The air in our building was full of music. Fugues and concerti poured through the heating vents, arpeggios and glissandos filled the hallways. As you rode up in the elevator, you would hear the trill of a flute, or a mezzo-soprano working on one phrase of an aria; the brassy wah-wah of trumpets, the mournful, lowing notes of a cello...but it had been years since a baby's cries had joined the choir.
The neighbors must have gathered around me, gazing down at a baby wrapped in a pink blanket, looking for signs of the talent I undoubtedly possessed. Those fingers, Mrs. Plansky the clarinetist might have said. A pianist, maybe?
Look at her lips, my father would interject. Woodwinds. Maybe the French horn.
No, no, Reina would say, clutching me proudly. Have you heard her cry? The notes she can hit? E above high C, I swear it! And she'd beam down at me, false eyelashes fluttering. (Somehow I know that even two days after giving birth, Reina would have been wearing her false eyelashes.) My daughter is going to sing, she would say, and all of them would nod almost unconsciously in agreement.
A singer, they would repeat, like two dozen fairy godmothers giving their blessing. A singer.
It would have been easier if I hadn't been able to sing at all, if I'd been completely tone-deaf, if I couldn't have carried a tune in a bucket. The hell of it was, I was good, just not good enough. I had a fine voice for high school choirs and college glee clubs and, eventually, for winning fifty bucks' worth of free drinks singing karaoke at the local bar. I had an ideal environment, and the best instruction that could be bought or bartered for. But to my mother's eternal dismay, I didn't have an opera voice.
My singing career, such as it was, ended when I was fourteen, two weeks before I would have auditioned for the High School of Performing Arts.
"Can you have your mother come up for a minute?" Mrs. Minheizer asked at the end of the lesson. Alma Minheizer was seventy-two, small and pink-cheeked, with a corona of fluffy white hair and a wall full of framed photographs of her own performances around the world. She'd been one of my mother's teachers, fifteen years before, when Reina had first moved to New York. I went downstairs to fetch my mother, who was home, for once. She'd made a big point of telling me that she'd turned down Queen of the Night in San Francisco in order to be home for my audition.
"What's this about?" she demanded from where she was posed on the couch, perfectly lipsticked, eyebrows plucked into dramatic arches and glossy curls piled high, with a lap full of sheet music and her calendar. She'd been chatting to her agent--in Italian, naturally--and wasn't happy to be interrupted. I shrugged, walking with her to the elevator, holding Mrs. Minheizer's door, and leaving it open so that I could make out most of what they were saying. I slumped against the wall, then sat on the floor, trying to make myself invisible. Easier said than done. I was five feet eight inches tall, with my mother's figure--big breasts that I disguised under shapeless sweaters and baggy sweatshirts, heavy hips that no amount of dieting or aerobics would ever diminish, my mother's full lips and thick curls. She wore hers flowing over her shoulders, or arranged in a complicated updo. I wore mine hanging in my face, which did a pretty fair job of disguising the zits on my forehead. I had Reina's looks (or I would, when my skin cleared up), but I didn't have anything even close to her sound. I knew it, and Mrs. Minheizer knew it too.
"...never be better than adequate," I heard her say. I sank down further on the carpeted hallway floor, giddy and queasy with a mixture of shame and relief. Someone had finally told Reina what I'd suspected, what a dozen other teachers had hinted at but hadn't had the courage to come out and say...and because it was Mrs. Minheizer, who'd been, in her day, one of the leading soubrettes in the world, Reina would have to listen.
"Alma, that's absurd," my mother said. I could imagine her lifting her chin in an imperious gesture, and the gold and ruby bracelets she wore clinking on one plump wrist.
"...know how hard this life can be. If I had a daughter--"
"Well, you don't. I do." Even back then, Reina spoke primarily in italics.
"If I had a daughter," my teacher continued, her voice smooth and quiet and absolutely serious, "and she could do anything else--write, or paint, or teach, or work in a bank--I'd tell her to do that. You know what our life is like! There are a hundred singers for every slot in the chorus, never mind the principals. If you're not the best of the best, there's no place for you."
There was a pause. Some murmuring. "So she'll practice," said my mother.
"She does practice," Mrs. Minheizer said. "I've never had a more diligent student than Kate."
I could picture my mother dismissing my diligence with a wave of her hand. "She can always practice harder." She slammed Mrs. Minheizer's door harder than she had to and strode down the hall, white lace sleeves fluttering, lavender chiffon skirt swishing, in a cloud of perfume and indignation.
"What'd she want?" I asked, pushing myself to my feet.
Reina made a dismissive noise in the back of her cosseted throat. "You need to practice harder," she said.
"Mom..." I took a deep breath to steady myself while she pressed the button for the elevator. "I don't want to sing anymore."
She stared at me, black eyebrows aloft, as if she'd never heard those words before and didn't know what they meant. "I'm sorry?" Her stiff eyelashes fluttered. "I beg your pardon?"
"Mom, I hate it," I said. This wasn't exactly true. I liked crooning Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday songs in the privacy of my bedroom. What I didn't like was the endless cycle of reaching and falling short and trying harder and falling short again, the way I'd finish a piece and watch while Mrs. Minheizer would compose her face carefully and pause before saying anything. In that pause, I'd feel her weighing her words, parsing the difference between what she wanted to tell me and what she would actually say. I'd lived with the real deal long enough to know that I was a pretender. I'd heard my mother. I'd heard her students too, heavy-hipped, double-chinned girls, unfashionable and unremarkable until they opened their mouths and their voices were so ethereal, so transcendent that, like magic, they became beautiful.
"I'm no good," I mumbled.
"Kate, I won't hear this."
"You know I'm not," I said, the words tumbling out, loud and reckless in the high-ceilinged hallway. "I don't have it. If I go to the auditions at Performing Arts, they're going to laugh at me, and if they take me, it'll just be because I'm your daughter."
My mother's face softened for an instant, probably because I'd paid her a compliment. Then she jabbed the button for the elevator again with one crimson-tipped finger. "We'll find you another teacher."
"Mom, I've been through every teacher in the building!"
"There are other buildings," she said grimly. The elevator doors slid open. She got on. I stood in the hallway.
"Kate."
"No."
"Kate, you're being--"
"No."
She must have seen something in my face that convinced her I wasn't kidding. The doors slid shut on her disappointment, but by the time I'd walked down the stairs, Reina had regrouped. She stood in the doorway, gave me a tremulous smile, and held something toward me like a peace offering. I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry when I looked down and saw my father's third-best oboe in her hands. "You have talent," she called toward my back, as I pushed past her and half ran down the hall to my bedroom, where I flopped on my bed and opened my copy of The Mists of Avalon. "Kate, you do! And maybe you won't be a singer, but you shouldn't give up on music!"
I won the battle but lost the war. I canceled my audition at Performing Arts with the promise that I'd continue with my voice lessons until I left for college. Reina and Roger grudgingly enrolled me in Pimm, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side that was, I later realized, chosen because it was the only other high school they'd ever heard of (and the only reason they'd heard of it was that a senior there had been killed in a rough-sex-and-cocaine romp in Central Park that had been all over the headlines the year before). Pimm wa
s full of sleek girls with trust funds who'd heave up their celery sticks in the echoing marble bathrooms every day after lunch. They'd all known one another since their preschool days and weren't in a big hurry to welcome a brunette, trust-fundless interloper who wore a size in the double digits and never made more than the occasional foray into their top two pastimes--shoplifting and bulimia.
I pretended not to care, but I did, of course, especially when I would watch my parents making music together. I pretended not to mind that my mother was out of the country more than she was in it, but of course I longed for her, even when I was fifteen and required by law to sneer at anything that came out of my mother's mouth.
"I'll be back by June," Reina told me the afternoon I arrived home from school and found her in the bedroom with her scuffed leather trunks with their brass padlocks open, getting ready for a three-month stint at the Staatsopera.
"Vienna?" I asked, hating the sound of my voice, hating the way I looked like her and how it seemed such a cruel joke that the instant I opened my mouth to sing, the best I could hope for was "adequate."
"Vienna," she confirmed. Her dimples flashed as she smiled, and her hair gleamed: she'd had the color touched up that afternoon, the way she always did before a long trip. "They've given me a contract for three operas, and you know how rare that is!"
"Three months is a long time," I said, my voice cracking. "You'll miss the school musical." We were doing West Side Story, with boys brought in from Episcopal, and I'd landed the part of Anita, a coup due mostly, I figured, to Pimm's lack of altos. But somehow the lowcut blouse and long black wig had given me a confidence I'd never felt in all my years of voice lessons. I'd been imagining opening night, my mother handing me a dozen red roses, her eyes wide with astonished approval. Kate, you're really good! she'd say.
Reina sat down on the satin coverlet on her bed, rubbed a scuff mark off the toe of one glossy black leather boot, then took my hands in hers.
"I'll miss you so much, you have no idea, but I have to do this now." She got to her feet and kept packing, boots drumming against the hardwood floor, skirt belling around her, and as she piled clothes and books and compact discs into her trunks, she explained about biology, about time, about how a singer has only so many years before her tone and control start to go. "First I'll lose my flexibility, and then..." She shuddered, a grimace of distaste pursing her painted red lips. "Character roles and fund-raising."
"Maybe you could come back for the weekend," I suggested. "For West Side Story."
"You know what flying does to my voice," she said. I hung my head. No Reina on opening night, no Reina for the Spring Ball, which I actually had a date for.
She snapped the latch of the trunk shut, then gathered her perfume bottles on the dresser, her long nails clicking against their cut-glass sides. Then she brushed my bangs out of my eyes. I squirmed away. I wanted her to hold me. I didn't want her to touch me. I didn't want her to leave. I didn't want her to ever come back.
The next morning I ignored her when she tapped on my door at six a.m., and pretended not to hear her whispering my name. I lay facedown on my bed, a copy of Lace under my left cheek, and thought about whether things could have ever been different. If I'd worn the makeup she'd bought for me, the soft leather boots and suede coat instead of baggy jeans and sweatshirts, would she have stayed? If I'd called myself Maria Katerina instead of Kate, if I'd practiced until sheer force of will had transformed my voice, my instrument, into something rare and beautiful, could it have kept her on the same continent as my father and me?
I pushed myself off the bed and looked down at the street, my forehead resting on the cool windowpane, my knees digging into the milk crates where I kept my novels, chewing at the ends of my ponytail as a limousine pulled up to the curb and my mother walked out the door. I watched as the driver spent fifteen minutes wedging all of her luggage into the trunk. I saw my father kiss her, then step back into the dark little doorway, handing her over to the driver, and her future: another airplane, another country, another opera, another three months of dying every night. The driver held the door. My mother shaded her eyes and looked up at my window. I love you, she mouthed. I bit down hard on my hair as she blew me a kiss.
Six
When I walked out onto the porch and into another perfect Connecticut afternoon the next day to collect the newspapers, I heard a car roaring down our cul-de-sac. My heart lifted as a bright red Porsche Boxster veered into the driveway. It was, I thought, the perfect car for a woman who drove maybe once a month. Badly.
"Janie!"
"So much for safety in the suburbs," said my best friend, scowling at me from behind her designer sunglasses. She wore a chocolate brown suede skirt that ended just above her knees, a soft cowl-neck cashmere sweater, and bright red cowgirl boots. Her hair was long and light brown streaked with honey and amber, her small mouth was glossed a shiny pink, her close-set eyes were artfully enhanced with liner and mascara, and her handbag and earrings probably cost more than my first year of college.
She sauntered up the stairs and peered into the house. "Hello, rug rats."
"Aunt Janie!" said Sam, who loved Janie.
"Janie!" crowed Jack, straining forward with his arms outstretched. Jack loved Janie even more than Sam did.
"Hello," said Sophie, air-kissing Janie's left and right cheeks in the manner of socialities the world over. She loved Janie more than both of her brothers put together, but even at four, she was too sophisticated for gushing. I led Janie and the kids into the kitchen, where we were working on a Welcome Home, Daddy banner to hang over the front door.
"Ooh, craft time!" Janie said, picking up a crayon and examining it like it was an artifact from another planet. She brushed glitter off a chair and took a seat. "Can you guess who brought you presents?"
"Aunt Janie!" shrieked the kids.
"Do you know who loves you more than your mother and father put together?"
"Aunt Janie!" they shouted.
"Guess who's having dinner at Per Se Friday night with a guy she's been out with three times and suspects might wear a toupee?"
"Aunt Janie!" said Sam and Jack. Sophie crinkled her nose. "What's a doupee?"
"Pray you never have to find out." Janie tapped Sophie's nose with the crayon and produced three gift-wrapped boxes from her Birkin bag.
The boys got remote-control race cars that they promptly began racing across the kitchen floor. Sophie got another custom-made outfit for her Uglydoll. Uglydoll was a rectangular blob of blue fur with buck teeth, yellow eyes, and small, protuberant ears that Janie had given to Sophie when she was born. I watched in awe as Sophie unwrapped a miniature cowboy hat, a lasso, bandanna, tiny cowboy boots, and a pair of chaps. "Chapter two hundred and thirty-seven," Janie growled in the gravelly southern drawl she'd assigned the toy years ago. "In which I ride a mechanical bull to glory."
Sophie giggled with delight and ran upstairs to dress her doll in his new finery.
"Got anything to drink around here?" Janie asked, rummaging through the frozen peas and chicken parts until she found the vodka she'd left on her last visit. The refrigerator yielded an empty carton of orange juice--a carton I swore had been full that morning. I waited until Janie's back was turned, mixed her a vodka and Pedialyte, and led her into the living room.
"So let's review," Janie said. She sank into the couch. (The decorator Ben had hired turned out to have had a vastly different view of what the word overstuffed meant than I did. I'd been thinking something comfortable in nubbly, washable linen. I'd ended up with a nine-foot sectional with taupe cushions so wide and deep you had to practically swim your way out of them.) Janie took a long swallow of her drink and winced, but luckily didn't ask me what it was. "You abandon me in Manhattan in favor of this hellhole."
"Give it credit," I said, smoothing the tassels on a throw pillow. "It's a hellhole with an excellent school district."
"The women here are a bunch of dopes who can't stop reproducing--and talking
about it," Janie continued with a shudder, "like the whole world wants to hear about their sore nipples."
I made a noncommittal noise, knowing what had my friend so freaked out. On her first visit to Upchurch, Janie had been cornered at the nursery school craft fair by Marybeth Coe, who'd described to her at great length how she was raising her newborn son without diapers by "getting in touch with his natural rhythms" and placing him atop what had formerly been a salad bowl when she sensed he was ready. Janie had proclaimed herself scarred for life by the experience. It had taken her weeks, she'd told me, before she could eat vinaigrette again.
"You're at least twenty miles from the nearest Saks, not to mention good deli," she continued. "Oh, that reminds me..." She rummaged in her bag and tossed me a gift-wrapped knish. I opened it up and took a big, blissful bite as the rant continued.
"You ditch me for bucolic little Bumblefuck, this allegedly safe haven, and the next thing you know, you're stumbling over dead bodies."
"I didn't stumble over her, I found her."
"Same difference," said Janie, shiny lips pursed in distaste.
I shrugged. It was so good to have Janie around that finding a dead body almost seemed like it wasn't too high a price to pay. "Can you stay?"
"Well, I think I should," Janie proclaimed, taking another swallow of her drink. "I don't think you guys are safe here all by yourself."
"And you're going to defend us?"
She reached into her bag again. "Mace," she said, showing me the spray can. "Straightening iron. All-day lipstick. BlackBerry. If the killer shows up, I'll just CC him on all my edit memos and bore him to death."
"Sounds like a plan," I said.
Goodnight Nobody Page 4