Trust Exercise(17)
“Who?”
“Mr. Kingsley.”
“Mr. Kingsley called here? Why?” Some terrified animal group—a quad of quail? a mess of mice?—explodes into flight inside Sarah’s rib cage.
“I have no idea why. I know his stated reason. He called to ask about your bakery job. He asked if I could possibly let you stop doing it, for your health and well-being. He seemed to think that I force you to do it and keep all your earnings.”
“I never said that to him!”
“I told him I don’t have the slightest control over how you spend your time, at the bakery or anywhere else. I’d like to know what made him feel entitled to call me about it.”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“I’d be very happy if you quit that job, and I could quit driving you there at five thirty both weekend mornings, but you’re so determined to buy your own car, you’re so convinced that not owning a car at the age of fifteen is some sort of awful deprivation, you’ve somehow convinced me I’d be mistreating you by not giving you rides to your job. And now your teacher, who keeps you at your school for twelve hours a day painting pieces of canvas and gluing flowers on hats, this man calls to suggest I’m mistreating you by forcing you to work, as if I’m making you sing for your supper? How dare he! Who the sam hell does he think he is?”
“I don’t know, Mom. I never said that to him.”
“I happen to agree with him that you should quit that job, but that doesn’t mean that I want his opinion. Your life outside school isn’t any of his goddamn business. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she says, edging toward her bedroom. Already, his phone call’s impact has changed shape. In the instant, she’d felt his betrayal, the violation of their special alliance. Now she grasps that he’s mounted a challenge to her mother’s authority. He has intruded for the sake of intruding. How proud she feels, to command his attention.
* * *
THE REHEARSAL ROOM, with its long mirrored wall and its frigid linoleum floors. So much has happened here, in this fluorescent-lit refrigerated box, where their twins stare at them from the room in the mirror. The room in the mirror is just as bright and cold as this room, just as provisional-seeming, with its plastic/chrome chairs, its foam/Naugahyde mats, its piano and bench, shoved aside, cleared away for their bodies. In this room they’ve crawled through the unrelieved darkness, encountering and groping each other. They’ve lain on their backs and been corpses. They’ve cradled each other, fallen into each other’s linked arms, formed a wheel and by turn had the hub stare at them and deliver a verdict (Norbert to Pammie: “I think you’re the nicest girl in our class, and if you were thinner, you’d be kind of pretty”; Chantal to David: “I don’t fuck white guys, but if I had to fuck a white guy, I’d fuck you”). Now, coming into the room, they’re told to set it up as a theatre. Three or so rows of chairs facing this way. At their front, a pair of chairs facing each other. As always, Mr. Kingsley will stand. “Side aisles, please,” he says, and they hurry to compact the rows so there’s clearance between the row ends and the walls. They take their seats, clustering in their usual ways: the black girls, the white boys, the rest filling in in accordance with vague, shifting rules of attraction/repulsion. The two chairs “onstage” remain empty. Sarah, coming in late from the bathroom, takes the empty chair at the back by Manuel, for no reason apart from its emptiness. Manuel is wearing a nice shirt; it seems lately he has better clothes, though this impression of hers isn’t consciously made, it’s landscape. Memory will reveal it.
“Sarah, please take one of the two chairs up front. Either one.”
She’s so startled to be singled out that for a moment she doesn’t stand up, though her gaze whips to Mr. Kingsley, questioning. Nothing in his gaze answers. He is loftily perched on the battlement tower, conducting the movements of miniature troops. As she stands she’s aware of Manuel quickly moving his backpack as if it might be in her way.
Last year, she’d had her wisdom teeth out. They’d come in unusually early, the dentist had said, and been unusually large in a way that would certainly cause crookedness that was harder to fix afterward; there was some sort of joke to be made here about oversize premature wisdom and irreparable crookedness, but she’d never worked it out to her satisfaction before the teeth were swapped for blood-soaked wads of gauze. They’d drugged her to do the procedure, her mother sitting in the waiting room, reading the paper, while Sarah lay prone and unconscious beneath the hot lights; and no sooner had the teeth been yanked out and the gauze wads stuffed in than Sarah had apparently swung her legs down from the chair, while the dentist and nurse washed their hands with backs turned, and before either of them, or the receptionist, or Sarah’s mother, or other patients in the waiting room could quite process that Sarah was walking, she’d walked out of the office, and out the door of the building, and across much of the parking lot until, giving chase, the receptionist and nurse had at last detained her as she attacked the locked doors of her mother’s Toyota. She retained not a shred of a dream’s memory of this dental escape. In fact she’d thought her mother was joking, until she’d gone back for her follow-up visit and the dentist had said, “Should I tie you down first?”