Perfect Pitch

by Amy Lapwing

  Chapter Four

  Sensitive Child

  New Hampshire enjoyed the rollicking nineteen-eighties along with everyone else. Many companies did the figures and concluded the southern part near Interstate 93 was a good location for business. Taxes and schools were all right, Boston was a mere forty-five minutes away, and, best of all, homes were affordable. Enriched by high-tech industry, the town of Kennemac grew three hundred percent from 1980 to 1989, and property taxes soared. Many new subdivisions went up on the old rock wall-crocheted farmlands that had finally grown back into their original woodland condition after a hundred years of oblivion. But there was also a noticeable transfer of apple orchard land to developers. The builders and homeowners assuaged their conscience by leaving a few apple trees on the lots. As a result, driving down one of the ancient country roads through an army of vigorous apple trees, one would suddenly see great big houses, their clapboards smooth with fresh paint, landed like bombs at odd angles to the rows of trees, the spaces around them denuded except for a few starved-looking refugees, spared but forever sadly cut off. These were the really expensive houses in town.

  Jack and Linda Hardy moved to Kennemac in 1984 with their eight-year-old daughter Grace. They paid big bucks for their new center-entry colonial on Longmeadow Road— whose handful of active farms lent it a prestigious, rurban cachet— with four bedrooms and two and a half baths, two-car garage, tiled floors, and two acres that required a landscaping service to keep looking decent. But they reasoned they would never have been able to buy a place near as nice if they had taken jobs instead in Massachusetts, which offered either shoeboxes or decrepit colonials with slanting floors in their price range. Here they had plenty of room for everything: a bedroom for Jack and Linda, a bedroom for Grace, a bedroom for guests and a bedroom for the computer. They compiled a list of projects and got to work. They finished the basement so Grace could have more room to play in the winter, and they fenced in the backyard so Grace could have a dog. After the dog ran away, Linda justified the expense of the fence by telling herself it would be handy if they ever had another baby. Jack wanted to put in a pool, but Linda’s family had had one when she was a kid, and she did not want the extra work. Between the fence and the scattered apple tree exhibits, the lawn mowing crew hated the Hardy job.

  Grace lived in the yard in the spring, checking to see which flowers were coming up. By summertime the manicured lawn was no match for the bushy orchard across the street and in her young girlhood, Grace spent much of her time acting out adventures among the trees. She was a princess and the orchard was alive with the voices of Mickey Mouse, the Evil Queen, the Seven Dwarfs and dozens of other cartoon characters. Many a sunset-striped evening Grace would stand at the door, her toes peeking out from beneath her nightgown, tears on her cheeks, while Jack ran across the street to retrieve Pinocchio or Babar or another stuffed animal from the branches of a tree, still in costume and awaiting its cue to finish the scene and leave the stage.

  Grace was making up songs as early as two: “We’re going to the store, to get some ice cream sandwiches, ‘cause they’re all gone, I’m gonna eat them all up, mm-mm-mm-mm, ba-dum-bum!” Her mother enrolled her in pre-school Music and Movement, and later when Grace was in grade school she tried out for parts in children’s productions. She loved whatever part she was given, no matter how small. She managed to stay in character as a fainted child when the youngest cast member, a three-year-old, started ad-libbing, trying to revive her by pounding her on the stomach. At the end of the show Jack gave Grace flowers. The three-year-old got the standing O.

  A happy only child, Grace had friends, she did well in school, Linda told her she was pretty, and she adored Jack. Grace turned thirteen and worked hard not to smile for her school picture and reveal the dreaded braces on her teeth. She wore glasses and was experimenting that week with parting her hair differently. The portrait was a disaster that would require the passage of twenty years before Grace could look at it and smile wistfully.

  That portrait joined the others of Grace down through the ages on the walls of their house, though her mother kept having to retrieve it from the garbage. Linda liked to put the most recent portraits on the table in the entry: Linda and Jack and Grace, and Grace alone. The delicate, pretty, blond mother with the over-sized smile that she thought was serene, the handsome dark-haired father with a practiced salesman’s smile, and the teenaged girl with wild, wavy sandy blond hair, hazel eyes and a look of wisdom that the sensitive child, no matter how young, always wears. The historical record of their likenesses was displayed on the wall going up the stairs, a graphical representation of the family’s evolution, second storey dwellers at first who eventually came down to the ground to live as the people we see today.

  On the second day of school, Mr. Nordstrom had each of his eighth grade chorus students come up to the piano and sing scales for him so that he could place them properly in their sections, sopranos, altos, tenors, and maybe a bass or two. Grace stood in line with Kelsey, whispering about the other kids and how scared they looked, and isn’t Mr. Nordstrom’s mole humongous up close, it looks like a spot of spaghetti sauce, don’t you just want to wipe it off, wipe that shit off your face, Mr. Nordstrom, ha-ha! Finally it was Kelsey’s turn. She could not look at Mr. Nordstrom, she was scared stiff, so she looked at Grace who made faces at her. Mr. Nordstrom started her off, then stopped her when she went screechingly sharp, and started her again. This time Kelsey’s voice withdrew into a whisper and Mr. Nordstrom had to play very softly in order to hear her.

  “Soprano one,” he decided. Kelsey looked wide-eyed at him, wondering if he was complimenting her. “You did great! A little quiet, but I’m sure you’ll improve,” he said, proud of his clever dig. Kelsey went to the other side of the piano and Grace stepped up next to her teacher.

  He smiled at her, his large teeth very white and his blue eyes very big, a stubborn strand of yellow hair falling across his forehead. Grace let out her breath and relaxed her shoulders and flung her hair back, and then unlocked her knees and concentrated on breathing from her stomach, as she had been taught by her children’s theatre work.

  “You ready?”

  He played scales and she sang, “Ah!” a small smile of concentration on her face. As the pitch climbed, she sang louder and felt her throat freeing itself. At the top of her range, she opened her mouth wider and felt a different sound come out. Mr. Nordstrom smiled to himself, then watched her. He pushed her a little higher than he should have, but Grace wisely stopped singing when she sensed it might hurt.

  He smiled at her. “Whoa! Soprano one! Very good!” Grace scampered with Kelsey back to their seats.

  “You did great!” whispered Kelsey to her smiling friend. “I think he wants to have sex with you!”

  Grace made a face of disgust. “He looks like Tweety Bird.”

  “Tweety Bird with hair!”

  “Tweety Bird meets Pinocchio!”

  Kelsey guffawed.

  “Quiet!” called Mr. Nordstrom. “Your classmates deserve the courtesy they showed you when you were here. Now show it to them!”

  The obstreperous girls looked from under their eyebrows at Mr. Nordstrom. He gave them the evil eye for a moment, then returned to the sullen boy with the Neanderthal brow who just might be a bass.

  Kelsey and Grace looked at each other, their eyes widening as they grinned. “‘Now show it to them!’” whispered Grace and she mimed flashing her chest at Kelsey. Kelsey flashed her back and they broke down in a fit of hysteria. Mr. Nordstrom shook his stringy blond hair in anger at them and had them sit at opposite ends of the soprano section.

  Grace stepped off the school bus jubilantly, full of the novelty of an early release day to benefit the overworked teachers. She sang a ringing, “Good-bye!” to Kelsey who responded similarly but at a dazzlingly higher pitch to redeem her performance at the audition, and hiked home in the early afternoon sunshine, her never-zipped jacket flaps dancing lazily. As she approached her
house she saw an unfamiliar car in the driveway, a new-looking van. Excited with new car shine, she ran up the steps and entered the front door. She put her book bag down on a chair in the kitchen and looked for her mother. Not finding her, she went up the stairs and heard her father laughing softly in the guest bedroom. She stopped and wondered, then smiled with forbidden knowledge and tiptoed toward the bedroom door.

  The door did not close fully; it was on the fix-it list. Grace crept up to it and stopped to listen. “Wait,” she heard her murmur. “There. Yeah.” She peeked through the gap and saw a woman with long dark hair sitting on her father who lay on the bed smiling at the ceiling. The woman arched her back.

  Grace backed away from the door and tiptoed back down the stairs, her heart pounding as though to leap away, past the smiling eight by tens, and out the front door. She ran away from the scene and climbed an ancient apple tree across the street. She watched, forbidding her drying eyes to blink, until she saw the woman come out the front door, get in the ugly car and drive away. She climbed down and slumped into a mound at the base of the tree, shivering. She saw her mother arrive home a couple of hours later, go into the house and not come out. Light-headed, Grace watched the house, expecting it to explode at any moment, her parents to drag themselves from the rubble, bloodied and disoriented.

  The night came, the lights went on in the house, and Linda and Jack came out the front door and called her name as they walked around the yard. “Grace! Grace!” they called, “Grace, come home!” Grace began to sob in hiccoughs and crossed the street back into her yard. Linda saw her first and ran to her and hugged the girl’s face to her chest. Jack came to them and Grace tried to bury her body in her mother’s, then turned and wept convulsively as Jack embraced her. They went into the house and Linda and Jack tried to get her to tell them what had happened, but it only seemed to upset her more, so they let it alone and she eventually calmed down. They had dinner, Jack ran out and got some hot fudge sauce, and they had ice cream sundaes for dessert. Linda figured she was now officially the mother of a teenager. Jack embarked on a long period of cluelessness. And Grace, all by herself, began a painful attempt to reconcile the event she had witnessed with all that she had learned of love so far from her parents’ example, a process whose first results were to be seen in the tongue-packed grin of Shane Butts.

  Grace awoke early next morning. Her mother went into her room as usual to prod her awake only to find her bed made up and all her stuffed animals put away and her desk clear, all the drawings stacked neatly and the pencils in their pretty pink cup with the dancers painted on it. Alarmed, Linda ran downstairs. She found Grace sitting at the kitchen table, carefully eating a bowl of cereal, her hair neat and pulled back in a ponytail. Linda rinsed out the coffee pot and Grace brought her bowl to the sink. She put on her jacket and zipped it up, for once, got her backpack, and said “‘Bye!” to her mother.

  “‘Bye, sweetie,” called Linda.

  “Tell Daddy I said ‘’bye.’”

  “Okay, I will,” said Linda, puzzled. Jack had left an hour before, as usual.

  “When you talk to him today, I mean.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “You’re going to call him today, right?”

  “Sure, honey, I’ll call him. And I’ll be sure to tell him you said ‘’bye.’”

  Grace went to wait for the bus. Linda marveled at her usually ebullient daughter’s quietness as she squeezed out the sponge. She wiped the table automatically, but needlessly, as Grace had spilled not a drop of milk.

  Grace sat quietly through her noisy classes, taking comfort in knowing the right answer, feeling separate from the other children. Kelsey made the usual sly comments about Mister Pratt the science teacher, let’s count how many times he pokes his chin out a minute, one, two, three, four, ha-ha— f— uh-oh, he’s looking at us, has he caught on to us? No, he’s talking again, five, six, hee-hee-hee. Grace kept her eyes on her notebook and wrote down as much of what her teacher was saying as she could. Kelsey at first thought that was just her way to keep from laughing. As they walked out of the classroom, Kelsey tried again to get Grace to laugh about Mister Pratt’s chin, but her friend simply said, “It’s not funny. It’s just his tie, it’s uncomfortable for him,” and walked on silently to her next class.

  Grace sang softly during warm-up exercises in chorus. Mister Nordstrom irresponsibly took the scales higher than usual, just to hear Grace again, but she did not sing, unwilling to give her voice the volume it needed to go that high. They sang “Streets of Laredo” in three parts, the bass singing an octave below the other boys. Grace switched to alto for the challenge, though she was barely audible even to herself on the lowest notes. Kelsey looked at her, thinking she herself was singing wrong. Grace did not acknowledge her friend’s confusion, but switched back to soprano.

  The school bus dropped her off at the customary mid-afternoon hour. Grace walked up the empty driveway fringed with yellow chrysanthemums. She went in the house, hung up her jacket, and sat doing her homework in the hushed kitchen for the next two hours, only the refrigerator motor breaking the silence. Jack got home first— “Hi, Punkin’!”— and she finished the last algebra problem and closed her books. Jack glanced over her shoulder at her work, breathed, “Whew! Better you than me, kiddo!” got a beer and went upstairs to his computer. Grace’s heart warmed at the sound of the beer can being cracked open. Her father was home.

  Grace chopped an onion so it would be ready for her mother to fry with the hamburger meat defrosting in the refrigerator, Linda so hated the smell of onion on her hands. She washed and bandaged the cut to her finger, which clumsily got in the way of the awkwardly wielded knife blade. Linda asked her about it when she got home. She said it was “Nothing.” Linda asked Jack about it when he came down for dinner. He shrugged, “No idea.”

  At bedtime, Grace got into the babyish blanket sleeper with the yawning bear on it that her grandmother had sent her last Christmas. She knelt by the bed and said the lapsed prayer Linda had taught her years ago: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. God bless Mommy and Daddy and Grace and— Sarge, even though he’s gone now.” She turned off the light and revisited the dinner conversation, convinced that Linda and Jack had looked often at each other, smiling at what the other had to say. She imagined they had enjoyed each other’s laughter at the night’s sitcoms on T.V. as much as they had enjoyed the clever lines from Hollywood. She rolled onto her side and fell asleep quickly. Linda sat reading in bed while Jack dozed on the couch downstairs, the comedy channel chirping away.

  Chapter Five

  Missing Face

  Michael Calderón had a reputation as an excellent voice coach. Late afternoons until six o’clock his choral classroom saw a succession of private students trilling in for a half hour or an hour and then out again. He worked mostly with young people, some of them gifted children whose parents could afford his fee. He usually had a few older adult students, but he did not invest much of himself in them, since they were usually feeding some personal vanity that he found depressing to ponder. He realized that music was for everyone, and that he should not resent someone wanting to learn to perform better, even if there was no professional future in it. But ever since he had stopped chasing the opera chimera himself, he nursed a sussurous desire to have some hand in shaping a future star. Adults were a waste of time, but a source of income.

  His four o’clock today was a Kennemac student, a soprano with pretty, round eyes. Her voice was quite nice, but her expression was childish. He wanted to give her the lead in that year’s opera, probably La Bohème. She would sound great, but she would move no one with her interpretation. He kept trying to see it differently, but each week she confirmed his assessment: no heart. He decided to turn his mind to finding some way of showing her how to tap what little emotional experience she had had. If he did not find some way to get a woman out of her, he would have to hold auditions and probably settle for less musicality.
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br />   The soprano stood beside the piano, her hands folded below her belly, singing scales as Michael played, working on the vowels, at various dynamic levels. The ‘i’s were coming along, he thought, but they still needed a lot of volume in order to work. He played a chord a step higher. Why did she want me to be having more women? Did she want a few serious relationships, or a lot of casual dating? Should I have told her about the others? The romps in the sack and so-long-Jack? No, no woman likes to hear that about a man they’re interested in. They want to believe it’s always love. Or at least attempted love. But a premeditated one-time fuck, that’s a bad thing. Makes them write to Dear Abby, in tears. Even if it happened years before they came along. He’s a monster! He’s never grow up! He’s outta there.

  Michael played the next chord, too high. The soprano waited, confused. Michael came out of his reverie and apologized, and he started over at the bottom of her range. The student switched vowels, to ‘e,’ her eyes on her teacher as she concentrated, as though he were the source of her sound. She's cute, though, the way she plays the age card. Does it matter to her? She’ll find out how old I am, she’ll do the arithmetic, then, what? If she acts distant next time I see her, it means she’s decided I’m too old for her. Then I have to somehow change her mind. Act younger, use words like ‘dude’ and ‘awesome?’ Pump iron? Dye my hair?

  The soprano’s tone rang like a velvet-covered bell as she approached the easy part of her range. Michael remembered to give her an encouraging look. I like her, though. She is memorable. And amoureux? Amoureuse.

  The soprano began singing the song he had assigned, her eyes still tied to him, this time for direction. Mister C seemed happy, and she was feeling especially on the ball today. She forgot all the mental notes she had made to herself while rehearsing the song. She sang, and her teacher watched her.