Return to Sullivans Island by Dorothea Benton Frank

Author:Dorothea Benton Frank
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780061438479
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Setting: The Porgy House in the music room.

Director’s Note: Photos of cardboard theater, cardboard actors, a soup tureen, and Jenifer on the backstage scrim. Voices of Jenifer and DuBose from off-stage.

Act II

Scene 4

Dorothy: I remember like it was yesterday. No change in the weather. No change in our moods, either. Our ship had yet to come in. We had consumed vast quantities of split-pea soup, more from boredom than from hunger, and we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.

DuBose was as sulky as I had ever seen him and Jenifer was whiny. I thought I might go a little crazy. Cabin fever, I thought, that’s what we’ve got. A colossal case of cabin fever. But it was cold and drizzling outside and no weather in which to send her out to play. She would catch her death and then give it to us!

Then I remembered the theater I had when I was a little girl. It was made of cardboard as were all the characters. Every day I wrote a new play and made new characters, forcing my family to attend the performances. I would make one with Jenifer and we would while away the hours reenacting fairy tales until the sun came out. Brilliant!

I remembered that I had some corrugated cardboard boxes whose present use was to hold old clothes I intended to take to the church for the poor. I dumped the contents of one of those boxes on the bed in the room downstairs opposite the kitchen and rattled through the kitchen drawers until I found my serrated knife. I cut off the flaps, turned it upside down, and cut out almost all of one side leaving some edges to be like stage wings. Then I cut a hole in the top of the box, through which I could lower my cardboard characters like puppets, their backs secured to pencils with tape.

I searched the pantry for some paint and all I had was some poster paints, old pots of red, blue, and yellow, almost dried up from neglect. I boiled some water, added a little bit to each pot, and shook them like mad. Then I covered the kitchen table with newspaper and called Jenifer.

“What is it, Mommy?” she said.

“We’re opening a theater!” I announced and put her to work, painting the building in red and blue stripes with yellow stars scattered all around.

Her eyes lit up and she clapped her hands. Jenifer was delighted. Here was my child, whose attention span was about as short as it could be one minute and in the next she was lost in space, completely absorbed in our project. That short attention span and spaciness would cause her trouble later on and all through her life. But then? We passed that afternoon and so many others, stretched across the living-room floor on our stomachs, lost in the world of princesses and every fantasy a childhood could hold. When all our stories were exhausted, we began to make up new ones.

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