Some families, the leftover farm families, had been there for years. But most had moved in more recently, like my parents, who bought our brand-new house because it was near my dad’s first job. Their college friends back in Queens had laughed at them for settling in “the sticks,” and it’s true that when you stood in our front yard, you could hear the gunshots from the cattle slaughterhouse down the road. But my parents didn’t mind. The neighborhood was new, the families were young. Like my dad, the other men in our neighborhood were up before the sun, commuting to bigger towns or taking the bus to New York City. The kids—three or more to each family—spilled out into the streets, roller-skating or playing curbside basketball when the weather was good, huddling at the corner school bus stop when it wasn’t.
East Brunswick barely had a music program back when the foreign teacher with the impenetrable accent and the funny last name came to town. The school board had figured he could whip up a marching band to cheer on the football team or maybe pull together a glee club. Instead, he ordered up storerooms full of violins, violas, and cellos and began drilling his students on the finer points of Mozart and Bach. By the time my big sister started the violin a decade later, his program was giving lessons to five hundred kids.
Mr. K ruled with an iron will at East Brunswick High School, an inelegant complex of low-slung brick buildings situated atop a hill, with a steep driveway and a sloping lawn perfect for sledding down on cafeteria trays in the winter. There, in the cavernous practice room, where the dust of violin rosin was so thick you could see it swirling in the sunlight slanting through the grimy windows, his voice would echo clear into the disinfectant-scented corridors. He was so loud that the football players running laps around the outside of the building would catch snippets of his shouted commands every time they passed.
“Who eez deaf in first violins?” you’d hear him yell.
If you peeked through the door into the rehearsal room, you’d see him putting the orchestra through its paces at almost any time of day. Standing atop his little box, waving his big stick wildly, he’d lurch forward like he was set to grab the kids, his tie flying, his sleeves pushed up past his elbows, his mouth wide open, spit flying right into the students’ faces. When somebody played a wrong note, he’d stop the whole lot of them, glare at everyone in turn, and snarl, “Who eez slob who play wrong note?”
The kids weren’t even sure what he wanted half the time, what with the Boris Badenov cartoon-villain accent that made him sound like he was plotting to foil Rocky and Bullwinkle. “Cellos sound like hippopotamus rising from mud at bottom of reever!” he screamed at the players fumbling in the back of the section when they drowned out the better players in the front. Backstage, he yelled at the students waiting to go on for acting like mahnyiaks. After much consternation and speculation—was a mahnyiak some kind of strange Ukrainian marsupial?—one of the violinists finally screwed up her courage to step forward and ask him.
“Idyot!” he replied. “Everybody knows what mahnyiak eez. A crazy person. M-a-n-i-a-c. MAHNYIAK!”
Every spring, he corralled all the kids into a big concert, attended faithfully by the families that liked to think themselves the more cultured residents of town. The performance began with the beginner orchestra and culminated in a performance by his showcase high school orchestra.
That’s why we were here, with me squirming in my seat as my parents proudly watched my sister Michele take her place in the second violins. To my great annoyance, Michele, the oldest of the three Lipman girls, was pretty and smart and so impeccably behaved that she charmed every grown-up we knew. Of course, the adults weren’t there to see when she picked me up by the armpits and dangled me over the upstairs banister, teasing and threatening to throw me down the stairs.
But that day, up onstage, Michele was the one who looked terrorized. She was peering at Mr. K through frightened saucer eyes. It seemed as if she weren’t breathing. I knew she sometimes came home from orchestra rehearsals in tears, and that she dreaded that the conductor might pick on her. I knew she was even more of a perfectionist than usual when it came to practicing her violin. I finally understood why.
Not far from Michele onstage sat a tiny girl no bigger than me. She was wearing a pretty pinafore with a big bow in her short red hair, and holding the smallest violin I had ever seen. It looked like a toy. Her legs didn’t reach the floor. The “Twinkle” triumph finished, Mr. K was now waving her over to the front of the stage. She hopped off her chair and walked toward him. Remarkably, she didn’t seem afraid. As he helped her climb up onto the podium, I could see she was smiling right at him.
The year before, my parents had taken us all the way to Philadelphia to see The Sound of Music. The movie was long and we were wearing our most uncomfortable fancy dresses, but the three of us—aged three, six, and eight—loved it so much we sat through it twice in a row. Now, up on the podium, the tiny girl with the tinier violin began to play. And out from her hands came a remarkable sound: the strains of “Edelweiss.”
As the audience murmured in astonishment, my mother leaned down to whisper in my ear. “That girl is just about your age,” she said. “Her name is Melanie. She’s Mr. K’s daughter.”
MELANIE
“Melanie! Time to play violin! Let’s go!”
I can hear my dad yelling. Looking back to the very beginning, to when I first learned “Edelweiss” and my family was still whole, that is what I remember. He is downstairs in his basement studio, calling for me to start my lesson. I am upstairs on the floor of my bedroom, playing with my Barbie dolls. My dad has been teaching me the violin for a few months now, since I turned four years old, though he disguises my lessons as a game we play together in his studio every night after dinner.
I never used to be allowed in his studio, with its teetering stacks of music, jumble of stereo equipment, and string instruments and cases of every size, spilling out across the couch and floor. But now every night I enter the inner sanctum, just like the big kids who parade through our house every weeknight from six until ten P.M., bumping up and down the stairs and scratching the walls with their cases as the strains of Vivaldi and Mozart fill the air. I like playing the violin, but I love getting to spend time with my dad and having his attention all to myself.
“Eez time for windshield wiper game,” he says, positioning my right hand on the violin bow. “Pinky curved on top. Now sweep the bow back and forth een the air, like windshield wiper. Here we go, one, two, one, two, back and forth, back and forth.”
“My pinky hurts, Daddy!”
“Just a few more, back and forth, back and forth… Eet weel make your pinky stronger! Keep going! Keep going! Okay… There, you’re done. Good girl!”
The pain is worth it. I live for those last two words.
“Melanie!” Daddy is calling again, impatient for my lesson to begin. I can still hear him, all these years later, his words echoing from the basement while my Barbie dolls stare up at me from the pink carpet. He’s anxious because we are preparing for my first solo performance, when I will play “Edelweiss,” my favorite song, at the annual spring concert. He says it that way—“first”—as if there will, of course, be many more. My mother has arranged the music herself, penciling the notes on manuscript paper and composing a piano part, too, so that she can accompany me on the stage. Sometimes my mom and I practice together, with me on my one-quarter-size violin that we nicknamed Violet, and she on her beloved big black grand piano that seems to swallow up the whole living room.
Carefully, I put my Barbie dolls in their place on my bookshelf and slide the little black violin case from under the bed. I flip open the latches, gently grasp Violet by the neck, and unhitch the bow from its felt-lined clasp. That’s when I hear the thud. And then crying. Feet come pounding up the stairs, and at first I think that Daddy is mad at me for not coming right away when he called me. His favorite expression is “When I say jump, on the way up ask how high!” But the feet stop at the end of the hallway, at my paren
ts’ bedroom.
Now I can hear my mother sobbing and my father trying to calm her down. His voice sounds different than usual. My father never talks like other kids’ dads. He’s loud, has a thick Ukrainian accent, and gives orders that make me, my mom, and my little sister, Stephanie, snap to attention. People always turn to stare when they hear him, which I figure is because he is important, though Mom says it’s just because they can’t understand a word he is saying. But now, his voice sounds… shaky. I have never heard him like this before. I creep down the darkened hallway, my feet soundless on the thick brown carpeting, and stop outside their door. It is open a crack, and I peer inside.
At first I can’t understand what I’m seeing. There is a shoe, an elegant high-heeled pump, lying on its side on the floor. And a pair of legs crumpled nearby. One foot is still wearing the other shoe.
Mommy and Daddy fight a lot about how much money my mother spends on her wardrobe. Her closets are filled to bursting with brightly colored dresses, funny-shaped boxes holding hats that have little nets and veils hanging from them, and stacks and stacks of shoes. Sometimes she lets me play dress-up and I wobble around the room on something called a Cuban heel, which has an exotically curved heel set almost in the center of the sole. Lord only knows how anyone can walk on those things.
She loves costume jewelry, too. She says it is important to always look nice, which is a corollary to her other rule: “Always be a lady!” Before I was born, when she was a school music teacher, she prided herself on never letting her class see her wear the same thing twice. And she made sure to shop for dresses with interesting backs. When she conducted her chorus, she always said, the audience deserved to have something nice to look at other than her behind. Daddy never stops fretting and fuming about how much she spends, so usually I close my bedroom door and pull out my Barbie dolls when the screaming and door slamming start.
But now I am puzzled. Why isn’t my mother getting up? Is she hurt? Daddy can fix anything. Why isn’t he fixing this? Something is wrong, but I’m not brave enough to push open the door to find out what.
Later, I will learn that this wasn’t her first fall. When she was pregnant with my little sister, Stephanie, she lost her balance as she and Daddy were leaving the house and tumbled down the four concrete steps to our driveway. My father rushed to her side and scooped her up in his arms, cursing and berating her for being a clumsy fool. It was only after they were both safely in the car that my mother noticed his hands shaking uncontrollably as he attempted to put the key in the ignition, while tears ran down his cheeks. Daddy has never been a crier. But he is a man of strong emotions—quick to anger, fiercely protective. And he must have known then that for all his cussing and yelling, this was no ordinary fall. It would be a long time before he admitted it, but something was deeply wrong.
But on that day, the day I hear the thud while waiting to practice with my dad for my first solo performance, I know none of that. As I stand on the worn brown carpet peeking through the crack in my parents’ bedroom door and hear my mother sobbing while Daddy tries in vain to comfort her, all I can see are my mother’s legs, one shoe still on and the other lying on the floor nearby. My mother will never walk on her own again.
Getting ready for her solo debut, five-year-old Melanie and her father practice “Edelweiss” together. “At first I was worried about starting her,” Mr. K says in the article, but “almost before I knew it—certainly before she could read words—she was reading music.”
2
The Rehearsal
JOANNE
My parents had a firm rule: Teacher is always right. If your teacher tells you to jump off a cliff, that’s what you do.
Once, in kindergarten at Memorial Elementary School over on Innes Road, my teacher sent me to the corner of the cloakroom for talking out of turn during story time. “Don’t come out until I tell you,” she said, and then promptly forgot about me. You couldn’t blame her. I was abundantly forgettable: quiet and shy and perpetually drifting through life in a fog. So I sat silently in the little wooden chair pushed up against the hospital-blue-painted coat cubbies. I stared at the Lost in Space lunch boxes and Bonanza Thermoses tucked inside the cubbies, wondering how long my sentence would last, even as the fire bell started clanging and everybody in class pushed back their chairs with a clatter and—single file, everyone!—lined up to leave. The teacher turned out the lights as she shut the door behind her.
I waited for the teacher to come back to fetch me. She didn’t.
I could hear all the other classes emptying out. Footsteps hurried down the hall. The kids were whispering to one another as they filed out quickly through the fire doors into the parking lot. Their voices floated back to my darkened corner of the cloakroom, hanging in the air around me. Then the corridors were empty. I heard the heavy fire doors swing closed, the loud click of the latch echoing through the abandoned halls. The classroom was silent. I stayed in my seat.
This must be the punishment for speaking without raising my hand, I thought. Death by fire.
I sat still, imagining my fate in gory detail. Was the fire outside the door yet? When would I see the flames? What would it feel like? I strained to listen for fire engines, but none came. I guess this is how it will all end. I was prepared to accept the consequences: Teacher clearly knew what she was doing. So I was puzzled and more than a little surprised when the students started to file back in. Not as surprised, however, as the teacher was when she found me, still cowering in my chair. It was only afterward that I learned that there was such a thing as a fire drill.
The teacher apologized to my parents, but they didn’t pass the apology along to me. They didn’t see any need to. It didn’t matter to them that I actually believed I was going to die. You don’t question a teacher. You just follow orders.
Maybe that explains why my parents didn’t seem nearly so scared of Mr. K as I was. After my first sight of him at my big sister’s concert, I did everything I could to steer clear of him. When I tagged along with my mom for orchestra carpool duty, I hid in back of her, poking my head out from behind her waist when I thought nobody was looking.
It was hard to avoid Mr. K if you were anywhere in his vicinity. For starters, he must have been the biggest man you ever saw—and the loudest. He didn’t walk like normal people, either. He stomped.
He stomped onto the stage, every step sounding like an angry ballerina slamming the floor with wooden pointe shoes. He stomped off the stage, so loud you could still hear him when he disappeared into the wings. He stomped up the steps to rehearsals, pounding his feet so that the whole staircase shook. The clamor of his stomping matched the volume of his voice, which apparently was permanently stuck on HOLLER.
“Orchestra eez not democracy,” he would yell. “Eez benign dictatorship.”
I watched from the back of the rehearsal room one afternoon as he stomped up on the box in front of the orchestra, then down again. The box was called a podium, my mother told me. It was made of scuffed, worn-out tan wood. It was hollow on the inside, so when he clomped up on it, it made a great, echoing wallop of a sound that boomed like a firecracker and bounced off all the walls of the big room and made everybody sit up like they’d just been smacked.
With his black suit jacket off and the tendons in his neck bulging from the top of his collar, he stomped up on that podium, and all the kids snapped to attention, with violins propped on kneecaps. When he clomped off, they scrambled to tuck their instruments back under the crooks of their arms. On he stomped, then off again. The kids would whip their instruments up, then down, then up, then down. All the while, he yelled.
“Snap to attention!” He stomped on the podium.
The kids bolted up straight in their seats, instruments propped up on their knees.
“Rest!” He stomped down, and the kids scrambled to get the instruments under an arm again.
“Attention!” He clomped up again.
“Rest!” Down he went.
“Attent
ion!” Up again.
“Rest!” Down once more.
“Again!” Up he went.
“Fiddles up!” Standing on the podium, he held his arms up high.
The kids whipped those instruments up to their chins, bows on strings, trying not to move or make a sound, as if they were playing a giant game of “Mother, May I?”
“Fiddles down!” He lowered his arms. Instruments came flying down onto laps, tucked under arms.
“Fiddles up!” More scrambling.
“Fiddles down!”
Mr. K’s booming voice bounced off the walls and made the panes of glass in the doorway shake. Why he had to bellow like that was a mystery to me, because other than his stomping and his screaming, the room was absolutely silent. The kids were far too terrified to speak.
“Oh. My. God.”
Apparently, somebody had messed up.
Mr. K let his arms drop and slowly shook his head from side to side. “You are most un-DEEZ-eeplined group I haf ever seen.”
Later, when we sat down for dinner, my sister Michele was still smarting. “Why does he have to be so nasty?” she said to no one in particular. My mom was clearing away our appetizer of canned fruit cocktail. She set out the main course of flank steak with Hawaiian Medley frozen vegetables, which Michele promptly sneaked under the table to our dog, Skippy, the family mutt who was the color of peanut butter. All of us kids secretly fed our vegetables to Skippy: the frozen peas with little squares of carrots, the canned corn, the dreaded brussels sprouts. Skippy must have been the healthiest dog in all of New Jersey.
Michele had never met anybody like Mr. K. Our own parents didn’t often scream, or stomp, or call us names. Ours were sensible parents, the kind who carpooled in a faux-wood-paneled station wagon, and who played bridge with their friends on Saturday nights, and who didn’t believe in spanking children. My dad’s harshest threat when I misbehaved was to tease, “I’m going to put ice cream in your face!” One time he actually did it, though he stopped when I broke out in great heaving sobs because I thought it was an actual punishment given to terrible children.
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