Story for performance #893
webcast from Sydney at 07:50PM, 30 Nov 07

Don't surprise us.
Source: Robin Wright, ‘Syria, Israel peace talks plan’, Washington Post, AFP in The Age online, 30/11/07.
Writer/s: Van Waffle

Larry has always spent evenings in his bedroom. He doesn’t remember exactly how or why, but it started by the time he was old enough to go to school. Every day when he arrived home, his mother would greet him at the door with a sour-smelling kiss, give him some candy and send him upstairs. If she had been shopping, she might have stickers or a colouring book. Larry liked to colour, so his mother stocked his bedroom with crayons and coloured pencils.

The room also had a shelf full of Dr. Seuss books (Larry liked to read), a big red desk where he could sit and draw, and a cage with a guinea pig named Fancy.

One day when Larry was seven years old, he came home from school, but his mother was not at the door. She was sitting in the den watching television. Larry went upstairs anyway and found the guinea pig’s cage empty. Wondering what had happened, he went downstairs into the den. His mother didn’t look at him, just sipped something red from a glass goblet.

She said, ‘What are you doing in here?’

Larry replied, ‘Where is Fancy?’

‘He went to live with Aunt Ruth,’ said his mother, ‘in Cleveland. It’s a much better place for guinea pigs. There is a new colouring book on your desk. Go back upstairs.’

After Fancy went away, Larry’s father bought him an aquarium and several guppies. Soon there were many guppies.

The bedroom had one thing Larry didn’t like. It was a closet with a louvered door. At night, grey slimy creatures slipped through the cracks and circled Larry’s bed, making a sucking noise. They exuded a choking gas that prevented him from crying for help. Every night the creatures got bigger and bigger. Soon they would reach the top of the bed.

Fortunately there was Danielle. When Larry was very small, and for a few years afterwards when he was not so small, his parents hired a babysitter. Danielle came from down the street and taught him to speak French to his guinea pig.

Larry told Danielle about the grey sucking things, so she brought him a little fat angel with a white mesh halo and shiny black hair like her own. She hung it from the corner of his closet. At night Larry just had to look at the angel and it would lift him into the air. When the closet creatures oozed out, they couldn’t reach him, no matter how big they grew. Eventually they got so hungry they went somewhere else and never came back.

Sometimes his mother and father went out for the evening, but even when they didn’t, Danielle came once or twice a week. She brought him books of mazes, and Larry became very good at finding his way through them. From conversations at school, he discovered most kids didn’t get babysitters as often as he, and if they did, it was usually an older sibling. Larry had a teenaged sister and brother, too, but his parents never left him alone with them.

His sister usually fixed Larry a dinner plate and brought it upstairs. When Danielle visited, she would bring two plates, while the rest of his family carried out its evening ritual below. Their loud voices carried up the stairs. That was how he learned his brother had been busted at school for having marijuana in his locker. Danielle refused to explain what that meant, but Larry remembered the word and figured it out years later. Meanwhile, he also learned that his sister was having sex with the boys at school. This part was especially loud. Larry thought he knew what it meant, but didn’t ask. Danielle brought over games like Clue and Mastermind to distract him. He liked these, and perfected his ability to win most of the time, while also listening to family discussions.

One evening it ended in his sister screaming. Then a door slammed and things fell quiet. Larry beat Danielle at cribbage. After she left, his mother came into the bedroom for a visit.

‘Larry, you’re 12 years old,’ she said. ‘Now you can get along without a babysitter.’

He said, ‘I want Danielle to keep coming.’

His mother looked at the angel with the mesh halo, and sipped the glass of wine in her hand.

‘Danielle can still visit, if you wish. Your father and I want you to be happy, Larry, but please don’t surprise us.’

Larry didn’t see his sister for a long time. He had to fix his own dinner plate most nights. Soon his brother left for college, too. After that, his parents hardly said a word.

Danielle got sick and had to stop coming. Larry suspected that someone had tried to poison her. His mother seemed sick all the time, too, and he suspected her of poisoning herself. The guppies died of ich, or maybe somebody poisoned the aquarium. Then Larry realised his mother had lied about the guinea pig. He didn’t keep any pets after that.

His father started working later and later. He would come quietly into the house at one or two in the morning. Larry, who liked to stay up drawing, would hear his father sneak upstairs. Larry designed more and more elaborate mazes on large sheets of paper. He would start at the edge by writing a question he couldn’t ask anyone, and imagine the paths carrying him closer to the answer.

Larry became good at answering other people’s questions, especially the kinds that teachers asked. He performed well at school, eventually moved out of the silent house, went to university and became a teacher himself.

Now, at the school where Larry teaches, the students seem to like him, even if he is slightly odd. He lives alone in a house with several rooms. When he arrives home, he goes to the kitchen, prepares a plate of cheese and crackers, pours a glass of red wine, and takes them to his bedroom.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Van Waffle.