A Singer's Secret

The entrance to a theater is nothing special. It’s a door, maybe it’s warm oak or metal or some plastic material. If it’s in a school, which this theater is, then there’s probably cinderblocks painted in dull colors or brick walls or tile coating the arc that an auditorium creates.
What’s special about a theater is what it’s like when you step inside of it. It smells like some earthy secret that’s been hidden away, locked in the deepest drawer or buried beneath a hundred year old elm tree. It’s like someone took that secret and let it loose in this great room, let it grace the seats with its comfort, let it wash the aisles with its familiarity; let it hang on the walls like a tapestry. And when I step in there, I’m overcome with this sense of home and belonging, because I know what a theater is for. It’s for acting and singing. For sitting quietly in the back rows, scrambling to do homework, hoarding baggies of wheat thins and water bottles and if you’re really artsy, thermoses of tea. It’s for running up when you hear your scene called and knowing what’s expected. Not to ruffle the curtains or talk loudly back stage, not to miss your queues or forget your props. It’s for hating the director every time she yells at you for doing something wrong, and then hating her for when she doesn’t give you any corrections.
           And that warmth and that comfort, it covers me like fresh paint and smells like fallen rain and tastes like a home-cooked meal. It fills me with a sense of purpose and lets me relax. But right now and right here, that feeling has been pulled out from under me, and all of a sudden that worn Persian rug I was standing on, the one where I knew where the coffee stains were and where the fabric  was starting to pull, all of a sudden it’s gone. And I’m standing on concrete and it’s cold and gristly with dirt and grains of sand and flecks of garbage and I don’t know how I got there. But I’m stuck there.
           So I’m stuck here. I’m in this new auditorium, this new theater, and I have a nametag that says Jenna Owens, Props Manager. And there’s a flock of girls, they swooped down on the first row and they’re sitting with their sparkly binders clasped between prettily painted pastel nails. And guys, too. Only about ten of them, but my god, for theater, that’s a lot. And there’s the director, this man, who’s probably about eighty years old or something, and he’s sitting on the stage with his legs all dangling down towards where the pit will be once they remove the floorboards. And I may as well be in a shark cage, because I’m floating in some foreign place where I don’t really exist, and there are these creatures that seem to have swam this route for a while, and now I’m the intruder.
           “Hey, Jenna?” A girl in my grade calls out to me. “I know you, like, don’t understand because you’re in props and stuff, but, like, I really need some water? And we’re starting? So could you get me some? Please?” I agree, though I’d rather have my eyelashes plucked one by one. At least I could wear false ones on stage.
           The director has started rehearsal, and so I am pushed off into the wings after fetching water. Behind the black velvet curtains, there’s dim lighting, and it’s an eerie green color. There are set pieces from past shows. I perch on a barstool and stare at a sign that says “Come See the Audrey II!” I’m blocking out everything that’s going on downstage and sorting break-away dishes into bins when I hear it. The music. Peering out from behind the curtains, I can smell mothballs and make up remover. They’re running through the prologue, and the show is Into the Woods. I want to sing. I want to get out there, center stage, and show them how it’s done. But I can’t.
           I can’t throw caution to the wind and do it, because it’s not just caution holding me back, not just the fact that I’m not supposed to be singing. I can’t do it. Not anymore. And it hurts; it’s like getting a limb chopped off. Those patients, those people with prosthetic legs, they can still feel the tingling sensation of having a working leg or arm. And they lie in bed and they remember, remember moving and touching and dancing and running. I know, because I do too.  
           Doing props feels like banging around on a piano. I don’t know how to play. It’s fun at first, making the list of what items we need and taking the department credit card and buying things at thrift stores, collecting them from the cast. It’s kind of neat to line them up in little rows on a picnic table. Like I’m setting a table for dinner for the show. Act I, Act II, Act II. Hope you saved room for dessert. But after a while, banging around on a piano gets kind of repetitive. It gets a little boring. And the keys have lost their initial glamour and they’re looking a little dustier and a lot less appetizing. And it would be okay if I knew all I had was that piano, so I could suck it up and deal with it because pianos are fun and I should appreciate the chance to play on one. But that piano isn’t the only thing I have.
           I’ve got this passion, rising up fiery and hot in my throat. A burn in my heart, an itch in my diaphragm. It’s melting out of my eyes and my ears, and it’s so hard to listen, because I’ve got music all melted right next to my earrings. I find myself eyeing the stage and taking deep breaths like pouring water from a glass pitcher into a crystal vase, filling from the bottom up, like I know I’m supposed to. But I have no outlet for this intensity, no way to release it, not anymore. So the fire continues to rage on, burning inside me, until I think you must see smoke coming out of my mouth when I open it to speak.  
And then what do they have? No fire and ice, they’ve got sandpaper and bubblegum. Nail files and headbands, a pipe dream for stardom and fame and a DVR that’s recording the Kardashians. They’ve got lead roles, which they rank on what kind of costume they get. They’ve got no appreciation for the art, only a knack for speaking loudly and wearing stage make up. And it’s making me mad, seeing them strutting around the stage, like turkeys pretending to be peacocks. No matter how much paint they splatter on their feathers, they’ll never be that colorful.
           It’s six o’clock now, and I’ve listened to the same wrong notes being sung for three hours. I’ve made up my mind. I have to, I need to, I'm going to do it and nobody’s stopping me. I’m quitting. So after all the girls pack up their handbags and purses, after they’ve reapplied strawberry lip-gloss onto puckered lips and slipped boots over their brightly socked feet, I silently pack my bag. And they dance off, long crane legs carrying them up the aisles, arms flapping and noses pointed towards the smell of Starbucks. I walk carefully over lost sweatshirts and scattered garbage—who in their right minds treats a theater like this?—in some form of sacrilegious hopscotch. I go up to the director. I tell him I have too many obligations too many homework assignments and tests and I’m awfully sorry but I have to resign from my position as props manager so hopefully it’s not too late to find someone else. And he nods his head like it sounds respectful and then he looks at me, he takes a too quick glance at my nametag, and says
           “Thanks, Jessica, for telling me.” I don’t correct him, just cringe internally, and he barely takes another look my way before walking up the aisle and out the door. I’m alone in the theater, which is what I’ve been waiting for. And now that I’ve gotten what I wanted, I decide to sit down and enjoy it, let it sink in. I see that the seats have eyes. They’re branded with numbers, pieces of brass that proclaim their position and reflect the light. The cushions squeak and they’re scratchy on the bottoms of my thighs. Red with yellow running through, they’re a terrible color, and the dark brown wood of their backs and arms find no place in this color scheme. No place because maybe they’re a little bit better, a little touch of design that got mixed in with the wrong fabric swatch. Picked out on accident but left to stay there, to rest in this theater that can never really be its home till it knows its place. This dark wood knows no likeness in the pale trim of the walls or the cool grey carpeting. It’s much richer and deeper; it holds thousands of stories and keeps them all a secret, the secrets collecting on top of each other until they’re this great protective barrier. A coral reef around this dark wood. So it knows it’s something special. So it knows it should just wait.
           And the air moves around me, in phantom gusts that shouldn’t exist, pulling me back up the steps and onto the stage. I sit down and just breathe. Relief expands in my chest like wings unfolding, and I welcome it. The grain of the wood is fine, and black paint covers it, splattered with greens and blues and whites, mistakes and dribbles and drips. Rough beneath my fingers, so I gently scrape away at the splinters until I find what’s hidden underneath. The gaudy yellow color of the original wood, the one that’s been covered because it fits better this way. I lay back down and close my eyes, and when I open them to look up I’m blinded. White hot lights glare down on me, and my eyes have to adjust before I can see past them, into the dark black mess of cables and beams that makes up the heavens of a theater. If a theater has a heaven, I muse, then heaven must have a theater. And I bet they put on all the great ones up there, I bet they’ve got the original cast of Shakespeare’s plays working with the likes of people like me to create beautiful art. And I bet they sing like angels, better than angels, dark and raspy when they want and then high and light like a dragon fly dancing on a breeze. Music that reaches all the way down here, in the rushes of rivers and the cries of owls, that speaks to us through the whispers of the wind and the way trees moan during a storm.
Carrying around this lie about my voice has made my toes like lead and I don’t think I can move. It’s seeping up my ankles and into my shins, liquid stone running through my bones and veins and weighing me down. Great slabs of granite and chunks of marble. A cement truck, its contents spilled across my body. Heavy bags of sand that line the Mississippi River when it floods, that’s what my legs feel like. Nodules, the pebbles and rocks taunt as they bashed into my knee caps. The voice that I’m remembering is the doctor’s. Vocal Nodules, in his I know what I’m saying and I know it’s hard to hear voice. Never sing? Is the question that reverberated in my mind.
           “Are you going to sing or not?” I look up, startled, a deer caught in headlights. There’s a guy in the lighting booth, and he pulls the spotlight onto me.
           “Any requests?” I call out to him. I was no longer just carrying around a secret in my pocket; I had taken it out and draped it over me, a scarf of the ugliest colors, and rank of lies.
           “Something from the show. Something pretty.” He comes down and sits at the piano.
           “Do you know how to play?” He nods and begins one of my favorite pieces. I opened my mouth, and like a hurricane, I let fly a whirlwind of scratchy notes. Surprise darkens both our faces; I blush with all the elegance of a school girl.
        “Um, I have…vocal nodules,” I whisper. To me it’s like admitting to murder, like I killed my vocal chords and buried them in my basement.
        “Any chance you’ll get better?”
        “I really, really hope so.” I sit down at the piano bench next to the guy from the lighting booth. The keys don’t look so terrible when they’re being played by confident hands, hands spattered with calluses and ready to accompany a singer on their journey through the measures. Maybe center stage isn’t where it’s at. I placed my hands on middle C. Gently, I pressed down.