Mr. Doktor gave me two-hour-long lessons in his living room overlooking Broadway, where the streets were alive with abuelas yelling at children in Spanish. While he taught, my parents sat doing crossword puzzles on his couch. At each lesson, I popped a fresh cassette into my portable tape recorder, so I would be able to listen to his instructions again later when I practiced.
When we were finished, my dad would say, “Let’s have an adventure!” and off we would go, usually to a fancy restaurant, where the lunch specials were affordable. I loved those afternoons, taste-testing the cheesecake at Maxwell’s Plum with its glamorous mirrored walls and ferns, or twisting pasta on my fork at Patsy’s Italian Restaurant with its signed photos of Frank Sinatra. Sometimes we stopped at the Frick Collection before we went home, or splurged on twofers for a Broadway show or on a backstage tour at Lincoln Center.
Soon after I started lessons with Mr. Doktor, I was named principal violist of All-State Orchestra. First in the state! Melanie was concertmaster of the orchestra again, of course. It was a record year for Mr. K, with ten East Brunswick kids in All-State Orchestra and two of us leading the string sections. Half of us scored well enough to be chosen for All-Eastern Orchestra, which pulled together the top high school musicians in a dozen states up and down the coast.
It was around then that my braces came off. Then I figured out how to stick contact lenses in my eyes. In a happy confluence of events, big ’80s hair was making its first appearance, a fortunate development for my out-of-control frizz. I was still an honors-class music nerd, but my social life improved.
That summer, I picked up a job as a camp counselor at the local swim club. The club was dominated by a large, L-shaped pool, which was surrounded on both sides by grass that was crushed into unappealingly scratchy turf. Nearby, the alarmingly warm kiddie pool was hidden behind a brown wood fence. A few tired paddleball and tennis courts sprouted from the crab grass out back.
Nate, the middle-aged guy who ran the snack bar and should have known better, threw a party at his house for the counselors one night. I lost count of the Seven-and-Sevens I downed during the barbecue. I don’t remember much after that. I’m told that the other teenage counselors threw me into the pool, fully clothed, to sober me up, then had to dive in to save me when I sank to the bottom. The water-sports counselor drove me home, and I puked all over her father’s brand-new car on the way there.
“You’ve learned your lesson,” my mother said when I stumbled through the door, caked in vomit. She undressed me and threw me into the shower. Ronni took out my contact lenses. I fell into bed. My mother woke me up a few hours later to go back to work.
“Rise and shine,” she said cheerfully as I struggled to sit up, my face as green as my shag carpet and my head about to explode. She ticked off brisk instructions: Get to work early. Stay at work late. Be cheerful no matter what. I got her point: Suck it up.
“I don’t need to punish you,” she said, taking an appraising look at the dehydrated, nauseated, Kermit-colored creature before her. “You’re doing it to yourself.”
My mother was right. I never again got falling-down drunk. I joined the school newspaper and the literary magazine. I did all my schoolwork as soon as I got home, the better to carve out a couple of hours to practice before rehearsals. But I did stay out past curfew on occasion. Once, my mother spent a couple of frantic hours on the phone in the middle of the night, prying an unlisted phone number out of a telephone operator as she tried to track me down at an unchaperoned house party.
I thought my parents were way too strict, but I did find one loophole. I was allowed to push the rules—stay out extra late, or take the bus into New York City—as long as I was with a Responsible Boy. A Responsible Boy was defined as one they trusted, which was further defined as somebody with good grades who played the violin. My orchestra friends Michael and Paul became my constant companions. With Michael I went to see Queen and Yes in Madison Square Garden. With Paul I got to go to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where the marijuana smoke was so thick that I almost blacked out after that first scene with the giant singing lips.
The orchestra boys were just friends; my crush was on a Camaro-driving upperclassman who dreamed of becoming a diesel mechanic and had no idea of my existence. Still, I was annoyed when Michael started dating Melanie and had less time to spend with me. “I don’t like that girl,” I wrote in my diary.
In a creative writing class at school that fall, our assignment was to write new lyrics to a familiar tune. I chose “Hava Nagila”—the song you dance the hora to at weddings and bar mitzvahs—and renamed it “The Jewish Mother’s Song.” Here’s how it went:
Straight A’s, They told me, Straight A’s,
They told me, Straight A’s, They told me
That’s what you should get!
Good grades, my child
No run-ning wild
Stay sweet and mild
You’re not eighteen yet!
Show up the Goldberg’s son
You can be number one!
Don’t shlump, now eat your food
Chicken soup is good for you!
Shmatas will never do
I only want nice clothes for you
Find yourself a Jewish boy
Who plans to be a doctor.
Go! Find!
GO AND FIND A
Jewish boy with lots of money
Faithful, sweet, and calls you honey
He won’t beat you
or act funny
And who will be—absolutely!—
The perfect son-in-law!
Melanie and Miriam weren’t impressed with my expanding social life. One day, I showed up for our weekly quartet practice, now held during school hours, to find I’d been replaced by another violist.
Miriam and Melanie “told Mr. K that I smoked cigarettes and pot!!” I wrote in my diary with great indignation.
But there was one person at school who took my side, who believed I was being unfairly maligned and had faith that my inner common sense would prevail. I never would have expected it. One person had my back, no matter what.
“Mr. K wouldn’t believe them,” I wrote.
After a few weeks of exile, I was back in the quartet.
MELANIE
Quartet without Joanne just isn’t the same. For a few weeks, we get other players to fill in for her. They’re talented, but something is missing.
It’s true that Joanne is different from the rest of us. My life revolves around the orchestra. All my friends are musicians. Even though there are almost eight hundred students in our grade, to me there may as well be just a few dozen. Joanne, on the other hand, has friends beyond the music room. At lunch, she sits with kids I don’t know in the cafeteria, some of whom head out afterward to the smokers’ patio. She goes to parties that I’m not invited to. I did go to a keg party once, but only because my dad, with his limited command of English, thought it was a “cake” party.
I can’t help but feel funny when Joanne goes to rock concerts in New York City with my boyfriend, Michael; concerts given by bands I’ve never heard of that I wouldn’t even dream of asking for permission to attend because I know what the answer would be. They both say they’re just friends, and I’m pretty sure she’s not interested in stealing him. Not that she couldn’t if she wanted to—she’s way cuter and cooler and smarter than I am. But I get the feeling that Joanne is looking for something more than he, or any other mere high school boy, has to offer.
It doesn’t take long to realize, though, that none of that really matters: the issues dividing us are trivial compared with the ties that unite us. They go beyond our inside jokes, and surviving my dad’s yelling, and the sheer amount of time we’ve spent sweating over tricky passages. Creating music is one of the most intimate experiences that people can share, and because we started so young, at such a formative time in our development, we couldn’t help but bond as we grew. Our quartet’s chemistry is what makes it all wor
k, like the transformation that occurs when oxygen and hydrogen combine to make water, and we’ve come too far to let petty differences break us apart. I’m relieved when Joanne comes back to where she belongs.
The day I get my SAT scores back, a tiny doubt that has been flickering unnoticed in the back of my brain flares up suddenly like a struck match.
I am excused from school that afternoon, missing gym class so that I can get in extra practice time. Standing in the living room, holding my test scores in one hand and my violin in the other, I consider my future. There has never been any question in my house that I will major in music education at a music college and become a music teacher, just like my parents. I have never thought that I could, or would want to, do anything else. I’ve been training to be a music teacher almost my entire life.
But looking from the SAT scores to my violin and back again, it occurs to me that my future doesn’t have to be preordained. The test scores have come back well enough to qualify me as a National Merit Scholarship semifinalist. I could, if I really want to, think about some other kind of path.
What would I be, if I could be anything in the world? What do I really want to do for the rest of my life?
I look out the big window of our living room, focusing on some faraway horizon, not noticing the cracked driveway that always needs repair or my father’s garden, which he tends so aggressively that it threatens to take over the whole front lawn. Around me is the silence of a suburban weekday afternoon. Steph and my dad are still at school, my mom in the hospital.
Certainly, I love the violin. But I love reading and writing, too. I’ve devoured everything on my mother’s old bookshelf, from Valley of the Dolls to Great Expectations, and lately I’m immersed in the red leather-bound copy of The Lord of the Rings that Michael gave me for my birthday. My favorite class is biology. The best part of the school day is while I’m in biology lab, wearing safety glasses, dissecting a frog or examining an amoeba pinned between two glass slides under a microscope.
How do I know that music is for me when I have never been allowed to try anything else? Did I ever even choose music, or did my parents choose music for me?
That is one question I know the answer to. My parents chose, not me.
I was so young when their decision was made. I just walked the path as it spread out before me. Now, it seems too late to turn back.
If I go to music school, I think, swinging my bow absentmindedly from my pinky, I know I will never again use a microscope or see the inside of a lab. It will cut me off from that. Forever.
My father no doubt will be furious if I bring up the subject. Nothing arouses his contempt more than the expression “He eez steel finding himself,” which he delivers with a mocking sneer and an eye roll. Back where he came from, the Communists decided who would be allowed to pursue what careers. There was no such thing as “finding yourself.” I know how grateful he is to have come to America, where he can follow his passions and make his own dreams come true.
But what about people who aren’t as sure of their dreams? He has little respect for those who don’t have the “guts” to be certain, the way he was. He doesn’t have patience for kids who are confused by the variety of choices, who resist the deep, difficult work of becoming excellent in favor of “flitting from thing to thing, a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none!” My dad never mentions the aspirations of his own that he may have abandoned in pursuit of his career, though he used to write poetry as a young man and perhaps would have been a writer himself. I only know that he is driven, focused, and single-minded. His goal: to be the best music teacher it is possible to be.
Later, I muster my courage, expecting a confrontation.
“Daddy? How come I can only apply to music schools?” I take a breath. His face is impossible to read, so I rush on.
“Is there any way I can still take some other classes, like science, even if I major in music ed? It just doesn’t feel right, that I never picked this for myself. You started me on violin when I was too little to know what other choices there were. I feel like I’m always going to wonder if music was the best thing for me to do. I like other things, too, maybe even better than I like music…”
I trail off, afraid of my dad’s reaction. I have already said too much. I wait for him to fly off into one of his rages where he yells about what an “ungrate!” I am.
Instead, he regards me sympathetically.
“Look, sis. You were talented from the start, extremely talented. I’ve seen enough kids over the years to know what I’m talking about. Maybe you would haf been good at something else, but to become excellent on the violin you had to haf discipline, you had to put een the time, you needed to be focused. You weel never truly know what other things you might haf been good at. But we do know that you are good at violin.”
He pauses. I may be having a moment of doubt. But he speaks with absolute certainty.
“You weel thank me one day.”
12
Yesterday
JOANNE
In high school, I started to suspect there was a method to Mr. K’s concertizing madness. One year, he hauled the high school orchestra all the way to West Virginia University, a twelve-hour bus ride, to perform for an audience that included prominent music professors.
On the way there, Stephanie took out her violin on the bus and entertained us with TV theme songs—The Love Boat, The Brady Bunch, whatever we called out to her, she nailed it. At a rest stop somewhere in rural Pennsylvania, I slid into a faux-leather booth at Bob’s Big Boy next to Melanie and Miriam. Through the big plate-glass window, we could see Jonathan, the class brain, picking at the ground with a tool he pulled from his pocket, searching for fossils.
“Where do you think you’ll go to college?” Melanie asked me.
“Don’t rush me!” I laughed.
Ever since our quartet had gotten back together again, I couldn’t help noticing a difference in our playing. We blended better than we had before, the music flowing a little more easily. Maybe it was because we were progressing as musicians, but more likely, we were growing up. College was getting closer, our shared childhood a little further away. The differences that had grown between Melanie and Miriam and me seemed suddenly childish and long ago.
In West Virginia, our quartet would be performing a piece that composer Philip Gordon had written especially for us, with each one of our personalities and abilities in mind. We knew we wouldn’t be playing together much longer. I gazed out the window at Jonathan in the parking lot, then looked from Melanie to Miriam across the table littered with hamburger scraps and a congealing side order of greasy fries.
“Time to go,” Mr. K ordered from the front of the room.
I took a last sip of my Coca-Cola and then, with a wink toward Miriam, poured the rest into her glass of milk. She upended a bottle of ketchup and conked it on the bottom until it spurted into the mix. Melanie picked up the salt and pepper shakers to add the finishing touch. Then we sat back to admire our masterpiece: a perfectly gross concoction, just like we used to make as little girls.
The West Virginia performance went well, so well that four orchestra members were awarded music scholarships there. Miriam was one of them, and so was our cellist friend, John Stine.
Mr. K, it turned out, had quietly been helping to arrange college music scholarships for his students for years. He also gave lessons to some of his students for free. Miriam told me about what she laughingly called the every-other-Simon rule—she and all six of her siblings studied privately with Mr. K, but he only charged for half of them.
Now Mr. K was focusing his attention on recruiting the next generation of students. He had lots of help, including from a new student teacher: Miss Lipman. Michele was following in his footsteps, studying music education while playing violin as concertmaster of the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra. Another of our teachers was Darlene Morrow Brandt; the violinist whom Mr. K had yelled at twenty years earlier for crying onstage was now one of his most trus
ted colleagues.
Mr. K looked for every angle, and every gimmick, to fill the pipeline with prospective new recruits. That’s why one day he handed Donald Meyers a red costume. We’re playing Orpheus in the Underworld, he said. We need a devil.
Don, a few years behind me, was one of the most impossible students Mr. K had ever had. His left thumb was always creeping up in an ungainly way alongside the neck of his violin. It drove Mr. K nuts. “I weel cut thumb off and feed eet to cheekens!” Mr. K would warn him. Don loved the violin madly anyway.
Don’s role was perfect for him. Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld—an operetta best known for giving the world the cancan—was a crowd favorite, especially for little kids. The piece starts slowly before picking up steam. Just as it winds up to the big cancan moment, Don as the devil ran onto the stage, pushing Mr. K off the podium. With theatrical melodrama worthy of an old vaudeville act, the two of them went at it in front of the audience, pushing and shoving, while the orchestra threw itself into an increasingly maniacal rendition of the dance, until Mr. K finally triumphed as the piece rushed to its climax.
Don Meyers never did make it beyond the back of the second violin section as a musician. But at the end of our orchestra concert that day, Mr. K ushered him to the front of the stage to take his solo bow.
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