“Can I have a bit of your doughnut?” Julia says, because underneath it all, the ordinary rules of thieving still apply.
The role of Mrs. Bly requires a fat suit, and special latex pouches that slip into either cheek to fatten the jaw. The fat suit is impeccable. It is made mostly of silicone, sculpted especially for the woman’s frame, and it is heavy enough to make her stagger when she walks. She is wearing a tubular denim skirt that buttons up the front, and a gold link necklace with a slender golden charm, and she has rouged her fattened cheeks and sprayed her hair with scented mist. She waddles gracefully into the room and descends upon one of the armchairs, sighing and reaching down to rub her artificially fattened calf. You can’t even tell it’s a fat suit. The saxophone teacher almost forgets to speak, she’s so busy admiring the effect.
“You were recommended to me by one of the Tupperware mothers,” Mrs. Bly says. “She said her daughter swapped over to you after that whole scandal at the school, and she’s been very pleased.”
“I’m glad,” the saxophone teacher says. “Yes, I’ve had a considerable influx of students this year from Abbey Grange.”
“Wasn’t the whole business just terrible,” Mrs. Bly says, and she puckers her lips and squints her eyes and gives a merry chuckle.
“Catalytic,” the saxophone teacher says in pretended agreement, guessing that Mrs. Bly won’t pause for long enough to think about the word. She doesn’t.
“It was just terrible,” she says again. “The girl is ruined. She’s damaged goods now. And all the girls are keeping their distance of course.”
“As they should be,” the saxophone teacher says.
“Because it spreads like a virus, that’s what I said to my girls,” Mrs. Bly says, drawing the vast spread of denim over her knee and puckering her lips to form a little thatched smile that draws all the wrinkles around her lips into a single central nub. “That kind of stain doesn’t come out in the wash.”
The saxophone teacher suddenly feels weary. She sits down. “Mrs. Bly,” she says, “remember that these years of your daughter’s life are only the rehearsal for everything that comes after. Remember that it’s in her best interests for everything to go wrong. It’s in her best interests to slip up
The spiderweb lasso of creases around fat Mrs. Bly’s mouth loosens slightly.
“The good news,” the saxophone teacher says briskly, turning now to her diary, “is that I have an opening on Wednesday afternoon, if that suits your daughter’s schedule. One of my students was hit by a car.”
“Oh, isn’t it dangerous,” Mrs. Bly says. “I don’t let Rebecca cycle. I flat out refuse to let her cycle anywhere at all. Wednesday afternoon is perfect.”
“At four.”
“At four.” Mrs. Bly chuckles again. “She’ll be so pleased,” she says. “She’s practiced so hard to get her clarinet up to scratch, and she’s wanted this so badly. It’s as if for the first time in her life something has just begun to blossom.”
“I suppose you didn’t know Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says to Isolde one afternoon.
“The girl who died? She was the year above, in sixth form.”
“She was one of my students.”
“Oh,” Isolde says. “No, I didn’t know her.” She stalls a moment, looking clumsy and rocking back and forth on her heels. “Are you okay?” she asks finally, wincing to show a kind of concern.
“Wasn’t it a great shock,” the saxophone teacher says.
“Yeah,” Isolde says.
“Everyone must be terribly upset. At your school and so forth.”
“Oh,” Isolde says. “Yeah, they had an assembly.”
“Just an assembly?”
“And they flew the flag at half-mast.”
“I suppose everyone is still terribly upset,” the saxophone teacher says, “skipping class, weeping, remembering everything that was irreplaceable about Bridget.”
“I suppose so. She was in the year above. I don’t know anyone that knew her.” Isolde is wearing the half- stricken expression of someone who is required, but ill equipped, to offer condolence or advice about death. She shuffles uncomfortably and looks at the floor.
“Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says abruptly, changing tack, “was my least favorite student. Bridget had a way of bucking and rearing her pelvis when she played that I privately found a little distasteful. Bridget would lean back with her knees bent and her eyes closed, tensing up and preparing to catapault her weight forward on to the balls of her feet, the saxophone rearing up like a golden spume about to break and fall. The muscles in her jaw were tight. I bent over Bridget’s notebook to avoid looking at her, scribbling curt bullet-points in the margin for her to remember in her practice. Tone, I wrote, and then underneath, Brightness.”
Shyly, almost respectfully, Isolde slips out of herself and becomes Bridget—not the real Bridget, just a placeholder, a site for the saxophone teacher to aim at, a figure to address. She stands hangdog in the middle of the room with her sax tucked against her hip and her hair across her face. She doesn’t speak.
“This was the last time I saw Bridget,” the saxophone teacher says. “She came to the end of ‘The Old Castle’ and removed the sax from her mouth, shoving her lower jaw forward and back several times as if repositioning a set of dentures. She’d practiced. She always practiced. That was one of the things I didn’t like about Bridget so much. I asked her, What did you learn in counseling today? And Bridget said, This week we’re talking about guilt. About how guilt can be illuminating. We’re doing role-plays based on ideas about guilt.
“Guilt, I said. And Bridget said, rushing on with this rare flash of pleasure that she was owning the spotlight, that the voice she was using was for once her own, and worth hearing, she said, Guilt is really important. It’s the first step on the road to something better.”
Isolde’s toes are ever so slightly pigeoned, her knees inward turning and her hips awkwardly thrust. She rubs the bell of her sax with her finger and looks at the saxophone teacher’s shoes.
“So I said,” the sax teacher says, “Bridget, I think you are being deceived. Guilt is primarily a distraction. Guilt is a feeling that distracts us from deeper, truer feelings. Let me give you an example. You might feel guilty if you become attracted to someone who is forbidden to you. You feel attraction, and then you remember you are not allowed to be attracted to this person, and then you feel guilt. Which do you think is the more primary of these feelings, attraction or guilt?
“I guess attraction, said Bridget. Because it came first.
“And I said, Good. Guilt is secondary. Guilt is a surface feeling.”
Isolde nods a tiny nod, to show she’s listening. The saxophone teacher is glazed over now, the memory filling her vision like a glossy cataract over each staring eye.
“I said that,” she says, “because Bridget was my least favorite student. I said that because I didn’t care for Bridget much at all.”
The memory dissolves and her vision sharpens once again.
“What have
Isolde is not sure what answer she should give. As she hesitates and paws uncomfortably at the sax around her neck she thinks about the girl, the one assembly and one half-masted flag, the never-scheduled counseling sessions about her death, and the paper cutout convenience grief that some of the older girls wielded for a week or so, just to earn a half-hour’s freedom and a pass to the nurse.
The saxophone teacher is still looking hard at Isolde, waiting for an answer.
Isolde says, quietly and full of shame, “In counseling we all mourn everything that was irreplaceable about my sister. We grieve for everything about Victoria that is now lost.”
