You, the Ocean, and Me
From Act I, Scene 1 of Blisters by Ivy McSlade
SETTING: A house in London, Hampstead Heath. Much too expensive for MARIE PRICE to afford on her own. We can see the sitting room, with a couch with a blanket draped over it, a coffee table with three or four mugs sitting on it, and a desk with an askew chair in the corner. Scattered about are cardboard boxes, some labeled with black marker, some taped shut. The only light comes from a lamp on an end table. On the wall hangs a photograph of a bride and groom. Stage left, a door to the kitchen stands ajar. Stage right, the front door to the house.
AT RISE: The lamp is on. No movement. No one is there to move.
Ivy gazes out the window for so long that she loses track of where she ends and the water begins. The ocean is the biggest thing she’s ever seen, bigger than her love for Joshua, bigger than her love for her mum, bigger that the gaping hole in her chest that Joshua left her with when he went away. Bigger than her disappointment in herself.
In another life, she thinks, maybe she’s a mermaid. Maybe she and the ocean are so close that they can’t be separated. In this other life, maybe the ocean is part of her. The biggest thing in the world, inside of her like it belongs there. Like it doesn’t have anywhere else to be.
There was a time when Ivy thought she belonged somewhere. Belonged with somebody. But that was a long time ago. Now she’s aimless, with nothing to do but drift along until she bumps into dry land.
This is not dry land. This is an empty cottage on a beautiful stretch of beach that she doesn’t deserve. This is a fucking frigid winter, cold not only because of the temperature but also because Ivy is alone. Physically, mentally, insanely alone.
I shouldn’t have come here, she thinks as she sets her mug in the sink. It can sit there forever if she wants, because there will be no one around to see it. That’s supposed to be a perk of living by yourself, but it’s just another reminder that Ivy is irreparably, unavoidably alone. Besides her thoughts, of course. They won’t leave her alone.
“Take the cottage,” her mum had said. “No one will be there.”
And Ivy had agreed, because she had that stipend money sitting in the bank and a voicemail on her mobile from Charlotte, asking “for the third time this month” when the first draft would be ready. The next morning, Ivy packed a bag and told Charlotte she was taking the next two months to finish the damn thing, “assuming I don’t freeze first,” she’d said.
The pipes nearly froze themselves last night, banging in the walls like the banshees in Ivy’s brains. At 2 AM, she sat on the floor beside the fire with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, thinking that she should’ve expected to feel so alone out here. Some parts of West Cornwall are well-populated, but the area surrounding her parents’ cottage isn’t. There’s a house up the road, and another one in the other direction, but out the kitchen window, all she can see is the ocean. At 2 AM the wind hit the walls of the cottage like bats in an attic, and Ivy shivered.
Her mum had forgotten to warn her that things are louder when you’re the only one around: the sound of your shoes as you click across the hardwood floor, your laughter at something stupid on telly, your heart beating alone in the darkness.
Now, at 10 AM and still just as alone, Ivy puts another log in the fireplace and sits down on the couch with her laptop. The cottage is small, just a kitchen, a sitting room, a miniscule kitchen, a bedroom, a tiny bathroom. Ivy’s tested out nearly all of the available spots, but none of them have inspired brilliance. That’s unfortunate, because brilliance is what Ivy needs right now. She’s been working on this play for what feels like years, but it’s really only been eighteen months since she graduated and won the money to fund her “next great work of genius,” as the head of the committee said when he presented her with a certificate.
“We can’t wait to stage the next Ivy McSlade play at the Weatherby Theater,” he’d said, clapping a hand on her shoulder as she blushed. She’d worn a bare-shouldered dress that night, and his hand was ice cold, though not as cold as the smile Joshua gave her from where he sat beside her parents.
Only a week after that, Ivy found out Joshua was cheating on her. She gave him his ring back, and that was that. Nearly four years together, over and done with in a second. She wished, as his hand closed around the ring and she turned to walk away, that she could forget it all: their first meeting, just before they began uni; the first time they slept together (her first time, too); the moment he proposed to her; the look on her mother’s face when she told her the news. She’d never seen her mum look so happy.
And she never hugged Ivy as hard as she did the day Ivy told her why she and Joshua had ended their engagement. “What a coward,” her mum had said, and Ivy had agreed.
She doesn’t love Joshua anymore, doesn’t think she has since that moment she realized that he didn’t love her any longer. It’s hard to love someone who doesn’t love you back; Ivy knew this from films and being a teenager, so when Joshua told her about Alice, her heart broke, and that was that.
That was that, so why hasn’t she gotten anywhere with the play? She’s been staring at the same first act for months now, typing and erasing and typing and erasing repeatedly. She can’t get it right. The dialogue feels inauthentic and the characters feel like they’re floating in jello, moving at a snail’s pace with no destination in mind.
“I don’t know,” she says whenever Charlotte asks her. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but I’ll figure it out.”
Both of those things are lies: Ivy knows exactly what’s wrong, and she doesn’t expect to figure out how to get through it, not at the rate things are going. The whole plot of the play is wrong, that’s the first problem. It’s supposed to be about a young woman piecing herself back together after the tragic death of her husband. The memories ensconced in the walls of her house come alive around her as she prepares to move out, and the story ends (at least according to Ivy’s proposal) with something tragic, maybe her own death or the violent destruction of the house just as she decides she can’t leave it. It’s the kind of tragic ending that will leave the audience feeling shaken but as if the story has been resolved.
But now it feels wrong, the devotion the character has to somebody who’s dead and gone and never coming back, and the ending feels forced and unreal. Ivy’s begun to hate Marie (that’s her name, the character) and her silly habit of spinning her wedding ring around (the ring she won’t take off even though Marcus, that’s her husband, has been gone for months now) when she’s nervous. She’s begun to hate Marcus, too, who only appears in the play in memories, dancing around the stage (or so Ivy imagined when she dreamed the thing up) in shadow, coming just close enough to Marie to touch her, but only just, before disappearing once again into the darkness.
Marcus is a figment of Ivy’s imagination, a figment of a past Ivy’s imagination. Present-day Ivy, the girl huddled in blankets relying on her laptop and a dwindling fire and the creaky heater in the corner to keep her warm, could never create such a creature as Marcus. Marcus does things no real man would ever do, like write a love letter a week to his wife, dating back from the first day he met her, and keep them in a box below his bed for her to discover after dies. Marcus is who you imagine you’ll someday spend the rest of your life with when you’re 14, before your heart’s really been broken. Marcus is the kind of man you imagine when you’re young and fresh-faced and dreaming of forever.
Joshua had promised Ivy forever. Now the only kind of forever she can see is one she has to spend alone. One she wants to spend alone. When she’s alone, there’s nobody to tell her how to feel or what to do or how to think. There’s only her and her thoughts and there’s no one to disappoint besides herself.
Maybe the most disappointing thing of all is this anger that won’t dissipate. She tells herself she’s not angry anymore, but that’s a lie. She tells herself that anyway, because it’s been months. Too much time has passed for her to still be holding bitterness in her chest like a scab that won’t heal.
But there it is, really and heavy and not getting her anywhere. She thinks she’d be able to tolerate it, this anger, if it were helping her write. But it isn’t.
AT RISE: The lamp is on. No movement. No one is there to move.
Ivy gazes out the window for so long that she loses track of where she ends and the water begins. The ocean is the biggest thing she’s ever seen, bigger than her love for Joshua, bigger than her love for her mum, bigger that the gaping hole in her chest that Joshua left her with when he went away. Bigger than her disappointment in herself.
In another life, she thinks, maybe she’s a mermaid. Maybe she and the ocean are so close that they can’t be separated. In this other life, maybe the ocean is part of her. The biggest thing in the world, inside of her like it belongs there. Like it doesn’t have anywhere else to be.
There was a time when Ivy thought she belonged somewhere. Belonged with somebody. But that was a long time ago. Now she’s aimless, with nothing to do but drift along until she bumps into dry land.
This is not dry land. This is an empty cottage on a beautiful stretch of beach that she doesn’t deserve. This is a fucking frigid winter, cold not only because of the temperature but also because Ivy is alone. Physically, mentally, insanely alone.
I shouldn’t have come here, she thinks as she sets her mug in the sink. It can sit there forever if she wants, because there will be no one around to see it. That’s supposed to be a perk of living by yourself, but it’s just another reminder that Ivy is irreparably, unavoidably alone. Besides her thoughts, of course. They won’t leave her alone.
“Take the cottage,” her mum had said. “No one will be there.”
And Ivy had agreed, because she had that stipend money sitting in the bank and a voicemail on her mobile from Charlotte, asking “for the third time this month” when the first draft would be ready. The next morning, Ivy packed a bag and told Charlotte she was taking the next two months to finish the damn thing, “assuming I don’t freeze first,” she’d said.
The pipes nearly froze themselves last night, banging in the walls like the banshees in Ivy’s brains. At 2 AM, she sat on the floor beside the fire with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, thinking that she should’ve expected to feel so alone out here. Some parts of West Cornwall are well-populated, but the area surrounding her parents’ cottage isn’t. There’s a house up the road, and another one in the other direction, but out the kitchen window, all she can see is the ocean. At 2 AM the wind hit the walls of the cottage like bats in an attic, and Ivy shivered.
Her mum had forgotten to warn her that things are louder when you’re the only one around: the sound of your shoes as you click across the hardwood floor, your laughter at something stupid on telly, your heart beating alone in the darkness.
Now, at 10 AM and still just as alone, Ivy puts another log in the fireplace and sits down on the couch with her laptop. The cottage is small, just a kitchen, a sitting room, a miniscule kitchen, a bedroom, a tiny bathroom. Ivy’s tested out nearly all of the available spots, but none of them have inspired brilliance. That’s unfortunate, because brilliance is what Ivy needs right now. She’s been working on this play for what feels like years, but it’s really only been eighteen months since she graduated and won the money to fund her “next great work of genius,” as the head of the committee said when he presented her with a certificate.
“We can’t wait to stage the next Ivy McSlade play at the Weatherby Theater,” he’d said, clapping a hand on her shoulder as she blushed. She’d worn a bare-shouldered dress that night, and his hand was ice cold, though not as cold as the smile Joshua gave her from where he sat beside her parents.
Only a week after that, Ivy found out Joshua was cheating on her. She gave him his ring back, and that was that. Nearly four years together, over and done with in a second. She wished, as his hand closed around the ring and she turned to walk away, that she could forget it all: their first meeting, just before they began uni; the first time they slept together (her first time, too); the moment he proposed to her; the look on her mother’s face when she told her the news. She’d never seen her mum look so happy.
And she never hugged Ivy as hard as she did the day Ivy told her why she and Joshua had ended their engagement. “What a coward,” her mum had said, and Ivy had agreed.
She doesn’t love Joshua anymore, doesn’t think she has since that moment she realized that he didn’t love her any longer. It’s hard to love someone who doesn’t love you back; Ivy knew this from films and being a teenager, so when Joshua told her about Alice, her heart broke, and that was that.
That was that, so why hasn’t she gotten anywhere with the play? She’s been staring at the same first act for months now, typing and erasing and typing and erasing repeatedly. She can’t get it right. The dialogue feels inauthentic and the characters feel like they’re floating in jello, moving at a snail’s pace with no destination in mind.
“I don’t know,” she says whenever Charlotte asks her. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but I’ll figure it out.”
Both of those things are lies: Ivy knows exactly what’s wrong, and she doesn’t expect to figure out how to get through it, not at the rate things are going. The whole plot of the play is wrong, that’s the first problem. It’s supposed to be about a young woman piecing herself back together after the tragic death of her husband. The memories ensconced in the walls of her house come alive around her as she prepares to move out, and the story ends (at least according to Ivy’s proposal) with something tragic, maybe her own death or the violent destruction of the house just as she decides she can’t leave it. It’s the kind of tragic ending that will leave the audience feeling shaken but as if the story has been resolved.
But now it feels wrong, the devotion the character has to somebody who’s dead and gone and never coming back, and the ending feels forced and unreal. Ivy’s begun to hate Marie (that’s her name, the character) and her silly habit of spinning her wedding ring around (the ring she won’t take off even though Marcus, that’s her husband, has been gone for months now) when she’s nervous. She’s begun to hate Marcus, too, who only appears in the play in memories, dancing around the stage (or so Ivy imagined when she dreamed the thing up) in shadow, coming just close enough to Marie to touch her, but only just, before disappearing once again into the darkness.
Marcus is a figment of Ivy’s imagination, a figment of a past Ivy’s imagination. Present-day Ivy, the girl huddled in blankets relying on her laptop and a dwindling fire and the creaky heater in the corner to keep her warm, could never create such a creature as Marcus. Marcus does things no real man would ever do, like write a love letter a week to his wife, dating back from the first day he met her, and keep them in a box below his bed for her to discover after dies. Marcus is who you imagine you’ll someday spend the rest of your life with when you’re 14, before your heart’s really been broken. Marcus is the kind of man you imagine when you’re young and fresh-faced and dreaming of forever.
Joshua had promised Ivy forever. Now the only kind of forever she can see is one she has to spend alone. One she wants to spend alone. When she’s alone, there’s nobody to tell her how to feel or what to do or how to think. There’s only her and her thoughts and there’s no one to disappoint besides herself.
Maybe the most disappointing thing of all is this anger that won’t dissipate. She tells herself she’s not angry anymore, but that’s a lie. She tells herself that anyway, because it’s been months. Too much time has passed for her to still be holding bitterness in her chest like a scab that won’t heal.
But there it is, really and heavy and not getting her anywhere. She thinks she’d be able to tolerate it, this anger, if it were helping her write. But it isn’t.