“Why aren’t you eating? Eat!” Jenny says to Marsha, who is eating, albeit quite slowly since she’s preoccupied by all the vessels.
Marsha quickly shoves a forkful of kasha into her mouth.
“Why aren’t you eating?” Sarah asks Jenny, who didn’t bother putting food on her plate.
“I ate before. I didn’t want to waste any time.”
Jenny is all business.
“I’m going to set up the projector. But please, for the love of god, eat! I don’t want any leftovers!” barks Jenny as she leaves the room to get the equipment.
“There’s too much pressure, I think I’m full already” says Sarah, who never eats much anyways.
“Don’t say that so loud,” Marsha says, taking a second helping from the dish of brisket.
Jenny drags a box full of wires and electrical equipment in from another room. She rummages around a bit until she finds the projector and sets it atop a plaid ottoman. Jenny doesn’t like the way it’s sinking into the cushion, so she grabs two books from the coffee table, both about renaissance art, and puts them underneath the projector. She turns it on. A cobalt blue square appears on the wall in front of the ottoman, perfectly covering an oil painting of a snowy village, illuminating the cerulean undertones in the freshly fallen snow. Jenny walks over and takes the painting down so that the blue square projects flat against the beige wall. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a USB stick and plugs it into the projector. (This was a huge upgrade. Usually Jenny makes a big stink about finding the right cord to connect her computer to the projector. For some reason the cord is never in her box of wires. Marsha often hypothesizes to her husband that Jenny knows exactly where the cord is and making a big stink about finding the cord is just part of the performance. Every month Jenny spends exactly ten minutes looking for it in another room and then returns to the dining room, cord in hand, while exclaiming, “A- ha! I found it. We can finally start!” Now with the cord being a thing of the past, Marsha and Sarah both wonder whether Jenny will pretend to lose her USB stick in a similar fashion next month.)
Jenny plugs in the stick and the blue square switches to white. A menu of Jenny’s folders pops up and she chooses one called VACATION PICS AND RELATED MISC.
Jenny clicks open the file and chooses the first picture. It is of her husband, Barry, smiling in front of a sunset on a balcony.
Jenny straightens her apron and clears her throat.
“Today I will be showing you a selection of photographs from our recent trip to Puerto Vallarta. To reiterate what I said in our email exchange, the trip was good, Barry is feeling a lot better, I think the sun was good for him, the food was only ok and the beach was crowded.”
Click.
“Here’s our room. The mattress wasn’t great. But the sheets were lovely”
Click.
“This is a small lizard I saw on a walk down to the breakfast buffet. I never saw a lizard before in real life.”
Click.
“Here’s another picture of a lizard. I found it on the Internet while trying to find the one I saw at the resort.”
Click.
“That’s Barry lining up at the breakfast buffet. He had an omelet every morning. I just had yogurt. Then we shared a plate of bacon and sausages.”
Click.
“Oh, would you look at that! This is the bacon and sausage plate.”
Click.
“This is a photo of a beach I found online. None of mine turned out. The sun was too bright”
“Well, were you pointing your camera toward the sun?” asks Sarah, who is generally pretty tech savvy.
Jenny glared at Sarah.
“It’s the beach. The sun was everywhere. I think my camera was the problem. It’s too old.”
Jenny hates to be interrupted. Sarah figured the more likely problem was that Jenny was too old.
“Here are some nice flowers I saw inside the reception area.”
Jenny continued on like this for another 15 minutes. Most of her pictures were from the Internet. Marsha thinks this makes sense, both because it was in Jenny’s character to attempt and fail at overachieving and because going to a resort is the stock photo equivalent of travelling anyway.
“And finally, here’s Barry with a mojito. Have you ever had a mojito?”
Sarah and Marsha both nodded their heads.
“Wow. What a special time!” said Marsha. Her enthusiasm was genuine.
“It’s too bad the beaches were crowded,” said Sarah.
Jenny says thank you and turns around on her heels and removes the USB stick. She puts the stick in her pocket and turns off the projector before placing it inside the box of wires. She pushes the box to the side and puts the painting back on the wall.
Once Jenny has taken her seat, Sarah stands up with her big purple tote bag. She walks to the front of the table and sets her bag down between serving dishes. She takes out her phone and a portable speaker and makes sure both are on and connected. Marsha and Jenny wait quietly.
“Today I’ll be sharing a dance I learned 3 years ago then forgot about. And then when I remembered it, I realized I’d forgotten most of it. So, this is a dance I made up, inspired by a dance from 3 years ago. Does that make sense?”
Marsha and Jenny nod. Jenny is picking at the crispy bits stuck on the sides of the scalloped potato dish. Marsha takes another sip from the tiny glass.
“Alright, here we go,” Sarah says, rolling her neck and shoulder while exhaling dramatically.
She hits the play button on her phone and jazzy trumpet music fills the room. Sarah turns around so her back is facing the audience and holds her arms out wide and taps her left foot on the floor.
As the music reaches a crescendo, Sarah pulls her arms in and jumps and spins around and faces the audience. Her arms shoot back out again and she wiggles her hips and twirls her wrists in time with the music. She pulls her arms back in toward her chest and stares up at the ceiling. Marsha smiles big. She loves Sarah’s dances because they always seem so significant to Sarah. Jenny doesn’t care much for Sarah’s dances, but she likes how excited they make Marsha.
Sarah directs her gaze back to the women, making sure to instigate and equal amount of eye contact with both of her audience members. She sweeps her arms above her head and snaps her fingers three times before slowly lowering her arms back down to her sides. Then she does the same thing again using one arm at a time.
Sarah’s dance is mostly arm movements. Marsha thinks this is an interesting progression because last time Sarah did a dance the movements mostly came from her legs. Marsha wonders what this could mean in terms of Sarah’s mental health. Maybe Sarah was going through a hard time.
Marsha’s thoughts are interrupted when the music becomes increasingly clamorous and Sarah intensifies the speed at which she’s jutting out her arms in various directions. Then the music stops suddenly and Sarah jumps into a wide legged stance and holds her arms out in front of her with her palms facing the audience. She pauses for a few seconds to catch her breath. Jenny and Marsha stand and applaud.
Sarah bows and the applause stops. She places her phone and speakers back in her bag and takes her seat at the table. Little beads of sweat have formed on Sarah’s brow. She uses one of the cloth napkins and dabs at them.
“You’ve gotten a lot better,” Jenny says, with a surprising amount of glee in her voice.
“Thanks! You have too,” says Sarah, undoubtedly referring to Jenny’s use of the USB key.
Marsha stands up to close the show. She goes over to the entrance of the room and dims the lights like she always does. This bothers Sarah because she falls asleep easily and muted lighting makes her tired. Marsha likes the way dim lighting promotes intimacy and therefore openness. Jenny feels satisfied that someone is using the dimmer because neither she nor Barry ever does.
Marsha pulls a neatly folded piece of paper out of her pocket. She clears her throat twice.
“I want to read you my most recent journal entry.”
It’s unclear to both Jenny and Sarah whether Marsha’s journal is just a bunch of loose paper or if she transcribes a page from her notebook onto a piece of loose paper before she brings it over to Jenny’s house. In actuality Marsha doesn’t have a journal, in the traditional sense. She’s part of a pen pal program that pairs women in prison with women on the outside. Marsha keeps a document on her computer where she chronicles her thoughts every day so she can send her pen pal a full description of her life. That’s the extent of her journal. Each month Marsha deletes everything she’s written after she prints the pages and sends them to the prison. Marsha’s considered saving her writing but worries it would make her pen pal feel less special and the last thing Marsha wants to do is make things worse for someone in jail. So she continues to delete her writing. She’s about to read the last thing she wrote. After tomorrow, this entry will be lost to everyone except one woman in a federal prison.
Marsha clears her throat.
“It was breakfast and it was very abnormal because I never run out of bananas and eggs at the same time but this morning I did. I settled on making two pieces of cinnamon raison Ezekiel bread with almond butter and raspberry jam and some chia seeds, even though I would have preferred something with bananas and/or eggs. Ezekial bread isn’t good. It is one of those foods that everyone pretends is good but really isn’t. Sometimes I feel like I use chia seeds as a coping mechanism, but I guess all “super foods” are coping mechanisms in one way or another. I also ate an orange. I’ve recently decided to be more vocal about loving oranges because I’m not sure if I love them deeply or just matter-of-factly and consistently. I’ve said this same thing a whole bunch of times, so I think I love them deeply. My biggest problem with committing myself to oranges is that I feel extra disappointed when one goes bad in my fridge. You know, because I love them deeply. You don’t let the things you love deeply go bad in the fridge. I do this kind of thing a lot. I decide to commit myself to arbitrary statements like ‘I love oranges deeply’ without really being sure if they’re true or not. Before it was oranges it was crying on public transit. Crying on public transit is the purest display of emotion. Or at least that’s what I kept telling people. I cry on public transit all the time. Maybe it’s something about the gentle humming of the bus and watching the world go by that makes me start remembering the bad stuff that happened last year. The best part about it is that I’m usually all cried out and feeling better by the time I get to wherever I need to go.”
Marsha takes a deep breath and continues.
“Although I’m not sure this is so universal because I’ve never seen a man cry on public transit. Nobody has ever disagreed with me, though, about public transit being the best place to cry. So I am inclined to believe that it’s at least mostly true. I can convince myself a lot of things are true though sometimes I don’t even know if I’m fully convinced.”
She pauses.
“My name is Marsha and I love oranges.”
At this point Marsha does an excited little run back to her place at the table to find her purse on the floor beside her chair. She reaches inside and pulls out three navel oranges. She gives one to each of the women and keeps one for herself.
“For the last part of my piece I thought we could all eat oranges together” Marsha says, while digging her thumb into the top of the fruit, ready to peel it.
“Oh, I’m not very hungry right now,” says Sarah.
“Me either” says Jenny, swallowing a bite of chopped liver straight from the serving dish.
“Just eat the damn orange with me!” says Marsha, tears filling her eyes.
Sarah and Jenny sit quietly and look at Marsha, standing in the dark holding an orange. Nobody moves.
“Fine. Then for my next act I will eat this orange and you can watch me.” Marsha says vindictively. She pierces the top of the orange with her thumb.
She drops strips of orange peel on the hardwood floor and Sarah and Jenny watch in delight as she rips off orange wedges and chews them with her mouth open.
Marsha is always trying to get them to participate.