Second Annual Wild Violet Writing Contest Winners (2004)
Fiction
— Third Place
What
it Might Mean
By Sara Beth Jonassen
(continued)
There she is, a golden sun in the darkened theater!
Her body solid and spherical like a sun. Trunks of arms and legs emanating from the center, like rays of light. A large, womanly center. A deep and steady core, I think, sitting in the darkness, looking up at my big sister on the stage, squinting at her brightness.
On stage, Joanna is BIG! Bigger than the shipwrecking storm in this play, bigger than the tempest itself. My big sister — big arms raised, face beaming in the spotlight. A consummate Ceres, Goddess of the Earth. My big sister. BIG! Dressed for the role: a skimpy, thin-strapped chiffon dress the color of flesh, garnished with bunches of grapes, leaves, and a small monkey, some earthy debris. On Joanna’s head: a flaxen crown made of wheat stalks, like the kind she’d weave for us as children out of the long, silky-green grasses upstate. On her beautiful round face, a smile that could, verily, as Shakespeare might say, materialize some spirit-paradise on earth. Ceres, my big sister, is the great big Earth today, at this, her last matinee.
At the diner on Second Avenue and 44th Street, Joanna and I sit with our dad, wait for our burger deluxes, and discuss The Tempest.
“According to the reviewer, the fairies were the best part,” Joanna says, slightly on-edge, angry even, though she should be giddy, happy, saying this with a “Ceres smile.” “Yeah, I know,” our dad says, “You were terrific, Jo, really, terrific.”
I look at my big sister from across the table, tell her she was amazing too, but she deflects the remark immediately, turning her head, nibbling at her raw cuticles.
It is hard for me to say what I want to say to Joanna, and this has been the case for as long as I can remember. Me, the little sister, not knowing how to tell her how marvelous I think she is, how out of context in our world, how undervalued as an actor, how beautiful up on stage, like a large sun with thick rays. How I adored her bedroom as a child, how I always sought it out. How it was always filled with fun objects: toys, dolls, hats, scarves, feather boas, tap shoes, ballet slippers, Playbills, theater masks. And music — Broadway soundtracks oscillating around the lavender-painted walls. She should’ve been suspended on that stage, I think, in an utopian paradise; encircling men, hanging bunches of grapes over their bearded-faces, power at her fingertips, her big body powdered and sparkly like that.
“Was there anyone in the play you didn’t like?” Joanna asks me now. When she speaks, without being Ceres, it sounds slumberous and ineffectual, like she’d rather be smoking a cigarette or eating her cheeseburger already instead of asking me about the play. And its not that Joanna isn’t interested in my opinion, I can tell. She asks it like one whose energy is used up, that’s all. From withholding something colossal, something that at every moment threatens to burst forward, into flames.
“You were, by far, the best part,” I say and it sounds dorky and inarticulate, the way I knew it would, like I’m 13 again, and Joanna is still my hero, and I want to cry all of a sudden — and that pisses me off! Just like a baby. Right here in this diner on Second Avenue between 43rd and 44th.
“Oh, really.” Joanna’s lips purse tightly, curl up at the corners, not with a flirty “Ceres grin” but with a kind of taut anxiety. Her blue-gray eyes roll back; toss around in their knotted-up sockets like insomniacs in blue bedclothes. I feel that there is no way to look in her blue-blue eyes; even though I am looking into her blue-blue eyes. They don’t stay still on me. Rather, they accidentally crash into me from time to time. I sip my soda and wait for those happy accidents, when I see inside of Joanna so far — so deep — it strips me down to her level of terror. “I’m just glad it’s finally over,” she says.
