“Is that so unusual?” the sax teacher asks.
Isolde shoots her a vicious look. “It’s
sick
,” she says. “It’s sick like when kids dress up their pets like real people, with clothes and wigs and stuff, and then make
them walk on their back legs and take photos. It’s just like that, but worse because you can see how much she’s enjoying it.”
“I’m sure your sister is not enjoying it,” the saxophone teacher says.
“Dad said it would probably be years and years before Mr. Saladin gets properly convicted and goes to jail,” Isolde says.
“All the papers will say child abuse, but there won’t be a child any more, she’ll be an adult by then, just like him. It’ll
be like someone destroyed the scene of the crime on purpose, and built something clean and shiny in its place.”
“Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says, firmly this time, “I’m sure they are scared only because they know the sin is still
there. They know it snuck up inside her and stuck fast, wedging itself into a place nobody knows about and will never find.
They know that
his
sin was just an action, a foolish deadly fumble in the bright dusty lunchtime light, but hers—her sin is a condition, a sickness
lodged somewhere deep inside for now and for always.”
“My dad doesn’t believe in sin,” Isolde says. “We’re atheists.”
“It pays to be open minded,” says the saxophone teacher.
“
I’ll
tell you why they’re so scared,” Isolde says. “They’re scared because now she knows everything they know. They’re scared
because now they’ve got no secrets left.”
The saxophone teacher gets up suddenly and goes to the window. There is a long pause before Isolde speaks again.
“Dad just goes, I don’t know how it happened, honey. What’s
important is that now we know about it, it won’t happen anymore.”
“So they called off jazz band this morning,” Bridget says. “They go, Mr. Saladin can’t come in this afternoon. He’s helping
with an investigation.”
She sucks her reed noisily.
“You know it’s something really serious,” she says, “when they cross between not enough information and too much. Normally,
see, they would have just gone, Listen up, you lot, jazz band’s canceled, you’ve got three minutes to get your shit together,
get out and enjoy the sunshine for once, come on, I said move.”
This girl is good at voices. She actually wanted to be Isolde, because Isolde has a better part, but this girl is pale and
stringy and rumpled and always looks slightly alarmed, which are qualities that don’t quite fit Isolde, and so she plays Bridget
instead. In truth it is her longing to be an Isolde that most characterizes her as a Bridget: Bridget is always wanting to
be somebody else.
“Or,” she says, “they would have gone the other way, and told us more than we needed to know, but deliberately, so we knew
it was a privilege. They would have done the wide-eyed solemn holy thing that goes, Come on everyone, we need your full attention,
this is really important. Mr. Saladin’s had to rush off because one of his family has fallen ill. Okay, now this could be
really serious and it’s really important you guys give him the space and consideration he needs if and when he comes back
to class.”
This is a theory that Bridget has been thinking about for some time, and she gleams with the pleasure of it. She screws down
her reed and blows an experimental honk.
“Helping with an investigation,” she says contemptuously,
returning to readjust the mouthpiece. “And they all came in together
to say it, all in a pack or whatever, breathing together, quick breaths in and out, with their eyes back and forth sideways,
and the principal at the front to break the wind, like the chief goose at the front of the V.”
“Geese usually rotate, I think,” the saxophone teacher says absently. “I gather it’s quite hard work breaking wind.” She is
rifling through a stack of sheet music. The bookcase behind her is stuffed with old manuscripts and bleeding stray leaves
on to the floor.
The saxophone teacher would never interrupt Isolde in such a dismissive fashion: that was one of Bridget’s reasons for wanting
the role. Bridget remembers all over again that she is pale and stringy and rumpled and thoroughly secondary, and then flushes
with a new determination to reclaim the scene.
“So they shuffle in,” she says, “in their V formation or whatever, this gray polyester army all trying really hard not to
look at anybody in particular, especially not the big gaping hole next to first alto which is where Victoria usually sits.”
Bridget says “Victoria” with emphasis and evident satisfaction. She looks at the saxophone teacher for effect, but the saxophone
teacher is busy shuffling papers with her big veined hands and doesn’t flicker.
“The doors to the practice rooms have little windows of reinforced glass so you can see in,” Bridget says, trying harder this
time. Her voice gets louder the harder she tries. “But Mr. Saladin pasted the booking sheet over his, so all you can see is
the timetable and little slivers of white light all around the edge if the light’s on inside. When Victoria had her woodwind
tutorial all the slivers would go out.”
“Found it!” says the saxophone teacher, and she holds up a handful of sheet music. “ ‘The Old Castle’ from
Pictures at an Exhibition.
I think you’ll find this interesting, Bridget. We can talk about why the saxophone never really caught on as an orchestral
instrument.”
The saxophone teacher sometimes feels disgusted with herself for baiting Bridget in this way. “It’s just that she tries so
desperately hard,” she said once to Bridget’s mother. “That’s what makes it so easy. If it wasn’t so obvious that she was
trying, I might be tempted to respect her a little more.”
Bridget’s mother nodded and nodded, and said, “Yes, we find that’s often the trouble.”
Now the saxophone teacher just looks at Bridget, standing there all stringy and rumpled and trying so desperately hard, and
raises her eyebrows.
Bridget reddens with frustration and deliberately skips all the possible lines about Mussorgsky and
Pictures at an Exhibition
and Ravel and why the saxophone never really caught on as an orchestral instrument. She skips all that and goes straight
for a line she likes.
“They treat it like a dosage,” she says, even louder this time. “It’s like a vaccination where they give you a little slice
of a disease so your body can get a defense ready for the real thing. They’re frightened because it’s a disease they haven’t
tried on us before, and so they’re trying to vaccinate us without telling us what the disease really is. They want to inject
us very secretly, without us noticing. It won’t work.”
They are really looking at each other now. The saxophone teacher takes a moment to align the pile of papers with the edge
of the rug before she says, “Why won’t it work, Bridget?”
“Because we noticed,” says Bridget, breathing hard through her nose. “We were watching.”
Julia’s feet are always scuffing, and she has a scab around her mouth.
“They called an assembly for the whole form this morning,”
she says, “and the counselor was there, all puffed up like he’d
never felt so important in his life.”
She talks over her shoulder while she unpacks her case. The saxophone teacher is sitting in a slice of cold sun by the window,
watching the gulls wheel and shit. The clouds are low.
“They started talking in these special quiet honey voices like we’d break if they spoke too loud. They go, You’re all aware
of the rumors that have been circulating this past week. It’s important that we talk through some things together so we can
all be sure of where we’re at.”
Julia turns on her heel, fits her sax to her neckstrap, and stands there for a moment with her hands on her hips. The sax
is slung across her body like a weapon.
“The counselor is a retard,” she says definitively. “Me and Katrina went once in third form because Alice Franklin had sex
in a movie theater and we were scared she’d become a skank and ruin her life by having kids by accident. We told him all about
it and how scared we were, and Katrina even cried. He just sat there and blinked and he kept nodding and nodding, but really
slowly like he was programmed at a quarter speed, and then when we’d run out of things to say and Katrina had stopped crying
he opened his drawer and got a piece of paper and drew three circles inside each other, and wrote
You
and then
Your Family
and then
Your Friends
, and he said, That’s the way it is, isn’t it? And then he said we could keep the piece of paper if we wanted.”
Julia gives a mirthless snort and opens her plastic music folder.
“What happened to Alice Franklin?” asks the saxophone teacher.
“Oh, we found out later she was lying,” Julia says.
“She didn’t have sex in a movie theater.”
“No.”
Julia takes a moment to adjust the spidery legs of the music stand.
“Why would she lie to you?” the saxophone teacher asks politely.
Julia makes a sweeping gesture with her hand. “She was probably just
bored
,” she says. In her mouth the word is noble and magnificent.
“I see,” says the saxophone teacher.
“So anyway they go, Maybe we could start the ball rolling by asking if anyone’s got something they want to get off their chest?
And one of the girls started crying right then, before anything had even happened for real, and the counselor just about wet
his pants with joy, and he goes, Nothing anybody says this morning will go further than this room, or some shit. So this girl
starts saying something lame, and her friend reaches over and holds her hand or something sick like that, and then everyone
starts sharing and saying things about trust and betrayal and confidence and feeling all confused and scared… and it’s going
to be one fuck of a long morning.”
Julia darts a glance over toward the saxophone teacher to see if the word has any effect, but the saxophone teacher just gives
her a wintry smile and waits. Bridget would have balked and fluttered and turned scarlet and wondered about it for a long
time afterward, but Julia doesn’t. She just smirks and takes unnecessary care in clipping the slippery pages to the edge of
the music stand.
“So after a while,” Julia says, “the counselor goes, What is harassment, girls?, looking at us all eager and encouraging like
when teachers are torn between really wanting you to get the right answer but also really wanting you to be wrong so they
can have the pleasure of telling you themselves. Then he goes, speaking softly and solemnly like he’s revealing something
nobody else knows, Harassment doesn’t have to be touching, my darlings. Harassment can also be watching. Harassment can be
if someone watches you in a way that you don’t like.
“So I put up my hand and I go, Does it become harassment
because of what they watch? Or because of what they imagine while
they’re watching? They all looked at me and I went really red, and the counselor touched his fingertips together and gave
me this long look like, I know what you’re doing, you’re trying to sabotage the trust thing we’ve got going here, and I’m
going to answer your question because I have to, but I’m not going to give you the answer you want.”
The saxophone teacher stands up finally and picks up her own saxophone as if to say “enough.” But Julia is already saying
it, thrust on by a strange sort of red-cheeked momentum.
“
I
imagine things when I watch people,” is what Julia says.
Isolde is waiting outside in the hall. She can hear the faint rumble of the saxophone teacher’s voice through the wall as
the 4:00 lesson draws to a close. Here in the deserted hallway Isolde takes a moment to enjoy the backstage silence before
she is cued to knock and enter. She inhales and with her tongue she tastes the calm and careless privacy of a person utterly
unobserved.
Normally she would be flooded with pre-tutorial dread, leafing through her sheet music, practicing in mime, her eyes following
the music on her lap and her splayed hands moving on the empty air. But today she is not thinking about her lesson. She is
sitting still and with all her mind trying to preserve and capture a private swollen feeling in the deep well of her chest.
It is like a little pocket of air has rushed into her mouth and sent a little shiver down her back and tugged at the empty
half-basin of her pelvic bone. She feels a prolonged and dislocated swoop in her belly and a yank of emptiness in her rib
cage, and suddenly she is much too hot. Isolde feels this way sometimes when she is in the bath, or when she watches people
kiss on television, or in bed when she runs her fingertips down the soft
curve of her belly and imagines that her hand is
not her own. Most often the feeling descends inexplicably—at a bus stop, perhaps, or in the lunch line, or waiting for a bell
to ring.
She thinks, Did I feel this when I saw my sister for the first time as a sexual thing? After Dad touched my head and said,
This is going to be hard time, these next few weeks, and then left me to watch TV, and after a while Victoria came in and
sat down and looked over at me, and then she said, Fantastic, so now everyone knows. And we sat and watched the tail end of
some C-grade thriller on the Thursday night special, except I couldn’t concentrate and all I could think was, How? How were
you able to turn your head and look hard at him and crane up and kiss his mouth? How were you not paralyzed with fear and
indecision? How did you know that he would receive you, gather you up and press hard against you and even give out a little
strangled moan like a cry, like a cry in the back of his throat?
Here in the hallway Isolde is thinking, Did I feel this feeling then, that night? Did I feel this jangled swoop of dread and
longing, this elevator-dive, this strange suspended prelude to a sneeze?
Later maybe she will identify the feeling as some abstracted form of arousal, an irregular toll that plucks at her body now
and again, like an untouched string vibrating in harmonic sympathy with a piano nearby. Later she might conclude that the
feeling is a little like a hunger-stab, not the gnawing ever-present lust of real hunger, just a stab that strikes like a
warning—here and gone. But by then, that time in years to come when she has come to know her body’s tides and tolls and can
say,
This is frustration
and
This is lust
and
This is longing, a nostalgic sexual longing that draws me back to a time before
, by then everything will be classified, everything will have a name and a shape, and the modest compass of her desires will
be circumscribed by the limits of what she has known, what she has experienced, what she has felt. So far Isolde has experienced
nothing and so this feeling does not mean
I must have sex tonight
or
I am still full from last
night, still brimming
. It does not mean
Who must I be in love with, to feel this pull?
or
Again I am wanting the thing I cannot have.
It is not yet a feeling that points her in a direction. It is just the feeling of a vacuum, a void waiting to be filled.