Trust Exercise(26)
They know that Julietta’s parents store flour and rice in sealed plastic tubs against a coming apocalypse, but they don’t know if Julietta herself believes in this apocalypse, or is worried about it. She certainly doesn’t seem worried.
They know that Colin’s father hits Colin, “punches his lights out,” “knocks his block off,” “smacks him clear to next week,” but they don’t know what Colin has done to deserve this, or whether he’s angry or sad to be beaten. They don’t even know if the words Colin uses to mean getting hit are his own words, or words he’s been taught.
They know, at least some of them do, at least one of them does, that Sarah has let David have sex with her in the music room hallway, right out in the open, where anyone could have seen them.
They don’t know that Sarah works weekend mornings at a French bakery, on the opening shift. Alone, Sarah carries the wide baking sheets of croissants, chaussons aux pommes, pains au chocolat, and brioches. She pulls the greasy pastries off the trays, to which they are lightly adhered, trying not to poke holes in them with her fingers. She fills up the display case. The baker, whoever it is, has finished the baking and left at some point before Sarah got here. She wonders who it is, why they never cross paths. The pastries are still warm. The curled, browned, brittle croissants make her think of the discarded shells of locusts she sometimes found hooked to the trees, when she was a little girl, and they lived on a street that had trees, before her father moved out. Sometimes in the very early mornings she would put on her sneakers and slip out of the house while her parents were asleep, and a blanket of white fog lay over the lawns, reaching just to her knees. Strange exhalation of the lawns at daybreak, magic child’s-height fog she could pierce with her legs like a giant. In a certain season, she can’t recall which, she could pull fragile locust husks off the trees and, if she wanted to, crush them in her fist, though she never did so. It would have seemed like such a waste of so much hollow intricacy, so many chambers and hinges and spikes, like an alien spaceship in miniature. She couldn’t have been more than eight then. Half a lifetime ago. She had never been tired in the morning, couldn’t imagine what being tired felt like. Running back through the fog as it melted away like a dream, to see her dad leaning out the front door of the house for the paper.
Now, she is always so tired she doesn’t even realize she’s tired. Words stall on her tongue. Tears gather prematurely in her eyes. Waking dreams drift and coil through her mind, similar to ideas, but perhaps not the same.
* * *
THEY KNOW SO much about each other, yet so little. Manuel knows, or thinks he knows, about her. A whore would have more dignity.
She knows, or thinks she knows, about Manuel. Furtive and smug. The closed doors, and new shirts.
And yet she doesn’t know where Manuel lives, doesn’t know his home number. Can’t conceive where such information might be found. She’s already forgotten the morning, freshman year, that a four-alarm fire broke out on the far side of the massive apartment complex she lives in with her mother, a complex so massive they couldn’t even see smoke from their carport and only found out what the sirens were about from TV, where they’d seen the complex filmed from the air, and the flames six or eight blocks away. Distant though the fire had been, it had made for bad traffic, and her mother had dropped her off late, but when she went in the office to get her late pass the office ladies had cried, “Oh my gosh, honey, are you okay?” because in the office they knew her address—they’d actually looked through their records, when they’d seen the big fire on the news, to check if they had any students in danger.
So of course home addresses are known in the office, but she doesn’t think of this. She isn’t scheming. She lacks not just the skills for, but the very resolve for, premeditation.
Nevertheless, even in her tiredness, she’s alert. Having noticed some things, she keeps noticing more things. Her work on costume crew is basically finished, she has not been assigned as a dresser, but she’s still responsible for the general state of the costumes; the costume shop and dressing rooms are her wheelhouse, she patrols them, tidying and repairing. Particularly the hats were her thing for this show; she monitors their clusters of feathers or fruit or their bands of grosgrain, she gets out the glue gun if need be. In hushed hours before run-through starts, when nobody’s around, she’ll check the boys’ dressing room, where they neglect their fedoras, leave them tossed on the floor. She’ll re-form the crowns, dust them off, put them pointedly up on the shelves with the masking-tape labels where the boys should have put them themselves. The male cast members share two extremely overtaxed garment racks, cardboard dividers sticking up at dense intervals bearing their character names. “Gambler 1,” “Gambler 2,” “Sal Army guy,” “Sky Masterson.” They do a lousy job of hanging up their costumes. This Friday after school, before the show’s second and last weekend begins, Sarah’s going to be slaving away at the ironing board. She wiggles her fingers into, pries apart the crushed mass of male clothes between “Sal Army guy” and “Sky Masterson.” Here’s a pale green shirt, perhaps it’s a color the store would call sea foam. The label: Armani. Duh, this isn’t part of Sky Masterson’s costume. She almost laughs at Manuel’s lame deception. But of course, no one else is alert to his shirts. No one else has realized, as she has, that he wears these shirts only at school, changes back into cheap, crappy shirts, poor boy’s shirts, before going home. Despite its crushed condition, the fabric of the shirt feels newly stiff and fresh. No gray ring in the collar, no yellow stains at the pits.