Free Nothing That Meets the Eye by Patricia Highsmith Page A

Pendergast’s flat figure rose from the piano stool. A hole had been bored in the keyboard cover and the wood below so that a chain might pass through. Holding the chain was a large rusted padlock, which Miss Pendergast now fastened. Then she stacked her music and tiptoed a polite ten feet behind Miss Juste across the wooden floor, out of the gymnasium.
    Friday Sophie Stephanopolos’s elastic had been repaired, but Grace O’Rourk had been unable to procure a romper belt. She said so, from her place on the floor, when Miss Juste’s hawkeye found her.
    â€œNever mind! Never mind! I don’t want to hear about it!” Miss Juste interrupted her, at the same time pointing ominously to the door.
    Grace O’Rourk, after one humiliating instant, broke and ran tearfully to the exit.
    And on this, the last day of rehearsals before the visitors came, Miss Juste’s wrath at the state of the dance knew no bounds.
    At Miss Pendergast’s first sprightly chords they could group themselves into five circles, they could skip around twice, reverse and skip once the other way. They could break into two squares, pirouette, change places diagonally, and form their circles again. But they could not skip to the center of the circle and make a turn and skip backward again to finish in a circle. Invariably there were collisions in the center, violent collisions, or else they did not come in far enough. And when they skipped backward, the result was anything but a circle.
    Miss Juste stamped a sneaker on the platform. “No!” she screamed. “No! No! No!”
    They had been stuck on the circle now for the entire six weeks. She had seen it from the beginning. The rest of the dance went well enough, but the circle!
    â€œTake hands! Take hands when you skip backwards, so you’ll at least end together! . . . Again, Miss Pendergast!”
    Again Miss Pendergast bent to her work, reading tensely through her horn-rimmed glasses, her eyes only a few inches from the music and her thin arms akimbo as her fingers pounded.
    There was a fancy run at the point where the dancers were to skip, in simulated coyness, to the center of the circle. Here poor Miss Pendergast went off, and a few little girls, like Helen Murphy and Teresa Galgano, doubled up with suppressed laughter.
    The terrible whistle shrieked again, and Miss Juste glowered on various sections of the class until the faces were recomposed.
    â€œAgain!” she commanded.
    Miss Pendergast, always with her eye over her shoulder lest she miss a cue from Miss Juste, ventured to ask, nodding her head and smiling, “From the beginning?”
    â€œNo, from the skip in, please!”
    Miss Pendergast resumed from the phrase marked “skip in” on her music.
    Taking hands helped the shape of the circle, but Miss Juste was still not satisfied. “If you could stand up here where I am . . .” (Miss Pendergast’s music wilted out at the first sound of Miss Juste’s voice.) “It’s abominable! . . . Simply abominable! . . . I’m going to give every girl in this class a D unless that circle’s perfect right now!”
    A shudder passed over the class. The faces grew serious. There was a story that once, long ago, Miss Juste had given a senior a D, which delayed her graduation one year, during which time she had had to take gym all day with Miss Juste. Some little girls believed this story and some did not.
    â€œAll right, Miss Pendergast!”
    â€œFrom the beginning?” Miss Pendergast said timidly.
    â€œYes!”
    Again the sprightly chords. The little girls, in position for the skip in, turned in confusion as they tried to start from the beginning. Some even skipped in.
    â€œStop!” screamed Miss Juste. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
    Everything stopped. There was not the twitch of a muscle in the whole gymnasium.
    Miss Juste sighed. “From the beginning, please.”
    The circles skipped around and