by Michael Lund
Sixth grade music had generated a desire to express myself in a new way that, by and large, had gone unfulfilled over the next half dozen years. And now, as I approached my last year of high school, the search for a different form of Susan Bell's secret self had been reinvigorated. There was something out there (or within me), I believed, beyond the standard modes of expression I'd been taught at home, at church, and at school.
Not that I knew then what it was I wanted to say, or sing, or do. And not that I was profoundly unhappy in my current life. It was more that I suspected there was more, that there was other. Too, I felt my mother could still help me expand my horizons if we had more time for each other.
My sense of the world's and my own potential had an analog in the pear trees that were scattered about our small-town neighborhood. They showed us beautiful white blossoms in spring, hard green pellets in early summer, larger bulbs with deeper color by early August. They were always offering, that is, to transform themselves one magical fall day into the ultimate answer to our taste buds' craving. I wanted transformation myself, a richer, fuller Susan Bell growing out of the child, teenager, adolescent who'd been shaped by the conditions of my growing up.
The neighborhood I had always lived in had been superimposed on a pear orchard sometime before the war years. Dr. Masters' house, on the eastern edge of these homes, was the old farmhouse, now redone to make a residence significantly more grand than the mostly two-bedroom frame and brick houses surrounding it. The streets of Limestone and Oak reached west from that minor mansion across about twenty acres of old orchard. Eventually some fifty small lots gave room for military veterans from European and Pacific theaters to put roofs over their families' heads.
These trees were full-sized, not the dwarf varieties bred to give high yield in small spaces I have in my suburban St. Louis home now. Those old trees were substantial structures, two or more feet wide at the base, perhaps forty to fifty feet high. They produced what my Mom always called "cooking pears."
"Oh, you can eat them," she would tell Tricia, my older sister, and me. "But they're mostly grainy and sharp tasting. You won't like them."
We had to learn about that for ourselves, of course, but she was right. They were very rarely as good as the pears we could get in season in local grocery stores, juicy and sweet. Even canned pears, swimming in heavy syrup, were more palatable than the local variety.
Mrs. Baker, on Limestone Street--the other side of the Circle--was able to produce something that would be edible in winter months by putting up bushels in mason jars with a special recipe. And Colonel Springer's wife, whose property included the greatest number of trees, made pear preserves many families in the area were pleased to receive as Christmas gifts.
We kids, of course, had other uses--mostly as missiles--for the neighborhood pears, uses that evolved with the seasons. The little ones of early summer were the size of the balls you use to play jacks. We threw them at each other, painful if you were caught up close but generally harmless.
Midsummer pears, the size of tennis balls, were not to be aimed at people, but squashed against tree trunks, thrown at makeshift targets (an old garbage can lid), or lofted in simple distance contests. Fully ripe pears were generally too big and heavy for girls to throw, though the boys, playing war games, lobbed them like grenades. And in late fall rotting pears, half eaten by wasps and yellow jackets, were pitched underhand to the unwary. "Hey, Susie, catch!"
But there was always one day in the fall--oh, late September, mid-October--when, as if by magic, those sour-tasting, fibrous green pears hit a perfect, enormously satisfying ripeness. And I thought I could do the same thing myself: suddenly mature into a woman no one could have anticipated from the gawky, shy precursor they'd known for years.
I knew I wanted to be someone who could shut down the incessant love machinery of Randy Alexander and go on to something better. Not that I didn't like Randy OK, a straightforward sort of fellow locked onto a trajectory of taking over, at the appropriate time, his father's real estate business. But his raging hormones, barely held in check by fundamentalist guilt, were becoming tiring.
"Come on, Susie," he'd begged only last weekend. "A man can't go on like this." I hated, by the way, being called "Susie" or any other diminutive.
We were parked in a turnaround near the tiny Fairfield airport, a dozen miles from town. The format for such evenings had been officially followed by this Midwestern male: pick up girl and exchange greetings with parents; take in movie, with popcorn and soda, at the Uptowne; absentmindedly cruise up highway 00 north across Route 66. We'd been kissing for 45 minutes.
"OK, Randy, let's go home." I knew that wasn't what he wanted to hear.
"Oh Suze, I'm not even sure I can drive." He squirmed in the driver's seat. I squirmed at the word 'Suze.'
I have to admit, though, his argument had its appeal: the completed act wins out in my book over something begun but abandoned before the end. Still, this was sex we were talking about, not a thing girls like me were supposed to be indulging in.
"Help me finish," Randy whispered, and I heard a zipper going down. "You know," and he thrust his hips up beside the steering wheel. "You know, play the 'mouth organ.'"
"I'm going to buy it," I announced sternly to Sandy, referring to that flute in Martin's Jewelry Store window.
And I did.
2
I know we all have shocked our parents at some point in growing up. At the dinner table, on a family vacation, in the heat of some argument, we've made an announcement that challenged the identity they had so carefully constructed for us:
• "I'm going out for football," the smallest boy in his class tells his folks one early day of autumn.
• When her parents ask how her lessons went Wednesday night, beautifully coordinated Patricia explains, "Dance was good, but the car's fender is a bit mangled."
• "It means I'll be repeating English next year," admits dean's list student Tim as his Mom stares at the F on his research paper.
The second most famous day for such a revelation in my high school history is the one where I place that flute case on the dining room table and call out to my Mom in the kitchen, "Can you come here a minute?"
"What is it, honey?" she calls back, busy, as usual, fixing dinner for the four of us. My father will be home in another thirty minutes, just after five o'clock.
"Come see." I've opened the case, and the flute lies in full view.
"OK, OK." She comes around the corner wiping her hands on a dishtowel, her thoughts still on meat loaf, rolls, boiling potatoes. "Whose is that, Susan?" she asks, looking around the room as if the flute's owner is present but not immediately visible. She does not connect the flute in any way to me.
"It's mine."
"Oh, Susan, you don't have a flute."
You see, one idea about me had already been established in our family history: I was bright enough, attractive enough, but not talented in any particular way.
Now my older sister, Tricia, she had beauty and brains. Although away now at tiny Drury College in Springfield studying acting, she had been so popular in high school her social calendar had had to include specific blocks of time for turning down boys who wanted to go out with her. Her drama teachers thought she had ability as well as looks, a real future. This was viewed as confirmation of what our parents had decided when she was in junior high school and starred in Our Town.
Albert and Margaret Bell had a different conception of my place among my contemporaries: I was "sweet." Therefore I would always have friends, I would marry a "nice man," I would be someone welcome in any group. And it's true I'd risen on sweetness all the way to class president in eighth grade. But my parents' conviction was that I would never really stand out. I could not finally rise above. I should not ever blossom.
These two versions of their daughters were, I fully understand, arrived at honestly and openly, based on observation and evidence gathered over the nearly twenty years of our existence. When
Tricia adopted an exotic bird as a pet in college, it was seen as part of her theatrical character. I would never draw attention to myself.
The Circle's children, you see, like all generations, I guess, grew up within a set of concepts created by their parents, notions appropriate to an earlier age, a sense of the world's order that was dissolving even as older people attempted to standardize it. And one of the rules that had spread throughout our parents' consciousness--and, I suppose, in even wider circles--was that natural talent would reveal itself on its own.
In this view, genius needed no particular encouragement--say, early music lessons--to be recognized. One's singing in the bathtub would be noticed by the attentive mother. Crayon drawings on construction paper at school would unveil the artist to the observant teacher. Mathematical genius would be evident when the toddler riding in a grocery cart spotted at eye level the product with the cheapest price per unit of weight on the shelves.
Now, I know I've taken a different approach with my own daughters, none of whom is likely to become a professional musician or performer. I've asserted that it might take some time for abilities to surface, some additional help to bring out latent gifts. And they've all had formal training: piano, guitar, singing, dance, sports, anything they showed the least inclination to try or even the lack of energy necessary to stop me from signing them up for lessons. It's a typical reaction, I guess, me reversing the philosophy of parents who saw no spark of the prodigy in their younger daughter.
"It's my flute, Mom. It cost $30."
"You paid for it?" my mother asks, credulity seeping into her expression. "You used your baby-sitting money to . . . to buy a flute you don't know how to play?"
My mother did know how to play. She'd had lessons for half a dozen years in grade school and high school and even considered attending a music conservatory. Her own training led her to conclude that I had no special gift. I didn't show perfect pitch singing hymns in Sunday school, nor had Mrs. Jeebers' tonette produced the obvious rich sounds and delicate phrasing of a future performer. So, me buy a flute? It made no sense.
Thirty dollars, by the way, sounds pretty cheap today for a functioning flute, but that's what I used to purchase a finely crafted musical instrument, which, as you'll learn, changed my life. It needed some minor work, I would find: pads and cork replaced, hinges cleaned and oiled, the wood polished. But it was more than adequate for the beginner I most certainly was.
Cocking her head to one side, my mother studies me and the flute. "It's yours?" she says again, less disbelieving.
"It is. Will you help me learn to play?"
Wiping her hands again, she drapes the towel over her shoulder and steps to the table. She picks up the case and smiles, a funny, whimsical smile.
"Let's go into the living room."
There she takes out the flute's three pieces: head, body, and foot. The cork is dry, but she knows there's a small container of wax somewhere in the case to soften it. The parts slide together reluctantly, but her fingers find the keys easily. Her arms rise to the side so that the flute stretches out horizontally above her shoulder.
She blows air through pursed lips, but above the mouthpiece so that it makes no sound as yet. Then she settles her bottom lip securely onto the mouthpiece and plays a simple scale. Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do. There are some gaps and hesitations, as the keys move stiffly and the pads aren't seated cleanly on the holes.
"I can do that," I assert, reaching out for the flute.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute." She works the keys and flexes her arms before playing again: Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do.
The minute Mom put that instrument to her lips and made music, I don't know exactly how, but I felt my life change. I had come into being as a different Susan Bell the moment that sequence of notes sounded through our little house on Oak Street, the Circle, Fairfield, Missouri, U.S.A.
It was not that I became something I had never been. Rather, some part of me so deeply buried I hadn't even quite known it was there rose up from the depths, joined with the girl I'd been to make something . . . well . . . better, richer, finer. Susan Bell, future musician. And who knew what else?
Of course, it was also possible that my mother had changed, too. She handed over the flute to me, telling me to "be careful, that's a valuable piece of craftsmanship." And she stepped back into the dining room, headed through the kitchen toward the basement stairs. "I have my music," she called happily. "And my old flute!"
On this occasion, though, she didn't get through the kitchen, as, once in that room, she remembered the potatoes boiling, her rolls in the oven. But a connection had been made: the former Margaret Simpson was going to be recalled from the past with things she'd boxed up years earlier and stored in the basement.
The new/old two of us would begin flute lessons the next day. And practicing that flute, even the basic scales, revealed to me something else important right away: nobody, especially Randy Alexander, had been playing me like a musical instrument!
3
Now I'll admit, those make-out sessions I'd been having with Randy Alexander were not unpleasant for me, at least not at first. I liked kissing him, and even his hands' roaming just beyond the official limits my mother would have approved was generally exciting.
But after a while I realized Randy was kissing and sucking, squeezing and pulling, hunching and arching all to please himself, to find relief in the terrible driving of his manhood. Almost any contact with me helped him along that road. It probably never once occurred to him that I might want to travel a parallel path.
"Randy," I suggested not many days after I'd purchased my flute. "Randy, um, could you maybe stop, ah, pushing on my knee." We were in his father's car, parked again out near the Fairfield airport. And he had moved into the center of the front seat in order to drape across me.
"Pushing? Was I pushing?" He seemed surprised. But his left thigh, crossed over the right, lay on my knee. He had his right arm around my shoulder, his left hand on my right breast.
"Well, yes." I patted his knee. "Right there. It's, um, sort of shaking."
Of course, it wasn't really his knee's fault, I realize now. Those humping hips were driving it. The thigh bone's connected to the hip bone, and so forth. But, you know, it was dark in there, so I didn't realize all the connections. And what I felt was this incessant, repeated pressing on my knee, driving my leg into the corded seam of the car seat as his pelvis strained for contact.
Now, let me say again, I had sympathy for Randy's condition. His body had a cycle it wanted to go through, and I believed in finished processes. Accordingly, I had already subscribed to the full itinerary of the teenage date, which included heavy make-out as the conclusion to an evening's food and entertainment. (Tonight it had been bowling, French fries, Coke, ice cream.) So I was out there on a country road following through in the pattern that governed love for my generation.
Still, I knew I couldn't go, as we said then, "all the way" until I was legally married. But now, as Randy threw himself back toward the driver's side of the front seat, I wondered about my own parallel process of sensation in necking. Was I enjoying the full cycle of pleasure, even within the limited definition of the conservative 1950s?
And shouldn't Randy control himself just a bit better than he was right now? He was snorting, and hooting, and shifting himself around in his clothes, acting as if he might be on the verge of a seizure of some sort. If I'd been Sally Winchester, it occurred to me, he'd be a lot better behaved.
Sally was Fairfield High School's reigning Homecoming Queen (elected as a junior, mind!) and had been picked by everyone to become the next Miss Route 66. She had the ideal hourglass figure, short blonde hair turned up neatly, and a perfect smile that shined on all she met.
Sally and I got along (remember, I was "sweet"), but we were no longer close. We'd been together in school since second grade, when she had moved to Fairfield, only child of Missouri National Bank's new vice president. (He was president now and chairman o
f town council.) Sally had lived for a few years on a new section of Hill Street, the other side of the famous sledding run of our neighborhood. So we were close enough to play together after school and on weekends. A lot of summer days found us sharing dolls, teen magazines (before we were teenagers), and tea parties full of elaborate ritual.
But after the Winchesters moved to a bigger house on the east side of town--a structure and address appropriate to a bank president--we saw each other only at school. I later settled into the second tier of high school society, a girl Sally or one of her closer friends might take with her to a party if she wanted to avoid being picked up by a particular boy. She'd say coyly that she couldn't leave her friend Susan behind.
Boys behaved differently around Sally and that handful of other girls she associated with in our class. The guys were intimidated, I guess, by the American version of an aristocracy. Randy, I knew, would be in awe of those girls' physical beauty and their recognized abilities. Sally was nationally competitive as a baton twirler and had been the marching band's majorette since freshman year.