The Rehearsal

wise words or a summons to a better life. They hand out pancakes. It’s enough. Soon many of the girls are exchanging their plastic Fuck-me bracelets for nylon bands that invite them, in mnemonic, to consider what a grown man might do if he were one of them, if he were faced with the same choices and confounded by the same desires. Bridget herself had been a sometime member, a wearer of a nylon commitment band—this is a comfort, the girls agree, as they mutely beg their own salvation and reach sideways for each other’s hands.
    The lunchtime youth group shifts from a classroom to the school hall to cater for the swell in numbers, and with the counselor long since returned to his frosted cubby between the bursar and the nurse, the youth leaders rise to take his place. They conclude that, in all likelihood, He would do just as they are doing now, and as they regard their bracelets they feel a throb of satisfaction that they possess the single correct answer to the rhetorical question stitched around the band.
    In a sense, Bridget comes to eclipse Victoria after all. Victoria’s questionable victimhood, the all-too-visible streak of her own reciprocation cannot, in the end, compete with the indubitable victim of a roadside smash. But the posthumous Bridget is not a singular and universal notoriety, celebrated as Victoria had been celebrated, herself the symbol and the locus of her fame; Bridget is an instrument, subtler and more pliable and vastly more diffused. It’s the best she could have hoped for.
    “There was a girl at my high school who died,” the girls will say, years later. “She was hit on her bike coming home from work. God, it was sad. It really affected us, you know? All of us. I hardly knew her, but even so. It was so sad.”
    Tuesday
    “That’s it, then,” Patsy said, when the saxophone teacher received her teaching diploma. They looked at it, stamped with a blue watermark, silvered and inked and glossy under its pane of glass. “That’s it,” Patsy said, “you’re damned. A lifetime of the world assuming that you are a spinster, a closed thin-lipped efficient spinster who lies spangled and lock-jawed in her bed at nights and has no love or pleasure to light the room. It’s the one truth about music teachers, and everybody knows it: they are alone, always alone, limp and graying in their cold offices and waiting in the dark for their next student like a beggar waiting for a meal. Congratulations!”
    They touched glasses lightly and drank.
    “But you’re not a spinster,” the saxophone teacher said. She was still looking at the shining diploma, tracing the words with her eyes.
    “But everyone still assumes. Or a lesbian. If they are generous, then they assume I am a lesbian.”
    “That’s why she asked for that ring,” Brian said, pointing to the penultimate finger on Patsy’s left hand. “She said, Make it the biggest fattest old diamond you can get your hands on. This isn’t just a symbol, it’s a whole bloody advertising campaign.”
    “And this is what you came up with,” Patsy said, waving her hand and making a disgusted face, as if the ring was worth nothing. They laughed.
    “Anyway, well done, old thing,” Brian said, reaching across and covering the saxophone teacher’s hands with his own. “It all starts here.”
    Friday
    As Isolde unpacks her case the saxophone teacher talks enthusiastically about the upcoming recital, the venue and the other performers, and the chance for everybody to listen to everybody else. Isolde is not listening. She is going to mention the saxophone teacher’s complaint about Stanley. The thought of bringing it up makes her heart thump, and the advance phrasing of the question paralyzes her, consumes her utterly. She senses that the topic is dangerous, that she is somehow backfooted at the outset: she has done something wrong without her knowing, and she will lose.
    There is a knock at the door.
    “Hang on a minute, Isolde,” the saxophone teacher says serenely. “I think that’s probably Julia.”
    “What?” Isolde says.
    “I thought we could try the Raschèr duet with both of you together,” the saxophone teacher says. “You’ve each been learning one part and I thought it would be fun to bring them together properly.”
    Isolde goes red. She looks at the saxophone teacher without speaking for a moment, and then says, “I didn’t know I was going to play it in a duet.”
    “Well,” the saxophone teacher says, “I