Tin House, Summer 2001
I imagine some essayists don’t worry much about the questions of rightness and fairness and whose version wins. I know many memoirists don’t. I’m familiar with the trend toward blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction—the insistence that we write what is true to ourselves and nothing else matters. But of course what we do matters to those we use as material. “Violation” is an attempt to grapple with the ethical dilemma of writing about people who have no say in what we write.
Second Chair
IN FOURTH GRADE WE WERE PUT ON A READING “SYSTEM,” a box of color-coded cards with stories and questions. Each color represented a grade level, and I finished the twelfth-grade cards—dark purple—by November. All it meant was that I had nothing to read for the rest of the year, and spent that time with my head down on my desk. I was the first girl to wear glasses, the first to wear a bra, and the last to get a clue. When we put on a play about a beautiful princess with long golden hair, I waited to be picked. When Mrs. Hurley announced that Charlene, the pretty girl with long golden hair, would be the princess, I was actually surprised.
So the next year, I tried band.
At home, I took piano lessons from a fussy German man who wore a bow tie and rapped my knuckles with a ruler. For band, I picked the clarinet, sleek and pure. Several times a week I walked past the teachers’ lounge, where my mother smoked cigarettes with other teachers behind a closed door, and into the upper wing of the school, the one set aside for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, to the music room, a warehouse of lousy acoustics, bad lighting, and a rat’s nest of scattered metal music stands, risers, and chairs. The music teacher was a tall, skinny man with a mop of black hair, big glasses, and pockmarked skin named Mr. Hutchinson. He was one of the youngest of the faculty, intense and kind to the mob of middle-schoolers that made up band. He didn’t conduct so much as wave his long arms at us in patient exasperation. We called him Mr. H, teasing, because we liked him.
I rented a clarinet from the little music store on the main street of town, and I had to go back every few weeks to buy mysterious bamboo reeds, an errand I imbued with as much status as an assignation. New reeds were stiff and tasted fresh and grassy, but day by day they softened with my spit into something all my own. Walking there and back along wide small-town streets, I drifted from dream to dream, drifting toward something just my own, toward music, or a life.
Both my parents were schoolteachers; they met in what was then called normal college. My father taught industrial arts at the high school. Most of the kids in the county attended there, some traveling an hour each way through ranch land or down logging roads. My father reigned over a small village of modular classrooms set apart from rest of the school, a noisy, male world filled with welding torches, voltmeters, and table saws. The industrial arts classes were forbidden to girls; I rarely saw the inside of his classrooms, and he seemed only rarely to notice me.
So I helped my mother, who taught fifth grade and lower-section music. For a long time I didn’t think anyone worked in the summer. The seasonal ecology of public school was my world—rhythmic shifts from crowds to solitude, from noise to quiet. From school to everything else, and back again. Our town was the small center of a wide territory—a lot of fine, empty land and not many people. So I saw my teachers at school, and I saw them in my living room and at my parents’ barbecues and New Year’s Eve parties. Mr. H somehow became pals with my hopelessly square mother, who called him “Hutch.” There were teachers everywhere: Mrs. Meamber lived across the street, Mrs. Hurley and Mrs. Cramer and Mr. Noonan were my parents’ friends, and Mr. and Mrs. Herfindahl were my godparents. Straight A’s were the least that was expected and the last thing noticed in a world where the lines were as blurred as this. I didn’t even need to bring home my report card. My mother got it early.
From late August, when we made new bulletin board displays, until June, when I helped her take them down, I spent a lot of extra hours in school with my mother. We often arrived before the first bell and left after the last, and when I was tired of her room I wandered the wide tiled hallways painted in muddy greens and browns, sneaking peeks at other classrooms, with their walls of windows and blank chalkboards waiting for words. On empty afternoons, cutting up scalloped construction paper borders, I thought that I quite liked school.
I was a child with passions—intense, unbudging, irrational passions, inevitably strange and confusing to my mother. She was a plain, shy woman all her life. I realize now that she longed to feel accepted as much as I did; this was our shared secret and we kept it from each other until she died. I was unable to grasp the subtle and terrifying nuances of classroom politics. She encouraged me to read Seventeen magazine so I could figure out how to be like other girls. And I wanted to be like other girls; for years I thought I was. In fact I was a sideways creature, and not really at home where other people lived. I was uncensored and a little primitive and tunneled through my mind like a mole who didn’t know the light. I perched in trees, waded culverts, and often refused to wear shoes. I read adult books and wrote odd stories, the kind that lead to parent-teacher conferences and visits to the school counselor to take interesting tests. Sometimes I disappeared for hours, scrabbling up a fifty-foot cedar to chew on sap while the wind swayed me back and forth in its cradle, forgetting time.
CLASS PHOTOS WERE taken in the spring, on breezy sunny days, each class perched on bleachers set up on the front lawn of the school, 1965, 1966, 1967—second grade, third grade, fourth: I look at them now and can tell you who’s headed for perdition already. So young, and each of us jammed in place like pegs under a hammer.
Steve, the class clown, cavorting in the middle of the top row with his retinue, Randy, Ryan, Jim, Mitch. In the front row sits Charlene, with her long golden hair in a neat bun on top of her head like a movie star, and her friends, Danette and Tracy and Lori, with their neat braids and white-ribboned socks on neatly crossed ankles. On the edges and in the hidden middle are the rest of us: the fat girls like Dee Dee, skinny ones like Ramona with her wild carrot hair and flagrant freckles, Joyce in her second-hand clothes. In second grade I sat near the end of the front row, my legs crossed and hands resting on my knees in the kind of casual, sophisticated pose Grace Kelly might strike. A few years later I am back in a corner, wearing sky-blue glasses with pointed corners decorated with fake diamonds and a homemade dress I’d talked my mother into making out of psychedelic fabric from the discount store, all bright green rhomboids and yellow swirls. I look like a before ad in the back of Good Housekeeping, but I am smiling because I think that I look pretty cool.
The band was the only place where the poles of social relation met, a curious mix of the popular and the picked-over. Steve played trumpet, which even today seems obvious. Ryan chose the trombone. Lyle, who looked a little like Tom Cruise in his early years and was wildly popular, played the drums, but so did Jean, who hit six feet tall in seventh grade and moved with a kind of bovine assurance between snares and the lone tympani.
For a year, I took clarinet lessons with Ida and Eileen and Mary, squeaking and shrieking in arrhythmic hoots and sudden, startling flights of music like little birds surprised out of a tree. Any music we managed to make was punctuated by the constant scrape of chair legs and the rattle of the stands knocking whole rows over like dominoes in a frantic tumble, but we practiced our scales and tried to follow Mr. H’s swaying baton.
I never liked the slim B-flat clarinet, after all; it made a small nasal song and I wanted more. I bugged Mr. H to let me play the bass clarinet instead, which I longed for like a dog wants a bone, with a simpleminded need. I wanted the profound dark-chocolate notes of the big reeds, the perfect satisfaction of its large silver keys and the big curved bell at the bottom. The bass clarinet was so big I could barely lift the case. That was what I wanted—that heft and burly weight.
Finally, Mr. H let me switch. Overnight, I left the crowd of chubby clarinetists to be the second-chair bass
clarinet, next to Sue—a year older, academically gifted, a natural musician who could sing and play several instruments well. For a time I followed Sue’s lead, practiced regularly, and drew the big sleek body of the clarinet intimate and near. I loved its low, still sound, like the sound of small round pebbles falling slowly through a dark deep pool. I was genuinely happy in the making of that sound, alone or in the band, at home or at school. For a time, the music was enough.
All the instruments were divided into sections, rows, and chairs. Populated sections like flute and trumpet might have two or three full rows, each row a hierarchy of first and second and third chair and down, assigned by Mr. H. Such is the subtle strength of an orchestra, of course—the complex supporting frames of row upon row, each section holding up a piece of the whole. But the first row, which led the section solos and set the standard, was the only visible one, and to be lodged in second and third row was to labor anonymously. First chairs held the kind of deadly power only children really understand. For a few of us, first chair was what it was all about.
Our seats were assigned, but sometimes we moved—by Mr. H’s royal directive and by “challenge.” If there was a coup—if a player moved up a whole row, for instance—alliances were broken, players shifted forward and back like gypsies shoved along the road.
Any player could, at any time, throw down the gauntlet to another player. Challenges were wars conducted in private. Mr. H picked a piece of music, each player performed it, and Mr. H decided who would sit where the next day. You won or you lost and there was no appeal; we believed Mr. H was fair and we knew he was God. It was his lot in life to know how well or badly we played, to know what would happen in a challenge before it started. He knew in fact how well or badly we managed to live through any given hour or day. His particular curse that he had to tell us what he knew.
One day, I challenged Sue for first chair, and I lost. I was a little surprised. I practiced more, dragging the heavy instrument home every day, and I challenged her again a few months later. When I told Mr. H I was ready to try again, he looked at me a moment without a word and then said, “All right, you can try if you want,” and I knew then and there I would lose.
IN SIXTH GRADE we switched wings. I left my mother’s room behind and entered the world of lockers and homeroom, white lipstick, sudden shocks. It was 1969 and I had big breasts and grew my hair long and started wearing a fake cow-skin miniskirt and boots. Nothing quite fit anymore—clothes and parents and school had begun to chafe, raising a faint bruise beneath my skin. I took advanced math and won the writing prizes, and these things counted for about as much as straight A’s.
All year long, I challenged Sue again and again; it became our ritual, an almost friendly duel. I always lost. The worst of it was that I had come to see Mr. H was right. I loved my music, I held it as tenderly as my fantasy dates, but what I wanted was to be the first. I was a teacher’s kid and the second-chair bass clarinet and it should have been more than enough, but it came to mean only that I was last. The bruise spread. I would never have said it out loud; it was a betrayal to feel it, a betrayal to say, but deep in the lightless tunnels I thought to hell with Dee Dee and Ramona. To hell with Sue, heading off toward her music scholarship. It was Danette and Tracy I wanted to be; they were the bright ones, and it seemed they would forever burn brighter and hotter than me.
Eighth grade, 1971. Bright patterned shirts on the boys, whose hair was getting shaggy. I put mine in tiny braids while it was still wet, and when I combed it out the next day it filled the air around my head in a dusky halo, eyes lost behind a curtain of hair. I began to push backward through the river of school, shoving aside the waves of girls with their neat ponytails, the boys with their wide-lapel polyester shirts who hardly knew my name. After the last bell rang, the empty hallways of school were as airless as a small cell, as doomed as hunger strikes, and instead of staying late, I cut out early. I allied myself with Danny and Don, the shortest and the tallest boys in our class, two gay boys of awkward teeth and lonely hours. We spent long spring afternoons in Danny’s garage, trying to play “Revolution #9” backward on the tape deck, making sandwiches in his empty kitchen, walking through the town from one end to the other, and doing nothing much at all. We were waiting, mostly.
Perhaps the worst job a teacher has is as witness: to watch the bucktoothed kids with bad clothes scramble up like Sisyphus, to watch the easy climb of the Steves and Tracys who peak at sixteen and tumble down inch by inch for the rest of their lives. In such a way, every child is abandoned, left in tears beside the road, and all any of us can do is watch. What else can we do? Here is the sour-smelling girl who lives in a trailer, and here the boy with a limp who smiles all the time as he lurches madly through the crowded halls, and here one of the tightly wrapped little geniuses who will manage to shoot herself in the foot if she only has one bullet.
As high school loomed over us like a shadow of wings, I spent my breath on sarcasm instead of the bass clarinet. I drove the teachers to distraction and more, until one day Mr. Castor threw me against the wall as I stomped between classes, my big smart mouth talking all the while. Mr. Castor held me up against the wall of the tired school in front of a hallway full of people, shoving his crew-cut blond hair and thick-necked wrestler’s rage in my face, and I smiled. I knew he was just another also-ran.
The way so much ends, band ended, fading out, pianissimo. Grade school ended. I quit piano lessons and a year later, took the clarinet back to the store. I gave up on making music, but I called it something else. I called it knowing better. I walked away, and called it wising up.
I was still disappearing for hours—and not up cedar trees. I was under the bleachers in the empty high school football field, kissing a boy I didn’t particularly like. I was cutting out of class to ride back roads in some rump-sprung convertible with a bunch of dropouts drinking jug wine. I was lying to my mother and shouting at my father, and riding on the back of chopped Harleys with men years out of high school, leaning back with my long hair flying. As a girl, I loved to swing; I swung in wild arcs up and back, legs pumping and blood roaring, straining for height. At the top of each crescent curve I would throw all my weight to one side and fall back and up in another gathering spin like pleats of a skirt—swirling, swinging, a helix of weightless flight. In such a way I leaned back on the sissy bar on hot afternoons. No helmet, no shoes, no hands. No hope, no plan.
A few years later, I left. I left, I left, I went away to be an adult before I was ready, because I was so ready, and I destroyed more villages and burned more bridges than I really want to think about even now. The problem with being second chair is thinking, I could do better than that. Sometimes it’s true and sometimes it’s not; the problem is when you go on saying it all your life.
WHEN MY MOTHER died, I went back to my hometown for several days. I ran into Tracy working behind a cash register at the Safeway on the edge of town. She had dimmed. The day before the funeral, I walked the short blocks that had once stretched so far—home to school, back again. It is a curious dream, the place we live as children, like a stage set from a half-forgotten play. The houses that seemed like Tara in the wastage of my early years were a bit shabby, and I could smell the stink of wood smoke over the whole town, the nothing much that once seemed to be a world. I worked my way up behind the school, to what used to be a broad wild meadow pocked with mysterious rabbit holes and fine purple thistles. It was a dull and empty park, a false green lawn under a gray sky.
Half the town seemed to come to my mother’s funeral. My God, she was loved, and I sat in the front row of the church and wept, lost. We invited her closest friends to the house afterward, and I found myself sitting beside Mr. H in our backyard, sitting side by side in twin chaise lounges and drinking whiskey together in the dark. He was old, or at least that much older than me still, and he moved with the steady patience and mild disappointment of someone who knew he was exactly where he belonged. We talked of this and that—of her, of me, of
town. The next day, he was going back to work again, earnest and willing to try, to raise his voice over the scrape of metal chairs on dull linoleum and the dreadful squeaks of beginning clarinetists. To witness.
So we leaned back in the summer darkness and looked at the stars hard above us in a black sky, in the empty sky of a small country town. He had a weak radiant sorrow about him, and it took me a while to realize how much he was going to miss my mother. Of course they’d been friends. She loved music, and she wasn’t so old—just one of the shy, plain people who need friends in a lonesome world, and I didn’t even know that I was one of them for a long time.
For a moment I envied Mr. H his impossible job and the small town sky and the gift of resignation. It is something like a real victory to not have to fight in the first place. I began with appetite, which has no enemies. Somewhere along the way it turned, like bad milk. I caught the world in a big lie—the one that claims we’re all lined up in sections in some kind of fair order, holding each other up. Whatever contest might be going on isn’t played by fair rules, and it has nothing to do with appetite—nor with passion, music, swinging, stars. I was the last to get a clue, but finally, I did. I rarely play the piano now and never the clarinet, but I listen to music all the time. Sometimes I still think, I can do better than that, but I know the only thing I’m doing is me.
After everyone had gone, I stood in my old bedroom in the dark, gentled from the whiskey, tears all gone and so far gone I thought I might never cry again. “Dint of long longing lost to longing,” wrote Beckett. “And longing still. Faintly longing still.”
In the middle of the street below was a young girl, roller-skating all alone. It was late; the neighbors’ houses were already dark. But she crossed the asphalt for a figure-eight and her skate wheels grated and rumbled, low and then louder, higher and fading away again and again. She was under a streetlight in a pool of yellow. I watched her dip and spin and slide suddenly backward in perfect control, the way a flock of birds moves high in the sky without a sound, in grace. Her hair swung with the rustle of wings. She looked up and seemed to see me in the window, and stared as though I had no business there at all.
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