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ACT ONE: ISADORA AND THE LACK OF REALIZATION
It was the first warm Tuesday of the year, and the Earth let out its colossal breath. Isadora woke Klaus up excitedly, having already packed the sandwiches for their standing Tuesday lunch into a picnic basket. Her body careening into a seat at the breakfast bar to wait for him to get ready, which was often a forty-five minute endeavor, Isadora ate tofu scramble with gusto and sang herself a jaunty song she may have picked up either from a dusty record of Renaissance Christmas carols, or from Top 40 radio. It was rather hard to say. Violet shook her head at Isadora, smiling.
“You’re a funny girl,” she said, eating oatmeal at the seat next to Isadora, “and I love you for it.” Thump, thump, went Isadora’s rose-colored heart.
The two passed the time in companionable silence. Violet designed prototypes in her sketchbook and Isadora decorated the edges with beautifully lettered couplets from Dickinson poetry, mish-mashing her favorites into mangled-up, tangled-up, little poetic disasters. They kicked each other’s ankles softly and whispered soft compliments back and forth about each other’s work, and when Klaus emerged from the bathroom with a triumphant new hairstyle, they cooed at him in unison. He stuck his tongue out at them.
Coming around to stand behind Violet, Klaus hooked his chin over her shoulder and traced her design with fascinated fingers. Violet began to explain the belts and the carburetors and the design elements here, and there, and again there. Klaus listened attentively; to him, whatever Violet had to say was the most important thing in the world.
(Isadora found she quite agreed. Violet always had something important to say, and her eyes sometimes crinkled into a such a lovely smile when she was talking to Isadora, and when Violet smiled it meant she was happy, and whenever Violet was happy, Isadora got really happy, which really did make sense because Violet hadn’t really had a very happy life up until now, so why shouldn’t Isadora be happy that Violet was happy? But Isadora digressed.)
When Klaus’s eye found Isadora’s mismatched Dickinson couplets, he hesitated. The moment hung patiently in the air for a moment before he opened his mouth to speak. “You know,” he licked his lips nervously, “lots of scholars have proposed that Dickinson was, uh. A, um, lesbian.” His eyes searched Violet’s face, and Violet’s searched his. “And, uh, my reading would corroborate that claim.”
Violet seemed to find what she had been looking for in Klaus’s eyes, because she smiled and nodded. She covered his hand with hers, and he smiled with relief and nodded back. Then, at the exact same time, the two turned to search Isadora’s face.
Isadora herself was thrown off-balance for one barely-perceptible moment before she recovered. It’s not as if she wasn’t supportive of lesbians - she was! Very, very supportive! She just felt strange, inexplicably, for that one tiny second. That’s normal! But she smoothed herself, and smiled brightly. “That’s nice, Klaus! A lot of the best artists have been part of the LGBT community. I myself am a strong ally. I say, write all the gay poetry one desires!”
Violet and Klaus looked at her, disbelieving. Klaus looked especially stunned. “You really don’t…?” Isadora blinked at him. He laughed, with only slight exasperation. “Okay!”
Violet laid a placating hand on his arm. “Klaus, not yet, she doesn’t...” Violet cleared her throat and smiled again. “Well, go on, you two. Have a good picnic!” She winked at Klaus. What on earth did that wink mean? Was she...hinting? About Klaus and Isadora’s relationship? That’s good, right? Didn’t Isadora have a crush on Klaus? Except instead of making Isadora pleased, it just made her feel like a worm squirming on the pavement. She could see Klaus’s shoulders stiffen slightly as she took his arm, and she assumed he was as slightly uncomfortable as her. Until they got to the bottom of the picnicking hill, their movements were tense and stilted.
But now, Isadora’s straw hat fluttered innocently in the wind as she broke off and dragged her basket up the hill. Turning back to face Klaus, she called to him, teasing. “Come on, you slowpoke!” She reached the top and set down the basket primly. The tension broke like an egg yolk. “‘Best of all is first / Second’s just the worst.’”
Klaus, who Isadora knew was rarely one to go down without a fight, began to sprint, letting his long legs do the work for him. Collapsing on the picnic blanket Isadora had laid at the top, he sighed and looked up at the clouds. “I’ve read that clouds can weigh more than a million pounds, sometimes more than a billion.”
Isadora laid down, too. “Then that’s very poetic. They’ve got the world weighing them down, and they defy it. They float! And they’re so beautiful!” She laughed. “Sort of reminds me of us. Except, maybe not the beautiful part, in your case.” She stuck her tongue out at Klaus, who scoffed.
“Excuse you, I’m Mister Beautiful. My face is quite symmetrical.” Isadora laughed, and the two of them gazed companionably up at the clouds. But Klaus began to fidget, got tense, became serious, suddenly; she could feel the shift in his demeanor as it rippled through the air. Klaus hesitated, then spoke softly, voice shaking slightly. “Isadora?”
Klaus sounded like a child, scared of the dark. Isadora rolled over to face him. His eyes were wide and nervous, like leaves beginning to go orange around the edges at the end of September. “Yeah, Klaus?”
“What if...What if I thought somebody else was Mister Beautiful?” He looked to her hopefully, fidgeting with a blade of grass plucked tenderly from the springtime ground.
Isadora’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?” He looked petrified, so Isadora touched his shoulder lightly. “It’s okay, Klaus, I just...don’t know what you’re saying.”
Klaus closed his eyes. “I’m saying...What if, when I looked at a boy, I thought, ‘Hey. You’re Mister Beautiful.’”
Isadora cocked her head and hummed inquisitively, still not quite getting it. Klaus laughed, a high, nervous, and exasperated thing that grated slightly on the ear as if it were a block of fine parmesan. “Okay. Okay! Um, Isadora...I like boys. Men. I don’t know. No, I do know. God, everything I’ve ever read on this, volumes and volumes... it’s literally all failing me now.” He sighed. “I think I’m gay, Isadora. Please, don’t hate me.”
Isadora’s eyes blew wide. “Oh!”
Trust Klaus to find the most roundabout and awkward way to work that into a conversation! Ha! Isadora was shocked, honestly, a phrase which here means not “struck by an amount of electricity, small or large,” but “surprised by a wholly unexpected and typically negative event.” Oh, but this wasn’t negative, not really. She searched Klaus’s tense face, his eyes closed tight for fear of her reaction, his shoulders drawn up close so he took up as little space as possible. He was so scared; her heart ached. She softened and smoothed herself as best she could. “Oh, Klaus. It’s okay, you’re okay. I love you so, so much. You haven’t changed, Klaus, I just know more of you now. How could I hate you? I love you so much.” Her hands shook, and she tried to calm them.
Why was she shaking?
“Klaus? Open your eyes, Klaus, come on. There you go. Look at me, I love you. I love you like you’re my own brother.”
That had slipped from her mouth entirely without permission. Just this morning, Isadora had thought she was ensconced in a Klaus-flavored crush. But, Isadora supposed, somewhat giddily, it was true. She never really was in love with Klaus, was she? That would have been easiest, and Klaus was comfortable and familiar, so she had convinced herself of it. He was only ever really a third brother to her. And that was perfect.
Okay. Okay. She was still shaking; by now the tremors had galloped through her hands and arms into her shoulders like a thousand mustangs. “Stop shaking!” she murmured to her body, but it paid her no mind.
Klaus sniffled rather unattractively, but Isadora didn’t blame him. She handed him her handkerchief. Finally, he opened his eyes, wiping away an errant tear. “I love you like you’re my sister, too. Thank you for loving me.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Could you please...not tell anyone? Not yet?”
“Oh Klaus, of course,” Isadora managed, through chattering teeth. “Though I can’t imagine anyone being anything but accepting of you. We all love you so much.”
Klaus chuckled, thickened by the threat of tears like a blue cloud hovering just above a barbecue. “Me neither, especially considering you and Violet.” Isadora looked at him quizzically. He seemed to backpedal. “Oh! Oh, you’re not...? Oh, dear, sorry. Never mind!”
“What, Klaus?”
“Don’t worry about it, just the panic talking!” Klaus laughed, somewhat nervously.
“Okay,” said Isadora slowly, the way people do when trying not to startle a horse. Then she collected herself, sat up, and smiled, determined for her wish of an easy first picnic afternoon to be fulfilled. “Klaus?”
“Yes, Isadora?”
“Let’s have some sandwiches.”
She would worry about the shaking, and about the never-really-a-crush, and about the Violet comment, when they got back home.
ACT TWO: ISADORA AND THE ACT OF REALIZATION
Violet’s bangs swept across her forehead as she bent down to survey the marigolds. Isadora watched her calculate the length of the stems, watched her take a pencil to mark down the amount of pollen she observed on the stamens, watched her run her finger pads along the leaves to test their texture. If she noticed the brilliant gold of the petals’ color, she would only have noted it down as proof the plants were thriving. Nowhere did she record the way the swaying heads looked like summer days bobbing one by one into autumn, nowhere the way that the green, envious fingers of leaves extended sneakily from every stem.
But Isadora’s heart thrummed with poetic passion for these little round suns. The yellow of the light refracting through the petals onto Violet’s porcelain chin couldn’t be replicated by even the most careful of measurements. This was the lifeblood of the garden: this mysterious beauty, this certain slant of light . Violet’s brow was so furrowed in concentration on all the wrong things that Isadora couldn’t help but laugh.
Violet looked up at her, startled, but already smiling. If Isadora was laughing, she knew that before long she would be, too. And now, Isadora was always laughing. So Violet was always smiling. Violet had told this to Isadora, once, after the two of them had laughed for what felt like years about something so, so trivial, and Isadora had tucked those tiny words beneath her second rib on the right side. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she pulled them loose, held them in her hands, and stared at them. They cast an orange glow across her face. Now, here, watching Violet struggle to suppress a giggle caused by nothing but Isadora’s (rather honking) laugh -- the orange glow encompassed not only Isadora’s face, but her entire body. Perhaps she was floating. Before she could check to see, Violet’s laugh finally burst from her in surprised ecstasy like shining water from a gleaming fountain.
“Now, Violet Baudelaire, what could possibly be so funny?” Isadora said this in the most stern tone she could muster, which is to say not very stern at all, considering she had dissolved into quite the same foam of hilarity that currently encompassed Violet.
“Don’t try to pin this on me, Isadora Quagmire,” Violet rebutted, ever regal even in the face of such horrific giggling attacks as this, the likes of which the world had hardly seen. “Perhaps you could enlighten me .”
“Why, Violet, I would never!” Isadora was scandalized, really.
Violet pinned her with a cheeky look.
“It’s just,” Isadora paused, suddenly sobered. Her eyes traveled across Violet’s face: here her jaw, her eye color, the space where her cheekbone met her ear. She blushed so prettily, and was she leaning in, a bit? Her delicate, practiced fingers brushed a strand of Isadora’s hair behind her ear and oh my, were Violet’s eyes always so brilliantly colored? Up Isadora’s neck crept a furtive flush. “You.”
A couplet flew towards her ear, and she unraveled it like a ball of yarn in her mind. The girl who misses forest for the trees/The only one I ever want to please.
Oh.
Oh!
Perhaps...She and Violet...Did she like Violet?...so, Klaus was saying that the two of them...but Isadora never knew...and Violet, did she...? Was she…?
Oh, dear.
Isadora blinked and leaned quickly back, away from Violet, away from that , because that was not something she was quite prepared to tackle today, or perhaps tomorrow, or perhaps ever.
“Isadora? Are you alright?” Violet’s voice was heavy with concern, and maybe a note of disappointment, a stark, yet complementary contrast to the hilarity of the moment just prior. Oh, was it only a moment? To Isadora it could have been years, it could have been centuries, for in the space between that moment and this, the next, she had crossed a threshold through which she could not cross back.
“I-I have to go. I...just remembered that, well, Sunny and I have...tai chi. ‘When duty calls,/Leisure falls.’ I’ll...be back!”
Violet watched Isadora’s back as she went, and covered her face with her exasperated hands.
ACT THREE: ISADORA AND THE EFFECTS OF REALIZATION
It was completely certain that Isadora was not the luckiest girl in the world, but there was one part of her life that was consistently outstanding: her friends and family. Klaus, and Sunny, and Duncan, and Quigley, and Violet got her out of bed in the morning, and they kept her going through the day.
It was terribly hard to remember this, though, when one was trying to get ready in the morning.
“Klaus! Klaus, you’ve been in the bathroom for forty-three minutes! You don’t have forty-three minutes worth of hair,” Duncan shouted through the bathroom door, punctuating his words with an occasional feverish knock. Klaus, intending to drown Duncan out, replied with a horrific vocal rendition of “Spring (Concerto No. 1 in E Major).” Sunny cringed.
Meanwhile, Violet’s papers spread across the entire length of the counter like greedy-fingered moss as she stirred her oatmeal in Isadora’s favorite soup pan, leaving no space whatsoever for Isadora’s patented sandwich assembly line. (What? Violet wasn’t the only invention-savvy girl in the house!) Across the hall, Sunny was reading her battered copy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis . The last bastion of peace in the house, Sunny had already woken up, dressed, eaten breakfast, and gotten her backpack in order (not that kindergarteners had much in the way of school supplies to get in order, even the advanced ones). She observed these chaotic morning proceedings with an amused and jovial eye.
For Isadora, however, the observation of the Baudelaire-Quagmire morning routine necessitated a deep and cleansing breath. She ladled chili into lunch containers with slightly more force than necessary, still extremely bitter about the lack of sandwich space.
When Klaus, at long last, tumbled out of the bathroom, Isadora watched Duncan laugh victoriously and dash inside. Moments later, he re-emerged and struck up a cheerful argument with Violet, toothbrush in mouth. Isadora watched this, too. She noted the way the two settled quickly into easy banter; she catalogued the gentle curl of Violet’s smile; she filed away the pleased slant of her broad shoulders; she indexed her indulgent, perhaps even flirtatious expression; she recorded the feeling of strange yet newly familiar longing and jealousy curling around her ribs. Two months of this sickening display on daily repeat. Oh, God. This was truly impossibly to take any longer.
“Klaus? May I speak to you for a moment?” Isadora grabbed him by the arm and pulled, not waiting for him to follow on his own. Wheat germ and spoon in hand, Klaus followed, shutting the door behind him.
“What’s wrong, Isadora? In case you can’t tell, I’m trying to eat my wheat germ.” Klaus’s hips tilted with sass and panache, but Isadora saw his brow furrowed in furtive concern. Isadora’s back was ramrod straight, and her arms laid tense at her sides.
“I am going to tell you something, and you are not going to laugh at me or tell me that you told me so,” Isadora said authoritatively. Klaus looked confused and slightly scared.
“I am... interested , shall we say, in girls.” Though she was nervous, Isadora saw little point in beating around the bush, and got directly to the point. “Namely, your sister.” Then, she made a face. “Dear Lord, sorry. Your older sister. Sunny’s about twelve years too young for me. But it doesn’t really matter, anyway, she seems really into Duncan.” Isadora flopped dramatically down onto the couch and groaned.
Klaus opened his mouth, then closed it. Then opened it again, and closed it. He opened his mouth, produced a single syllable, scrunched his face up in contemplation, and then - in a shocking twist - closed his mouth, with a click this time. Again. It’s okay, Isadora was patient. It would be pretty fucking hilarious if Klaus, the gay one, hated Isadora for being also the gay one. He shut his eyes and rubbed his temples once, twice, now three times. Then, he sighed and spoke.
“Isadora, thank you for trusting me enough to tell me.”
Isadora muttered a muffled “you’re welcome” into the couch cushion.
Klaus was heavy with patience. “It doesn’t bother me that you have a crush on Violet, she’s wonderful and deserves to be happy.”
Isadora agreed, saying a hearty “hell yeah, she does,” still face down in the couch cushions. Lifting her head, she said, very nobly, “And if that comes through Duncan, that’s fine by me.”
Klaus facepalmed. “Why do you think Violet has a thing for Duncan, Isadora?”
“Did you not see them this morning? It looks like Violet is running for a mayoral position in Flirt City. And Duncan’s the city councillor. And they’re going to run the city together and it’s going to be a perfect example of an environmentally friendly city and they’re going to work to curb the opioid epidemic and--”
Interrupting Isadora’s rant, which Klaus knew from experience would soon turn into musings on urban efficiency on a whole, Klaus groaned. “Isadora. What did you and Violet do last Thursday?”
“We went to the beach with Sunny and got lunch and then came home and made dinner together.”
“What did she bring you on Saturday?”
“A freshly cut bouquet of my favorite flowers...”
“What did Violet say to you in the car yesterday!”
“...That I was the most intelligent and beautiful girl in the world and I was deserving of love whatever form it came in. But listen, Klaus, that’s just a friends thing! I’m telling you!”
Klaus stared blankly at her. “I am literally losing my entire mind. Say goodbye to Klaus as you knew him. You’ve killed me, Isadora, you are killing me.” Isadora started to protest, but Klaus shushed her. “Listen to me. Go back out there right now, and tell her how you feel about her. She won’t be mean to you either way, though I’m strongly leaning towards her reciprocating your feelings.”
When Isadora made no moves, Klaus hauled her up by the waist, manhandled her into the kitchen and sat her in the stool next to Violet.
“Violet,” he said, panting. “Isadora has something she’d like to discuss with you. Come on, Duncan, let’s let the girls talk.”
Isadora looked pleadingly at the boys as they left her, but when they shut the door she turned her head to look sheepishly at Violet.
And Violet, God, Violet! Her face was lit brilliantly from the inside, kind, worried eyes, tracking all over Isadora. A tentative smile was splashed across Violet’s face. How could Isadora do anything that would scrub that gorgeous smile away? Make it falter, dim the inner light? Nope, no, no matter what Klaus said, no matter the tiny little kernel of hope just threatening to break past the surface of the dirt in her heart, she would not tell. Instead she thought it might be nice to start sobbing, so she did.
Violet’s strong, gentle hands found her wrists immediately, circling around them as Violet’s eyes peered into Isadora’s. “Izzy? What’s wrong?”
“Nobody calls me that, Violet,” Isadora sobbed. “Why do you call me that?”
That struck cruelly, and Violet stiffened. “Isadora?”
“I think…I think,” Isadora sniffled, “that you should keep your distance from me.”
“Oh,” said Violet, withdrawing into herself, pulling back her hands from Isadora’s wrists and her heart from Isadora’s hands. “I didn’t know you felt...that way. I’m...sorry that I made you” - she breathed deeply - “uncomfortable.”
There was silence for a few moments, until what Violet had said caught up with Isadora.
“Wait, what? Un- Uncomfortable? Me?” Isadora laughed bitterly. “If only you knew how wrong you were! I’m the one that you’ll be uncomfortable with.” Violet quirked her head and Isadora sucked in a shaky breath. “Violet, I’m the dissonance that breaks the euphony. Do you know how easy it was supposed to be? You’d marry Duncan, and Klaus would marry some wonderful man, and I could be content with spinsterdom. We’d all live here and watch your kids grow up and keep each other sane and safe. I would’ve been okay with that, you know? But Klaus, he wanted me to…” She huffed. “Say this. So I will. I guess. I’m sorry that I messed all this up. I’m sorry I got a little greedy. I don’t want you to flirt with Duncan, because I want you to flirt with me. Not to get too ahead of myself, here, but I don’t really want you to marry him either.” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “I kind of like you and I kind of think you should consider marrying me instead. But we’re only eighteen and I’ve never really even kissed a girl, so maybe let’s wait on the whole ‘marriage’ thing. Anyway, I really do think I can muster up the courage to take a chill pill.” Isadora stood from the stool. Violet looked frozen. In shock, disgust, fear, panic? Isadora wanted to laugh, but instead she made up a couplet. “‘Maybe I should’ve sucked it up/Before I went and fucked it up.’ Goodbye, Violet.”
She turned to leave and made it one, two, three, four steps until Violet called after her.
“Wait, please wait, Izzy!”
Isadora stopped, but didn’t turn around. She didn’t want to see the look on Violet’s face; she had had enough heartbreak for the day and she did not need a visual, thank you very much.
“Do you remember the day we met?” Violet said, softly.
Of course I do, Isadora wants to say. How could I forget the best day of the worst part of my entire life?
“I saw you, and I knew you were...something. Something special, for me. You clicked with Klaus, first, and Duncan and I got along, so that was the way we paired off, first. But after we bought the house and spent actual time together, time that wasn’t a moment’s escape from a terrible existence, I realized that more than anyone, more than Sunny, more than Klaus, more than Duncan, you knew me.”
Isadora turned, slowly. “I...knew you?”
“You...understood me. And you’re so...you. In the most wonderful way. You can say something like, ‘I want to eat this summer day,’ and it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. Because you can put words to feelings that I’ve felt always. And I love that, and I love you, I love you like the best friend I’ve ever had or could ever want.”
And there, there it was, and Isadora deflated because well, she had expected that, but at the same time, there was the tiniest spark of hope floating closer and closer to the kindling. It was okay, it really was, but it hurt like hell.
“But,” Violet began again, “I also loved you more than that.” She laughed, a little. “You’re so easy to love.”
Isadora’s heart beat so fast she was worried she’d fly away. “Violet?”
Violet just smiled at her. “Do you want to kiss me now?”
"I really, really do."
And so she did.