concentrate and all I could think was, How? How were you able to turn your head and look hard at him and crane up and kiss his mouth? How were you not paralyzed with fear and indecision? How did you know that he would receive you, gather you up and press hard against you and even give out a little strangled moan like a cry, like a cry in the back of his throat?
Here in the hallway Isolde is thinking, Did I feel this feeling then, that night? Did I feel this jangled swoop of dread and longing, this elevator-dive, this strange suspended prelude to a sneeze?
Later maybe she will identify the feeling as some abstracted form of arousal, an irregular toll that plucks at her body now and again, like an untouched string vibrating in harmonic sympathy with a piano nearby. Later she might conclude that the feeling is a little like a hunger-stab, not the gnawing ever-present lust of real hunger, just a stab that strikes like a warning—here and gone. But by then, that time in years to come when she has come to know her body’s tides and tolls and can say,
You can’t tell any of this from Isolde’s face: she is just sitting in the gray half-light, her hands in her lap, looking at the wall.
“I am never quite sure,” the saxophone teacher says, “what is truly meant when the mothers say, I want my daughter to experience what was denied to me.
“In my experience the most forceful and aggressive mothers are always the least inspired, the most unmusical of souls, all of them profoundly unsuccessful women who wear their daughter’s image on their breast like a medal, like a bright deflection from their own unshining selves. When these mothers say, I want her to fully experience everything that was denied to me, what they rightly mean is, I want her to fully
The saxophone teacher runs her tongue over her teeth. She says, “The successful mothers—musical women, sporting women, literate women, content and brimful women, women who were denied nothing, women whose parents paid for lessons when they were girls—the successful mothers are the least forceful, always. They do not need to oversee, or wield, or pick a fight on their daughter’s behalf. They are complete in themselves. They are complete, and so they demand completeness in everyone else. They can stand back and see their daughters as something set apart, as something whole and therefore untouchable.”
The saxophone teacher goes to the window to let down the blinds. It is almost dusk.
Mrs. Tyke waits in the corridor for ten minutes before the saxophone teacher opens the door.
“I just wanted to touch base, really,” she says once they are inside, “in light of this dreadful scandal up at the school. I’m thinking of the girls.”
“I understand,” the saxophone teacher says, pouring out two mugs of tea. One of the mugs has a picture of a saxophonist on a desert island and the words “Sax on the Beach.” The other mug is white and says “Let’s Talk About Sax.” The saxophone teacher returns the jug to its cradle and carefully selects a teaspoon.
“Mrs. Tyke,” she says, “you would very much like, I think, to sew your children’s hands to your waistband, just to keep them with you always, their little legs swaying when you hurry and trailing on the asphalt when you stroll. If you turned on your heel very fast your children would fan out around you like a sunburst pleated skirt. You would be a goddess in a corset and a bustle, your children radiating out from you like so many graceful little spokes.”
“I’m thinking of the girls, that’s all,” says Mrs. Tyke. She holds out both hands to receive her mug of black- leaf tea. The saxophone teacher lets the silence creep until Mrs. Tyke bursts out, “I’m just worried about some of the
She blinks dolefully at the saxophone teacher, then shrugs in a helpless fashion and ducks her head to sip her tea.
“Can I tell you what I think the problem is?” says the saxophone teacher in a special quiet honey voice. “I think you feel a little bit as if that horrible man up at the school, that vile and disgusting man, has left a big fat fingerprint on your glasses, and it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at, all you see is his fingers.”
She stands up to pace.
“I know you wanted your daughter to find out about it all the ordinary way. You wanted her to find out behind the bike sheds, or underneath the bleachers on the rugby field, or in Social Studies, the facts written on the whiteboard with a felt-tipped pen. You wanted her to sneak glances at magazines and at movies she wasn’t allowed to see. You wanted her to start off with some sort of blind sticky grope in her mate’s front room on a Saturday night while her friends are outside being sick into flowerpots. That might happen more than once. It might become a phase. But you’d be prepared for it.”
As Mrs. Tyke watches the saxophone teacher she lets something steal across her face, not something as crude and bold as realization or awakening, but something which registers only as a slackening of her features, a tiny release. It’s such a good performance the saxophone teacher almost forgets she’s acting.
“You wanted her to finally get a boyfriend in sixth form maybe, some prancing, empty sort of boy you didn’t really like, and you wanted to catch her with him eventually, coming home early because you had a funny feeling, and seeing them on the couch, or on the floor, or in her bedroom among her teddy bears and her frilly pink cushions that she doesn’t really like but she’ll never throw away.
“I respect these things that you wanted for your daughter,” the saxophone teacher says. “I imagine they must be the things that every good mother wants. It’s a terrible thing that this venomous little man should have stolen your daughter’s innocence so slyly, without ever having laid a finger on her, shoving his dirty little secrets down her throat like candy from a brown paper bag.
“But what you need to understand, my darling,” she whispers, “is that this little taste your daughter has had is a taste of what could be. She’s swallowed it. It’s inside her now.”
TWO
“The first term,” they said, “is essentially a physical and emotional undoing. You will unlearn everything you have ever learned, peeling it off skin by skin, stripping down and down until your impulse shines through.”
“This Institute,” they said, “cannot teach you how to be an actor. We cannot give you a map or a recipe or an alphabet that will teach you how to act or how to feel. What we do at this Institute is not teaching by accumulation, collecting skills as one might collect a marble or a token or a charm. Here at this Institute we teach by elimination. We help you learn to eliminate yourself.”
“You may break or be broken,” they said. “This happens.”
The fat one on the end leaned forward and said, with emphasis, “A good actor makes a gift of himself.”
