Wake up before the buzzer. Shove alarm clock across the room. Wipe eyes. Imagine being alone in a hotel room where no one wants anything from you. Buck up. Suck it up. Remember you’re sleeping on the pull-out sofa while your two children share the only bedroom in the only apartment you can afford since the divorce. Try and forget you were ever married. The apartment’s beautiful with 15-foot ceilings and hardwood floors and a totally renovated kitchen, but again one bedroom. Contemplate doing Pilates, yoga or weight training. You’re forty-five and perimenopausal, you need to do it. Fuck it. You lift your aching bones off the bed. 6:45a.m. Put away sheets, covers. Make coffee. Put the cereal box on the table, maybe a couple of bananas and a pint of milk. Yes, you all still drink cow’s milk even though it’s probably causing cancer and acne and IBS. You are from West Virginia after all. Raised on biscuits. Wake kids up at 7:30a.m. Enough time to hustle out by 8:15a.m. The thirteen and four-year-old move as if slogging through slime. When you finally make it out of the apartment and onto Fort Washington, you avoid fighting with the prepubescent one. School is 0.6 miles away. You steer your four-year-old away from large piles of dog shit. Dodge cars, bicycles, scooters, strollers, people stumbling towards their next high on the steps of the church. Drop kids at 8:23a.m. exactly so that no one (said 13-year-old) has a nervous breakdown. Remember not to use the words crazy or bonkers or lunatic, even though you were raised in the 90’s. Avoid having your own nervous breakdown as you remember that you forgot their water bottles and lunch and so they could dehydrate to death and will be forced to eat a wildly soggy or overly hard slice of pepperoni pizza, which is also definitely causing a listeria outbreak or cancer or disease or…pause. Check watch, phone, stoplight. Check your breath, heart rate, lung capacity, brain waves. 8:45a.m. Board the A train to 42nd street to West Side Studios. 18th floor. Rehearsal 10-1p.m. You only have enough money to reserve the space for three hours each day before you have to get to work to teach theater to kids. Warm up. Unique New York. Unique New York. You know you need Unique New York. Red leather, yellow leather. The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue. Stretch, bend, dance, run, laugh, wheel, wild. Remember you trained your whole life for this. Remember it matters. Theatre. Art. The truth. Remember why you wrote the show in the first place.
End rehearsal late and rush to the D train. Crowded now. Packed. People sleeping and drooling. Migrant mothers with babies strapped to their backs selling candy bars and chiclets. People hustled tight together. Stalled. Delayed. Cops with shoulders crossed. Cops eating donuts. Cliché after cliché. You fall asleep at 125th street and your neighbor jostles you awake at 167th. Bound out of the train and race to the corner of 165th and Washington Avenue. 15 minutes door-to-door if you run. Shin splints, aching ankles. Did you forget you are forty-five now? Slow down. You make it in twenty-three minutes. You’re late again, the supervisor tells you. Apologize profusely. Tell her the train was stalled. Delayed. Your after-school theatre kids show up. 3p.m. They are rowdy, ready and hungry. They are teen-aged and drama and soda filled. They don’t care what you look like. They care about trust. About honesty. They somehow seem to care less and less about social media. You trust these kids most of all. Twenty total. They show up every week. Three days a week to make devised theatre. You get to it. 5:30p.m. Run out to the D train again. Twenty-seven minutes this time. You are lagging. You are getting older every minute. Reframe. You are aging beautifully. You are spectacular. You are not sure that positive thinking actually works. But you are trying. Make the D train by 6p.m. Take the D to 145. Walk up what feels like 1,247 stairs. Actually seventy-five. But still. Transfer to the A train that goes from 145th to 168th. Get out early to pick up one lamb gyro and two falafel plates from the Halal Guys. They know you by name. It’s somewhat embarrassing but at least it’s food from your people. Your mom would be proud. Ask for extra vegetables and even though that’s mostly fried onions, convince yourself you’ve got your children’s best interests at heart. Speed the seven blocks home. Your kids are sitting still in front of the television. Their faces a highlighted glow. How long have they been home? Check your watch. An hour, ninety minutes tops. You check closer. They are both showered. Nothing educational is on, but nothing horrifying either. You don’t throw your hands up in despair or weep into the dark night sky. You call them to the table. And you smell their clean, wet hair and you hold both of their small bodies to your own and you know that life is just one disaster away from ending all the fucking time. But not tonight. You are all lucky enough to still be breathing. You all sit and share a meal together. Before you collapse and hope to god that you get to do it all again. Tomorrow.
* * *
Willa arrives early for the audition. The hallways flooded with actors preening and pouting in front of their phone cameras; a hip bone plastered here and a jut of collarbone there. Willa took three deep breaths, pretending that stretching didn’t hurt her aging hips and rolled her shoulders back. She was gonna rock this audition. When they called her name, she was more than ready.
“Yes. My name is Willa. It’s lovely to meet you.”
“That’s a unique name,” the casting director looks at the two others looking down at their clipboards. They glance up briefly and then check the fuck out.
“My name is Chloe. This is Anna and Devon.”
Willa nods a hello.
“Hi. Nice to meet you all. And yes, Willa is a family name. My mom is from West Virginia and Kentucky. A true Appalachian. She named me after her mama Winifred. Definitely different.” The casting director makes eyes at the others and smiles to herself.
“Well, could you go ahead and stand in front of camera number one and tell us a little bit about yourself?”
Willa needed this role. It was a part in a sitcom. What’s the call exactly: sexy middle-aged mother? Stoic grandmother? The money would be steady. Theatre could be good for reputation, but not for the retirement account. At each audition, Willa felt like there were still doors that could open. They were on the 35th floor. She looked out at the whole of Manhattan, in all its complicated chaotic beauty, spread wide before her. A city she’d been traversing for the last several weeks trying to find “the best” public high school for her kid. She eyeballed the private schools along both the upper west and east sides, gave them a silent middle finger. She could even see all the way uptown toward Washington Heights and Inwood—her home; the place she felt most secure, even if that’s not what her ex-husband Bryan envisioned for his first two kids. She never should have married a Bryan with a Y.
She took a breath in and looked at Chloe, Anna, and Devon. Congratulated herself for remembering their names.
“My name is Willa Harris, and I’m originally from West Virginia, but have been living in New York City—Washington Heights to be exact, for the last 25 years. My roots are from Assyria, Ireland, and Italy. My mom is Middle Eastern, maybe you can tell? I mean, I know I look White but I consider myself mixed-race and that complicates the way I see the world and the way it sees me.”
She doesn’t look up because she has said these words before.
“Let’s see… I’m a former waitress and hostess, current teaching artist with several nonprofit arts in education programs and teach a couple of adjunct theatre classes at City College and am currently working on a project about school choice…” Willa hears a sharp sucking in of breath. She pauses, looks up, and at this moment, all eyes are on her.
“School choice?” Devon asks. He puts his clipboard down and looks directly at Willa. “For colleges or…”
“Oh, no. I am working on a solo show about school choice for kids who live in the city applying to public schools because that system is…basically fucked. I…have a soon to be 9th grader and a soon to be kindergartener, and I’ve been interviewing other families who like me are in this race to figure out the best options and frankly I’m wore out.”
That’s what her granny used to say, and suddenly she wished she could sit out of this race and go home. Just for a spell. She longed for the quiet. But there were no off-off Broadway stages, no auditions for sitcom pilots or national commercials, no snake-lines of actors waiting for their big break in West Virginia. Just massive mountains, winding country roads, gas stations stocked with beef jerky and homemade biscuits. Goddammit. She missed those biscuits.
Willa realizes they asked her to tell them about herself and she forgot she was auditioning for a role. But she didn’t care. She wanted them to know who she wanted to be in the world. They either took it, or they didn’t. They either wanted to know more, or they’d send her away with a thank you.
They all stare back at her now. Fully rapt. At attention. Focused. Clear.
“Oh my god!” Anna says. “We have a soon to be four-year-old. I hear you, loud and clear. Applying to school is so messed up, made to keep so many of our children out.”
Devon looks at her, and Willa can see him grab Anna’s hand quietly under the table.
“What?” Anna sneers at Devon. “We’ve been arguing about what is the best fit for our four-year-old. It’s totally absurd but it’s real.”
Willa nods.
“Thank goodness, I don’t have kids,” Chloe adds, looks at the clock on the wall and is ready to continue with the audition.
“We live in Brooklyn, and it all depends on where the lines are drawn if your kid is zoned or not or gonna get into the specialized school or the art specific school or the fancy Oak Street Nursery program which is a pipeline for the even fancier Friends Academy which only does early family interviews with the Oak Street Nursery families…”
Anna looks at Willa as if she has the answers. She does not.
“Don’t you want the best for your kids?” Devon asks. Clearly this is something that he and Anna have been arguing about. And Willa understood that she may have blown the audition but was getting some really good material for her solo show. She had been looking for more from the point of view of elite Brooklynites.
“I want the best for all kids,” Willa said. “I don’t want the best for my kids if it means the worst for your kids. But some people only think of their own kids.”
Nobody says anything so she continues. “Family interviews, standardized tests, portfolios and admissions tests all have to do with proving you’re better than someone else. And it’s not just schools. It’s housing and red lining and determining where people live and where they pay taxes and how their kids are schooled and by who and the demographics of who is included and who’s not. That’s the whole reason the ‘Ivy League’ exists. Whose Ivy League? What does that even mean?”
“Come on,” Devon says suddenly, looking right at Willa now. “You can’t be serious. I went to Brown. It’s called the Ivy League for a reason.”
“What’s the reason?” Anna asks.
“They’re top-ranking institutions around the world, Anna. You’re talking highly competitive academics, world class sports, a rich history of elite…”
“That’s it! Elite. I don’t want our daughter to be pressured at four years old to be part of some elite bullshit cohort that exists to make others feel like shit.”
Willa nods. If only she could take her phone out and start recording this conversation.
“You think going to NYU gave you a leg up,” Anna says, looking at Chloe, and you,” she keeps on, eyes on Devon now, “you think that going to Brown gave you a leg up? I went to SUNY Purchase. A state school, where I got enough scholarships and got out almost debt free and look at the three of us. Sitting here doing the same exact job. Right?” Chloe and Devon nod in agreement. “So, who is the sucker in this situation?”
“According to the world…it’s you. Since you don’t have a bumper sticker or a shirt or a tote bag that says Ivy League for Life or Ivy League or Bust. Right?” Willa says.
Willa starts to laugh a little. She’s definitely not getting this job. She knows it. Maybe she lost the gig with her name or all the school choice talk or maybe it’s when they realized she was an actual forty-five-year-old woman with two kids and not one that still looked thirty…no, twenty-seven. Often she was the only one with wrinkles or strands of gray hair. An anomaly in the business. A total freak show eventually. But still, she held onto the hope that women would eventually be able to grow older on camera. She wanted to look in the mirror and see a body and a face that had been through something. She wanted a face that could rage and weep. One that could be radical in its love and twisted with its fury. Complicated and ugly. She wanted to be able to be fucking ugly and not give a shit about fillers or Botox or things that puffed you up or exploded you or thinned you down or whatever the hell it was supposed to do to fix you. She did not want to be fixed after all. And she wanted to be someone who told the truth when it mattered and when it didn’t. Just someone who showed up and said what needed to be said. Most of all, she wanted to have an opinion.
“We should really get started,” Chloe says, smiling just slightly as if she was already trying not to damage her face with too much expression.
Take one – Hello my name is Willa Harris.
* * *
Image by Yasmin Santana
