Once the thought came to me, it took up residence. For weeks the dead girls hovered around my head like summer flies; I had to blink them out of my eyes and bat them away from my hair. Anytime I managed to distract myself—slipping bread into the toaster for a sandwich or leafing through the libretto Ada had given me for my birthday—one would pluck at my sleeve until a thread came loose. And as soon as I acknowledged one, the lot would be upon me, whispering their insubstantial opinions in my ear.
The haunting took its toll. I began to toss and turn in my sleep, and the food on my plate lost its savor. Whatever the meal was—pierogi, pizza—it appeared sallow to me, lacking in essential nutrients. My cheeks hollowed out. I looked like a ghost myself.
One day Ada was sitting across from me in the living room of our apartment, correcting my posture as I warmed up with a series of minor scales. She held a yardstick like a conductor’s baton, waving it back and forth to keep time. Occasionally she would press it to my shoulders or stomach to make sure I held an erect carriage. This was how I spent my time after school, on weekends. Other girls came over sometimes, but few returned. They made vague noises about being too busy, and most of the time I didn’t mind—we didn’t have much to say to each other. But it would have been nice to have someone to whisper to about the ghosts.
Baba Ada’s approach to my training was unscientific—she encouraged a straight spine that looked disciplined but is not technically correct for singing. At an age when most of my peers were still inventing games with plastic horses and sneaking makeup from their mothers’ purses, I was singing Puccini. But the maturity of my voice outstripped my emotions by several years. Inside I was still young enough to want to believe that my babenka always knew best.
Today, though, the short wooden flicks began to irritate me. It was already taking all my attention to focus on the transition from an ascending melodic minor to a descending when my mind kept drifting to the graveyard behind Greta’s house. Each tap of the ruler against my abdomen felt like a gentle reminder: you’re breathing, it said, that must be nice. We started every rehearsal session with at least fifteen minutes of scales, and today there seemed to be no end to them.
Ada switched the ruler to her other hand, and in doing so cracked a nail.
“Matko Boża,” she said under her breath. And she set the yardstick on the sofa while she went to find clippers and a file. In the meantime, I was meant to take a short rest; this was the agreement made through countless sessions of voice lessons—while the cat’s away, the mouse must save her breath. I walked over to the couch and picked up Ada’s ruler, flexing it between my hands. Not very strong. With one swift bend, I snapped it.
Baba Ada rushed back into the room.
“What do you think you’re doing, lalka? Do you think rulers don’t cost money?”
I was ready to start yelling at her. To tell her that her rules were crazy and that my posture was fine and that I was tired. But instead my lower lip began to tremble.
“What happened to Greta’s daughters?” My voice came out in a whisper. “Her other daughters?”
“Oh.” Ada looked surprised, turning the nail clipper over and over in her hand like there was some important part of it she was missing. “You’re worried about that?”
I nodded. Ada walked over to the window and looked out of it, and for a little while I thought she wasn’t going to answer me at all. My anger started to heat back up, but before it could boil over, she spoke.
“Konrad used to pick flowers for them.”
“What?”
“Well, they all did. Konrad and the others picked flowers, and Greta buried the girls in their own little yard and kept them safe.” She turned towards me and looked thoughtful. “Except one. But you know that. It’s part of the story.”
It was true. The girls’ graves, the boys’ gallantry—all that was part of the story. I troubled each piece smooth over time, from Greta’s appearance in the factory door to her fight for the sacred ground of Poland when the war came. Ada told me her mother was a warrior, and that when she was tired she went and lay down with the girls underneath their house, ready to wake up again when the time was right. Safe and protected.
All this should have comforted me. It had, in fact, many times before. But today something nagged at me. The ghosts, who wouldn’t let me go.
“So where’s Konrad?”
Ada just blinked at me.
“And Fil? And Andrzej? Where did your brothers go? Why aren’t they here?” If Greta is safe, I wanted to ask, and you’re safe, why didn’t she save them too?
My baba pressed her lips together, considering. “Darling,” she said. “I think you’re trying to put me off. I think you don’t want to practice your scales.”
I shook my head. She knew that wasn’t true. Her eyes told me so.
“I think you need to go to your room and think about what you’re saying. Maybe when you come back out you’ll be ready to practice again, like a good girl.”
We stared each other down for a moment; then I spun on my heel and ran out of the room. Lying on my bed, I did exactly what she asked—thought about my questions, and thought about Ada’s answers too. All the girls, buried in the yard. All the girls, safe with Greta.
Except one.
It’s unsettling to think that I’m still looking for my lost family all these years later: one more of Greta’s daughters tucked into the soil. I know it’s crazy, but part of me thinks, There’ll be a sign. Ada wouldn’t just leave me. As I step outside the apartment building, my phone rings again from the bowels of my purse, and I think, It’s starting. I answer without even checking the caller ID.
“Lu?” On the other end of the line, John sounds frantic. “Are you all right? I’ve been calling.”
“I’m fine.” I feel a little numb—just John. What did I expect? “I was in the shower.”
I hear him sit down as he says, “Oh,” and can in an instant imagine him exactly. On break from rehearsal, hiding from the elementary school audience in the singer’s greenroom, sitting on the old leather couch. Stirring honey into his midday cup of peppermint tea. His flushed cheeks. The chintzy tinkle of a cheap steel spoon in a microwaveable ceramic mug. He never really liked children before Kara was born, which is one reason his sudden devotion to the image of our perfect family unnerves me. That, and the fact that it can’t last. Once the truth is out, then what?
“Well,” he finally says, “any plans for the day?”
“Yes.” I readjust Kara with one hand, tuck the phone between my chin and shoulder with the other. “Ada.”
“What?” Concern creeps back into John’s voice.
“We’re going to see Ada.” I pause, letting him think I’m crazy. “Bring flowers.” I pause again. “To the cemetery, John.”
“Today? In this?” I imagine him gesturing to the weather, which, from his windowless room, he can’t see.
“We’ll be fine.”
John hesitates.
“Be careful, Lu,” he says. “Be gentle with yourself.”
He has no idea how much loss a person can stand.
Of course, I haven’t lost him yet. So maybe neither do I.
6
Kara’s infant form switches around in every Greta story; she’s bundled up inside them like a tiny egg. In Greta you can see us all, descending from her like wooden nesting dolls. But when I was a girl I thought the view stopped with me. That when my baba Ada braided my hair or led me through scales, I was the last note in the song, the last line in the tale. The little queen our family machine was built to make.
In her time, my mother, Sara, thought so too. I couldn’t know, as a child, what a surprise I’d been to her. All I saw was that she was suspicious of me. That she wanted to keep me close, but didn’t know how to stay.
If she was bored she picked up my hand, so much smaller than hers even I could see it was delicate, and clipped off the raw, smiling ends of my nails. If she was in a good mood, she’d file them down with her
many emery boards, each possessing its own subtle use. And she’d pick a candy color she felt suited me and paint my nails until they resembled jelly beans.
“Okay,” she’d say. “Now blow on them. And don’t move. You can’t move until they’re dry because you’ll muck around with something and mess them up.” Then she’d frown. “I’m not doing this over again. So you’d better keep them neat.”
So I would sit. Sara disappeared into her room or out into the day, but I remained perfectly still, to show her I could. When Ada happened by—ten minutes later, sometimes an hour—she would find me in my small wooden kitchen chair, practicing my mother’s frown. My hands would be laid out on the table in front of me, itching on the palms and starting to twitch impossibly, with my fingers each separated by the width of a cotton ball.
The first time she discovered me this way, Ada sat across from me and smiled as if we were playing a game.
“What are you doing?”
I didn’t look up. It seemed important to maintain focus on my nails.
“I have to wait for them to dry. Otherwise I’m going to mess them up.”
Ada made a small aah and came over to me, picking up one of my hands in her own. “So when will these be dry?” she asked. “They look dry to me.”
I scowled. “You can’t tell by looking.”
“So touch one.”
“I’m not allowed.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well.”
We sat quietly together for some time. The beams of sun coming through the window traveled across the waxcloth on the table and crept up my wrists. At last Baba Ada stood up and stretched her arms, pressing her nails into her palms and then wiggling her fingers, balling her hands up and then extending them so her arms looked like wings.
“Sitting here is making me stiff, lalka. I’m going to go get a hot chocolate,” she said. “I was going to invite you, but I can see that you’re busy. So I suppose I’ll just have to go alone.” She walked out into the hall, still talking back at me as she put on her coat. “It’s too bad. A long way to go by myself, since I don’t have a book to read on the train ride. And I’ll be awfully lonely if I have to wait for a table. But there’s nothing to be done.”
Before she had fitted her key to the lock, I sprang from my seat and threw myself against the door. Ada came back in and wrapped me up against the wind outside, making sure that my scarf and hat matched the new grown-up color of my nails. Sitting pressed together on the train, rocking back and forth as we traveled towards a bus exchange, Ada told me about Greta’s home in Poland: about what had been and what was to come. I leaned into her on the turns and let the words seep beneath my skin, as the light had in our small kitchen.
I knew that Ada was trying to make me feel better about the fact that my mother had left me alone. What I didn’t understand was that once upon a time, my mother had heard these stories too. That she’d been petted and painted and made to believe she was whole, until one day she cracked open and out I came: a smaller doll with a sleeker voice.
Ada taught us both that Greta’s magic set our family line in motion: women who came from women, women who came with music. Each woman a better singer, a more perfect form. When I was a girl I couldn’t see that in these stories, Kara was implied by my very existence. That I was required to improve on my mother, and that the day would come to improve on me.
My first major role was almost Mélisande from Debussy, and it was so boring that I cried the first time I ran through it with Baba Ada, who was at that point still my de facto voice coach. You barely need a soprano for the part, and I just think the libretto is ridiculous, with its all-too-fragile heroine and her darkly fated loves. I was an apprentice at the Lyric back then, allowed occasionally to fill in soubrette roles, like the Massenet, and pretend I wasn’t biting my fingernails to pieces every time a new show was being cast. So when they decided to give me a genuine debut, whispering the news in my ear and giving me a champagne toast, I was meant to be very grateful.
The only justification I could fathom for the casting was that I was young and knew how to hold back my sass onstage when the moment demanded it. They didn’t want a mezzo-soprano, they wanted someone really innocent, and after spending twenty years under Ada’s watchful eye, I suppose I appeared to qualify. She hadn’t been careful with Sara, because Sara’s voice is low and easy, waves against a boat and wine dripping down the neck of a bottle. But my voice is limoncello, steam from a kettle, flint. It can be dangerous if you turn your back on it, and Ada knew better than to make that mistake again.
The first day of rehearsal was a disaster. Or at least it started out that way. I’d been working over the role phrase by phrase, picking it apart with Baba Ada in our living room, while outside the snow melted and then froze back up in rigid bulges. We could have worked in my mother’s empty room—had, in fact, intended to turn it into a studio. But that didn’t pan out. Her absence shuddered through it, always. When I crossed the threshold I couldn’t sustain notes and started breaking out in nervous sweats. My throat closed up, growing thicker and thicker from the inside, and I swallowed with great glottal gulps until Ada couldn’t take it anymore and swatted my bottom. I felt smoke rising behind my eyes. So we moved back into the living room.
I stood onstage at the Lyric beside the piano and drummed it with the pads of my fingers. The pianist gave me a dirty look—I was nowhere near the tempo of the section we were rehearsing. Pelléas et Mélisande has no real arias, but there are two brief solos and one of them belongs to Mélisande. A foundling from the woods, she marries a prince and falls in love with his brother but is too stupid to understand quite what she’s done. Her song from the tower is all about her long and long-suffering hair—shades of Rapunzel—very waiflike and full of dull quavering. That was what we were starting our day with. I tapped out the rhythm but sped it up to triple the appropriate pace. In my rehearsals with Ada, I’d sprinted through the song to keep myself motivated, and it left us both rolling on the floor with tears in our eyes. My long hair awaits you in the tower—it sounds much better frantic, as maniacal as its meaning.
“Ehm, I think we should get started,” said Rick. These days, I’ve come to love Rick. I love that his name sounds like it should belong to a bricklayer instead of an accompanist. And that he can hold a casual conversation while playing Tchaikovsky’s first concerto. But that morning I did not love him yet.
“I am started,” I snapped at him. “All warmed up and nowhere to go.”
“Whatever.” Rick yawned. He’s used to dealing with divas, actual divas. I barely weighed enough to legally give blood.
“All right,” said the director, Martin. He was parked in the fifth row—not the house’s best seats but close enough to be audible when he wanted to start dissecting our work. Beside him sat Philippe, who was overseeing the whole season, and looked crassly intimidating in a black mock turtleneck and blazer. It was unusual for Philippe to attend a first run-through, and I pushed away the feeling that perhaps his presence had to do with me. The feeling that this was perhaps a test.
“From the beginning. We’ll run through the tower song a few times at least so we can”—he waved a hand above his head—“get calibrated, really make sure Mélisande feels right. She’s the key to setting the tone here. Remember”—Martin swiveled to face me directly—“in her head, she’s still lost in the woods, even though technically speaking she’s up in the castle. And she’s about to get a lot more lost, though she doesn’t know it yet.”
He leaned over and whispered something to Philippe and then settled back in his seat, hitching one ankle over his knee.
“Okay, Mellie, let’s take her for a ride,” said Rick. I glared at him but said nothing, just curled my fingernails up into my palm so I wouldn’t be tempted to tap them on the piano shell. I rested my other hand briefly on my stomach, checking my own posture since there was no ruler here to keep me in place. Then I breathed, and sang.
Mes longs cheveux descendent jusqu’au seui
l de la tour;
Mes cheveux vous attendent tout le long de la tour,
Et tout le long du jour,
Et tout le long du jour.
I had just about reached Mélisande’s list of saints when Philippe tilted over and started whispering to Martin. I stared at them without breaking my pace, then glanced back at Rick, who shrugged. It’s not a long piece, and we were through it before I had time to really worry. Without looking up, Martin flicked a hand at us.
“Again.”
And so we started from the beginning. Mes longs cheveux descendent, and all the rest. The two men had their heads pressed together as if they were teenage boys planning a conquest. They flipped through something, and then Martin looked up briefly.
“Again,” he said.
So we did it again. And again. And again. Repetition, obviously, is par for the course in a rehearsal, especially an early one, but you usually get some sort of direction to stop you from tearing off into the same mistakes over and over. By the fifth go-round, I was tapping my foot against the stage as quietly as I could, swaying my hips just a little to see if a hint of the sultry would get some kind of response. Très innocent, they’d said. Très jeune.
On the sixth repetition, Martin and Philippe were still deep in congress, and my heart was beating hard. Well, I thought, give them something worth whispering about. I caught Rick’s eye just before he went into the opening and released a quick thrum of nails on the piano, then two more, double time. He winked at me.
At first I’m not sure either of the men in the audience noticed our slight edits to the score, but by the tenth bar I’d substituted out Mélisande’s quiet liquid rippling for a tremulous jazz, and by the time we turned the corner into our seventh repetition, Rick and I were racing each other to see who could control the tempo. I had unsettled him by taking the whole piece up an octave, and he retaliated by trilling shamelessly at the end of a phrase.
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