“The counselor is a retard,” she says definitively. “Me and Katrina went once in third form because Alice Franklin had sex in a movie theater and we were scared she’d become a skank and ruin her life by having kids by accident. We told him all about it and how scared we were, and Katrina even cried. He just sat there and blinked and he kept nodding and nodding, but really slowly like he was programmed at a quarter speed, and then when we’d run out of things to say and Katrina had stopped crying he opened his drawer and got a piece of paper and drew three circles inside each other, and wrote You and then Your Family and then Your Friends, and he said, That’s the way it is, isn’t it? And then he said we could keep the piece of paper if we wanted.”
Julia gives a mirthless snort and opens her plastic music folder.
“What happened to Alice Franklin?” asks the saxophone teacher.
“Oh, we found out later she was lying,” Julia says.
“She didn’t have sex in a movie theater.”
“No.”
Julia takes a moment to adjust the spidery legs of the music stand.
“Why would she lie to you?” the saxophone teacher asks politely.
Julia makes a sweeping gesture with her hand. “She was probably just bored,” she says. In her mouth the word is noble and magnificent.
“I see,” says the saxophone teacher.
“So anyway they go, Maybe we could start the ball rolling by asking if anyone’s got something they want to get off their chest? And one of the girls started crying right then, before anything had even happened for real, and the counselor just about wet his pants with joy, and he goes, Nothing anybody says this morning will go further than this room, or some shit. So this girl starts saying something lame, and her friend reaches over and holds her hand or something sick like that, and then everyone starts sharing and saying things about trust and betrayal and confidence and feeling all confused and scared… and it’s going to be one fuck of a long morning.”
Julia darts a glance over toward the saxophone teacher to see if the word has any effect, but the saxophone teacher just gives her a wintry smile and waits. Bridget would have balked and fluttered and turned scarlet and wondered about it for a long time afterward, but Julia doesn’t. She just smirks and takes unnecessary care in clipping the slippery pages to the edge of the music stand.
“So after a while,” Julia says, “the counselor goes, What is harassment, girls?, looking at us all eager and encouraging like when teachers are torn between really wanting you to get the right answer but also really wanting you to be wrong so they can have the pleasure of telling you themselves. Then he goes, speaking softly and solemnly like he’s revealing something nobody else knows, Harassment doesn’t have to be touching, my darlings. Harassment can also be watching. Harassment can be if someone watches you in a way that you don’t like.
“So I put up my hand and I go, Does it become harassment because of what they watch? Or because of what they imagine while they’re watching? They all looked at me and I went really red, and the counselor touched his fingertips together and gave me this long look like, I know what you’re doing, you’re trying to sabotage the trust thing we’ve got going here, and I’m going to answer your question because I have to, but I’m not going to give you the answer you want.”
The saxophone teacher stands up finally and picks up her own saxophone as if to say “enough.” But Julia is already saying it, thrust on by a strange sort of red-cheeked momentum.
“I imagine things when I watch people,” is what Julia says.
Friday
Isolde is waiting outside in the hall. She can hear the faint rumble of the saxophone teacher’s voice through the wall as the 4:00 lesson draws to a close. Here in the deserted hallway Isolde takes a moment to enjoy the backstage silence before she is cued to knock and enter. She inhales and with her tongue she tastes the calm and careless privacy of a person utterly unobserved.
Normally she would be flooded with pre-tutorial dread, leafing through her sheet music, practicing in mime, her eyes following the music on her lap and her splayed hands moving on the empty air. But today she is not thinking about her lesson. She is sitting still and with all her mind trying to preserve and capture a private swollen feeling in the deep well of her chest.
It is like a little pocket of air has rushed into her mouth and sent a little shiver down her back and tugged at the empty half-basin of her pelvic bone. She feels a prolonged and dislocated swoop in her belly and a yank of emptiness in her rib cage, and suddenly she is much too hot. Isolde feels this way sometimes when she is in the bath, or when she watches people kiss on television, or in bed when she runs her fingertips down the soft curve of her belly and imagines that her hand is not her own. Most often the feeling descends inexplicably—at a bus stop, perhaps, or in the lunch line, or waiting for a bell to ring.
She thinks, Did I feel this when I saw my sister for the first time as a sexual thing? After Dad touched my head and said, This is going to be hard time, these next few weeks, and then left me to watch TV, and after a while Victoria came in and sat down and looked over at me, and then she said, Fantastic, so now everyone knows. And we sat and watched the tail end of some C-grade thriller on the Thursday night special, except I couldn’t 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, This is frustration and This is lust and This is longing, a nostalgic sexual longing that draws me back to a time before, by then everything will be classified, everything will have a name and a shape, and the modest compass of her desires will be circumscribed by the limits of what she has known, what she has experienced, what she has felt. So far Isolde has experienced nothing and so this feeling does not mean I must have sex tonight or I am still full from last night, still brimming. It does not mean Who must I be in love with, to feel this pull? or Again I am wanting the thing I cannot have. It is not yet a feeling that points her in a direction. It is just the feeling of a vacuum, a void waiting to be filled.
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.
Monday
“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 appreciate everything that was denied to me. What they rightly mean is, The paucity of my life will only be thrown into relief if my daughter has everything. On its own, my life is ordinary and worthless and nothing. But if my daughter is rich in experience and rich in opportunity, then people will come to pity me: the smallness of my life and my options will not be incapacity; it will be sacrifice. I will be pitied more, and respected more, if I raise a daughter who is everything that I am not.”