Strings Attached

by Joanne Lipman

  “Hey, Melanie,” she sneers. “See that guy over there?” She points to a short boy with glasses who is vigorously practicing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Major, one of the most difficult pieces in the classical violin repertoire. “He’s really good, and he’s your competition. Let’s see if you can beat him!” She stalks off, leaving me with my smile frozen on my face.

  How could this girl hate me? Why is she so hostile? She doesn’t even know me.

  Confused, I hide behind my instrument and begin to warm up with some scales. This is a new and awful feeling, being singled out for derision. I had first noticed it this past summer at ASTA, when the camp photographer posted candid photos on the wall for parents to buy. It’s a coup to get your picture taken, and every year, kids walk up and down trying to spot themselves. But my dad always insists that the photographer take multiple portraits of him with Steph and me so he can get one where Steph isn’t laughing or his bald spot isn’t showing. “Why are there so many pictures of Mr. K’s daughters?” I heard one of the kids complain as I walked past the photo wall.

  That did it. When Daddy waylaid us for our next portrait session, his suit buttoned up neatly and his tie smoothed, Steph and I told him we didn’t want to pose. Daddy was furious. He exploded, then stormed off and refused to talk to us for days afterward. I felt terrible, writing him a long letter begging forgiveness, saying, “I’m sorry! I didn’t get a chance to explain my feelings of embarrassment about the dumb way I look in a picture and the way I feel when people complain…”

  Now, warming up for my first All-State audition, the feeling comes flooding back. The boy is playing the Tchaikovsky loudly, and his friends, I’m sure, are snickering at me. I try not to notice them, and my heart gradually stops pounding. After a few minutes I’m engrossed in my piece, Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto no. 1 in G Minor.

  That night, when Daddy gets home from the auditions, he’s wearing a huge grin. “Well, sis, congratulations! You made concertmistress of the All-State Orchestra.”

  “Concertmaster!” my mother yells from the living room, correcting him. “You can’t call her concertmistress. A mistress is something between a mister and a mattress.”

  My dad ignores her. “There eez a boy, a high school junior, and you outscored him by only a couple of points. Really, eet could haf gone either way. This eez his last year in All-State…”

  I know instantly whom he’s talking about. The boy whose friend taunted me.

  “I think eet would be the right thing to do to offer to split the concertmastership with him.”

  I consider what my father is saying. My dad has a firm philosophy about seniority. When he holds auditions in his own orchestra, he gives extra points to upperclassmen, five points for each year of seniority. He always says there has to be some reward for loyalty, some benefit to sticking it out through the years.

  He is waiting for my answer. I think about the girl with the beautiful hair, sneering, “Eeew, Melanie!” I don’t like to be singled out. Anyway, what’s the big deal about being concertmaster? Being awarded first chair seems to come easily. I couldn’t care less about it. At least, I don’t think I care.

  I nod.

  “Good,” he says. “You weel have other chances.”

  As far as my social life is concerned, I’ve hit bottom.

  My tiny neighborhood elementary school was located in a corner of East Brunswick that some kids consider “the other side of the tracks.” At my new school, Hammarskjold, there are wealthier kids, too. It isn’t cool to be smart, or musical, or especially talented at anything except athletics. I figure out the rules pretty quickly but have no hope of mastering them:

  A) Appearance and confidence override everything else.

  B) It’s crucial to have an insulating group of friends.

  C) It’s helpful to have parents who can assist with A and B by providing a dermatologist, an orthodontist, a ride, and a credit card.

  I don’t have any of those things. It’s hard to blend in when you’re a lime-green-plaid-stretch-pants-wearing music nerd. I can’t do much about my parents, but I do persuade my dad to give me an old clunker violin that I can stash in the music room semipermanently so I don’t have to parade around with my telltale instrument case on orchestra days.

  I learn how to hide my grades, too, concealing the A’s on assignments by covering them up with my palm as the teacher hands back papers, then quickly stuffing them into my notebook. In class, I never raise my hand or volunteer to answer a question. I adopt a hairstyle that hides part of my face from view, with my bangs swept dramatically over one eye. My mother calls it my “Veronica Lake look.” My dad calls it ridiculous.

  I haven’t given up hopes of reinventing myself. I won’t be able to imitate the pretty, wealthy, fashionable girls who saunter by confidently in cute jeans with their shirttails knotted around their midriffs. I’m just hoping I can break free of polyester clothes in colors not found in nature that come from the Sears catalog, arriving wrapped around cardboard and sheathed in plastic bags. Finally, my dad gives me money and allows Steph and me to shop for ourselves at the mall.

  Getting real jeans is a dream come true, even though they have to be loose enough to satisfy my dad’s sense of decency. I also get a pair of white painter’s pants, complete with the hammer loop and the long, skinny brush pocket where I keep a comb for hair emergencies. Tan corduroy gaucho pants and vest come next; all I need is a hat and a rope slung over my shoulder to look like I’ve just stepped off a cattle ranch in Argentina. A mint-green jumpsuit that makes me look like a gas station attendant becomes one of my favorite outfits. And when I am finally allowed to get a pair of “buffalo sandals”—tan suede two-inch platforms with beige leather straps—I sleep with them beside my bed for a week so I can see them as soon as I open my eyes in the morning.

  Baba is disgusted by my new clothes. “Vhy you not take-it nice dress? Vhy you wear-it always the pants?” she asks.

  She takes one look at my new sandals and laughs bitterly. “How you can walk like thees, een these crazy shoes? You looks like you have-it two bricks strapped on you feet!”

  I don’t care. I love my platform shoes, and I’m not going to take fashion advice from a woman whose wardrobe consists largely of floral-print babushkas. But Baba doesn’t let up. A few years later she has a similar reaction to my shoulder pads, snorting “You looks like you have-it two hard rolls under you blouse!”

  Hammarskjold is a lonely place for me. I have Miriam, of course, and some friends in the orchestra, but if Miriam is absent that day, then I have no one to sit with at lunch. Joanne goes to Hammarskjold, too. We laugh and joke at orchestra and outside of school. But inside school, we don’t connect much. Joanne excels in advanced classes that I’m not allowed to take. She seems to have lots of friends, most of whom aren’t in the orchestra. She’s confident, even around teachers and boys, which makes me feel more shy. Joanne is the type of girl who would surely laugh at me for acting uncool. Once, in seventh grade, she does invite me to a Girl Scout party, but the invitation is halfhearted.

  “Uh, we’re having this party?” She isn’t even looking at me. “With my Girl Scout troop? I guess I’m supposed to invite you?”

  I’m embarrassed to say how eagerly I accept.

  In my scrapbook, I paste an article about one of our orchestra concerts in Atlantic City. On the margin, I compile a list of my friends’ names. There’s Miriam, whom I’ve nicknamed Murray. And Michael Grossman, the cute boy our age who plays violin, and our family friend, John Stine, who plays the cello, and his big sister, LouAnn, a violist. Last of all, I write down Joanne’s name. Next to it, I pencil in a question mark.

  Not long after the All-State audition, at the end of eighth grade, my mother goes into the hospital again.

  This is becoming a familiar routine. Her health rallies, then deteriorates, in an almost predictable cycle. Whenever her illness gets out of hand, she checks herself in to the hospital, usually for a few weeks, whi
ch seems to stave off decline for a little while. Lately, she’s having more trouble transferring in and out of her wheelchair without help. I have been lending her a hand when she needs it, but that is no longer enough, and I don’t have the strength to lift her on my own.

  The morning my mother heads off to the hospital, I kiss her good-bye with my violin in one hand and turn back to the concerto I’m working on. “I’ll be back in a few weeks,” my mom promises as she leaves.

  Dad takes Steph and me to visit a few days later. My mother seems to be in good shape compared with most of the others. At forty-four, she still has the lustrous hair and piercing blue eyes that first caught my father’s attention back in college. She is a few decades younger than most of the other patients, the majority of whom have suffered strokes or accidents that leave them with debilitated speech and urine bags tucked beneath their wheelchairs. I hand my mom a box of chocolates to share with her roommates and gather up a laundry bag full of her clothes.

  For the next few weeks, that’s our routine. My mother calls every day. Once or twice a week, Daddy loads Stephanie and me into the car to visit. Each time we bring her magazines or chocolates or her favorite McDonald’s milkshake, and I take home her laundry, which I’ll wash and return to her on our next visit. Sometimes we bring our violins and play for her, and Daddy lets us count it as practicing, since she corrects our intonation. She introduces us to Millie and Mary, stroke victims who have lost the ability to speak. She’s giving them choral breathing lessons that are so effective that a local newspaper takes note, writing about the music therapy she introduces to patients.

  Between treatments, Mom organizes a patients’ choir that she conducts. She positions her wheelchair in front of them, looking out at a line of a dozen old stroke and accident victims, most in wheelchairs, their hobbled knees covered by afghans knit by wives or grandchildren. On our visits, she starts asking us to bring her sheet music instead of magazines. Just before the holidays, she leads her patients’ choir in a performance, all of them outfitted in Santa hats.

  Jean Kupchynsky conducts the Roosevelt Hospital Nursing Home patient choir in a holiday concert, circa 1977.

  It’s Christmas morning. I’m just getting out of the shower when Steph calls down the stairs, “The ambulance is here! Mommy’s home!”

  A big white emergency vehicle with flashing lights, its siren mercifully silent, has just pulled into our driveway. It has arrived half an hour early.

  I run up the staircase in a towel, my hair dripping on the carpeted stairway. Daddy is already pulling the living room couch out of the way to make room for the medics who will be carrying her inside. Steph, still in her pajamas, is jumping up and down in the open doorway.

  Just outside, I can see the neighborhood kids streaming out of their front doors to see what the commotion is about. A group of them gather on the sidewalk directly in front of our house, staring and pointing, as my mother is loaded onto a stretcher, strapped down, and carried across our lawn to the front steps. I feel the familiar blush of embarrassment rising in my cheeks.

  “Merry Christmas,” my mom sings, as if there is nothing unusual about her entrance. “It’s good to be home.”

  We couldn’t have gotten a better present. After a celebratory breakfast and a frenzy of gift unwrapping, Steph and I set to making my mother’s annual Christmas meal—roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy—while she happily calls out instructions. My mother’s gift to me, appropriately enough, is my own copy of one of her favorite Fannie Farmer cookbooks, inscribed in a hospital volunteer’s unfamiliar handwriting: “To Melanie, as a supplement to Betty Crocker. Love, Mother.” My dad plays records of Christmas carols.

  Still, even though she is in high spirits, I can see that my mother is struggling. She’s trying mightily not to betray how weak she is. Despite being in the hospital for several months and daily physical therapy, she is frailer than when she had checked in. Her hands aren’t strong enough to play carols on the piano, as she used to do when I was little.

  We have barely finished dinner when, at six P.M., the ambulance rolls up our driveway again.

  My mom is going back to the hospital. “Just a few more weeks,” she promises as she leaves.

  10

  Stage Fright

  JOANNE

  In my old photo album, there is a yellowing snapshot of me at age fourteen, all knobby elbows and frizzy hair and glasses, painfully skinny in a purple gown, the very picture of excruciating adolescence. I am standing awkwardly in my family’s front hallway, my cough-syrup-colored dress clashing with the brown-striped wallpaper behind me. Yet in the photo, I have a huge grin on my face.

  I remember the moment exactly. After my disastrous youth orchestra audition, I had developed a horrendous case of stage fright. I froze up every time I had to play for anyone, even for my sisters or my parents. If my mother so much as spoke on the phone while I was practicing, my hands would start to tremble and my bow arm would seize up with fear that the caller might overhear me, the notes croaking and the music sounding like a dying frog.

  Alone, I practiced for hours, advancing steadily through the standard repertoire: Telemann Concerto, Reger Sonata, Bach Cello Suites transcribed for viola. But when anyone was listening, even Mr. K at my lessons, the dread that started in the pit of my stomach ballooned like some sort of monstrous tumor, taking over my muscles, my nerves, my organs, until it squeezed out every iota of music in my body. I was paralyzed.

  The first audition after my tryout trauma was for Senior Regional Orchestra, a qualifier for All-State Orchestra. I was supposed to be a shoo-in for principal violist. But when I woke to the insistent ringing of my alarm clock that morning, my head felt like it was being pinched between pliers while simultaneously being suspended upside down on a broken Ferris wheel—the kind my mother had warned me about years ago. My eyes refused to focus. When I sat up, my body lurched forward while my brain sloshed backward. I pulled off my lime-green covers and stumbled toward the bathroom, but before I could get a look at myself in the mirror, I fell to the floor in a dead faint.

  My parents found me there, crumpled on the linoleum tile next to the washing machine. After much whispered discussion and desperate entreaties from me after I revived—“I feel fine! I can’t miss the audition!”—they allowed me to go. But they both came along, insisting that I lie down and rest in the leather backseat of my dad’s brown Oldsmobile 88 on the way. They kept watch over me while I warmed up and then sat outside the audition classroom when it was my turn, as if they were holding vigil for an accident victim in an emergency room corridor. Afterward, they took me to the doctor. Diagnosis: nerves.

  I was too embarrassed to admit my fear to anyone, especially my intimidating teacher. Mr. K never acknowledged that he knew my secret. If he noticed my cramped gait and sweaty palms, he didn’t let on. But one day not long afterward at my lesson he announced, “You weel play solo at next orchestra concert. Eet eez all arranged.”

  He pulled out one of my favorite pieces, Tema con Variazioni, a pretty Renaissance-era work composed by Marin Marais, a court musician at Versailles. The piece wasn’t originally written for viola—not much is—but it had been transcribed by Paul Doktor, the violist I idolized and followed around like a groupie. His autograph was one of my prized possessions.

  The day of my solo performance, I woke up with creepy silent fireworks exploding in front of my eyes, splashing garish splotches of color anywhere that I tried to focus my gaze. I took deep breaths to calm myself before gingerly stepping out of bed. I forced myself to choke down an English muffin. After showering, I spent two hours trying to tame my hair into submission. My arms were shaking while I maneuvered the lime-green blow-dryer and stared back at the fearful reflection in the mirror in my bedroom.

  When we pulled into the high school parking lot, I smoothed my purple dress, pulled back my shoulders, and pretended to feel a confidence I didn’t remotely possess. I pushed through the rehearsal room door, viola case swinging
behind me. Mr. K greeted me with a hug.

  The concert featured the orchestra playing typical Mr. K music, heroic and patriotic and celebrating the triumph of right over might. After Richard Rodgers’s World War II–inspired “Victory at Sea,” I quietly stood up and headed to the wings to prepare for my piece.

  Backstage, I felt my bravado crumbling. I paced back and forth in the wings, unable to concentrate on the Mozart echoing through the auditorium now. The increasingly familiar feeling of panic set in. I could taste bile in the back of my throat.

  That was when I felt an arm slip around my shoulder.

  “Shh,” Mr. K said. “You worked hard. You are well prepared.”

  His left arm firmly encircling me, his right hand holding my own, he fell in beside me, matching the rhythm of my pacing, whispering in singsong in my ear.

  “You weel have fun. You weel go out and have a good time.”

  Back and forth we paced in the wings. In the distance, a string quartet was playing onstage. Beyond the footlights, hundreds of pairs of eyes were watching, paper programs were rustling, a few muffled coughs were echoing faintly from the back rows. But backstage, it was just the two of us. It was just Mr. K and me now. My own face felt rigid with fear, but when I looked at his, I saw serenity. Certainty.

  “Shh,” Mr. K said again.

  Onstage, the group before me was finishing up, and applause filled the hall.

  With a gentle nudge, Mr. K propelled me from the wings.

  “I’m proud of you” was the last thing he said, looking into my eyes as I drifted away.

  From the front of the stage, I looked out at the full auditorium. I had that feeling of approaching the very top of a roller coaster—when you hear that ominous click click click click sound on the tracks before you plunge into a free fall. The taste of bile was making a return appearance in my mouth. Whenever I was at an amusement park and heard that click click click click of the roller coaster, I always looked frantically around for an escape route, reeling at the dizzying sight of trees and people on the ground and concession stands all receding into tiny primary-colored plastic toy figures. Can I get off?