Free This Is Not for You by Jane Rule

gave him Frank’s and Doris’ address. I didn’t want to be angry, but the control I thought of as a virtue might have been fear. I could not afford to feel frightened.
    I went back to my desk to write the final paragraph of the sermon. “We are the betrayer and the betrayed. We are Cain and Abel.”
    Monk announced her engagement to Robin Clark at the party after the opening performance of her play. Her parents were not there, and, because you were as surprised as everyone else, I decided that it was an impromptu gesture, its motives despair over the obvious failure of the play and perhaps revenge against Richard Dick, who was there with his wife. The party was very like the play, sad and silly and confused, everyone with ponderously intelligent lines dealing with true confession circumstances. Yet the only difference between that very bad play and Monk’s recently very good ones is that she is now conscious of her view of the world.
    “Do you think we could leave?” you asked before I did think so, but I agreed at once.
    “When did she decide to do that?” I asked as we walked back to the dormitory.
    “She didn’t. And she won’t be able to make it stick. Her father will never let her go through with it.”
    “If one kind of performance fails, try another.”
    “I think so,” you said. “What’s going to happen to Monk?”
    “She’s going to be a rich man’s wife,” I said, and then I remembered what Sandy had said about you. “Or not.”
    “But she does have talent, Kate. She just doesn’t know yet who she is.”
    I began to laugh, not being able to help it.
    “What?” you asked, still urgently serious.
    “Oh, I don’t know, little dog. Do you know who you are yet?”
    “Well, I know this much—that right at the bottom of me there’s one strong word, ‘yes.’ ”
    And at the bottom of me an even stronger one, “no,” but the sweetness of your confidence did touch me. I did not want to mock you, ever.
    “Is your show just about ready?” I asked.
    “No. I’m never ready until the day after things are due, but I still have three weeks. So much of the old stuff is junk, Kate—swollen heads and fallen tits. I wish I had enough to show only what I’ve done since I got back. I had a good title for it all, ‘Holey, Wholly, Holy’ but I can’t use it.”
    “Thank God for that.”
    “Nobody likes my jokes but me.”
    “They aren’t jokes,” I said.
    “When are you going to walk me through the service? That’s more pressing. What a weekend it’s going to be, Sandy’s proficiency concert Saturday night and your sermon Sunday.”
    “I haven’t seen Sandy lately.”
    “Nobody has. I just caught sight of her between classes a couple of days ago and she said, ‘You and Kate are coming to my concert, aren’t you?’ It’s funny, but I think it matters to her a lot, our going. I do like her. Do you?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    It is hard to believe that anyone was important to Sandy on the night of her concert. When she came onto the stage, the black Grecian folds of her dress making her stiffness appropriate, her pale, triangular face was grave, preoccupied. She turned not away from the audience but toward the piano, which was what she had come to find. She sat down, making no nervous adjustments of bench or dress. She was perfectly still, waiting with perhaps no awareness at all that an audience waited with her. Then she began. The music she played was chosen to display the range of her skill, technical and interpretive. The professional critics were there because Sandy had already begun her career as a concert pianist. They could be picked out among the music students and faculty members, who also made occasional notes on their programs. This was as much an examination as a concert, and at first I found it hard not to listen with some anticipation of the criticism. She was precise, almost automatic, a perfect machine, the emotion there, but programmed in advance, memorized. Then first