Voice Lessons

by Cara Mentzel

  “I can be spontaneous—”

  “No, you make a big deal out of everything,” Dina said.

  I took a deep breath and then forgot to let it out.

  “I’m not making a big deal,” Mom said.

  “Fine. Whatever. She won’t come over.” Dina got up and started to walk away.

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Mom said. She couldn’t see Dina’s eyes, but given the tone of Dina’s voice, the eye rolling was a safe bet.

  “I don’t know why I even ask for friends to come over. I don’t want to be here, why would my friends want to be here?”

  “Oh, right. I never let your friends come over, I never let you do anything?” Mom gave the sponge a quick squeeze and then dropped it into the sink.

  “I didn’t say that—”

  “I’m such a bad mom.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Why are you starting with me again, right before school?” Mom asked, but it was an accusation, not a question.

  “Oh, I’m starting?”

  “Don’t talk back to me.”

  “How many days’ notice do you need for a sleepover? Is a month enough, Mommie Dearest?”

  Mommie Dearest was a 1981 movie starring Faye Dunaway as famed actress and abusive mother Joan Crawford. Mom, Dina, and I had watched it together. In one scene, Joan is furious because her daughter hung up some clothes on wire hangers instead of satin ones. Joan’s hair is pulled off her tall forehead in a headband, her face is ghostly, covered in greasy, white cold cream, her eyes are bulging beneath her arched, penciled-in eyebrows, and with a handful of wire hangers she screams through the circle of red lipstick she’d yet to remove, “No. Wire. Hangers. EVAHHHHH!” After the movie, Mom, Dina, and I took turns reenacting the scene, unable to keep a straight face, always breaking into laughter on “Evahhhhh!”

  I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but at some point “wire hangers” weren’t funny anymore. In heated moments Dina started to call Mom “Mommie Dearest.” It was the surest way to hurt Mom’s feelings.

  I heard the engine of the school bus as it turned the corner. Dina grabbed her stuff and said, “You know what? Keep your fuckin’ chicken cutlets. I’ll go to Linda’s house instead.” Then she bolted out of the house and the screen door slammed behind her.

  Mom followed after her, and as Dina raced to the corner for the bus, Mom reopened the screen door and shouted, “Selfish! You only think of yourself!” Dina must have been too embarrassed to shout anything back to Mom with the other kids standing around, but I’d seen their fights enough to know that as she took that first big step through the bus’s folding doors, she called Mom a bitch.

  As an adult I’d finally understand why a clean house and a good meal were so important to my mother. I’d learn that my maternal grandmother had been abusive, possibly an alcoholic, that my mom had taken care of her brothers since she was five years old, and that their house had been a pigsty. As a little girl Mom had been too ashamed to have her friends over. To Mom, a nourishing meal and a clean house meant she was a better mother than her mother had been to her. It meant she was doing things “right.” But Mom wanting to get everything right was often the reason things went wrong with Dina. The ever-present threat of being like her mother made Mom defensive to any criticism. And Dina could be critical. She was sometimes more firecracker than candle. After too many blowups with Mom, Dina started to feel like something was wrong with her, like she was bad—even as a child I sensed this (but lengthy discussions as adults would confirm it). Fighting became a way to defend herself, to convince her own mother that she was good. And ironically, Mom fought for a similar reason, to convince her own daughter that she was good. And yet the louder they screamed, the worse they felt about themselves.

  Sometimes I’d intervene, and I did this for myself as much as for them. I hated it when they fought. They were two of my three favorite people on the planet (Dad was the third one). And they took care of me. I was the little sister and the younger child. But when they argued, I wanted to take care of them. More as mediator than referee, I tried to inject objectivity into the scant lulls in their arguments, but my attempts to resolve their conflicts failed repeatedly. Instead, Dina would redirect her anger at me: “Why do you always take Mom’s side?” she’d ask, and the question hurt my feelings. I was Dina’s biggest fan. I didn’t want there to be any sides.

  Over time I learned that my efforts to make peace were futile and I was better off outside their conflicts than in the middle. But keeping my distance had its drawbacks, too. One day after one of their screaming matches I came out of my room and saw Dina in Mom’s arms sitting at the top of the stairs. They were crying.

  “I love you so much,” Mom whispered into the air over Dina’s shoulder.

  “I love you too.”

  “You’re a wonderful daughter,” Mom said and let go of Dina for a second to pull a strand of hair off Dina’s damp cheek. “Sometimes I just think we’re so much alike … and that makes it hard.”

  “I’m sorry I get so angry,” Dina said, looking down into her lap. “You are a good mom.”

  I felt the impulse to move toward them. But I hesitated. It wasn’t my moment, it was theirs. They were in their own little world and I didn’t want to trespass.

  I think that seeing Mom and Dina fight so much is one of the reasons I have so few memories of Mom and Dad’s fighting. With the exception of Mom’s pleas for Dad to quit watching so much football, or the night she threw the keys at him, any clues that my parents were unhappy together were scarce. They played doubles tennis, spent afternoons laughing together on their friends’ boat, tanned next to each other on lounge chairs while Dina and I jumped off the diving board, and coordinated their Halloween costumes—a ridiculous photo of Mom as a devil and Dad as a vampire comes to mind. So when they told us they were separating it knocked the wind out of Dina and me.

  The news of my parents’ breakup came on Thanksgiving Day, 1986. Dina was fifteen years old and I was twelve. Nothing had been planned that day. Unlike most Thanksgivings, we didn’t have a turkey in the oven, and we weren’t having company or mashing bananas into sweet potatoes to take over to my aunt’s house.

  Dina left Dad in the basement with the football game and came up to the kitchen, where Mom and I were taking a break from watching movies. We talked about who knows what for an hour maybe. Then, one of us mentioned Dad: “Ask Dad,” or, “I wish Dad were here to weigh in,” and there was an uncomfortable pause. Dina and I looked at Mom. Her eyes were fixed on a spot on the empty table and something about her seemed empty, too. She wasn’t mad, there was no muscle to whatever she was feeling. Instead, she seemed limp, resigned. Dad showed up in the doorway and we all looked at him. He stood there like the inattentive kid in class whose teacher had unexpectedly called on him. He stood there like a kid without an answer. I was worried for him.

  When Mom asked us to leave them alone for a little while I didn’t know what to do. No one outright said that anything was wrong, yet I sensed that there was a threat in the room. I didn’t want to be near the threat, but I also didn’t feel safe turning away from it. Instead I turned to Dina, who said, “Come on,” and we walked up the stairs.

  A couple of years earlier, Dina and I had performed Kenny Rogers’s “Through the Years” for one of Mom and Dad’s anniversaries. (I had no idea Kenny was on his third marriage when he sang about those years, which has since left me wondering which years he was referring to exactly.) It was Their Song and it had played on cassette through our living-room speakers on countless occasions. Kenny sang, “I never had a doubt, We’d always work things out.” Dina played the piano and sang while I accompanied her on the flute. We even made Mom and Dad tickets for the show and served Pillsbury cinnamon buns.

  Dina and I took their marriage for granted. We had friends whose parents were divorced, and some whose parents should have been divorced, but we never worried about Mom and Dad. We knew their story well. It wa
s a first love. A hometown love from the Bronx. It became a Dad-was-in-the-army-Mom-was-waiting-tables love. Mom and Dad became adults together. I’d recently asked Mom how I would know when I met the man I should marry and she’d said, “You’ll know.” That’s how it had been with Dad, she’d just known.

  I lay on my bed entranced by a brass finial and then the stitching on the underside of my comforter and then probably a strand of my hair. Every now and then the trance broke and I could hear enough of Mom’s and Dad’s voices to know they were still talking downstairs, but not enough to make out what they were saying. I waited for a reassuring knock on my door, someone to peek a head in and tell me what was going on. Mostly, I waited for someone to tell me how to feel. I knew how much I loved my parents as individuals. My father woke up early every Sunday morning to wait on line at the deli for bagels, then returned home and cooked us his signature salami and eggs. He walked in the front door after business trips armed with stuffed animals for Dina and me, and he always brought me water when he tucked me in at night, even though he knew it was just my ploy to delay my bedtime. And I idolized my mother. She was beautiful and athletic and I thought she knew the answers to nearly everything. But until that night, I didn’t know how much I loved Mom and Dad as a couple and how much I needed them to be together. My family was the one place I knew I belonged, and I needed to belong somewhere. We were one interdependent system, and if the parts of that system started moving or breaking, I didn’t know how my life would change. How I might change. I’d been safely tethered to my parents’ togetherness my whole life, and suddenly I felt myself dangling over the unknown.

  I was antsy and eventually found Dina eavesdropping at the top of the stairs. She looked at me and mouthed “shhh” with her finger over her lips. I hoped the floor wouldn’t creak as I stepped closer to her and she took my hand. I don’t know how long she’d been standing there or exactly what she had heard, but I could feel the weight of her thoughts in her tight grip. Soon, Mom called us downstairs to join her and Dad in the kitchen.

  They both sat there at the table, but it was Mom who spoke, and I remember her words exactly; knowing Mom, she’d chosen them carefully. She said, “Your Dad and I are separating. We think we can be happier apart than we are together.”

  In those first milliseconds I felt nothing. Then my heart constricted as if a hand were squeezing it to keep it in one piece, and I wondered, If I cry, will it make Mom and Dad feel worse? Mom had often told me I was wise beyond my years and I remember that when she told me they were separating I wanted to be wise. I wanted to say the right thing. In fact, like Mom, I’d always wanted to say the right thing, do the right thing, even feel the right thing. I was consumed with getting everything right and trying to make everyone all right around me. Is it okay to want them to stay together? I continued to wonder. If Mom and Dad think they could be happier apart, then shouldn’t I want them to be apart? Is my happiness more important than theirs? But how can I be happy if they’re not? I heard Dina start to cry and her sadness put an end to my spiraling thoughts and gave me permission to cry, too. Then Mom and Dad stood up and the hugs started and with the hugs came more tears, even from them. Tears all around me and the fading echo of the word “happy” in my ears.

  Mom, Dad, Dina, and I have different accounts of that Thanksgiving Day. What’s important and consistent in Mom’s and Dad’s versions is that they’d been planning their separation. What was sudden for Dina and me was not sudden for them, they just hadn’t planned to tell us on Thanksgiving. What’s important from Dina’s version is that I’m not even in it, which she told me as an adult while shaking her head, “That should tell you how self-centered I was.”

  Though nothing spoils an appetite quite like an imminent divorce, what’s indisputable among the stories that we all tell is that we had Thanksgiving dinner at the Fox Hollow Inn. We hopped into the car like the intact family we’d been only a day earlier and drove over to the restaurant. Dinner was a blur. I’m sure there was a white tablecloth with some kind of centerpiece, and mashed potatoes and gravy, but I can’t be certain. Dina and I spent most of the meal standing in the restroom crying together in front of a pair of sinks. I remember how broken Dina seemed, and how strange it felt to stand next to her and share tears, and how when she wrapped her arms around me, she wasn’t only taking care of me, but I was taking care of her, too. And how, because she needed me, there was a flicker of satisfaction in my grief.

  I knew then that marriages may end but sisterhood does not. If there was one thing she and I would always have in common, it was that we were sisters and when it mattered most, we’d be together.

  Lesson 3

  HOW TO PLAY A PART

  On the East Coast it’s customary for parents to spend a small fortune to send their kids to sleepaway camp for the summer. In the weeks before camp starts, parents buy their soon-to-be campers brand-new summer wardrobes—“ten pairs of socks, eight pairs of shorts, ten T-shirts, and one rain jacket.” They pack everything into one huge duffel bag and one large trunk. Kids ages six to sixteen went to camp to spend their days playing kickball and soccer, to swim, canoe, and weave lanyard bracelets in arts and crafts, to spend their nights flirting at the canteen over Heath bars or chips, and to stay up late with friends in a flashlight-lit bunk, the smell of skunk a frequent reminder that rodents enjoyed skulking beneath the floorboards.

  Dina went to sleepaway first. When I was six years old and Mom and Dad were still together, I was old enough to go with her.

  “I wanna go too,” I told Mom.

  “But you’ll be away from home, from Dad and me,” she warned, and then added, “for a long time.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I’ll miss Dina more if I stay than I’ll miss you guys if I go.”

  Dina meant home to me. In my mind, I belonged with her, to such an extent that I would leave my actual home to stay with her.

  Mom and Dad let me go to camp that summer and I was miserable. While Dina loved camp, it wasn’t for me, at least not yet. She had a close-knit group of girlfriends—they had beaded friendship bracelets and matching haircuts. I didn’t connect with girls my age. I felt closest to the foreign counselors, especially the ones from Scandinavia who always had candy for me and taught me that real licorice tasted nothing like Twizzlers. It surprised me that even with Dina at camp, I was homesick. I missed Mom and Dad. I cried each night at bedtime. I subsisted on letters from them and crossing paths with Dina, who made sure she checked on me daily. I even got sick. I’d had high fevers as a child and I had a couple that summer. Dina worried about me and made frequent visits to see me in the infirmary. The highlight of that summer was when I received a package from home and opened it to find a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine. The savvy beagle helped me bridge home and camp, and I spent one jubilant afternoon making “The World’s Flavorite Icy Treats” for Dina’s friends and my bunkmates. By the time I had enough ice shavings to fill the Dixie cups, my “snow cones” were hard-earned swigs of diluted juice.

  The snow-cone machine had been retired for a couple of years when I decided to give sleepaway camp another try. Though I was older and didn’t miss home as much, I still had trouble forming lasting friendships. For the first time, I considered that the best place for me might not be with Dina but on my own. In the summer before seventh grade—the summer before Mom and Dad’s Thanksgiving separation—I sought a greater sense of belonging and a fresh start at a new camp.

  The theater program at my new camp was putting on a performance of Guys and Dolls. I went to the audition hoping to be part of the show, to have a line or two much like I had in Baylis Elementary’s performance of Oliver, in which I played a milk maiden and sang, “Any milk today, monsieur?” Or in My Fair Lady, in which I played the Queen of Transylvania at the Embassy Ball and said two words (three if repeats count): “Charming, quite charming.”

  At the audition I stood on the large, scuffed stage looking into a recreation hall where before me were rows of empty woode
n benches, and in the darkness above, bats clung to the rafters. The hall was dank and had an old-building musty smell like worn wood and dirt. The director, a spunky African-American woman with busy hair of kinky curls, handed me what I assumed was the audition scene for all the girls. It featured Adelaide, who was a hopeless romantic and the lead dancer at a 1950s nightclub called the Hot Box. Having seen the movie multiple times on Sunday afternoons in bed with Mom, Dad, and Dina, I knew the part well. I reached for my best New York accent—in retrospect it wasn’t as much of a stretch as I’d thought.

  “Nathan, dawling. I can do without anything just so lawng as you don’t stawt running that crap game again.”

  It felt good to be the lone voice in such a large room.

  On the rec-hall stage that day my heart was pounding and I felt it through my whole body like the bass of a boom box. I read the scene with the director, occasionally peeking down at the lines and then at her on the floor near the edge of the stage. She looked pleased. A couple of times I glanced out over the invisible audience and imagined the seats filled with campers, the girls on one side, boys on the other, as they always sat there. I felt hopeful and excited. Unfortunately, those feelings were short-lived.

  “Can you sing?” the director asked, and I froze for a second that felt like a minute.

  Dammit. Those three words. My joy of acting was inextricably linked to my fear of singing, and I wished that it were not.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Sing something,” she said.

  “No, I can’t sing,” I told her.

  “How ’bout ‘Happy Birthday’? Just sing ‘Happy Birthday’ for me.”

  “Really, I can’t.”

  But the pianist, a graying, heavyset man, tapped on some keys, and that surprised me because up until then I didn’t know he was sitting there. He was off to the side of the stage behind an old standard piano and I wished we could trade places. I’d taken piano lessons for four years and would have preferred to pick through a version of “Sing a Song”—“make it simple to last a whole life long”—than actually to sing one.