I heard running footsteps behind me. “Joni! Joni! Wait up!” Martin rushed to my side and put his arm around me, slowing me down by cupping my shoulder in his hand. “Wow! You really blew my mind!”
Of course he would say that. He had an untrained ear, and he wished the best for me. “I forgot,” I said in a flat, angry tone. “Three whole seconds passed and I didn’t play a note. I had to start the section over, and did you hear how I missed some of the runs? Oh, Martin, I forgot!” Finally the tears I had been holding back burst forth.
He held me, his forehead pressed against mine. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Joni. You had soul! There were sparks of genius!”
I pulled my head away from his. “Just sparks?”
“Well, yeah. Here and there. When you were able to forget you were in the spotlight and the audience melted away, and it was just you in the music. Do that all the time, and you’ll be great.”
“Yeah?” I said hopefully. Trained or untrained, Martin was a natural musician, and I was not.
“You care too much what people think of you. Forget ’em. Do your own thing.”
“But how?”
“You’ve got to live in the moment. You’ve got to live like everything matters and nothing matters, all at the same time.”
I knew this was some of his I Ching mumbo jumbo. “That makes no sense.”
“You can care a lot, but when things don’t work out like you hoped, just accept it, and try again the next time.” He framed my face in his hands and wiped my tears away with his thumbs. He smiled at me sadly, then kissed me. “I’m glad I finally got to hear you play. It was beautiful. You’re beautiful, Joni.”
When I got home, my mother hailed me from the den. “How did it go, Joanne?”
I ignored her. I sat at the piano and played my Beethoven straight through nearly flawlessly. Why I couldn’t do that at master class, I didn’t know.
At my next lesson, Dr. Harold didn’t say anything about my performance, and I didn’t mention it. I handed him my Beethoven, and he said, “Let’s start with the Chopin nocturne today.”
After that, he spent nearly a half hour helping me voice my Bach fugue. Time was running out. As he was wrapping up on Bach, I reached for my sonata again.
“I want you to give Beethoven a rest,” he said.
“I can’t! I’m going to play it next month on the Palace of Fine Arts program.”
“Joanne, I’m taking you off that program.”
I dropped my head and felt a tear trickle down my nose. It was humiliating to cry in front of my teacher, but the disappointment was too great.
“I’m sorry. I had reservations when I saw you sign up for the program. I should have said something then. Then at master class—”
“I was horrible, wasn’t I?”
“Not at all. You had some dazzling moments.”
It was exactly what Martin had said, but it was no consolation. I felt my shoulders shaking with my sobs. I wouldn’t be performing at the Palace of Fine Arts after all, and I was too devastated to move. Dr. Harold handed me a Kleenex.
“I bet you’re sorry you have me as a student.”
“I’m honored to have you for a student, Joanne,” he said quietly. “Put the musicians on the top of the ladder and the technicians on the bottom, and you’ll find yourself several rungs higher. It would be wrong of me to allow you to perform in public before you’re ready.”
“I could get ready if you’d let me,” I said hopefully. “I could practice more, hours and hours.”
“You’re giving Beethoven a rest,” he said firmly. “I’ve got something for you.” From his filing cabinet he removed a thin, yellow Schirmer publication. “I’m assigning you a new piece.”
I read the front cover: RAVEL SONATINE. It sounded like “saltine.” “Who’s Ravel?”
“It’s Ravel.”
“Who’s that?”
“You’re about to find out. Beethoven’s “Pathétique” is a very popular piece, you know. Several of my students are working on it, but this piece is just for you. I’m going to ask you not to listen to any recordings. I want you to make this piece your own.”
I opened it up to a swirl of complicated sixty-fourth notes. The third movement was ten pages long and marked “Animé.” I knew enough French to know that meant fast. The Ravel looked hard, hard, hard. Another thing to fail at.
I wiped my eyes and stood. Dr. Harold must have had a schedule change, because waiting at the door was Suyu. I watched the way he smiled at her. It was not how he looked at me. She was special to him, his star, while I was just a blubbering goof-up.
When I got home, I threw the Ravel on top of the piano with the mess of music there. Then I went into the den, where my mother was, and burst into tears again as I told her what had happened at my lesson.
“I don’t understand your Dr. Harold at all. First he tells you you can play at the Palace of Fine Arts, and then he goes back on his word. He’s not being the least bit fair to you.”
I didn’t correct her by saying I had signed up to play without his saying anything about it.
“Heavens, Joanne! I never should have agreed to your taking lessons from him.” She waved her hand at the stack of cards, addressed and stamped, waiting to be mailed. “Do you realize how many people I’ve told about your performance? I’ve already mailed a hundred cards!”
* * *
I didn’t sleep well; I had nightmares about performing. In one dream the keys on the piano were rearranged so that I couldn’t find the ones I needed. In another, the audience held a program of pieces I had forgotten to practice. The night before Thanksgiving, I woke up and began to play Beethoven’s “Pathétique” sonata in my mind. I got out of bed, put on my bathrobe, and crept downstairs. I sat at the piano, lit by the streetlight, and went through the motions of playing over the tops of the keys. A few times I accidentally sounded a note, but very softly.
I started, having spotted out of my peripheral vision a ghostly figure perched on the edge of the sofa. It was my mother, in her nightgown, her face glistening with cold cream and her hairnet stuffed with Kleenex to prevent her weekly beauty-parlor bubble from flattening out in her sleep.
“Joanne,” she said forlornly, “it’s the middle of the night.”
“Sorry. I was just checking this one part.”
“Allowing you to take piano lessons from Dr. Harold was a mistake. It’s too much for you. You’re too high-strung. I can’t bear to see my own daughter so unhappy.”
“But, Mom, these have been the happiest three months of my life!”
“If you think this is happiness, you’re headed for a miserable life! I worry you’ll never be able to settle down like your sensible sister and be content with everyday life.”
I swiveled to face her. “Mom! I am content! I love my life and the piano and Dr. Harold, and if you take that away from me I’ll die!”
Mom sighed. “I’m not suggesting you quit piano. I only think that if you go back to Mrs. Scudder—”
A clatter from the back porch caused the house to shake like an earthquake had struck.
“The turkey!” Mom exclaimed in horror. Snoopy must have knocked down our Thanksgiving turkey, wrapped in tea towels and thawing on the washing machine.
We both ran through the kitchen onto the back porch to find a drunken Dan, sprawled on the linoleum amid a half dozen broken flowerpots, plants, and dirt. Dan struggled to find his feet and fell back on his butt before hurling chunks down the front of his jacket.
I looked at Mom. “And you’re worried about me?”
Thanksgiving was a dreary day, pouring rain. Mom complained that I had missed some spots of tarnish when I had polished the silverware and had slathered too much pimento cheese spread on the celery sticks. I wasn’t quite certain what she meant when she called me high-strung, but I was pretty sure I’d inherited the trait from her. As soon as Jerry and Denise arrived, Mom banished me from the kitchen, exclaiming that I was “underfoot,” bu
t I knew it was only so she could rant to Denise about my recent failure as a pianist.
I wandered into the den, where Dad, Dan, and Jerry were watching the Forty-Niners, leaning forward on their seats, clutching the necks of their beer bottles, and hooting and hollering. I didn’t understand why it was so crucial that grown men knocked each other down in various formations and I didn’t care, but Martin had once speculated that without football there would be a lot more war.
I sauntered over to Mom’s desk and read one of the Christmas cards she had lying open.
Dear Ralston and Valentine,
How’s the weather in Michigan? Denise is now happily married to one Jerry Westfield, a soon-to-be psychotherapist. This is hush-hush, but from the looks of it, we’re soon to have a bouncing baby grandchild! Our Dan is attending San Francisco City College as a business major, following in the footsteps of his daddy. Our Joanne will be performing at the Palace of Fine Arts this December. As Dick says, “We count our blessings.”
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,
Dick, Helen, Dan, and Joanne
P.S. Dick complains about our dance lessons after working on his feet all day, but he just signed us up for another eight. Go figure!
Who were these people, Ralston and Valentine? Would my parents ever see them again? All around the world people were telling lies in their Christmas cards to people they hardly remembered. In my mother’s case, they weren’t exactly lies; she just didn’t know what her family was really about. Was that true of most mothers? I had an urge to revise the whole thing:
Dear Ralston and Valentine,
Why would I be writing to some people in Michigan that we never see? Denise is now unhappily married to one Jerry Wienerfield, who won’t let her go to college and complains she has immature clitoral orgasms. This is hush-hush, but our Dan is a drunk, flunking out of San Francisco City College, and from the looks of it will soon be a casualty in Vietnam. Our Joanne is the biggest failure of them all, having forgotten her Beethoven, so she won’t be performing at the Palace of Fine Arts. As Dick says, “No one in this family has any talent.”
P.S. Dick is just another word for penis. Go figure!
I wandered into the living room and flung myself on the sofa, looking over its back out the bay window. Martin was planning to hitchhike to spend the day with his Santa Cruz friends. I wondered if he’d gotten a ride or if he was standing on Highway 1 in the pouring rain. Why didn’t he want to spend Thanksgiving with Gus, his only relative in California?
I felt a presence in the room and turned to find Denise standing before the piano. I could see why Mom thought she was pregnant; she’d gained weight, and although she’d never had acne as a teenager, her face was splotchy with zits. She wore a shapeless long skirt and a V-necked, grandfatherly brown cardigan, the front pockets sagging. Her hair was done up in a librarian’s bun, and it was greasy.
“Did you ever think you couldn’t do it, Joanne?” she asked. “I mean, you get so nervous at recitals. Why do you like to play the piano so much, anyway? Maybe you could try something else.”
I looked at her for a long moment. “Like what? Typing letters?”
“Oh! That is so mean!” She plunged her fists into her sweater pockets and stalked back to the kitchen.
I looked out the window some more. I felt the weight of someone sinking into the sofa beside me. It was Jerry. He had greasy hair, too. Couldn’t they afford shampoo? “Hi, Beethoven,” he said, forcing a cheerful tone.
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped.
A long moment of silence passed. “I think you should stick with it,” he said quietly. “It’s part of you.”
I kept staring out the window like I wasn’t paying attention to him. Maxine Fulmer was coming up the walkway with Quentin Allen, whom Mom referred to as “Maxine’s star boarder.” Mom didn’t seem to have much in common with Maxine anymore, but then Maxine and Quentin probably had no other place to go. Her kids were far away, a married son who practiced law somewhere on the East Coast and a daughter in the Peace Corps in Kenya.
My parents greeted their guests in the foyer, and Maxine handed Mom a plastic-wrapped tofu loaf shaped like a miniature roasted turkey, which I doubted anyone would touch, even Maxine.
Quentin was wearing a beautiful maroon Edwardian suit with a flowered vest, a pink-and-white-striped dress shirt, and a purple-and-pink paisley wide tie. It made me think how boring men’s clothes usually were. He stood behind Maxine and attempted to slide off her raincoat.
“I’m not helpless,” she scolded. More and more, “liberated” women were biting the heads off men who dared to open doors or pull out chairs for them, gestures that had traditionally been considered gentlemanly displays of respect for the weaker sex.
Quentin was not the least bit ruffled. “Of course you aren’t helpless, my dear, but one ensconced in a coat is not as well positioned for said coat removal as another caring individual standing by to lend a hand. It is an honor and privilege for me to offer this simple act of kindness to one who has given me so much.”
She patted his cheek. “You are a dear, Quentin.”
My dad cleared his throat as if he were an embarrassed observer of a lovers’ quarrel. “Well! What wet weather we’re having!”
At dinner, Maxine talked about the 1968 presidential election, which was a whole year away. My parents weren’t political. They were Democrats who voted in every election, and Dad was a big union man, but other than that they were pretty conservative. They complained that taxes were too high and believed that all people on welfare were too lazy to work. They weren’t so much for the Vietnam War as they were disgusted by those who protested it.
“If only Bobby Kennedy would run,” Maxine said. “He’d stop the war. I’ll bet he throws his name in the ring yet.”
“That would make no sense,” said Jerry. “Eugene McCarthy is our antiwar candidate.”
Maxine went on and on about Bobby as if she hadn’t heard Jerry. As attorney general, Bobby had done so much for civil rights, and Bobby had taken on organized crime, and Bobby would fight for the redwoods and end poverty, and Bobby this and Bobby that.
“It’s a moot point, Max,” said Dad. “The incumbent is always nominated at the Democratic convention, and the incumbent is Johnson.”
“And LBJ is doing a hell of a job!” exclaimed Dan.
“Yeah, bombing the hell out of Hanoi,” said Jerry.
“Of course!” said Dan. “That’s how we’ll win. We can’t withdraw from Vietnam without winning. It would be a waste!”
What he really meant was that the U.S. couldn’t leave before he had a chance to get mixed up in the war. No ears for Dan, I still hoped. I didn’t say much. I stuffed myself with turkey, cranberry sauce, dressing, mashed potatoes, marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, and two kinds of pie: pumpkin and black bottom.
After the dishes were cleared and the dishwasher was humming, Maxine asked me to play something for her.
“I don’t really feel like it,” I said.
“Go on,” said Mom, carting the heavy, grease-filled roaster from the stove to the sink. “Denise and I will finish up. Play your Beethoven for Maxine, Joanne.”
I hadn’t touched my Beethoven since the day of that fateful master class, but once I was seated at the piano, I played my heart out, just for Maxine. In my peripheral vision I could see her gently swaying, her eyes half-closed, her lids fluttering.
I had not released the final dying chord before everyone but Mom entered the room without giving Maxine time to compliment my playing. She didn’t need to. That she had listened was enough. Maxine looked at Denise and patted the empty place next to her on the sofa. When Denise took the seat, Maxine launched into a tirade about how her “brothers,” meaning men, had stood by her during the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, but now for the women’s movement, they had fled. From across the room, Jerry glared at Maxine’s hairy legs flashing beneath her long brocade skirt.
I was so r
estless, I had to get out of the overheated room. I ran out the back door, flinging on my car coat, and dashed down Frederick Street in the cool drizzle. Just because I couldn’t explain to Denise why I loved the piano, that didn’t invalidate my feelings for it. I hurt inside so badly that not even Martin could console me. In fact, he made me mad. He had all the talent in the world, and he didn’t even bother to learn to read music. Maybe I was a little jealous of him, too. Would I ever learn to relax into the music the way he did, or would every performance of mine be sheer agony and misery?
Of all people, I appreciated Jerry the most. He was right; the piano was part of me. Who would I be if I quit? Who would be walking down the street or into a classroom? Just a shell of me, lacking purpose and passion and a goal. Without the piano, I would simply not be me.
With that resolved, I turned around and dashed back home.
Chapter
Fourteen
It happened on a day when I had a dentist appointment and had to make up a history quiz at lunch. Rena sat with Lisa Girardi and the in-crowd kids. The next day when I got to lunch, she was already at their table. I walked right by them as if they didn’t exist, or at least I tried to.
“Hey, Donnelly, where’d you get that neat Nehru jacket?” Candy shouted after me. “It looks just like George Harrison’s.”
I stopped. “It doesn’t look anything like his. My mother made it for me, and it’s one of a kind.”
“I’m sure glad my mother doesn’t dress me,” said Candy.
“Here’s a spot for you right here, Joanne,” Rena said hopefully, patting the bench next to her. I walked on as if I didn’t hear her.
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