Take a Lemon

When I left the rehearsal room, I was flying. Not only had he not tossed me, he was going to help me – really help me! For the first time, I was starting to be a bit jealous of Marsha. She’d managed, not only to be cast in three of his productions, but also to become close enough to be treated as an asset, if not a friend. Now, I was going to be the beneficiary of her efforts, since I had temporarily taken over her life. I could really enjoy some of this.

Marsha’s roommates were surprised by the sheer glee in my step when I swept into the room and greeted them with a cheerful, “Hey, guys!”

“Hey, Marsh,” Lee Ann replied, looking up from the reality show she was watching with Terry and Chandra-whatever. “You’re in a good mood tonight. Rehearsal went well?”

“Very well,” I said. “Well, actually the rehearsal wasn’t all that special – it was just a blocking rehearsal, after all – but I had a terrific conversation with Alvin, afterwards.”

“What’s a ‘blocking rehearsal’?” Chandra-something asked. Lee Ann looked as though she already knew, but Terry looked curious. Given my mood, it felt really good to be able to explain.

“You know how when you see a play, the actors move around during their scenes? The director usually plans that out beforehand, making sure that people will be in the proper places so that they can react to one another, or make nice pictures on the stage. So when you’re acting with somebody, they always know where you are, without looking.”

“Like having set plays in basketball?” Terry suggested.

“Do they?” I asked. “I guess I didn’t realize that.”

“Uh huh. That way you can pass and pretty much know where everybody is going to be.”

“OK, then, I guess it’s a lot like that,” I continued. “Usually, the director gives out the blocking at one of the first rehearsals, and we write it in our scripts. Of course, he might make adjustments during later rehearsals, depending on how things work, but the idea is that you learn the blocking along with your lines and interpretations. The point is, we don’t do an awful lot of acting at a blocking rehearsal. With a director like Alvin, we might try out different ways of saying our lines, but he doesn’t say anything about it unless he really likes it,” He had in fact complimented Jo on one of her readings, presumably to make sure she knew to do it that way again.

“So what was the great conversation you had with Alvin?” Lee Ann asked.

“Oh, I was having some problems and I sort of panicked a bit, and he told me how valuable I was to the show and he had enjoyed working with me in the past and would give me all the help I needed,” I said, trying to be as general as I could get away with. “And Nikki’s probably going to come over and talk to me as well.” I didn’t want to ask if she knew Nikki. It seemed as though she had been closer to Marsha than Terry had been, so she probably did.

“Well that’s great, Marsh,” she responded. “I’m glad it’s all working out for you.”

The other girls agreed, and I joined them in watching the end of the show. The biggest difference I noticed from the times I had watched with the guys as Marshall was the conversation, although I couldn’t quite figure out why, only that I was having to work harder at feigning interest. That might just have been my preoccupation with the evening’s events.

It wasn’t until I’d gotten back to my bedroom that reality started to intrude. Marsha had achieved that because of her abilities. Because of her sewing, which I couldn’t do, and because of her acting, which I wasn’t quite sure I could match. This wasn’t just me being given an incredible opportunity; Alvin was expecting ‘Marsha’ to deliver, and I wasn’t completely certain I could. He didn’t know that I wasn’t really the girl he’d known. What if I let him down? At least I knew that I could have handled Paravicini…

So far, I had been able to use the fact of my participation in that experiment as an excuse; but we hadn’t actually gotten to the hard part. What if I couldn’t handle the role of Mollie? Even his friendship or affection for Marsha wouldn’t save me, would it? At least, it would hardly be fair to the rest of the cast if their leading lady couldn’t do her share. He’d have to replace me in that case, wouldn’t he? If I wasn’t careful, I could wind up losing big.

And what about the sewing? He had promised to tell Nikki what had happened to me and to get her to help. She was Marsha’s friend, so she would probably be willing. But would it be enough? I had essentially no knowledge of how to be a seamstress. Would she really be able to teach me to do what I needed in a reasonable amount of time? I didn’t exactly have years to learn, after all. And would she get frustrated with my ignorance and just give up on me? What if she expected me to react the way Marsha had to things, and I didn’t? Would she really be as patient with me as Alvin had implied?

It was really getting to me. I wound up doing my course reading almost perfunctorily. All I could think about was that I was a fraud, an interloper. I was trying to play the role of Marsha, but I didn’t have all of her knowledge or her skills, and it was going to be way too easy for people to find me out. I didn’t want to be a quitter. I didn’t want to pull the plug on this performance. Even though I would be the only one to know it, it would live with me for the rest of my life. And would I be able to look Tina in the eye again, knowing that she would have known about my failure if the very fact of it hadn’t wiped her memory of the whole thing. Finally, I put my books down and called it a night, frustrated.

I slept, but not particularly well. I dreamed that I was myself – Marshall – and that I was in the hallway of Marsha’s dormitory, carrying my guitar. All the girls were in the hallway, just as they had been when I came to school Sunday night, but instead of greeting me as a friend, they were pointing and laughing. I looked behind me, hoping that their target was somebody else, but it wasn’t. It was me. Then I caught some of their words and looked down. They were laughing because I was wearing a dress, and for a moment I didn’t understand why that was funny.

When I realized it, I tried to take it off, but there was another one right underneath it. I ran into Marsha’s dorm room and she and her roommates were there, also laughing at me. I thought that if I played my guitar, maybe they wouldn’t laugh, but suddenly I was a girl again and the guitar was gone, and I had a sewing needle and thread and didn’t know how to use them.

“Marsha,” I pleaded. “You have to help me! I’m your brother Marshall who should have been born instead of you, but now I’m stuck in your body and I don’t know how to use it. Please. Please, I need you to teach me!”

But she just laughed and told me, “You’re the one who likes to look up user manuals online. Why don’t you look up the one for ‘Jennifer Marsha Steen’?”

When I awoke, it was about three in the morning, and I had the feeling that there was something I needed to do. That I should do a web search for ‘Jennifer Marsha Steen.’ I was still half asleep, so it seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do. What surprised me was that I actually got a hit.

It wasn’t a user manual, of course. It was a Facebook page. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that Marsha would have one? Sitting right there were pictures of some of her friends, along with their names. I didn’t know her password, of course, but I had her email account, so I was able to request a reset. A minute or so later, I was able to see all of her Facebook friends, as well as postings she had made. I recognized many of the faces; now I had their names as well, and she had also talked about performing in Alvin’s shows. If only I had thought to do this a week ago! It would have made things so much easier.

“Nikki Forsberg” was there, her picture definitely resembling the girl who had been sitting next to Alvin at the read-through. The two had exchanged quite a few messages in the past year, according to their “wall-to-wall.” They had talked about sewing, and Alvin’s plays, and Alvin himself, and – to my slight embarrassment – about boys Marsha might have been interested in, but was too timid to approach.

Both of my roommates were there, of course. Terry’s full name was “Theresa Baldwin” and she was a member of the women’s basketball team. Given her comments earlier, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. And while I had known Lee Ann before this, she had never let me see her page; it had been part of her flirting with me that it was supposed to have some dark secret. The secret turns out to have been that she’d had no intention of breaking up with her boyfriend. It really made me wonder why “Chandraki Kumar” (according to Facebook, that was her full name) had led me to believe otherwise.

I was going to have to recognize and greet Jack and Naomi, so I looked them up next. Naomi was easy, as she was the only female member of the cast I didn’t know, but I looked her up anyway, just to be safe. There was a Naomi Katz listed, but her picture was just a joke image, so I couldn’t initially be certain that it was she. The page did mention that she was a junior, majoring in economics. There wasn’t anybody named Jack on Marsha’s friend list, but there were several boys named John something or other; looking through their pages, I found one who claimed to have performed in Alvin’s shows. He was a senior philosophy major, and was apparently dating Naomi, which Alvin had not mentioned. I spent extra time on both of their pages, looking for facts that Marsha should have known.

I couldn’t remember the names of everybody in the cast, and Marsha might not have known them all previously, although Jo was there; as far as I could tell, she and Marsha had met during auditions for Mousetrap. I hadn’t met anybody; I’d been too nervous, but Marsha had apparently managed to socialize while auditioning for and receiving the best role she could have wanted.

I was too tired to sit and memorize everybody, but now that I knew about the page, I would make it a point to return to it frequently. People had posted on ‘my’ wall and were apparently expecting responses; I put that off for a bit until I had a better understanding of their relationships to Marsha. I was feeling much better, now. I hadn’t solved the skill and knowledge problems, but at least I had made some major steps – and I’d only been back to school for three days.

I could finally sleep soundly until morning.