The Thing I'm Most Afraid Of

by Kristin Levine

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Violetta has a bad reputation.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Felix said.

  “No. It is an opera,” Sara said, as if that explained everything.

  “So do Alfredo and Violetta break up?” I asked.

  “Yes. Then get back together. Then she dies of tuberculosis!”

  Felix rolled his eyes.

  “Death sad,” Sara admitted. “But music—beautiful and romantic!”

  “Hmm.” The plot sounded a bit like the time on Love on the Evening Tide when Georgio met a cocktail waitress and brought her home to his family. He’d wanted to marry her, but his family threatened to disown him and give his portion of the casino on the family steamboat to his third cousin. So he’d broken up with her. But then she’d come down with cancer, and he’d rushed to her side and . . . Okay, it sounded exactly like Love on the Evening Tide. (I hoped Grandma was remembering to tape it.) “I’ll give it a chance,” I said cautiously.

  “Thank you, Becca,” Sara said.

  We got off the bus and onto the streetcar and were almost to Schottentor before I realized I had forgotten to ask the most important question of all. “Wait—where is this opera?”

  “At the opera house,” said Sara.

  “That’s like a theater, right?”

  “Yes.”

  No. No, no, no. “I don’t like crowds,” I said, my voice wavering. Doesn’t she remember? It’s number three on my list!

  “I know. It number three on your list.”

  Okay, so she did remember. “I’m not ready to do this tonight,” I said, beginning to sweat. Occasionally, I could go to the movies, like on weekday afternoons when they’re mostly empty. But never on opening night. You could get trampled. Or robbed. Or what if someone yelled, Fire? There’d been a whole Supreme Court case about that (DJ #2, p. 17, Schenck v. United States, 1919).

  “You are,” Sara said. “You need to build confidence. Then you ride bike.”

  “You tricked me!” I complained.

  “She tricked both of us,” Felix grumbled.

  Sara nodded. “I very tricky.”

  “You’re sly. Deceptive. Devious. Sneaky!” Felix went on.

  Sara nodded again. “English has many good words.”

  My heart was pounding by the time I followed Sara and Felix onto Straßenbahn 1. I’d gone to the symphony at the Kennedy Center once, on a field trip in fourth grade. I’d ended up spending most of the visit in the bathroom, throwing up. My teacher had not been pleased.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want to go.”

  “It’s on your list,” Felix pointed out.

  Okay, so I did want to go. But not now. Sometime . . . later. In the future. When I didn’t feel so scared. “I’m too afraid when I can’t easily leave a place. Like in a theater.”

  Sara looked at me kindly then, her lock of green hair sparkling in the late-afternoon sun. “Rebecca,” she said slowly, breaking my name down into its full three syllables. “You were afraid to eat egg.”

  “I did that,” I admitted.

  “Felix was afraid to have a party,” she continued.

  “He did that,” I said.

  “Feeling afraid is part of being brave.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said.

  “Yes,” Sara said. “Most important part.”

  It was time to get off the streetcar then. The opera house didn’t look pretty to me anymore. It looked like a big, squat jail.

  “You have choice,” Sara said. “You get back on Straßenbahn, go home alone. Or you go to opera.”

  “I don’t like those choices.”

  Sara shrugged. “Choosing is part of being brave too.”

  She waited for me to make my decision. I said nothing. I couldn’t choose. I did want to be brave. I wanted my father to buy me tickets to the latest musical. And do you think I enjoyed always waiting for a movie to come out on video? Heck, I even kind of wanted to see the opera. But I didn’t want to die! And being trapped in a room full of strangers in the dark, well, it sounded like a nightmare. My thoughts went around and around in a loop, like that ancient Greek snake that eats its own tail. I was scared of snakes too and—

  “Can I go home?” Felix asked.

  “No,” Sara said.

  “Why not?” Felix asked.

  A snake eating its own tail made a big circle, and that made me think about the Riesenrad and how awful I’d felt when I hadn’t gone on the ride. What made me think the opera would be any different?

  Except . . . I had eaten that egg.

  “Felix, please stay,” I said, “because I want to see the opera. And if I’m going to sit there with all those hundreds of strange people, I’d like to have a friend on both sides.”

  “Fine,” Felix said. “You can sit in the middle.”

  And just like that, the snake gobbled up the last bit of itself and disappeared.

  CHAPTER 23

  Standing Room

  In the movies, when someone does something brave, the soundtrack swells with inspiring music. Or the people around them burst into spontaneous applause. But when I agreed to go to the opera, all that happened in real life was Sara said, “Good. Becca made a decision. But no sitting.”

  She led us to an escalator that would take us under the busy street. I was still worried, but I felt better. Deciding, I remembered, was another one of Dr. Teresa’s techniques. “Don’t worry about making the perfect decision,” she’d told me. “The important thing is just to do something.” Maybe she was right.

  “Wait a second,” Felix said. “What do you mean, ‘no sitting’?”

  “You have the tickets, right?” I asked. Forgetting tickets was another fear of mine. I’d made Mom check our boarding passes fifteen times on the way to the airport.

  “No,” Sara said. “We get standing room.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Standing room,” Sara said impatiently. “Where you stand and listen to the opera.”

  “We don’t get a seat?” I asked.

  “No, that why it called standing room!”

  “How long is this opera?” Felix asked.

  “Short one. Only a bit over two hours,” Sara said.

  “We’re going to stand for two hours?!” Felix asked.

  “Little railing to lean on.” She turned to look at us. “Now we buy scarves.”

  “Scarves?” I was confused. Sara was changing topics every other second.

  She ignored me as we stepped off the escalator into an underground shopping mall. There were shops and stands around the sides and a restaurant in the middle. Tunnels led off in different directions toward the subway station.

  Sara dragged us over to one of the little stands. A short man with black hair and a thick mustache stood proudly in front of a number of different scarves displayed on a rack.

  “Nur hundert Schilling,” he said to Sara.

  “Well, go on,” she told us. “Pick one out.”

  “What’s it for?” I asked.

  “To mark our place at the opera.”

  I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but the scarves were pretty, all super thin and soft, like silk. There was a bright-red one, one with purple swirls, and every color of the rainbow in between. I picked out a blue one to match my dress; Felix got black. Sara already had a scarf stuffed into her purse.

  Sara handed the man a couple of bills and hurried us off. I did a quick calculation in my head—Dad had told me one dollar was equal to ten Austrian schillings. Hundert meant one hundred, so each scarf had cost ten dollars. We stepped onto another escalator, and when we got off, we found ourselves right at the foot of the opera. I stared up at the big doors, my heart starting to beat faster.

  “No, no,” Sara said. “Side door. Hurry!”
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  “Why?” Felix said, glancing at his watch. “It’s barely five! The opera doesn’t start until seven thirty. We still have over two hours.”

  “People already in line.”

  She led us around the side of the grand building to a nondescript door. This felt much better. It was just a normal door. Like to a library or an office building. Sara held it open and gestured for us to go inside.

  The corridor looked like a hallway at school. Boring beige tile. Fluorescent lighting. It wasn’t intimidating at all. Except for the two hundred people ahead of us, already waiting in line.

  Sara bustled us inside and gave a huge sigh. “We made it,” she said.

  “Is the line sometimes longer?” Felix asked.

  “Sometimes it goes around the building.”

  “People wait in line for the privilege of standing at the opera?” I asked.

  “Standing room in Galerie offers the best acoustics,” Sara said firmly.

  An old woman who had followed us inside nodded in agreement, then looked back at her newspaper as soon as we glanced at her, as if she hadn’t been listening to our conversation.

  I looked around the corridor. The room was so mundane and drab, it reminded me of my school cafeteria. There was no reason to feel nervous. Right? The line snaked around, back and forth, organized by a red velvet rope. Near the front of the line was a couple. They looked like they had been there awhile, because they had brought their own folding chairs and were sitting patiently, holding hands, each reading their own book. Two old men sat on the floor with a chess game set up between them. In front of us was a young man, maybe a college student, studying a musical score clutched in his hands. In front of him was a young woman with headphones on, her eyes closed, her hands moving as if she were conducting her own private orchestra.

  “Opera seems to be popular here,” I observed.

  The woman behind us snorted. “Once,” she said in English with a thick German accent, “I was in line to get tickets to see José Carreras in Carmen, and when the tickets went on sale, people started pushing and shoving. I nearly got trampled!”

  I felt dizzy.

  “Did you get a ticket?” Sara asked.

  “Of course!” the old woman said. “I pushed right back! And Carreras was amazing. Worth every bruise.”

  The room was spinning now. It was like when I was trying to get on the Ferris wheel.

  “Becca, are you okay?” Felix asked.

  I couldn’t reply. Couldn’t even shake my head. Trampled. That was what the woman had said. And bruises! I already have as many bruises as I . . .

  “Sit down,” Sara instructed, pushing me to the floor.

  I sat right where I was in line, cross-legged on the tile, and put my head down in my lap. I waited for the murmurs to start, for people to come over and ask if I was okay. I knew they meant well, but it always made it worse, my embarrassment making me even more anxious. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited. And waited. I felt so dizzy I was sure I was going to faint or throw up or . . . The feeling got worse and worse. I wanted to run away, but I didn’t know where the bathroom was. My heart was beating so quickly, I was sure I was going to die.

  But I didn’t. In fact, nothing happened. I just sat there on the cold, hard, uncomfortable floor, feeling sick.

  And then, for no reason at all, I started to feel a little better. It was like a dog had had its teeth in me, and it just decided to leave and chase a squirrel instead. My heartbeat slowed. Not a lot. But a little. I waited a while longer.

  Finally, I opened my eyes. There was a speck of lint on the floor. Bright-pink fuzz, as if it had fallen off someone’s sweater. I looked around.

  No one was staring at me. In fact, a number of people were sitting down on the cold tile floor themselves, including a man in a tuxedo. Next to him, two women in jeans and sweaters were doing a crossword puzzle. The old men still played chess. The young woman conducted to herself. No one paid the slightest bit of attention to me.

  I looked up. Felix’s face was pale, but Sara was smiling. “You are brave, Becca.”

  I nodded, almost too scared to move. I took one deep breath and then another. Dr. Teresa had told me this might happen. If I could ride out the anxiety long enough, the spell would pass. It would simply go away. I thought about Sara on the steps of the police station.

  I felt as if I had run a race—exhausted but a little exhilarated too. Sara pulled a couple of magazines out of her bag. She offered me one. It was in German, but I took it, flipping through the pictures but barely seeing them. I didn’t run. I didn’t die. In fact, nothing happened! Boredom started to creep in, slowly, slowly, but welcome, like an old friend. I realized we still hadn’t gotten any closer to the box office. “Why isn’t the line moving?”

  Sara glanced at her watch. “Tickets go on sale eighty minutes before showtime. Still have a while.”

  Once I was done with the magazine, I played with my new scarf, weaving it in and out of my fingers. It was so soft! Like flowing water. Maybe it really was silk. Maybe it was a good-luck charm that had washed my anxiety away.

  At precisely 6:10 p.m. the window at the box office opened, and everyone jumped to their feet. Sara clutched a couple of coins in her hand. “How much are the tickets?” I asked. The opera sounded expensive. What if I get nervous again and can’t stay for the whole thing? How much money did Dad put in that little envelope?

  “Fifteen,” she said.

  She must mean fifteen hundred, I thought. Fifteen hundred schillings was $150, and $150 times three was $450. That was a lot of money! “Did my dad give you that much?” I asked.

  Sara gave me a strange look. “Each ticket costs fifteen schillings.” She held up one fifty-schilling coin.

  “But, but . . . ,” I sputtered. It didn’t make sense. “Fifteen schillings is only a dollar fifty. That’s cheaper than a Big Mac. That’s cheaper than the scarf!”

  “Of course,” Felix said. “There’s a large government subsidy. How else could poor people go to the opera?”

  Apparently, Austrians believed poor people needed to go to the opera! But I didn’t have time to wonder about that, because once the line started moving, it moved very quickly. When it was our turn at the ticket counter, Sara said, “Drei Galeriestehplätze, bitte,” slid across her coin, and received three white tickets and five schillings in return.

  She led us through another set of doors, and as soon as she reached the stairs, she began to run. “Come on!” she called.

  In fact, everyone was running up the stairs. Felix and I ran too, struggling to keep up with Sara. “Why are we running?” I asked. “Didn’t we just get our tickets?”

  “We have to mark our spots!” she huffed as we turned at a landing and hurried up another flight of stairs. Finally, we were at the top. There was a crowd of people waiting in another line in front of a closed door.

  Once again, we stopped to catch our breath. It looked like a normal stairwell, not at all what I had pictured for the opera. After a moment, a sour-faced usher threw open the door, and the crowd poured out of the stairwell into a lobby. I started to get nervous again, my hands cold, my breath shallow. I wanted to find a nice quiet corner, but Sara rushed forward with the crowd into the auditorium. I didn’t want to be left alone, so I followed her.

  The theater was amazing! It was a cavern filled with red velvet seats. Far below were the orchestra seats. Next, I could see three levels of boxes. Not cardboard boxes, but little rooms where people could sit in armchairs and watch the show. Just below us was another balcony filled with seats. We were at the very top. A giant round chandelier hung overhead, with sconce lighting on every box. There were people bustling around me, but I didn’t notice. My anxiety melted away, like an ice cube in a cup of hot chocolate.

  “Becca!” Sara called. “Felix!”

  She was standing in front of a railing, w
aving at us. We pushed past another woman and walked over to her. “Look!” she exclaimed. “I got a nice spot!”

  “It’s a railing,” said Felix glumly.

  It was behind the last row of seats, on the very top balcony. But actually, as I glanced at the stage, I could see pretty well. The seats were staggered, like at a stadium. All of them were empty.

  Sara rummaged in her purse and pulled out a delicate purple scarf. She tied it in a neat bow around the railing. “Now tie yours.”

  I took out my new blue scarf and tied it too, around a section of railing right next to hers. Felix tied his black one on the other side of mine.

  Sara bounced excitedly on her toes. “We made it. Got good spot! Now go get snack.”

  “But . . . ,” I protested.

  She turned to look at me. “You hungry?”

  “Yes, but if I leave my new scarf here, someone might take it,” I said.

  Sara gave me a look as if I had suggested that a dolphin might swim up to watch the final act. “Why they do that? It marks your spot!”

  I glanced around. There were scarves tied all over the railings. But strangely, almost no people, as if they had run up the stairs, marked their spots with pieces of cloth, and then disappeared. Okay, so maybe that was exactly what had happened.

  Then I realized. “Is this another honor-system thing?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The Opera

  We trekked all the way down the stairs and back toward the subway. I sat on a bench while Sara and Felix went to one of the food stands lining the Ringstraße and came back with three plates. Each one had a round roll, a long sausage that looked like a skinny hot dog, and a big dollop of mustard. The mustard was much spicier than I was used to, but it tasted good. I watched how Felix tore off chunks of the bread and combined all three ingredients.

  “I’ve never actually been to the opera,” Felix mused, his mouth full of mustard and sausage. “Does the Staatsoper have supertitles?”