Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  Mr. K, on the other hand, was brutal even to his own kids. On the first day of Michele’s beginner orchestra rehearsals, he ordered his daughter Melanie, who like me was in kindergarten, to the front of the room. “Melanie has been playing violin as long as the rest of you,” he said as she climbed up onto the podium, clutching her tiny violin in one hand. “But to prove she eez not just here because she eez my daughter, she weel demonstrate.”

  Melanie played a few songs from memory, Mr. K looking on in stony silence. After she was done, she quietly retreated to her seat, and he instructed the orchestra to pull out the music for “Reuben and Rachel.” That was one of the easier pieces; it required only about half a dozen notes, and even the worst beginners could usually handle it. But when he raised his baton, somebody burst out crying in the back of the room. Mr. K halted the orchestra, surveyed the group, and fixed an angry gaze on the culprit: his daughter.

  “Melanie, what eez the matter weeth you?” he roared, his voice ricocheting off the walls and making the kids in the orchestra shrink into the backs of their metal folding chairs. “Why aren’t you playing? I brought you here to play, so play!”

  “I can’t f-f-find it, Daddy!”

  She could read notes—but not words. Apparently, that was not a sufficient excuse for Mr. K.

  Tales of Mr. K’s tirades were passed from one generation of students to the next. He was an equal-opportunity terror. When he first began teaching in East Brunswick a decade earlier, a violin student named Darlene Morrow was so nervous that she broke down in tears at her first orchestra concert, right on the stage. Mr. K came striding over, a smile on his face, and bent down to whisper in her ear as the audience looked on. What the audience didn’t know was what he was whispering:

  “You leesen to me, seester,” he was spitting, the smile for the benefit of the spectators never leaving his face. “You shot up you crying right now. You going to put your bow on thees string and you going to play best concert you ever played een your life. And you going to love eet.”

  She did as she was told.

  Whenever I heard stories like that about Mr. K, I just hoped he would never be my teacher. But my dad just shook his head and smiled. “Nobody ever said life is fair,” he told us.

  That was one of his favorite sayings, and really, it fit almost any situation. Bad grade on a test? Neighborhood kids saying mean things about you behind your back? Picked last for volleyball? Whatever injustice had been visited upon us that day, “Nobody ever said life is fair” pretty much covered the waterfront, usually delivered with a genial shrug and a laugh.

  Almost all the parents we knew felt that way. They didn’t care much if Mr. K was tough and unbending: he got results. So what if he used Old Country tactics? Whatever he was doing, it worked. The nuns at the Catholic school still thwacked their students for misbehaving. Mr. K got way better results, and all he did was holler.

  Nor did anyone—the parents or their kids—display the slightest curiosity about his life outside the music room. They knew he was Ukrainian, but nobody thought to ask how he ended up in our unremarkable New Jersey suburb, or when, or why.

  A 1961 article captures Mr. K in action.

  “Get the point?” the caption says. The students got it.

  MELANIE

  My mother comes home in a wheelchair. Neither she nor Daddy explains why. After my mom’s fall in their bedroom, I end up performing “Edelweiss” in the big auditorium without her. She doesn’t have the strength to accompany me. When we get home after the concert, her piano stands silent, untouched. Up until now, the big black grand piano had been her greatest happiness, the place where Stephanie and I would find her if we were looking for an afternoon snack or a kiss for a skinned knee. The house was always filled with the strains of her practicing Beethoven and Chopin or accompanying Daddy’s most advanced violin students on Mozart or Bach.

  Now, Daddy pushes her in the wheelchair to their bedroom, doing his best not to bump into the hallway walls along the way. She eats dinner there on a tray. “Mommy is tired,” our father says, shooing us out of the way and closing the door behind him. He doesn’t mention the wheelchair then, or the next day, or the day after that. But that night Daddy gives us our baths and tucks us into bed, and over the next few nights he starts taking over Mommy’s other duties as well.

  Before long, we settle into a new routine. At bath time, Daddy teaches us the names of our body parts in singsong Ukrainian: “Day ruku, day nohy” he says, and we lift our hands and feet to be washed. At bedtime, he reads us “Medovy Tolasik,” a Ukrainian version of “The Gingerbread Man,” and sings us Ukrainian folk songs. For breakfast he makes us scrambled eggs and toast—one of his specialties, another being Black Russians, a drink that is most certainly not for little children.

  When our hair needs cutting, he does it himself, chopping our bangs clear up to our hairlines in a hopeless attempt to make them straight. At dinner, after Steph and I carry our plates to the sink, he dashes around the kitchen, cleaning up in a frenzy so he can be ready for the private students who begin letting themselves in through the unlocked front door early every evening.

  A few days after the wheelchair makes its first appearance, my mom maneuvers herself onto the piano bench. But when she starts to play, she stumbles over the keys, and I hear her cry out. Soon she is hardly touching the instrument at all. My parents used to talk about how my mother was going to teach Steph piano one day, how they were just waiting until her tiny hands got a bit bigger. They looked forward to the day Steph and I would perform together, she accompanying me on the piano. But when Steph turns three years old—the age she is supposed to start lessons—nobody says a word.

  Not long afterward, I wake up screaming, torn from sleep by a nightmare: the Communists have come for Daddy. In my dream, soldiers in red uniforms invade our house. They storm up the front staircase, rush past the kitchen, muscle through the bedroom hallway with its Pepto-Bismol-pink-and-blue bathroom, and grab my daddy. They pull him away from me as he struggles mightily to break free. I reach out for him, straining to grab him, but the soldiers are too strong. I call out to him—“Daddy! Daddy!”—and realize I am still shouting for him as I wake up. I hear his feet hit the floor with a thump as he comes running into my room.

  “Shh! Lastivko, I’m here!” My father is at my bedside, whispering in my ear.

  Lastivko is Ukrainian for “little bird,” the first word of my favorite lullaby. When I was a toddler, the tune was so effective that I would protest, “No ‘Lastivko,’ Daddy! Please, no ‘Lastivko’!” because I knew I could never keep my eyes open once he started singing that soothing song.

  I’m not actually sure who or what Communists are. All I know is that they’re evil and that Daddy escaped from them when he was a boy, back in Ukraine. I once heard him tell my mother, over one of his end-of-the-day Black Russians, that they murdered his father and want him dead, too. What upsets me most is how scared my fearless father seems when he mentions them.

  “Always tell the truth,” he lectures Stephanie and me. “Unless the Communists come looking for me and I’m hiding under the bed. Then it’s okay to lie.”

  My night terrors will continue for years. I fall asleep easily in my bed with the pink fuzzy bedspread, but in the dead of night I jolt awake screaming—instinctively calling for Daddy, not Mommy. He always comes running as soon as he hears me crying out for him, always with the same comforting whispers, assuring his Lastivko that everything will be all right. The world is a bleak and frightening place in the dark of night, perhaps for my dad as much as for me. But no matter how exhausted my father is, he’s never mad or impatient with me then.

  During the day is a different story.

  “Okay, sis, now let’s do it again. But put more life into eet!” Daddy is yelling as I practice with him in his studio. “Use some energy, move a leetle, flex your fingers! Lift your bow up in the air!”

  Since my successful debut performance of “Edelweiss,” my daily dos
e of violin has gradually increased. Every night after dinner, I unpack Violet and head downstairs to Daddy’s studio. He’ll be waiting for me, on the edge of his chair, one hand clutching a conductor’s baton that he uses to poke me when my left wrist comes up or my right wrist goes down. A crooked bow gets an instant whack with the baton, as does a straight right pinky that should be gently curved instead. As I play, he bangs the baton on the music stand to keep the beat, like some kind of agitated human metronome. Tonight he is especially manic, pounding so hard with his baton that little slivers of wood break off and go flying through the air.

  “Okay, sis, again!” I hate when he calls me “sis”—his interpretation of American slang, which comes out sounding like Sease! when he says it—but I just wince and try to concentrate harder.

  “Don’t stand there dead, weeth fingers hanging like sausages on the bow!” He practically spits out the words.

  I take in a sharp breath but will myself not to cry. Daddy won’t stand for it. “Discipline yourself,” he says, when he sees me fighting back tears.

  My mother’s illness is wearing on us both. Daddy charged through the door a few hours earlier in a mad dash back from work so that he could drive the after-school babysitter home, then stop at McDonald’s to grab some dinner for everyone. Steph and I both hate fast food, but Daddy loves it. There is something about its sheer abundance—the row upon row of prepackaged hamburgers at the ready under warming lights, the fryer baskets filled to the top with French fries—that he finds irresistible.

  At least it’s better than the TV dinners we more regularly eat these days. On those nights, Steph and I sit glumly at the table, shooting each other glances as Daddy unveils our meals from the foil coverings. We survey the compartments, which have inevitably all spilled into one another, leaving us with peas covered in applesauce and gravy, all of it congealing in a lump as Daddy yells at us to eat it anyway.

  “Seet down! You haf not been excused! Eef you won’t eat them, I weel feed them to you myself.” My dad scoops up a forkful of peas and tries to shovel it into Steph’s mouth while she lunges for her glass of milk, missing it and sending it flying. My mother shrieks, Stephanie gags through tears, and my father jumps up, cursing, to get the paper towels. I run down the hallway and dive onto my bed, covering my head with my pink blanket and squeezing my eyes tightly shut, hoping it will all just go away.

  We miss Mommy’s cooking. Before she got sick, she loved to make elaborate dinners of ham studded with cloves and pineapple slices, potatoes au gratin, and fancy desserts. She learned from her mom, Grandma Brown, who was the sort of hostess who served cold cuts on silver platters and ketchup in china bowls. My mom comes from pretty fancy stock, Grandma Brown always reminds us. She grew up in a New Jersey village in a proper Protestant home, playing the church organ from the time she was big enough to reach the pedals. According to family lore, she can trace her roots back to both Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman and Richard Stockton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and a close friend of George Washington.

  My parents met while they were music graduate students at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. She was an all-American girl with piercing blue eyes, a gorgeous singing voice, and a taste for high heels. He was “a dashing Ukrainian man with a funny accent,” or at least that’s how she describes him. He had landed in the United States just a few years before, attending college in rural Kentucky, and “he had learned his English with a Kentucky twang. I thought it sounded hilarious.”

  Compact and muscular, with a hairline that was already receding, my dad was an avid hiker who stayed in shape by doing sit-ups every night. He was a romantic who wrote poetry but also a prankster who laughed at his own off-color jokes. His stern brow was set over eyes that sometimes seemed somber and haunted by private thoughts that she couldn’t decipher. But when he smiled his face was transformed. The years melted away, and he was suddenly a delighted, impish boy, with an expression that one of his students would later call “a mixture of glee and victory.”

  They went on dates to concerts, my mother towering over him in her heels. After he returned to a teaching job in Illinois, they courted long distance for a year. Their plaintive love letters flew back and forth over the thousand miles between them, until at last he found a teaching post in East Brunswick so that they could be together. “I am overjoyed about the job!” she wrote to him in the spring of 1958. They married a few months later, and she was hired to teach in East Brunswick, too. Their students promptly dubbed them “Lucy and Ricky,” after the I Love Lucy television show.

  When my mother became pregnant, they asked their classes to vote on potential names. I will be forever relieved that “Olga” didn’t win. When my little sister came along two years later, the orchestra named her, fittingly, Stephanie Joy. An old newspaper clipping shows a photo of my dad conducting the high school orchestra while my mother accompanies the group on piano, with me in a playpen between them. “All our babysitters are in the orchestra,” my mother explains in the caption.

  But the marriage has frayed since then. My mom spends too much, cooks too many side dishes, is simply too excessive in every way for my dad. He was born in 1928, right into the teeth of Ukraine’s Holodomor, a great famine when millions of Ukrainians starved to death. Growing up, he used to sneak into the workmen’s quarters at his grandfather’s farm at mealtime, bringing his own spoon to eat out of their communal pot. After he and his mother arrived in the United States as refugees, his mother’s “good” dishes were promotional giveaways from the local supermarket, and her glassware sported the logo of their neighborhood gas station. The ketchup bottle sitting on the table at every meal was diluted with water.

  One morning at breakfast, I reach over to my dad’s bowl of Life cereal to try to grab a few pieces, as I often do. This time, he slaps my hand away. That’s when I notice that as he is eating, he is picking little black pellets off his spoon and gingerly placing them on a napkin. A mouse had gotten into the cupboard, but he doesn’t want to waste perfectly good food just because of some droppings. My mother is horrified, but my father just shrugs: “I’ll eat around eet.”

  Not long afterward, I reach into my sock drawer, but it’s empty. The laundry is piling up. The pink wicker hamper in the bathroom is overflowing. My mom can’t manage the stairs to the basement laundry machines, and my dad is too busy at work to do it himself.

  “I’ve got a new game for you,” my mom says.

  At five years old, I am up for a new game. But this one doesn’t sound so fun. My mom tells me to carry the pink plastic laundry basket downstairs, load up the washing machine, and turn it on. The laundry room is near my dad’s studio. The big blue furnace is in there, too, and the water heater, both of which make frightening noises when they kick on and off without warning.

  “Oh, Ste-eph,” I sing out to my three-year-old sister. “We have to do the wash.”

  From then on, we play our game each week with Mommy. Down the stairs we go, me with the overflowing laundry basket while Steph trots along behind, picking up stray socks. I can’t reach the controls on the washing machine, and I am still just learning to read. So I jump on top of the machine, sit on my knees, and stuff the clothes inside, while Mom shouts out letters for me to find: “W!” when she wants the wash cycle; “C!” when she wants cold.

  From her wheelchair, my mom teaches me how to cook, clean, and do the Irish jig. She teaches me to cross the street by watching from the big bay window upstairs and giving me a thumbs-up when the coast is clear. Her hands are too tired to play the piano most days, but she teaches Steph and me how to sing melody and harmony for what seems like every show tune ever composed.

  At mealtime, Steph and I follow her as she rolls into the kitchen, and she shows us how to make dinners of baked beans covered in bacon strips and hot dog slices, or macaroni and cheese. After we help her mix up the ingredients, she wheels herself across the room, holding the casserole dish on her lap. I stand on a chair
so I can reach the wall oven, and she hands the dish up to me with a warning: “Careful! It’s heavy!” I practice my numbers by listening to her directions about where to turn the temperature dial.

  “Someday, I’m going to write a book: ‘How to Cook without Really,’ ” my mom says with satisfaction when dinner is in the oven.

  “Really what?” I ask.

  Jean and Jerry Kupchynsky pictured in the March 1960 Town Crier magazine. The article describes young Mr. K as a “muscular, sandy-haired young man who easily could have passed for the local high school football coach, instead of director of its string orchestra.”

  She laughs. “Really cooking. It will be about cooking from a wheelchair.”

  She sighs and plants a kiss on Stephanie, who cuddles on her lap in the wheelchair, a thumb in her mouth.

  In the coming years, my mother will miss every parent-teacher conference and mother-daughter event. She will never see an in-school pageant, play, birthday celebration, or musical performance. She will depend upon the kindness of acquaintances—she doesn’t have the opportunity to make many friends—to pick me up when it rains or snows. Even a working mom can often adjust her schedule to be there for her kids at least some of the time. We never discuss it. Mommy can’t, and that is that.

  On the day a tow truck comes to take away my mother’s ’57 Chevy, I watch from my bedroom window in confusion. She tells me that someday she might get another one, but then I hear her crying when she thinks I am out of earshot. I have no recollection of the grand piano’s disappearance. One day, it is simply gone.