The Rehearsal

her classmates swoops down and says, “Hey, Issie. You all right?” She makes a mock-sad face at Isolde, pulling down the corners of her mouth like she is begging, and in her mind’s eye picturing herself as motherly and caring and kind.
    Isolde scowls. “Today is not a good day,” she says, because it’s easier to pretend that it isn’t.
    Saturday
    “A man can be powerful and still be loved,” Patsy reads aloud, “but it’s rare to see a woman loved for her power—women must be powerless. So as women gain power in our society, they also find love more difficult to attain.” She closes the book and looks at the saxophone teacher questioningly. “Do you agree?”
    This is a scene from a long time ago. The saxophone teacher looks younger. Her skin is tighter underneath her eyes and the droopy muzzle lines around her mouth have not yet started to show. Patsy is surrounded by books and papers and ballpoint pens. Outside it is raining.
    The saxophone teacher leans back in her chair and ponders the question doubtfully. “I knew a couple with a baby,” she says at last, “a baby boy, maybe fourteen months. The father worked all day, came home every night, and the baby would smile and simper and reach out his little arms and perform for his daddy. But if the mother left for a while, maybe left him with a relation or a neighbor if she popped out on her own, when she came back the baby would be furious. He would scowl at her and turn away from her and refuse to be held by her, and howl if she came too close. In the baby’s mind, she had no right to go away and leave him. The father’s love was conditional and it had to be fought for. The baby had to win his father over, and he did. But he saw his mother’s love as rightfully un conditional, and when she took it away he felt nothing but injustice and contempt.
    “At first,” the saxophone teacher says, “I felt sorry for the mother. I thought the baby was being terribly unfair. But then I think I changed my mind.”
    “You changed your mind?”
    “Yes,” the saxophone teacher says. “She had a kind of power too. She had a kind of influence. That’s what I saw, in the end.”
    “You haven’t really answered the question,” Patsy says. “I asked, do you think that as women gain more power in the world they find love more difficult to attain?”
    “No,” the saxophone teacher says. “I object to the wording of the question. I object to the assumption that power and love are necessarily two discrete things.”
    “You always object to the question,” says Patsy in mock-irritation. “We never arrive at any answers because you are always objecting to the question.”
    “It’s what you learn at university,” the saxophone teacher says. “At high school they expect answers, but at university all you’re supposed to do is dispute the wording of the question. It’s what they want. Ask anyone.”
    Patsy sighs and brushes a crumb off the dust jacket with the flat of her hand. “Ridiculous,” she says, but she sounds defeated.
    “I had a friend in first-year,” the saxophone teacher says, “who would begin every essay the same way. Suppose she was set an essay on Images of Violence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . She would begin the essay, ‘The problem of violence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is twofold.’ It was always the same. No matter what she wrote on. ‘The problem of nationalism in prewar Britain was twofold.’ Always the same.”
    “What if it wasn’t twofold?” Patsy says, scowling afresh at the textbook on the table.
    “It always is,” the saxophone teacher says. “That’s the secret.”
    Wednesday
    “There’s this girl at school,” Bridget says, “who tells these weird lies. The reason I think they’re weird is that I don’t think she even knows she’s lying when she does it.”
    “Which girl?” the saxophone teacher says.
    “Willa,” says Bridget vaguely. “But you wouldn’t be able to tell. She’s good.”
    Bridget fiddles with her reed for a second and then looks up.
    “Like, I always made this mistake,” she says, “whenever I read the word misled I didn’t realize it was mislead , to lead somebody astray. I thought that there was a word mizle which meant to diddle somebody, and if you were mizled then it meant you’d been diddled. So I always said mizled , not miss-led .”
    The saxophone teacher’s fingertips are on her saxophone hanging from her neck, and when she moves her hand she