“Oh, God, Brigham,” Liza moaned, trying to impart to him in the least hurtful way that he was an Olympic-level dork, light-years beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings of purebred, championship dorkhood, but that she did not hate him for it.
“I know you’re hurting,” Brigham began emotionally, taking hold of Liza’s shoulder. “Your mother… I know this is going to sound weird to you, but her vanity and lust are bringing you down, but you deserve better—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Brigham,” Liza spat out, beginning to hate him.
“No, listen, I’m totally sincere, I wouldn’t be asking you to go with me if I didn’t think that you were the type of girl I’d want to marry someday….”
Liza was seized by the image of herself in a white bridal gown, age eighteen, advancing down the aisle of an ugly modern church to organ music, toward an unthinkably terrifying future as Mrs. Liza Hamburger. She aggressively pushed from her mind the nightmare of Brigham’s trembling virgin dork-fingers exploring her nudity on their wedding night.
“I’m not taking this,” said Liza, handing the bear back to Brigham as if it was teeming with bacteria.
Brigham looked shocked.
“But I got it for you.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want it. Take it,” Liza said, holding the diabetically cute thing out at arm’s length.
“Are you gonna go with me?” Brigham kept at her, unable to realize he was being shot down, such was his faith in prayer.
“No!”
“Wait, wait, wait, let’s talk about it. I don’t think you know what I mean when I say ‘go'—”
“I don’t care what you mean when you say ‘go,’ “Liza stammered, suddenly aware that Misty-Dawn and Barren were watching them with glowing eyes through the slits in a rotten clapboard.
“Just get to know me—”
“I don’t want to know you! Take this goddamn thing!” The noxious figurine began to embody all of the cooties of a nude Brigham Hamburger. “TAKE IT!”
“… come to my church with me, and I’ll….”
Liza wound up and slammed the china animal with great force onto the sidewalk, where it crashed satisfyingly at their feet into several dozen shards, one of which ricocheted off the concrete and lodged itself in Brigham Hamburger’s right eye.
Peppy, alarmed by the sounds of pain, hustled her fleshy legs past the painting crew as fast as she could motor them; Barren was flat on his back, laughing so hard his limbs were twitching like a bug.
“Yuk it up, Barren. That act will get you a one-way bus fare back to junior jail.”
“Bitch,” Barren whispered, his face downshifting to its usual wrath.
Peppy looked at Liza with eyes of purest freon as they drove the sobbing Brigham to the emergency room.
“Hold his hand,” Peppy hissed with layers of threat.
“I don’t want to,” muttered Liza.
“Jesus let me not be blind in this eye,” gasped Brigham.
Liza felt the stone-deep feeling of time, in a horrible circumstance, becoming composed of heavy individual minutes that one must chain-drag over one’s shoulder alone. She noticed, out of the car window, something darkly ironic that would tattoo itself on her mind forever: an aged and peeling mural from a defunct drive-thru of an anthropomorphic hamburger with a talk-balloon that said, in letters nearly too faint to read, “BITE ME!”
Brigham’s punctured cornea meant that Roland Spring was immediately installed as Rolfe, to the overwhelming approval of everyone but Liza. Chantal’s portrayal of Liesl’s puppy love became thrillingly believable. “They’ve got some chemistry, those kids,” chuckled Peppy, watching Roland make Chantal blush.
Barbette pronounced Roland “a physical genius” and rechoreographed the number into an adorable modern pas de deux. Roland turned out to have the silky, relaxed vocal quality of a young Nat King Cole; “You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen” became the high point of the entire production.
Liza’s intestines twisted into sausage links. Her worst fears had come to pass; the blood was on her hands. This turn of events in no way resembled her wish-mantra, in which Chantal and Desiree Baumgarten both broke legs in a car wreck (Desiree being Chantal’s natural understudy, by birthright) and Liza took over the role of Liesl. As the final cherry-on-the-insult, Liza was forced to send a get well card to Brigham.
Heartfeft Wishes… for a Healthful Recovery
“You bet your ass you’re going to be sweet to that boy. His people could sue our pants off. Good thing they’re Jesus freaks or we’d be living in a bush already,” Peppy said irritably while cutting Maria’s wedding gown so that the long skirt could, via Velero, tear away to a minidress (a last-minute suggestion of one of the mustachioed nuns).
And suddenly, like a beast in a tree, it pounced upon everyone:
OPENING NIGHT!
A spirit of high frenzy possessed The Normal Family Dinner Theatre; trembling hands drew on liquid eyeliner, dogs barked, things fell down and were hurriedly righted. Hems were stapled, furniture duct-taped. Scenes were cut at the last minute (the “Lonely Goatherd” number, among them—Peppy’s take on yodeling evoking crude disembowelments to the human ear), eleventh-hour decisions were made by any available human, and projects were carried out unsupervised.
In answer to the main question that ticket buyers had been asking over the phone, a cardboard sign with adhesive vinyl lettering was thumb-tacked to the door reading:
TO NIGHT THERE WIL L BE NO DINNE R SERVED AT THE NORMAL FA MILY DINNER THEA TRE S Or r Y FOR THe INCOnVENAinCE
(The sign would never be removed.)
“We’ll give them popcorn and beer,” Peppy reasoned, that particular menu being dinner enough for her, most of the time. Neville realized that there was some wisdom in filling a hungry audience with booze.
Everyone at the theatre was punchy and sleep deprived from the ten-hour cue-to-cue two nights earlier, during which Ike and Ned designed the lighting.
Ned was exhilarated by the emotional power of lights—a blue wash plunged the stage into mystery and spookiness, pink brought actors vigor and beauty, green inflicted disease, a red gel created heat and sin. It was perspective-altering, and Godlike.
The doors were opened. Seats filled with parents and a few denizens of the local press. The apiarylike noise, to the actors, was nerve-racking but euphoric. Girls kept peeking into the audience to glimpse how many people there were; Misty-Dawn saw Brigham Hamburger arrive in an eyepatch.
“Look,” she whispered to Liza, beckoning her over to peer through a hole in the backdrop. “There go your boyfriend.”
“Shut up!” Liza yelled through gritted teeth.
Backstage, everyone wished each other Broken Legs. Peppy glued on two sets of false eyelashes, donned fishnet tights, and rouged her cleavage. Neville and the nuns did bleating vocal warm-ups. Chantal and Desiree Baumgarten arrived at the theatre with their hair professionally salon-curled into perfect ringlets, which gave them otherworldly, nineteenth-century naiad looks.
Liza was so jealous she attacked the crimping iron with renewed fervor and made herself up, despite her role as an eleven-year-old, utilizing the full weight of Peppy’s makeup box.
“I didn’t know children wore aquamarine glitter eye shadow in prewar Austria,” Desiree Baumgarten sniffed.
“Now you know,” Liza spat.
Roland was wearing his lederhosen