Shakespeare Sunday

A ball of fire flashing light. Rose awoke from an apocalyptic nightmare. The morning sky crackled with lightning.

What's that? asked Ben.

Earthquake, she said.

Ben turned over and snored.

Binkie barked, jumped into bed, and licked Rose’s face. He was both afraid of thunderstorms and eager to protect her.

Binkie, have you no consideration? You have doggie breath. She patted his head.

Binkie looked at her out of big eyes half-hidden under his terrier bangs.

It rained buckets. The hard-core fishermen would go out anyway. Rose got out of bed and poured kibble for Binkie. She poured cereal for herself. She would not go out. She considered with satisfaction the prospect of spending the day playing Scrabble with Ben (an ultra- serious competitor who liked to play Shakespearean words like “sneaping," meaning “biting,” which nobody had ever heard of) and amusing Binkie by letting him carry the wooden letter squares in his mouth (she and Ben had had to replace half of them with cut-up index cards, assigning points to the letters at random).

It’s raining. Want to play Scrabble? she said when Ben got up.

Maybe. I have to wake up. Maybe you could write that PR thing first, Ben said.

Oh, Ben, it’s our weekend away.

Oh, yeah. I thought maybe you’d enjoy it.

It’s not the sort of thing I enjoy.

You do it so...easily. With such flair.

I don’t enjoy it, Rose admitted.

Rose really did not want to write it. It was for Ben’s Shakespeare club. It was for a good cause. He had founded a Shakespeare club that got together monthly and studied Shakespeare’s plays and read them aloud. Once a year they put on a play at a community center. This year it was RICHARD III. And once a year Rose had to put together a PR kit for the local newspaper and TV stations, plus write a hokey promotional scene which they performed to recruit new members.

Rose hated PR. She hated writing--anything to do with it. She got stuck doing it because years ago, in her student days, she had worked on a gubernatorial campaign (for the losing candidate) as a PR assistant.

And Ben was crazy about Shakespeare. She really did it for him. Shakespeare was the only thing he read besides newspapers. He read the plays over and over. He bought different paperback editions of the plays: the Pelican Shakespeare, the Folger Shakespeare, the Arden. He carried them around and read them at work when he had nothing to do and then gave them to his clients. He memorized passages when he had insomnia. He knew a surprising amount of Shakespeare.

How many times had he made her watch SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE?

Rose was a member of the Shakespeare club. Much as she loved Shakespeare, she was a self-conscious actress. In the beginning she had acted bit parts in the plays but now left them for others who enjoyed acting more. Most of the time they were chatting and reading aloud anyway, or eating the homemade muffins and cookies she brought for snacks. As Ben’s wife, she was sort of the hostess. And she loved the people: the meat packers from the Sudan whom Ben had recruited after representing them in a discrimination case, promising that Shakespeare would improve their English; the unemployed high-school Russian teacher whose language was cut from the curriculum; a divorced accountant who was trying to meet women; a middle-aged barista who had acted in college, by far their most talented actor; a retired English professor who smoked a pipe in the non-smoking community center despite repeated warnings from peppy anti-tobacco types and who knew everything about TWELFTH NIGHT, the play he had taught every semester for 35 years.

Ben looked so worn out. He was starting to get lines around his mouth. Rose felt guilty. He was giving Shakespeare to the people and she was thinking about Scrabble.

She sighed. I think I WILL start on the PR stuff. I feel a spurt of energy.

She dragged out their copy of WILL IN THE WORLD and started takng notes.

We’ll play Scrabble later, Ben said. In an hour. You don’t want to work too hard.

She smiled. Two hours, okay?

She got to work. She could write the background stuff here. A brief FAQ about Shakespeare (how she hated it when she went into FAQ mode, but she could already picture the way it would look on the page and knew the reporters would grab dates and other information from the release). Then a rewrite of the detailed history of the Shakespeare Club which she sent out every year (maybe with a different font: something radical like that). Once home, she would arrange a brief interview with the Bosnian bank clerk with the British accent who played Richard. He was a pleasant guy; she didn't think he would object. Maybe it would inspire a feature writer.

An hour and ten minutes later, she was ready to play Scrabble.