The Encore

by Charity Tillemann-Dick

  Still, Dr. Girgis had barred me from traveling for work for almost a year, and I really did miss singing for an audience. I convinced myself that—since I’d be in town to visit Yoni anyway—auditioning for a silly TV show couldn’t really hurt anything. Maybe it would even be fun.

  After hours of waiting, I got in front of the first trio of judges—not Randy, Paula, and Simon, but rather three assistant junior producers. Singing for them, I finally felt comfortable again. My voice filled the arena to bursting and, as I finished my performance, both the judges and the 12,000 spectators behind them broke into exuberant applause. After breezing through the next two screening rounds, I went back to Yoni’s apartment wondering how I ever could have doubted myself.

  About a month later—just before my transplant—I received another callback. Mom begged me not to go. She thought the entire thing was crazy. But by that point I was so sick, I felt like I had nothing to lose. So I went. Again, I was advanced by all the junior producers. Gathered together in a room with the other contestants who had made it that far, our handlers explained that we wouldn’t get on TV if rejected by this next judge, an executive producer, but we should still act as though we were performing on the actual show.

  The room I walked into for my audition looked exactly like the American Idol set I’d seen on TV—bright colors, microphone stand, flimsy backdrop emblazoned with the American Idol logo. Except where the judges should have been, there, instead, sat a middle-aged man with long sideburns, a round face, and a plume of gray hair. After starting and stopping my performance several times, he dismissed me—“Not the right fit, hon.” As I left the room, I felt more self-satisfied than disappointed. I was right, Yoni was wrong, and everything was right with the universe. After that, my life got so crazy I didn’t even think about the audition again.

  This can’t be good.

  I go to YouTube, already feeling ill. The advertisement isn’t hard to find. There I am, belting out a high C at the end of the Season 9 Chicago auditions promo. The girl on that screen—me, six months ago—was dying. But she still wanted to be Great. At the very least, she wanted to be remembered. To be known and appreciated for doing the thing she loved most. If she didn’t have the time to be admired at the Met or La Scala, she could at least get 20 million viewers to tune in to watch her from the comfort of their own living rooms. Only as I sit in front of my computer six months later, the promo reel on loop in front of me, do I realize what a terrible mistake I made.

  I never should have given them that high note, I taunt myself with crystal-clear hindsight. Regardless of the note’s being clean and right on pitch, it was different. And that meant, in the hands of the right video editor, it was mockable.

  Sitting in front of the television the next night, my entire body is tense. As segment after segment of the show passes, I begin to hope they’ve cut me out altogether. But then it happens. After a gag reel of zany, off-pitch, off-color performance snippets, I swoosh onto stage in a sunshine-yellow dress. Amputated from the rest of my performance, my high C bellows out from the TV’s speakers. Then the tape deftly splices to a close cut of Simon Cowell’s signature blasé scowl. Unhurriedly, he states in an uninspired British drawl—

  “That was a complete and utter waste of time.”

  The scene cuts back to me. The Charity on screen smiles, says, “Thank you,” and walks off happily—probably because she hadn’t just been pilloried by Simon Cowell on the top-rated prime-time show of 2010. But current-day Charity isn’t so lucky. I am utterly mortified. My head starts to spin, dizzy with embarrassment. Apparently, Mom feels similarly—

  “Charity,” she laments beside me, “I begged you not to do it! I begged you!”

  And how I’m now paying for not heeding her advice. The opera world does not look kindly on unorthodox disciples of the antiquated art form. On the list of unforgivable sins in the classical universe, being ridiculed on a reality television show for performing one’s craft is probably pretty near the top. Without a hint of my typical exaggeration, I can honestly state that I’ve never been so humiliated in my entire life. The fact that the interaction portrayed on-screen never occurred in reality doesn’t make it any better. In fact, it might even make it worse. If I try to explain the circumstances to anyone, they won’t just think I’m pathetic—they’ll assume I’m a liar too. Talk about hitting a girl when she’s down.

  I feel my world imploding. Simultaneously, all of my family’s phones begin to ring. My Facebook, voicemail, and email are jammed with notifications from friends, frenemies, acquaintances, and strangers letting me know they had just witnessed my professional downfall along with millions of other people. Hours later, the phones still haven’t stopped ringing. People begin telling me I have to sue for defamation. I go to my room and fall onto my knees in painful, humble prayer.

  For a week, the Facebook posts, voicemails, and emails pile up. I dig a pit of self-loathing so deep I can’t see daylight anymore. Then, almost as suddenly as they started, the calls and notes stop. The next episode of American Idol airs and establishes a new lineup of unwitting human punch lines. I delete everything and decide to move on from this catastrophe the way everyone else already has: by forgetting about it.

  As my wounded pride and my wounded body begin to heal, I begin training in earnest. With half a decade of intensive vocal training and without the stamina for an hour, let alone a half-hour, lesson, I feel like I can at least start the process on my own. My breath always feels a little shallow, but every moment I practice, I feel my new lungs growing stronger. Each song I sing makes my new lungs seem more at home. After every session, the pressure around my scar diminishes. The act of singing makes me feel more complete—more whole. Each day, it seems my breath carries me a little farther in a musical phrase.

  And it’s not just in my head. The doctors confirm that my lung function is improving steadier and more quickly than before. As is my voice. While I still never quite feel like I’m taking a full breath, my body begins to belong to me again. But not just me. Now, I’m a collaborative endeavor; a partnership between the lungs, their former owner, and me.

  I’ve taken up painting since my surgery—reading and TV give me headaches while I’m on my meds, but painting brings a sort of productive relief from the monotony of getting better. While I paint, I listen to master classes with the Greats: Callas, Tebaldi, Freni, Carreras, Horne. Blue, yellow, and green strokes dance across wood boards to Sumi Jo’s Ophelia; droplets of ivory speckle a robin’s-egg blue sky as Fleming sings Marguerite’s arias alongside Domingo’s Faust. As my hum crescendos and decrescendos along with these masterful performances, my brush ebbs and flows its way across my canvas—it’s an encompassing sensory experience.

  I could do this forever. The stakes are low. It’s less public. And I have purpose, of a sort. Slowly, I begin to feel content. Then, on a Friday afternoon in February, I hear a knock on my door.

  “Charity,” Mom invites herself in. “Today are the regional finals for the Met auditions. It’s at the new opera house. Should we go and listen?”

  The Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions are the American Idol of opera. They take place annually across the country for singers under thirty. Local winners advance to the regional finals and regional finalists advance to the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center for the final competition. Thousands of singers participate every year. A lucky few are catapulted to national and international careers in opera.

  The prospect of going torments me. I miss opera terribly, and I’ve always dreamed of singing at Lincoln Center. But watching others on their way to accomplish my dream might be a special kind of torture. Even if I ever had a chance to be the next Great opera singer, how could I expect to now—after everything I’ve been through? I’ve begun to love painting, but deep down I know it’s not mine. A single image can capture glamour, pain, joy—a thousand different words. Music captures nothing; it sets sound free.

  As I contemplate whether or not t
o attend the auditions, my heart starts pounding in my chest. My life can never be a work of art hanging static in a bare gallery space. Because it’s already an opera. Dramatic. Dynamic. Loud. Cast with exquisite, imperfect people—together with their wrinkles, fat rolls, and flat notes. Virgin priestesses who long for love and the men who misunderstand them; fishers of roles and menders of people, either trying to hook their next big break or save a life worth dying for. Somehow, this cacophony of noise and humanity comes together in transcendent highs and ecstatic lows—strong enough to create waves that pull people back across centuries, just to hear for themselves the sound of being alive.

  “Let’s go. It will be fun,” Mom goads me back into the real world as I shake myself out of the strange reverie into which I’ve ascended.

  “Yes. All right,” I agree.

  A pile of Purell wipes accumulating in my lap, I sit in the theater listening to the young singers who have devoted so much of their lives to this esoteric art form I love so much. Their voices are beautiful—some more polished, bigger, brighter, darker, fuller, or flatter. But none of them are mine. Until I’m singing where they’re singing, I refuse to be content.

  So, the joke goes: A tourist asks violinist Mischa Elman how to get to Carnegie Hall. Elman tells him, “Practice.” It’s not bad advice.

  I start to practice in earnest. Every day, I double my singing time. Soon, my body begins to quake with exhaustion. It doesn’t matter. I am going to do this until my voice feels like my own. But returning to the world of opera requires more than a voice. Eventually, I’ll have to start functioning like a human being again. Changing out of my sweats seems like a good place to start.

  It’s a more challenging task than I’d anticipated. My sisters have brought me piles of clothes, but Double Zero skinny jeans sag on me and every single one of my ribs is visible through their old T-shirts. Looking through drawers in my mom’s room, I find a pair of black leggings. I pull them on. They’re loose, but they’ll do. I tug an oversized Scotty dog sweater over my head and move toward the vanity in my room. Putting on makeup, I attempt to fill out my sunken cheeks and eye sockets. The results aren’t exactly convincing. These days, looking in the mirror is depressing. My face is so thin I can hardly recognize it. My legs are sticking out of the bottom of my sweater like a pair of black fleece chopsticks. As I wrangle my hair, trying to cover the bald spots and bedsores on my scalp, a tear runs down my cheek. I don’t want to subject other people to looking at me. As if on cue, Zen strolls into my little suite, sees me standing at the mirror, and begins to laugh.

  “Don’t tease me!” I wail.

  “I’m not teasing you,” he rejoins. “I’m giving you some much-needed fashion advice. Scotty dog sweaters are not your look.”

  “I don’t have any other options!” I throw my hands up in frustration.

  “You would if you’d eat more.”

  I glare at him. Eating used to rank as one of my all-time favorite activities, but now it’s one of the most unpleasant things I do. Every meal begins with a caloric tour de force: a full-fat-and-sugar root beer float and a cheese quesadilla topped with green chili and sour cream. A couple of Lindt truffles, and, then, an entire meal on top of that. And this happens for Every. Single. Meal. But no matter how much I eat, it never sates my family’s expectations. As long as I’m underweight, they’ll remain unimpressed. Nothing I do is ever enough for them.

  I start to cry in earnest.

  “Dude. Charity. You can’t just cry every time anyone tells you anything,” Zen scoffs, walking back out of the door.

  Zenith should have been an only child, I think contemptuously to myself as he leaves. Nearly six feet and thirteen years old, he’s too tall for his age and too handsome for his own good. To make it worse, Zen’s charming too. Girls flock to him in indecent numbers, and no one except Zen can quite figure out how to manage them. He gets what he wants and has no respect for authority—expertly tugging emotional threads to torment or delight others as it suits him. The rest of us have always been responsible for someone or something—a sibling or a pet, a chore or exchange student—but somehow Zen has never fallen into the regular Tillemann-Dick chain of command. In his eyes, he’s either equal or superior to everyone else—mother, brothers, sisters. Church leaders and doctors and soccer coaches. It makes no difference. Zen is on their level—or at least he can talk like he is.

  “You just don’t understand,” I mutter after him.

  “No, I don’t”—he spins around, agreeing with me. “To me, you seem totally nuts. Like, kind of emotionally unhinged.”

  I am a little unhinged. I’m twice Zen’s age, living at home, and dependent on my family. I can’t walk on my own, I can’t cook on my own, and apparently I can’t even dress myself. I can’t sing—really sing—anymore. I don’t look like I used to. I can hardly take a deep breath. I’m not myself right now and I’m the first to admit it.

  In the hospital, every single one of my nurses would tell me how well I was doing every time we interacted. Each therapist would comment on how strong I’d gotten during each of our sessions. Whether I needed it or not, there was always a “You’re doing great!” or “I can’t believe how far you’ve come” just a few sentences away. At home, though, I can’t help but feel I’m doing something—maybe everything—wrong. Now surrounded by teenage siblings, snarky asides and eye rolls have replaced glowing commendations and high fives. I’m still working as hard as I ever have, but somehow I keep coming up short to everyone around me except Mom. At the hospital, I felt like an athlete training for some epic feat of physical prowess. At home, I feel more like the embodiment of disease and its inconveniences.

  I’ve been training my voice in earnest for almost a month, but it’s still a shadow of the instrument I had planned to build my life around. If I could only get Zen to understand what I’ve lost—

  “You don’t know what it’s like to have spent your whole life working for something, fighting for it, and then losing it all for no reason—to complete arbitrariness. It’s really painful, Zen. It’s hard.”

  “You’re talking about singing?” he asks, an eyebrow raised.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Then you’re a selfish idiot,” he states matter-of-factly.

  “Excuse me?”

  He continues—“Dude. You had a mom and a dad when you were a kid. Guess what? I’m pretty much an orphan. Me. Glorianna. Mercina. Shiloh—we were orphaned because Mom ran off to take care of you and Dad died. I mean, grow up a little, Charity. We didn’t have anyone to raise us and we figured it out. But you’re crying because you can’t sing? That’s why you’re a selfish idiot.”

  He slams the door behind him as he saunters out of the room. I’m aware that my illness was hard on my siblings, but it’s not a walk in the park for me either. Frustrated, confused, and, for the first time in years, PMSing, I face-plant into my pillow and sob.

  “What did you do to your sister?!” I hear Mom ask Zen in the stairwell.

  “Nothing!” Zen exclaims. “Charity’s just crying again because she’s insane.”

  “Zen . . .”

  “Really! Nothing!” He pauses. “Nothing to merit this kind of response, at least.”

  “Zenith. What happened?” demands Mom. “Your sister wouldn’t be crying like this for no reason.”

  “Maybe it isn’t ‘no reason’ but it’s a stupid reason . . .”

  I could scratch out his eyes right now.

  “. . . She’s in there whining—sobbing—because she says she’s never going to sing opera again,” he finishes in a mocking voice.

  “That’s very hard for her, sweetie,” Mom rejoins calmly.

  “Yeah, well, it’s dumb. For a few reasons: First of all, she already sings better than 99.9 percent of the world’s population. My guess is that she’ll be doing whatever the heck she wants a few months from now. But, Mom. She’s in there mourning like, like, Mimo died because—one month out of the hospital—she’s not singing as
well as she did when she was working as a professional opera singer in Italy. That’s just unreasonable. In my opinion, it’s crazy.”

  “Well, when you say it like that . . .” Mom concedes.

  “How else are you going to say it? She’s already down here all day belting like Barbra Streisand. So what if she doesn’t sing opera again? No one really likes that crap anyway! She’s probably better off singing something else.”

  Mom takes a deep breath and they both walk back up the stairs together.

  Guilt has been my constant stalker. There’s been no way to avoid the drain my disease puts into our trough of family relationships. But whether I am conscious of it or not, listening to Zen helps me begin to unravel a paralyzing culture of perfection within the opera world, my understanding of faith, and of family. Theoretically, all three hold an appreciation for what makes something different. But all Zen wants me to do—all that my family wants me to do—is to sing and be happy; however, wherever, and doing whatever I can. That is the only thing they want for me. It doesn’t matter if it’s opera, musical theater, or children’s songs. When I sing, I see judgment and inadequacy. Zen sees a miracle.