around the hull as the boat pushes onward. Inside, a different sound, piston-powered steam engines reverberating through the vessel’s walls, a melodic
kathunk-kathunk-kathunk
that becomes background to the workday and lullaby at night, so much so that John wakes from sleep if it stops. Then there are the sounds of the
American Queen
’s steam-powered calliope, which plays when they go through a lock in the river or pull into
or out of a port. It does old ragtime songs and, once, “Like a Virgin.” “God-awful,” John says.

As they pass days together, he notices some things about Teresa. She’s inquisitive, hardworking, hard partying, happy to be on the boat, but also helped along by a huge amount of coffee. “No one has brought up how much coffee Teresa Butz drank?” John says. “Oh. Ohhhhhhh. Teresa drank twelve to fourteen cups of coffee a day. And that’s a conservative estimate. The way she would walk, it was like her coffee was leading her. One of her bosses told her, ‘You need to stop following your coffee cup around; you need to start leading the way.’”

—

On a break from her new job, Teresa visits Jean, now living in London. Keeps going on about this big thing she has to tell her, so of course Jean wants to know immediately. “Not the kind of thing I’m going to handle on public transportation,” Teresa says. They get back to where Jean is staying, Teresa pulls out some whiskey she’s bought in Ireland, they have a drink, and then Teresa tells her. “It was like, ‘Oh,’” Jean says. “I hadn’t expected her to tell me that. It wasn’t any of the stuff I was guessing. But it was like, ‘Oh, of course.’ I’m not sure why it never occurred to me, because when she said it, it made total sense.”

Not long after Teresa came to the realization, the riverboat had docked in New Orleans. She’d gone to the St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, walked inside, knelt, and prayed that her homosexuality, which she knew her church considered a sin, would be taken away. Hearing this, Jean says, “I felt my heart
rip.”