Boy Crazy by Amy Pence

The actors seem to be talking underwater as soon as the play starts: a boy lolling on a couch is garbling his college Shakespeare. Ridiculous to think she can follow it, and so Miranda contemplates her encounter with the restroom’s toilet seat on the way into the theater. Someone had criss-crossed toilet paper across the seat, with such fetishistic care that even the back—where you had to have an enormous ass to even touch it— had been meticulously papered. Overkill.

When she’d flushed, all the paper had remained in place. She hesitated: push it all in with her foot? Leave it? Leave it, she decided. The stall door rocked shut behind her, and a college girl with her blonde ponytail and seamless complexion trounced in. She realized the girl would think she’d left the woven anal retentive work of art. Especially for you, hun!

She opens her program, regarding the bangles on her wrist: this too is overkill; she’d drawn on over twenty. When, eventually, she’d have to raise her arm to clap, they’d jangle—bangles jangle—and she’d regret the stupid vanity of her choice.

She glances at Henry—bespectacled, his hair foppish—professorial as always. He’s very attentive; he’s actually enjoying this. Perhaps one of his students is performing.

Twelfth Night. The students, or the director, have decided on broad comedy. The actors—male and female—prance around on high heels. A six foot plus thin African-American young man in the role of Sir Andrew Aguecheek teeters on red two-inch pumps and sports a matching boa—a transvestite touch. The drunken rollicking of Toby Belch and his team of rogues take on a knowing frat-boy homoeroticism. Whose choice was that? Miranda searches the program to find the name of the director: Linda Finn-Worcester. New faculty, she would guess: young and freshly married, hence the overly laden hyphen.

The homoerotic touch reminds Miranda of a book review she’d read about a new trend among young men. She can’t remember the author, but he or she had found that young males conspicuously delay adulthood. The schlubby slacker phenomenon has now stretched into the late twenties; they all hang out together, get drunk, and work hard not to appear gay. Pick up women at bars for temporary flings to boast of their conquests afterwards. Recent movies, she thought, revel in the gay overtones. The Peter Pans of the day work hard to prove they aren’t gay, but love this kind of entertainment. The suggestion of homosexuality. The unconscious forbidden.

She crosses her legs and bites her lip so as not to lean over and say something of it to Henry. He would nod reassuringly to her, but his eyes would roam away to gaze at something or someone else. In the seats directly in front of them, a college girl huddles in toward her date; he’s a ball-capped mouth-breather. It’s true the south does not typically produce handsome men. Typically the women are far superior in looks and they appear more “mature” than their dates. Even though she detests that word—the way middle-aged men—in crisis or just in transition—love to slap the moniker on helpless young women stripped of their power. “Mature” really means a strapping lovely has dutifully learned to act unselfishly, maybe even slavishly towards a man somewhat older than her. She can carry on a conversation as well as periodically jump into bed with him, without conspicuously cracking her gum or doing pratfalls in her high heels or otherwise embarrassing him in front of his friends. The sex is good for him because she wears Victoria’s Secret underwear and she hasn’t the capacity or experience to complain.

Miranda uncrosses her legs and senses a rustling. It’s Laura Destin, the classics professor, sitting two rows ahead and just off to the right. With her jutting profile, high cheekbones, and taut neck against which flashy drop earrings swing, she clearly wants to be seen. She and Miranda had tried friendship; they were both in the same yoga class. For some reason, Laura, like many potential friends, was put off by Miranda’s work as a therapist. Laura, recently divorced, seems alternately attracted to and repelled by Miranda. “Don’t psychoanalyze me,” is what they (including Laura) always say to her. “Off-duty,” Miranda replies. But to no avail.

Ball-cap’s girlfriend, no more than twenty, bobs her head back and forth alternately blocking and revealing a view of the play. Her wide-shouldered date sits still as a rock, while the girl wraps herself around him like a river. Dancing, gleaming, and thinking, quite erroneously, she has to catch Rock’s attention. Rock is rock, sweetie. Girl pushes back her lush auburn hair. She probably doesn’t even appreciate those thick locks, so far untouched by a color job. Enjoy it, Miranda wants to whisper. It’s all temporary.

Among her friends, marriages are falling apart left and right. But the messiness is her bill and trade. Miranda soaks in the infidelities during the day, watching the chrome timepiece just to the right of each client flattening out the hours. Today, a newly busted East Cobb woman of forty, tit job indirectly paid for by her husband’s law firm, confessed to stockroom fellatio with a bag boy. Miranda drives the 45-mile commute back and forth to Atlanta listening to zen talks or new age music, tries for a meditative state to let it all go before she walks in the house for the evening.

And in the evening: more news from the marital war-front. Laura Destin isn’t the only mid-life soldier of fortune to leave or to be left by her partner. The year 40 is a lightning rod for long-buried fantasies and neuroses. She thinks of Judie Crichton and Missy Nartal, who found out, after doing yoga on mats next to each other for two years, they were highly attracted to each other. They broke up their marriages, only to discover a discreet fling might have done quite nicely instead.

Malvolio struts onstage wearing shiny black ankle boots and a heightened gray pompadour. The prude: the sour judge to all this fine mess. This kid, at least, could project his lines, and Miranda tried some imaginative unclothing. A bit thinnish, still a boy. Her mind turns to her teenage daughter sleeping over at a friend’s house. Leah is not much younger than this college boy.

“OMG,” her daughter would say, that is, if she knew what her mother actually imagines. If Miranda had a dick, it would shrivel with embarrassment.

Viola, dressed as the male Cesario, is good at seducing Olivia, though Orsino is her intended target. The self-involved Orsino is clearly like Rock, dumb as a doornail, but more effeminate. The woman’s touch with words is what unhinges Olivia: does she detect some native feeling?

Ironically, Shakespeare’s farce turns on the cleverly disguised homosexual pairing of Viola and Olivia, yet no broad “girl-on-girl” comedy finds its way into the scene. Judie and Missy would likewise think it no laughing matter. Yet, the titillation of lesbianism is also rampant in contemporary comedies; Miranda wonders what held Director Hyphen back from that? Were her female actors are too mature for such redneck slapstick or simply less creative than the boys?

Leah, at 13, isn’t at all boy crazy. Or at least not yet. In fact, she seems fairly indifferent to them; she’s too obsessed by the trifecta of glasses, braces, and acne. Her mood turns on a dime; if her name shifts down on a girlfriend’s MySpace page, she glowers for the rest of the evening.

Laura’s handsome profile—it couldn’t really be called beautiful, could it?—catches the spotlight again, and Miranda looks to Laura’s right. Not a date there: she’s with Fran Nussbaum, the heavy-set anthropology professor, perennially anxious and un-datable. A teacher’s pet sometime in her past, Miranda guesses.

This is Miranda’s third viewing of Twelfth Night. The first time she’d seen it in college, with her father during Parent’s Weekend. It was a Sunday matinee, and her father had come in on the train for the afternoon. While Miranda sat stressing over an unfinished paper, the sour stench of alcohol emanated from her father. Worry over her paper faded; instead she’d sat wondering if it was a drinking binge the night before or maybe he’d become an alcoholic. Was it because all the kids had left the nest—Miranda the last one to go to college—or was it her mother’s persistent and resentful sarcasm?

In that production, she has no memory of Toby Belch and his team of homos drawing attention to themselves. But would she have known, would any of them in the early 80s, all primed for future yuppie-dom, have registered the phallic jokes? Sir Toby weaves drunkenly about, talks about “flax on a staff.” He and Sir Andrew take turns riding a wooden pole with fervor.

“I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs and spin it off,” he slurs loudly. Fran Nussbaum holds her mouth closed, then eyes Laura surreptitiously. Laura lets out a cackling laugh, her eyes squinting, her earrings bobbing.

Miranda retraces her steps: why had her thoughts so rapidly flitted away from her father? He seldom came to visit her after that. But then it came out, within the year, that her father had been taking the train to New Haven to see Sarah Smallwood, his Executive Assistant. Sarah lasted two years with her father beyond the affair. Her mother, after the divorce, lasted ten years outright, then died of breast cancer. Her father was now retired in a condo in Florida. An ex-exec with time on his hands, his nightly whisky sour, or maybe two, or maybe plenty, in front of the TV.

“What’s a drunken man like, fool?” Olivia says onstage. The actress has a slight lisp. Miranda looks in the program to find that Amanda Duncan wants to be on Broadway. Pretty, but heavy-hipped, heavy-lidded, and lisping. Not likely. Well then, Miranda, she thinks: who are you to judge who’s ready for the Great White Way?

Miranda scans the crowd again, spotting Debbie Lucas. Debbie’s daughter Morgan is an on-again, off-again friend of her daughter’s, much to Leah’s ire. Morgan enjoys shuffling her MySpace friends’ list (was it called wallpaper?—it was hard to follow Leah’s rushing complaints) to keep Leah panting with high-pitched hope and desolation. It was no wonder Morgan likes passive aggressive power games: her mother Debbie spills her guts indiscriminately.

A personal trainer at the local gym, Debbie had once confided to Miranda during a 40-minute gym session that she first and foremost regretted she hadn’t insisted on a rubber when she slept with Morgan’s redneck dad on a first date, and secondly wished she hadn’t married the local ophthalmologist three years later. He turned out to be fussy and controlling and he didn’t much like Morgan. Not part of the complaint was that Debbie got the huge house in the divorce settlement and now she sat next to Brad Mumpower, who was way too aptly named for a body builder. From what Debbie had told her in the gym bathroom, Brad came in his pants the first time she and Debbie had made out, yet was excellent at cunnilingus. A premature ejaculator, for Debbie at least, can be borne if he has good tongue technique.

Henry shifts next to her; he parts his legs and a hand relaxes on his thigh. Miranda wonders at Laura’s thoughts two rows ahead: why is her head shifting so that her profile is so obvious to both her and Henry? Does she have a crush on her husband?

Viola, still posing as a boy onstage— her hair bound up in a feathered plush hat—tries to tell Orsino that women love as well as men. The actress turns to the audience, all but winking. Her ears are too large on either side of the hat.

Do women make love as well as men before they hit forty? Miranda doubts it. She’s collected enough tales of female sexuality to get the picture: most women haven’t even landed in their bodies until mid-life. Before that, it’s all about stewing in their own distorted images of themselves.

The second Twelfth Night was a Central Park production after college. That year she lived with her former English professor and waited tables on Columbus Circle, trying to figure out her next step. In hindsight, it was precisely that first step away from college that had been the bad one. They’d set up their blanket and lawn chairs early—five o’clock maybe—at Ralph’s insistence. They’d waited while gnats began to swarm, then settle, and Ralph proceeded to complain about the height of the stage, the “fetid” feta salad she’d made, and the nearness of the other blankets that began to encircle them. She’d been so charmed her senior year by him; all the girls had lusted for him, the youngest English prof, and he had, after all, picked her: Miranda. She’d been most assuredly so “mature” for her age that she’d gotten herself saddled with a narcissicist and alcoholic all her own. He’d brought three bottles of cabernet. They had drunk two before the production started. Ralph was rabid by the time Tracey Ullman came onstage as Viola.

“Not her! Bullocks, I say, bullocks,” he’d yelled, so loudly that the irritated New Yorkers surrounding them had turned and heckled him to shut up or they’d throw him out of the park. Miranda shrinks in her seat thinking of it, even now, many years later. Henry turns to her, sensing her discomfort, his shadowed eyes taking her in. His hand gently strokes the be-jangled arm prone between them on the armrest. She hadn’t let it budge and Henry’s cocked smile registers his sympathy. Henry knows she would be mortified to make any noise.

Henry. Miranda glances again at Laura, who still holds her head like a little statuette, so conscious of herself she might just leap out of her own skin. Henry is oblivious or acting oblivious. They’re so stable—Miranda and Henry—such a model of marital bliss that their friends always qualify all tales of marital discord: “Not that you or Henry would worry about______.” Miranda could fill in the blanks.

Their first time sleeping together was in the cabin in the North Georgia woods, 1985. They’d both moved to Atlanta for psych graduate school. They were compelled toward each other almost immediately, the drunken professor firmly in Miranda’s past, though their break-up had been so wounding that she’d taken everything with Henry at a snail’s pace, stringing him along, some would say. The truth was she was fearful of falling headlong for more damaged goods. Surprisingly, with Henry, the other shoe never did fall.

And finally, there they were, slipping under the calico blankets, cautiously regarding the fire Henry had laid out in the grate. Gray plumes immediately began to fill the cabin. Henry, without his glasses, looked like a surprised rodent when he turned to her.

“The damper,” Miranda cried. Henry leapt up naked and pranced toward the fireplace still in his socks, muttering obscenities. Miranda, stupidly she thought later, laughed out loud. But his smooth body with a shiny pelt of black hair between his breasts was unexpected—delicious, actually. Often clothed in lumberjack shirts and still in his twenties then, Henry was so unassuming. Not a looker, or “a fox,” as they used to say. But in bed without clothes, he was smoothly built and seductive. Now, almost 50, Henry did turn heads. His age, having brought the requisite silvery strands and the darkened pouches under his eyes, had only seemed to endear Henry to everyone. Yet Henry, ostensibly, even teaching college co-eds for over 20 years now, only desires Miranda. His hand slips down into her lap, his thumb pushing down against the tight fabric of her skirt, feeling for the cleft between her legs.

Malvolio had returned to the stage, piqued by a letter that Belch and his co-horts had conspired to fool him with. His pompadour teeters on his head and Miranda wonders if his tight black pumps hurt his large feet. He thinks his lady Olivia loves him, and Miranda takes Henry’s hand firmly in her own, moving it away from her crotch. There was a time when she’d have wanted his hands there, but was that time already past? Is this, finally, the other shoe? Her throat clots with the unthinkable.

After a round of Toby Belch and Sir Andrew shenanigans, in which they pantomime wanting to ride Maria, the lights flicker on. Henry smiles over at her; he hadn’t registered her rebuff. He stands, wearing an easy grin. He stares at the curtains as they swing closed.

“Freaky costumes, eh?” he mutters.

When Miranda rises to smooth out her skirt, all her bangles fall down to her wrist like a giant slinky. Girl, with her ravenous red hair, looks back at the ringing sound, then curls a smile up at Rock, who has no idea what she’s trying to signal. His consciousness, Miranda supposes, is so interior, so buried in his massive football brain, that he is just now digesting the first act’s outrageous display of boas on men.

Miranda follows Henry out into the aisle; the students look blandly satisfied as they might after a night of video gaming and titter amongst themselves. The community, probably families associated with the college, wear bemused expressions or hold the hands of their children too firmly and march for the exit.

In the lobby, Laura is holding up her clutch purse to wave at them— her thin, lipsticked mouth parting. Fran trails behind her like a pet troglodyte. Miranda hates the idea of a tedious conversation with the two of them; the sole purpose, she suspects, for Laura to register herself in Henry’s eyes. Henry leans over to give Laura a welcoming hug, and Miranda decides to watch closely—is there something she should know? But Henry’s gesture is causal, requisite even. Nothing quickens but Laura’s jugular vein next to the swinging chandelier earring. Laura’s pickings are slim; it’s a college town and after forty, the southern men grow more hideous; they get paunches where there may have once been muscle.

“Well hello, Miranda, how are you?” she says in her flat Midwestern accent.

“Just terrific,” Miranda finds herself saying, but too falsely. Fran is fingering a large bohemian necklace with unease, grinning hideously.

“We haven’t seen you in yoga class, Miranda,” Laura says, cocking her hip provocatively. Henry’s leg tenses.

“Oh, I know, I’ve been so busy, sometimes getting in the car again on a Saturday…” Miranda falters.

“Oh, God, don’t I know it! It’s so, so hard to get moving sometimes on weekends. This morning, I just let my boys run around the house so I could get a little shut-eye.” Having done her duty with Miranda, she turns to preen in front of Henry. “What’s been keeping you busy over at the college, Henry?” Laura’s voice has acquired a lilt, and Henry’s hand wanders up to his hair to smooth back one salty lock.

“Well, besides a shit-load of courses this term, there’s the uh…well, you know, there’s the committee work we’ve both been doing,” Henry says, engagingly. Fran drops her program while Laura adjusts to the idea that their committee work together is now public knowledge. As Fran stands up straight, a look of terror crosses her face. Like she’d seen a ghost is what someone might say. But there no one else saw it; only Miranda had.

“Oh, I hear ya! That meeting on Friday went so long, didn’t it?” Laura has recovered, her handsome face mobile. Fran, to her left, clutching the errant program, tries to settle her features, and Miranda senses how painful the adjustment is.

“Excuse me,” Miranda leans forward, touching Henry’s elbow. “I need to use the restroom.” On the way, she waves to Debbie, who is hanging onto Brad’s arm fiercely. Her hair, Miranda notices, is a newly minted shade of platinum with streaks of brown which seem to accentuate the creases on her face. Brad surveys Miranda with a grin, and she feels the hot spread between her pelvic bones, thinking of what Debbie told her about Brad’s special expertise. Was it her imagination, or had Brad just followed her ass with his eyes?

A line has formed for the restroom and Miranda recognizes the ramrod back and sidelong glance of the ponytailed girl who had followed her into the restroom before the performance and had seen the leftover toilet paper installation. Ponytail covers her mouth to whisper to another sorority girl next to her.

Miranda fingers her bangles, mulling over Fran’s unaccountably fearful expression. Fran’s terrors must have loomed out of her past. But they were stirred by the dropping of the program. Or was it the recognition that Laura clearly wanted Henry. And thus, Laura would never want Fran. But it was more—it was the fear—what she has heard countless times in her office—that nobody wanted her, would ever want her.

Once in the stall, she mulls over Fran’s expression: the skewed mouth and haunted eyes. The teacher’s pet who had been, somehow, violated.

That had to be it. Miranda veered to her own sex life: she does it routinely, tiredly and seldom. It was often an irritant: the imploring Henry, the dutiful or negligent Miranda.

Would it really bother her if Henry wanted to bed someone else, would it be, maybe, a relief? Hadn’t she begun to worry, hearing so many tales of dissatisfaction, daily, years and years on end, whether her own marriage was a sham held together by routine and sentiment? Hadn’t she eyed Brad and the boy onstage? More to the point, didn’t she sometimes think about Dr. Leonard Paulsen (call me “Lenny,” he’d said that once) in the office next to hers? Knew what days his car was in the lot, dressed differently those days? She passed his window slowly, hoping for his wry smile. The fantasy often recurred on her drive home: how he might press against her under the staircase—that forgotten spot—unseen. A reckless, ridiculous passion overwhelming both of them. A tense and hasty fuck.

But what was she doing with it? Squashing it, as usual. What secrets do they all keep, flashing in and out of each other’s lives, mistaking each other—as they do in Twelfth Night—for something meaningful: an end, a beginning? Does she really want to desire again?

She stares at the gray metal door, stunned. Words swim into view: someone has scratched the words “Become Yourself—F. Nietzsche” into the paint. At the sink, she washes her hands and wipes at the tears budding in her eyes, threatening to wipe out her eyeliner. The seamless blonde sorority girl catches her friend’s arm on the way out.

“That woman,” Miranda hears her say “is a nut.”

“Touché!” Miranda says to the woman in the mirror, middle-aged, beginning to calcify around her wrecked sex like a snail in its poor housing. The tears spill out and down her face. She thinks of Fran’s horrid recognition: a shock when you realize that what you’ve been chasing is a dream. Broadway, sanity, a better orgasm, true immutable love. Her mother, curling to a breastless chest, hating her father to the end. Her father bitterly slugging down the whisky. Fran, violated every day by some memory that won’t let her go.

Miranda and Henry settle back into their seats, and the play spirals into its necessary conclusion: all characters restored to their proper genders, to their proper partners, the fool singing his song of wind and rain, something about toys. Henry, as usual, praises the actors and wraps an arm around Miranda’s shoulders as they brave the chill wind out into the parking lot. Is he aware of all the suffering in the dark theater?

Miranda sees Laura and Fran up ahead; they’ve parked their cars next to each other, and Fran is grimacing and craning her neck to hear what Laura says. Laura— who can see miles around and right down into the center of Fran. She lifts a skeletal hand to wave their way.

Girl and Rock are heading toward their car, just ahead. Is it the way Girl hangs too pleadingly on his arm, or is too many years of seeing versions of Girl that reveals for Miranda their evening ahead? Girl, naked and closing her lean legs shut on the bed, crying. Rock breaking his knuckles against a wall.

Henry settles into the car and Miranda’s bangles ring wildly, catching the little short hairs on her arm. “Ow,” she says.

“What?” Henry answers, backing up the car and glancing past Miranda.

“I shouldn’t have worn these fucking bracelets,” she says. Henry laughs, then withdraws, his glasses glossy in the dark car.

There’s a longing for something she can’t name. A bleakness, just beginning. They’re silent for some time, and Miranda watches the headlights nose down the rural road toward home. Without the brights on, their car is like an opossum, only able to see inches ahead.

Tonight, they’ll lie on the bed, waxen figures. She’ll try to remember a Henry that was and a Miranda that had been. The future that she cannot see waits for her in the dim gutted woods all around them. The becoming unclear, yet waiting, in some detached way. She imagines the moment when she’ll rise above the pliant bodies, the dumb machines. Containers really. Her mother. Her last day: Miranda wheeled her out onto the grounds and they plucked the institutional pansies; how thrilling it was for her mother. How elemental, to put them—like bruises—in her thin hair.

Amy Pence is the author of Skin’s Dark Night, published by 2River Press. Current poetry and fiction appear in New American Writing, Drunken Boat, Quarterly West, Storyglossia and Silk Road. Poets & Writers and The Writer’s Chronicle have published her nonfiction. She teaches college composition and creative writing in Atlanta and lives in Carrollton, Georgia with her daughter and her husband.