Trust Exercise(48)
As the line inched forward, a young female employee of the bookstore worked her way back. She handed each person a single Post-it Note, and if needed, a pen. “If you’d like Sarah to sign your book to you, please write your NAME on the Post-it exactly the way that you’d like her to write it, and then please use the Post-it to MARK THE PAGE that you’d like her to sign on. The title page is what most people choose. If you want her to sign just your first name, PLEASE ONLY WRITE YOUR FIRST NAME. If you want her to sign it to somebody else, PLEASE WRITE THEIR NAME. If this is for a birthday or some other occasion, please write BIRTHDAY or whatever the occasion on the Post-it. Thank you! Does anybody need a pen? No, you keep the Post-it. Use it to mark where you want her to sign. That way she can open right to it. It’s your choice, but the title page is what most people choose. Does anybody need a pen? Oh, look at you—so organized!” While the time-saving system was being explained over and over again to every single member of the line, Karen had removed a block of Post-its and a pen from her briefcase, written “Karen” on a Post-it, and posted the flag on the edge of the title page. And yes, I used quotes on the Post-it. I wanted Sarah to use them when signing.
“I had my own Post-its,” Karen told the employee, who wore a name tag that read “Emily.” Emily’s strenuous effort to save Sarah perhaps half a minute per signing demonstrated that Emily’s own time was worthless to her.
“Ooh, you have the hardcover,” Emily said. Karen being the last person in line, there was nobody left who required a Post-it or who needed the system explained. Emily loitered with Karen as by tiny degrees they approached the white table. Karen didn’t do anything to encourage this loitering. “I love the hardcover design,” Emily went on, as if it had been Karen who designed it. “Well,” Emily wanted to clarify, “the paperback’s really nice too. It’s just a gorgeous book inside and out. Have you already read it?”
“I have,” Karen said, interpreting the question broadly, without guilt. But there didn’t seem to be an easy way to leave it at that. Emily seemed to be hanging on Karen’s every word. Emily seemed to intuit some kind of special relationship between Karen and the book, or maybe this was just Karen having another inaccurate thought. “Very closely,” Karen added, to make up for a meaningless half-truth of which Emily would never be aware. This made Karen think about the historical problem she had of tending to try to please other people, even strangers, for less than no reason. She’d always hoped that making this problem historical—acknowledged and documented—would leave it behind in the past, but so far that hadn’t worked out.
“Oh, wow!” Emily said, gratified. “A real fan!”
“Oh my God.” Sarah’s voice, up to now mellifluous and artificial and vague as white noise, abruptly fell into a lower register, as if in the middle of singing inanely, she’d burped. For the second-to-last person in line had turned away, like a curtain pulled aside, revealing Karen. It was the moment Karen had been waiting for, and, distracted by Emily the bookstore employee, she’d missed it. Or rather, she’d missed seeing it. She had heard it. But she’d wanted to see it. She had wanted to see Sarah exposed in a moment of panic. Instead she saw her quickly rising from behind the white table, unleashing the rarely seen dazzling smile. By “dazzling” we mean extremely impressive, beautiful, or skillful, and we also mean so bright as to cause temporary blindness. It’s a frequentative of the verb “daze,” by which we mean to make someone unable to think or react properly. In high school, the man we’re calling Mr. Kingsley assigned us, as fifteen-year-olds, the song called “Razzle Dazzle” as the audition piece for our production of Chicago (music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb). Sarah, who never could sing, embarrassed herself at auditions. Karen, who could sing, nailed the song but apparently lacked some other quality required to be cast in the show. “Razzle Dazzle” is a cynical song about getting away with murder. Sarah rose up from behind the white table, dazzling with her rarely seen megawatt smile, and before Karen could step back, Sarah hooked her arm around Karen’s shoulders and pulled her in for a hug, with the table between them, while the person named Emily squealed, “I should have known you were an old friend of hers!” Despite being a former dancer with excellent balance, Karen almost lost her footing while this awkward hug, which you’d almost think had been done for that purpose, was happening. Almost losing her footing, Karen was almost unable to think or react properly. She almost felt herself at a disadvantage. But that was an inaccurate thought.
* * *
I ALWAYS KNEW I was one of the ones who would leave. Whether it was talent or just willpower, something would get me far from my hometown. How likely you were to leave town after graduation was another way CAPA ranked people. Everyone assumed the stars would leave. Everyone assumed the people in the background would stay. Sarah was the exception to the rule, actually. Sarah was a bad actress, a worse singer, and a nonexistent dancer, but we could tell she would leave, rejected and depressed as she pretended to feel, with her self-destructive habits that were her best stab at acting, and her shredded punk clothes. Our senior year, when she went shrieking down the Theatre hall waving her Brown acceptance letter, no one was surprised. It was when I got my acceptance to Carnegie Mellon that everybody was shocked. But I’d known I was getting out somehow, while so many of the stars who were supposed to, Melanie who’d stood smiling in her own private dream while I crawled around on the floor buttoning her My Fair Lady shoes with a hook, or Lukas who’d thrown his Music Man shirt on the dressing room floor every night because he knew I’d pick it up and iron it, ended up boomerangs. The farther they hurled themselves out, the more quickly they landed back where they’d begun.