Trust Exercise(22)

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IN THE FUTURE, Joelle will run away. She will simply disappear, halfway through senior year. Rumors will abound of her reasons, her means, her location. Her father beat her with a belt and a stick and tied her to a tree; she’d been sent to live with him by her mother, for being too wild. Her father has the FBI looking for her, he has doors broken down, Joelle’s spotted all sorts of places: Tampa; Waikiki; New York; the background of the Aerosmith video for “Love in an Elevator,” in which she is said to be one of the dancers. Confirmation of any of this awaits a farther future than the one in which she runs away.

In the future, Pammie will decide to be an astronaut. It’s no frivolous decision, though she’s remained, to her grief, overweight. She must go back to school and learn physics. After physics, a diet.

In the future, Taniqua will become one of the most recognizable television actresses on earth. She’ll play a cop on a long-running show about rookie cops growing and changing in the course of becoming experienced cops. Taniqua will play the absolutely humorless female cop, whose awful past (of course), full of poverty and abuse and incarcerated fathers and drug-addicted mothers and shot-to-death brothers, accounts for her absolute humorlessness. Her old classmates, from her youth, will hardly believe it’s bright, sassy Taniqua who’s playing that humorless cop. They’ll keep thinking that her hidden sense of humor, its belated revelation, will have to provide a plot point, but year after year it does not. Nor do her good singing voice or her dancing. None of these seemingly central aspects of Taniqua will ever appear in her signature role. She’ll play that role for years, and be rich.

In the future, Norbert will be a manager at Whataburger. This will be so consistent with their cruelest expectations of him that they’ll dislike him even more, for not proving them wrong. Norbert, so incurably himself. So stubbornly immune to all those means of metamorphosis.

In the future, Ms. Rozot’s prediction in fact will come true. Things, at least the sorts of things implied in that discussion, like heartbreak, will hurt less, although the range of hurtful things will expand. Heartbreak will come to seem like a rather luxurious reason for pain. There will also be the failings of the body and the wallet. The extinctions of friendships. The crimes against children committed by grown-ups. And the inexplicable, small kindnesses, which somehow pierce Sarah most deeply of all, as when she left the house one summer day so distracted she forgot to zip her sleeveless summer dress, so a wide slit was open from armpit to hip, through which her bra and her panties could clearly be seen, and she walked this way, obliviously, all the way to the park, where a strange woman cried, “Sweetie! How have you been?” and embraced her.

And while Sarah stood bewildered in her arms, the woman said in her ear, “Your dress is open. I’ll keep hugging until you’ve zipped it.”

And Sarah zipped, and then they stepped apart and said goodbye as if actual friends, keeping up the charade until turning and walking their opposite ways. And Sarah recalled, for the first time in years, that acting was truthful emotions in false circumstances. She already missed that strange woman, her make-believe friend.



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IN THE FUTURE, David will be so changed it will be hard to give credence to the David she first knew in these mid-teenage years. It will be hard not to see that young David as sort of a sham, a lightweight cocoon through which the future David, knobbly and heavy and hard, is already beginning to obtrude. Or perhaps this younger David really is an insubstantial shell. Perhaps they all are.

Mr. Kingsley no longer asks her to his office. There is no more of their confidential chatting, about her and David, or her and Joelle, or what a help he expects her to be when the people from England arrive. There is no talk between them at all. Sometimes, he winks at her in passing. Most times he looks straight through her. She’s aware of having missed some opportunity, squandered some advantage, in the course of having tried to do exactly the opposite. One Friday afternoon instead of driving to the Empanada Outpost with Joelle and whoever else Joelle has in her car, Sarah returns to the deserted department hallway. On Fridays rehearsal doesn’t start until five thirty, because of lesser pressure to finish by nine, it not being a school night. Instead of dining at U Totem on Fridays, they all walk in raucous packs or drive in dangerously overladen cars to one of the real restaurants they’ve adopted, where they are well known and in some cases greatly disliked. They are grimly tolerated at La Tapatia Taqueria, where they consume the free chips by the bushel. They are just short of banned at Empanada Outpost, where they will only be served if they all sit outside on the rickety deck. They are adored and spoiled at Mama’s Big Boy, the once unremarkable Big Boy somehow entirely taken over by gay male waiters, who will give them free pie if they sing. Fridays can feel like a festival, the five thirty rehearsal start time often drifting toward six if Mr. Kingsley himself isn’t back from wherever he’s gone for his dinner—never any of the cheap nearby places that they go for theirs.

In the deserted hallway, Mr. Kingsley’s door is closed. There was no reason to think he would be here, as he is other days when they just have the half-hour break and he spends it at his desk typing in gunfire bursts, his rimless spectacles precariously balanced at the end of his nose, his door half open but his severe absorption a deterrent to all but the most desperate, or confident, students.

She slides down the wall to the floor, hugs her knees to her chest. Perhaps Joelle will bring her a pineapple empanada, though she isn’t hungry and can hardly recall the last time she was hungry. The cold ache, like a fist pressing onto her diaphragm, has long since replaced hunger. She’s almost used to it, this pressure of sadness like a stone on her diaphragm’s bellows. Or maybe she’s not used to it, but it’s actually lessened? She thinks of Ms. Rozot’s promise to her as a prophecy. If she can just stick it out long enough, she will earn the bewitchment and stop feeling pain. Every morning she X’s a calendar in her mind’s eye: one day closer to feeling less pain. She tries a deep breath, even stretching her legs out along the cold floor so her diaphragm has ample space. She can’t do it. She can’t fill her lungs. She can’t shift the stone and inhale all the way. And this was the first thing he’d taught them: how to breathe. The location of the diaphragm and its unequalled importance, perhaps even exceeding the brain’s. As they mastered three-part breathing, he explained to them, two things would happen: they would come to understand the diaphragm’s true dimensions, and they would come to understand the true scope of its powers. Until now, they had probably only used half (or a third!) of their diaphragm’s total capacity. Even worse, they had probably thought that their brains were in charge of their bodies. Wrong. It is the diaphragm—opened to its full capacity, regulating influx and outflow, tuning us in to ourselves and the world, tuning out all the static, enabling clear thought—that’s in charge of the body and mind, which of course are all one. And Sarah hasn’t just lost control of her own diaphragm, she’s perhaps lost possession of it. It’s usurped by a stone.