but still I gasp when his lips hit mine,
a little hard, a little hungry,
nothing like the tentative kisses I’ve traded
with boys from youth orchestra,
Or the silly, innocent pecks exchanged
In the semi-public of summer night bonfire parties by
the lake.
His hands don’t go to my shoulders, my hair.
Instead his left arm encircles my ribs,
just under my arms;
he draws me in, kissing so powerfully my head bounces against the driver’s side window.
I feel his tongue pushing my lips apart . . .
HBO warnings start flashing in my mind:
A blurry AC—adult content—
and the threat of encroaching N—nudity—
blink in sleek yellow letters
against the gray-black screen of my eyelid interiors.
I squirm out from under his fierce embrace.
“I should get going. I’m . . . I’m not hungry.”
I don’t look back as I trot across the lot to my beige Subaru.
37
I try to ignore Dave’s car,
right behind mine as I turn onto Main;
try not to look at his half-amused,
half-annoyed expression haunting my rearview mirror.
I feel a whoosh of relief when he goes left at Broad Street
and I keep going straight.
A ring around my ribs still vibrates
with the memory-sensation of Dave Miller’s grasp.
My mind fills with wonder, yearning
for whatever might have happened next,
yet I can’t understand—
beyond our baby-days romance,
why would Dave Miller be drawn to me,
the trumpet girl?
Maybe it’s all those jokes about buzzing lips
and what that power might be good for
inside a boy’s jeans.
I know that sometimes there’s a bit of bragging
where my classmates tell their friends how our high school has the All-State number one brass player,
how I’ve won competitions
from New England down to Florida.
I’m a feather in their cap
even if my lips never move south of there.
Stupid jokes—being a trumpet girl, I’ve heard ’em all.
But somewhere in there, is there the why,
the logic that could connect the dots
between Dave Miller and me?
38
Despite my plan, I get home before seven.
Rebellion failed.
Steven is staring toward some cartoon
on the little kitchen television
while Mom loads the dishwasher.
“There’s a plate for you in the fridge, Daisy.”
“Hey, hon.” Dad surprises me
by coming through the door.
“Shower time, Steven!”
he says with enormous fake cheer,
doesn’t bother to smile.
Steven doesn’t seem to respond to Dad’s expressions,
so there is no point in looking any happier,
unhappier, than he feels,
and Dad is pretty much always far beyond blue.
The plate is a giant chef salad
that looks delicious,
especially because it’s been more than twelve hours
since anything but cafeteria food landed in my stomach.
I sit alone at the kitchen island,
watch Mom’s furious arms scrub pots and pans in the sink.
Her hair is up in a ponytail,
the knobby bones of her spine a ladder of anxiety.
I cram my mouth until
the awful, flat wailing begins floating down the stairs,
accompanied by Dad’s attempts at not shouting,
which fail:
“Steven, Steven, close your eyes or they’ll get full of soap.
Steven, this is just water.
Steven, hang on, Steven.
Shit!”
Growing ever tenser, less mock-cheerful.
Mom leans her weight against the counter’s edge,
hands framing the sink, elbows bent.
I watch her try to yoga-breathe,
count, prepare to go upstairs
and mop the sloshed and soapy battleground
Dad will have abandoned
as soon as Steven is passably clean.
“Gonna go start practicing.” I set my half-full plate
on the counter.
She doesn’t mention the waste
or ask for explanation.
We all know.
39
I stare at my horn, freed from its case,
as if it were half a stranger,
not a comfortable extension of my arm, my voice.
Three simple valves
I have pressed nearly every day for eight years,
buzzing, tonguing, even singing into the mouthpiece,
sometimes feeling like it’s the only way I can free
the secrets of my heart.
But tonight, in this tasteful basement,
I worry that my forward momentum has stalled.
Perhaps I will even, like Steven, regress.
I know my brother has lost more—
never had so many of the things I have—
yet sometimes it’s hard not to blame him for my descent from orchestra-guest-artist-worthy
prodigy horn player at ten or eleven
to mere highly capable teen trumpeter, winner of things like ribbons and high school plaudits.
Maybe that’s all I am now.
Are my parents the devils
who shot me from highest grace?
Or are they simply the arrows fired by Steven,
who has morphed from challenging autistic boy
to dangerous, nonverbal near-man?
Are they, like me,
victims of genetics and circumstance,
targets and weapons in a war
that is happening inside my brother’s mind?
Either way, they pierce me with their flagging energy, decreasing allotments of time
to come with me to master classes,
regional competitions,
to hear me perform.
Is seventeen old enough
to not need a mother and father anymore?
Should I not care
that Dad doesn’t tuck me into bed at night,
nor mind that there’s no time
to confide in Mom that Dave asked me to the movies?
Is this the way it ought to be?
All I know for certain is that
here I am
without showers of attention;
with fewer trips, fewer prizes,
hour after hour
trying to make a sound like Miles Davis,
imagining jazz as a cure
for the blues.
40
Ten o’clock
should be quiet.
Ten o’clock,
the warriors should be back at their separate bases.
Instead,
Mom and Dad have closed the pocket doors,
sealed themselves inside the kitchen.
And I hear whispering, the occasional loud word.
I retreat to the solace of the family room television,
but HBO provides no relief.
The naked, writhing bodies of the historical miniseries
remind me only of Dave Miller, wh
at I wanted,
what I feared.
I study the girls’ breasts, some huge and pendulous,
some small and firm;
consider my own, somewhere in between, I think.
Enough for Dave Miller, I guess.
Consider my face, pretty enough,
though maybe not for television,
the nose a little buttonish,
the mouth a little wide.
Now there is a Roman king, speaking of power
to a woman who tries to wield her own
through the translucent gauze of her dress.
(I love the British accents, which make even seduction
seem like art.)
I wish
that my parents still shared a bed,
that Dad did not sleep in the extra room beside Steven’s
while Mom has the master to herself.
On television, a kiss,
a slap.
No resolution.
I pull out my phone.
Text Justine:
“Did your parents start talking more
right before the divorce?”
But she doesn’t reply.
Real time has passed.
It’s now almost eleven.
Maybe she’s asleep.
Eleven,
and Steven is quiet.
The credits are running,
HBO tantalizing viewers with promises
of more passion next Tuesday night.
Just past eleven,
the pocket doors to the kitchen still drawn,
the whispering goes on.
No answers.
41
Wednesday’s breakfast,
dutiful as usual, yet there’s something less resistant
about the weight of Dad’s tread
on the kitchen hardwood,
which yields, instead of comfort,
a sense of impending doom.
The dah-nah-nah-nah-nah of Phantom of the Opera.
The dee-up, dee-up, dee-up
of John Williams’s Jaws movie score
as the shark’s narrow fin emerges, razorlike,
from the ocean’s surface.
The threat throbbing
through the silence of Dad’s absent criticism
as Mom stoops belatedly
to tie my brother’s shoes.
42
I am so embroiled in my family horror story
I don’t think to tell Justine about Dave Miller
and the egg chair and the parking lot
until we’re in the girls’ room after lunch.
Her squeal is so glass-shatteringly loud it draws my eye
to the bathroom mirror
in search of cracks.
“And you didn’t text me that last night?”
She gives me a soft pinch.
“There was a lot going on. My parents . . .”
“Oh, but no,
my parents didn’t talk more before the divorce.
Maybe they’re trying to make up,” she suggests.
“But, back to Dave,” she says. “How was it?”
Two other girls come through the bathroom door.
We exchange polite hi-but-you-can’t-hear-my-secrets glances.
Justine puts her lipstick back in her purse,
drags me into the hall.
“Let’s go find him!” she says.
“He’s usually out on the bleachers
behind the school after lunch, right?”
I don’t know how to explain the power of his kiss,
something hard to understand.
Not as terrifying as the force in Steven’s arm
when he smashes a dish.
Yet, with both, I never quite know
if it’s entirely innocent, if it can be at all controlled.
What is it
when someone so close to you
makes you hurt, a lot or a little,
in action or in circumstance?
“It kind of didn’t end well,” I tell Justine.
“Besides, I want to do some work on my Overton application.”
“More good news for your parents!” she declares.
“Yeah,” I say.
But all I know for certain
is that despite the calm of the morning,
Dad still didn’t kiss Mom good-bye.
43
“Describe some of the ensembles in which you play”
is the prompt for the second essay
of the Overton application I am frantic to finish.
If my parents split up, will going away to music camp be harder or easier?
Will Steven be less my responsibility
or more?
The worries clutter my straight-A mind,
which has gotten me through all kinds of essays,
from a sunny “My Summer Vacation”
to the endlessly boring Moby-Dick.
This should not be so hard. I try to calm myself.
This should be about jazz versus classical,
band versus orchestra versus playing in the basement
alone.
Yet, when I hit “save” on the keyboard,
I have managed just three lines:
Playing a solo is very different from being in an ensemble.
Even if your own standard of perfection is constant,
different mistakes are more noticeable,
different skills are more valuable in different groups.
And I’m off,
with my unfinished essays and all my other burdens,
to figure out how to say,
“We had gone to the beach,”
“He had arrived at the beach,”
“They had wanted to go to the beach,”
en français.
44
Yoga
is bullshit to me
but salvation for my mother.
I do not see how “downward dog” and “tree”
can bring her some kind of peace. I think
it is the music of the voices around her;
the quiet lull of the instructor’s voice, encouraging;
the birdlike chatter of the other moms, who,
after bending and stretching, cluster round her, listen
to the tune she plays, the horrible, discordant song
of Dad and me,
of Steven,
of inescapable tension, of worry,
of hoping today won’t be as bad as yesterday,
that tomorrow won’t be worse.
That is yoga for my mother,
while I sit and wait
for Dad to oblige us all by coming home
before Steven hits me
out of some incomprehensible frustration
or tosses something hard against a wall.
Why do we pretend
that there is any kind of harmony in our house?
Thank God there is music at school,
at band,
at orchestra.
Thank God there are places
with sounds that make me cry
from beauty,
not from pain.
45
“C’mon, Steven, bedtime,”
Dad says as he comes through the door,
drops his briefcase by the hall table.
No hello, no “how was your day?”
Even if Steven’s reactions are often nonexistent,
it seems to me inhumane to behave that way.
No wonder Mom twitches at the sight
of Dad
and Steven together.
I think Dad loves him in some way.
I remember when I was small, before I realized
that Steven wasn’t like other little brothers,
that his staring and stimming were not games
for me to imitate;
when I thought we lived a normal life,
when my parents both assured me
that, despite everything, we could.
A tiny ball of this emotion still curls deep inside me,
still stirs when I remember
pushing cars along the edges
of the family room carpet beside Steven
and smiling at him
and not thinking much of anything
about his failure to smile back.
I want to believe
there’s a place like that inside my father’s heart, too.
As Dad slides a hand under his arm,
gets ready to encourage him up off the couch,
I try to look into Steven’s eyes:
matching brother-and-sister blue with mine
but different in every other aspect.
Steven does not meet my gaze, and yet
when I play for him, there’s something I know,
some connection
that stretches past the neurological limits,
the things the doctors tell us he can know,
can feel,
can express.
There is something
there
inside,
kind of magical,
kind of unique.
“Up we go,” Dad says.
Together they move slowly to the door,
The Sound of Letting Go Page 6