Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

  Greg Veltin performed his last cue and turned his attention to Mr. Kingsley, still in the front row showing the rest of the house the expressionless back of his head. To his disappointment, Greg couldn’t derive any clues about the state of Jim’s, or rather, Mr. Kingsley’s, face, from the back of his head. Greg was no longer sure what he’d expected, or what he had hoped for. The show was over—had they taken their bows? Not having started with raising a curtain, they couldn’t end with lowering one, so just walked off the stage. As throughout, the audience, once released from the spectacle, could not reach consensus on how to react. Some stampeded for the doors. Some remained as if roped to their seats. Even these motionless ones, like Pammie, appeared torn between opposing impulses, in Pammie’s case the passive immobility of shock, and the active immobility of rage. Pammie’s seatmate, Julietta, didn’t stay to find out. For Julietta, the only thing worse than watching the show would be talking about it.

  * * *

  “HI-HO!” CALLED AN English voice in a manner both sarcastic and sincere. Assume friendly intent? Assume mockery?

  Sarah looked up from her boots. She was sitting on the hood of her mother’s ancient Toyota Corolla, at the corner of the front parking lot. Sarah was parked here to avoid everyone, and so far she’d succeeded. She would have succeeded even in the back lot which was unusually empty, her classmates having left for the day. The Sophomores had no rehearsals, indeed almost nothing to do, until the end of the month. Instead of being performers this month they were supposed to have been learning the role of presenters—drumming up publicity and printing up programs, ushering patrons to seats, counting the box-office take. But Candide had been canceled.

  Neither Martin, who had called out “Hi-ho!,” nor Liam, who sat in the passenger seat of the car Martin drove, seemed regretful. Martin was the author of the stage adaptation of Candide as well as its director. Liam was not merely the star, but the star for whom Martin had chosen Candide. They were far from home, in a city the April climate of which was already hotter than their native one ever approached on its worst days of August, and they had brought, as their ceaseless plaint went, too many “jumpers” and “trainers” and not enough of whatever nursery words they employed to mean T-shirts and sandals, and they were living as houseguests, in some cases decreasingly welcome. Were Martin and Liam angered, or embarrassed, or even pleased, to find themselves idle where they had expected to be presenting six performances in the space of ten days? It was impossible to say, as Sarah knew, because we cannot read minds but can only react honestly in the moment.

  “Hi,” Sarah says carefully. There is much to confuse her here. She has never spoken to or been spoken to by either Martin or Liam, for all the hours she’s spent in their presence at school. She has never seen either of them in a car without Mr. Kingsley, their host, at the wheel. Having just, at long last, received her own license, a milestone the enormity of which is equaled only by its sense of anticlimax and its failure to grant her relief from her pain, Sarah is hyperaware of those occasions when a body and a steering wheel conjoin. She wonders whether Martin is licensed to drive in this country. Somehow she doubts that he is. The car Martin is driving isn’t Mr. Kingsley’s Mercedes. It’s a teenager’s car, a stylish beater of the exact make Sarah desperately covets, a convertible Bug, midway through extensive dermatological renovation. Its shell is heavily plastered with what Sarah assumes is a rust medication. In this year of their sixteenth birthdays, cars, or the absence of cars, are the only significant emblems. Sarah knows she knows this car but she can’t place it, the car having only recently appeared in the lot, around the same time as Sarah’s mother’s impoverished Toyota, which Sarah hopes is not connected to herself in the minds of her peers despite how hard she has fought for the right to drive it. The crucial thing is not to be dropped off at school by her mother. Sarah is allowed to drive from her mother’s workplace to school, and from school to her mother’s workplace. This is why she’s still in the CAPA lot, although there’s no rehearsal. Her mother’s workday doesn’t end until six.

  “Fancy taking a spin in our chariot?” Martin goes on, Liam grinning encouragingly. It’s Karen Wurtzel’s car, Sarah realizes. Karen’s father has been helping her restore it. Somehow in her taciturn remoteness Karen has made the car’s deficits into an asset, proof that she actually knows about cars.

  “I have to pick up my mother from work,” Sarah says, so surprised by the invitation she does not think to lie.

  “Where’s her job? Is it near?”

  “She’s a secretary at the university.”

  “Might have been there, we’ve seen every bloody attraction, is it the one down past those fountains? Why don’t we follow you there, you can drop off the car with your mum and then come on with us and have dinner.”

  It’s so simple the way he describes it—like driving itself, when one thing shape-shifts into another, for example her solitary vigil in the front parking lot smoothly eclipsed by Martin and Liam making ridiculous faces they know she can see in her narrow rearview, secondarily framed by the bug-spattered glass of Karen Wurtzel’s windshield. Down Fountain Boulevard she leads them, underneath the linked arms of the live oaks, the afternoon sun her attentive spotlight, the Toyota Corolla suffused with an alien splendor.

  Sarah knows her hopeful excitement is the result of reprieve from exile, from her status which isn’t quite that of a slut but a soiled castoff even Norbert ignores. She’ll no more show herself this hope, which is the same as abject gratitude to Martin and Liam for noticing her, than she would show it to Martin and Liam, let alone to her mother, from whom she conceals everything with such thoroughness that her mother doesn’t know there are visiting English at school, available to magically pluck Sarah from her disgrace. Prior to the English People’s own disgrace, which seems to so little concern them, the CAPA Sophomores were under constant pressure from Mr. Kingsley and Mrs. Laytner to sell Candide tickets to family members and friends. Sarah had not sold her mother a ticket. Sarah’s continuation as a student at CAPA is largely a condition of her mother’s being able to forget that the school exists.

  “You’re early,” her mother says, not without pleasure. “Would you like to use Petra’s typewriter? She’s gone for the day.”

  In the barely recalled past of junior high school, Sarah spent most afternoons with her mother, in her mother’s little office, also not without pleasure. Her mother would take her lunch hour late, at two thirty, using it to pick Sarah up from her school and bring her back to the campus. There Sarah had been allowed a freedom she had not yet possessed anywhere else. She had wandered the full breadth of the university with its enormous crabgrass lawns, its famous old live oaks, its broad pebbled walks, its oft-photographed Spanish-style buildings, its backpack-wearing students hurrying along among whom Sarah would pretend to belong. The campus bookstore was where she had bought the paperback copy of Tropic of Cancer she still hadn’t managed to read; the campus commissary was where she had sat alone, with a Dr. Pepper, pretending to read it, cultivating an air that aloneness was the state she had chosen, and sometimes actually feeling a fierce pride in being alone. But most of the time, she would return through the towering heat of the late afternoon to loiter purposelessly with her mother, slouching in her mother’s extra chair, receiving unembarrassed the attentions of her mother’s co-workers, rearranging her mother’s collection of witty coffee mugs, all of which had been gifts from Sarah on Mother’s Days past. She’d spent those afternoons with her mother so effortlessly that she’s never given them a thought until now that they’re as intimately strange as the object landscape of her mother’s desktop.

  “That’s okay,” Sarah says, picking up the photo of herself she most likes, the one from seventh grade. She looks far older than her years, is wearing just enough makeup, is smiling with unrecognizable confidence. There’s neither the slutty excess of eyeliner nor the desperate excess of eye contact that marred her last three school pictures despite deliberate precautions
to the contrary. She does not recognize the very pretty, very happy thirteen-year-old in the picture, perhaps because the picture has become for her an icon. She wishes she had some pretext for showing it to Martin and Liam. “I ran into Karen Wurtzel after school and she invited me to sleep over”: the lie as always successful in direct proportion to her lack of preparation. Duplicity, or she’d rather call it storytelling, is her sole realm of inspiration, the entire basis for her mistaken belief she can act.

  “Who’s Karen Wurtzel?”

  “You know, she lives in Southwoods.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She’s in my class. She followed me here so I could drop off the car.” No need to talk about the building’s lack of visitor parking, the reason Karen isn’t standing here also; Sarah had thought of saying this on the way up, which means it’s too much detail and so she does not. Sarah’s mother has long since chosen her battles, and theirs is now an almost marital understanding of tacit permission in exchange for unblemished appearance. Sarah’s grades will never slip, she will never be addicted or arrested or pregnant.

  “She’s taking you to school in the morning?” confirms her mother by way of farewell, turning back to her work. Sarah feels a pang; her mother had been happy to see her. If they were a different mother and daughter she would go around the desk and kiss her mother’s drooping cheek, but even in the past, when theirs was a shared world, they rarely touched each other.

  Sarah goes back down in the elevator and finds Martin and Liam horsing around in the lobby despite the building’s lack of visitor parking; through the glass doors Karen Wurtzel’s car is visible parked in the fire lane. “We were just about to send out the search parties,” says Martin, and when Sarah says it’s good that they didn’t she must show alarm, because both men laugh.

  “Did we give you a scare?” Liam hopes.

  The rear seat of Karen Wurtzel’s car is almost not a seat at all and Sarah has to twist sideways to fit. “Now off to fetch Karen,” says Martin. “Those Calamitous Bournemouth Yokels.”

  “The Captain Boffed You.”

  “Three Corpulent Britons Yodel.”

  “Troubled Cooks Bludgeon Yams.”

  “You have a future on Fleet Street, Liam. This Can’t Beat Yours but There Comes Bonny Yanni.”

  “Who’s Yonny?”

  “Y-a-n-n-i. Greek fellow with long flowing hair, plays the keyboards and sings.”

  “Do you fancy him, then?”

  “Oh yessss, he reminds me of you, you pretty thing, needs a shave like you do. Hasn’t old Lillian taught you to shave, you inveterate son of a smothering mother?”

  “I’ll thank you not to mention my sainted mother.”

  “I’m humoring you as the way to her heart.”

  “Will you be my daddy then?” Liam grotesquely curls in the narrow front seat and paws Martin’s sleeve in the manner of an uncoordinated kitten. “Will you change my nappies? Waaahh! Waaahh!”

  “Don’t I already?”

  “Now, Martin,” admonishes Liam, leaving off his kitten act and sitting up. “I’m trying to impress this girl, aren’t I?”

  All this witty repartee is shouted back and forth across the stick shift as if for the peanut gallery, as Martin drills the little car down the street like a man fully licensed, or perhaps never licensed. Sarah need not acknowledge what Liam has said. Had he not made the comment she would have felt sure they’d forgotten her. As it is she can’t be sure she’s the girl that he wants to impress; perhaps “this girl” is Karen. The force of the wind as Karen’s car speeds along isolates Sarah in the back seat, her tornado of hair intermittently blinding and gagging her. Concealed within these onslaughts she is able to contemplate Liam. He has the chiseled features of an idol, eyes so unlikely in their blueness and brightness as to suggest something doubtful, an improvised or artificial arrangement, hidden under his skin. Rejected as Sarah has been by Joelle—by Joelle, whom Sarah tried to reject—Sarah is unaware of Joelle’s verdict on Liam, and had she known it she would have surely contradicted it. Yet Sarah comes to much the same conclusion. Liam is within range, although she doesn’t frame it to herself the same way. But the impression of inexplicable deficit, of a queer gap between outward gifts—tall, handsome, lanky, flashing eyes, dazzling smile, the fringes of his hair tangling just the right amount with his eyelashes, one could go on and on—and inward integrity, this Sarah notices also. She envisions a cringing creature, some naked frightened nonhuman thing, having put on Liam’s body like a suit. Now it has to be vigilant, it has to keep watch on the humans around it, to see how to act, so it isn’t found out. And who was Liam keeping watch on? Martin.

  The vision of the creature in the Liam bodysuit had to be forcibly struck from her mind. Liam was exceptionally handsome. Sarah repeated this idea to herself as if it were a lesson.

  Martin wrenched the steering wheel and Karen Wurtzel’s car dove roughly over a curb cut and into a small parking lot. Brief strip mall, a handful of storefronts, the retail totem pole at the parking lot entrance indicating Chinese takeout, shipping center, and TCBY, which stood either for The Country’s Best Yogurt or This Can’t Be Yogurt, Sarah wasn’t sure which. Karen Wurtzel was standing in front of TCBY wearing jeans and a kelly-green polo with TCBY stitched above the left breast. She held a white plastic tub about the size of a medium popcorn. Martin braked just short of running her over and flourished grandly with one arm. “Thine Chariot Beckons You.”

  “Too Clever By Yards,” complained Liam.

  “Testy Can Be Youth,” replied Martin.

  Sarah watched a series of storms break across Karen’s face and disappear before the men had looked up from their wordplay. “Hi,” Karen said brusquely to Sarah without looking at her, as Martin and Liam got out of the car, Martin handing Karen her keys with a bow. Karen handed Martin the white plastic tub and Martin peeled off the lid and peered in. “This Can’t Be Yogurt,” he said.

  With Karen driving, Martin took Liam’s place in the passenger seat, and Liam climbed in with Sarah. “How’s the water?” he asked. Their knees clashed in the inadequate space and Liam bent to study their conjunction. “They’re talking about us,” he reported to Sarah, who bent her head near his to hear him.

  “What are they saying?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t speak any Knee.”

  “How do you know they’re not just making noises to fool you?”

  “The way dogs do? ‘Woof woof woof,’ as if they’re saying something? Dogs must think we’re quite daft.”

  “I don’t actually hear our knees talking.”

  “It’s on a higher frequency, like a dog whistle. Perhaps dogs talk to knees. But they don’t have knees, do they? Do they? Look, Martin! Who am I?” Liam sprang onto his knees in the tiny back seat and let his tongue idiotically loll from his mouth as the wind beat his hair from his face. “Arf arf!” he shouted into the wind. The toes of his upturned shoes were digging into Sarah’s thigh; they were battered black lace-ups made of cheap or fake leather, sad-sack shoes yet he wore them as obliviously as would a little boy whose mother still bought all his clothes. He had fully committed to playing the pleasure-maddened dog and was barking and slobbering and nosing Martin’s shoulder as best he could around the impediment of Martin’s seat behind which Martin, twisting so as to face back, sheltered whilst whacking Liam’s “dog” nose with a rolled magazine he’d produced from his satchel.

  “Bad dog! Bad dog!” Martin cried as Karen wordlessly drove and Sarah, seated behind Karen, rode while trying to catch a glimpse of Karen in the rearview, spotting only herself. Her grim expression repelled her and she forced herself to laugh with crazy energy at Martin’s and Liam’s antics.

  Karen parked in the lot at Mama’s Big Boy and they filed inside, first Karen, looking at no one and speaking to no one, then Martin and Liam shoving and goosing each other, then Sarah, at whom Martin and Liam grimaced and clowned and for whom she felt herself performing as a mirror, laughing a laught
er not her own, although it would become hers, she told herself. She would not mimic Karen’s wounded hauteur, the flattened line of her mouth.

  “Table for four,” Karen told the host as the host pirouetted in welcome.

  “Right this way!” the host cried. “Are you going to need high chairs, honey? Not even boosters?”

  “I dooo want a boothstah, I dooo!” Liam said.

  At the booth Karen slid in first. As if scoring a run Martin slid in beside her, slamming her against the booth’s inside wall. “So terribly sorry!” he cried. “Are you injured? We must take a pulse—I’ll be gentle. Cold as ice. Is there a doctor in the house? Perhaps a licensed dietician? Liam, crumple up these napkins for a fire, I believe Karen’s heart has stopped beating—”

  “Let go,” Karen said, laughing, for even she could not withstand Martin’s earnest assault—but it was different with Karen than it had been when Sarah mirrored Martin’s and Liam’s hilarity. Sarah knew she had been copying, while Karen had somehow reclaimed her own place. It no longer mattered to Karen that Sarah was here.