Main > Series > Chapters > Fame Annual 1984 > Nuts

Reardon clapped his hands and the rehearsal stopped. “Doris,” he said patiently, placing his arms gently round her shoulders, “the part you're supposed to be playing is a housewife about to flip her lid, right?”

     “Right,” agreed Doris.

     “She's had it up to here.” Reardon mad a stiff salute to his eyes. “She's been scratching and scraping for nearly forty years to keep body and soul together. Her husband can't hold down a job. She can hardly bear to be in the same room as him.”

     “You know the feeling,' said Doris, flashing Danny a smile.
 
     “Her kids never write to her, the neighbours never speak, they've stopped her credit at the grocery store all she ever sees on TV is bad news and violence. This woman has had enough, right?”

     “Right,” agreed Doris again. Reardon allowed himself a theatrical roll of the eyes.

     “Then why are you playing her like she was on a first date with Al Pacino?”

     “You got me there. I supposed, well - I know that this is what acting is all about but - I don't know what it's like to be old, defeated, without hope.”

     “You don't know what it's like to date Al Pacino either,” said Danny.

     Reardon ignored him.

     “Observation, Doris,” he explained, and suddenly his whole body slumped. “Her legs hurt. Her hips hurt. She's carried too many shopping bags in her time. Her expression is pinched -”

     “Where from?”

     “Her expression is pinched, means, hurt. But -” And here, with unusual accuracy, Reardon mimed an elderly lady climbing stairs with an armful of shopping and backache. “She still has her pride. The world may have left her out of its plans, but she's still in there pitching.” He stood up straight and addressed himself to the whole class. “You can learn just so much from books, but your biggest and best reference library is right outside the window. They're all out there, the heroes, the villains, the saints and the crazy men, the desperate, the caring, the unfeeling, the lost, the beaten, the brave - all you've got to do is look.”

     “And make sure they don't catch you doing it,” muttered Danny.

     It was cold when Doris got to Central Park that weekend, but she didn't let it put her off. She was there to work, to observe, to improve her craft, to draw from the deep well of human experience some nugget of truth - and it was a pretty good chance to show off her new woolly hat. She'd already been whistled at twice and the young man with the deely boppers had been extremely pleasant right up to the moment he'd tried to steal her watch.

     Her first stop was the Bethesda Fountain. A gang of greasers sat drinking nearby, acting surly. A shaven-headed woman in an immaculate three piece suit danced barefoot in front of them. Lovers kissed. Families shared picnics. Children squabbled and played. Two men on skateboards, backed by an all-girl acoustic band, sang about the perils of eating meat. An old man with dark glasses handed Doris a badge that had on it a mushroom cloud and the words HECK NO - WE WON'T GLOW. “Now let me take a picture,” he said, fastening the badge to the lapel of Doris's coat. “You look awful pretty in that hat.”

     He raised his camera and took a shot of Doris standing by the fountain.

     “You an actress?” he asked. “You've got something about you, you know?”

     “You really think so?”

     “Sure,” he said, peeling off the covering to the instant picture. “That'll be five bucks.”

     “What?”

     “Five bucks - c'mon, it's a good picture. Five bucks.”

     Doris started walking away.

     The man grabbed her arm. “What do you think I am? A charity? Five bucks, lady!”

     “I haven't got five bucks.”

     “I should have known it,” snarled the man, ripping the photograph into small bits and stamping on them. “You're too fat to have class! You hear that, pear-drop? Go on! Get out of here!”

     Doris was only too pleased to. She made her way down to Conservatory Lake and watched the courting couples in their rowing boats trying to avoid the presence of a giant canoe crammed with young men and women with green Mohican haircuts and identical green jackets, who were trying to capsize every boat that came near them.

     “You wanna buy a watch?

     “Huh?”

     “You wanna buy a watch, girl?”

     The speaker was a sallow skinned girl of around Doris's age.

     “No.”

     “C'mon - they're good watches.” She pulled up her sleeve. There were seven different watches strapped to her arm.

     “What's the time?” asked Doris.

     “Hey! C'mon - these are good watches!”

     “What's the time?”

     The girl peered at the watch with the largest face and then pulled her sleeve down.

     “It's a quarter to,” she said.

     “A quarter two what?” asked Doris.

     “I said it was a quarter to,” she said indignantly, turning to leave. It was twelve twenty.

     Doris made for the zoo, passing a group of long-haired bearded men playing what seemed to be tennis, but with no racket and no ball. She stopped briefly to listen to a man in a loin cloth denouncing New York's archaic betting laws, and she felt a warm glow when the driver of a horse-drawn cab raised his hat to her and bowed as he passed.

     At the zoo, Doris pulled faces at the monkeys and laughed out loud when she saw a little boy pulling his tongue out at a snake. A man with an easel sat before an empty cage, telling anyone who would listen that he was the son of a sabretoothed tiger. At the café, she bought herself a glass of milk.

     For nearly an hour, Doris watched the visitors to the zoo. At the next table, two impossibly thin model girls drank cokes and ate double cheeseburgers with all the trimmings. From the snatches of conversation that came her way, it seemed to Doris that the main trouble with their lives was the differing colour of the upholstery inside their boyfriends' otherwise identical limousines.

     Doris turned her attention to the parade of families, friends, loners and freaks who ignored the DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS signs, until her observations were interrupted by an extremely young boy with a green baize cloth who came and sat at her table, talking fast in a language Doris could not place.

     “Yes?” said the boy, spreading the green cloth out before Doris. On it were marked drawings of several cards bearing symbols - hearts, diamonds, club, spades, a pelican and a skull and crossbones. The boy began a long monologue that Doris found incomprehensible.

     “Yes?” said the boy again, producing some dice from his pocket.

     “No,” said Doris.

     “The boy threw the dice and stared at them like a witch doctor studying bones. Doris finished her milk.

     “A dollar - yes?” said the boy, ppointing first to the dice and then to the skull and crossbones.

     “No,” said Doris, getting up to go.

     “A dollar!” said the boy. “A measly dollar!” He held out one hand and began folding up the cloth with the other.

     “Get lost, shrimp,” said Doris, picking up her bag and making to leave. “I don't have a dollar.”

     The boy wasn't listening. He was approaching a silver-haired couple in matching crimplene suits. Doris walked to a bench and pulled out her sandwiches while three middle-aged men did wheelies on their bicycles in front of her.

     As Doris ate her cucumber sandwiches she began to wonder if she had made the right decision joining the School of the Arts. Sure, the performing arts were an important mirror on mankind's aspirations and failings, an illumination of people's hopes and fears, but . . . Her attention was drawn by a quick scurrying movement on the ground to her right.

     It was a small grey squirrel. One of its eyes was covered by a milky film and most of the hair on its haunches was missing. It stared at Doris with its one good eye, and when Doris held out a piece of lettuce it scampered forward.

     “Here you are,” said Doris, holding out the lettuce close to the squirrel's mouth.

     The squirrel ignored it and sank its teeth deep into Doris's hand.

     “Hey! Let go!” shouted Doris, pulling her hand away. The squirrel let go and ran off. Doris looked at the blood oozing from the wound between her thumb and her forefinger.

     “Ungrateful little rat!” she hissed, as the squirrel climed a tree. Doris wrapped her hand in her handkerchief and went back to the zoo to buy something to put on it. The first person she saw was a young zoo attendant with blonde hair and black eyes.

     “You did what?” he asked, when Doris had explained what had happened.

     “I was feeding this squirrel and -”

     “Has nobody told you not to feed the squirrels without gloves?” the man asked angrily.

     “My name's Doris,” said Doris.

     “Kirk,” said the man. “Kirk Walters. You got any money?”

     “No.”

     “Come with me then.”

     Kirk took Doris down to a hospital on 42nd street. On the way, he gave her the low-down on squirrel bites. “There's rabies of course, and lockjaw . . . not to mention Bu.”

     “Bu?”

     “Bubonic plague,” Kirk explained, opening his car door and pointing the way to the hospital waiting room. “It's not impossible. And typhod, tetanus, cholera - have you had your injections?”

     Doris wasn't sure. The only thing she wanted to do was go home. Kirk sat her on a bench in the waiting room and went to find a doctor. On one side of her was a bearded man in tennis shorts, and on the other was an enormous woman with a star tattooed on her forehead and a Mickey Mouse hat on her head. “Don't ever touch my bag.” she said softly.

     “I won't,” said Doris nevously.

     The woman had no bag.

     Kirk came back with a nurse who was carrying a blow full of clear liquid. “Soak your finger in this,” said the nurse.

     Doris placed her finger in the bowl and two policemen came over with a nosy, thin, leather-jacketed girl handcuffed between them.

     “The nurse says you were bitten by a squirrel,” said one.

     “That's right,” answered Doris.

     “Could you identify the squirrel if you saw it again?”

     Doris stifled a scream, picked up her back and ran home.

     The following Monday, having been reassured by her mother's doctor that she was not about to drop dead, Doris was back in drama class reading a part with Julie and Coco.

     “It's no good, Mr. Reardon,” she said. “This part is too thin. The person doesn't exist. She's anaemic. She's just there to help the plot along.”

     “I agree the part is not one of Miller's best,” said Reardon, “but it's up to you to flesh it out. That's acting.”

     You think a change of costume would make a part more meaty?” asked Doris.

     “Yeah,” said Danny. “Designer jeans - by Moby Dick.”

     Reardon sighed. “It's not costume that makes up a character,” he said. It's what's inside. Dress can be an extension of somebody's character, but it can also be a disguise. The fact that dress is a readily-accepted status indicator means that it is open to subversion and manipulation.”

     “You're saying that a man dressed like a tramp could just as easily be a bank president?”

     “I'm saying we must try and break away from the general assumptions about how people dress.”

     “I always put my socks on last,” said Danny.

     Doris was looking puzzled. “Mr. Reardon,” she began. “What do you make of a grown man who stands on a soap box in the freezing cold wearing only a loin cloth?”

     “Huh?”

     “Or a group of boys and girls with matching Mohican haircuts - green? Hippies that play tennis with no rackets or balls? Model girls who do nothing but eat and bicker? Women with Mickey Mouse hats and stars tattooed on their forehands? Bald barfoot women in three piece suits?”

     “It's probably an affirmation of their individual -” Reardon paused. “Didyou say a loin cloth? In this weather?”

     Doris nodded.

     “Green hair? Starts?”

     “Yep.”

     “Nuts.”

     “That's what I thought,” Doris affirmed. “Nuts.”