The Rehearsal

insidious means, might push one of you against the music-cupboard door and press her cold cheek against yours so her lips are almost touching the feathered lobe of your ear. The prospect that one of you might want her , even, and pick her out as an object and a prize. That one of you might blush every time she looks at you, might stammer and stumble and take every opportunity to divert through the music block in the hope of brushing past her in the hall.”
    “Yeah,” Bridget says. “She blew it all out of the water, so we could get on and make some music and have some fun.”
    “So you got on and made some music and had some fun.”
    “Yeah,” Bridget says again.
    “And Mrs. Jean Critchley suggested that you play this piece like an ice-cream jingle.”
    “She didn’t say that.” Bridget senses she’s winning, in some obscure way, and draws herself up a little higher. “She just said, Sometimes it’s not about originality. Sometimes it’s just about having fun.”
    The saxophone teacher is frowning. Inside she asks: does she feel jealous? She reminds herself that Bridget is her least favorite student, the student she mocks most often, the student she would least like to be. She reminds herself that Bridget is lank and mousy, with a greasy bony face and a thin hookish nose and pale lashes that cause her to resemble a ferret or a stoat.
    She is jealous. She doesn’t like the idea of Mrs. Jean Critchley, who is jovial and flat footed and forever appealing to her students to just have fun . She doesn’t like the idea of Bridget having a basis for comparison, an occasion to see her , the saxophone teacher, in a new and different light. She doesn’t like it.
    “Let’s move on,” she says. “I think it’s time to try something new. Something a little harder, that will make you struggle a little more and re-establish which one of us is truly in control out of you and me. Okay?”
    “Okay,” Bridget says.
    “Let me find a Grade Eight piece,” the saxophone teacher says. “One that Mrs. Critchley won’t have any cause to comment on.”
    Friday
    Isolde falters after the first six bars.
    “I haven’t practiced,” she says. “I don’t have an excuse.”
    She stands there for a moment, her right hand splayed over the keys and damply clacking. The shifting tendons in her hand make her skin stretch white and purple.
    The sax teacher looks at her and decides not to fight her. She moves over to the bookshelf and lifts the plastic hood off the record player. “Let me play you that recording, then,” she says. She selects a record from the pile and says, “Tell me what happened at school today.”
    “They wanted to cancel Sex Ed,” Isolde says gloomily. “In light of recent events. They took Miss Clark out into the hallway, and the principal was there and we could hear the whole thing. We’re not supposed to call it Sex Ed. We’re supposed to call it Health.”
    The saxophone teacher lowers the needle with a crackle and a low hiss. It’s Sonny Rollins playing “You Don’t Know What Love Is” on tenor sax. The record trembles like a leaf.
    “What is it that you learn in Health?” asks the saxophone teacher as they sit back to listen.
    “We learn about boys,” says Isolde in the same flat voice. “We put condoms on wooden poles. We learn how to unroll them so they won’t break. Miss Clark showed us how much they can stretch by putting a condom over her shoe.”
    Isolde lapses into silence for a moment, remembering Miss Clark struggling to stretch a condom over the toe of her sensible flat-soled shoe, hopping and red-faced and puffing with the effort. “ There it goes!” she said triumphantly in the end, and wiggled her foot so they could all see. She said, “Never believe a boy who says it won’t fit. You say to him, I saw Miss Clark put a condom over her whole shoe.”
    The music is still playing. Isolde is only half-listening, looking out over the rooftops and the chimneys and the wires.
    “We don’t really learn much about girls,” she says. “Everything we learn about boys is all hands-on 3-D models and cartoons. When we learn about girls it’s always in cross-section, and they use diagrams rather than pictures. The stuff about boys is all ejaculations, mostly. The stuff about girls is just reproduction. Just eggs.”
    In truth the classes are patched and holey, hours of vague unhelpful glosses and line drawings and careful omissions which serve to cripple rather than assist.