Parking Lot Obscenities

can save a life

Have you seen the movie My Octopus Teacher? It’s one of my favorites. I see so much of myself in the heroine. I love the way she hides from the narrator, then opens up to him; covering herself in seashells and detritus and then expanding out to dance. Is there anything more earnest than a creature who spurts ink as she flees in excitement? I love the way she’s at once innocent and haughty, with her giant head thrown back like she owns the ocean. The first time I watched, I fell as much in love with this enchanting octopus as our narrator did. Really, this is a love story.

Do you remember what happens (spoiler!)? How she loses some of her strength to a shark and is later impregnated by another natural predator—her mate…? This octopus, after having her thirty thousand babies, turns white and just drifts away, the diaphanous ribbons of her body finally attacked by the same breed of shark that first bit off one of her legs.

Well, this landed. I was never more aware of a feeling than when I watched this creature lose her color and drift across the ocean floor. Her babies sucked her dry and she became weightless and unmoored until some unspecified moment when she simply ceased to be animate and floated away like a cheap plastic bag.

Why has this been such a hard spring? Or do I feel this way every April (I think, yes.) I think, every year: we got through the worst month (January) and February is the shortest month, so we’ll get through that in a jiffy, and then March sucks, but at least we (sometimes) get to visit grandparents in Florida to break it up a bit and by April, we’ll be great! But April is inevitably a slog trough moods that mirror the weather: dense, cold, dreary, grey, with little buds and voices underfoot and everywhere, like the thirty thousand babies you had who are adorable and ruthless as they suck you dry. Why is it so lonely, being with children?

When I start to identify with the drifting octopus, I think: Oh, Isabel, time to get to work. Creativity is red meat and self-reclamation. When I write, my blood runs, my face goes sanguine and I’m as playful as a creature with eight legs, dressing herself in seashells. I am ALIVE.

Today was going to be a Great Day. I blow dried my hair, I put on my favorite tee shirt and I hopped on an early train to New York. Today was my first scene study class at Stella Adler. Iron for a hungry, creative heart. I’ve been eager to get back into the world and make art with other people. It couldn’t have come at a better time: our caregiver went to the ER earlier this week (all’s well, thank God) and we endured so many soggy, interior days that by this morning I felt see-through pale. I arranged for after-care at school and I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into my scene, hard. I felt my gums itch as the elevator doors opened at what my father (who himself attended Stella Adler) dubbed “the acting factory.”

“Sorry, what time was the class?” The girl with the impossibly blue eyes and the ribbed crop top looked at me and then back at the computer screen. How is it that people who are actual adults can look decades younger than I do? Frankly, I felt a little dizzy, being thrown into the Taft black box circa 2001. There I stood, confused and excluded, amid a whirlwind of zitty faces; pale exposed bellies and backstage types wearing all black and carrying walkie-talkies. Theater people are theater people, across all time and space.

“Advanced scene study. K— put me into the class in March,” I answered.

“You’re not on the list,” she snapped her gum.

“Is K— here?”

“He’s in a meeting.”

“Is the teacher here?”

“The class isn’t actually happening. Because, actually, they canceled it.”

“They canceled it?” (Somehow, I stopped myself from protesting, “But I came all the way from Westchester!”)

“Yeah, but don’t worry. You’re not on the list, anyway, actually.”

“Right,” I said, and I went into the bathroom to recover from the vertigo of drifting sideways along the ocean floor. Didn’t even make the list; just, forgotten.

I got back on the train in time to take Max to tennis. As soon as he was out of the car I beat the wheel with the sides of my hands and cried until I had to laugh. Then I drove to the grocery store and called my sister, who is an actor. For money. Lily has done many scene study classes.

“Pfft,” she said. “The thing about scene study class—it’s a lot. They want you to rehearse like, three times a week for that shit. I always just kind of wanted to wing it.”

“Three times a week!” I yelped. “That’s a lot of trains to Manhattan. An unbearable number of trains. But I still want to do art with other people,” I complained. “I feel adrift when I get lonely.”

“I get that,” she said. “But G and I were talking about your essays and she was like, ‘damn! Your sister is doing so well, it seems like she’s thriving’… So, just so you know. You look like you’re okay.”

“I do?” I said, surprised by the compliment and ashamed by how much I relished it.

“Yes,” Lily assured me. “I think you just had a hard week.”

I considered the possibility. It was a hard week, it was a hard winter, it was a hard… two to eight years.

“But I want to make money,” I whined, realizing, the instant I said so that visits to the Stella Adler rehearsal room were an unlikely path to riches.

“You could make money tomorrow,” Lily told me. “You want something else from your work. And most days, you have it. But maybe today you just need to pull over and listen to Alanis Morissette and shout, ‘suck a dick, world!’”

This gave me a real thrill. I’m embarrassed by how much of a thrill this gave me.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Yeah!” I arrived early at the tennis bubble and sat in the the car listening to ‘90s femme rock and shouting high school profanities at all of the people who made me feel like a drifting octopus today. (Except my children, never them.)

Actually, sorry, you’re not on the list.

You know what, lovely? Suck a dick!

I have never felt so ALIVE.