The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt

Author:Siri Hustvedt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312428204
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

BY THE TIME I arrived for Eggy’s play, the folding chairs had all been filled and I stood at the back of the room near the door. Before The Mitten, I watched The Maple Leaf, a production that included six feminine cardboard leaves prancing about the room “fluttering” and “falling,” and one badly confused male leaf who continually hissed into what would have been wings if they had been performing on a stage, “Do I do it now? Now?” When the cue came at last from a woman sitting off to the side (long gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, forehead wrinkled into a permanent expression of concern), the hapless leaf thudded to the floor, his face awash with relief at having completed his theatrical mission. Eggy’s play, following the logic of seasonal change, came next. A little blond girl, heavily overdressed for the early June day in a snowsuit, skipped across the stage waving two red mittens in her hands. Then she casually let one of them fall to the floor. I understood that the highly calculated gesture was meant to be an inadvertent one, because a moment later Eggy, in a large red-knit costume that covered her entirely—except for her ankles, her feet, and her intense little face sticking out of a hole—waddled in, placed her sneaker directly on the small mitten to hide it from view, and launched into her soliloquy. With one arm straight out to provide the necessary protuberance of a very large thumb, she faced her audience and began her speech. “Woe to the mitten,” she exclaimed in a surprisingly commanding voice. “Woe to the mitten that has lost its mate.” She paused and wailed, “Woe! Woe!” Eyes to the ceiling, arm cum thumb beating her breast, Eglantine bemoaned her sorry fate. Her tortured expression shifted to one of ineffable joy when Bundled Blonde reappeared, waving a small version of Eggy herself. Thunderous applause, considerable laughter, and a couple of whistles were then heard from the gathered audience of highly appreciative relatives and friends.

After the winter drama, I watched The Tulip and The Sprinkler, and located Miranda in the audience near the front. When I identified the back of her head, I felt a flash of excitement, followed instantly by agitation. Why had I come? When the leaves, water drops, tulips, mitten owner, and mitten had taken their final bows and the applause subsided, the room erupted into noisy and chaotic congratulations. Lilliputian thespians squealed, shouted, and ran. I watched Miranda embrace Eggy and was able to pick out the child’s grandparents, a corpulent man with pale skin, a scattering of moles on his face, and the grandmother, as tall as her husband, but slender, darker-skinned, and dressed in an elegant tunic of some kind. Some of the others who hugged Eggy must have been Miranda’s sisters and their husbands. A baby with wild hair, who I gathered belonged to the family, was happily using the chairs as props to cruise up and down a row. No Lane, however, and his absence made me momentarily glad.

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