Trust Exercise(23)
She stretches out full length on the spine-chilling floor of the empty hallway. What if these floors had been carpet or wood? Could soft texture or warm temperature have changed memory’s substance? The unrelieved hardness and coldness of the linoleum floors will always be to Sarah an inseparable part of the lessons learned here. For the first time all year she sincerely attempts it, flat on her back on the floor with the bulletin board above her. She has to scoot a little closer to the center of the hall, so her arms and legs lie properly without touching themselves or her sides. Palms up, eyes closed. The air-conditioning turns her torso to gooseflesh beneath her thin blouse, her nipples hardening with discomfort, but she for bids herself from crossing her arms over her breasts. Relaxation requires discipline. Strangely, she seems to hear better lying here on the floor. The air conditioner’s resonant hum, which she’s not sure she’s ever heard before, seems to have different parts: a dull, buried knocking, a rising note over a rumbling low note, a scrape as of a chair across the floor. The foot of Mr. Kingsley’s door is inches from her head. From behind the door, perhaps from the bowels of the building buried deep beneath the floor, Sarah hears a tuneless vocal noise and an abrupt creak.
Hard as she can, she pulls air through her mouth, as if hauling a rope. It’s no use. There might as well be someone sitting on her chest. David sitting on her chest, as he did once. In the summer. When she’d reached around, grabbing his buttocks, forcing him to lean over her face.
She scrambles up to a seated position, back hitting the wall as with almost no warning Mr. Kingsley’s door opens. Manuel steps out, sees her seeing him. He pulls the door shut behind him. She’s against the wall next to the doorframe and so cannot see into the room and has no way of knowing for sure if Mr. Kingsley is in there.
Without a word to her Manuel turns and walks quickly away, disappears around the corner of the hall.
She rises also, before the door can open again, and goes the opposite way from Manuel.
Last year, she’d had Mr. Banks for geometry. Mr. Banks was rumored not just to have sex with some girls at the school but to have had a baby with one, who had dropped out a few years ago. No one knew the name of this girl or had ever seen her, or her baby. No one disliked Mr. Banks. He was tall, with muscle packed on his torso that shifted and bulged when he raised up one arm to write proofs on the board. He wore snug, short-sleeved polos that clearly displayed a dark upside-down U on his right upper arm with bent-back ends that it sat on like feet. All year Mr. Banks had made Sarah and William his pets, ostentatiously excusing them from proofs because, he told the rest of the class, they knew what they were doing while nobody else had a clue. Mr. Banks would say, “William, man, he’s going to be sitting here doing the books for my outside business, and I’m going to be paying him, right under this table, while the rest of you fools still don’t know how to measure circumference.” Sarah, Mr. Banks would announce, was going to brush her hair like a shampoo commercial for his special enjoyment. Sarah would do so, bending forward so her hair hung like seaweed in front of her face, and then whipping her head so her hair fell back onto her neck. “You’re supposed to do that in slow motion,” Mr. Banks would complain. “C’mon, L’Oreal.” At the end of the year, when Mr. Banks informed Sarah he was taking her off-campus for lunch, she hadn’t been surprised or dismayed. She’d known he wouldn’t touch her, whether through superior instinct or na?veté rewarded by luck, she couldn’t have said. She’d followed him to the front parking lot and climbed into the cab of his huge pickup truck with the two bumper stickers. One said, “Easy Does It.” The other said, “My Other Car Is Up My Nose.”
“What does that mean, anyway?” she had asked.
“It means my life was ruled by an addiction to cocaine.”
“So, what—you turned your other car into cocaine?”
“I had to turn it into money first. Here I thought you were so smart.”
“What about that thing on your arm?”
“My brand?”
“It’s a brand?”
“Like they do onto cattle. It’s the letter omega, from Greek. You don’t know that either? You’ve had me fooled, girl. I thought you were some kind of genius.” He’d shown her his coin laundromats—his outside businesses—on their way to a hamburger stand in a part of town she’d never seen and could never have found her way back to, everyone black except her, standing outside their cars, their burgers in hand, in wax paper, the older woman at the open-air counter wagging her finger at Mr. Banks, meaning “How old is this girl?” and Mr. Banks telling her off with a gesture, and the two of them laughing.
In the truck, driving back, Sarah had said, “That’s the best burger I’ve ever had. Thanks.” This was back when she ate, and enjoyed it.
“You’re welcome,” Mr. Banks had said. “And thank you for your charming company.”
That was all that had happened. It hadn’t seemed unusual or wrong to have gone to lunch with him. Even her hunch that he wouldn’t kiss her, implying the less likely odds that he might, hadn’t made the lunch feel secretive. They hadn’t skulked, walking out to his truck. They hadn’t skulked, coming back, amid everyone else coming back from wherever they’d eaten.
Despite all the rules—the repetitions without extra words, the relaxation with arms never touching their sides, the breaths drawn in three parts—no rules exist to define their relations with teachers. They can have lunch with teachers, or not. They can shed tears and tell secrets, or not. Vague norms emerge and dissolve, are specific to people, don’t apply generally or across time or across the whole group. They’re arrived at by instinct, by na?veté rewarded with luck, or by na?veté not rewarded with luck. When Sarah’s mother had said, “Your life outside school isn’t any of his goddamn business,” and asked Sarah whether she understood, although Sarah said yes, she didn’t agree. Her disagreement perhaps was the same thing as not understanding.