The marriage isn’t cracking—or, probably not. Franny might be, though.
“You’re not thinking past your nose,” Chuck tells her. Visiting family—too risky. No vaccines, yet.
“You know what I think?” she retorts. “I think you’re cold and remote and detached. Do you even care? Not seeing the kids—does it even matter? Do you even miss them?”
“You’ve lost all perspective,” he says.
“Not true,” says Franny. “Not. Just, I despise this—this—gulf. I hate it. I hate it.”
They’re already en route. Merely stopping for gas (and creamers, because the relatives in Pittsburgh mightn’t have any—they always drink their coffee black) means wiping down the car door handles afterwards, the steering wheel, even the soapy-water jug tainted by her touch.
The woman in Sheetz couldn’t make out what Franny was asking. Too much padding in her mask. The creamers—could she take a few? The woman would’ve said yes. Walking out with them wasn’t stealing.
But let’s back up.
Early August, the pandemic in hot swing, eviscerated by her loneliness and grief, Franny decided she couldn’t take it anymore. Since the grandkids couldn’t come to Virginia for their usual summertime stay, she and Chuck would pay a visit. Take their old tent. No going in their daughter’s house except for the bathroom. Out in the backyard, no evil corona particles jumping from person to person.
When Chuck bristled at her idea, Franny said, “You always do this. Anytime I suggest something the least bit out of the ordinary, you shut down. It’s always a no. No, no, no. You’re such a skeptic.”
“Franny.” He scowled.
“Right? You know I’m right. You’re the worst foot dragger.”
“Well now.”
“Drag your feet. Drag, drag.”
“Yep.” He tipped back in his chair. “I’m just not like you.”
“Thank goodness, you mean. That’s what you mean.”
Sporadically, as the play progresses, singing erupts from a pair of musicians trying out new lines for a song on their backlist, echoing the bloviating onstage or suggesting a twist in the play’s plot. She tells her kind but disinclined foot-draggin lover man / to just cooperate, croon the two, their words winding and wailing around the heads in the audience. How hard, though, should somebody married to her opposite push?
As Franny has never been one to give up, what happens in the end might throw you.
Workshop production 11 March 2023, video credit Kathy Stoltzfus
