burning with a question of their own: what did
Patsy wiggles into her coat, waves, blows a kiss. She is leaving.
“They try to imagine her stroking his face and arching her neck and whispering things, special things that nobody’s ever said before. They try to imagine her up against the wall of the music room, breathing fast and shallow with her eyes closed and her hands clenched in fists on the wall above her head. They try to imagine the ordinary things, like How about lunchtime?, or I couldn’t sleep last night, or I like the shirt with the stripes better. They think maybe now when she clutches her arms across her chest, when she smoothes her hair down at the side, when she suddenly falls silent and bites her lip hard, they think maybe these things mean something now that they didn’t mean before. They try to imagine, Mrs. Miskus. They try to imagine what these things might mean.”
The saxophone teacher is silent now, listening, fingering the phone cord. The door slams in the stairwell.
“I understand,” she says after a while. “Your poor fragile sensible daughter feels dirty by association and she wants to put as much distance as she possibly can between herself and that horrible man. You tell her I have a space on Tuesday at three.”
A notice goes up to say that rehearsals will resume. A new conductor has been found for jazz band and senior jazz ensemble and orchestra, identified in bold type as Mrs. Jean Critchley. The unnecessary naming serves to emphasize the
“Course they got a woman,” says first alto darkly. They are standing in the corridor in a bedraggled clump.
“I liked Mr. Saladin,” says Bridget in her stringy unfashionable way.
“Is he in prison already?” says first alto.
“Probably under house arrest,” says double bass. “So he doesn’t reoffend.”
“Bullshit,” says first trombone. “He’ll just be at home in his pajamas watching daytime television.”
They run out of things to say and spend a moment regarding the name of Mrs. Jean Critchley, identified in bold type.
“She sounds like a bitch,” says first alto, voicing what they are all thinking anyway.
“I went to see Mr. Partridge about an extension after school yesterday,” Isolde says. “He was in his office, and when I came in he sort of exploded out of his desk and said, Let’s talk in the hallway, come on, out. They all do that now. They’re afraid of enclosed spaces.”
The saxophone teacher watches her and thinks, This is the dawn of a new Isolde, a hardened deadened Isolde who has witnessed the dirty and perverted glamour of the world but still nurses a tiny kernel of doubt because she has not yet felt what she has heard and seen.
“Anyway we went out into the hallway,” says Isolde. She swings her saxophone around so it is hanging limply off one shoulder like a schoolbag, both hands at her shoulder holding the strap. She shifts her weight to the other leg and sticks her hip out and blinks her big eyes, converting in an instant into a sweet and undeserving victim. The lights change, becoming duller and more diffuse, until Isolde is standing in the creamy lilac light of a late-afternoon school corridor with all the lockers hanging empty and open and the chip packets scudding across the floor like silver leaves.
“So I go, I was just wondering if I could get an extension or whatever, because things have been so hard at home—”
And she seamlessly slides her sax off her shoulder and into her arms, holding it loosely underneath the bell with both hands, and pressing it flat against her pelvis in a casually protective way, as a man might hold a folder against himself, standing in a corridor with a student in a shaft of creamy lilac light after all the others have gone home.
The saxophone teacher reflects how much she enjoys these changes, when Isolde slips out of one person and becomes another. Bridget is good at voices, but with Isolde the performance is always physical and total, like the unexpected shedding of a skin. The saxophone teacher shifts in her chair, and nods to show she’s listening.
“And he shakes his head at me,” Isolde says, broadening now, rocking back on her heels and sucking in her belly so her chest inflates, “and he goes, Isolde, I am not the kind of teacher who ingratiates myself with my students in order to gain their love. That is not my style. I am the kind of teacher who gains popularity by picking a scapegoat. I do this in each and every class I teach. If I was to grant you an extension I would be a hypocrite and I would undermine my own methods.
“He goes, Isolde, when I set out to gain the love of a student, I do not begin by granting them an extension when they don’t really need one. I begin by cultivating a culture of jealousy in my classroom. Jealousy is a key component to any classroom environment, because jealousy means competition and competition means excellence. It is only in a jealous classroom that a true and fervent love can blossom.
“It is only once I am sure my students are well placed to become very jealous of each other that I pick my scapegoat. Picking a scapegoat is not easy, Isolde. It is not as easy as granting an extension to a student when they don’t really need one. Picking a scapegoat is a very difficult and delicate task. The trick—” and she brandishes her saxophone now, jabbing it into the air to emphasize what she is saying “—is not to pick the girl that everybody already genuinely dislikes. This will induce the other students to pity the scapegoat, and to become contemptuous of me because I am being cruel. I don’t want to be cruel to my students.
“The trick is to pick the least original girl in the room. You want someone unoriginal because you want to be sure that they will behave exactly the same way every time you use them. You want someone unoriginal because you need them to be dull enough to believe that they are being singled out on the strength of their own comic merits. You need them to believe that the laughter you generate is inclusive laughter.
“Isolde, he goes, I am a good teacher who is loved by my pupils. I gain their collective love by choosing a sacrificial victim on behalf of them all, not by currying favor with every individual student. It is a good method and I am a good teacher. I don’t want to give you an extension because your sister had sex and everyone found out and I feel sorry for you. I’ve explained my reasons. I’m sorry.”
The lights fade back in. Isolde comes gracefully to an end and reattaches her saxophone to her neckstrap, ready for the lesson.
“So you didn’t get an extension,” the saxophone teacher says as she rises.
“No,” Isolde says. “He goes, What you need to learn, Isolde, is that life just isn’t fair.”
It is a new and popular tradition at this secular school to purchase short-snouted plastic Coca-Cola bottles from the tuck shop, and then retrieve with a fingernail the little blue disc with a stiff rim that sits snugly on the underside of the bottle’s cap. The girls hold this blue disc up to their lips and with their front teeth they bite a hole in the greasy plastic center to pierce the flesh. They are then able to rip out the middle of the disc so that only the rim remains. Gently they tug at this little translucent hoop of plastic, turning it around and around in their hands, pulling at it tenderly so it stretches wider and wider and the thin hoop becomes a pale band of ribbon through which they can slip their hand. The girls then wear these plastic ribbons on their wrists.
Popularly they are known as “Fuck-me bracelets.” It is a mark of a girl’s daring to fashion such a bracelet for herself from the aqua seal of a Coca-Cola bottle neck, for whoever breaks the bracelet, however accidentally, thereby enters into a contract with the wearer. Sometimes at parties a boy will lean over to kiss a girl and with his free hand he will scrabble at her wrist to try to break the Coca-Cola seal. Most often the girl will feel him trying to snap the bracelet and she will pretend to struggle, knowing what the breaking of the seal will mean: she will feign resistance and twist her wrist away from him to make the bracelet snap the sooner. Once it has snapped they know that they must go through with it to the very end.
It is a shameful thing to break your own bracelet. The girls snicker at the prospect, and alienate anyone clumsy enough to catch the side of the thin plastic band on a doorframe or on the buckle of her backpack so it snaps.
One of the girls says, “They found a Fuck-me bracelet in Mr. Saladin’s tutorial room. Under the piano. It was broken.”
