Shrug
Page 24
In the fall, my father, Drew and I put half a dozen boxes of my stuff into the Plymouth and drove over to the women’s co-op I’d been assigned to on the north side of campus. Dorm rooms were more expensive than co-op housing. So were two-person rooms at co-ops instead of the four-person suite I’d chosen. I was worried that my father would criticize me for liking creature comforts, so I purposely chose something less expensive and a little chaotic.
As we were bringing my cartons into the room I’d been assigned to, a mouse scuttled across the floor next to the molding in the front hallway. Actually—it was a pretty big mouse. I hoped my father hadn’t seen. But then the roommate who had already gotten there was sullen and unfriendly, and there was something about the green, poorly lit walls and the cabbage-y, institutional smell wafting in from the kitchen that made my eyes fill with tears.
My father took one look at me and said, “You know, you don’t have to move in here,” and, without waiting for my response, started carrying my things back to the car. Drew followed him, a box of clothes in his bony arms, and then I brought up the rear with my blanket and pillow. I hate to admit it, but I was really relieved.
I know, I know, you’re disappointed. You were hoping I’d make a clean getaway. Look, it’s not so easy for people like me to escape with certainty or elegance. We limp along, or shrug along, until we can take the next clumsy step in the right direction.
Back at the apartment, of course, I had second thoughts. I steeled myself the next morning and called the housing office, and luckily, a very nice woman answered and put me on the waiting list for another co-op or a dorm. “Students change their plans sometimes,” she said kindly. It wouldn’t be for the fall, she said; I was too far down on the waiting list. But something might open up winter quarter.
It was finally the day I was starting my fall classes, and I’d been up most of the night tossing and turning. What if I couldn’t keep up with all the reading? What if I didn’t get good grades? What if there was no housing available winter quarter? What if housing was available but I got a crummy roommate? Why was my mother so mad at me? What had I done, really? It was beyond unfair. Was Drew going to be okay? Was Hildy? And then there was Clifton. I’d bought him a greeting card and was planning to send it to him, but what would I write? I didn’t know how to find the words, figure out how to say, Hello, I’m here, call me, without quite saying it.
I dozed off around four and overslept, but luckily, my first class wasn’t until ten. I sat bleary-eyed at the kitchen table in a pool of autumn sunlight, picking at a bowl of dry Cheerios and sipping hot tea while my father drank his instant coffee and pored over yesterday’s newspaper. I checked my schedule again: Beginning Musicianship (though my father thought it was ridiculous for me to sign up for something so basic), Introduction to Western Music (ditto, but I was worried that I’d learned stuff from him along the way that just wasn’t true), English 1a, Psychology 101, and University Chorus.
The table jiggled a little as my father got up and left the kitchen. I heard him open the door to the front closet, and figured he was rustling around for LPs to take to one of the dealers in San Francisco. But when he came back into the kitchen, he was carrying a dusty violin case, which he shoved into my hands without comment.
“What’s this—? Dad! You can’t afford—” Shrug. I felt awful. I had more money now than he did. I was rich.
“It’s in shitty shape,” he interrupted. “Got it at the flea market. Needs new strings, and the—what do you call it? That piece that holds up the strings—”
“The bridge?” I got up and put the instrument on the deep ledge of the kitchen window, opened the case and took it out. My father apparently hadn’t noticed that by now, I was much more of a singer than a violinist. Still, the violin was an inviting, mellow shade, and the inside of the case was crushed blue satin that had faded but that was still pretty. The bow needed to be rehaired, but I was glad to see that rosin dust had collected around the violin’s f holes and the wide end of the fingerboard. Someone had played this instrument.
“The bridge,” my father said, as if he’d come up with it on his own.
“It’s okay! I think that’s all very minor—”
“Take it down to Aschow,” he barked, referring to the violin repair guy way down Telegraph in Oakland.
“Dad—thank you!”
“You’ll get it fixed up. Isn’t that teacher of yours in the Music Department over there?”
For a minute, I was annoyed that my father just assumed he knew what I wanted. But then I realized I was smiling. He was right, for a change: I could study with Mrs. Cray again. I’d been planning on private voice lessons, but maybe I could do both if I alternated.
I put the violin back in the case and hugged my father. Just for a second.
And then I gathered up all my stuff from the shelf above my futon: my reg packet, with the Regents’ Scholarship card that would be fed into a computer, my schedule, my textbooks, and a spiral-bound Cal notebook and Lindy pen that I’d bought for the occasion. I thought of Hildy, who was so much more of a natural for this than I was. Natural, ha ha. I wished she and I had matching Cal notebooks that kept getting confused with each other. I wished she could show me the ropes now the way she’d tried to do when I was starting kindergarten. Shrug.
I thanked my father again and left the apartment. Down on the street, the fall light made everything look really vivid. I walked up Bancroft toward Telegraph, treading over those strange little frosted glass panels that were still embedded in the sidewalk even though so much else had changed.
I crossed Bancroft, leaving behind me the Doughnut Central that had replaced Smoke and Records, and leaving Cody’s behind that. There were Cal students everywhere, my peers, all of us immersed in an overture of sound: Holy Hubert spouting fire and brimstone, the Hare Krishnas in their endless metal-castanet-punctuated chant, the congas thumping hollowly from Lower Sproul Plaza, the rhyming knish vendor singing Delicious! Nutritious! Hot knishes! over and over, a 51 bus making that loud letting-off-steam sound as it nosed into the A/C Transit stop in front of the student union building. The whole place was jumping with noise and color and vitality, and I was part of it.
acknowledgments
I am very grateful to the visionary Brooke Warner and the She Writes Press team for their exceptional professionalism and steadfast support throughout the publication process. I also want to acknowledge Julie Powers Schoerke and her team at JKS Communications for their enthusiasm about my book and their excellent follow-through.
I had many fine readers who helped me along the way. Kathleen Caldwell, Jody Cornelius, Liza Dalby, Amy Grossman Di Costanzo, Ruth Greenstein, and Elisabeth Schlessinger offered valuable feedback and cheered me on. Very special thanks to Joanne Rocklin for her thoughtful reading and generosity with her time. And heartfelt gratitude to Michele Lieban Levine, whose critical eye and friendship were, and are, godsends.
I’ve been working on this book for a long time. My husband, Mark Moss, always my first reader, gamely took on draft after draft, somehow able to give me a fresh perspective each time. I am deeply grateful for his loving support.
As a survivor of childhood domestic violence, I’ve been very glad to witness the increasing awareness of how battery at home affects children. More information is available from the Childhood Domestic Violence Association (cdv.org).
Appendix
musical references
in Shrug
(in order of appearance)
Brahms’s cello sonata opus 38
Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn
Beatles’ Help! album
Beatles ’65
Beatles VI
Johann Strauss’s waltzes
Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”
Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man
Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion
Khachaturian’s violin concerto
Prokofiev’s 5
th symphony, Allegro marcato
Dobie Gray’s “The ‘In’ Crowd”
Dobie Gray’s “The ‘In’ Crowd,” Ramsey Lewis version
Beatles’ Yesterday And Today album
Beatles’ Revolver album
Beatles’ Rubber Soul album
Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate
Beethoven’s 8th symphony
Beatles’ “Dizzy Miss Lizzie”
Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There”
Beatles’ “You’re Gonna Lose that Girl”
Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album
Beatles’ “You Like Me Too Much”
Beatles’ “If I Needed Someone”
Beatles’ “Think for Yourself”
Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride”
Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing”
Beatles’ “We Can Work it Out”
Bach’s Cantata #140, Wachet Auf
Beatles’ “Martha My Dear”
Youngbloods’ “Get Together”
Beatles’ “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”
Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever”
Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote
Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier suite
Brahms’ piano quintet opus 34, Scherzo
Franck’s Prelude, Fugue and Variations for organ
Schubert’s Lieder (songs)
Schubert’s piano trio opus 100, Andante con moto
Irving Berlin’s White Christmas sung by Bing Crosby
Stravinsky’s Petrushka
Beethoven’s Archduke trio
Bernstein’s West Side Story
Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms
Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety
Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti
Orff’s Carmina Burana, “Blanziflor et Helena”
Loussier’s jazz versions of Bach pieces
Ravel’s Bolero
Walter Gold’s “It’s My Party” sung by Lesley Gore
Wagner’s Ring cycle
Beethoven’s string quartets
Brahms’s violin sonatas
Loesser’s Guys and Dolls
Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero” sung by Joan Baez
Bob Dylan’s “North Country Blues” sung by Joan Baez
Bob Dylan’s “Love is Just a Four-Letter Word” sung by Joan Baez
Bach’s unaccompanied violin partitas and sonatas
Bach’s Italian concerto
Debussy’s piano works
Bach’s Magnificat
Mozart’s flute quartets
Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue, opus 133
Barber’s violin concerto
Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head”
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons
Pachelbel’s Canon in D
Bach’s Goldberg Variations performed by Glenn Gould (1955 version)
John Lennon’s “Imagine”
Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May”
Isaac Hayes’s “Theme from Shaft”
Don McLean’s “American Pie”
Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”
Bonnie Bramlett and Leon Russell’s “Superstar”
The Chi-lites’ “Have You Seen Her”
Mozart’s Requiem: “Confutatis”
Verdi’s Otello: kiss motif
Bernstein’s West Side Story: “I Have a Love”
Mozart’s Flute and Harp concerto in C, K. 299
Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky
Bach’s Cantata #8, Liebster Gott
Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”
About the Author
© Chris Loomis
Lisa Braver Moss has written for Parents, Tikkun, Lilith, the Huffington Post, and many other publications. She specializes in family issues, health, Judaism, and humor. Moss is the author of the novel The Measure of His Grief (Notim Press, 2010). Her nonfiction book credits include Celebrating Family: Our Lifelong Bonds with Parents and Siblings (Wildcat Canyon Press, 1999) and, as a coauthor, The Mother’s Companion: A Comforting Guide to the Early Years of Motherhood (Council Oak Books, 2001). She is also the coauthor of Celebrating Brit Shalom (Notim Press, 2015), the first-ever book of ceremonies and music for Jewish families opting out of circumcision. Moss, a survivor of childhood domestic violence, grew up in Berkeley and lives in nearby Piedmont with her husband. They have two grown sons
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