Index to Idioms: A Performance Novel

Figure 1.

Deb Margolin, Index to Idioms: A Performance Novel, Culture Project, New York City, 2005. (Photo by Jim Baldassare)

(The stage begins in a state of fertile blackness; when the lights come up, a WOMAN makes her way onto the stage, tentatively and joyously, as if anticipating a great pleasure. She looks up and to her left, checking on something before allowing herself this indulgence; satisfied by what she sees, she sits down in a chair downstage left. Immediately, an exquisite aria sung by the velvet Leontyne Price is heard, and the WOMAN is in a clear state of ecstasy; her pleasure in the aria is palpable. After a short time, over the voice of Ms. Price, the screaming of WOMAN’s children can be heard, in all the familiar ways: complaining about the taking of a toy, a tube of toothpaste; sounds of a toilet flushing; calls for Mommy! Come Now!; etc. WOMAN acknowledges these sounds, which encompass both the tenderness of the tedium and the harshness of the beauty that her life is made of, with one eye cast in the direction of the children, and struggles, as their shrieks grow louder and more insistent, to stay within her sphere of enjoyment. Eventually, their supplications become so insistent that she accepts the end of this moment of leisure and begins to rise from her chair to adjudicate their struggles. Aria fades; blackout.)

(WOMAN now begins the convention that carries through the entire work, in which she will try to tell, through the use of a list of English idioms, the story of her life, her invisible, intimate life, as a mother, as a soul in a feminine body, and the function of that body in pleasure, in study, in simple parlance and use, and in the singular utility of birth and motherhood. At the beginning of each emotional snapshot, an idiom appears on a screen behind her; as she begins to speak, the idiom fades. At the end of the story, it will reappear, and its meaning will have changed, having been expanded or reshaped by its relationship to the story engendered under its auspices. This format is repeated again and again throughout the play. The first one, in which the audience learns the particular rhythms of this method of the word being made flesh, is done with particular attention to rhythm, as it is progenitor of all the rest.)

(Lights to half, slide up. Slide: all’s well that ends well. Slide fades out as WOMAN speaks.)

All’s well that ends well

WOMAN: The woman is in the bathroom with her two children, Matt and Julia. All three in one smelly bathroom, the pink ’50s tile, the tattered bath mat, the sink splattered with toothpaste droppings, the toilet exhausted from its sad receipts, the towels drooping like eyelids, oblique and damp. Two kids and a Mother in a bathroom. Enough for a painting.

The girl is six, and she’s beautiful in that drowsy, preconscious way. Her lips are puffy, full of deep pink flesh, her eyes tight in her head as if in collusion with her mind and thoughts, her little feet exuberant with the floor. The boy is eight and a half; his beauty is more obvious and easier to ignore, his hair is too long, his eyelashes are endless and curl up towards his forehead like those of a torch singer in an evening gown. He is very much the poet, out of step with the practical universe, richly attuned to invisible things. His sister torments him much of the time with the practicalities that elude him. She understands how to hurt anybody. She understands that people are hurt by different things.

The little girl has just realized that she’s going to die someday, just realized this fully; for some reason, some unknowable reason, there’s always just a moment in a young life when this dawns fully on a person, a person for whom death is generally very far away, but it dawns fully, like a soldier waking for his first...