All the What If? and What's Next? and What's After That? games left me mixed-up and feeling at odds with myself.
Sometimes I imagined myself as one of the lucky ones, a big-name soloist.
More often I just wished we could keep on right where we were, with nothing more changing except that the worried games would go away.
February came on wet and gray and with Mom and Mr. Stubner and me all pretty equally unhappy with each other.
Mom started it by deciding I should take part in a young artists' competition that had as its prize a guest appearance with one of Germany's finest orchestras. Auditions would be in April and the concert in June.
"Mom, that's not something I want to do. Not yet. I'm not good enough."
"Nonsense. Look where you sit in orchestra, one chair from concertmaster, a position you will win next yeas."
"I don't know that. And school's not a competition." I thought of Kendall. "At least not for most of us."
Mom's eyebrows arched. "Really?" she said, as though she knew exactly how we all ranked one another It wasn't something we admitted doing, but these days the questions were always with us: Who was best and who was least promising and where everybody was in between.
"Please, Mom," I said, "I really don't want to enter a contest. You're going to be unhappy if I don't win, and if I do win ... Mom, I'm not ready to play a real concert."
"That's really not for you to judge, is it?" Mom said.
"AND JUST WHO else should be the judge?" Ben asked. I'd expected him to be sympathetic, but instead he got almost angry. "Why don't you stand up to your mother? You're sixteen years old, but she runs your life like you're six."
"That's not fair" I told him. "Just because you're free to live like you want ... Anyway, Mom's usually right. She's been behind almost every good thing that's happened with my violin. Without her. I wouldn't even be in New York."
A grin replaced Ben's scowl. "And you wouldn't have met me. So, okay, maybe your mom's ideas aren't all bad." His grin grew devilish. "Would a kiss make you feel better?"
"Not in the school cafeteria!"
"It's the only place I see you these days."
"You know Mom doesn't want me getting involved..."
"Back to her!" Ben jabbed a french fry into ketchup but didn't eat it. "Are you going to let her even decide how you feel?"
"No! It's just that things are complicated right now." I looked away so I wouldn't have to meet his eyes. "And I don't know if I'm ready to ... to get entangled."
"That's what I am?" Ben demanded. "An entanglement?"
I didn't answer and a moment later his voice calm again, Ben said, "Anyway, you ought to talk to your violin teacher about the competition. If he says no to your taking part, then your worries are over."
MR. STUBNER didn't say no. He said, "I don't think you should do it, Tess, but it's your decision."
"You can tell my mom it's a bad idea," I said. "I did, when she called me about selecting music for you to prepare."
"Did she pick Vivaldi's Summer or did you?"
"His Four Seasons Concertos are lovely, sparkling music, and audiences are familiar with them. There's an advantage to playing music that people already like."
"But was Vivaldi her choice or yours?"
Mr. Stubner frowned, and I knew I'd gone too far "I'm sorry," I said, opening the music. "I'll get to work."
IT DIDN'T TAKE me long to understand why Mr. Stubner disapproved of competitions. To prepare for this one, I had to let slide much of the other work he assigned me. I knew it frustrated him—I could see it on his face when he struggled to stay patient—but he helped me with the Vivaldi piece all he could.
Increasingly often, though, despite his patience, my lessons didn't go right. Sometimes he'd stop me in the middle of a passage and say, "No! This is beautiful music, Tess. I want you to give it the most beautiful sounds in your heart."
I'd nod as though to say, Yes, I will. The truth, though, was that I didn't have a clue how to find those sounds, and I worried that if I did find them, they might not be beautiful enough. It was safer to concentrate on being technically perfect. I knew how to work out fingerings and drill on hard passages until I could make them sound effortless, and I knew that would count in the competition.
Mr. Stubner listened and shook his head. "Being a good contest player isn't the same thing as being a good musician," he said.
But I couldn't aim for both at the same time;. And I knew which I was supposed to be come April.
Tess
The rain continues to soak the Rattlesnake through the rest of the afternoon, with each brief letup of sound followed by a new onslaught. Around suppertime, we finally see lighter skies to the west, but by then we've resigned ourselves to spending the night Where we are.
"Tess," Amy says, "please get up with me to watch for the deer Pop says it's okay if we carry pepper spray and stay in calling distance. Mom, too."
"How early?"
"They feed at first light."
"Before dawn? Once we're back home you can see deer any evening just by looking in people's gardens."
"It's not the same thing."
"But before dawn?"
"Please?"
LATER I LIE in my sleeping bag wondering how she talked me into agreeing Maybe she did it by not taking no for an answer Or maybe it had something to do with Midnight, because I'm sure she's still thinking about him a lot more than she lets on. I hope this will be an adventure that will somehow help her.
It occurs to me that might have been Dad's intention too, when he pointed out the meadow to Amy and said just enough to make her want to visit it in the early morning Dad, I think, is becoming an old softy.
Amy whispers, "Are you asleep?"
"Almost."
"You forgot to tell me 'pleasant dreams.'"
"Pleasant dreams."
"Sametoyou," she says, making it one word. "Don't forget to set your watch alarm."
THE TENT IS still dark when we put on clothes we've kept warm in our sleeping bags. And then we're outside, giggling with excitement, finding our way through a wet forest that seems like a different place than it did in the day. The moon has gone down, but a scattering of stars shows swaying, black branches overhead, and our flashlight beams rove across looming, unidentifiable shapes.
Amy, treading on my heels, asks, "Are you scared?"
"No. Are you?"
"No." She pauses. "A little."
The meadow isn't far, and once there, we circle its edge until we're where the breeze won't carry our scent to any animals that come down to browse. I shake out the plastic sheet we've brought to sit on, and Amy decides where we should put it. She says, "Animals can't see us so well if we're against a tree instead of next to it. That's what Pop said, and also..."
"And also he told you we're not going to see anything unless we're quiet?"
"Yes."
I can sense her watching, intently scanning the dark field for all of a minute or two. Then she announces, "It's too early. We can talk till it's time."
"And how will we know when that is?" I ask.
Amy ignores the question. "Tell me about Ben," she says.
"I already have."
"Will he get a new girlfriend now?"
"I don't know." I hadn't thought of that. I hope not.
"There are lots of boys in Missoula you can go out with. And there are concerts you can be in, too, if you want."
"I don't think I ever want to go on another stage," I tell her.
"I know!" Amy says with feeling "Before school was out, when my class put on a show, I had to be a tulip in a flower garden. It was so dumb" She squirms into a more comfortable position. "Did you want to be in that big concert where..." This time she doesn't finish "where you played so bad." She says, "...the one in Germany?"
"No."
"Then why did you do it?"
"Mom thought I should."
"She made you?"
"Sort of."
"How?"
&
nbsp; "Well, she..." I halt, confused, unable to explain, and then I wonder if maybe the reason I can't explain is that that's not how it really was. Startled, I suddenly realize Mom didn't have any way to make me.
I remember how Mt Stubner said that although he was against my entering the competition, the decision was mine. At the time, I thought he just meant that he didn't have the last word.
But maybe he meant that the decision really was up to me.
After all, even though Mom argued hard for it, I was the one who'd win or lose at the tryouts. All I had to do was not play my best there, and somebody else would have gone to Germany. I must have realized that, and yet I tried my hardest to win.
But Mr. Stubner wouldn't want me to do less than my best. So had he been suggesting that I was the one who had to say what was right for my playing?
I draw my breath in sharply, and Amy asks, "Do you hear something?"
"No."
I know what I want to believe—that the whole Germany thing was Mom's fault.
But what if it wasn't?
What if I'm the one to blame because I didn't have the courage to stand up for myself? I didn't listen to my own sense that I wasn't ready to play a big concert, and I didn't make anybody else listen to it, either My heart starts pounding hard as I wonder if I could have, should have.
Amy tugs on my sleeve. Are you paying attention? I said when I was a tulip, I had to wear a flower collar."
It takes me a moment to remember what she's talking about and to come up with a response. "Was it nice?"
"No. It was cardboard and it scratched. Did you wear a costume in your concert?"
I wonder how she pictures a concert. "Not a costume," I tell her "I wore a formal, pearl-colored dress. It had a scooped neck and a long row of tiny buttons up the back."
Amy sighs, and her voice is wistful: "You must have been so gorgeous."
"I doubt that," I say. Anyway, I was feeling too many other things to think about how I looked."
"Like what?" she asks.
I don't answer because I've heard something Putting a hand out to shush her I feel for my canister of pepper spray and then flick on my flashlight. Its beam catches the black and white slink of a skunk gliding to cover Neither Amy nor I move—I think we hardly even breathe—until it's gone.
"Close," Amy says. Then she repeats her question. "Feeling what?"
"At the concert? Lots of things."
"I guess you were scared, huh?"
"Yes. I hadn't thought I'd be. Not too much. But when the orchestra was ready, waiting for me ... when the conductor whispered, 'Fräulein'..."
I stop because my throat has become too tight for me to go on. Detail after detail is jamming into my mind, things I've been managing to forget.
Amy finds my hand and squeezes it. "It's okay," she says. "We should stop talking, anyway, or else the deer won't ever come."
She doesn't leave me anything to do but remember.
I wasn't sure what I had expected at the competition. Something more difficult, more like my audition for music school, maybe. Not that adrenalin didn't pump through me while I waited for my turn, or that I didn't feel a little sick, but some of that was good. It was how I felt when I had to play a piece for grades or in a school performance, and I'd learned that the tension in me added an edge to my playing.
I didn't know most of the other contestants because they came from all over A couple were way out of their league and everyone was embarrassed for them. A few played really well. The more I heard, though, the more I knew I stood a good chance of winning if I just performed my piece the way I'd been practicing it.
And I did.
When the judges went to confer I was pretty sure they would make their choice from among just three of us—a boy from another school, Kendall, and me.
I went to the ladies' room during the break before they announced their decision, and I was in one of the stalls when Kendall and her mother came into the bathroom. "Do you think I'll get it?" Kendall asked.
"The boy won't," her mother said. "But between you and Tess Thaler..."
"She doesn't deserve it," Kendall said. "She's never even entered a contest before, or played a guest spot anywhere."
"Then she'd better hope she doesn't win. A major concert isn't any place to find out if she's up to performing before a critical audience."
Kendall said, "If she does win, she'll mess up. She's been playing worse and worse all year like half the time she doesn't know what she's doing."
TWO MONTHS later I was in Germany, rehearsing on the stage of a vast concert hall. I sounded the last note of my solo and lowered my violin, relieved that my first run-through with the orchestra had gone reasonably well. There'd been only a couple of places where my playing and that of the strings and harpsichord hadn't synced as well as they should.
"Gut, fräulein. Gut," the conductor said. In the hall's fine acoustics, his words carried clipped and cleat They were accompanied by the light tapping of bows against music stands.
Pleased, I waited for the conductor to indicate which of the rough sections he wanted to tackle first. But instead he said, "Play as good this evening."
"I'll try my best," I answered, puzzled at his tone of dismissal. I glanced at the violin section and saw musicians already turning to other music. Was that all the rehearsal I was going to get? And all that bow tapping—had it been applause because I'd played well or relief that I at least knew my part?
PHONE CALLS HELPED me through the next crawling hours. I was glad the first one was from Dad. Mom, waiting at the hotel with me and as nervous as I was, had just been complaining about him. "Your father would have found a way to get over here if his new family weren't taking all his time."
"That's not fair" I'd told hen "It's not his fault the vet who was going to sub for him backed out."
Not for anything in the world would I have admitted how disappointed I was.
And Dad's first words were "I wish I could be there tonight."
"I wish you could be, too," I told him. And because he'd be hurt if I didn't say it, even though my stepmother and stepsister were still just faces in photographs, I added, And Meg and Amy, also."
Next, Ben and then Mn Stubner called. It was funny, how alike they were in their attitudes about this concert. Neither thought I should be doing it, but both, I knew, were pulling for me with all their hearts.
"You ready?" Ben asked.
"I hope so. I didn't make any terrible mistakes at rehearsal, but there were places that needed more work. In that section where the tempo keeps changing, I came in too early once, and there was this one place where my part goes loud, only I went too loud, and..."
"Tess, you're going to be great," Ben said.
Mr. Stubner said, "Did I ever tell you that I made my debut in Germany?"
"No."
"I did, and now it's your turn." His voice got gruff, "You're one of the best students I've ever had, Tess. You know your piece. Be honest to what's inside you, remember who you're there for and you'll be fine."
I LISTENED TO the first half of the concert from behind a side curtain, dazzled by the sight on the stage. The orchestra fanned out before the audience, violins to the left, violas in the middle, and cellos on the right. The polished metals and woods of flutes and clarinets, trumpets and French horns flashed in front of the percussion instruments lined up across the back.
And now it's your turn. Mr. Stubner's words kept repeating themselves in my mind. My turn. Like maybe I just had this one chance. I knew that wasn't what he meant, but I couldn't make the idea go away.
By the time the stage emptied for intermission, my hands were so sweaty I didn't know how I was going to hold my violin properly. And I felt like I might throw up.
A stagehand pointed to my mouth and drew a smile with his finger.
And then the string players and harpsichordist who'd play the Vivaldi concerto with me filed back out and took their seats.
I felt Mom straightening my dres
s, pale and shimmery and fitted to my shape except for a flare that began at my knees and went almost to the floor Low-cut and sleeveless, the dress made me look twenty years old. Twenty-five, maybe. Grown-up.
Mom whispered last reminders, and then the conductor touched my arm. We needed to go now, me first, him right behind me.
I walked out quickly. Command the stage. Somewhere I'd heard that was important.
I paid my respects to the concertmaster The musicians who had been wearing casual clothes that morning looked like different people now. The men were in tuxedos. The women's bare necks gleamed above matte black dresses. They're all so elegant, I thought. And so assured. And so good. And they're going to accompany me? All of a sudden it didn't make sense.
I didn't realize I'd halted until the concertmaster made a slight gesture. I turned then, quickly, into a spotlight that pinned me before an audience I couldn't see. I knew they were out there, though. That they were watching me, not a child prodigy in a recital but someone who looked like an adult. Someone they would expect to give a professional performance. Their welcoming applause became a smatter of claps and died out.
"Fräulein?" The conductor's soft question jerked me back to what I had to do.
I nodded. Yes, I'm ready.
From the corner of my eye, I saw him set a tempo. Then the strings swept into sound.
I tucked my violin against my neck. I raised my bow. I listened for my entrance. And then...
When Amy squeezes my hand again, the sky has already lightened to a deep color that I can't quite put a name to. Bluey charcoal, maybe, faintly glowing with the kind of half-light that plays tricks with your eyes. In the next minutes, time and again it plays the same trick with mine. I glimpse a shape at the edge of my vision and think it's alive, only to have it turn out to be a boulder or shrub.
Once, the glistening tops of the grass in front of me wave and part and then close back up but the animal passing through stays hidden.
Mountain Solo Page 14