The Rehearsal Read Free Page B

says.
Friday
    Isolde is waiting outside in the hall. She can hear the faint rumble of the saxophone teacher’s voice through the wall as
     the 4:00 lesson draws to a close. Here in the deserted hallway Isolde takes a moment to enjoy the backstage silence before
     she is cued to knock and enter. She inhales and with her tongue she tastes the calm and careless privacy of a person utterly
     unobserved.
    Normally she would be flooded with pre-tutorial dread, leafing through her sheet music, practicing in mime, her eyes following
     the music on her lap and her splayed hands moving on the empty air. But today she is not thinking about her lesson. She is
     sitting still and with all her mind trying to preserve and capture a private swollen feeling in the deep well of her chest.
    It is like a little pocket of air has rushed into her mouth and sent a little shiver down her back and tugged at the empty
     half-basin of her pelvic bone. She feels a prolonged and dislocated swoop in her belly and a yank of emptiness in her rib
     cage, and suddenly she is much too hot. Isolde feels this way sometimes when she is in the bath, or when she watches people
     kiss on television, or in bed when she runs her fingertips down the softcurve of her belly and imagines that her hand is
     not her own. Most often the feeling descends inexplicably—at a bus stop, perhaps, or in the lunch line, or waiting for a bell
     to ring.
    She thinks, Did I feel this when I saw my sister for the first time as a sexual thing? After Dad touched my head and said,
     This is going to be hard time, these next few weeks, and then left me to watch TV, and after a while Victoria came in and
     sat down and looked over at me, and then she said, Fantastic, so now everyone knows. And we sat and watched the tail end of
     some C-grade thriller on the Thursday night special, except I couldn’t concentrate and all I could think was, How? How were
     you able to turn your head and look hard at him and crane up and kiss his mouth? How were you not paralyzed with fear and
     indecision? How did you know that he would receive you, gather you up and press hard against you and even give out a little
     strangled moan like a cry, like a cry in the back of his throat?
    Here in the hallway Isolde is thinking, Did I feel this feeling then, that night? Did I feel this jangled swoop of dread and
     longing, this elevator-dive, this strange suspended prelude to a sneeze?
    Later maybe she will identify the feeling as some abstracted form of arousal, an irregular toll that plucks at her body now
     and again, like an untouched string vibrating in harmonic sympathy with a piano nearby. Later she might conclude that the
     feeling is a little like a hunger-stab, not the gnawing ever-present lust of real hunger, just a stab that strikes like a
     warning—here and gone. But by then, that time in years to come when she has come to know her body’s tides and tolls and can
     say,
This is frustration
and
This is lust
and
This is longing, a nostalgic sexual longing that draws me back to a time before
, by then everything will be classified, everything will have a name and a shape, and the modest compass of her desires will
     be circumscribed by the limits of what she has known, what she has experienced, what she has felt. So far Isolde has experienced
     nothing and so this feeling does not mean
I must have sex tonight
or
I am still full from lastnight, 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