Then I see the faces of my family, the glazed-over eyes, the open mouths. They look like people who have been tied down and beaten. I meant to play only the first few improvisations. Somehow, I have performed them all.
Nobody applauds.
“Maybe,” my mother says faintly from the doorway. “A Christmas carol…would be nice?”
A Christmas carol. I melt down onto the bench. Humbly, I begin to play “Silent Night” in slow, block chords. I can feel the mood in the room begin to change. My father uncrosses his arms and legs. My mother actually takes a seat. When my grandfather slips the last of the chocolates from the box, I wait—watching from the corner of my eye—for my grandmother to slap him, but she doesn’t. She has pulled herself forward on the couch, and when I begin the second stanza, breaking into a few light arpeggios, she astonishes us all by beginning to sing.
Stille nacht, heilige nacht
Alles schläft, einsam wacht
I remember, vaguely, my grandmother’s voice before the stroke, before she became the person she is now, locked into the straitjacket of her body, locked into a faith that offers her no comfort, locked into a marriage that should have ended long ago. My grandmother’s voice is not beautiful, but it is true, and the words she cannot speak roll like a miracle off her tongue. Now my mother is singing, too, in her thin soprano, and there’s my father’s wavering baritone. My brother doesn’t sing, but he does shake the hair out of his eyes while my grandfather rolls the last morsel of dissolving sweetness around on his tongue.
I play on and on, verse after verse. I am overwhelmed with love for my life, for everyone in this room. It is exactly as the Greeks foretold. The artificial Christmas tree shines.
Eight
I sat on the examination table, shivering in the white paper gown. I had strep throat again, I knew it, even without the throat culture. One of the things I liked about our family doctor was that he listened when you told him these things. He was tall and stooped and handsome, in a quiet way, and if you weren’t feeling well, he looked genuinely sorry to hear it.
There was a knock on the door. “Oh, no,” Dr. Melchek said, coming into the room. “Not you again.”
“Oh, yes.”
I’d had strep throat off and on for over a year. I hadn’t really minded it because it meant that I could stay home from school. But this was different. It was August; I’d graduated from high school in June. I’d been accepted at the Peabody Conservatory, and I was supposed to leave for Baltimore in just a few more days.
“How’s the piano-playing?” Dr. Melchek said, as he swabbed out my throat.
“Fine,” I said, trying not to gag.
My Peabody audition had been a series of firsts: my first time seeing the Atlantic Ocean, my first time in a taxicab, my first time exposed to people my age who were as focused on their music as I was. Students came to Peabody from all over the world, and I listened to the jostle of languages in the corridors—Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese—the way I might have listened to a twentieth-century composer, alternately wincing and wondering at the unexpected sounds. Even English sounded different here, seasoned with Spanish, Yiddish, Korean. Outside the Conservatory walls, in the streets, I heard native Baltimore voices, liquid sounds and singing tones. I luxuriated in new diphthongs, in fresh highs and lows, marveled at the way people called to each other, multisyllabic names ringing out like bells. I saw yarmulkes and dreadlocks; I saw saris and African robes. I ate grape leaves and gyros, curries and egg rolls, steaming platters of crab legs, bagels encrusted with poppy seeds and salt. Three weeks later, when the acceptance letter came, I’d canceled my remaining auditions and started to pack right then and there. Much to my mother’s amusement, I kept the open suitcase at the foot of my bed, and this is what I lived out of—leaving my dresser drawers empty—until it was time to leave for Maryland.
“How are your arms holding up?” Dr. Melchek asked.
I held them out. He pressed his thumbs up and down the length of my forearms.
“Any tenderness?”
I shrugged. “A little.”
“Do the ice baths help?”
I nodded. Twice a day, I emptied the ice tray into the kitchen sink, then filled the basin and submerged my arms. After recitals, when no ice was handy, I did my soda pop routine, buying a couple of cold cans and stuffing them down my sleeves. My arms were fine. Or, at least, they weren’t any different than they always were. Sometimes they burned. Sometimes they buzzed. Other times they were silent.
“Anything else?” Dr. Melchek said.
I hesitated. My mother had wanted me to mention my legs, but I felt stupid bringing it up. It wasn’t something that happened very often. Just once in a while, like after I went jogging two days in a row, or climbed the steep hill that led from the downtown to Saint Mary’s Church. A few hours later, my legs would start to burn. Just like my arms, when I practiced too much. It didn’t always happen, and it never lasted more than a day or so. It always went away.
Dr. Melchek waited.
“My legs hurt sometimes after I run,” I said.
He pressed his thumbs along my shins, the way he’d done with my arms. “Anything?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said.
Dr. Melrose raised his eyebrows. “Try more walking and less running,” he said.
“OK.”
I was eager to get the prescription and go. I didn’t want him to think I was one of those people who was always sick, always convinced that something was wrong, someone like Grandma Ansay. Of course, something was wrong with my grandmother—she’d never regained full use of her right side after the stroke, and her speech was garbled, exhausting—but everyone seemed to think she might have overcome these things, if she’d done her physical therapy, if she’d tried a little harder. At any rate, she only made things harder on herself, shutting herself away. People felt sorry for her, but they got annoyed with her, too. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t do anything. She could watch television, for Pete’s sake. She could read. She could go out onto the patio, take in a little sunshine, instead of sitting indoors all the time.
On my way home from Dr. Melchek’s, I stopped in to see her one last time, careful to conceal my prescription deep inside my backpack. No one in my family had ever caught one of my strep infections, but I knew that if my grandmother found out I was sick, she’d develop a sore throat on the spot.
The house was dark, the curtains drawn. I rang the bell, waited, rang the bell again. My grandfather answered the door when he was home, but he spent as much time as he could out of the house, playing cards at the senior citizens’ center. Guiltily, I hoped that my grandmother would decide it wasn’t worth the bother of getting up, but after several minutes, she appeared at the door.
“Come, come,” she said, motioning me to follow her through the foyer into dark, stale air. When I snapped on the lamp beside her parlor chair, I saw that she was crying, had been crying, perhaps, for most of the day. This was not unusual. My grandmother’s grief was endless. Now she continued to weep, her rosary pooled in her lap, as I chattered about the courses I expected to take at Peabody, the letter I’d gotten from the girl who would be my roommate, steadfastly ignoring her tears the same way that my grandfather and parents did. If you asked her what was wrong, it only made her cry harder, and what was the point of that? If you asked her where it hurt, she’d say, “Hurt! Hurt!” and wave her good hand up and down the length of her body—an accusation, a strange benediction, I did not want to know which.
The Peabody Conservatory stood directly across from the George Washington Monument in Charles Square, a once-grand historic neighborhood that had been swallowed up into Baltimore’s sprawling red light district. The Conservatory itself was a physical haven—nicknamed, affectionately, the cloister—enclosed by gates and a high stone wall surrounding a private courtyard. The entrance was monitored by security guards and video cameras but, from time to time, an intruder still managed to slip through. Whenever this happened,
the resident assistant, a dark-eyed flutist nearly as slender as her instrument, ran up and down the halls telling us to stay in our rooms with the doors locked. Outside, drug dealers lounged on the bus stop benches; panhandlers stood on the corners, rattling cups. If they didn’t like the looks of you, they’d follow you for blocks, alternately wheedling and cursing.
My first week at the Conservatory, a man offered me money for sex. I’d been returning from the Korean market a block away from campus. It was midmorning; the streets were filled with people. When he said hello, I did what I would have done in Port Washington: I smiled, returned his greeting. The next thing I knew, he was pressing a wad of bills into my palm, trying to steer me toward the open car door where two of his friends sat waiting. His touch wasn’t rough, but brotherly, cajoling, as if we were playing a game. “Sir?” I said, not wanting to be rude, worried that I might be overreacting. “Excuse me, sir?”
Then I woke up. I dropped the money and took off running and I didn’t stop until I’d dashed through the gates of the Conservatory, where the security guard dozed over his gun, across the main courtyard and through the cafeteria and up the back stairs to the third floor of the women’s dorm. There, I burst into my room and gasped, “A man offered me money to get in his car!”
My roommate, Leigh, looked up with interest. “How much?”
“That’s not the point,” I said.
“Did you keep it?”
“Of course not!”
Leigh sighed dramatically. Her face assumed the expression of a world-weary parent. “You spoke to him, right?” she said.
I could not deny it. “He spoke to me first.”
Another sigh. “What did I tell you about making eye contact? Do we have to go over this again?”
Leigh was a soprano. She’d already found a boyfriend, a bass player who liked to walk on the furniture in the dormitory lounge, pretending he was the Pink Panther. They’d met at a party during the first week of classes. “You look like a television,” he’d told Leigh, “the way you turn on and off.” That was it, they had fallen in love—despite the general disapproval of everyone in the women’s dorm. How could Leigh make time for a relationship without cutting into her singing? What would happen down the road, when their careers pulled them different ways? We were all, I think, a little in love with Leigh ourselves. She had long dark hair and button-black eyes, perfect pitch and an impressive Grateful Dead collection. Her hobbies included riding motorcycles and dressing up in period costumes to attend Revolutionary War reenactments. And me? I had no hobbies. Sunday mornings, I went to Mass at Saint Ignatius, the little church around the corner and, during the week, I lit candles at the grand Basilica across from the city library. Every morning, I rolled out of bed and onto my knees, where I made the sign of the cross and said an Our Father and a Hail Mary. I did these things automatically, unselfconsciously, the way I brushed my teeth and combed my short, overpermed hair. Why they’d paired the two of us as roommates was beyond me, but I was endlessly grateful. Leigh looked out for me, and I clung to her as if she were a Sherpa guide.
Now she put up one graceful finger, warning me to wait, and left the room. Within a minute, she was back with Susan, the third spoke in our snug little wheel. Together, she and Leigh gave me yet another lecture on city etiquette: if you must carry a purse, wear the strap across your chest, don’t just loop it over your shoulder; keep your cash separate from your credit cards and ID; keep a spare ten in your shoe so that even if a mugger gets your cash, you can still grab a taxi home; don’t give change to panhandlers; don’t talk to strangers; don’t look at strangers; if somebody starts to follow you, make a scene, don’t worry about embarrassing yourself.
“For Pete’s sake, I’m not stupid,” I said, but my long Midwestern vowels only caused them to collapse into fits of giggles. “Say, ‘Jeez!’” they begged me. “Say, ‘Goh hohme.’ Say, ‘Parrk the carr!’”
Now I was laughing, too. What had happened five minutes earlier seemed every bit as unreal, as unrelated to my life, as everything else that happened out there in what we called the real world, the world that did not revolve around music, the world we had voluntarily left behind.
As a child, I’d daydreamed about becoming a nun, alternately tantalizing and terrifying myself with the thought that I might have a vocation, a calling from God. The Conservatory was very much like what I’d imagined then, a clear-cut, stripped-down little world that simplified your choices, retooled your life around one single, burning thing. We studied music theory, music history, music composition, and conducting. We declared both a major and minor instrument, and prepared recitals in both. We took private lessons, group lessons, master classes, ensemble; we hired ourselves out as ringers in church choirs and local orchestras, gigged at restaurants and coffee shops and bars. Few of us went out on dates, and if we did, we dated other music majors. Some of us held part-time jobs—I ushered at the nearby Morris Mechanic Theater—and if somebody wanted a nonmusic course in math or science or literature, they could always ride a shuttle bus to Johns Hopkins University, with which the Conservatory was affiliated. But mostly, we stayed on campus, in the cloister. Set apart from the distractions of daily life.
Occasionally, a group of us ventured out for breakfast at Sam’s, a diner across the street where cockroaches raced up and down the walls. Less frequently, we’d walk down Charles Street to the harbor, where we shopped and watched the street performers. Saturday nights, we might put on our Peabody Conservatory sweatshirts and skulk around outside the Joseph Myerhoff Symphony Hall, alert for someone with an extra ticket: the man whose baby-sitter had canceled and whose wife insisted he come alone; the woman whose friend had the flu; the widow whose husband had died at the beginning of the concert season. When people saw we were Conservatory students, they often gave up their extra ticket for a token amount, if anything at all. “And what instrument do you play?” they’d ask, sweeping us inside, one by one. “And what do you think of tonight’s program?”
Afterward, we’d meet in the lobby, then walk back to campus in a large, loose group. The streets always seemed to be shining from rain or, in summer, from the humidity; the sky overhead was a luminous orange. I didn’t know anything about light pollution, and for a long time I thought that the Baltimore sky changed color every night for some mysterious reason no one could explain. I loved that sky, that color. I loved the cobblestone streets, the thin sad faces of the row houses, the porches where families sat in hot weather, watching the world pass by. I loved the stink of the buses, the blast of air conditioning that ballooned in front of the banks and public buildings, the drawn, wary faces of men selling jewelry out of slender briefcases.
I loved the Conservatory itself, the sweeping marble stairway that led up toward the teaching studios, the shining black-and-white tiles in the lobby, the extraordinary architecture of the library. I loved the listening lab, the rows of headsets and record players, the tall shelves packed with thousands of recordings. I loved the student body, its range of eccentricities; the particularly robust soprano who’d come to breakfast in a pink, taffeta gown; the drag queens, who arrived for classes transformed by makeup and beautiful shoes; the punk rock trumpet player, who tied shut her broken instrument case with a padlock and chain. The practice rooms stayed open from six in the morning until two A.M. and the collision of so many instruments—an edgy, otherworldly sound—played in the background of every meal, every class, every conversation. It created a kind of living pedal point, a long, held note so constant I almost forgot to hear it, like the church bell at Saint Mary’s back home, ringing at intervals throughout the day. I could go for hours without noticing it, and then, for no particular reason, the sound would come clear: a reminder, a reference point, the tonic key. Home.
Our days began and ended with practice, a routine, a habit, that was very much like prayer. When we weren’t actually practicing, we were talking about it: how much we had left to do that day, the room we’d signed up for, the chances of
finding extra time in a room nobody had claimed. Practice rooms were chosen every morning though what had come to be known as The Lottery. Promptly at six, a senior RA arrived with the sign-up sheets and a top hat filled with numbered pieces. One by one, we drew the number that determined the order in which we got to reserve the room we’d practice in that day. Drawing a low number meant an acoustically pleasant room with an excellent piano during prime hours. Drawing a high number meant you’d wouldn’t get to practice until the wee hours of the morning—unless you were willing to settle for a windowless studio with barely enough room to push back the piano bench, waves of sound thundering from wall to wall like the retort of a howitzer. These were the studios that housed the worst pianos, the crippled and infirm, the geriatric warhorses put out to pasture. Many had fallen victim to composition majors, who’d riddled the strings with paper clips and rubberbands, burned the hammer pads with cigarette lighters, and generally transformed what had been a passable instrument into an atonal misery.
My favorite room, when I could get it, was my piano teacher’s studio. It had two good pianos, each with a different action, and tall, west-facing windows that overlooked Charles Square. At night, resting my arms, I’d sit on the window ledge with my feet dangling over the three-story drop, watching the parade of expensive cars trolling up and down Charles Street, circling the Monument, coasting to a stop. Prostitutes stepped forward from the shadows then, silent as deer, and like deer they were long-legged and watchful, gangly in their teetering heels. They bent forward at the waist, pushed back their hair; they seemed to be waiting for something. At last, one would break from the rest to approach the idling car, and now a man’s hand would emerge, the glint of a wedding band, a languid elbow resting on the door frame.
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