The curtain that stops sight but not sound

A stage curtain hangs to conceal; the gym divider curtain hangs to interrupt sound, tracking on an overhead rail that spans the width of the gymnasium and splits one large room into two smaller, slightly worse ones. Drawn shut during simultaneous periods, when one half hosts a badminton unit and the other a test on the rules of basketball, sound crosses it anyway: a vinyl-backed canvas roughly a quarter inch thick, heavy enough to block a line of sight but porous enough that the squeak of a shoe carries clean through to the other side, along with any whistle blown within thirty feet of the seam. The weave is coarse on the near side and smoother on the far, a manufacturing quirk that acoustically favors whichever class happens to be standing on the smooth half, though no teacher has ever measured this or would think to. It hangs on forty-some rings that have gone slightly green with age, running along a track bolted to the rafters, and when pulled shut it does not glide so much as travel in a series of small reluctant lurches, each ring catching and releasing in turn. Folded back, it gathers into a heavy curtain of pleats against the east wall, taking up a strip of floor no one is allowed to store equipment behind, though equipment ends up there anyway. Its grey has faded unevenly, darker where the vinyl backing has kept the sun off, lighter in a long vertical stripe where it hangs exposed between classes, a shade difference visible from the top row of the bleachers if anyone happens to be looking.

Sig. Lundqvist