The saxophone teacher runs her tongue over her teeth. She says, “The successful mothers—musical women, sporting women, literate women, content and brimful women, women who were denied nothing, women whose parents paid for lessons when they were girls—the successful mothers are the least forceful, always. They do not need to oversee, or wield, or pick a fight on their daughter’s behalf. They are complete in themselves. They are complete, and so they demand completeness in everyone else. They can stand back and see their daughters as something set apart, as something whole and therefore untouchable.”

The saxophone teacher goes to the window to let down the blinds. It is almost dusk.

Tuesday

Mrs. Tyke waits in the corridor for ten minutes before the saxophone teacher opens the door.

“I just wanted to touch base, really,” she says once they are inside, “in light of this dreadful scandal up at the school. I’m thinking of the girls.”

“I understand,” the saxophone teacher says, pouring out two mugs of tea. One of the mugs has a picture of a saxophonist on a desert island and the words “Sax on the Beach.” The other mug is white and says “Let’s Talk About Sax.” The saxophone teacher returns the jug to its cradle and carefully selects a teaspoon.

“Mrs. Tyke,” she says, “you would very much like, I think, to sew your children’s hands to your waistband, just to keep them with you always, their little legs swaying when you hurry and trailing on the asphalt when you stroll. If you turned on your heel very fast your children would fan out around you like a sunburst pleated skirt. You would be a goddess in a corset and a bustle, your children radiating out from you like so many graceful little spokes.”

“I’m thinking of the girls, that’s all,” says Mrs. Tyke. She holds out both hands to receive her mug of black-leaf tea. The saxophone teacher lets the silence creep until Mrs. Tyke bursts out, “I’m just worried about some of the ideas she’s bringing home. They’re ideas she didn’t have before. They stick in the side of her mouth like a walnut, and when she talks I can see glimpses of these ideas—just a flash every so often when she opens her mouth wide—but it’s enough to make me very nervous. It’s like she’s tasting them, or poking them around her mouth with her tongue. They’re ideas she didn’t have before.”

She blinks dolefully at the saxophone teacher, then shrugs in a helpless fashion and ducks her head to sip her tea.

“Can I tell you what I think the problem is?” says the saxophone teacher in a special quiet honey voice. “I think you feel a little bit as if that horrible man up at the school, that vile and disgusting man, has left a big fat fingerprint on your glasses, and it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at, all you see is his fingers.”

She 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.