Trust Exercise(8)

Joelle, precociously fleshy and pungent, so obliviously manifests the carnal that Sarah’s own self-conscious carnality becomes disgusting to her, along with her own flesh, her own scent. Joelle’s enormous breasts are heavily freckled, their trapped clefts and creases are constantly sweaty; Joelle’s crotch, encased in her jeans, trails an olfactory banner like some sort of sticky night flower to inflame jungle bats. Joelle sleeps with much older men; at school, she disregards boys as if they’re not even incipient men. She only has eyes for Sarah.

Half closing her eyes, almost grinding her teeth, Sarah takes Joelle into her arms. Joelle clings to her gratefully, soaks her shoulder with tears and slick snot. This is also self-control, Sarah thinks. This brute willing of the self to take action. Until now, Sarah thought self-control was only restraint: not putting the chair through the glass.

“I’m really sorry,” she hears herself mumbling. “I’m so messed up right now, I didn’t mean to seem distant. Things have just been so crazy.…”

“What’s been going on? I could tell you had shit going on! I just knew—”

Soon the counterfeit is complete. Sarah intended to confide in no one, and if someone, Joelle least of all. Now, as if reading a script, she tells Joelle about the decoy tennis racquet, the empty snack bar. Confession made, she’s in receipt of Joelle’s whole devotion again. Joelle’s sobs turn to mirth, her abject supplication to glee. She clings to Sarah no longer from the weakness of grief but to prevent herself rolling merrily on the sidewalk. Having bought back a friendship she no longer wanted by defiling the one thing she cared about most, Sarah knows it doesn’t matter that she enjoins Joelle to a “secrecy” that puts Joelle into raptures. Joelle is practically wrapped like a vine around Sarah as they stumble back into the classroom and almost literally into David, because they’ve been gone for so long class has ended, and David’s the first on his feet, to escape. At the sight of David, Joelle bursts out laughing and covers her face. David shoulders roughly past Sarah and Sarah feels bonfires ignite on her skin. Mr. Kingsley, also on his way out, says as if as an afterthought, “Sarah, come by and see me tomorrow at lunch.”

Not even David in the course of escaping fails to hear the summons, or fails to understand what it means. Even Joelle, who has so misunderstood her entire transaction with Sarah, understands what Mr. Kingsley’s summons means. Joelle tightens her hot grip on Sarah with sisterly envy. Sarah has become the kind of Problem they would all like to be.



* * *



“THAT WAS KIND of you yesterday,” Mr. Kingsley began, after closing the door behind her with a resonant click. He’d indicated the chair she should sit in, and perhaps it was the novel sensation of sitting in a chair in his office that induced her to say, right away, “I didn’t want to be kind.” She was aware of a dangerous urge to spar with him.

“Why not?” asked Mr. Kingsley.

“I don’t feel close to Joelle anymore. I thought, with everything you’ve taught us, that honoring my feelings about that was what I should do. But yesterday it seemed like the way that I felt didn’t matter.”

“How so?”

“You wanted me to go after her and make her feel better, and tell her we still were best friends. And I did, even though I was lying. And now I have to keep lying because she thinks that we’re best friends again.”

“What makes you think that’s what I wanted?”

“Because you told me to go after her!”

“Yes, but that’s all I told you to do. I didn’t tell you to make her feel better. I didn’t tell you to lie, and say the two of you were still friends.”

“Then what was I supposed to do? She was crying. I felt guilty.” Now Sarah was crying, which she had sworn she wouldn’t do. All the anger she’d brought into the room was transformed into sobs. There was Kleenex on the end of Mr. Kingsley’s desk nearest her chair, as if people often sat where she was sitting and cried, whether out of anger or some other emotion. She took a handful and blew her nose in it.

“You were supposed to stay with her in that moment, with tenacity and honesty. And that’s what you did.”

“I wasn’t honest. I lied!”

“And you’re aware of the lie, and aware of the reason you told it. You were there in that circumstance, Sarah. More there than Joelle.”

That this disparagement, to her, of her classmate might be considered a dishonest behavior of Mr. Kingsley’s wasn’t among Sarah’s thoughts at that moment. His comment seemed true in some way, and for a moment her crying subsided. “I still don’t understand how telling a lie makes me true to my feelings, unless you’re saying that making someone feel better is more important than telling the truth.”

“I’m not saying any such thing. Honesty is a process. Standing up for your emotions is a process. It doesn’t mean running roughshod over everyone else. If you weren’t a person of integrity, I don’t think you’d be sitting here challenging me about what happened yesterday.” Sarah prickled with alertness to hear him describe her as “challenging” him. It was clearly the right thing to do. “I’ll be counting on that integrity of yours when the English students are here in the spring,” he went on. “They’ll need the guidance of someone like you.”