Egg Shells- Draft #3

ACT I

SCENE 1


SETTING

A man sits on a stool facing his kitchen in a small, run down New York apartment in the Bronx. His knuckles rap the surface of the counter in front of him impatiently. A coo coo clock chirps the hour. His hand tightens around a beautiful crystal egg as he looks at the clock.


TIME

Seven thirty p.m. Winter of 1995.


CHARACTERS

SUSAN A young woman in her mid twenties. Wife of Ham. Nervous and jerky in her movements like a dog who has been beaten. Plain in appearance.

HAM Thirty years old, suspicious, Ham is angry and tired. Purple circles under eyes. Drawn handsome face but tall, overbearing, and strong.



Door unlocks and Susan enters, her arms laden with
grocery bags.

HAM
(angrily)
Where have you been?


SUSAN
(setting groceries on counter and hanging coat on rickety peg)
Out.

HAM
Out where? Be specific. The things that
happen to you will be a lot worse coming
from some punk than from me if you get lost.

SUSAN
(her back always towards him)
I was shopping, Ham. For groceries. But
don’t be angry…Please.

HAM
(his words are slow and deliberate)
We’ve gone over this. You’re not to spend
money without my say so.

SUSAN
(quieter)
There was nothing to make you dinner in the
house.

HAM
(standing up from his stool, fist clenched
around the egg his voice raising)
You could’ve asked me to pick some up for
you on my way back from work. And don’t
pretend you care if I have anything to eat.

SUSAN
How was work? Did you have any buyers?

Susan drops cans of soup clumsily and begins
picking them up.

HAM
(voice raising louder still)
Why you ask how work was? Have you
been talking to Benny? He sold today. I
didn’t. DON’T try to change the subject.

SUSAN
(trying to be calm, taking a deep breath)
I haven’t seen Benny.

HAM
I didn’t ask if you’d seen Benny. I asked
if you’d talked to him.

SUSAN
(picking up groceries with shaky hands)
I haven’t talked to Benny.

HAM
(walking toward Susan, her back still toward
him)
Susan, look at me when I am saying some thing to you. That way I know you hear me.

SUSAN
(glancing over her shoulder)
Where did you get that egg? It’s pretty.

Beat.

HAM
Why do you want to know where I got this? You wanna sell it for groceries or something?

SUSAN
No. I was just wondering.

HAM
(holding the egg up to the light)
Well stop wondering. It’s from Dooney. He got it off a foreign guy for five ounces and mailed it to me. Paying up for last month.

SUSAN
(glancing at egg again)
Does tomato soup sound ok?

HAM
(throwing up arms)
Who eats tomato soup? I won’t keep this thing, Sue. It’s got no use.

Ham tosses the egg into the air catching it casually as Susan’s jaw hangs slack.

Beat.

SUSAN
Couldn’t we keep it for decoration?

HAM
People like us don’t have (sarcastically) ‘decorations’ That’s for money people. I don’t got money. You don’t make beans and I make more than you.

Beat.

SUSAN
(looking at the ground)
Money people are happy, aren’t they?

HAM
I used to be happy when you didn’t…

Ham reaches over and scratches at the peeling wall paper broodingly.

SUSAN
(looking at him for the first time)
Say it Ham. When I didn’t what?

A convulsive shiver shakes Susan.

HAM
When you didn’t run scared of me.

Susan looks toward the door shaking her head, reaching for keys.

HAM
You’d better not leave me here. I haven’t got my dinner.

SUSAN
Who eats tomato soup anyway? A dog knows the difference between when it’s been stumbled on and kicked. So do I.

Walks moves quickly toward door, leaving fast.

HAM
(to himself in outrage, glaring at crystal egg glimmering in light)
WHY?

Throwing egg on kitchen floor it shatters. He grabs a bottle from the cupboard and goes into the bedroom slamming the door.



SCENE 2

The same coo coo clock chimes eleven p.m. The door of the shabby apartment is unlocked and Susan walks in. Her eyes are red and swollen from crying. After kicking off her shoes, she stumbles into the kitchen and walks to the sink in her socks. We hear a CRUNCH.

SUSAN
OUCH!

She looks at her feet to see her socks are now turning red with her blood. She smiles to herself.

SUSAN
(picking up a piece of crystal)
An egg shell. I stepped on his egg shell.


CURTAIN

Phone Pause

It's amazing to me where the pauses in our conversations go. Face to face, the pauses go to our feet scuffing the dirt in an awkward manner trying to find a way to escape the lagging conversation. Sometimes we will laugh nervously and crack our knuckles when all else fails. A sure-fire way to end it is to look at your watch and acted shocked to see what the time is. Out of the blue you have appointments and deadlines to make. And so, the conversation ends. Instant messaging the only necessary element needed to end the weak conversation is the nack for telling believable lies.
Pretend you are chatting on the phone with your best friend. He has never been one for talking on the phone in the first place and you are gradually running out of things to ramble on about. However, the conversation must go on since it is the only viable form of communication you posses between you and the boy. Like a car heading towards a stop sign, you can sense the dreaded pause. Things decelerate until they stop. It is quiet. "Are you there?," he asks. You respond by telling him you are before the silence sinks in again. "Was it something I said?," he wonders. You tell him he said nothing wrong. He then asks the favored question of all questions: "Are you mad at me?" Once again you say no...you just don't feel like talking. This is his cue to panic. If she doesn't feel like talking, his world must be coming to a swift end. (Although this assumption is sometimes justifiable, believe it or not, men, women run out of air at one point and they might need a few days to re-fill.) The panic in his voice escalates to annoyance on your part.
Snide remarks are exchanged and before either of you know what has happened, you are in a spat. A spat because of the interpretation of a pause.
The moral of the story? Either keep the pauses to yourself, hang up before they come, or fill the silence by humming the newest Alanis Morrisette song.

Imagine the Universe

Scientists have said there is neither end nor beginning to the universe. To us, our little world is huge. I could not spend five days of my life in every town in the United States, let alone the world. My world is a small thing dwelling in po-dunk Utah, wondering if my life is ever going to start and if the truth were told Small SUU is the beginning and the end.
Now imagine the universe. It starts with Cedar City, expanding to Iron County. Iron County gives way to the state of Utah. Utah is drowned by the United States of America. Zoom your vision out further and you will find our North American Continent. Past that we get a view of the world. It is a grain of sand on a zillion mile beach with no end. We strain our vision and find an expanse of sand as far as the eye can see. We run in a straight line for years wondering if our earth really is so small only to discover...its true. We are a speck, if even that.
Grab a string and stretch it until it is a football field-width long. Now tie a knot in the middle of this string. The knot is our earth and on either side is the expanse of black punctuated by tiny lights of terrestrial beauty. Take the string and bring it around the world. Even then we are not touching base with the dream of forever.
Massive, endless, forever, eternally our universe extends. Try imagining forever. Try to see the string with no beginning. Now see it with no stopping point.
Go take some aspirin.

Soundtrack of My Summer

My summer would have to have been the most boring movie in the history of film making. Luckily, it is not viewed by the general public but stayed carefully filed away in my own head.
Despite the movie of my summer being a flop, the soundtrack was amazing. It was full of sounds people didn't even know existed. I heard the deafening moan of a tremendous machine every Monday through Friday, from 7a.m. to 3p.m. working at warp speed for the public to get their daily servings of milk and cheese. I never comprehended the language of Chinese, Japanese, Loa, and Spanish I listened to all in the same hour but I heard them just the same. At dusk I waited until the world moved and then I would hear a million parts of nature singing in their beautiful chorus. The birds chimed in with the crickets and for a fraction of a second the butterflies wings would whisper past my cheek. I heard a baby with blonde hair and blue eyes laugh at my silly face and then burst into tears shaking her whole body. During wild nights I heard the wind try to come into my deserted basement and kill me. Then I listened hard and heard it laugh long and deep. My favorite sound was the thunder rolling over the hills and rocking the prairie. It reverberated over my head and toes and sunk into my skin with such magnitude, I forgot I was alive. Then the lightening would strike and the kids would scream from upstairs. In the evenings my ears tingled every time I made the fire alarms echo throughout the house and then a silence would fall as the fan over the oven shut itself off. Hours of such sounds were unforgettable.

Thin, Pale Sunshine

Great big tears flood my eyes when I think about my little sister Maria. She is the essence of sweetness and grace. Only nine years old, and on top of the world, Mia does not understand why her body hurts her so when she does nothing to provoke it. Children love my sister. Like a thin ray of sunshine she permeates the rooms she enters with smiles, singing out, “Whoever wants to be in my new game of Bunnies and Puppies can come and play.” The play is rambunctious and happy but it does not last longer than an hour before Mia has to leave. Her heart tells her it is time to quit…time to slow down.
This last week Mia had another surgery on her weak heart. She came home from the hospital thinner than her sheets, pale with the exhaustion of breathing without the machine. Flecks of blood were stained to her neck and I am ashamed to say I shrank at them. Maybe someday when my little star has a new, stronger heart I can look at her and say, “Let’s play Bunnies and Puppies.” And we will play for hours.

Outrage

For three summers I have worked with the migrant people of this country, the majority of whom are Hispanic speaking Spanish. For the most part I have dealt effectively with having to have my instructions given to me through Spanish to English interpreters, but this last summer topped the cake. I was standing in my assembly line thinking about nothing in particular when I ask a woman near me when it was she learned English. She told me it was while she was learning to be a maid and that her skills were so-so. Then she said, “We all learn little English or none. We make it. Why your people don’t learn more Spanish?” I bit my tongue before it could strike her.
If this woman went to China, she would be expected to learn Chinese. If she went to Switzerland, she would have to learn Swiss. In America, she needs no more than a couple words and the rest is taken care of. An interpreter will be there for her. Our instructions are written in three languages on all of our packages. Clothes labels are Spanish/English. We baby the immigrants who come here so badly, a lot of them see know need to adapt their language to the country they live in.

Grandma's Cats

My father’s mother is a fiery red-head with ice blue eyes. She has a temper to match her hair, but for the most part it has remained dormant in the presence of her grandchildren. I don’t like to see grandma loose her cool anymore than the next person, so when possible, I keep cats out of her walkway. I love cats. They are my favorite animal. Chances are in my previous life I was a cat. My grandma on the other hand, was a dog. A couple of years ago grandma was given two felines of the best quality with tender personalities to match their thin skin. Three months after she received the pets I came to visit grandma again, but her cats were gone. In their place were two snarling, spitting, possessed-of-the-devil tigers, with paws flexed for the kill. Grandma had wanted two farm cats, and so she made them into such within a three month time frame of kicking them when they wanted to be petted, spraying water on them when they were starving and throwing them by various body parts when they were within lawn boundaries. I still haven’t forgiven her.

Colors of High School

As a freshman the idea of high school with guys four years older than me was enough to make me pee my pants. Senior girls were the terror of my life with their big chests, big hair, and big voices. If they spoke to me, it could be fatal. My looks were no where to close to the Barbie dolls they were imitating. My friends were few, but we were a close knit group, traveling the halls with our heads hung low in fear of retribution or separation from the group. We were the essence of paranoid, in our dart-y eyes and scuttling walks.
Sophomore came and went and I relaxed, but it wasn’t until my junior year I began to explore the word, “eclectic.” A contest sprang up between a few of my now many friends and I in our weirdness to see who could become the supreme eccentric one. It was a novelty to look around our lunch table and see who was wearing the most bizarre shirt, who had the oddest eye shadow/hair color, who had the best lofty air about them. In the mornings we would sit in a corner of the cafeteria and discuss our philosophies on life and love, interpret dreams, and poor over our psychology books. During breaks in between classes other kids would avoid eye contact with the “new age children” and when they did talk to us it was in a sarcastic tone saying things like, “Nice, um…what is that thing you are wearing?” Looking back, I realize we came off as strange more than stuck up, and depressed more than distant.
Eventually the leaders of our gang had to graduate and the upcoming seniors were left to take over. We were much more sensible and cost efficient when it came to the brand of our gang resulting in us becoming the, “be yourself idiots.” It went over beautifully.

I LOOK I WAIT

I don't know how long I have been looking and waiting, but the look is always a day longer than the wait. This is given. I know it through the cracked condition of my bloody hands. They have been looking almost as long as I have. I wonder how long it takes for hands to crack white and bleed red. My mind is not cracked and bloody. I yearn to touch what I am waiting for so immensely I can see it, but no matter how hard and long I search for what I am looking for it never comes to my eyes. No matter how long I sniff it out, it doesn't hit my nostrils like she does. I had a daughter once. She is what I wait for. She is what I see and touch and breathe. She is beneath my skin, but she is not what I look for. My little girl was pretty and they knew it. With one giant swipe of their clean, white papers they took her away. Where, I do not know. But I am not looking for her. I am waiting for her, overturning her in my head. My pretty white thing will come.
I overturn the singular piece of furniture in my small house and look under it fifty two times a day, then I open the drain pipe and poke my eye ball down it twice in case I see what I am looking for before I start to howl strong and loud and ferocious. On one of the less painful desperate days my neighbor came over and said in her calm tone, "Stop screaming, Cherlie. It won't make things better." And then she left like she hadn't come at all. The walls of my house were so white after her colored skin went, I didn't howl. I lay on the floor and looked up at the ceiling. My white ceiling with one florescent light bulb makes me sick. Maybe it was up there purposefully and they want me to be sick. This way I cannot look for it anymore. Forces beyond my control call me back to waiting.
I call the neighbor Mrs. Lank but she doesn't answer to it. My daughter- my pretty white daughter- had a name once but when they took her, her pretty name went with them. It was a pretty name, and I wait for it to come back. If her name came back she would come back with smiles. The last time I saw her, she had pretty white tears on her cheeks sparking like bits of river falling from the mountains. My girl called me “Mommy” in the fresh mornings when it was still cold. Climbing upon my small lap she looked wonderfully sleepy and ready for breakfast. Maybe if it were cold she would clamor upon me again and say “Mommy” but here, in my house, the feel is always the same: 72 degrees until the moon glows yellow. For now it stays white under the crying face of the moon man until… forever. I can wait forever. I think. Something stirs my weary senses with that word: “Mommy.” Maybe it is the wind I haven’t tasted in forever. Is this what forever feels like?!
I feel the walls under my cut nails. Perhaps I will touch what I lost before I see or hear it. The walls are solid under my short fingernails bending and contracting with no woman’s touch. If the walls could tell me what they remember, things would be beautifully different. I would remember with their memories what went missing from my white world and sing about it with such joy and spirit these walls would not recognize me. A man asked me once what I do all day to make my house a mess. I said, “I look.” When he asked me what I looked for, my head hurt and I choked on my air. A stupid question. I knocked the air out of the man for asking his questions and now, I knock the air out of the silent walls. They forget who they answer to in her time of repose and the knocks I blow to their surface are ineffective. Someone wails. Maybe it is me.
I hear a knock upon my door but do not answer. Mrs. Lank enters with her hands in her pockets followed by that man—the one with the stupid questions. I back up into the wall, hoping I will melt with it into the other side of space. Mrs. Lank says, “Cherlie, it is time for you to take your medicine. Let me see your arm dear.” Her hands come out of their pockets with a syringe of clear liquid taking aim at the proper spot on my arm. I hear the sounds stop letting themselves out of me when the liquid is through magicing itself into my arm. “Cherlie, will you talk to Mr. Harvey for me?” Lank asks and I nod peacefully. Mr. Harvey smiles just as an insane person would, gesturing towards my couch, my one piece of furniture. “Please sit next to me on your bed Cherlie and tell me how you are doing today,” he sneers. I spit at his indignation and tell him about my waiting and my search. No Progress. Then my world reels.
“Cherlie, will you try to listen to me today?” he asks.
I nod, dimming.
“Cherlie, I will tell you again like I did yesterday and everyday for five years, Jill will visit you when she is older and can handle seeing this place. If you work towards giving up your search she might see you sooner than that.”
I look at my red, cracking hands and tell him I need to find.
“Mr. Roberts and I have deduced you are looking for the one thing you will never find. Is it your husband?”
I lean over the couch and watch my lunch come out of my mouth onto the floor. Then I lay and scratch at my hands. They hurt. I hurt all over. Another pain day comes at me again.
“That’s what I thought,” he shrinks at my pain. “Cherlie, he is dead. Try to understand. Tomorrow we will see if you have started to accept that you will not find him.”
Mrs. Lank leans forward to clean the orange pile. I lean forward lifting up the couch pillow. Time to overturn my singular piece of furniture for the twenty-sixth time today. I know I will find it. Its here somewhere.
I don't know how long I have been looking and waiting, but the look is always a day longer than the wait.