Spring Break Up

This month's monologue is written and read by Barbara Anderson...enjoy!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello there, and welcome to another episode of Shouting in the Evening, brought to you by the Scheit International Theatre Company. This month's monologue was written using the prompt word. Please make yourselves comfortable. The performance is about to begin.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

When everything changed. Everything. Not like they paid me or anything, but not that silly karaoke stuff people do nowadays. But nowadays is now, not then. Then was 1974, and Tommy's was the best bar in Fairbanks, Alaska. Dimly lit blue smoky air, round birch tables surrounded by ladderback chairs, a ten-foot-long salvaged wood bar, no stools, standing room only, and a distressed plank floor before distress became fashionable. In one corner, a bright light, a microphone, and a couple guitars passes the stage for performers. The only nod to elegance are the colorful Chinese umbrellas holding maraschino cherries for the Harvey wallbangers hardly anyone ever orders. It's not that kind of bar. The laughter, shouting, and conversations get louder with each passing hour. The peanut shells and cigarette butts carpeting the floor dampens some noise, but not until 3 a.m. does it begin to quiet down. Tommy's closes at 4 a.m. and reopens four hours later. When it's dark for 20 hours a day, and daylight is a combination of daybreak and sunset, there's no need to wait till the sun goes down to start drinking. Then was May 25th, 1974, University of Alaska graduation. Then everything was different. Even the weather. Then I loved singing. Well, I love singing now, even if my voice isn't the voice I had then. I was on stage when the heavy door flew open, slammed the wall, and put an abrupt end to my set. Stampin' her feet, shaking off muddy debris, and cursing like a raging banshee, Sandy made her entrance. It's Sandy's fourth spring in Fairbanks, and she still doesn't understand spring breakup. People down in the lower 48 think spring is all budding trees and blooming violets. Well, not in Fairbanks. In Fairbanks, spring is sink to your knees mud. It starts snowing in September and stops snowing in December when it gets too cold to snow. Then for a few months it's so cold you can't even make a snowball, much less a snowman. The ice creates frozen roads solid enough for trucks to drive to villages that can only be serviced by airplanes the rest of the year. Finally, it warms up enough to start snowing again. By May, spring breakup begins, and all 100 inches of snow melt, the frozen ground defrosts, the ice roads disappear, and every trail and pathway you walk just a few days before is now nothing but mud. Sandy is the smartest person I ever met, yet she has never grasped what it means when snow melts. This morning we graduated. I got my BSN to begin my nursing career. Sandy got her Bachelor of Science and she's off to Boston to study software engineering. Today should be one of the happiest days of our lives. This is everything we've worked so hard to achieve. Sandy arrived in Alaska from Arizona where people start wearing winter coats when the temperature drops below 70. It never snows in Phoenix, and if there are two consecutive days of rain, people think it's time to build arcs and collect two sums of animals. Sandy won the Harriet Esther Estate Scholarship for Women. But why she applied to Alaska, I will never know. Maybe she was just applying to colleges in alphabetical order. Or maybe she just wanted to get as far away from home as she could. In the four years we were roommates, I never got the whole story. I know after her mom remarried, Sandy had to leave home to live with an auntie who drank, but was very nice when she was sober. She drank despite being a Seventh-day Adventist who expected Sandy to live by their excessively strict rules, even if she never did. When Sandy first walked into our dorm room, she was a bit shocked to be sharing with an indigenous person. Months later, she told me that in Arizona, people like me went to school at the Indian School on Indian School Road, not her high school. I am Athabascan from Tanana, and the college assumed as a Native American I would drop out before receiving my degree. One of many assumptions that would prove false. Sandy was tall, skinny, and awkward like a misplaced giraffe. I am, as you can see, short and what is politely termed compact. She wore a denim jacket, a white peasant blouse, and bale bottom jeans that had already collected a layer of mud. She was visibly cold and miserable, so I volunteered to take her shopping. We shopped secondhand where we found a mouton parka with a wolf ruff and reindeer mucklucks. She started wearing her parka right away, even though I warned her that it was still fifty above zero, and the parka was for when it dropped to fifty below. I was her guide to everything Alaska. And she was mine to the mysterious world of the lower 48. Our friendship began with us laughing in the dark and twin beds across the room, telling stories of giant tortoises, scorpions, and gila monsters in the desert, and caribou moose and bears on the tundra. I couldn't imagine 120 degrees of heat, and she couldn't imagine weeks of temperatures below zero. But she wouldn't have to imagine for long. She would soon be living it. Sandy introduced me to country music as a background for studying, and I introduced her to country skiing as a break from studying. The first time we locked arms was when we stood outside and watched the shimmering curtains of northern lights. Sandy was mesmerized by the kaleidoscope of colors undulating across the sky. And I was mesmerized by her. In our junior year, we went out for a bit of skiing. Sandy fell, lost her mittens, had trouble getting up. By the time I reached her, she was shaking from the cold. Nothing warms faster than the body temperature of another person. So I unzipped the top of my parka, took her hands, and put them inside next to my body. We stood there like that until she stopped shivering. Until she reached around me to hold me close. Until her face rested next to mine. Until until we abruptly broke apart and returned to our room in silence. We didn't chat that night. Both of us went right to sleep. Or pretended to. And that's how it was for the next several nights, until one night she silently rose from her bed and joined me in mine. And that was how it began. I am a birch tree, deeply rooted into this frozen land. And Sandy is a tumbleweed from the desert with nothing to hold her in place. Except me. Outside our room, the tumbleweed and the birch were best friends. But inside our room, we were so much more. Much, much more. And this evening is our celebration. I bring over two boilermakers, we toast each other, the guitarist riffs sweet home, Alabama, and I joke that if she really applied to colleges alphabetically, she could have ended up in Alabama instead of Alaska. How appropriate that now she was off to Boston, just working her way through the alphabet. She says one thing for sure, she won't miss anything about muddy spring breakup. Sandy, when you get to Boston, you'll have all the pretty little flowers and tweeting little birds you ever dreamt of. There's absolutely no mud in Cambridge. They're too hoity-toity for mud, except at their spas. You just had your last free mud bath. But I won't have you, she replies. I'm nothing without you. You got a scholarship to MIT. You'll be the engineer you've always wanted to be. You probably start some company and get filthy rich and buy your Phoenix Auntie some fancy thank you for raising me apartment. Then you come back to Tommy's, flaunting your money and lording it over all as poor peasants, buying rounds of drinks for everyone and showing off some fancy, expensive snow gear. But you still won't know how to dress without me. That's when she asked me to come with her. Just for a few weeks. I remind her that I have a wedding to attend. My own. She's known all along that I have a fiance in Tanana. I studied nursing to live with and help my people. She has a crazed idea that I could move south or that she could come back and we would be what? What? I ask her. What would we be? She answers, we would be what we are now. Did I mean nothing to you? I should lie to her. This is one time when cruelty would be the greatest kindness. I should tell her, you were you were just a fling, a youthful experiment. She could get angry and hate me. She could move on in bitterness, but at least move on. But I I can't. I I've never lied to her before. What I should have done and what I did will always be my greatest regret. I am selfishly honest. I tell her, you are everything to me, the love of my life. You will always be the love of my life, but there are no exit ramps on my life's road. My people paid for me to go to university, to become a nurse, to return to my family, to our villages. You and I were like those frozen roads that melt away in summer. We had our winters together, but now our road has disappeared. I know my life's path. It's with Hanta. She hates Hanna, though she just met him at today's graduation ceremony. She thinks he's a wacko gun nut. It's true, he carries a gun everywhere. He makes a living as a hunter and he's a crack shot. She thinks he's the reason I carry what she calls my goddamned rifle. She has never understood. We're all armed. It's in our DNA. We grow up handling guns, squirt guns, baby guns. Hell, my first pacifier probably looked like a gun. And you never know when you might see something you want to shoot. I remind her that you didn't mind when I taught you to shoot. She says she didn't mind anything we did together. And neither did I. Maybe in a different time, in a different world, we could be more than best friends outside our dorm room. Maybe that time will come, but it hasn't come in 1974. Not yet. I will marry Hanta. We will move to a village where he'll work as a hunting guide and I'll be the village nurse. We'll have lots of little kitties, and I will teach them all to sing. This has been the plan all along. Sandy knows this. She has always known this. Every time we have this conversation, she acts like it's the first time she's heard it. I beg her not to ruin everything by making this goodbye worse than it already is. You want to go to MIT and study neural nets or neurotic nets or whatever they are and create some weird shit that I will never understand and never want to understand. You want a life in a world that I would never want. Sandy insists. Lots of same-sex couples make lives together. She says she'll come back to Alaska. Teach. We would be as good as married. No, we wouldn't, I explain. Not in my family. My family has been here since before this hunk of ice was a state. I have aunts and uncles and cousins and siblings, a great giant jigsaw puzzle that is my family. Hannah and I will fit right in. You and I, we would be a puzzle piece from another puzzle board that would never fit. She thinks we could make a life in Cambridge. I explain again. I belong here. If I was with you down there, I would be that puzzle piece that gets lost in the shag rug, forgotten, stepped on, alone. Oh, I do love you. But I am a realist and you're a dreamer. You know that Hanta is coming here tonight. He and I are leaving for home in the morning. She begs me for one more night together. She says to make up some story to tell Hanta. But no, I tell her, no. He'll be here any moment. Please, let's be happy for each other and all that we've been to each other. We should celebrate the futures each of us will have. She leans over to give me an angry kiss, and I duck away before she makes our secret public. They call me over to sing, and I return to the stage. The last words I hear her say are, I hate him, I hate him. I go to the stage and pick up the mic as the guitarist starts drumming the chords for leaving on a jet plane. It's our favorite song. The light is so blindingly bright. I cannot see the room. I don't see the birch tables or people standing at the ten foot bar. I don't see Sandy put on her parka. I don't see her pick up my rifle. I don't see her walk out the door to stand waiting in the cold for Hanta. That's when I hear the single rifle shot. I drop the mic, step out of the light, see the empty table, and stare at the door, waiting for someone to open it. Not knowing who will open it. Knowing that whatever happens, my heart will be broken. That was then. And this is now. And now would never be what I imagined. Not after what happened then. Then is when everything changed. Everything.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

That was Spring Breakup, written and read by Barbara Anderson. Thanks go to our esteemed technical wizard Ian for sound manipulation and button wrangling. Join us again next month for another Shouting in the Evening monologue. Cheerio!