The Rehearsal

what I have going for me: the force of her feeling, the massive release of her trepidation, when at last she surrenders and responds. If she surrenders. Whatever she ends up feeling, at least it won’t be ambivalent. It will be either the terror-struck forbidden heave of her desire, massive and explosive like the breaking of a dam, or it will be the massive repelling force of her revulsion, her opposition, her denying me. Either way, I’ve made her feel something. She’ll have to feel something. Whatever happens next.”
    Friday
    The girls at Abbey Grange are forever defining each other, tenderly and savagely and sometimes out of spite. It is a skill that will be sharpened to a blade by the finish of their fifth and final year. It is the darkest and deadliest of their arts, that each girl might construct or destroy the image of any of the rest.
    They say, Who do you think is most likely to marry first? and Who do you think will get with the most boys? and Who is most likely to cheat? and Who will be best in bed? and then, inevitably, Who is most likely to be a lesbian, out of all the girls in our form?
    The last question is always met with shrieks and slaps and a swift intake of merry breath. In their minds they weigh up the girls with the least conquests, the girls currently not in their favor, the girls that are marginally less attractive than the rest. Unpopularity, silence, bookish introversion, any disinclination to follow in the footsteps of the flock—all these are symptoms, the girls agree, as they huddle round to diagnose. They shout out names and laugh and laugh like a coven of giddy witches casting a terrible fate.
    If Julia’s name is mentioned, however, the girls will frown and flap their hands and say, “Yes, but apart from Julia.” Julia is no fun to diagnose. She somehow does not exist in this breathy, shrieking realm of social and sexual investiture where girls are named without their knowledge, convicted, and condemned. The girls cannot alter Julia’s fate by saying, I reckon Julia’s most likely to be gay. Their power has no meaning for her. She is like a loaded gun cast into their toy-box and half-buried among the plastic rifles, the plastic revolvers, the toy cannons, the caps. They fear the glint of her.
    A few of them have kissed each other for the satisfaction of the St. Sylvester boys, perhaps to earn a ride around the block in a low-seated car, or in exchange for a stolen bottle or a crate of beer. A few of them have kissed each other at parties in their mates’ front rooms while their friends are outside being sick into flowerpots. Not passionately—that is their defense—but casually, and experimentally, and with no eye for affection or the promise of a sequel or a trend. These are not romances, but selfish tallies that they will later use as a mark of their own liberalism, their own worldly free-spiritedness: the kiss is an insurance, a proof for the later remark, Yeah course, I’ve kissed a girl.
    By not speaking of Julia, the girls have the subtle advantage: they reduce the threat to almost nothing. When they pass her in the hall, they turn their heads and simply walk on by.
    Monday
    There is a message waiting on the saxophone teacher’s answer machine after Julia’s lesson. The speaker swiftly and gracefully identifies herself as one of the uninspired mothers, one of the cloying snatching mothers who would rather smother their daughters in the fold of their bosom, clasp their daughters’ faces tight to their chests and let them be stifled and choked than lengthen the ribbon of their leash and see them walk away.
    The saxophone teacher pauses the machine with the edge of her fingernail, and stands a moment with her finger on the dial.
    “The mothers always imagine that my allegiance lies with them,” she says aloud, “that our mutual adulthood functions to bind us together against the daughter, the child. They imagine that the daughter is simply the pursuit that draws us together, the activity we both enjoy, the monthly book club, the tennis game. The daughter is simply a medium for our friendship, an opportunity for our togetherness, a shared interest that allows us to explore and reflect upon our adult selves.
    “The mothers imagine that I am their ally against the daughter, and that they are mine: they imagine that I have to work as hard as they do in order to forge a connection with the girl, and they roll their eyes at me and shake their heads and laugh like the