CHARLIE: I remember, before I was born, I was a dinosaur. And a fish, and an amoeba. And before that, just a cell, just protons and electrons, just a particle, just a momentary pulse of electromagnetism, just a thing exploding out of nowhere and then growing into nothing again.
(A buzzing escalation, bringing us into: a reception hall. Music, conversation, an event space.)
JANE: Oh God, Wynette looks so beautiful. That dress. I’m gonna cry.
CHARLIE: Did they already cut the cake?
DELIA: What’s his wife’s name again?
JANE: Whose?
DELIA: The one you were just -- Jim. Cousin Jim. You were just--
JANE: Oh! Linda? I think?
CHARLIE: Gladys.
JANE: Gladys?
CHARLIE: He introduced her to me as Gladys.
DELIA: Georgina!
JANE: Georgina?
DELIA: That’s what I wanted to tell you. She said the most absurd... But it’s gone now. Jesus. My mind is just...
CHARLIE: What does Cousin Jim even do? How old is he?
JANE: I thought you were close?
DELIA: No, no, he’s my age. I know him.
CHARLIE: Everyone always tells me about people like I should know them but I never get introduced.
DELIA: He’s Earl’s kid.
JANE: Grandpa Earl?
DELIA: No. No, the other Earl, on the other side.
CHARLIE: How come no one ever made me go to therapy?
DELIA: There’s something she was saying that was totally absurd... Now I’m forgetting.
JANE: Who, Wynette?
CHARLIE: Gladys.
DELIA: Georgina.
JANE: You’re tired. It’s a sign of fatigue. Forgetting things. Proper nouns.
DELIA: Who said anything about proper nouns? Wait, did I already tell you this story?
JANE: I don’t know. Tell me again.
CHARLIE: Sometimes I lose my train of thought in the middle of a sentence and become terrified and try to cover it but then I have no idea what words come next so I just stop and think the walls of reality might cave in around me and I don’t know where I am or who I am or what comes next, and there are people staring, waiting, staring, and my next moments are never coming, and then I die and trail off and disappear.
DELIA: You feel like you die. You don’t die. You feel it.
JANE: Charlie, those glasses make you look like Ayman al-Zawahiri.
DELIA: … Who?
JANE: From Al-Qaeda--
DELIA: What?
JANE: Like when he was a sixties radical Egyptian college student—
DELIA: She looks like a U.S. sixties radical college student making bombs in the town house--
JANE: Oh. Yeah, maybe like that. Maybe like that, too. History, right? It’s all the same.
DELIA: Doesn’t this remind you of when Charlie was born? Everyone gathered around and waiting? Balloons, cigars...
JANE: Silly. Charlie was born through a glowing hole in the bedroom floor. Little cold stone limbs and glassy eyes and rabbit fur growing out of her head. Pineapple leaves for ears and fingernails.
CHARLIE: A hole?
JANE: Oh god. No. I’m sorry. That wasn’t you. See? What did I tell you. Sleep deprivation.
(A GASP from DELIA as she begins to quietly cry.)
JANE: Oh you know who you look like in those glasses! Dad. You look like Dad, when he was in college.
DELIA: (her voice distorted) Did you know that one time when I was in college, I came home for Christmas break and I replaced all the pictures-- all the family pictures, on the wall in the hallway? -- I replaced them all with stock images? And celebrities? And Mom never noticed.
JANE: You did not.
DELIA: I did. When we were moving her out, they were still there.
JANE: All of them?
DELIA: Celebrities. Stock photography. Smiling. “Mother with child on beach.”
JANE: No, that was mom. And me. I was the child on the beach.
DELIA: Tell yourself whatever you want.
JANE: I remember that day. That was me, Delia. Flying a kite with mom. The ocean spray in our hair.
DELIA: It was from a picture frame. From a Walmart.
CHARLIE: Maybe a stock photographer was on the beach that day and he took a picture of Jane and mom, only to sell their picture to the picture frame company that sold its frames to the Walmart that sold that frame to you so that you could replace the framed pictures of our family with other pictures of our family, the prints of which just happened to come in ten-dollar picture frames you bought at the store.
JANE: I really think the pictures in the hallways are all of our family.
DELIA: Like I said, believe what you want.
JANE: Remember when you used to lie to everyone about brushing your teeth?
DELIA: That wasn’t me, that was Charlie.
CHARLIE: (her voice distorted) Yes, it was me. Why do you think I’ve had so many cavities? My dentist says my mouth smells like death. Like something died inside it or is dead inside it, or is perpetually dying. Why do you think I’ve never had a boyfriend? Why do you think I drink so much? I went to AA the other day in the back room of a Colombian coffee shop. Cuban? Ecuadorian? Oh god. I’m not sure. There were guava cheese empanadas and I ordered 10 and ate every last one.
DELIA: I know that place. It’s Cuban.
CHARLIE: Are you sure?
JANE: Did you tell AA that your life is a haze and you can never tell where you begin or end? That you don’t know which of your memories are dreams or dreams are memories, that there are whole stretches of time for which you have no evidence that you were ever really alive? Documentation can be faked. Other people aren’t real. Memories are nothing but electric impulses between cells, that get created anew every time you access them. The past is changeable. The past doesn’t exist.
CHARLIE: I confessed that none of this has anything to do with the drinking.
DELIA: (her voice distorted) Youngest children are always such narcissists. I have three friends who are youngests and they’re just like her.
(Beat.)
DELIA: Alice! Are you having fun at Aunty Wynette’s wedding?
ALICE (a child): I was all in for Roosevelt. Used to listen to FDR on the radio and think of him like my own Grandfather. My own kin. My President. Joined the Navy when I was 16—
DELIA: Jane: you let her do this?
ALICE: --lied about my age, wanted to serve my country. Avenge those boys what got ambushed in the Pacific! But I didn’t fight in the war. Got stationed in Alaska. Radio operator. One day in the spring, there’s an earthquake in Alaska--
JANE: We’re into “self-directed” learning.
ALICE: --triggers a tsunami in Hawaii. I call out a warning signal on the radio. “Mayday, mayday,” “evacuate!” ‘Cept it’s April 1, 1946. So they don’t believe me. 159 people die. April Fools.
(Beat.)
CHARLIE: That’s traumatic. For a little girl.
ALICE: ‘Course then come the declassifications. The evidence. And here’s the kicker: FDR knew all about Pearl Harbor before it ever happened. Let it happen, just to get us into that war. ‘Least I tried to call out “mayday, evacuate”—
DELIA: Alice, that’s-- Jane, you know that’s a conspiracy theory, right?
ALICE: But he saw the wave coming and just let those boys die.
JANE: Are you calling my daughter a liar?
ALICE: You can look it up. Instagram. Wikipedia.
(Mom’s LAUGHTER enters the space.)
MOM: Did I ever tell you girls about the time your father and I went to China? On our trip to China on the China tour, the tour of China, and we’re in the hotel room. And I’m getting ready. And we have to catch a bus, to go with the tour. And your father’s ready early because he’s always early, and your father says to me—
ALICE: You know that HIV was made in a lab by the World Health Organization?
MOM: “You can stay here. You don’t have to come with me now. Just meet me downstairs at 10am.”
ALICE: Control the populace. Chem trails.
MOM: And so—
JANE: Do you think that Wynette is making a mistake?
MOM: I take my time and relax and at almost 10—
DELIA: Don’t say that.
MOM: -- not even 10, at 9:30 or 9:45—
JANE: I didn’t say anything. I asked a question.
CHARLIE: Do you remember that time that Tony had that giant freak out?
MOM: --he BURSTS into the room, total panic—
ALICE: You ever hear of the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program?
MOM: “EVERYONE’S ON THE BUS. EVERYONE’S ON THE BUS WAITING FOR YOU!”
ALICE: Flouride in the water. Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike. Just like Biden. You can look it up.
MOM: “YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE LEFT AND THEY’RE GOING TO LEAVE WITHOUT US. WE’LL BE STUCK HERE FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES.” Having a heart attack.
JANE: You mean at Thanksgiving?
MOM: Well. We rush down, no time for my stockings, my hair still in curlers, not even a scarf around my head.
CHARLIE: No, no, we weren’t there. When he-- did he hit her? Am I making that up?
JANE: Hey! Child present--
MOM: Can you believe it?
ALICE: Do you know about the Illuminati? JFK Jr.? Reptiloids?
DELIA: I would remember if he hit her.
MOM: There was not a damn person on that bus. Typical Earl.
ALICE: The Rothschilds?
JANE: Maybe she didn’t tell you.
ALICE: The International Monetary Fund?
DELIA: You would have told me.
ALICE: The Glabula?
(Beat.)
DELIA: (whisper) You told her?
JANE: (whisper) She just knows.
DELIA: You would tell me, wouldn’t you? Both of you? If anyone ever...?
JANE: Did anyone ever??
DELIA: You would have told me!
CHARLIE: But what if...
DELIA: What if what?
CHARLIE: What if I did the...? Could I have done the...?
JANE: What if you repressed it?
CHARLIE: Did I?
DELIA: How would you know if you did?
JANE: Hypnosis.
CHARLIE: Hypno--? But doesn’t that create memories?
DELIA: Aren’t there generations of people with made up pasts? Alien abductions and ritual abuse and sexual trauma and imaginary friends?
(A voice in the background, making an announcement…)
JANE: Oh. Maybe that’s it. Was he an imaginary friend?
CHARLIE: Who??
(Sounds of a finger tapping a microphone, as…)
WYNETTE: (into a microphone) Hello. Hello. I hope you’re all enjoying the-- the cake, and everything. Halibut. Steak. Chicken. Eggplant. Tradition. Wine. Champagne. Tony and I are so happy to have our family and friends and everyone we know and love, everyone who has been a part of our lives individually and our lives as a couple. We’re so happy to have you all share in our-- This. Getting married is. I feel at a milestone. A life. A life mile. Marker.
I keep taking baths. I can't stop.
I take naked pictures of myself in the bath. To mark the. Because I'll want to remember. To look back. At this body that I worked to get into this dress. It will probably be hard to imagine in the future. Without evidence. But I don’t keep the pictures. Because someone else could find them on my computer or accidentally see them on my phone or. You never know. And then I’ll just die anyway and they’ll be there for someone else and that was never the point. So I delete them. The concerns of the present beating out the future. Which is the opposite of getting married! The concerns of the future beating out the past! The present! Beating! I have beat the present!
(WYNETTE laughs.)
CHARLIE: How would I know if I was hypnotized?
DELIA: I might know.
CHARLIE: Would you?
DELIA: I might. I was there. For nearly every moment.
ALICE: How do you know you weren’t hypnotized too?
End of Episode 8.
