Trust Exercise(9)
This futuristic leadership role seemed far less real to Sarah than her current crises. “I feel like, in telling her we’re still friends, I’ve put myself in a trap.”
“You’ll find your way out.”
“How?”
“I said you’ll find your way out.”
Sarah cried with renewed force, for such a long time that she eventually grew aware of an unfamiliar luxuriousness. Mostly she cried alone, on rare occasions in front of her mother, but either way the emotion alongside of grief was impatience. Her own impatience, her mother’s impatience, with her tears. Mr. Kingsley seemed to grow more contented and patient the more that she cried. He sat smiling benignly. Under the narcotic of his patience she felt tempted to share the real reason she was crying, but thinking of it she cried too hard to speak, and then she’d been crying and thinking so long, she felt she’d actually talked about David, perhaps even been told what to do, and a strange peace overtook her that might have just been exhaustion. Mr. Kingsley still smiled benignly. He seemed more and more satisfied.
“Tell me about life outside school,” he said when her guttering breaths had grown calm.
“Like what? Um. My mom and I live in the Windsor Apartments.”
“Where are those?”
“You don’t know? Oh my God, they’re like the biggest apartment complex in the world. Every building and carport and tree looks the same. The first year we lived there, every time we went out we got lost coming back. We had to put a chalk X on our gate.” This made him laugh, and she swelled with pleasure.
* * *
SO MUCH OF what they do, with Mr. Kingsley, is restraint in the name of release. It seems they have to throttle their emotions to have complete access to them. Access to one’s own emotions = presence in the moment. Acting = responding with authentic emotion under made-up circumstances. They fill their notebooks with such singular declarations, each of which, as they’re writing it down, seems to offer the key, or perhaps the keystone, that will make the whole structure cohere, but later, when Sarah reads her notes over, she hears a repetitive melody that never climaxes or ends, like the maddening song that the ice cream truck plays in the summer. Sarah doesn’t blame the information, or Mr. Kingsley, its source, any more than she would blame the book she is struggling to read, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, for its impenetrability. Clearly she’s too young to read Tropic of Cancer, but she can’t accept this; if she knows what the words mean, the book’s meaning ought to unfold. Stubbornly she keeps trying. Similarly, with acting, stubbornly she keeps trying. Similarly, with David, stubbornly she keeps up her half of the duet each blames the other for starting, this new flavor of longing embittered by outrage but no less exclusive to them. It’s still a promise, Sarah stubbornly believes. Still a performance that each reserves just for the other. Sarah hides her fear that she’s wrong—that she doesn’t have talent, or David—beneath a youthful indifferent swagger, an insistence that she’s willing to do anything.
By late September, the mainstage rehearsals have started. Their school day already ends late, at four p.m., unlike the day at normal schools, which ends at two thirty. But during times when there’s rehearsal, which is more than half the year, rehearsal starts at four thirty and can go on for three or four hours. At dismissal the whole mass of Theatre students pours across the parking lot to U Totem for junk food: Funyuns and hot-pepper-spiced pork skins, individual servings of ice cream, rolls of SweeTarts and stacks of Kit Kats. Joelle shoplifts most of her items and never gets caught. Back in the parking lot they gorge on their feast, throw their wrappers in the outdoor trash cans, wash their hands before hitting the mainstage. For all their shoving, shouting immaturity, their indifference to nutritional standards, their unhygienic disorder as expressed in their lockers, their backpacks, and, for those who have licenses, cars, there are certain fastidious habits all the Theatre students observe as a group, by reflex. They would never dream of eating on the mainstage, in the wings, in the house with its red velvet seats. They may be teenagers, but there is nothing teenage about their dedication to this space, their cathedral. They’d as soon defecate in the aisle as eat candy bars here. They’ll retain some of these habits the rest of their lives. Long after they’ve left the theatre, and their theatre dreaming, behind, they’ll still spell it “theatre.” The alternate spelling will always seem ignorant to them. The master’s pride in a difficult tradecraft: they’ll have Mr. Kingsley to thank for bestowing this on them, whatever else they conclude about him.
These long days, this life conducted almost wholly away from their parents, in a nearly unsupervised world of their peers, is the source of the ardor they feel for their school. Freedom, selfhood—those intangibles they might have once thought were reserved for adults—turn out to be already theirs. Even Sarah, still months from her license and perhaps an eternity away from a car after having to spend all her earnings on fixing the sliding glass door, tastes freedom now that Joelle will drive her anywhere, anytime, in the Mazda, despite the fact that they live an hour’s drive from each other, on opposite sides of the city. It’s a swift balm to Sarah’s resentment at having been forced to renew their friendship. Sarah and Joelle are both on costume crew, and have nothing to do until Mr. Freedman, the costume designer, has finished the measurements, but they stay for rehearsal because they would not dream of leaving; they sit in the house with their tedious history homework. David is on props crew, which also has nothing to do because props crew is waiting for certain artistic conflicts to be resolved between Mr. Browne, the props master, and Mr. Kingsley, the director, but the props crew stays also; everyone stays, regardless of whether they have to, except for certain Freshmen who don’t yet understand the ethos or whose parents object to a twelve-hour day.