Voice Lessons

by Cara Mentzel

  The pianist bounced on the same note a few times, my cue to begin singing. The note he played was higher than I wanted it to be and reminded me of singing for Mr. Roper, like I’d need to reach for each note again. I didn’t know enough about music to ask for a different key. I could feel my lips pressed together, and with a deep breath I let them part. The notes sounded right in my head, but the moment I opened my mouth they were wrong. I started, “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday…” When I strained to hit the high note toward the end, “Happy BIRTH-day dear so-and-so,” I was embarrassed and wished I hadn’t let the director make me sing.

  “Thank you,” she said with a smile—a smile I returned, though it was forced, a mere copy of hers, then I headed out of the dark rec hall and into the sun.

  At dusk I stood on the wide wooden planks of the rec-hall steps where the assigned parts were posted on a sheet of paper. I waited a couple of feet away in a crowd of my peers amid an outbreak of disappointed sighs and the squeals of the soon-to-be Nathan Detroit, Sister Sarah Brown, and Sky Masterson. The chatter was garbled, as if it traveled to me through a strand of yarn and a paper cup. Then someone was shouting, “Cara!” I stepped toward the sheet of paper. I lifted my finger and ran it across from my name, Cara Mentzel, to the next name, Adelaide. My eyes crossed the page a second time to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. I’m Adelaide? I’m Adelaide! I felt that boom box in my chest again. People were looking at me, at me, congratulating me. My smile looked like any other smile, but it felt different. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be Dina.

  I’d never allowed myself to think I’d get the part. Then, I started to worry that some kind of stupendous mistake had been made and that ten seconds of “Happy Birthday” had misled the director. After all, I knew how to sing “Happy Birthday”—I’d obviously sung it before. Then the thought of birthdays led me to the old adage, “Watch what you wish for.” I wanted to believe that I belonged on that stage, that the director had seen something in me that others had overlooked. I wanted her to be right. I wanted to surprise myself and be better than I had thought I was. I wanted to impress a rec hall filled with campers. I wanted to be good enough—whatever “enough” meant, I wasn’t sure. But maybe it meant being more like Dina. Maybe it meant being as exceptional as she was.

  In any case, what I wanted was a tall order.

  I took a yellow highlighter to each of my lines; some pages were more yellow than white, and the neon visual reminded me that I was a lead. My xeroxed copy of the script looked like Dina’s scripts always did when I sat on the floor in her bedroom and helped her run lines. Adelaide sang five songs, including a long-time favorite of mine, “Adelaide’s Lament,” where she tells her fiancé of fourteen years, Nathan, that her chronic cold is a psychosomatic symptom of being unmarried. I was proud to have ownership of the song. I’d often had fun singing it around the house when no one was home. I especially liked to say “poyson” instead of “person” in Adelaide’s accent when she sings, “… a poyson can develop a cold.”

  That summer I ran lines on the grass with the cast, studied them in my bunk with a flashlight after “taps” played over the campus speakers, and rehearsed onstage. I could have used Dina’s help; what was a new experience for me was routine for her. But she was too far away to help me. I was on my own. Besides, winning the part had been exciting, but it also made me feel vulnerable. I knew that if Dina ran lines with me or helped me with my solos I’d be even more self-conscious. No matter how kind she would try to be with her feedback, I’d worry about what she was really thinking, and that worry would be a distraction. So, maybe being on my own wasn’t so bad. With Dina elsewhere, I could focus on myself rather than on her perception of me—at least I could try.

  The performance was scheduled for the night before Visiting Day, a day halfway through the summer all campers looked forward to when parents were invited to drive the three hours up from Long Island (where most of us were from) and spend the day with their kids at camp. Campers loved Visiting Day, not only because we missed our families but because of the large garbage bags filled with junk food that they schlepped all the way from home.

  That year the best part of Visiting Day for me wasn’t the food but that it fell on the day after the performance of Guys and Dolls. Parents weren’t typically invited to camp theater productions, but given the timing of the show it seemed reasonable for my parents to drive up the night before and attend. I wanted them to see it. I worried that without them there my performance would eventually exist only in my memory, and I knew that memories faded. If they were with me, my Adelaide character wouldn’t be easily forgotten. I also wanted them to be proud of me, to watch me the way they’d watched Dina so many times. Unlike Dina, who could rely on getting solos and leads, I knew I might never get the chance to star in a show again. And though I hadn’t wanted Dina to be there during rehearsals, by then I wished she could be there for the performance. I always wanted to be the center of her attention and a stage could force the issue. I wanted to stand in front of her and have her feel as proud of me as I’d so often been of her. I wanted her to experience the rush that I experienced when I watched her.

  A week before the show, I was on the dirt path on my way to dinner with a friend and I spotted the camp director.

  “Barry,” I called to him and walked over. “Can my mom and dad come see the show this week?”

  “We don’t invite parents to our shows,” he replied. “They’re just for campers.”

  “I know, but it’s the night before Visiting Day and I’m one of the leads.”

  “Sorry,” he said too quickly.

  “What?” I asked, giving him another chance to say what I wanted to hear.

  “It wouldn’t be fair to the other campers, but don’t worry. I’m gonna videotape it.” It wasn’t until he turned me down that I realized how much I’d wanted him to say yes.

  The afternoon of the performance, I was walking through camp with a friend—picture matching Keds and leg-warmer socks—when I spotted Barry coming toward us with someone’s parents. I was taken aback and instantly felt tears forming. Sometimes my sadness and anger sat so close together I couldn’t tell them apart. But I also suspected that when I was upset, sadness was the default. Subconsciously I preferred sadness to anger; it was easier to manage and more socially acceptable—for a girl, anyway. Except, in that moment with Barry, something felt different. I wanted to shut the tears down. If I could resist those tears I could prevent myself from dissolving into the hurt little girl I was quickly becoming, and instead become the pissed-off teenager I wanted to be. Dina knew how to put her sadness on hold and identify with her anger, and I wanted to be like her. Bold and strong. I was trembling when I addressed the approaching adults with an unfamiliar bravery.

  “What are they doing here?” I asked, gesturing toward the parents.

  “Excuse me?” Barry said.

  “Why are they here?” I repeated as if we were on equal footing, as if he weren’t a foot taller than me, a man, and an authority figure.

  “They’re my friends.”

  “They’re parents of campers,” I reminded him. “Aren’t all the other kids going to be upset if they see them here before Visiting Day?”

  My snotty tone didn’t appear to remind him of our conversation only a week earlier. He looked confused.

  “You said my parents couldn’t be here tonight. I really wanted my parents here.” On the word “really” my tears came loose and with them he seemed to remember.

  “This is different. They’re friends.”

  I could feel myself shrinking under the downward stare of three apathetic adults, and I didn’t want to shrink. I could feel my argument slipping away, my words vanishing. And then something shifted. I made it shift. I overpowered my impulse to disappear with my desire to be heard. Suddenly I didn’t care about being good or liked. I wanted Barry to take responsibility for being hypocritical. I wanted to embarrass him and make him feel as awful as h
e’d made me feel. And so I banished the little victim in me and discovered my inner truck driver.

  “Fuck you!” I shouted into his shocked face. “Fuck you!” I shouted again and then shot a string of insults at him like projectile vomit. He wasn’t just an asshole, he became a fuckin’ asshole and then fuckin’ selfish and then he didn’t give a fuck about kids. If my intention was to embody a pissed-off teenager, I may have overshot a bit. No matter how many times I said “fuckin’,” or how loud I shouted it, my parents wouldn’t be there that night. Right or wrong, I hated him for that.

  I stormed off and, probably because he knew he couldn’t stop me, he let me go.

  A couple of hours later I headed over to the rec hall to get ready for the show. By the time my makeup was on as well as my first costume—heels and a tiny silver tube top with a matching tiny tube skirt—I’d mostly recovered from my emotional rant. My hair was huge, pulled back off my face, hanging long behind my bare shoulders and down my back. I looked hot, hotter than a thirteen-year-old late bloomer dressed as a thirtysomething dancer at a strip joint should look.

  I could hear the kids filing into the hall. The louder their voices, the more nervous I became. I was terrified. Why did I do this to myself? I wondered, until the room quieted and the show began. Then it was my turn to step out onto the stage. My body was buzzing and I had to clench my teeth together to keep them from chattering. The words from each of those yellowed lines I’d rehearsed nonstop for days were pin-balling inside my skull. I managed to say, “Hello, Nathan dear,” and then, “You go ahead, girls. Order me a tuna fish on rye,” and with those first lines my time as Adelaide began.

  The show had its high points and its low points. For one thing, Dina had once told me that her nerves subsided after the first few minutes onstage, but my nerves stuck around. Before long I started forgetting my lines. In one scene, I took a running start through the lines that were familiar, hoping the lines I’d forgotten would suddenly show up, only to realize that I was doing the wrong scene.

  I also noticed that in front of an audience, I’d developed an awkward mannerism. I liked to wave my right arm about as I talked or sang, the kind of gesture that, had I been seated at a table, surely would have knocked a drink or two to the floor. I tried to act natural, but natural was as hard to find as my lines were.

  Then there was a strange moment during “Take Back Your Mink” in Act II when I felt the undivided attention of the audience. The attention held an electric charge that made me feel powerful. But while I’d craved that power, the attention felt invasive, and I suddenly had the urge to resist it. I’d given over a hundred darkened figures access to something I held sacred, something private that I couldn’t name. And they hadn’t earned that access. They hadn’t earned my trust. I stood there confused and exposed.

  The show went on too long and we lost the attention of the audience, but it wasn’t all bad. I enjoyed singing “Adelaide’s Lament,” and with the exception of some embarrassing high notes, my singing had been decent. When I remembered my lines, I was proud of my acting. I relished my final bow—partly because I was relieved it was all over and partly because I was grateful to share the experience with the cast. The audience offered up courtesy applause, glad it was finally finished. Over their heads, I noted the far wall where Mom, Dad, and Dina, would have been standing and clapping had they been invited. Then I moved on and took my racing energy to the canteen, where I celebrated with my cast mates and gnawed on a frozen Charleston Chew.

  With my flubbed debut behind me and seventh grade in front of me, I began H.B. Thompson Junior High.

  Dina was in the thick of her dramatic teenage years. She was usually studying, out with friends, or on her phone. She had her own line in her room—a 1980s social necessity the equivalent of today’s smartphone—and more often than not, she kept her bedroom door shut for privacy. But if I ever needed advice about friends or boys all I had to do was tap on her door and she’d invite me in.

  One day I came home from school crying because a boy lifted up his shirt on the cafeteria line and asked me if I was jealous.

  “He did it in front of everyone,” I cried. “I was so embarrassed. Am I ever gonna go through puberty?”

  “First of all, yes you will,” she assured me. “Second of all, you’re gorgeous and one day he’s gonna wish he’d been nicer because he’ll want to ask you out and you won’t give him the time of day. And lastly,” she continued but then paused for a second, “he has bigger boobs than you?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, kinda.” And we left it at that.

  Another time, the night before my boyfriend, Ryan, and I had arranged to have our first bit of alone time together, I went to Dina.

  I think I’m gonna kiss Ryan tomorrow,” I told her. “Like really kiss him,” I clarified.

  Ryan entered junior high from the cooler elementary school, the one with the reputation for being more “advanced” than mine—and I don’t mean academically. Supposedly, Ryan knew what he was doing. It was rumored that at his school there wasn’t a pretty girl he hadn’t kissed.

  Dina waved me into her room, where we sat down on her bed, and I explained how a couple of friends would join me over at his place after school, and that he’d take me up to his bedroom where we could be alone.

  Like a true teacher, Dina didn’t believe in stupid questions and offered thorough answers. She listened as I asked:

  “What do I do if I’m chewing gum?”

  “How do I know which way to tilt my head?”

  “What do I do with my tongue?”

  “How do I breathe? Swallow?”

  The logistics were overwhelming and nothing about kissing seemed sexy to me. I was a long way from the hormonal infusion that would bring true passion to kissing, but that didn’t stop me from being a romantic (or a perfectionist). My kiss with Ryan was a rite of passage that I was determined to get right. And Dina was my ticket to success, so I listened intently as she answered my questions one at a time.

  “If you have a chance, you can go to the bathroom and spit your gum out first,” she advised. “If not, just swallow it.” I thought about the ten years I was once told that it took to fully digest chewed gum and was briefly concerned about the many pieces of Doublemint that could be lounging around in my belly by the time I went to college.

  “Don’t worry about tilting your head,” Dina continued. “That usually comes naturally. You won’t bump noses or anything.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Nothing about this feels natural to me.”

  “You’ll be fine. You wanna keep your lips soft, you know?” But I didn’t know.

  “That’s easy for you to say, you have those full lips. The minute I pucker, my skinny lips get all tight.”

  “Well, they don’t have to. You don’t pucker them so much as push them against his.” She lifted the back of her hand to her lips. “See, like this.” And I watched her mushy lips meet the skin on the back of her hand. “You try.”

  I was a little embarrassed to kiss my own hand, but I gave it a try anyway, pressing my lips against its tender skin. She was right. My lips were still soft.

  “When do I open my mouth?” I asked next and dropped my hand back onto my lap.

  “Whenever you want,” she answered. “He’ll probably do it first so you can follow his lead. And you can breathe through your nose if it’s hard to breathe through your mouth.”

  “What about my tongue? What am I supposed to do with my tongue?”

  “Keep it soft, just like your lips. You’re not sticking it out like some kid making faces out a car window.”

  “I know,” I said, but again, I didn’t know exactly. I couldn’t be sure what tongues looked like in the darkness of two kissing mouths.

  “Here,” she said. She grabbed a handheld mirror off her dresser, the one Mom used when we were younger to show us what our braids looked like in the back.

  She held the mirror a few inches from my face and said, “Stick your tong
ue out.”

  I stuck out my tongue.

  “Too far,” she corrected. “You barely have to stick it out at all. Pretend you’re tasting something good.”

  “You mean something other than a guy’s tongue?” I joked.

  “Yeah. Think more … uh, ice cream or cotton candy.”

  “Like thith?” I asked with a lisp, my tongue resting slightly out of my mouth like a napping dog.

  “Yeah, more like that.”

  “Tho thexy,” I joked with my tongue still out and we giggled.

  “You’ll be fine,” she assured me with an encouraging smile. “Let me know how it goes.”

  As it turned out, even with all of Ryan’s experience, he didn’t really know what he was doing. He only had one criteria for being a good kisser and that was the length of time we kept our mouths pressed against each other’s. He’d clearly taken the term “lip-locked” literally. He actually had a watch and timed us! When we made it past seven minutes he told me that was the longest he’d ever gone and said I was a great kisser. I managed to feel flattered even though part of me knew I couldn’t trust his judgment.

  When I got home, Dina and I debriefed. She was appalled by Ryan’s fixation on the time. I told her that between my tired jaw and his copious saliva, I could have been at the dentist, and in fact, I’d wished I had one of those suction straw thingies the hygienist used. At this, Dina looked stunned. She sat there speechless, just shaking her head. But I explained to her that the worst part wasn’t Ryan—it was me! I was so nervous that I could feel little gas bubbles expanding and then popping in my stomach. The more my stomach gurgled with gas, the more nervous I became and the louder it got. I kept clenching my butt cheeks so as not to let even the tiniest one escape. When we finished our marathon kiss, possibly because he’d broken his record (but maybe because my stomach was so noisy) he noted my growling belly and said, “You must be starving. Let’s go get you a snack.”