Play With a Tiger and Other Plays. Doris Lessing
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ANNA: None at all.
DAVE: I said to Dr Melville Cooper-Anstey: This society you want me to be integrated with, do you approve of it? If you don’t, what are you doing, sitting there with those big black scissors cutting people into shapes to fit it? Well, doc, I’ll tell you something, I don’t approve of society, it stinks. I don’t want to fit into it, I want society to fit itself to me – I’ll make a deal with you, doc, I’ll come and lie on this comfortable couch of yours, Tuesdays and Fridays from 2 to 3 for seven years, on condition that at the end of that time society is a place fit for Dave Miller to live in. How’s that for a proposition doc? Because of course that means you’ll have to join the Dave Miller fraternity for changing the world. You join my organization and I’ll join yours. [he turns on ANNA] Hey, Anna, don’t just lie there, reserving judgment.
ANNA: I didn’t say a word.
DAVE: You never have to. You’re like Dr Melville Cooper-Anstey – you put your spiritual fingertips together and purse your lips.
ANNA [furious]: Dave do you know something – when you need an enemy, you turn me into a kind of – lady welfare worker. Who was the great enemy of your childhood? The lady welfare worker. [jumping up – in Australian] I’m Anna MacClure the daughter of a second-hand car dealer. My grand-father was a horse-doctor. My great-grand-father was a stock farmer. And my great-great-grand-father was a convict, shipped from this our mother country God bless her to populate the outback. I’m the great-great-grand-daughter of a convict, I’m the aristocracy so don’t get at me, Dave Miller, corner-boy, street-gang-leader – I’m as good as you are, any day. [he pulls her down on to the carpet, she pushes his hands away] No. I told you, no.
DAVE [swinging her round to sit by him. His arms round her]: OK then baby, we don’t have to make love. Like hell we don’t. OK sit quiet and hold my hand. Do you love me, Anna?
ANNA: Love you? You are me. [mocking] You are the flame, the promise and the enchantment. You are for me – what Janet Stevens is for you. [she laughs] Imagine it Dave Miller, for you the flame is embodied in a succession of well-conducted young ladies, each one more banal than the last. For me – it’s you. [suddenly serious] You are my soul.
DAVE [holding her down beside him]: If I’m your soul, then surely it’s in order to sit beside me?
[They sit, arms round each other, ANNA’S head on his shoulder.]
ANNA: I only breathe freely when I’m with you.
DAVE [complacent]: I know.
ANNA [furious]: What do you mean? I was on the point of getting married.
DAVE: Don’t be absurd.
ANNA: What’s going to become of us?
DAVE: Perhaps I shall go back to Dr Melville Cooper-Anstey – like hell.
ANNA: It’s not fair to take it out of Dr Melville Cooper-Anstey just because he isn’t God.
DAVE: Of course it’s fair. If God wasn’t dead I wouldn’t be going to Dr Melville Cooper-Anstey. Perhaps I should wrestle with him – after all, these people have what’s the word? Stability.
ANNA: Stability. Security. Safety.
DAVE: You were born with one skin more than I have.
ANNA [mocking]: But I come from a stable home.
DAVE: Dr Melville Cooper-Anstey said to me: ‘Mr Miller, your trouble is, you come from a broken home.’ But doc, I said, my home wasn’t broken – my parents were both union organizers. He winced. A look of distaste settled around his long sensitive nose. He fought for the right comment. At last it came: ‘Really?’ he said. Yeah, really, I said. My parents were professional union organisers.
ANNA [being DR MELVILLE COOPER-ANSTEY]: Union organizers, Mr Miller?
DAVE: That’s right, doc, it’s true that my childhood was spent hither and thither as you might say, but it was in a good cause. My mother was usually organizing a picket line in Detroit while my father was organizing a strike in Pittsburgh.
ANNA: Really, Mr Miller.
DAVE: But doc, it was the late ’twenties and early ’thirties – people were hungry, they were out of work.
ANNA: You must stick to the point Mr Miller.
DAVE: But if I spent my time hither and thither it was not because my parents quarrelled. They loved each other.
ANNA: Were you, or were you not, a disturbed child, Mr Miller?
DAVE: The truth compels me to state, I was a disturbed child. But in a good cause. My parents thought the state of the world was more important than me, and they were right, I am on their side. But I never really saw either of them. We scarcely met. So my mother was whichever lady welfare worker that happened to be dealing with the local delinquents at the time, and my father was the anarchists, the Jewish socialist youth, the communists and the Trotskyists. In a word, the radical tradition – oh, don’t laugh doc. I don’t expect they’ll have taught you about the radical tradition in Oxford, England, but it stood for something. And it will again – it stood for the great dream – that life can be noble and beautiful and dignified.
ANNA: And what did he say?
DAVE: He said I was an adolescent. Doc, I said, my childhood was disturbed – by the great dream – and if yours was not, perhaps after all you had the worst of it.
ANNA: You are evading the issue, Mr Miller.
DAVE: But you’re all right, you have stability – Anna, you didn’t come from a broken home.
ANNA: No, I come from a well-integrated, typical stable marriage.
DAVE: Then tell me Anna, tell me about stable and well-integrated marriage.
ANNA [standing up and remembering. She shudders]: My mother wanted to be a great pianist. Oh she was not without talent. She played at a concert in Brisbane once – that was the high point of her life. That night she met my father. They married. She never opened the piano after I was born. My father never earned as much money as he thought life owed him – for some reason, the second-hand cars had a spite on him. My mother got more and more garrulous. In a word, she was a nag. My father got more and more silent. But he used to confide in me. He used to tell me what his dreams had been when he was a young man. Oh yes, he was a world-changer too, before he married.
DAVE: All young men are world-changers, before they marry.
ANNA: OK. It’s not my fault …
[They look at each other. DAVE leaps up, switches out the light. DAVE stands across from ANNA, in a hunched, defeated pose. ANNA has her hands on her hips, a scold.]
ANNA: Yes, Mr MacClure, you said that last month – but how am I going to pay the bill from the store, tell me that?
DAVE [in Australian]: A man came in today, he said he might buy that Ford.
ANNA: Might buy! Might buy! And I promised Anna a new coat, I promised her, this month, a new coat.
DAVE: Then Anna can do without, it won’t hurt her.
ANNA: That’s just like you – you always say next month, next month things will be better – and how about the boy, how can we pay his fees, we promised him this year …
DAVE: Ah, shut up. [shouting] Shut up. I said. Shut up …
[He turns away, hunched up.]
ANNA [speaking aloud the monologue of her mother’s thoughts]: Yes, that’s how I spend my life, pinching and saving – all day, cooking and preserving, and making clothes for the kids, that’s all I ever do, I never even get a holiday. And it’s for a man who doesn’t even know I’m here – well, if he had to do without me, he’d know what I’ve done for him.