The Rehearsal

stands up to pace.
    “I know you wanted your daughter to find out about it all the ordinary way. You wanted her to find out behind the bike sheds, or underneath the bleachers on the rugby field, or in Social Studies, the facts written on the whiteboard with a felt-tipped pen. You wanted her to sneak glances at magazines and at movies she wasn’t allowed to see. You wanted her to start off with some sort of blind sticky grope in her mate’s front room on a Saturday night while her friends are outside being sick into flowerpots. That might happen more than once. It might become a phase. But you’d be prepared for it.”
    As Mrs. Tyke watches the saxophone teacher she lets something steal across her face, not something as crude and bold as realization or awakening, but something which registers only as a slackening of her features, a tiny release. It’s such a good performance the saxophone teacher almost forgets she’s acting.
    “You wanted her to finally get a boyfriend in sixth form maybe, some prancing, empty sort of boy you didn’t really like, and you wanted to catch her with him eventually, coming home early because you had a funny feeling, and seeing them on the couch, or on the floor, or in her bedroom among her teddy bears and her frilly pink cushions that she doesn’t really like but she’ll never throw away.
    “I respect these things that you wanted for your daughter,” the saxophone teacher says. “I imagine they must be the things that every good mother wants. It’s a terrible thing that this venomous little man should have stolen your daughter’s innocence so slyly, without ever having laid a finger on her, shoving his dirty little secrets down her throat like candy from a brown paper bag.
    “But what you need to understand, my darling,” she whispers, “is that this little taste your daughter has had is a taste of what could be. She’s swallowed it. It’s inside her now.”

TWO
    February
    “The first term,” they said, “is essentially a physical and emotional undoing. You will unlearn everything you have ever learned, peeling it off skin by skin, stripping down and down until your impulse shines through.”
    “This Institute,” they said, “cannot teach you how to be an actor. We cannot give you a map or a recipe or an alphabet that will teach you how to act or how to feel. What we do at this Institute is not teaching by accumulation, collecting skills as one might collect a marble or a token or a charm. Here at this Institute we teach by elimination. We help you learn to eliminate yourself.”
    “You may break or be broken,” they said. “This happens.”
    The fat one on the end leaned forward and said, with emphasis, “A good actor makes a gift of himself.”
    “An actor is someone who offers up his body publicly,” they said. “This can happen in one of two ways. The actor can exploit himself, treat his body as a ready and obedient instrument, a product to be sold. At this Institute we do not favor this approach. We do not breed confectioners or clowns. You are not here to sell your body: you are here to sacrifice it.”
    And then they said, “You’re not at high school anymore.”
    February
    “I graduated from the Institute in December,” said the golden boy, his gaze passing from face to face with calm disinterest. “They asked me to come and talk to you guys today about my experience of the program and where I’m headed now and maybe you can ask some questions if you have any.”
    He sat cross-legged on the gymnasium floor like a prophet.
    “God, I envy you guys,” he said, and then he smiled and smiled. “Not too virginal, not too defiled. Sitting there all shiny and pregnant with the best still yet to come.”
    The golden boy looked at them, the tight pale ring of nervous faces and black tee-shirts still creased down the middle with newness.
    “The three years I spent at this Institute didn’t just shape me as an artist. They shaped me as a person,” he said. “This place woke me up.”
    He flushed brightly as if he were describing a lover he had lost.
    “Everything you’ve ever slammed shut gets reopened here,” he said. “If none of you had auditioned and been accepted you would all have become cemented, cast in plaster and molded for the rest of your adult life. That’s what’s happening to everybody else, out there. In here you never congeal. You never set or crust over. Every possibility is kept open—it must be kept open. You learn to