The Uncoupling Read Online Free PDF Page B

other writers about whom the word “terse” was often used. Teenaged boys stood onstage in their fathers’ boxy old double-breasted suit jackets, or red-and-black-checkered flannel jackets, scowling. Every time their heads moved, powder was tossed into the air like seasoning from a shaker. As the mothers of girls began to point out, there were never enough female parts, and this didn’t seem fair, for girls were generally the ones who wanted to be in plays in the first place.
    Many girls lived to be in plays—notably, Willa’s friend Marissa Clayborn, a tall and beautiful African-American girl with the best posture and the best diction of anyone in the school. She was almost always given the biggest female part available. Marissa could both project and emote, and you found yourself tearing up a little when she spoke onstage, even if she seemed pretty much like an elevated, costumed version of herself. Boys, except for a few, had to be bribed or tricked to be in plays, but girls were forever standing with a prepared monologue in hand, their hair pulled back tight, their hearts pushing hard in the narrow birdcage of their chests as they strode out under the lights to audition.
    After Robby was confronted by the unhappy mothers of girls, he picked The Crucible , and the high school stage became a sea of bobbing bonnets, with Marissa at the center of them all. But finally he was tired of directing. He said he wasn’t particularly gifted at it, he had too many papers to grade, the compensation wasn’t good, and he wanted to spend more time with Willa and Dory, so he told Gavin McCleary that he was done.
    Now, on the first day of school, Fran Heller entered the teachers’ room, then came right over to Dory, who, she had noticed, had been looking at her. “I’m Fran Heller,” she said with a New Jersey accent.
    “Dory Lang. Welcome.” The drama teacher’s hand was small and cold, with a few odd gemstone rings, the kind that you could buy—but mostly never did—from artisans at street fairs in the city. The rings pressed into Dory’s hand briefly and a little painfully.
    Fran, as though she’d been on faculty longer than five minutes, went to the fridge and peered in, then finally took out a bottle of diet soda and sat down beside Dory, twisting it open with a good ten seconds of air-release sibilance. It turned out that the Hellers—Fran and her son Eli, who was in Willa’s grade—had just moved into a house at the other end of the Langs’ long, straight street. Dory immediately knew which house it was: the one that had had the FOR SALE sign up for a long time, then the SOLD sign; and then, this summer, that had been painted in a Southwestern color scheme. The paint job was jaunty but too assertive. There were no adobes around here; the house just looked bohemian-pretentious. The drama teacher was married, but her husband Lowell, she explained, lived in Lansing, Michigan, where he was an accountant for small, struggling nonprofit companies.
    “It works better for us this way,” Fran Heller told Dory Lang. “It’s not a separation; nothing like that at all. It’s just a marriage, and a solid one. The only part that’s less than ideal is that Eli misses his dad, and vice versa. But they’re very close. When I tell people, they have a hard time wrapping their heads around it, but there you are. We’re a pretty happy family, the three of us.”
    Dory said that this was very interesting; the two women talked lightly, and Dory asked her what play she was thinking of putting on that winter. Fran Heller murmured that she hadn’t even begun to decide.
    “I have to meet the kids first,” Fran said. “When I see what kind of talent pool I’ve got to work with, then I’ll have a better idea of what sort of play would be best.”
    Ambient chatter floated through the teachers’ room. Fran was lifting the soda bottle to her lips when Abby Means appeared above them in one of her full-bodied skirts. She was like