“Papa, can I go to the cinema with Anna this evening?” Beatrice asked at the breakfast table. Her mother stopped eating mid mouthful and her father lowered his newspaper.
“Anna and I wanted to go to the cinema, can I go?” Beatrice asked again.
Her father slowly folded his newspaper and laid it on the table.
“No,” he said.
“What? Why not?” she protested.
“I don’t want you going to the cinema,” he responded calmly.
“But everyone else does! There’s nothing wrong with it, why won’t you let me go?”
“It’s out of the question Beatrice, I won’t have you going to places like that. It’s not appropriate for a girl of your age. It’s simply out of the question.” He reopened his newspaper signaling that the conversation was over.
Beatrice finished her breakfast in silence and headed off to her school, a large brick building. In front of the school she met her friend, Anna.
“So,” Anna asked. “Did they say yes?”
“Not really, but it should be alright.” Beatrice said as they entered the school. “We can still go to the cinema, like we planned.”
“Actually,” Anna said, pulling a crumpled pamphlet out of her school bag. “I had a better idea.”
***
“It will be fun!” she whispered to her over and over again throughout the school day. “They dress up in glamorous costumes and tell thrilling stories about romance and murder and all sorts. And everyone will be beautiful, they don’t let you go on the stage unless you're gorgeous.”
Beatrice remained reluctant. “We should go to the talkies,” she protested. “I don’t want to watch a play.”
“Come on, it’s no fun if I go on my own. And anyways, the cinema costs 35 cents, and this only costs 25.” That decided it. Beatrice relented and took the wrinkled pamphlet that Anna had been waving at her all day.
At least, she thought, my parents wouldn’t approve. That made the play seem a little exciting. “What even is a ‘Macbeth”, she asked, reading off of the pamphlet.
“It’s a play, everyone knows that.”
“But what’s it about?”
“I don’t know, but it’s famous, so it has to be good.”
And so, instead of sitting expectantly in front of a large screen with an absurd amount of popcorn waiting for a talkie to start, Beatrice found herself on an uncomfortable seat in a musty, almost empty theater waiting for Macbeth to begin.
Behind her, rows and rows of mostly empty chairs rose, covered in the same faded red velvet as the one she was sitting in. The velvet of Beatrice’s chair was threadbare and worn and smelling of must. It stretched over a hard cushion, seemingly designed specifically for discomfort. In front of Beatrice, long stained curtains hung from the rafters, obscuring the stage behind. The lamps lining the theater walls were dusty, casting only a dim pool of light onto the seats. Beatrice could see specks of dust floating through the dim light, little disturbed by drafts. Besides her, Anna sat, wriggling with anticipation.
“Bea, they’re starting!” Anna whispered, squirming in her seat. The dusty electric lights were switched off and a bright spotlight shone onto the closed curtains. When the spotlight was adjusted to shine onto the middle of the stage, something squealed from the back of the theater. When Beatrice twisted around to see the source of the noise, she could faintly make out a mechanical apparatus supporting the spotlight, manned by a figure dressed all in black.
Slowly, the curtains began to open, their movement stirring up the air and sending eddies of dust through the bright beam of the spotlight. Emerging from behind the curtain, three women appeared. They were dressed in draping rags, giving them the appearance of large shabby birds. Their faces were heavily lined and smudged. Beatrice shivered. And then the women began to talk. Though all their words were most definitely English, their arrangement, combined with the several words that Beatrice had never heard before, rendered the language almost incomprehensible. Beatrice looked over at Anna, who was wearing the same bemused expression as Beatrice was sure her own face was exhibiting.
“What are they saying?” she whispered to Anna.
Anna shrugged, her brow wrinkled and eyes squinting at the stage before them.
Beatrice slouched lower into her seat as the actors’ manners and voices became more dramatic. She vaguely wondered what was happening and who the characters were.
As the scene unfolded, Beatrice remained entirely bemused. The speech remained incomprehensible, their appearances unsettling and creepy.
The scene ended and the lights lowered, followed by a spattering of applause. Anna’s eyes had glazed over, and she was staring blankly at the wooden embellishments above the stage. She, too, had not understood what was happening. `
“You said this would be fun,” Beatrice whispered to Anna. “I don’t even understand what they’re saying.”
“Neither do I,” Anna muttered back. “Come on, let’s leave.” She moved to stand up, but at that moment, the lights came back up, and she was compelled to sit back down.
And so, Beatrice and Anna continued to watch Macbeth. Anna, bored and confused, clearly wanting to leave but never finding a polite time to do so, finally gave up and contented herself with absentmindedly picking at a loose thread hanging off of the velvet seats.
Beatrice had almost drifted off when a cough from the audience jerked her back awake. The three hags that had opened the play were on stage again, flocking like ravens around a big black cauldron. They chanted in a rhythmic, sing song voice
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Their voices rasped and grated, sending shivers down Beatrice's back. One of them called out above the others.
Fillet of a fenny snake
In the cauldron boil and bake.
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blindworm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Then, together they chanted once more.
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
The witches swirled and swooped, chanting and shouting around their black pot. When a man entered, they flocked around him, screeching and cawing. He spoke to them in the fancy, flourishing, incomprehensible speech again, and the women responded in verse. Beatrice’s breath was coming faster now, as her eyes flitted between each ragged woman. She felt drawn towards the stage inexplicably. The beam of the spotlight streamed onto the old crones, throwing dark shadows behind them, and sinking their eyes and mouths into deep shadows. When they shrieked and cawed, Beatrice jumped and started, until she felt that every time the witches breathed, she herself inhaled. They swarmed and circled, their ominous chanting growing louder and more dramatic, until, with a flash of light and a clap of thunder that shook Beatrice to the bones, the theater went dark and silence fell. When the lights rose again, the three women had disappeared, and on the stage a single man stood alone.
Beatrice leaned over to Anna. “What was that?” she whispered, still shocked by the sudden disappearance of the witches.
Anna blinked at her blearily, the roll of thunder had woken her. “Hmm?” she asked. “What was what?” She had slept through the entire scene.
Beatrice kept alert after that, waiting for the witches to return to the stage, until the curtains closed and the dusty lights lining the aisles flickered back on.
“Is it over?” Anna asked.
“It can’t be,” Beatrice said.
“About time,” Anna said, standing up and stretching. “You were right, we should have gone to see a talkie.”
“Wait,” said Beatrice, picking up the program from where it had fallen. “Look here, that was only the first half. This is an intermission, not the end.”
Anna shrugged. “Regardless, let's go before it starts again. I don’t want to have to sit through any more of that. I mean, you couldn’t even understand what they were saying.”
Beatrice followed Anna out of the old theater without protesting, but she folded the program she still had clutched in her hand, and slipped it into the pocket of her overcoat.
It was late, and the sun had set behind the tall buildings of New York City, leaving the streets lit only by the glow of luminaries.
Beatrice and Anna parted ways at the corner of Beatrice’s street. They lived only a block apart in tall, brownstone townhouses. Beatrice hurried the last block and ran up the front steps to her apartment.
Inside, her parents were sitting around their round kitchen table. Her mother was knitting, and her father was once more reading a yiddish newspaper. Looking up from her knitting, Beatrice’s mother frowned. “It’s rather late,” she said.
“Yes,” Beatrice said.
“Where have you been?” her mother asked.
“Um, I was over at Anna’s, we were studying -uh- Geography.”
This time it was her father who responded. “At Anna’s,” he said incredulously.
“Yes.”
“You want me to believe that you were at Anna’s all afternoon and evening.”
“Yes.”
“And if I asked Mrs. Roth if you spent all afternoon and evening with her daughter, at her house, she would say yes?”
“Yes.”
“Beatrice, I was very clear!” her father snapped. “I told you that you could not go to the cinema!”
“I didn’t! Really!” Beatrice said. “Like I said, I was at Anna’s.”
“Beatrice, I am not stupid. You clearly went to the cinema like I expressly told you not to. That is unacceptable. I made myself very clear.”
“But Papa –”
“No, Beatrice, I am not happy with you. I do not want you going to the cinema, and I do not want you wandering around New York City alone at night.”
“But I wasn’t alone. I was with Anna!” Beatrice immediately regretted speaking and the look of triumph in her father’s eyes at her admission only strengthened her regret.
“I am not happy with you,” he repeated, more calmly now. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
Beatrice lowered her eyes in defeat and fixed them on the cuff of her father’s pants. “I’m sorry Papa,” she muttered.
He nodded in satisfaction and dismissed her to go to her room. As her bedroom door closed behind her, she heard her mother say in a low, resigned voice. “It’s only the cinema.”
***
In her room, Beatrice lay in her bed, staring at her cracked ceiling. A gap in her curtains sent a sliver of light from the street into her room, forming crisscrosses with the ceiling cracks. Beatrice stared at the beam of light, imagining specks of dust dancing in the light. Out of her pocket she pulled the crumpled program that she had stuffed in, running her fingers along the long list of names printed below CAST. Matthew Smith, Felix Bywater, Samuel Johnson, Mary Edwards,...
Scrambling out of bed, Beatrice dug through her book bag until she found the stub of a pencil. The point was worn completely down, so Beatrice gnawed on the tip until she could write with it. At the bottom of the program, beneath the long list of names, Beatrice wrote her own name, Beatrice Mandell. She stared at the list. Matthew Smith, Felix Bywater, Samuel Johnson, Mary Edwards, John Brian, Emma Hunter, Beatrice Mandell.
Her name stood out, scrawled on with the pencil. It didn’t belong with the others, with their fancy font and strong, English names. She tried to erase the written-in name, but the eraser attached to the end of her pencil was completely worn away, and the words were only smudged and scratched by her attempts. With a rising sense of irritation, Beatrice scribbled over the Beatrice Mandell, until the words could no longer be seen under the dark lines of graphite.
She tossed the graffitied program into her book bag along with the pencil nub and lay back in bed. The band of light on her ceiling seemed brighter now, stretching across her vision in a searing blast. Outside her window, the sound of the city swelled. In her ears it sounded like thunder and far off laughter. She fell asleep with the sound of cackling filling her ears.
***
The next day, Beatrice met Anna in front of their school building, amid a loud swarm of children.
“I was thinking,” Anna said, bouncing on her heels. “Today we could go to the park, get pretzels or hotdogs or something –”
“I can’t today,” Beatrice interrupted. “I have to be home.”
“Oh,” Anna looked crestfallen for a moment. “Maybe tomorrow?”
Beatrice shrugged. “Sure,” she said.
A loud, abrasive bell rang out over the sea of children, summoning them to class.
“What’s even in a hotdog?” Beatrice asked, as she and Anna mounted the front stairs of the school. “Do you think they are kosher?”
Anna shrugged. “I don’t know, but everyone eats them, so they have to be fine.”
Beatrice sat behind Anna in class. Their teacher, Miss Jenkins, had tried to separate them by moving Anna across the room, thinking it would reduce disruption in the classroom. It turned out that they would still talk to each other, but now they would speak over the heads of the other students, creating a much larger disruption than previously. So now, Anna sat directly in front of Beatrice, and Miss Jenkins ignored their chatter with an exhausted air.
Miss Jenkins stood at the front of the class, waiting impatiently. She clicked her tongue and glared at the chattering children. Anna twisted in her chair and copied Miss Jenkins’ glare, making Beatrice giggle.
When the class finally quieted down, Miss Jenkins began her lesson. She was thin and sharp, her face rigid and strict with small spectacles framing her beady eyes and a bun pulling her greying hair back. Her lessons always drove Beatrice into an angry boredom that hung over her like a cloud. The lesson was geography, and as Miss Jenkins set about writing a list of states on the board, Beatrice picked at the glaze covering the wood of her desk, a patch of which had already been scraped away by previous bored students.
Beatrice watched Miss Jenkins’ sharp elbows rise and fall, the thin fabric of her dress flapping and rippling, as her chalk squeaked on the blackboard. A thin strand of hair escaped from the grips of her bun, and fell against her thin neck. Miss Jenkins’ thin voice blended into a drone, and Beatrice’s eyes glazed over.
“Beatrice Mandel,” Miss Jenkins was glaring at Beatrice. “Could you come to the board?” Beatrice could tell that she had been asked something, but she could not remember what Miss Jenkins had said. Everyone’s eyes were on her and the class was silent, waiting and watching to see if Beatrice was about to get in trouble. “Please come to the board, Miss Mandel.” Her chair made an overly loud noise when Beatrice pushed it back to stand up. She walked slowly to the front of the classroom. When she passed Anna, they exchanged quick glances, and then she was in front of the class; thirty two pairs of eyes followed her every move.
“Are you listening now?” Miss Jenkins asked.
Beatrice nodded.
One thin eyebrow shot up on Miss Jenkins’s lined face.
“Yes, Miss Jenkins.” Beatrice muttered, her eyes glued to the floor.
“Speak up.”
“Yes, Miss Jenkins. I am listening.” Beatrice said, raising her eyes.
“Very well. Please list the six states of New England on the board for me.” Miss Jenkins held out a piece of chalk expectantly. Slowly, Beatrice took the chalk and, holding between her fingers, lifted it to the board. She could feel thirty two pairs of eyes follow the thin white lines that she drew as she slowly wrote Maine. She paused and inhaled slowly. Any nervousness or embarrassment that she had felt when taking the chalk had evaporated, replaced by the singular knowledge that everyone was watching her. Sixty-four eyes were fixed on the point where her thumb and index finger pinched together on her chalk. She could feel their eyes move, following the chalk, like dogs watching a moving piece of meat, stock still except for their roaming eyes. Beatrice wished she could do something surprising, turn into a bird, or spit fire. She wanted to hear her audience gasp all together in one massive shared breath. Instead, she raised the chalk again and calmly wrote Massachusetts. Miss Jenkins tutted, urging her to hurry up, so, without pause, Beatrice added Vermont, New Hampshire to her list of states. She glanced behind her at Anna, who, mistaking her look for a call for help, mouthed Rhode Island.
“Miss Mandel, we do not have all day.” snapped Miss Jenkins. “Kindly list the remaining New England States on the board.” But Miss Jenkins' harsh words were not enough to break the trance that Beatrice had fallen under. She slowly turned back to the chalkboard and wrote the last two states. Even the realization that she hadn’t the faintest idea of how to spell Connecticut didn’t phase her. She guessed the second half of the word, and then turned back from the chalkboard.
“Miss Smith,” Miss Jenkins said, addressing a blond girl in the first row, though still looking at Beatrice. “Would you kindly come to the board and demonstrate the correct spelling of Connecticut.”
Alice Smith, flipping her yellow pigtails behind her back, proceeded to the board. In graceful curly letters, she wrote Connecticut, correctly, with both ns and all three cs. Beatrice returned to her seat, shooting a grin at Anna in the process. Connecticut had a ridiculous spelling anyways.
Once in her seat, the exhilaration Beatrice had felt at the board faded. Her hands started to sweat and heart started to beat faster. Only once her classmates had stopped looking at her did she feel observed and self conscious. She wiped her hands against her skirt to dry them off and then returned her attention to the board, which was just as mind numbingly boring as before she had been called up.
***
Around midday, the bell rang for lunch. Anna and Beatrice sat on the steps to the school with their packed lunch, watching the students stream out as they headed home for lunch.
“We could go over to my house,” Anna said, watching Beatrice pick at her cheese sandwich. “My mother said that I could bring you over for lunch, but we only have bread and cheese there too.” Unwrapped on her lap was her own sandwich, which she had not touched.
Beatrice shrugged.
“What I really want,” Anna continued. “Is a hot dog.” She gave Beatrice a questioning look.
“I said I can’t go today, my father wants me home.”
“We could go now. Take the subway downtown and be back for afternoon class.”
“Anna, we would never make it back in time. Why do you want a hot dog so much anyway?”
“I don’t know, they look fun. Everything at my house is so dull, we never have anything interesting to eat!”
Resigning themselves to their sandwiches, Beatrice and Anna sat on the steps to their school. When they had finished their lunches, they spent the remainder of lunch hour luring pigeons towards them with crumbs from their sandwiches, only to pelt them with twigs. The pigeons were always faster than they were, dodging their projectiles with relative ease and then returning immediately to snatch up more crumbs.
After school, Anna and Beatrice parted ways at the same corner as always. Beatrice walked down her street, passing her building without a glance. She hurried to the end of her block and, turning left down the next street, she descended into the dark, echoey subway. Digging through her pocket, she extracted a nickel and dropped it in the turnstyle, which unlocked and allowed her into the inner halls of the subway. She boarded a crowded train heading downtown and rode it for a couple stops, disembarking at a larger station in the east Bronx. She emerged back into the daylight and looked up at a majestic white marble building. Jutting out from the walls, mock pillars swept gracefully upwards, supporting a tall, peaked roof, bearing the words: New York Public Library. Beatrice scurried up the marble steps, the great building looming over her. The inside of the Library was cool and dry. She entered a large room, lined with bookshelves. Though a number of people were scattered throughout the room, carrying or reading large volumes or sheafs of papers that looked very important, the room echoed with a resounding silence. Beatrice felt that her heartbeat could be heard thumping away in her chest.
With some trepidation, she approached the front desk, where a small woman with eyeglasses sat. She looked up when Beatrice approached.
“Can I help you?” she asked, looking over her glasses with a piercing quality that made Beatrice feel as if she was being surveyed by a hawk.
“Yes,” Beatrice said, trying to keep her voice as soft as she could in the hushed room. “I’m looking for a play, Macbeth.”
“You can find plays upstairs to the left, next to the art section but before history.”
Beatrice looked around the room. “Where is upstairs?” she asked.
The woman pushed her chair back from her desk and stood, walking away without another word. For a second, Beatrice thought she had annoyed her and that the woman was leaving, until she looked back and, noticing that Beatrice was not following, beckoned to her to follow.
The woman led her out of the big entrance hall, into a hallway and then up a flight of stairs where they emerged into a second room with neatly ordered rows of books dividing the room into many little boxes. The librarian disappeared into one of those rows, reemerging with an old, dusty volume in her hands.
“It should be in here, if you want to borrow the book, come to the front desk and I will check it out for you.” And with that, the woman disappeared back down the stairs, leaving Beatrice with the big dusty volume in her hands.
Beatrice looked around for a place to sit but the room was filled with only bookshelves, no chair or seat in sight, so she sat cross legged in a corner and opened the book.
It was a large book and the pages were thin and crammed with words, as if someone had tried to fit the most amount of words possible onto each page. The cover was worn and frayed, and the golden letters of the title were so faded that Beatrice had to squint to make out the words The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. On the second page, Beatrice found the table of contents. She ran her finger down the list of names until she found Macbeth written in tiny letters next to a page number.
And there it was, right in the middle of the big dusty volume, the same incomprehensible words that she and Anna had been confused by the previous day. Beatrice thumbed through the leaves of the book, skipping ahead until she found the pages where the witches began to speak. Beatrice’s eyes skimmed over their speeches. This was why she was here. She wanted to be in the presence of those women again. She wanted to feel as if the world and her breathed together, in awe of the hags’ rhymes and dances and cackles.
In front of her sat the same words that they had spoken, marching across the page. Double, double, toil and trouble. One after the other, a word, a line, another. The thrill that the words had brought in that tiny, dusty theater, was absent from them now. There was no ominous presence, no collective intake of breath. Beatrice read the scene, and then read it again, to no effect. The words remained stubbornly inert. Disappointed, Beatrice closed the book with a snap, sending a cloud of dust into the air. She returned the book to a shelf and left the library and went home.
Her parents were sitting in their usual seats around the kitchen table when she entered. Her father’s hands were empty and folded on the table in front of him, and her mother, whose back was to her, had her head bowed slightly, as if she were reading something.
At the sound of the front door closing behind Beatrice, her mother turned around.
“Beatrice, where were you last night?” she asked.
“What?” Beatrice asked.
“We thought you went to the cinema, that was bad enough, but then we found this,” her mother said, revealing what it was that she had been reading when Beatrice entered. It was the program from Macbeth that Beatrice had taken home with her. “What is this?” she asked.
“I – that’s nothing!” Beatrice stammered.
“It was on the floor of your bedroom.” her father said, joining in for the first time. “Where did you get it?”
“I – it’s just something we found. Anna and I. It doesn’t matter.”
“Where did you find it?”
“I don’t know, it was just a thing we found.”
“Why did you take it home?”
“I don’t know.”
Beatrice’s father looked at her sternly for a moment. She couldn’t tell if he believed her or not.
“I don’t want you going to institutions such as these,” he said, gesturing to the pamphlet still clutched in his wife’s hand. “I don’t want you to associate with those people, or be drawn into their cohort.”
“Why not?” Beatrice clapped her mouth shut. The question had slipped out before she had time to think.
“Beatrice, do not talk back to your father!” her mother snapped.
“It starts small, with you in the audience. But then they draw you in, catch you in their web of dissolute men and promiscuous women. You might as well apply for a job at the brothel!”
“Harry! Be decent.” her mother reprimanded.
But her father was fired up now. “This is unacceptable! I will not have you be around these people, I refuse! You will return to the theater over my dead body! From now on, when you get out of school, you will come directly home.”
“But Papa! I didn’t even –”
“No, I don’t want to hear it. Go to your room.”
Seeing that she would get no farther with her father so angry, Beatrice turned and ran to her room. The bang from the door snapping shut behind her rattled her room.
She stood in her room, her heart beating and palms sweating. How had they found that program, and why had she not been able to weasel her way out of trouble like she usually could?
Since she had returned home, dusk had fallen, and her room was purple with shadows. With three large steps, she strode over to the opposite side of the room and stood beside her only window. Outside, the almost full moon had risen above the skyline, making the black fire escape outside her window glint silver.
Moving quickly, Beatrice opened her window, forcing the heavy bottom pane up so that she could clamber out onto the spidery fire escape. Once outside, she stood up straight, her hands loosely holding the thin guardrail. A cool wind blew on her face, ruffling her hair. Below her, New York City bustled on, the street lights casting a warm glow on the street. Beatrice looked up, and, high above her, shone the moon, bathing her in light. The night was clear, and faint stars peaked out, each singularly and decidedly focused on Beatrice. The rumble of New York City retreated into the distance, becoming the low growl of thunder. The buildings, the street lights, and the distant, tiny people became watching faces, held in rapture, as the moon and the stars and the world focused on Beatrice, who stood bathed in a pool of light. She inhaled, and the whole world inhaled with her. Waiting.
About the Author:
Julia Zay is a highschool senior at Kimberton Waldorf School in Phoenixville, PA. In her free time she loves to read, write, cook, and spend time with her friends.
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