Voice Lessons

by Cara Mentzel

  At camp there was lots of glue and sparkles, lanyard bracelets, and string tricks played with partners, like Cat’s Cradle. But one year there was a talent show for the older kids. They practiced all day, and their efforts culminated in an evening performance for their parents. They jumped rope, hula hooped, and sang and danced. And then it was Dina’s turn. She walked to the rounded edge of a small stage—perfect for a comedian and his bottle of water. She took her time and waited for the room to quiet. Then, with a thick Long Island accent and a vibrato unexpected for a seven-year-old, she began to sing a capella, and her voice stilled the room.

  “The sun’ll come out, tomorrow…”

  A few heads turned, as adults checked to see if anyone else was noticing what they were hearing. Dina continued, louder, forcing all eyes back toward her.

  “You’re always a day away…” she finished, and a stunned room clapped. A couple of people stood up, and according to Mom, one guy even shouted, “Encore!” When Dina sang she was captivating. Her voice was beautiful, but it was also big—several times bigger than what was expected from her gangly, forty-pound stature. And her voice had power. Even though she was only seven years old, about as mature as her newly forged front teeth, her voice had the emotional depth, tone, and timbre to really move people. That night, the first of countless audience-rousing performances, Mom and Dad understood their daughter in a way they hadn’t before. Lots of little girls sang, but Dina didn’t just sing, she was a singer.

  Unlike my mom and dad, I don’t have a singular experience to point to and say, “That’s when I knew my sister was a singer,” or, “That’s when I knew she’d be famous.” There was no beginning to singing. Dina always sang, we sang. We played and we sang and often at the same time. As long as I was with Dina, I didn’t know there was a difference between the two.

  The Annie album was a fixture in our childhood. The record jacket was bright red with large white bubble letters centered in the middle that read “Annie.” Against the “i” stood a cute girl in a red-and-white dress, with curly blond hair and her arms folded across her chest. (Later I’d come to know her as the Little Orphan Annie with signature red locks.) We listened to that album over and over until we knew almost every word to “It’s the Hard-knock Life.” We sang full-throttle, loud enough to drown out the music.

  Once we saw the show on Broadway, images from the performance added fervor to our at-home renditions. We crawled around and pretended to scrub the floor with clumsy sponges and metal buckets. I liked to play Molly, the youngest girl in the orphanage. I sang with a pout, “Santa Claus we never see,” and Dina replied, “Santa Claus, what’s that, who’s he?” We sang and made up the words we couldn’t quite make out. Instead of “It’s a hard-knock row we hoe,” we sang, “It’s a hard-knock life you know.” But the words didn’t matter as much as the jumping around and singing. As much as the choreography and histrionics. As much as the pretending and the way we felt the story through the songs. Maybe Mom was talking on the phone in the kitchen and Dad was downstairs watching the football game, but that didn’t mean Miss Hannigan wasn’t in the house, too, ready to bust through the bedroom door and startle us. Singing was a way to make myself feel bigger, to imagine I was being seen. When I sang I felt significant. When I sang, I was with—and like—Dina.

  I came to understand Dina’s talent in the same way a portrait is drawn, one line, one curve at a time: one performance for family and friends in front of the couch, one repeated verse sung from the bathroom, until eventually her likeness stared at me from the stage.

  Mr. Roper was the music teacher at Baylis Elementary School. He was a scrawny, graying man always equipped with a conductor’s wand or a plastic recorder, and perpetually ready to lead classes in a clunky rendition of “Three Blind Mice” at the drop of a hat. Every year, with his piano and, I suspect, a bottle of ibuprofen for the inevitable headache, he directed the fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders in a musical. He cast Dina as the lead in each production: Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance in fourth grade, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz in fifth grade, and Laurey Williams in Oklahoma! in sixth grade.

  Dina was waiting back in the music room when we found our seats for the production of her first big performance, The Pirates of Penzance. Mom made sure we got there early to claim our seats in the front row. I sat on a metal folding chair among many others placed in straight lines across the gymnasium floor. In front of me was a stage of plywood bleachers, and on the wall behind them were long sheets of butcher paper painted to look like a pirate ship. Families began to file in and take their seats. Mothers draped coats over chairs to reserve them as fathers parked the car. Mr. Roper’s productions were heavily attended, and before long the gymnasium was filled with nearly two hundred people.

  Earlier, Mom had helped Dina get ready at the house. I stood in the bathroom and watched as Dina sat on the closed toilet and Mom combed her hair, dabbed eye shadow over each lid, applied a light layer of blush to her cheeks, and stroked lipstick onto her full lips. The makeup ritual was fun to watch, and I knew I could count on Mom to call me over and sweep a tiny bit of blush on my cheeks so I wouldn’t feel left out. Dad had had one of the seamstresses from his office make Dina’s Mabel costume. Intended to invoke the style of 1870s England, it hung to the floor in red and blue with puffy short sleeves and a bonnet. In that dress, with her rosy cheeks and the tissue paper ruffles of the bonnet framing her face, she looked like a collectible porcelain doll.

  The lights went down over the audience and I waited. When the lights came back on, the stage filled with prepubescent pirates. They sang, and I waited. The stage filled with maidens, young girls lathered in makeup and melodramatics, and I waited. Finally, Dina snuck on stage, paused for her cue, and then pierced the silence with an operatic soprano-size “’Tis Ma-bel.” Then she sang the song that I had heard her practice in her room, in the shower, in the mirror, and in the car for weeks. She sang the song like she was pushing a feather through the air with each note. “Poor wand’ring one. Though thou hast surely strayed, Take heart of grace, Thy steps retrace…”

  The show was fun. I was happy and I was proud. But every now and then I turned around and peeked at the dimly lit audience as they watched Dina. They saw her, but I saw them. I had an odd feeling. My body buzzed with excitement and yet there was a fixed, tight place in me, a pressed finger against my chest.

  When the lights came back on, when the applause started and people stood up from their seats, I clapped so hard I bounced onto my toes a little. I found Dina center stage, holding hands in a long line with her cast members, a chain of cut paper dolls. They took a bow and there was a new wave of clapping. This time I stood on my chair, alternately waving at Dina and smacking my hands together until they hurt. But the feeling I’d felt earlier, the tight feeling I’d ignored, lingered. It lingers even now, but now I understand it in a way I couldn’t back then. Within my pride was a sense of loss. I was sharing my sister—not with a few friends from the neighborhood, but with too many people to count. Row after row of them. That night, even with my eyes still on Dina, I started to miss her as if she’d gone away, lost to the crowd the way a balloon is lost to the sky. She was no longer mine alone.

  Dina had just moved on to junior high when I finally reached fourth grade at Baylis Elementary and had my first audition for Mr. Roper. He was casting the opening solo of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” for the school concert. I practiced near the front door of my house in our hallway mirror, an art-deco square large enough to see myself from the waist up. I watched myself sing there after school for days prior to the audition. I sang loud and proud like my sister did. I was eager and innocent and had no clue that there were things I couldn’t do. After all, I could ride a bike down the steep hill in front of my house, swim across the lake at camp, and run—I often won the field day 100-yard dash at school. Dina just opened her mouth and sang, and I assumed that’s all there was to it. But one day after school, Dina heard me at the mir
ror.

  “Why do you do that with your voice?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “That thing. That thing where you hit a note and then drop down to another note. You do that every time, like two notes in one.” My stomach curled like a pill bug poked with a tiny stick. I didn’t understand what she meant. I think I was hitting the wrong note and then adjusting afterward to fix it. I instantly felt small, vulnerable, and my enthusiasm evaporated. I watched her, not sure I wanted to hear what she would say next, but also wanting the help she offered.

  “Try it like this,” she said and proceeded to sing each note with precision. She wasn’t showing off. She wasn’t belting out with some crazy vibrato, trying to make me feel bad. She was problem-solving. But up until then, I didn’t know I had a problem. I sang it again, and again my voice dipped down after each note. She repeated the line and it floated in the air for a few seconds after she finished, the way her voice always did. I tried to match her, but I couldn’t stop doing that thing—whatever it was exactly. I felt like the notes wouldn’t stay still long enough for me to catch them. By the third time, it was clear to me that Dina was frustrated, and her impatience made me anxious. She repeated a little louder, “Like this.” My tears were on standby even as I willed them to stay put. It was no longer clear to me whether I was trying to sing or trying to please her, whether I was aiming for the right notes or for her to smile in approval. If hitting the notes was as effortless for her as it appeared, then how could she understand how difficult it was for me? She couldn’t. When Dina turned around and headed up the stairs, I looked back at myself in the mirror. I took a deep breath and tried to sing one more time, but the air was full of failure.

  On audition day, the soloists went up to the front of the room one by one. Mr. Roper sat at the piano and played the same sequence for each of us. He had written the lyrics in red marker on large sheets of butcher paper for the class to see, and they hung over the chalkboard. I was staring at them when he called my name. I pulled myself out of my chair and turned my back to the lyrics—I knew them by heart. I looked up and saw the faces of my fourth-grade peers and became acutely aware of my own heartbeat. When the piano began, I nearly startled. I heard my chord and sang, “The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk, are secretly unhappy men because…” My windpipe narrowed to a straw. I squeezed the words out off-key and uneasy. The line repeated an octave higher, “The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk…” I sang louder, fighting it, chasing the notes, but every time I reached for them they moved farther away. The entire fourth-grade class stared. I don’t remember finishing. I do remember crying. The student teacher took me to the back of the room and offered me a Hershey’s Kiss.

  In those thirty seconds of singing it was clear to me that no one would ever mistake me for my sister. Not Mr. Roper. Not my friends. Not me. No one.

  I loved singing but was suddenly, and I feared irrevocably, embarrassed to utter a note by myself, to let anyone really hear me. I retreated. I backed away from solos and took my place in the chorus. When it came to singing, when it came to Dina, life had changed. The stage was pulling her away from me, and thinking lovely thoughts was suddenly a lot harder than it had been when Sandy Duncan sang about them.

  Lesson 2

  HOW TO WORK THINGS OUT—OR NOT

  Dina got a perm.

  For a short period of time, a young hair stylist with tight jeans and pasty coral lipstick would come to our house to give us haircuts. Dina and I would shower right before the stylist arrived and Mom would set up a chair in the kitchen, where our hair clippings could be easily swept off the tile floor. The stylist showed up at our door with shears, a smock, and, on this particular day, a perm solution.

  She twisted strands of Dina’s wet hair around narrow pink rollers and then stretched a black rubber band from one end of the roller to the other to hold the hair in place. With a small-tipped squirt bottle she doused each roll in a solution that I’m guessing was chemically related to both ammonia and skunk spray until the fumes made my eyes burn. When the process was over, Dina’s smooth brown waves were gone and in their place were fuzzy curls. Puberty struck soon after the perm, and thanks to a flood of hormones, that permanent solution was, quite literally, permanent. She never needed another treatment to keep her hair curly. Dina’s perm marked the beginning of her teen years.

  I wanted a perm, but my hair was naturally curly and this fact was a source of great frustration for me. Perms were trendy. The coolest girls had perms—Ilana Decker had a perm. With fake curls, girls could easily blow their bangs out and tease them into tall cliff-like structures over their foreheads. Natural curls, on the other hand, resisted straightening and therefore resisted the cliff trend. No amount of Sebastian Shaper hairspray could remedy the problem.

  Then Dina got a crop top.

  It was peach and off-the-shoulder and had a respectable brand name in Syosset’s high-fashion scene. One day, Mom, Dina, and I sat in the driveway in our new slate-colored Audi 5000 S. It was a replacement for our aging Chrysler Cordoba. I remember the Audi well because it had a leather interior and it made me feel a little more like I belonged in Woodbury, and its neighboring town Syosset, among the mansions and the girls with nose jobs and $150 jeans. Dina was sitting in the backseat with her big hair, teal eyeliner, and frosted pink lip gloss—commonly referred to by the girls at camp as #44. She and Mom were talking about the shirt.

  “I like it too, Mom,” I chimed in.

  “Oh really? I bet you don’t even know how to say the name of it,” Dina said.

  “I do too.” (I would have dressed as her twin every day if the mere suggestion wouldn’t have made her eyes roll.)

  “How?”

  “E Spirit (ee-spear-it).”

  She laughed at me.

  “It’s Esprit (eh-spree).” This, the pronunciation of brand names, was the kind of thing sisters bickered about on Long Island. Esprit signified Dina’s budding teenage attitude, and the years she spent mastering the art of scoffing.

  Even with her new perm and the occasional bickering, Dina and I remained close. My memory is filled with images of us snuggled up in bed with abundant blankets and pillows, our legs and arms tangled together. Sometimes we hopped out of bed and played Superman on the floor. Dina would lay on her back, press her bare feet against my belly and then lift me up into the air. With outstretched arms I’d balance on the soles of her feet.

  Weekly, we’d climb into bed with Mom and Dad and watch black-and-white movies on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Love stories, musicals, or Westerns, with actors like Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, or John Wayne. Actresses like Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, or Lauren Bacall. My dad loved A Place in the Sun and my mom loved An Affair to Remember. Dina loved having her arm tickled as we watched. “Do mine first,” she’d say and then flip her arm over and place it on the bed between us. I’d gently tiptoe my fingertips over its soft underbelly until she fell asleep—or feigned sleep to get out of returning the favor. I didn’t feel slighted that I rarely got a turn. I never told Dina, but I didn’t love arm tickling—it made me itchy. I loved her.

  If the football game was on, then sometimes our family was divided between the TV upstairs in Mom and Dad’s bedroom and the one in the basement. More often than not, I stayed with Mom upstairs, where the blinds were drawn and we could hibernate. Dina stayed with Dad downstairs, where the lights were bright and the television was loud.

  Dina had always been a tomboy. When we were little her pajamas were mostly fashioned after athletic jerseys, while mine were fashioned after princesses. Dina was ambidextrous and had what people called a “wicked two-handed backhand” in tennis. I had blisters. And Dina understood football. She knew what the commentator meant when he said “first down” and why a coach would choose to go for a field goal over a touchdown. She understood why Dad would shout things like, “He’s gonna go for it? What a moron!” and then sigh with his forehead in his hand. I didn’t know much about foo
tball, but when I opted to hang out in the basement during a game, Dad and I sometimes tossed an orange Nerf football back and forth across the three yards between us. Occasionally I made the ball spiral and Dad would flash me one of his big smiles, the kind that stretched straight across his round face and made me feel adored.

  I knew Mom didn’t like it when Dad watched football. A couple of times I overheard her tell him that his football “habit” was the reason she believed we didn’t do enough as a family. (Today she’d tell you that she alone planned our family trip to Disneyland and that marathon movie days at the Syosset Movie Theater were her idea.) But I remember only one fight between Mom and Dad. I walked into the kitchen one night and saw Mom crying. She and Dad were shouting at each other and she pitched the car keys at him, missed, and the keys hit the countertop.

  Mostly, though, if there was noticeable arguing in our house, it wasn’t between Mom and Dad, it was between Mom and Dina. Even before Dina became a teenager, she and Mom had screaming matches. It seemed they could fight about anything and that any disagreement, no matter how trivial—a forgotten textbook at school or missing shoes for one of Dina’s costumes—could escalate.

  One morning, in the rush to get some breakfast before the school bus came, Mom and Dina got into it. Dina was at the kitchen table and Mom was at the sink. I was eating my toast off a paper plate on the kitchen counter. We were spread out in the kitchen like the three points of a triangle.

  “Can Linda come over for dinner?” Dina asked.

  Mom sighed, which wasn’t a good sign, and said, “I didn’t defrost enough chicken cutlets.”

  I set my toast down and looked at Dina for her reply.

  “Can’t we just order pizza?”

  “I’d rather not. Couldn’t you have asked me yesterday? The house is a mess—you still haven’t cleaned your room.”

  “Well, I didn’t know yesterday,” Dina replied. “Can’t you just be spontaneous for once, like other moms?”