by Janis Ian
I also do impressions, and the ones I do best are the ones I learned to do first: my sisters. It is amazing what a person can learn by phone, calling her parents and pretending to be her siblings. It soon becomes clear who is loved the most.
The one impression I have never done is my mother—which is odd, when you consider that our voices, my sisters and mine, come from her, just like our features do, like my hair does. Our voices are her voice, so much alike that when she was alive and we all gathered in one room, people in the next room could not tell us apart.
In 1930-something, my mother, then a girl in her teens, met a famous opera singer, a woman whose name I now forget. The choir director at my mother’s church introduced the woman to my mother because my mother, like me, was the person directors sought out, making her lead, having her sing each part except contralto so that the others can hear how the music should sound.
The opera star offered my mother private lessons, said she should be auditioning for the major opera companies. You have the talent to become one of the most famous singers in the land, the opera star told her.
The story always ended there, with the validation of my mother’s skill, not with the explanation of why she chose to remain home. We were left to guess: did a lack of money hold her back? Or fear that she wasn’t good enough? Did my aunt—younger then, her flapper’s marcel appropriate and stylish—convince my mother that the sinful city was not a good place for an orphan girl still stuck in her teens?
It is a fleeting glimpse of a well-worn dream, a story told more and more rarely as time went on. I would think I imagined it, except my sisters know it too.
We discuss it in our matching voices, forming a trio of doubt. For we have learned over the years that we cannot trust our mother’s stories. She altered them almost by whim.
But there is always a kernel of truth. And we know this: there was an opera singer—although she may not have been a star. And we also know our mother was talented because, at one point or another, we have heard her sing.
~~~~~
She sings to me every Christmas, her voice growing strong as her death recedes into the past. Somehow, on Christmas Eve, I find myself standing beside her in the church of my youth.
The pews are made of polished wood, the air smells of pine boughs, and the sanctuary is dark except for hundreds of candles, held by each member of the congregation. The midnight service always ends with "Silent Night," which the congregation sings in unison.
All except my mother. She sings a descant, her beautiful voice soaring above the others. She is not singing the song as a lullaby—for there is no gentleness in this woman; there never has been—but she is performing, and the performance is breathtaking.
Her eyes are closed, her head tilted upward, her striking features accented by the candlelight. She is, for this moment and this moment only, somewhere else—a place where she is loved, where music is more than notes on a page.
Try as I might, I cannot replicate that moment, even with the voice she has given me. The descant does not exist in any hymnal or book of carols, and the words—the words aren’t even English. For when she tilts her head back and sings like one of the heavenly host, my mother reverts to the language of her childhood.
Every year, alive or dead, my mother sings "Silent Night" in German.
~~~~~
She also spoke German as she gave birth to me—and this story I know to be true because my father told it to me first.
My mother went into labor, forty-two years old and unhappy, terrified that my birth would kill her. The doctor could not calm her and finally put her under—a full anesthetic so that her body could expel me without interference from her all-powerful mind.
But her mind protected her all the same. Tears ran down her cheeks, and she repeated something, singsong in that beautiful voice, so many times that a nurse finally wrote a phonetic version of my mother’s utterances.
The nurses brought the paper to my father in the waiting room at the same time they brought me, and recited, as best they could, my mother’s words. My father laughed, as he was wont to do where my mother was concerned, and shrugged off the significance.
But the nurses did not. They remembered, and later told my mother.
She had done something she could not do while conscious.
Throughout my birth, she had recited the Lord’s Prayer.
In German.
~~~~~
My mother learned to sing in German. Every Christmas, her father would line up his children in the front parlor, near the piano. Each child, from the oldest to the youngest, would sing to my grandmother—and, if possible, that child accompanied herself on the piano.
Everyone in my mother’s family learned to play the piano. It was required, like singing was required, like German was required, like God was required.
My mother’s father was a minister, who came from a family of ministers. He emigrated to the United States from Germany in the first decade of the twentieth century, brought over by his elder brother, also a minister.
My grandfather married into a family of women, all of whom worked as maids at a seminary, and all of whom married ministers.
At home, my mother’s family spoke German. My mother, also the baby, did not have as many years of indoctrination in that language as her siblings had: her father died when she was eight—or was it ten? These stories are never clear—and her mother, destitute, opened a boarding house where English became the primary tongue.
But German was locked inside my mother, locked as so many other things were, locked and kept close, never to be released.
Not even now, when she haunts me all these years after her death.
~~~~~
I no longer sing with the chorus. I adored rehearsal, but performances destroyed me. For the two days before we sang, my stomach churned, and for the two days after, my head ached so badly I could hardly think.
I am an adult now. I realized I did not have to do something I did not enjoy. And much as I loved to sing, I could not exorcise the ghost of my mother from her seat in the front row.
~~~~~
When I first became a writer, I wrote stories about music. My first professional fiction sale featured aliens whose souls were songs, played with variations each and every day.
Music is my life, my heart, and my dreams. I cannot live without it. A soundtrack runs through my mind, always cueing me to the feelings I bury within me.
Over time, music left my fiction. I no longer sang at home, and I rarely listened to the radio. I locked music deep inside me, sealing it up along with its five-foot-two-inch ghost.
Yet I dreamed of it, like a drowning man dreams of air.
And when my husband, good kind gentle man that he is, asked me what I wanted for my fortieth birthday, a voice from deep inside me escaped the lock and answered him:
I would like, the voice said with a child’s breathiness, a child’s hope, I would like…a piano.
~~~~~
A piano. Sacred totem of my childhood, as forbidden as the name of God.
One of my earliest memories: sitting on the piano bench in the church basement—that same church where my mother still sings every Christmas Eve—my fingers finding scales on ivory keys. I play with the door closed, one ear trained on the slightest sound outside, so that I cannot be overheard.
I am happy there, in that little room, where a woman named Miss Mlsna teaches me how to sing, and asks me to direct the other children whenever she must leave the room.
My mother never touched that piano. In fact, I never saw her touch a musical instrument in her life. When I was seven, and the school I attended mandated that we all learn a musical instrument, my mother made me learn the flute.
Beginning woodwind players squeak and squeal, but they do not torture the ear the way beginning string players do. Nor do they offend the neighbors the way beginning percussionists do.
But the only instrument which sounds passable even under a beginner’s hands i
s the piano.
My mother would not allow a piano in her house.
~~~~~
There is a piano in mine. It is a Baldwin baby grand, black and shiny, with tone so pure and wondrous it should grace a stage instead of my living room.
I adore that piano.
It is the only place in the world where I do not see my mother’s ghost.
Oh, she tried to haunt it with her disapproving looks and her sideways comments—music is about perfection, she would say, and my flute teacher, a strict Greek Orthodox woman who never smiled, would chime in, reminding me that I am the laziest musician she has ever met.
I am lazy. I slid by on talent and on the ear I inherited from my father’s mother. That grandmother—the best dancer in Fond du Lac County in the decade before World War I—also played the piano, but she never learned to read music, preferring instead to play the popular songs of the day after listening to someone else perform them.
In the last two years, the years the piano has decorated my living room, I have learned that my laziness no longer matters. I do not practice for performance. I practice because I want to. I am amusing myself. Perfection is irrelevant, since the only people who will grade me on my abilities are my mother—and myself.
But my mother refuses to come into the living room. She will not sit near the piano—has not even looked at it since it arrived two years before.
She doesn’t even hover near the archway, peering into the room like she used to do when I sang or listened to music on the radio. Instead, she hides in my kitchen, paging through my cookbooks as if they hold the secrets to the universe.
Her absence is liberating. I pound the keys, playing loud, playing soft, playing discordant notes, playing random chords. Sometimes I sing as I play, and I remain alone in the room, no silver haired, five-foot-two-inch, sharp-faced woman sitting with her hands clasped, peering at me, waiting for me to make a mistake.
Oddly, the songs that I play, the ones that I learn all the way through, come from my mother’s youth. Big bands, sentimental journeys, smoke getting in your eyes.
Once my mother said to me, her voice breathy, childlike, and full of hope, that while she thought the music of my generation had beauty, no one knew how to write love songs like the people from hers.
The generation my therapist friend called lost, the generation with the gaping hole in their collective psyche, the generation forever embittered, forever lost.
When my mother made her statement—the only one, I recollect, she ever made about the music she grew up with—I pooh-poohed it. I was sixteen, full of myself, and convinced no one else could be right.
Yet as I climb inside these songs, learn their chords, their lyrics, their intricacies, I realize she was right. For these love songs have depth, a depth that comes from history. And only if you know the history do you understand them, do you realize that beneath the words of love are discordant hymns to unspeakable loss.
~~~~~
My generation sings of empowerment. I went through puberty listening to "I am Woman," and followed the singer-songwriters who rejected the woman-needs-man-to-thrive thread that coexisted with the Take Back the Night marches of my college years.
First we sang of our right to a place in the world, and now we sing of our victories. Like this from Janis Ian:
I don’t need permission
to change this tradition
When they tell me "You can’t play"
Well, I just turn my back and say…
"Now all over this big wide world
"I play like a girl"
The insult of our youth turned back on all of those who slung it.
I play like a girl.
But that isn’t the victory.
The victory is that I play at all.
~~~~~
By the time she died, my mother had stopped singing. She listened to news on the radio, soap operas on TV. Her house, once filled with the classical sounds of public radio, more often than not held silence, like someone was holding a breath they would never, ever let go.
The day after her funeral, my sisters and I began to clean that barren place. We did not turn on a radio to cover the silence. We barely spoke, and when we did, it was of sadness and disappointments, in simple sentences usually starting with I can’ts, I wishes, and I don’ts.
We found no hidden treasures, no caches of memories, no marvelous and unknown things. But we did find a stack of CDs hidden behind my father’s albums in the hallway—all big bands: Tommy Dorsey, Bennie Goodman, Collected Songs from World War II.
Sentimental journeys. Songs ostensibly about love, but really about loss so deep it leaves a gaping, unimaginable wound.
I have the CDs now. I listen to them, late at night, in the piano room, alone—always alone—and feel echoes of that wound. It is not mine; it is hers. And I do not understand it.
But for years it stopped me, forced me to trap my music and lock it up inside my soul.
The piano has set my music free. Sometimes I leave my practice sessions, my playing sessions, and wander into the kitchen, to find my mother standing there, a cookbook held like a shield in her left hand.
She watches me with that look she never had in life, that aware, startled look as if she can’t believe I have accomplished something she thought impossible, something she believed no one could ever do.
Then she turns away, and I can see through her—a five-foot-two-inch ghost with more substance than she ever held in life.
I want to ask her what happened; why she locked the music away along with her hopes, her dreams; what caused the hole in her life—the hole that haunts her, even in her death.
But as I frame the question, she vanishes like she’s never been—not exorcised, for she shall never be fully exorcised. She lives in my face, in my voice, in everything I touch and everything I do—but vanquished by a piano and the threat of sound.
We are each a product of our own history, our own generation.
I play like a girl.
And sadly, she did too.
(Back to TOC)
All In A Blaze
Stephen Baxter
Stars, they come and go
They come fast or slow
They go like the last light of the sun
all in a blaze
and all you see is glory
~ from Stars by Janis Ian
It all came to a head on the day of the Halo Dance.
On some level Faya Parz had known the truth about herself. In the background of her life there had always been the bits of family gossip. And then as she grew older, and her friends began to grey, she stayed supple—as if she was charmed, time sliding by her, barely touching her.
But these were subtle things. She had never articulated it to herself, never framed the thought. On some deeper level she hadn’t wanted to know.
She had to meet Luru Parz before she faced it.
The amphitheatre was a great bowl gouged out of the icy surface of Port Sol. Over Faya’s head the sun, seen here at the edge of the solar system, was just a pinprick in a tapestry of stars, its sharpness softened a little by the immense dome that spanned the theatre. Of course the amphitheatre was crowded, as it was every four years for this famous event; there was a great sea of upturned faces, all around Faya. She gazed up at the platforms hovering high above, just under the envelope of the dome itself, where her sister and the other Dancers were preparing for their performance.
"… Excuse me."
Faya glanced down. A small woman faced her, stocky, broad-faced, dressed in a nondescript coverall. Faya couldn’t tell her age, but there was something solid about her, something heavy, despite the micro-gravity of Port Sol. And she looked oddly familiar.
The woman smiled at her.
Faya was staring. "I’m sorry."
"The seat next to you—"
"It’s free."
"I know." With slow care, the woman climbed the couple of steps up to Faya’s row and sat down on the carved and
insulated ice. "You’re Faya Parz, aren’t you? I’ve seen your Virtuals. You were one of the best Dancers of all."
"Thank you."
"You wish you were up there now."
Faya was used to fans, but this woman was a little unsettling. "I’m past forty. In the Dance, when you’ve had your day, you must make way."
"But you are ageing well."
It was an odd remark from a stranger. "My sister’s up there."
"Lieta, yes. Ten years younger. But you could still challenge her."
Faya turned to study the woman. "I don’t want to be rude, but—"
"But I seem to know a lot about you. I don’t mean to put you at a disadvantage. My name is Luru Parz."
Faya did a double-take. "I thought I knew all of us Parz on Port Sol."
"We’re relatives. I’m—a great-aunt, dear. Think of me that way."
"Do you live here?"
"No, no. Just a transient, as we all are. Everything passes, you know; everything changes." She waved her hand, indicating the amphitheatre. Her gestures were small, economical in their use of time and space. "Take this place. Do you know its history?"
Faya shrugged. "I never thought about it. Is it natural, a crater?"
Luru shook her head. "No. A starship was born here, right where we’re sitting, its fuel dug out of the ice. It was the greatest of them all, called The Great Northern—we think. We’ll never know its fate; the Extirpation saw to that."
"You know a lot of history," said Faya, a little edgy. The great Extirpation of the Qax, once alien overlords of Earth, had succeeded in erasing much of the human past. And now the ruling Coalition of Interim Governance, focusing on mankind’s future, frowned on any obsession with lost, heroic days.
Luru would only shrug. "Some of us have long memories."
A crackling, ripping sound washed down over the audience, and a pale blue mist erupted over the domed sky.
"What a beautiful effect," said Luru.
"But it’s just water," Faya said. So it was. The dome’s upper layers of air were allowed to become extremely cold, far below freezing. At such temperatures you could just throw water into the air and it would spontaneously freeze. A water droplet froze quickly from the outside in—but ice was less dense than water, and when the central region froze it would expand and shatter the outer shell like a tiny bomb.