Island of Lost Girls - Jennifer McMahon [68]
Do you know, Rhonda, as the now elderly Wendy, said as she sat in the rocking chair by the window, peering out into the night, I sometimes wonder if I ever did really fly.
Over the past weeks, she had sensed change was coming. She sensed it each time she heard Peter speak, calling out directions, throwing them their lines. It was there in the way his voice was starting to crack when he let out his crow through the woods. She heard change in the tilt and tremble, the slight squeak of his call; felt its powerful presence looming like a monster under the trapdoor, waiting to ruin everything in the final act.
In the last days leading up to the play, they addressed each other in character all day long, losing track of their old selves as easily as Peter Pan lost his shadow.
But shadows, as Rhonda showed Peter on stage, can be sewn back. And after tonight, Rhonda wondered, would they put their old selves back on? Would it really be that simple?
And I wonder, Rhonda as Wendy said, if I would now remember the way.
The final scene in their version of the play, the one Peter wrote, had Wendy as an old woman (Rhonda wore a gray wig and drew wrinkles on her heavily powdered face) trying to remember just where it was Peter Pan lived and what it had been like there. Finally, after a great struggle, after trying to remember if Peter sang or crowed, if he had really taught them to fly, if he was even real at all, Rhonda, as Wendy, had a flasha line that came to her, and it was the last line of the play. She stood up slowly from her chair, hobbled over to the window with her cane, pulled back the curtain, and remembered out loud, Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.
Rhonda, there on the stage that night, had a sudden vision of herself as an adult, saying that line quietly on some far-off night as she stared up at the sky, like it might help bring her back. Back to Peter, to that summer. To Lizzy, her once upon a time twin. To her character Wendy who she was afraid of becoming, because Wendy forgets, little by little, and Rhonda did not want to forget, not one tiny piece. Not the way Peter looked in his green outfit theyd sewn felt leaves to. The way he smelled green all summer, like trees and roots, like growing things. She didnt want to forget Lizzy, who truly became Captain Hook, running through the woods with a bent wire coat hanger sticking out of her sleeve, a real felt pirates hat on her head, cocked sideways. The way Lizzy got to die at the end of the play, tossed to the crocodile, who gobbled her up as she screamed.
She did not want to forget the toothy crocodile, played by Tock Clark, who had been their worst enemy forever and then suddenly wasnt anymore. Tock Clark whom they all had hated, Peter most of all, until something changed, as big things always do when youre young, but as an adult, you can never remember just what it was. All you can do is pull back the curtain, thinking you half-remember the way back.Second star to the right, and straight on till morning . And there, through the window, at the edge of the horizon, is the crocodiles smile, Peters crow, and his adamant lineI shall never grow up!called out in a voice cracking with change.
Second star to the right, and straight on till morning, Rhonda said there in her Wendy nightgown, and she also heard herself say it in some alternate universe, where she was a grown woman trying to find her way back.
Rhonda spoke the last line and the crowd was up on its feet, applauding. Hooting, whistling, screaming, Bravo! Rhonda looked out into the rows of chairs set up in the clearing. Every one of them had been filled. There, in the front row, were her parents, and Daniel and Aggie. Next to them was Laura Lee Clark in a sequined gown. Some of the men her father worked with were there, and all of the parents of the lost boys, pirates, and Indians. There were children too young or too shy to have been given roles. Tinker