The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

  Lori talked on and on about the mundane, about the Corkys shoes she desired and the way she glared at the boy who once spit at her when she didn’t say hi back and the way the square of chocolate cake the cafeteria served today tasted like metal, which seemed unfortunate and wrong. I wanted her to help me so fiercely my skin burned. I wanted someone to help me.

  Now we sat in that cafeteria, our lunches set out on the table, the hamburger and frozen fries and pudding separated into their little compartments, and we pretended we were merely eating, that we were safe. The theater of the two of us continuing convinced me, a little. I believe Lori felt this, too.

  We both wanted to be first cello, to perform that solo, to play for a moment in a circle of brightness. We discussed the upcoming auditions for our new chairs carefully, not sharing what music we would audition with. Lori seemed particularly nervous, which was curious to me, for she was a good player, her tone better than anyone’s. She stretched and said, “I’m so bad. I’m going to fuck up,” a groan that was a lie, because she was better than I was, talented in an ineffable, natural way, and I understood that my role was to say to her, “No, you’re not going to,” which felt like opening my mouth too wide. And I was filled with a chilly, unruly fear. For this was the true thing: we both wanted to be first chair and perform that solo. We were both shouldering darkness, in that hot, dirty cafeteria, but what we wanted was a moment in the light, the auditorium filled with people listening to us play the music of composers who created these sounds two hundred years ago. We sat in the cafeteria, the other kids shouting to each other across the room, screaming. We wanted to taste those hamburgers forever; we wanted to live.

  We had two weeks to practice. The entire orchestra was practicing. I walked by little practice rooms and heard the muffled sounds of violins, cellos, oboes, flutes, the intent sounds of students. Inside these rooms, everyone sounded angelic and furious. I imagined the students had lost their voices and could now only speak through their instruments, like this. I walked by a room and heard Lori practicing and stood, my heart lacy with panic, by her door.

  In those days after the incident, we were different. We were all afraid. There was the way we all jolted up when the alarm system in the school went off, the false alarms that were a guttural, metronome sound. The way we all held our breath. The way the teachers walked down the corridors and could break into a run at any moment. The way it seemed the steel tables could lift off the linoleum floor.

  Eating our lunch, we eyed each other like vultures. We were flying over the world, hovering, ready to dive in and grab what we needed. We were talking about our pieces and what we would play and Lori’s arm stretched out on the chair beside her and she was describing I don’t know what, the fact that her bow didn’t take resin well, or that again she thought she would fail during her solo, saying this again, when we both knew it wasn’t true. It felt false in an elaborate, manufactured way, made in a factory of lies, and this made me furious. I was furious at the way the school had not told us exactly why the father had gone on his rampage, or I was furious at the lame directions they gave us, to hit the ground if someone else did this, which I knew wouldn’t help a thing. I was furious at the way my parents or the school told us not to worry. I was furious when Lori claimed she would perform badly when she knew music so naturally and fully she would not. There was a flash of violence outside of me and within me, a massive truck driving over and through my skin.

  “You won’t win,” I said. It just came out. There was no reason to say it. I just did.

  I paused. Then I continued—“No one thinks you’ll win.”

  She stared at me. She lifted a trembling hand to brush hair off her face.

  “Why not?” she asked, softly.

  “People just say. Lots of people. No way.”

  This was getting worse by the moment. I looked away. I felt a pressure in my throat, the capacity to say more and more.

  “What people?”

  “Many. I can’t say.”

  This seemed the worst thing, the manufacture of others demeaning her. But I stood by this. I didn’t know how to stop. “Well,” she said. She was unable to look at me. I felt powerful for the first time since the incident, as though I had become a steel spike, completely hard and sharp; but I also trembled, for I simultaneously felt a plunging sense of loss. It was confusing to experience both of these at once. I realized then how much I admired my friend, even loved her, and that I had damaged something I could not see. Lori didn’t stand up and walk away; she changed the subject to the staleness of the carrot cake on our plates, but it felt as though something finished between us, and that we were now unknowable to one another, separate, an ostrich and a bear.

  We auditioned for our seats, all of us, in the room where the orchestra met, and we perched on metal chairs and listened to each other play. It took two hours to go through all of us, our teacher listening with a blank face, his eyelids quivering when he heard music that was startling or good. The violinists went, the flautists, the French horn section, the cellos. We were middle school students, the harshest audience in the world. My playing flew by; I imagined I was housed within the music, and, perhaps, briefly I was. But when I finished, my hand was trembling. I barely heard the music I played.

  I sat in the back and listened as the other cellists performed; one by one, each carved their particular song into the air. Lori’s tone swelled dark and lovely into the room, and I was listening, knowing that she had beaten me with that tone, revealing some deep honeyed quality in herself—for the music, when played the right way, seemed to reveal a hidden internal beauty that, previously, no one could see. That was the most glorious feature of the orchestra, the surprising revelations of beauty from people who might be shallow or petty in everyday life. We were just sitting there in that grubby room and it would happen, a floating ribbon of sound. It was better than all of us. Some of the best players knew this and were coy about it. They rushed some golden thing off their violin or flute or trumpet and then gazed into the distance as though they had announced: See. Here.

  I clutched my cello, feeling more sick by the moment due to a variety of things: the peculiar fact that, two weeks after the attack, we were continuing this process at all, which felt both cruel and a relief, the fact that I wanted to be first chair so much I could barely breathe, the fact that I wished, beyond anything, that I could play like Lori, and that I had ruined something between us by my spite.

  And then there was a squawk of her bow. A bleat.

  We all heard it—the inside of her skin had been turned out, and for a moment all of ours had as well. Her face twitched. She continued. It was shocking. Lori never made mistakes.

  She did not look at anyone when she had finished, though I watched her, wanting to catch her eye, to be absolved of the awful fact: I made her mess up. It was a fact that was as clear to me as the sky. I had helped her doubt herself so she made this mistake, and suddenly I wanted to comfort her, in some sorry soft part of myself, but she put away her cello, picked up her backpack, and walked out.

  They announced the new order the next day. Mr. Handelman tallied everyone’s score and read out where we were. The class was quiet for once. He announced violins, violas.

  The order of these sections resembled what it had been before.

  Then he announced the order of the cello section. We sat and waited to be called.

  He said my name. First.

  I looked up. How could this be? He glanced at me, nodded. “You played well,” he said, acknowledging all of our surprise. I could feel shock flicker across the faces of other cellists. I was now Seat One. It felt at the same time wrong and also completely predictable, clicking into a buried hope I held about myself. I felt like I contained a thousand golden coins. After he read the names, we shifted into our new seats. I carried my cello to the first seat and sat down. I looked at the others and they seemed very far away, even though they were all just a few feet beside me, and John S
chubert right beside me. The sun had come up in the wrong part of the sky.

  After her disastrous audition, Lori now occupied the seventh chair out of eight. We did not know how to look at each other. I had won but I hadn’t. There was now a piece of rotten fruit in the room. I wondered if there was any way to actually win, to ascend to some place of calm and triumph, but perhaps there was not. There was no way to win. This thought scared me so much I tried to think of one word, like “red” or “sneaker,” over and over, because I did not want to be thinking about this at all.

  Sometimes Lori’s particular, deep tone rose through the others. I loved her tone. I wanted to inhabit it. I tried to send this message to her in my mind, my admiration of it. Our conversations were different now, and we mostly used the word “fine.” We were speaking another language entirely. Then she dropped out of orchestra and I didn’t see her at all.

  I prepared for my solo. I practiced a lot, and our teacher nodded at me in a way that said he thought I could do it. But right before the concert, there was a slight earthquake and the auditorium where we were supposed to perform was damaged. The concert was canceled, forever.

  A week later, we auditioned again for a holiday concert. This time, when I auditioned, I slipped down to seventh chair. I sat in the same chair Lori held before she left.

  We threw our caps into the sky. We ran into each other on the wide, grassy field where we graduated junior high, filled with hundreds of ninth graders and their parents, the grass trampled by a thousand shoes. Lori’s parents were walking carefully, distant from each other, her mother shouting something to her father. Lori walked in front of them, clutching a bouquet of balloons, her face squinting as though the afternoon light had suddenly become too much. I raised my hand to wave at her, low enough so that if she wanted to ignore me, I could pretend I was scratching my face. She saw me and raised her hand the same way, and for one moment we were looking at each other, with no expression I could categorize—then we kept walking, past each other, and on.

  We went to high school. Lori was districted for another school, so she vanished. Whenever I met someone from her school I asked if they knew her and found out various facts—that she was dating a football player, that she crashed her mother’s car, that she was working at Hardee’s. Then I heard nothing. Sometimes I passed Sandra’s older brother in our high school. He was on the basketball team, and walked with a loose, loping pace. Once I saw him pack up his belongings as he left his trigonometry class, and I was impressed by the way he organized his backpack, the tenderness with which he slid each notebook inside.

  The teacher whose arm had been injured in the incident was transferred to the high school I attended. She taught and sometimes told stories about the moment she saw the father run into the cafeteria. She kept thinking he wanted to eat the food being served that day. Why else would someone come to the cafeteria? What other reason could there be? She often said that and sighed, and gently touched her wounded arm.

  My life unfolded in ways that surprised me and did not. I stopped playing cello in high school, but that time in the orchestra left an echo—this fierce gleam of desire. The desire took various forms. It fell like a pale net over anything I could capture. It fell over people. It fell over a man who loved me for the way I kissed him and then thought I had the wrong taste; the man who admired me as long as I didn’t contribute more sentences to a conversation than he did; the man who loved the least pretty parts of me, loved my feet and legs, who I wanted to crawl inside because he seemed like a shelter, until he was not. We moved with the family to many cities over the years, and the net fell over each city as I tried to find a way to make it a home. It fell over my children, who appeared one way when I dreamed of them and another way when they arrived, who accepted my love but then were affronted by it, who believed I could offer nothing to them and rushed away. It fell over goals for work. I studied in my desired field, I took tests and failed them and took them again; but when I went from interview to interview there was something in my face, something lurking in the way I sat, that made them turn away. It fell over me as I walked down the street, as I walked by men I hoped would look at me and ones I hoped would not, it fell over my body, various days, as I tried to protect it—when that guy who came to fix the washer kept calling and telling me he would show up at any moment, when that boss somehow figured out where I lived and kept following me home, leaving oddly chosen gifts in my mailbox, the pink plush bunny, the Toblerone bar, until the day he whispered to me by the Xerox machine, bitch you didn’t thank me, and I quit the job and moved away.

  There were many types of violence in the world, some quieter. I walked down the street and I imagined if the pounding I felt, in different forms each day, existed within me or outside of me. Had I done something? Or was this the way everything was supposed to be? How did you make your way through the world dodging the violence both outside and within? There was, in me, a continual restlessness, a movement, a wondering.

  I was forty, then fifty. I never sold my cello, but I never played it either; it was in a closet, packed away. One day, I picked up the cello and played a few notes. It sounded terrible. I could hold my bow, but to pull the bow across the strings felt awkward. I could not move it with the right pressure. I could not believe that I was ever capable of making a sound that was like velvet or honey.

  I sometimes thought about Lori, and the way we talked about that audition, the way we had all waited, frozen, for our chance to play, and how we fell, so quickly, into that new order. How the process of making that order once seemed the most significant event in the world, and how I now understood its brevity. How I wanted to be important, and how I wanted to be alive. I thought of the feeling that rose up, sharply, when I told her she wouldn’t win. How I felt like a spike. I was both appalled by and enjoyed that feeling.

  During my life, I said things I wished I hadn’t. I stormed out of rooms, I ruined things with others, I acted foolishly and without thinking, I did things I don’t want to admit, actions that filled me with shame, but that moment was somehow the one I remembered.

  Then, one day, she called me.

  I was in the neighborhood, she said. I looked you up.

  It was her voice. It sounded like her regular voice, from forty years ago, but also like it had been put through a strange, bleary horn.

  “You may not remember me. I’m Lori Longstreet. From Garfield Junior High?”

  Her voice trembled, but I knew it.

  “From Advanced Orchestra?”

  It still was somehow important, to me, that it was Advanced.

  “It’s me!”

  She sounded delighted to be found. She was passing through the city where I lived, and she wanted to stop by. She was trying to see some old friends.

  Old friends—she said it as if we had rollicked through school together. I thought of our sitting in the cafeteria, and wondered if she remembered exactly who I was.

  I said I would be delighted to see her. I was. I wondered if she needed a place to stay.

  She hesitated. That would be helpful, she said.

  I lived alone in a rental then, a small house with blue vinyl siding that somewhat resembled wood. In the back, a deck overlooked a small yard, and during the spring, the azaleas rose, a pink and foamy tide. There was a spare room; my children didn’t visit often. So just like that, Lori was going to come by.

  I needed to get the place ready. I wasn’t someone who loved cleaning, but it seemed important to clean the house. I vacuumed, I scrubbed the counters, I wiped smudges off walls. I noticed the crack in the window I never seemed to get fixed, and the peeling paint where the kitchen ceiling leaked. I noticed everything that was wrong. I rarely looked that closely at this place where I slept and ate, but when I did, I found extensive stains, odd smears. I understood that I mostly moved through my life trying not to look at them.

  In the bathroom, I peered at myself in the mirror and haplessly rubbed moisturizer into my face. What w
ould she see when she saw me? Would she remember what I had said? I remembered my words, how powerful I felt after they left my mouth, and how sour it became after I said them. The way we sat at the steel tables in the cafeteria, the way we negotiated our confusion and shame at being alive, the way we tried to believe in our claim to this air, these tables, these hamburgers before us, sitting on those hard steel benches, so cold they seemed to be balanced on ice.

  She arrived in the afternoon. I saw her get out of a cab slowly. At first, I didn’t think I was looking at Lori at all, but at her mother. Her hair was now cut short and silver, in a bob. She had slipped into the body of her mother like it was a coat. It was always a surprise to experience this in people you hadn’t seen in a long time. But I pretended not to see any shift in her, as I knew she would pretend not to see any in me. I stepped out into the sunlight and waved.

  “Hello!” she called. I hurried to the sidewalk to meet her. She hugged me, a firm hug, which was a change—she was not the type who hugged before. Her hair held the smell of a meadow, and I remembered how wildflower shampoo was her favorite many years ago. I felt the solidity of her arms.

  We walked up to the house; she dragged a small suitcase behind her. She walked with care. I could see her fourteen-year-old face housed in her middle-aged face, which was the gift that friends from your youth gave you—they could locate the particular beauty in you from decades before, and you could locate it in them.