CASTING by Kristi Coulter
1. Gretchen
Gretchen is a lesser-known member of the Sleepy Hollow Van Tassel family; Washington Irving himself never knew she existed. In fact, she was made especially for this stage adaptation. And I was made for her, or so the director thinks.
Look at that face, he says about me at the audition, but in a kind way, not the creepy one you might expect when you think of grown men and child actresses.
My mother smiles as if she made my face herself while I, the rightful owner, try to look as if I have no idea I’m pretty.
I get the part because I always get the part.
“We did it!” my mother says, then starts complaining about the weeks of rehearsals she’ll have to drive me to. But she’s proud, and it buys me three peaceful nights at home until the glow wears off and I’m just some awful daughter again.
It’s not that she hates me. She just hates herself, and I don’t exist outside that self. She tells me everything that’s wrong with her figure, my father, their marriage, and when I get filled up and can’t hold any more adult disappointment in my nine-year-old body, she turns on me, too.
When she shakes me or hits me or holds me by the neck, I can feel her tremble with what she wants to do to me, with how hard she’s working not to hurt me worse.
In the moment, I forget to feel grateful for everything she’s holding back.
The next day, when she apologizes and takes me out for new clothes or ice cream or both, I fall for it every time like a sap, or like a nine-year-old who needs a mom.
My father also lives in our house.
When my mother’s night rages hit, he’s often in the same room, drinking bourbon and reading U.S. News & World Report in his recliner. My father has worked all day and just wants to be left out of my mother’s whole deal, so he ignores it as long as he can. Sometimes as she’s coming at me wild-eyed, I look at him and think he’s so much bigger than her and wonder why he doesn’t just put his body between hers and mine, why he’s pretending not to see what’s happening to me, and for that matter to her. Even when he looks right at us he doesn’t seem to see. And he doesn’t move from his chair.
Gretchen Van Tassel has what the Sleepy Hollow townspeople call “spells,” where she’s seized by visions of the Headless Horseman. To act out a spell, I freeze and stare into the middle distance and say things like “He’s on his way. . . .” The townspeople don’t understand what I’m talking about, of course, but they pay rapt attention, as one does when children have eerie premonitions.
I don’t have spells or premonitions in my offstage life. I have crippling stomach aches that the doctor says are caused by stress. Because my parents actually do want to do right by me to whatever degree doesn’t require them to change, I see a child psychologist once a week to find out why I’m so anxious. I’m convinced that if I tell the truth about home, I’ll be taken away and housed with strangers, or even sent to juvenile detention. So I make up reasons, like the Iran hostage crisis or the Jonestown massacre. When I’m in a play, I say it’s stage fright. But the truth is I am never afraid onstage. And on the days after I rehearse Gretchen’s spells, my stomach feels fine, especially after the stage manager tells me about method acting and even loans me a copy of Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. Being nine, I don’t understand most of it, but I do gather that I can take feelings from my real life and put them into my character. For the spells, I have been focused on looking intent and scared. Now I practice looking how I feel when my mother is coming at me, which is fearful but also exhausted and a little fascinated by this thing that keeps happening to me. I practice in the shower and in bed at night but never in front of a mirror. I only want to see it from the inside.
The director notices. He praises my intensity and I blush, so unaccustomed to and already so hungry for a man to see me. Maybe here is where it begins to strike me that the way to help a man to see me is to map myself onto a more familiar set of coordinates, such as a nineteenth-century child with visions of a pumpkin-headed horseman. I will do this half-unknowingly all the way through high school: take on Molly Ringwald or Siouxsie Sioux or even the mermaid from Splash (sans tail) as a simple, clean-lined cover for myself. Not a role model but a substitute. My father continues to look right past me for the most part, but it gives the others something to grab onto.
The local paper reviews the play and includes a large close‑up of Gretchen mid-spell, me mid-horror. My mother is so proud that she buys copies to send to all our relatives, and even frames one. Look at that face, she says.
2. Tereza
I’m about to start college and need someone to be.
The summer after high school graduation I see The Unbearable Lightness of Being, about a Prague Spring-era love triangle between a doctor named Tomas, his wife Tereza, and his lover Sabina. Tomas is brainy and distant. Tereza is warm, idealistic, and frequently wounded. I don’t care about the marital problems of these two old people (they’re at least thirty), and the complete upending of their lives by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia bores me even more. But I’m enthralled by Sabina, a painter who wears black underwear and a bowler hat (when she wears anything at all) and values freedom and lack of attachments above all else. Sabina says things like, “I love trains. They are so erotic,” and doesn’t care that Tomas never spends the night with her. By contrast, Tereza spends a lot of time waiting for Tomas to come home and asking why he doesn’t love her enough to stop seeing other women. Her one attempt at a revenge fuck is such a disaster that she nearly jumps off a bridge afterward.
The film presents me with two easily graspable choices. Tereza reminds me of my mother, frustrated and unnoticed by her own husband, drifting. But I’ve never known a woman like Sabina, who never asks men why they cheat on her because she doesn’t care, whose most plaintive question is, “Why do you never make love to me in Geneva?” Despite or because of her smiling aloofness, Tomas returns to her over and over until the end of his life, for friendship and sex and love. It’s clear to me that I should be like Sabina. That I am eighteen and live in suburban Florida does not strike me as hindrance.
I spend freshman year of college smoking cigarettes, wearing blood-red lipstick, and having nonchalant sex with various guys. I make it clear I expect nothing from them apart from the sex; honestly, I make it clear I expect nothing from them during the sex, either. I freely offer up a space to be fucked, because I think it isn’t real sex until someone is inside me and I want to be having real sex, serious sex. Czech sex. On my off-hours I spend a lot of time wondering if the guys I fuck are thinking of me or maybe a little in love with me, but I keep it to myself and assume that side of me will disappear in time.
Even Sabina had only one or two men in rotation at a time. When I meet an older student, a brainy, distant man who looks a bit like Tomas and finds me amusing to have around, I become his girlfriend and within months we move in together. After a year of behaving like a husky-voiced Slav twice my age, having someone to buy groceries and watch TV with bowls me over. I fall in love with him; he seems to mostly find me amusing to have around, smiling wryly at the pleasure I take in cooking him dinner or brushing our teeth side by side. No problem! Game on. I will close the distance between us. I will look at him so hard that he has no choice but to see me back.
But I’ve hung up Sabina, so I don’t know how to make him see me, or who I want him to see. Within six months I find him in bed with his ex‑girlfriend, a hippie nymph who wears bikini tops and bead skirts to class. “I was just giving her a massage,” he explains.
“That’s how it started with me,” I say.
“Yeah, but,” he says, his eyes straying back to the newspaper he’s holding.
I spend two more years in this unclear role. Where were you? Who were you with? Why don’t you love me enough to stop doing this? I dislike him, but I hate myself and every pleading question that leaves my mouth. Finally, one night, he tells me what he sees: a shrieking harpy. I have to look it up at the library the next morning. It’s exactly the kind of effete, Aeschylus-reading insult he would sling.
And it’s true. I’ve become a grasping bird of prey, desperate to be enough for this man who even I realize is not worth the trouble. But it’s not him I’m shrieking at. I’m shrieking because I’ve become Tereza.
3. Beatrice Plum
“My wife made you this,” another man says twenty years later, and slides an envelope across the table. Inside is a pen-and-ink drawing the size of a Tarot card of a dark-haired woman on a trapeze. She’s surrounded by delicately rendered objects: a miniature carousel, music notes, an upside-down wineglass, half a pomegranate, a pair of high heels.
I have never met his wife, though I know she admires my writing. And has read it closely, I see now, because the objects in her illustration all tie to small details of my written life: rock shows, the drinking I did lots of then renounced, my weakness for beautiful clothes. The toy carousel was a first-birthday gift. The pomegranate, though, stumps me. I tap a finger on it and look up at him to ask, but he’s already half out of his chair.
“It’s annotated,” he says, and hightails it to the coffee counter. So it is. I pull two pages of notes from the envelope, handwritten on the same heavy vellum as the drawing. The woman is on a trapeze because I’ve recently written about the feeling of living in mid-air. She has a sword (I hadn’t noticed it before) because I seem like someone who has fought a battle or two. Her name? Beatrice Plum, the burlesque alias bestowed on me by a Facebook meme; she must have seen this post. The pomegranate? That symbolizes a vagina, my vagina.
He comes back with our coffees. “She knows,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “She must.”
For weeks I keep the drawing in my car and steal glances at stoplights. I see new details every time I look. A lipstick, because I’m always wearing it in photos. A sand dollar that I recognize from an old photo of my desk. I don’t even remember where I got it, but she’s made it a part of me. “Is this something she just does for people?” I’d asked him that day. “Like, a series of obsessively detailed portraits?”
He half-smiled. “No,” he said.
“It’s a warning shot,” I tell him the next time we meet.
“What? No.” He shakes his head. “She admires you. She told me she wants to understand you, because you’re important to me.” He seems to actually believe what he’s saying and I realize for the first time that in this triangle, she and I are the ones who know what’s what. After all, she was once his other woman too. They are talking a lot, he says, and this is her way of processing. I don’t know exactly what he’s told her and I don’t ask.
Later that day I take my portrait out in the double-layered privacy of the car wash. I read about my bold, free, sexy self again and then look at myself in the rearview mirror. My red lipstick looks harsh and cracked and I rub it off with the back of my hand.
I start to watch myself move through the world as a collection of signifiers, like props in a play. The reusable bags in my car’s trunk say I have good intentions to use them at the grocery store even though I usually forget. Worn trail-running shoes say I train myself to do hard things. Lipstick named after a filthy Prince song says I am a reckless husband-poaching nympho-tramp. Buying pricey, racy underwear, I think this is exactly what she would expect from me and wonder if Beatrice Plum is already wearing crotchless panties underneath her inky dress. Then I decide his wife has probably never heard of such a thing, because based on what he’s told me, I’ve boiled her down to signifiers too: a neat pile of diced vegetables, a heavy hand-knit sweater, a garden spade.
I’ve been known to chop vegetables and wear sweaters too, but they have no place in her drawing. She wants to see me as a sword-wielding siren, a mercenary, just as I want to see myself as a lovestruck girl, not a thief. Or worse: a borrower, mining her husband for dopamine and leaving her to deal with the infrastructure and upkeep.
“I feel watched,” I tell him. I don’t say: I didn’t even intend the performance, this time. I don’t say: it was your attention I was going for.
“Because she’s watching you,” he says. “She’s obsessed with you. It’s okay. It’s just her way of processing.”
Slowly he sees Beatrice Plum, too. The woman who tells stories about her dogs and perpetually yips in surprise that coffee is hot is replaced by a nest of life-ruining wiles. Week by week he disapproves of me a little more. Not the things I say or do, just my general being. Or Beatrice’s being. My eyes have too much emotion in them, or my “energy” is too intense. He says it interferes with his processing of our relationship, and also with his wife’s processing of our relationship, and also with their joint processing of our relationship and their relationship and the impact of one on the other. “Just standing here in public with you I’m doing something wrong,” I paraphrase back to him one day.
“It’s nothing you’re doing,” he says.
“My passive existence in your presence is wrong,” I say. He sighs but doesn’t correct me.
For a brief time I try to alter my eyes, my energy. I try to act the role of someone who isn’t in love. Or at the very least, who doesn’t need to be seen. But then I think, who is this performance for? I am in love and I want the love inside me to float out however it will while I drive to work or wash my hair or argue with him on a street corner.
“I don’t want you to police my face,” I tell him.
“Our interactions have the potential to cause harm to my wife,” he tells me.
So we stop having them, for the good of all the various processes and also for the sake of my retirement from acting.
I step offstage but his wife keeps watching, following Beatrice Plum online and even liking one of Beatrice’s posts now and then. Well, the sad ones. If Beatrice meets a friend at the movies or gripes about a long supermarket line, she lets it go. I imagine her updating the master illustration with objects from the sad posts: a raindrop, a tiny bust of Leonard Cohen.
Uh, maybe she wants you too, says the only friend who knows. But I think she just wants me to be sad, and who can blame her? I don’t owe her my sadness, but if she wants to collect the trail of it I leave, I don’t mind. I don’t mind if she wants to ascribe all of my hundred mundane griefs to the loss of him. And if he needs to see a raptor where once there was just me, okay.
Kristie Coulter is the author of the essay collection Nothing Good Can Come from This (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).