Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  While my dad searches for a podium for me to stand on, Michele eagerly scans the audience, pointing out her parents, who sit waving in the front. Alongside them sit her two sisters, the smaller one a girl about my age named Joanne, who has a book in one hand and looks bored.

  I am the first violinist, which means I’m supposed to lead the group. As we begin our piece, I look up at the others every once in a while to make sure we’re all playing together. Each time, Michele smiles reassuringly back at me. When we finish, the audience applauds enthusiastically, Michele’s family loudest of all. I can see my father in the wings. He isn’t clapping, but he looks satisfied.

  I gaze out from the stage, the last chords of the piece still in my head. My mom isn’t here—nothing can change that—but so many other familiar faces are, smiling back up at me. It’s a wonderful feeling, like an embrace, and relief and happiness. And belonging. There is no better feeling in the world. I want it to last forever.

  4

  The Concertino

  JOANNE

  I glared silently at my parents who were dragging me into Hickman Hall at Douglass College to go watch Michele play in her dumb summer music program. My mother pulled me by one hand. In the other, I gripped my paperback copy of Harriet the Spy, which I was reading for the third time in a row.

  Seriously. It was summer vacation. What were we doing here?

  All I wanted to do was go to the county fair, which we were missing right this very second. My mom never let me go on the good rides—the upside-down Ferris wheel or the roller coaster—because she was convinced that I would be thrown out and die, splattered across the fairgrounds. She never let us go on rides when we went to the boardwalk on the Jersey Shore, either, because they were rickety and run by convicts. But at least at the county fair, held just a short bike ride from our house, I knew she’d offer up a consolation prize like frozen custard or fried dough.

  Instead, here we were at Mr. K’s ASTA conference, to watch my thirteen-year-old sister, Michele, perform chamber music. I lagged behind my parents as they pushed through the doors into the bracingly cold, over-air-conditioned auditorium. A shiver went through me as my mother prodded me to keep up.

  “I’m cold,” I said, but I knew it was useless to protest, because my mother would just tell me it was hot outside and you weren’t supposed to wear long sleeves in the summer anyway.

  “It’s going to be hot later. You don’t need a sweater now,” she said, as if this logic made perfect sense.

  I wrapped my arms around myself as we settled into the scratchy pull-down seats with the nubby upholstery. Around us, teenagers were sitting in groups whispering and giggling. Up on the stage—a wide, low-slung expanse with a green curtain drawn against the back wall—Mr. K was talking loudly about how important it was to be quiet during the performance.

  I yawned and fidgeted in my seat as the first few groups played, daydreaming about frozen custard and Ferris wheels. But I was jolted back to reality by a commotion on the stage. Mr. K was clomping across the floor—my, could he do anything without making a racket?—looking for something. I watched as he noisily dragged over a podium to the center of the stage.

  Michele’s quartet drifted out from the wings: three teenage girls and Melanie, Mr. K’s daughter. Melanie was wearing a smock dress and shiny black shoes with ankle socks. I silently thanked heaven that I didn’t have to wear clothes like that anymore. In my second grade class, I had signed a petition so girls could wear pants to school. Melanie’s red hair was even shorter than mine, and her jagged bangs looked the way mine did that time I got hold of my mother’s scissors and started snipping away. I couldn’t reach the mirror while I cut and figured no one would notice anyway. When my mom got a look at me, she tried to yell, but she was laughing too hard.

  Melanie was tiny, so it was a good thing she had the podium to stand on. Hauling herself up the two big steps and positioning herself on the top of the box, she lifted her little violin with a theatrical flourish. The other violinists looked toward her expectantly. Michele, who so easily lorded her authority and wisdom over me at home, was gazing at this little girl with respect.

  I sat up in my seat as they began to play, watching with equal parts curiosity and envy. You could see that Melanie was better than any of them. She led them through the piece, through to its grand, galloping finale, and all four girls ended with their bows high in the air. My parents clapped madly. Mr. K, visible in the wings, didn’t clap at all. He gave a barely perceptible nod.

  “Can I read my book now?” I asked my mother. On the cover, Harriet the Spy wore a red hooded sweatshirt and big horn-rimmed glasses. She carried a marbled composition notebook under one arm. I had convinced my mom to buy me a notebook just like it, so I could go write observations about people the way that Harriet did. I was going to be a spy, too.

  I pulled the book onto my lap and starting searching for the page.

  “No,” my mother said.

  The truth is, while it was fun to see a girl my age play the violin, the music itself left me cold. At home, we never listened to classical music like that.

  Instead, whenever one of my sisters wasn’t practicing an instrument—before school or right afterward, when we grabbed a snack of Yodels at the kitchen table—we would crank up the scratchy transistor radio. It was perpetually tuned to WABC AM Top 40, blaring the Beatles and Three Dog Night. My big sisters had their favorite songs—there was “Michelle” by the Beatles that Michele loved and “Help Me, Rhonda” by the Beach Boys that spoke to Ronni. Later there would be David Bowie and the Allman Brothers and Yes and Led Zeppelin. The first time I ever heard about sex and drugs had been the year before, when I wandered into Michele’s red-, white-, and blue-flowered bedroom and she helpfully tried to explain the lyrics to the song playing on her portable radio, “Hey, Jude.”

  “What does ‘let it out and let it in’ mean?” I asked, as she sang along.

  “Let me try explaining again,” she said, sighing.

  Our parents were strict in lots of ways, but music wasn’t one of them. We gathered on the green family room couch to watch the Who smash their instruments on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the Doors infuriate their host on The Ed Sullivan Show after Jim Morrison sang “Light My Fire” and refused to change the line “girl, we couldn’t get much higher.” My dad listened to the Beatles’ “Yesterday” on his hi-fi stereo, a massive contraption encased in a wooden cabinet that dominated our family room. Later, my parents would take us to see Hair on a vacation in London, with a bunch of naked actors running around onstage.

  When the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar opened on Broadway not long afterward, Mr. K chaperoned a music-class trip to see it. My sisters, who both went, were ecstatic. He was repulsed. His face contorted in disgust as the overture began to play. He got more agitated when he peered into the orchestra pit and saw the electronic synthesizers that mimicked the sound of violins. “Where are the strings?” he sputtered. “Electronic music eez taking over real music!”

  He would never warm to rock and roll. He once described it to a reporter as “A bunch of wild savages running around a campfire and howling like a bunch of wild hounds.” Mr. K was on a crusade, one that anybody could tell you was crazy. He wasn’t going to let his students turn into “wild savages” who listened to god-awful music. He would teach them discipline, even if it killed him.

  Mr. K clearly lived in some other world than the one we inhabited. On our street, the boys were all growing their hair long. They worried about the Vietnam War and the draft. There was a rumor that the older brother of a neighborhood boy had died in the jungles over there. Some of the girls started showing up at school wearing silver POW and MIA bracelets with names of strangers etched into them. Our parents were arguing about the new president, Richard Nixon. The teenagers on our road tuned out the grown-ups with psychedelic music and tried to one-up each other as they bragged about how many people they knew who went to Woodstock. Every time we saw a rock b
and on television, I would say, mimicking the older kids, “That guy’s on drugs!”

  Mr. K’s world, meanwhile, was populated by clean-cut girls with Patty Duke flips and sensible shoes. His rule inside his music room was autocratic; his enforcement unyielding. He regulated his students’ speech (no talking); their dress (“No mini mini mini and no maxi maxi maxi!”); their fingernails (he chopped off nails that grew too long with the clipper he carried in his pocket). Still, he groused to a reporter that “the children today are not disciplined enough.” When his orchestra was invited to play in Washington, D.C., in early 1969, he seemed a world away from the race riots that had rocked the city in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination the year before. “I told them they’d work ’til they sweat,” he told a reporter about his students. “I put it to the students squarely, telling them to search their soul to make sure they really were ready to put in the extra work necessary for the concert.”

  Perhaps there was another reason Mr. K was so maniacal about maintaining control of the world inside his rehearsal room: he had so little control outside of it. The chaos of war protests and love-ins and drugs was crashing into the shoals of our little suburb. The fallout would ultimately threaten even his own younger daughter, who at that moment was barely a toddler. The accent and mien that so effectively intimidated his students inside his music room didn’t always translate outside of it.

  On his way to a music-teachers convention in Chicago in the late 1960s, as his plane idled on the tarmac at Newark Metropolitan Airport, he chatted up a stewardess, cracking what he thought was a mild joke: “I hope thees plane eezn’t going to Cuba.”

  A couple of minutes later, the pilot and two burly passengers escorted him off the jet and into a holding room, where the police questioned him for an hour. What they saw: a swarthy foreigner in a tight black suit with a little mustache and a sinister accent—a potential hijacker. What they got: a frightened immigrant. The closest thing he had to a weapon was the clipper he always carried in his breast pocket to cut his students’ nails. The cops let him go when he showed them something else he never left home without: his discharge letter from the U.S. Army.

  I wouldn’t realize it until much later, but he had reason to try to keep reality at bay.

  Back at school that fall, a letter from Mr. K arrived at our house. Every year, he gave a music aptitude test to fourth graders. The children who got the highest scores got personal letters from him, recommending that they play a string instrument. He invited their families to a meeting at the elementary school, to hear about instrument lessons kids could get in school for free starting in fifth grade.

  Michele had been the first one in my family to get the letter from Mr. K, and when it arrived, she was so happy that she screamed and danced around in circles with the envelope. Now Ronni got one of the letters, too. Our family went to the meeting, sitting on folding chairs in the cafeteria while Mr. K spoke from the stage. Near him, a man from the local music store set out a display of violins and cellos and flutes and bassoons, alongside a stack of rental forms.

  “A low score does not necessarily mean that the child has no musical aptitude,” Mr. K was saying. “However, eef your child performs well on the test, that eez no accident. That does not happen by chance. You cannot be genius and idyot at the same time.”

  Music teachers circulated as he spoke, peeking inside students’ mouths to look at teeth. Apparently kids who were going to need braces shouldn’t take up the oboe. Ronni was looking longingly at the wind instruments; she had already decided to play the flute. Meanwhile, Mr. K stood in front of the room, going on about music education, and discipline, and how important music is to civilized society. He was getting wound up now, talking as if music were crucial to survival itself.

  “Your child weel be pulled out of class to take a lesson,” he was saying. “Every effort weel be made not to take your child from a class they are struggling weeth. But let me say that een all my years of teaching I haf never seen music lessons bring about an academic collapse! Our music students excel at their classes. Eet instills wonderful discipline.”

  That’s when the room got real still. Mr. K had gotten to the part of his speech where he was telling the parents that if they sent their kids to him, he wouldn’t let them become wild savages listening to rock and roll and howling like wild hounds. They would learn to discipline themselves.

  “There eez a saying,” he said with a meaningful look at the hushed crowd of parents. “No keed who blows a horn weel ever blow a safe.”

  MELANIE

  “I’m sick of you wanting to have fuuunnn,” Daddy sneers one day when I complain about practicing while my friends are going to the movies. “The only fun that lasts, the only fun that means anything, eez the happiness you can achieve through hard work!”

  I sigh and go back to practicing.

  The problem is, I can remember a time when our family did do fun things together, at least once in a while. I still think about the last time our family went to the movies: a double feature of The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! and Bambi at the Turnpike Drive-In, when I was five years old, right around the time my mom got sick. My dad laughed louder than I’d ever heard him laugh before at the fumbling Russian Communists in the first movie. But Bambi proved an unfortunate choice.

  “Mommy? What’s going to happen to Bambi? Where is his mama? Who’s going to take care of him now?” Steph asked as Bambi ran searching through the snow, calling out for his mother.

  My mom reached for my dad’s hand, which was resting on the steering wheel.

  “It’s okay,” she said softly. “He still has his daddy, honey.”

  Now, at eight years old, I envy the kids whose families go to the movies or the bowling alley on weekends, or spend hot summer afternoons swimming at Dallenbach’s lake, or take vacations to exotic places like Florida.

  We don’t even go to the Jersey Shore anymore. It’s too difficult to travel with my mom. She can’t go anywhere, and there’s no money to pay for it if she could.

  “Daddy? How come we never go away?” I know the answer, but I ask the question anyway.

  “Eef you want to travel, then practice,” he erupts. “Your violin weel take you where you want to go someday.”

  I turn back to my music stand.

  The violin is slowly taking over my life. It isn’t like I have a choice. I can’t have friends over to play, and I’m too embarrassed to expose my home life anyway. Being the youngest in my grade, one of the “brainy” kids, and clueless about sports—nobody in my family could tell you what the NFL or the NBA is, much less tell them apart—compounds the humiliation. Put it all together, and it’s clear that a perfect storm of conditions is brewing that will ensure years of discomfort as a social outcast.

  I used to make friends easily. When I was three years old, before my mom got sick, she took me to the nursery school run by the high school home economics class. I still remember that first day, running to greet all the other children, and feeling sorry for another girl who was wailing and crying and refusing to let go of her mother. I would find out later that the girl was Joanne, though we didn’t meet then because she was so hysterical that the teachers sent her home. But now things have changed for me, too. By the end of second grade, painful shyness creeps in, the kind that keeps me from raising my hand in class ever, even if I’m sure of the answer. My teachers complain that I need to contribute more. I have become a quiet kid.

  Meanwhile, the violin comes easily to me. All my teachers know my dad, and they all know that I play. Every year my dad has me perform for my classmates, and I like the attention from kids who usually ignore me. There’s always lots of oohing and aahing over my little violin, and the other kids think it’s cool that I can do something special that they can’t.

  The day I play for my second grade class, one of the girls lingers to examine my violin. Miriam Simon is plump and bookish and has thick brown braids that reach all the way down her
back. We’ve occasionally been thrown together before: in the top reading group, sitting with the other social nobodies at lunch, or pretending not to care when we’re among the last to be picked for teams in gym class. She gets teased for wearing flood pants that she’s long outgrown, and I’m at the mercy of whatever is on sale in the Sears catalog, which accounts for my lime-green-plaid stretch bell-bottoms. I wouldn’t have been allowed to wear pants to school at all, except that they’re required for phys ed. And blue jeans are out of the question, being what my father calls “dungarees—what farmers wear to fling dung!”

  Miriam and I are soon spending recess together and picking each other first when it’s our turn to be team captain. A few times she invites me to her house after school. Her home is a wonderfully chaotic place full of noise and laughter, the TV always blaring some sports event or other, dog barking, brothers bickering. Her mom is frantically busy with six kids under the age of nine—a seventh will be on its way soon—yet she can always make room for one more around their giant dinner table. “That Melanie, I’ve never met such a loud, noisy girl!” her dad teases me as I sit silently, taking it all in.

  It takes a long time, but I finally screw up my courage enough to invite Miriam to my own house. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and Daddy is home.

  “Ahhh! So thees eez Miriam! Such a lovely creature! She has braids like the girls back een Ukraine. Oh, and cello hands… she has cello hands!” He holds up her hands to the light streaming in from the front window to examine them.

  “What’s a cello?” Miriam asks as we head upstairs to my room.

  “A big violin. It sits on the floor when you play it,” I begin, when suddenly Miriam freezes, her eyes fixed above my shoulder. I turn and follow her gaze. My mother is struggling toward us, attempting to walk, wearing leg braces and leaning on her bulky metal walker.