the diner at providence
I think I have always known I would end up here. When I was a freshman at Kenyon - we didn’t call ourselves “first-years” then, we were freshmen, and that’s how I remember myself, the way my friends from India call the city they grew up in “Bombay” - when I was a freshman at Kenyon taking the course we all called Baby Drama, officially THTR 11-12, Introduction to the Theater, we had a series of what, when I was in graduate school in teaching, my advisor, George Hillocks - we called him George, occasionally Hillocks but to his face George - would have called “scaffolded” exercises in creating drama.
Well that was a hell of a start. Try again: When I was a freshman at Kenyon, we had a series of assignments writing plays. Imitation, spectacle, etc., up to laying out the events of a full play. I remember I kind of failed at that last one, not “got an F” failed, but I remember I left the ending unresolved, quasi-intentionally but in reality because I didn’t know where to go with the story, so I decided it was OK to leave it unresolved. I had seen TV shows that did that. Harlene Marley - we called her Harlene, and there was nothing better than showing up at the Hill Theater on a Tuesday or Thursday morning and sitting in the dim light while our classmates presented scenes and Harlene critiqued them, often unsparingly, although every now and then somebody would nail one and she would tell us and them that, too. One of my classmates wrote a scene where a teenager arrived home from a date, and as soon as she walked in the door her parents came into the living room to greet her and ask her how it went. Harlene took issue with that bit; why are the parents coming out? she asked. Some of us explained that, yeah, our parents would do that, they would be waiting for us at the appointed time. I don’t think my parents ever did that, but then I never had dates in high school. But later, I think it was in the same play, the boyfriend got caught in a lie, and the playwright classmate of mine had set it up so beautifully, laid the trap that the boyfriend stepped into so smartly, that Harlene fairly marveled at it. I still remember the phrase she used: “He had better be tall, because he is in Deep. Water.” (She said “water”; she projected a worldly-wise, theater-people demeanor, but she was circumspect with her drama babies.) It’s a wonderful blessing to have teachers willing to marvel at what you can do.
So anyway I left that scene unresolved, and I knew I was breaking a cardinal rule of Good Drama - and Baby Drama was about Good Drama; you might could break the rules once you knew what you were doing, when you were writing for TV maybe, but to start out you’d better learn the way the tools worked. I so knew I was breaking a rule that I wrote “THE END” after that last, unresolved scene, which might as well have been my foot snapping a very loud twig as Harlene was tracking down the shortcomings of my effort. “NO IT’S NOT” she wrote. I don’t have that play anymore, but I’m pretty sure she used capital letters. And then she excoriated me, in so many words, for not having followed the most important precept we had learned all semester. It’s a blessing, too, although perhaps less wonderful, to have teachers who call you out when you know yourself that you’re trying to slip one past them.
Somewhere in that first semester we were writing basic scenes involving conflicts. I don’t remember the full exercise. The scene I wrote was two people, exes, running into each other in public, like at a mall, maybe at the skating rink of a mall. That’s where I remember them being; it might not have been in the play. I was trying to write about two people, a man and a woman, who had loved each other once, and were at that moment friendly, but had broken up for whatever reasons. Maybe they had been married - I think they had been married, but again I’m not sure if it was in the play. In the scene they rediscover their fondness for each other. The male character, toward the end of the scene, starts to express the thought that maybe they could - and his ex says, no, we’re not those people anymore, there’s too much history there, too much you’re not remembering.
It sounds trite. I think I’m glad I don’t have that play anymore.
I don’t know why I wrote that scene. I had never been in a serious relationship at that point; I never dated in high school. My parents were not divorced; their marriage had, at times, the tensions that all relationships have, but there certainly wasn’t any talk of breaking up, not that I knew of. I knew nothing of these things. But I was trying to write something lovely and aching, and I found the idea of that ache appealing, romantic, ….
Whatever. I don’t really feel like psychoanalyzing myself right now.
Just - I have always known I would end up here.
In a diner in Providence, off Thayer Street, a couple blocks from Brown University, we are sitting, my former husband and I, talking. We are still married, but we are not together, and the person who was my husband is a woman, and we are figuring out in our fumbling way the path forward from here. I don’t know what we are talking about. Our families. Waffles. The scourge of mobile ordering, and the benefits it pays to people who can’t go out. Eugenics. The play she directed. The play is What to Send Up When It Goes Down, which is a fascinating, possibly masterful, possibly just adept at sleight-of-hand work about, roughly and simplistically, living as Black people in a world where Black people are repeatedly and without repercussion killed by police. The performers are a bunch of students at a university that doesn’t have a drama program. They are game and honest. The production has Reggie’s fingerprints all over it, beautiful pictures and disco dancing and a certain amount of goofing, and by Reggie I mean the director I knew and watched and worked with for twenty-five years. When I think of the work they did, the beautiful stage pictures in Coming Time at Freedom Theater in Philadelphia or the disco scene in our production of The Cherry Orchard, the name I remember is Reggie.
I know that’s wrong and we’ll deal with it another time.
Pink says, in the diner at Providence, “I think the best parts of me are still in me,” and that’s the first thing I think about, her ability to take a group of non-theater people and free them to deliver remarkable performances (even if they’re not always “good” performances). I’m sure that’s not what she was talking about. She was talking about - I don’t know, but I don’t think it was primarily her skill as a director.
Anyway, we’re talking about things like that, and also about how the hummus on her bagel looks like tofu eggs, and how the vibe at the crepe place the night before was so wrong, and how we’re going to deal with buying a car in this market, or whatever, I don’t know what we were talking about, all I can think about is how much I miss this, miss him. And, if I’m honest, at other times how much I don’t.
I’ve always known I would be there, but I didn’t know how much it would hurt, over and over again, didn’t know how those characters in my trite little scene were going to feel so much pain, so much anger that the only way they could hide from it is to bury themselves in sadness, and how the sadness would hurt so much that the only way they could hide from that was to bury themselves in nothing, or in trying to write something clever. I’ve always known I would end up there, but I’m not there yet, where I am is some scene earlier in that play, a scene I never wrote, a scene that came before the words “THE BEGINNING” which I also never wrote. (It is, perhaps, not a rule of drama that you have to begin at the beginning, just that you have to end at the ending.)
My freshman English teacher Terry Hummer - American Lit, ENGL 15-16, and how the hell am I able to remember the numbers? - once told us, “The problem with people who hang out in literature departments is that they start to think their lives are a novel, and that at certain times something important is supposed to happen, and if it doesn’t happen they make it happen.” It’s a mistake to live your life like it’s a novel, or a freshman’s badly written play, or even an essay about a deer in Ecuador. There are no rules to this, and if there are there’s no Harlene to tell you what they are, and you might be at the point where you’re allowed to break them anyway.
My freshman history teacher Reed Browning once wrote on one of my papers, “This is an important point, but it has the unfortunate effect of undermining the rest of your essay.”
It was British History, and I don’t remember the numbers, but it was an upper-level class with juniors and seniors and I was way over my head. Browning - we called him Mr. Browning - was known as one of the best lecturers on campus. He kept the size of his classes manageable by holding them at 8 a.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. There were better things than stumbling to class in the dark of a Gambier morning. For those who had slugged it out through October, he pointed out to us, the week before daylight saving time ended, “This is the darkest morning of the year, we get a reprieve next week.” We slugged it out because he was so erudite, so polished, so engaging and knowledgeable, so able to land a conclusion at 8:59 a.m. He made it look so easy you thought you could do it.
Then you’d take an exam or get a paper back and discover you couldn’t.