Trust Exercise(33)



Sarah knows her hopeful excitement is the result of reprieve from exile, from her status which isn’t quite that of a slut but a soiled castoff even Norbert ignores. She’ll no more show herself this hope, which is the same as abject gratitude to Martin and Liam for noticing her, than she would show it to Martin and Liam, let alone to her mother, from whom she conceals everything with such thoroughness that her mother doesn’t know there are visiting English at school, available to magically pluck Sarah from her disgrace. Prior to the English People’s own disgrace, which seems to so little concern them, the CAPA Sophomores were under constant pressure from Mr. Kingsley and Mrs. Laytner to sell Candide tickets to family members and friends. Sarah had not sold her mother a ticket. Sarah’s continuation as a student at CAPA is largely a condition of her mother’s being able to forget that the school exists.

“You’re early,” her mother says, not without pleasure. “Would you like to use Petra’s typewriter? She’s gone for the day.”

In the barely recalled past of junior high school, Sarah spent most afternoons with her mother, in her mother’s little office, also not without pleasure. Her mother would take her lunch hour late, at two thirty, using it to pick Sarah up from her school and bring her back to the campus. There Sarah had been allowed a freedom she had not yet possessed anywhere else. She had wandered the full breadth of the university with its enormous crabgrass lawns, its famous old live oaks, its broad pebbled walks, its oft-photographed Spanish-style buildings, its backpack-wearing students hurrying along among whom Sarah would pretend to belong. The campus bookstore was where she had bought the paperback copy of Tropic of Cancer she still hadn’t managed to read; the campus commissary was where she had sat alone, with a Dr. Pepper, pretending to read it, cultivating an air that aloneness was the state she had chosen, and sometimes actually feeling a fierce pride in being alone. But most of the time, she would return through the towering heat of the late afternoon to loiter purposelessly with her mother, slouching in her mother’s extra chair, receiving unembarrassed the attentions of her mother’s co-workers, rearranging her mother’s collection of witty coffee mugs, all of which had been gifts from Sarah on Mother’s Days past. She’d spent those afternoons with her mother so effortlessly that she’s never given them a thought until now that they’re as intimately strange as the object landscape of her mother’s desktop.

“That’s okay,” Sarah says, picking up the photo of herself she most likes, the one from seventh grade. She looks far older than her years, is wearing just enough makeup, is smiling with unrecognizable confidence. There’s neither the slutty excess of eyeliner nor the desperate excess of eye contact that marred her last three school pictures despite deliberate precautions to the contrary. She does not recognize the very pretty, very happy thirteen-year-old in the picture, perhaps because the picture has become for her an icon. She wishes she had some pretext for showing it to Martin and Liam. “I ran into Karen Wurtzel after school and she invited me to sleep over”: the lie as always successful in direct proportion to her lack of preparation. Duplicity, or she’d rather call it storytelling, is her sole realm of inspiration, the entire basis for her mistaken belief she can act.

“Who’s Karen Wurtzel?”

“You know, she lives in Southwoods.”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s in my class. She followed me here so I could drop off the car.” No need to talk about the building’s lack of visitor parking, the reason Karen isn’t standing here also; Sarah had thought of saying this on the way up, which means it’s too much detail and so she does not. Sarah’s mother has long since chosen her battles, and theirs is now an almost marital understanding of tacit permission in exchange for unblemished appearance. Sarah’s grades will never slip, she will never be addicted or arrested or pregnant.

“She’s taking you to school in the morning?” confirms her mother by way of farewell, turning back to her work. Sarah feels a pang; her mother had been happy to see her. If they were a different mother and daughter she would go around the desk and kiss her mother’s drooping cheek, but even in the past, when theirs was a shared world, they rarely touched each other.

Sarah goes back down in the elevator and finds Martin and Liam horsing around in the lobby despite the building’s lack of visitor parking; through the glass doors Karen Wurtzel’s car is visible parked in the fire lane. “We were just about to send out the search parties,” says Martin, and when Sarah says it’s good that they didn’t she must show alarm, because both men laugh.

“Did we give you a scare?” Liam hopes.

The rear seat of Karen Wurtzel’s car is almost not a seat at all and Sarah has to twist sideways to fit. “Now off to fetch Karen,” says Martin. “Those Calamitous Bournemouth Yokels.”

“The Captain Boffed You.”

“Three Corpulent Britons Yodel.”

“Troubled Cooks Bludgeon Yams.”

“You have a future on Fleet Street, Liam. This Can’t Beat Yours but There Comes Bonny Yanni.”

“Who’s Yonny?”

“Y-a-n-n-i. Greek fellow with long flowing hair, plays the keyboards and sings.”

“Do you fancy him, then?”

“Oh yessss, he reminds me of you, you pretty thing, needs a shave like you do. Hasn’t old Lillian taught you to shave, you inveterate son of a smothering mother?”

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