The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin

pair of bifocal glasses. As I approached, she whisked off the glasses and her face came to life, though her eyes were still unfocused. Hersmile had about it, always, I was to learn, a trace of sadness. “Who are you?” she asked.
    “I’m Edward Day,” I said. “Is this where the improv session will be?”
    “Is that your real name?” she asked.
    “It is,” I said. This meant Marlene Webern was not her real name but I didn’t pursue it. Later I learned her name was Cindy Webewitz and that she came from the Bronx. Another student arrived and another until we had a troupe of eleven. Marlene herded us onto the stage, announcing that we would do a warm-up called “catch.” This was a silly business in which the actors stand in a circle while one among them assumes a peculiar posture and movement. “Mark,” Marlene instructed, “start with a chicken.” Mark stretched his neck up, thrust out his butt, flapped his arms, and turned his legs into strutting sticks. He bobbed his head, making chicken clucks, and bopped into the center of the circle. After a bit of preening he approached a pretty young woman named Becka, who responded with a quick peck and screech, took on the chicken, entered the circle, and modified the movement into something slithery and reptilian, which she then passed on to me. I turned the snake into something, I don’t remember what, passed it on, and so on. Actors love this sort of thing; it limbers the instrument and allows for fierce grimacing and eye flashing. Marlene got something piggish, transformed it into an insect walking on water, then snapped abruptly back into Marlene and said, “That’s good.” She went to a table and took up a folder of pages which she handed out to each of us. “These are the improvs,” she said. “There are six of them. They’re all two-personscenes, so pair up. I’ll have to do one too; Ed you be with me. We’ll do number four.”
    All eyes shifted to me momentarily, and then there was a brief hum as we read over the pages and couples gravitated together. Marlene assigned random numbers and sent all but the students assigned to the first exercise into the audience.
    They were clever scenes. I don’t remember much about the others, one was an argument in a bar, and in another a man didn’t want his wife to know what (or who) was behind a curtain. But I recall every detail of my own. It was the improv that changed my life.
    The scenario was elaborate. I was a young man named David who wanted to go to Japan and become a monk, but I didn’t have the money for a plane ticket. I sneaked into the kitchen of my mother’s house and there on the table was her purse. I decided to steal her credit card; she came in and surprised me in the act. Marlene would be my mother.
    As the others created conflict and comedy and pathos from thin air on the stage, I tried to work my way into a condition of such desperate urgency that I would steal from my mother. I kept my real mother in a safe place; I seldom took her out to look at her and this bit of fluff with Marlene Webern was clearly not an appropriate venue for delving into that dark and painful cache of emotion memory. I understood that I would never have stolen a dime from my mother, no matter what my condition, so there was, in addition, no point in dredging about in my own past. I queried my character, who was my own age and determined to make a complete break from the world as he knew it. He wanted to be in Japan, and he wantedto be there right now. Why? Because he had failed somehow, because he regretted actions he couldn’t repair. What sort of actions? What would make me desperate to enter a monastery in Japan? I must have betrayed someone, or someone had cruelly betrayed me, but who and how?
    I was getting nowhere and the scenes were ticking by. There was a round of bright applause. “All right, Ed,” Marlene called to me as she dashed up the steps lugging a large red purse. “You’ve got to get to