Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

They were all children who had previously failed to fit in, or had failed, to the point of acute misery, to feel satisfied, and they had seized on creative impulse in the hope of salvation.

This is also self-control, Sarah thinks. This brute willing of the self to take action. Until now, Sarah thought self-control was only restraint: not putting the chair through the glass.

“Please leave me alone!” Sarah sobs angrily. Why is solitude so fucking hard to achieve? If only she had a car, she thinks for the billionth time. She would lock all the doors and just drive.

What is the moment? thinks Sarah. Where is the Now she’s supposed to respond to? How does repetition not void all the moments, like a great spreading darkness behind which David hides, safe from all observation, and nursing his hatred of her?

It exalts Sarah almost, this death of her heart, this drought of her tears.

Joelle’s spotted all sorts of places: Tampa; Waikiki; New York; the background of the Aerosmith video for “Love in an Elevator,” in which she is said to be one of the dancers. Confirmation of any of this awaits a farther future than the one in which she runs away.

She thinks of Ms. Rozot’s promise to her as a prophecy. If she can just stick it out long enough, she will earn the bewitchment and stop feeling pain.

In the truck, driving back, Sarah had said, “That’s the best burger I’ve ever had. Thanks.” This was back when she ate, and enjoyed it.

The impression of power they gave seemed not wrought, but inevitable.

This was a good-looking guy who would never be sexy, due to what sort of deficit or obstacle it didn’t interest Joelle to discover.

For Julietta, the only thing worse than watching the show would be talking about it.

They were far from home, in a city the April climate of which was already hotter than their native one ever approached on its worst days of August, and they had brought, as their ceaseless plaint went, too many “jumpers” and “trainers” and not enough of whatever nursery words they employed to mean T-shirts and sandals, and they were living as houseguests, in some cases decreasingly welcome.

In this year of their sixteenth birthdays, cars, or the absence of cars, are the only significant emblems.

Sarah’s mother has long since chosen her battles, and theirs is now an almost marital understanding of tacit permission in exchange for unblemished appearance. Sarah’s grades will never slip, she will never be addicted or arrested or pregnant.

Neither Sarah nor Karen could compete with this, nor were they invited.

This was the strange quality that hung around his handsomeness, a blur or a warp where he seemed to be lagging behind his own actions and wondering how they had gone.

“God you’re so lovely,” he marveled again and again, like an actual idiot. She wished he would put on his clothes, cover his pale washboard chest and its brightly pink nipples. But he seemed perfectly at ease, sitting cross-legged on the heap of fouled sheets, his spent penis flopped between his legs like a stricken worm.

As she pursued it Liam caught up, wearing the gaze of devoted assurance she longed for from David. “I adore you,” Liam whispered as they emerged, pungent and nest-haired and obvious, into the kitchen.

Joelle gazed at Sarah as if from the deck of a ship that was moving away from the dock toward a glorious distant horizon; and Sarah saw herself, in Joelle’s steady gaze, marooned on the dock, shrinking down to a pinprick, vanishing.

Then they were smoking in the gazebo with Simon and Erin O’Leary, who clung to each other with the stunned despair of lovers so overcome by their lust they cannot take the first step toward solving it; they could have walked indoors and fucked in any of several unoccupied rooms as Sarah had just done without meaning to, but the simplicity of this solution escaped them. Their mutual grip was white-knuckled.

Here she sat in the octopus arms of a man whose attractiveness she had to keep scolding herself to perceive and for whom she felt nothing but, now, an uneasy responsibility, as he slobbered and groaned his undiminished longing into her ear.

She had expected this because they were adults. Yet she’d gone off with them because they didn’t behave like adults, so that she couldn’t understand, now, whether they’d deserted her or whether she’d been stupid to expect otherwise.

She wasn’t petty, she has never been petty, has never had enough self-possession, or possessed enough self, to afford pettiness, because petty is a way people are who have something to spare.

All this is just speculation; Karen isn’t the type to pretend to have superior insight into people she knew as a child and then turned her back on and then used as she wished for her personal gain. Not to finger-point. That would be petty.

Sarah was wearing some kind of punk outfit that was supposed to look uncaring—punk—but instead shouted effort.

And right away her gaze went hard with the anger we always feel at the person who spoils our idea of ourself.

In high school, Karen and Sarah had done everything to their hair they could think of except take care of it. They had bleached it, shaved it, permed it, dyed it, as girls do when vandalizing themselves seems the best way of proving their bodies are theirs.

Obsession is an accidental haunting, by a person not aware she’s a ghost.

How many rooms house the past? In their hometown, space came cheap.

Karen’s mother had adored Masterpiece Theatre with the slavish adoration of somebody who thinks she’s cultured but in reality is turned on by the clothes.

Frisson is a French word meaning “shiver or thrill,” and it wasn’t much used in this country until the late 1960s. Then, once the sexual revolution came, people needed it or wanted to need it. Karen’s mother, of the negligee as daywear, adored the word frisson.

Equally pretending this wasn’t the case they sat down and told each other piles of pointless lies about the past dozen years of their lives while the young actors deferentially supplemented the pitcher of water with several pitchers of beer.

Sarah failed to recognize the kind of recognition I meant, as I knew that she would.

Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached.

Girls are complicated. They rarely love each other without also hating each other.

We almost never know what we know until after we know it.

At last, says Karen’s inner therapist, so much more cost-effective than a real one. At last you’re done crawling around inside Sarah, measuring all of the ways that she wasn’t a good friend to you.

Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.

“You won’t die,” Karen reassured Martin. “You just won’t be the same.”

She was always surprised to encounter such actually masculine men, with their sword-tip eyes and their brooding brows and, when old, their somehow all the more menacing physical diminishments, as if their power hadn’t been lost but just put in reserve.