Trust Exercise(12)
Oh, no, they can’t respect her. It’s perfectly ridiculous. And the music she’s playing! Cat Stevens. The Moody Blues. Satirically, then, they walk, walk, walk!—making faces at each other, swinging their arms, bouncing on the balls of their feet, speeding up comically so they’re marching like robots. Whenever Norbert and Colin pass each other, they make absurd faces. Then, when they pass each other again, they both make absurd faces and leap in the air, still without breaking stride. This behavior spreads, evolves. Most of the boys adore Monty Python, and embarrass the girls at lunch with their flawlessly recalled and completely unfunny enactments of skits, by which they, the performers, are slain with hilarity. In the Black Box, the boys do “silly walks,” and then pratfalls-in-motion to show they are slain with hilarity. By and large, the girls grow increasingly serious as the boys grow increasingly ludicrous. The girls no longer walk, they glide, they skim, they slice. The music changes to classical stuff without words. The girls begin taking on speed. An additional layer is added: high speed without hitting one another. They are weaving a mad tapestry with their movements; some unpredictably change direction in the hope of collisions. No matter what they do, no matter how subversively they do it, Ms. Rozot cries from the sidelines:
“Good!
“Move! Move! MOVE!
“Ah—you are making something.”
Indeed they are. Somehow, silliness dies. All the theatrical forms of movement—the “silly walks” and pratfalls, but also the arm-swinging (“I am carefree!”) and the deliberate direction-changing (“I am a rogue!”)—leach out of the room. Unexpected collectivity has slowly emerged in its place. Perhaps most important, embarrassment has been given up. Without their having noticed it, they’re no longer embarrassed. Their speed has equalized until they’re all traveling at about the same rate. Their winding paths, their cloverleafs and hairpins and loops, knit some underlying pattern as if they learned this maypole dance beside their parents as children, as if it binds them to something, and makes of them something.
Sarah’s face is streaming tears. At the point where she ought to curve left or curve right she goes straight, and plunges out the Black Box doors and down the hall, running, her speed snatching the tears from her face.
There’s a single toilet stall at the back of the girls’ dressing room, off stage right, which no one ever uses except during performances. Sarah locks herself in and succumbs, her whole body folded and violently jerking as if she’ll throw up in the bowl. Her mind startles her with the wish to be dead. To be dead, instead of in pain. Suicide, she realizes, isn’t opting out of the future, it’s opting out of the present, for who can see more of the future than that? Reference to the future, to its unbroken promise, is the reflex of those for whom the future’s mirage still exists. Such people are lucky, deceived.
As if Sarah’s thoughts had conjured her, Ms. Rozot comes into the dressing room and insists on discussing the future. Sarah cannot imagine how, apart from her own mind’s self-defeating wizardry, this unwanted hippie Frenchwoman could have located her in this bathroom. Ms. Rozot is brand-new to the school. More than half the school’s experienced students and teachers do not even realize this bathroom exists. Outside the stall door Ms. Rozot says, “Sa-rah? Sa-rah?” mispronouncing both a’s the same way, like the “o” sound in “odd.” “Sarah, are you in there? Are you in pain?”
“Please leave me alone!” Sarah sobs angrily. Why is solitude so fucking hard to achieve? If only she had a car, she thinks for the billionth time. She would lock all the doors and just drive.
“Sarah, I want to share with you something. I think it will help you. Young people like you experience pain more intensely than those of us just a bit older. I speak of emotional pain. Your pain is greater, in duration and strength. It is harder to bear. This is not a metaphor. It is a fact, of physiology. Of psychology. Your emotional sensitivity—it is superior to that of your parents, your teachers. That is why these years of your life, when you are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, are so difficult, but also so important. That is why developing your talent at this age is so crucial. This heightened emotional pain is a gift. A difficult gift.”
Despite herself, she’s listening. “Are you saying,” she manages after a while, “that in the future, when I’m older, things won’t hurt as much?”
“Yes, exactly. But Sarah, I am saying something else. Don’t turn away from the pain. When you are older, yes, you will be harder. That is a blessing and a curse.”
Ms. Rozot does not insist Sarah open the door, and this alone opens Sarah. They linger, she does not know how long, on their opposite sides of the door. “Thank you,” she whispers at last.
“Please take your time,” says Ms. Rozot, departing.
* * *
IT’S BEEN OBVIOUS from the beginning who are Broadway Babies and who aren’t. Those who truly can sing, who can give them the old razzle-dazzle, who live for that one singular sensation, have for the most part drawn attention to themselves from the first day of school. They cluster around the Black Box piano during rainy-day lunchtimes and sing The Fantasticks. They wear the Cats sweatshirts to school that they got on their holiday trip to New York. Some of them, like the Junior named Chad, are enviably serious musicians who can not only sing but play Sondheim, for real, from sheet music. Some of them, like Erin O’Leary, don’t just sing but dance like Ginger Rogers, having apparently put on tap shoes at the same time as they took their first steps.