The Performance by Claire Thomas (2021)
The Performance by Claire Thomas (2021)
Chapter Three
She wishes she were more evolved, more aware and in control of the tenuous boundary between what is concealed and what is not. She thinks this leakage is a developmental flaw, that if she were properly adult and competent, she would not cry in public. She would wait and be appropriately private rather than have her feelings spill out all over her.
Ivy concentrates on the woman on the stage.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, the woman says. Did you hear that?
Yes, I heard it, Ivy thinks. It’s Shakespeare. Cymbeline.
That line’s also quoted in Mrs. Dalloway, and Ivy is fairly sure it was in another novel she read not long ago. And here it is again.
Why does she remember things like that? How does that help her with anything, in the slightest?
Can’t contain tears. Can contain detailed information about books.
Now Willie is yelling back at Winnie. Fear no more!
He is yelling back half the line, half of what she said to him, and for that, Winnie is very grateful. She appreciates his paltry efforts to engage with her words and provide a kind of response.
Why? Why is she grateful for that?
How does it help her to be grateful for that, in the slightest (55)?
Chapter Six
What’s the idea of you? What are you meant to mean?
What hideous questions to contemplate.
Winnie dismissed them as rhetorical and did not answer.
What’s the idea of you? Ivy replays the replayed question. What are you meant to mean?
No one could properly respond to that riddle when stuck and exposed under a searing sun. Ivy thinks she might have a chance of producing an answer if she were given a quiet room to reside in for a week, or a vast landscape made of gentler material, paths to move through, and plenty of shade-those environments might be conducive to existential coherence-but the harshness of this wilderness with its ceaseless glare prevents any lucid explanation.
The answer in these circumstances can only be-to endure.
The point of Winnie’s presence is to endure her presence.
The point of her here is to endure.
The point of her here is to perform her attempt at endurance.
Yes, that’s it. Nothing more than that is a possibility, under the circumstances.
Winnie is recalling that the strolling couple asked further questions, beyond the existential one Ivy is fixed on.
The woman asked, Why doesn’t he dig her out?
The man asked, What good is she to him like that?
And among the various interrogations, it is the practical question that is most bothersome to Winnie. Why doesn’t he dig her out?
Why hasn’t her companion attempted a rescue?
Is it a lack of desire or a lack of capacity or a lack of the right tool to help with the job? If there happened to be a shovel, with a retractable handle, snug inside Winnie’s black bag, would she have thrown it over to Willie by now? Could she finally capture his attention, not with her attempts to engage him in conversation, but by giving him a practical, physical task to perform? That can be an effective method for activating the ambivalent male.
Have a go at getting me out, Willie! she might have shouted. Here’s a tool from my bag!
Looking at Winnie sealed in the earth, Ivy thinks of an entrée she ordered years ago at a Michelin three-star restaurant in Paris, back when going to such a restaurant was still a shock to her, when the distance between herself and her surroundings felt anthropological, when the only way to make sense of the strangeness was to pretend she didn’t feel any strangeness and believe that she might one day relax inside such luxury.
Ivy chose to order the items from the menu she understood. I better have the betterave, she thought. At least I know what that is. She wasn’t expecting a mini Mont Blanc. The entrée arrived on a large white plate-a small white mountain of sparkling salt. The salt glinted when the waiter placed it down on the table, the candlelight catching on the bigger crystals. The waiter picked up a piece of cutlery Ivy had never seen-similar to a fish knife or a butter knife, but bigger and without a sharp edge. The waiter used the odd piece of cutlery with an elegant momentum, tapping on the salty slope and looking up to smile at the diners. After much tapping, the small salt mountain crumbled away toward the perimeter of the large white plate to reveal a steaming, glossy, whole beetroot. The waiter explained to Ivy how the vegetable had been cooked inside the salt mountain and how its flavors-and there are many flavors, you will be surprised, mademoiselle-would now reveal themselves to her. Ivy ate the whole beetroot in a few mouthfuls and felt inadequate about tasting nothing but the earthy, bloodred thing itself, and the salt. She could certainly taste the salt.
The plated mountain was the same shape as Winnie’s desiccated mound, with the same gentle gradient. If Willie took to Winnie’s mound with an appropriate shovel and gave it a few good whacks, it might crumble away and reveal the whole of her. Would Winnie be all pinkly cooked inside her mountain? Would the full spectrum of her flavors only be revealed when her entire body was exposed?
Enough, Ivy thinks. I know the play. I know what it is doing and where it is going.
Winnie’s mound will not budge even if the right implement is wielded at the right angle with the right force for the right duration. She will not be rescued or exposed. She’s stuck in the earth and the sooner we all realize that, the better. Right.
She is also stuck in time.
She must endure the torture of experiencing each second of each day, with only scant and blessed glimmers when her actions become successful distractions, when her memories are absorbing, when her tight, interminable grip on reality is relieved.
The day is long, and she feels each tick (107-10).
Chapter Seven
What horror it would be if only the mind remained-to be left with one’s incessant cognitions without the solace of the corporeal (159).
Margot’s capacity to compartmentalize has been so regularly praised that she now believes it to be one of her finest qualities. At the very least, it’s allowed her to maintain a career in an environment that is riddled with dissatisfied and highly articulate people whose concerns are prima facie rather distracting. Just this afternoon, during her meeting with the dean, Margot was asked how she felt about the casual academic staff protesting against their work conditions. She shrugged. What about the bullying accusations in chancellery? She shrugged again (165).
There is my story of course, when all else fails.
Winnie has now turned to praising the power of narrative. Well, that’s a move forward from reason.
Tell your story. But which one? We need to choose our story, and recognize it, in order to tell it to anyone else.
And then how to tell it? When to tell it?
There was such volatility between Margot and John in the early days. Adam would be surprised to learn about that.
Margot remembers one fight on a grassy nature strip only a few months after they began dating. They were crossing the road together, bickering. Before they made it to the other side, they were yelling. Margot stopped on the nature strip and stormed off along the cushiony green ground, traffic zooming past her in both directions. John jogged to her, grabbed her arm, and she spun around. They stood facing each other, possibly weeping, definitely shouting. After a few minutes of that, Margot stormed off again and walked a decent distance before she looked around to see that John had stayed in place, bent over, his palms resting on his thighs, head dropped down as though he were puffed, as though he had just finished running a race. Margot flopped onto the grass and sat, cross-armed and cross-ankled (wearing her brown mini), on the nature strip until John ambled up beside her and sat down too. It was the afternoon. They hadn’t been drinking. People filled both footpaths-the one they’d left and the one they hadn’t reached-and Margot and John had made what could only be described as a scene. Margot snapped out of the fight and realized she’d lost control in public, and that John too had lost control in public. She was twenty-three years old, mortified that she was the type of person to have a public screaming match.
But somewhere else, deeper than the embarrassment, she also sensed a tingling thrill. To feel so much and share such passion and to be-even for a few moments-the center of a real drama. This was a real love affair, she thought. This was the real thing.
Margot and John soon stopped performing their passion, unless privately, and developed a sense of public decorum. They learned to understand enough about each other so that they could choose whether to antagonize the other person, rather than it happening unintentionally through exasperated confusion. They were harmonious. People envied them their marital longevity. And Margot never again had cause to question the type of person she had become within their relationship.
Until the recent violence.
Until tonight.
Until she considered what Ivy Parker would think of the esteemed professor being hurt by her husband. Until she imagined telling her son about it at last.
So, is Margot the type of person to have public screaming matches? Yes. Is Margot the type of person to be bruised by her husband? Yes.
But what misguided questions.
Margot suspects that there is no such thing as a type of person who is more susceptible to a particular behavior. There are only situations, and we do not know what will become of us until we are inside each new one (177-9).
Chapter Nine
There have been times in Ivy’s life when a single warm sentence from another person has made the difference between wanting to die and not wanting to die that day. After Rupert, if a guy in a shop so much as handled her purchases with care or asked about her afternoon, Ivy would absorb a rush of replenishing tenderness. It wouldn’t last long, but there it was, keeping her going for another moment.
Ivy knows what a glint of kindness can do for another person, so she tries to be careful with her interactions, feeling for potential impact, choosing her words. Ivy can still be fierce or direct or rude to people, but rarely by accident.
Hilary is a mostly contented person-even-tempered, even-and Ivy complimenting her hair would likely make no difference to her overall mood. Still, Ivy can’t help weighing down such a simple thing with all these connotations. She cannot un-know what she knows about the precariousness of the human soul (205).
Ivy used to hide in the ladies during events. She often had to attend functions as the recipient of a scholarship or the participant in some enrichment program, and she would dash out of the room as soon as the speeches ended to avoid any moment of the standing-around-and-speaking-to-people part of the party. She was unable to muster up enough self-assurance to trust that she could converse with strangers. The idea of chatting to people she did not know, who might ask her questions she did not want to answer, filled her with a nauseating dread.
But something shifted when she finished uni and moved overseas, and it was such a foreign experience that she was able to turn into whatever version of young-Australian-woman-abroad that was required. Her life didn’t seem connected to reality enough to have any consequences. She learned to listen. She learned to notice. She learned to ask questions rather than waiting in fear to be asked them.
These days, she does not hide in bathrooms to avoid conversation. She isn’t so afraid of herself or other people. She likes to think she can talk about anything-a carrot finger, a relationship that is unusually skewed, a philanthropic program. Ivy still overthinks the conversations she has, and worries about getting it wrong, and stuffs up occasionally-with the usher tonight, maybe with the professor too-but she is doing it.
She is not hiding. She has not given up (224-5).
Chapter Three
She wishes she were more evolved, more aware and in control of the tenuous boundary between what is concealed and what is not. She thinks this leakage is a developmental flaw, that if she were properly adult and competent, she would not cry in public. She would wait and be appropriately private rather than have her feelings spill out all over her.
Ivy concentrates on the woman on the stage.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun, the woman says. Did you hear that?
Yes, I heard it, Ivy thinks. It’s Shakespeare. Cymbeline.
That line’s also quoted in Mrs. Dalloway, and Ivy is fairly sure it was in another novel she read not long ago. And here it is again.
Why does she remember things like that? How does that help her with anything, in the slightest?
Can’t contain tears. Can contain detailed information about books.
Now Willie is yelling back at Winnie. Fear no more!
He is yelling back half the line, half of what she said to him, and for that, Winnie is very grateful. She appreciates his paltry efforts to engage with her words and provide a kind of response.
Why? Why is she grateful for that?
How does it help her to be grateful for that, in the slightest (55)?
Chapter Six
What’s the idea of you? What are you meant to mean?
What hideous questions to contemplate.
Winnie dismissed them as rhetorical and did not answer.
What’s the idea of you? Ivy replays the replayed question. What are you meant to mean?
No one could properly respond to that riddle when stuck and exposed under a searing sun. Ivy thinks she might have a chance of producing an answer if she were given a quiet room to reside in for a week, or a vast landscape made of gentler material, paths to move through, and plenty of shade-those environments might be conducive to existential coherence-but the harshness of this wilderness with its ceaseless glare prevents any lucid explanation.
The answer in these circumstances can only be-to endure.
The point of Winnie’s presence is to endure her presence.
The point of her here is to endure.
The point of her here is to perform her attempt at endurance.
Yes, that’s it. Nothing more than that is a possibility, under the circumstances.
Winnie is recalling that the strolling couple asked further questions, beyond the existential one Ivy is fixed on.
The woman asked, Why doesn’t he dig her out?
The man asked, What good is she to him like that?
And among the various interrogations, it is the practical question that is most bothersome to Winnie. Why doesn’t he dig her out?
Why hasn’t her companion attempted a rescue?
Is it a lack of desire or a lack of capacity or a lack of the right tool to help with the job? If there happened to be a shovel, with a retractable handle, snug inside Winnie’s black bag, would she have thrown it over to Willie by now? Could she finally capture his attention, not with her attempts to engage him in conversation, but by giving him a practical, physical task to perform? That can be an effective method for activating the ambivalent male.
Have a go at getting me out, Willie! she might have shouted. Here’s a tool from my bag!
Looking at Winnie sealed in the earth, Ivy thinks of an entrée she ordered years ago at a Michelin three-star restaurant in Paris, back when going to such a restaurant was still a shock to her, when the distance between herself and her surroundings felt anthropological, when the only way to make sense of the strangeness was to pretend she didn’t feel any strangeness and believe that she might one day relax inside such luxury.
Ivy chose to order the items from the menu she understood. I better have the betterave, she thought. At least I know what that is. She wasn’t expecting a mini Mont Blanc. The entrée arrived on a large white plate-a small white mountain of sparkling salt. The salt glinted when the waiter placed it down on the table, the candlelight catching on the bigger crystals. The waiter picked up a piece of cutlery Ivy had never seen-similar to a fish knife or a butter knife, but bigger and without a sharp edge. The waiter used the odd piece of cutlery with an elegant momentum, tapping on the salty slope and looking up to smile at the diners. After much tapping, the small salt mountain crumbled away toward the perimeter of the large white plate to reveal a steaming, glossy, whole beetroot. The waiter explained to Ivy how the vegetable had been cooked inside the salt mountain and how its flavors-and there are many flavors, you will be surprised, mademoiselle-would now reveal themselves to her. Ivy ate the whole beetroot in a few mouthfuls and felt inadequate about tasting nothing but the earthy, bloodred thing itself, and the salt. She could certainly taste the salt.
The plated mountain was the same shape as Winnie’s desiccated mound, with the same gentle gradient. If Willie took to Winnie’s mound with an appropriate shovel and gave it a few good whacks, it might crumble away and reveal the whole of her. Would Winnie be all pinkly cooked inside her mountain? Would the full spectrum of her flavors only be revealed when her entire body was exposed?
Enough, Ivy thinks. I know the play. I know what it is doing and where it is going.
Winnie’s mound will not budge even if the right implement is wielded at the right angle with the right force for the right duration. She will not be rescued or exposed. She’s stuck in the earth and the sooner we all realize that, the better. Right.
She is also stuck in time.
She must endure the torture of experiencing each second of each day, with only scant and blessed glimmers when her actions become successful distractions, when her memories are absorbing, when her tight, interminable grip on reality is relieved.
The day is long, and she feels each tick (107-10).
Chapter Seven
What horror it would be if only the mind remained-to be left with one’s incessant cognitions without the solace of the corporeal (159).
Margot’s capacity to compartmentalize has been so regularly praised that she now believes it to be one of her finest qualities. At the very least, it’s allowed her to maintain a career in an environment that is riddled with dissatisfied and highly articulate people whose concerns are prima facie rather distracting. Just this afternoon, during her meeting with the dean, Margot was asked how she felt about the casual academic staff protesting against their work conditions. She shrugged. What about the bullying accusations in chancellery? She shrugged again (165).
There is my story of course, when all else fails.
Winnie has now turned to praising the power of narrative. Well, that’s a move forward from reason.
Tell your story. But which one? We need to choose our story, and recognize it, in order to tell it to anyone else.
And then how to tell it? When to tell it?
There was such volatility between Margot and John in the early days. Adam would be surprised to learn about that.
Margot remembers one fight on a grassy nature strip only a few months after they began dating. They were crossing the road together, bickering. Before they made it to the other side, they were yelling. Margot stopped on the nature strip and stormed off along the cushiony green ground, traffic zooming past her in both directions. John jogged to her, grabbed her arm, and she spun around. They stood facing each other, possibly weeping, definitely shouting. After a few minutes of that, Margot stormed off again and walked a decent distance before she looked around to see that John had stayed in place, bent over, his palms resting on his thighs, head dropped down as though he were puffed, as though he had just finished running a race. Margot flopped onto the grass and sat, cross-armed and cross-ankled (wearing her brown mini), on the nature strip until John ambled up beside her and sat down too. It was the afternoon. They hadn’t been drinking. People filled both footpaths-the one they’d left and the one they hadn’t reached-and Margot and John had made what could only be described as a scene. Margot snapped out of the fight and realized she’d lost control in public, and that John too had lost control in public. She was twenty-three years old, mortified that she was the type of person to have a public screaming match.
But somewhere else, deeper than the embarrassment, she also sensed a tingling thrill. To feel so much and share such passion and to be-even for a few moments-the center of a real drama. This was a real love affair, she thought. This was the real thing.
Margot and John soon stopped performing their passion, unless privately, and developed a sense of public decorum. They learned to understand enough about each other so that they could choose whether to antagonize the other person, rather than it happening unintentionally through exasperated confusion. They were harmonious. People envied them their marital longevity. And Margot never again had cause to question the type of person she had become within their relationship.
Until the recent violence.
Until tonight.
Until she considered what Ivy Parker would think of the esteemed professor being hurt by her husband. Until she imagined telling her son about it at last.
So, is Margot the type of person to have public screaming matches? Yes. Is Margot the type of person to be bruised by her husband? Yes.
But what misguided questions.
Margot suspects that there is no such thing as a type of person who is more susceptible to a particular behavior. There are only situations, and we do not know what will become of us until we are inside each new one (177-9).
Chapter Nine
There have been times in Ivy’s life when a single warm sentence from another person has made the difference between wanting to die and not wanting to die that day. After Rupert, if a guy in a shop so much as handled her purchases with care or asked about her afternoon, Ivy would absorb a rush of replenishing tenderness. It wouldn’t last long, but there it was, keeping her going for another moment.
Ivy knows what a glint of kindness can do for another person, so she tries to be careful with her interactions, feeling for potential impact, choosing her words. Ivy can still be fierce or direct or rude to people, but rarely by accident.
Hilary is a mostly contented person-even-tempered, even-and Ivy complimenting her hair would likely make no difference to her overall mood. Still, Ivy can’t help weighing down such a simple thing with all these connotations. She cannot un-know what she knows about the precariousness of the human soul (205).
Ivy used to hide in the ladies during events. She often had to attend functions as the recipient of a scholarship or the participant in some enrichment program, and she would dash out of the room as soon as the speeches ended to avoid any moment of the standing-around-and-speaking-to-people part of the party. She was unable to muster up enough self-assurance to trust that she could converse with strangers. The idea of chatting to people she did not know, who might ask her questions she did not want to answer, filled her with a nauseating dread.
But something shifted when she finished uni and moved overseas, and it was such a foreign experience that she was able to turn into whatever version of young-Australian-woman-abroad that was required. Her life didn’t seem connected to reality enough to have any consequences. She learned to listen. She learned to notice. She learned to ask questions rather than waiting in fear to be asked them.
These days, she does not hide in bathrooms to avoid conversation. She isn’t so afraid of herself or other people. She likes to think she can talk about anything-a carrot finger, a relationship that is unusually skewed, a philanthropic program. Ivy still overthinks the conversations she has, and worries about getting it wrong, and stuffs up occasionally-with the usher tonight, maybe with the professor too-but she is doing it.
She is not hiding. She has not given up (224-5).