The Rehearsal

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.”
    The saxophone teacher runs her tongue over her teeth. She says, “The successful mothers—musical women, sporting women, literate women, content and brimful women, women who were denied nothing, women whose parents paid for lessons when they were girls—the successful mothers are the least forceful, always. They do not need to oversee, or wield, or pick a fight on their daughter’s behalf. They are complete in themselves. They are complete, and so they demand completeness in everyone else. They can stand back and see their daughters as something set apart, as something whole and therefore untouchable.”
    The saxophone teacher goes to the window to let down the blinds. It is almost dusk.
    Tuesday
    Mrs. Tyke waits in the corridor for ten minutes before the saxophone teacher opens the door.
    “I just wanted to touch base, really,” she says once they are inside, “in light of this dreadful scandal up at the school. I’m thinking of the girls.”
    “I understand,” the saxophone teacher says, pouring out two mugs of tea. One of the mugs has a picture of a saxophonist on a desert island and the words “Sax on the Beach.” The other mug is white and says “Let’s Talk About Sax.” The saxophone teacher returns the jug to its cradle and carefully selects a teaspoon.
    “Mrs. Tyke,” she says, “you would very much like, I think, to sew your children’s hands to your waistband, just to keep them with you always, their little legs swaying when you hurry and trailing on the asphalt when you stroll. If you turned on your heel very fast your children would fan out around you like a sunburst pleated skirt. You would be a goddess in a corset and a bustle, your children radiating out from you like so many graceful little spokes.”
    “I’m thinking of the girls, that’s all,” says Mrs. Tyke. She holds out both hands to receive her mug of black-leaf tea. The saxophone teacher lets the silence creep until Mrs. Tyke bursts out, “I’m just worried about some of the ideas she’s bringing home. They’re ideas she didn’t have before. They stick in the side of her mouth like a walnut, and when she talks I can see glimpses of these ideas—just a flash every so often when she opens her mouth wide—but it’s enough to make me very nervous. It’s like she’s tasting them, or poking them around her mouth with her tongue. They’re ideas she didn’t have before.”
    She blinks dolefully at the saxophone teacher, then shrugs in a helpless fashion and ducks her head to sip her tea.
    “Can I tell you what I think the problem is?” says the saxophone teacher in a special quiet honey voice. “I think you feel a little bit as if that horrible man up at the school, that vile and disgusting man, has left a big fat fingerprint on your glasses, and it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at, all you see is his fingers.”
    She