“Go well, my dear,” she said, and she put her hand on my arm. I looked at her hand. It was veiny and spotty and it had gullies along the back between the bones. I looked at my arm and her hand together, at the place where her hand stopped and my arm began, and I felt the borderline, the little gaps of air under her fingers. I thought of all the notes she’d played with that hand and all the notes I’d played with that arm. I was still looking at my arm and her hand together when she lifted her hand away and turned around and walked off across the grass.
Night was coming. People were hustling instruments and picnics into cars and turning on headlights.
Mr. Kaplan hadn’t said anything to me. Now he said, “See you tomorrow, Allegra,” and got into his car with his wife and Jessica. I put my bouquet in the back of the car where Daddy’s cello rides, and kept my violin between my legs. David was driving, and if we made a sudden stop my violin would get broken. Daddy was beside him, and my mother and I were in the back.
“Well, one down,” Daddy said.
“And goal to go,” David said.
We drove past three churches and a service station on our way out of Trout Creek Ridge and onto the freeway.
“How did you really like it?” my mother asked me.
“Very strange,” I said. I wished Jessica was riding with us.
“How strange?” she asked.
“Strange from beginning to end,” I said.
“All that sound,” Mommy said.
“Right,” I said. “It just kept jumping out at me. Like pushing me from behind.”
She nodded her head and said, “Right.”
“Everybody has a first time,” Daddy said.
“I guess so,” I said.
“And those rushed sixteenth-notes. You stayed steady, that was great,” Mommy said.
“My brain didn’t,” I said.
Daddy said, “I couldn’t tell that from listening.”
I don’t remember the rest of the trip home. Daddy and Bro David were arguing over whether the horizon is 2.8 or 2.6 miles away if you’re standing on flatland and your eyes are five feet above the ground, and I fell asleep. I woke up with my head on my mother’s lap and David was driving into the garage.
But when I got into bed I couldn’t sleep. I played with Heavenly Days for a while, swinging the end of the sash from my nightgown back and forth like a pendulum for her to catch. She moves her head like a metronome when you do that, and you can change the tempo whenever you want. Cats don’t get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. They have a good attention span.
I tried going to sleep. It was a hot night. Portland has a few of those in the summer, not too many. I kicked all the covers off. Heavenly went to the foot of the bed and started to study the wall. Usually she sleeps curled against me. I turned over. And over. And over.
It’s always hard to sleep after a concert, or even after a big rehearsal. Your adrenaline is going too fast. You have all these tunes going around in your ears. I don’t know why I slept in the car.
Did I play well? Or were those people just saying those things? The four wrong notes—didn’t anybody notice them? Well, what would people say—“You played really well, except for that part in the first movement, which was awful”? If I’d known Karen Karen was in the audience, would I have played differently? I wondered what her last name was. I didn’t want to know.
I looked at the bouquet, in a pitcher on my desk. If only she hadn’t turned out to look that way. I wouldn’t have felt so bad. I turned over and tried not to look at the flowers. And she could stand there and say Mozart makes you forget your problems. I put my head under my pillow. It was too hot under there. I kept listening to my own breath. I sat up.
The clock said 12:22 A.M. I didn’t want to read. I didn’t want to go over my list of words, starting with “tenacity,” all over again. Heavenly and I were tired of playing. What do people do? Jessica knits. She’s knitted six sweaters in her life. And Sarah gets up and does exercises beside her bed.
I put on some shorts and sneaked down into the garage and got my bike and went out bike riding.
I hadn’t ridden my bike for a long time. I couldn’t ride to my lessons because I might drop the violin case; Jessica and I hadn’t had time that one afternoon; and I’d been busy practicing; and I don’t know what the other reasons were. I rode down our street to the corner and took a left turn. The streetlights were on, but I used my bike light anyway. I rode around three blocks twice. The air felt so good, just nice air. Nice air, I kept saying to myself, in rhythm with the pedals. I stopped and unbraided my hair.
I felt my hair blowing straight back. I felt bugs hitting my legs and bouncing off; the handlebars were shiny under the streetlights and then gray and then shiny again. I rode past an all-night doughnut shop and saw three men laughing inside. One of them was holding a doughnut high in the air and they were all shaking with laughter.
I went into the dark again and rode in a straight line for a while. A bat or something swooped down in front of me. Maybe it was a swallow. We had a nest of swallows once when I was a little kid, and I saw the babies getting fed when they were brand new. I think seven or eight years had passed. Where would those baby birds be now?
I rode into Laurelhurst Park, where I’d turned pages for Charley Horner. The bushes were shadowy, clustered in bunches, and the air was cooler. Some kids were sitting on a bench, smoking cigarettes. I had a tune in my head: I tried to remember what it was; it was from somebody I’d turned pages for. It kept on playing in my head and it was so beautiful and sad; it’s a tune about love. I mean it’s about love for everything: stars, hills, bushes, trees, and it was about being in love, too. It kept going around in my head, as if it were on a tape, just that one part of something I’d turned pages for. It’s a melody that makes your stomach and brain and everything get all melty. I slowed down and pedaled in time to it.
Joel Smirnoff was much too old for me, and I kept hearing the tune anyway.
When I rode out of the park the tune was still in my head. I rode straight home, not around any extra blocks. I put my bike away in almost silence, not to wake anybody up. I walked around to the back door and stood between two rosebushes smelling them and hearing that melody for a couple of minutes. Then I got inside without making anything click noisily, went up the stairs very carefully, skipping the sixth step because it creaks, and I went to bed.
Exercise is good for you. It helps you sleep better. It makes peace.
8
Mr. Kaplan was wearing a sweatshirt that said, like a National Enquirer headline, “Dvořák alive! Terrorizes couple in Tampa!” The first thing he wanted to do was listen to the concert tape. We both sat in chairs in his studio and closed our eyes.
“Intonation problem … dragging on that shift … sixteenth-notes are beautiful.… Too soft right here, I can’t even hear you … nice descending trills.… You landed on that second G like a dive bomber.… Where’s the fortissimo? I thought you were supposed to be fortissimo there.… Mozart thought so, too.… Take longer on that low A.… Your timing here needs to be more assertive—remember, it’s your cadenza … again, trills quite strong and good here.… Second movement wants somewhat more, I don’t know, it wants some, some, some kind of quiet elegance … not that there isn’t any, but.… Here—right here—hear that pleading tone? That’s wonderful, Allegra … and here, where he answers the questions he’s just asked in the previous section.… This cadenza isn’t quite liquid enough.… Again, fine, fine trills here … you lost the grazioso a bit there, didn’t you? Nice bright tone here, good for you.… Margaret’s band sounds like a flock of geese.… Good fluid grace notes, they’re like birdcalls ascending, aren’t they?”
At the end, I opened my eyes and he said, “In short, Allegra, your violin invites you to do more with this concerto. Mozart does, too. Listen to your instrument more, hear what it’s capable of doing. More, much more.” He looked at me, then away, out the window. “Indeed.”
> He looked back at me. “I’m proud of your work last night. But. But. In the first movement, you can run like an athlete. In the second, you’re capable of melting snow. In the third, everyone should feel like dancing.” He smiled. “But it’s not happening yet. Are we ready to go to work?”
“Yes,” I said, and opened my violin case. There’s a music teacher saying: Did you come here to be praised or appraised? I thought of the voice my softball coach used when she said, “Pretty good isn’t good enough. Let’s go to work.” While I was rubbing rosin on my bow, I glanced at the A teacher is someone who makes you believe you can do it pillow. We went to work. I hadn’t had much sleep, and there was a lot to remember, everything he’d said about the tape. It wasn’t very much fun at times that morning, but I didn’t say so. And I didn’t ask how many minutes and seconds the performance had been. It didn’t seem so important anymore.
As we played that morning, in the first movement my sixteenth-notes were too muddy; in the second movement, I wasn’t melting any snow; and in the third, I didn’t feel anyone dancing.
“If you can do in performance what you did with the second-movement cadenza the first time in rehearsal with Margaret’s group—ah, Allegra.…” he said. “Isn’t it strange—how difficult it is to do the perfectly natural thing?”
I nodded my head. “Something got into me and made me forget people were listening,” I said.
“Almost but not quite, Allegra. Let you forget, not made you. Shall I tell you a funny story about Menuhin? A genius at relaxation. He once woke up in a concert in Boston and realized he’d played an entire movement asleep. And he’d played it beautifully. The Beethoven concerto. Koussevitzky was conducting. This is a true story, Allegra.”
I laughed. I’d heard the story before, but it was still funny.
“This sleeping performance is not our objective for the competition, however.…”
As I left my lesson, he put his hand under my chin and said, “No reason for you to be a ’fraidy cat, Allegra. Mozart didn’t want you to be one.”
And he also said, “Have you been doing anything for just plain fun this summer? Anything irresponsible?”
I thought about banging on the metal sculpture in the Rose Garden with Deirdre and all those people. And messing around with Heavenly Days. And going bike riding last night. “A little,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you do more than a little?” he said. “Give yourself a day off—do something different? Tomorrow.”
“You mean not practice?”
“Indeed. I mean not practice. Do something away from your violin.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t really know what to do.
When I got home, Heavenly had a mouse on the lawn and I stuck my tongue out at her for doing it. I used to get berserk when she killed things. But I’ve gotten myself under control and don’t do that anymore. I made myself think of it differently: Heavenly was doing what nature taught her to do. She wasn’t a maniac being made happy by murder. Nature didn’t plan on a whole species running to the sound of electric can openers; cats were designed to get their own food, and they kill things because that’s their law.
But that mouse had had such a short life.
I went upstairs to my room to take a nap.
I was supposed to run like an athlete and make snow melt and make everybody want to dance. Menuhin could play the violin while he was asleep, and I was supposed to be as divinely inspired as the Boston Celtics, and I was supposed to take a day off and not practice, and Mozart didn’t want me to be a ’fraidy cat, and I was supposed to take longer on that low A and have more quiet elegance, and I was supposed to be ME: Allegra Shapiro—I’M playing this concerto, and there was a mouse being chewed up on the lawn that just thought it was going out for a walk. I think I was bewildered.
Sarah called and woke me up. She was back from her ballet camp in California. We should celebrate.
The concert that night in the park was another orchestra that both my father and mother play in in the summertime, called the Festival Orchestra. It’s not against their union rules to play in it. People, including Daddy, had been kidding Mommy about how she might never play again after this concert so she’d better enjoy it. In fact, if the Oregon Symphony players didn’t get their contract for the next season, they’d be “locked out” and the Youth Orchestra might have to play the concert in Waterfront Park that my mother’s orchestra was supposed to play on Labor Day weekend.
The calendar dates suddenly hit me. The Bloch Competition would be on Labor Day. The Oregon Symphony was scheduled to play in the park on Labor Day night. If my mother’s orchestra got locked out, I’d be playing the competition in the afternoon and playing a concert that night. I braided my hair and said to myself that it wasn’t fair to have everything crowded together that way and then have to start school the next morning. And I’d have a completely new stand partner; I wouldn’t be anybody’s Little Buddy anymore.
And I wondered: When do you stop being a seventh-grader and turn into an eighth-grader? Is it on the day when you get your report card in June, or the day after Labor Day, when you start in a new grade? Or is it on Midsummer Night or some other time?
I met Sarah and Jessica where we usually meet, by the violin side of backstage in the park. My parents weren’t as strict this summer about where we could sit, because we were twelve. Last summer we’d had to put our blanket exactly beside at least one other symphony family if we didn’t have our own grown-up along. This time they said we could sit anywhere if there were only three rows of blankets between us and the stage.
Sarah said, “Parents lie in bed at night and think these things up, the same way teachers do. You really have to work to think up that three-rows-of-blankets rule.” It was great seeing her again. She thought the Bloch Competition was nifty. “Nifty. Sure. How many people in the whole world are finalists for something like that?” She put on her little kid pose and said, “Totally awesome.”
We walked up one side of the park and down the other, smelling the food. You can get a whole meal if you want to spend a lot of money. Chinese food (“very un-Chinese,” Jessica says), and shish kebab, all kinds of pastries, pasta salads, grilled sausages, bagels, ice cream. We had to walk around the long lines of people waiting to get into the bathrooms, and every once in a while we saw somebody we knew and said hi, and stuff stuck to our sandals, and we just walked along in the summer evening.
Sarah had her own food in a bag; she wouldn’t eat any from the booths. She said, “You know what’s in those things? You know what they dip the chicken in? That cooking oil has forty-one percent saturated fat. You know what a fat-filled cell looks like? The nucleus and the cytoplasm are all squinched up; there’s no room for anything but fat. If you get a whole bunch of fat cells you can have a stroke and brain failure.” But she still wanted to go along and smell. Sarah is an extremely healthy person. She doesn’t get colds or anything and she hasn’t been absent from school in three years. She gets these embarrassing Attendance Awards and has to get up in front of the school and receive them at the end of the year.
We were reading the signs on the food booths, all the various kinds of cappuccino you could buy, and all the things you could get with a plate of fried noodles, when we saw QUITE BROILED SALMON. Jessica and I decided we wanted that. “How do you ‘quite broil salmon’?” I said. It smelled fabulous.
Sarah said, “It’s probably a British expression. You ever hear it in Hong Kong?” she asked Jessica.
“No. Never,” Jessica said. We stood and stared at the sign. Quite broiled salmon. Sarah walked up close to it and burst out laughing. “It’s partly covered up.” She pointed. Hooked under a board was the beginning of the sign, “Mes.” MESQUITE BROILED SALMON. We roared. Mesquite is a smoke flavor from a mesquite tree.
While Jessica and I were eating Quite Broiled Salmon and fried noodles and chicken and Greek gyros and Sarah was eating her healthy food and taking bites of the salmon because it passed her Healthy
Test, we played I’m Neek. Somebody taught it to us in school in second grade, and we still spell it that childish way. It’s called I’m Unique: everybody has to tell unique things about themselves. It was supposed to make us more thoughtful when we were little.
“I’m Neek because I’m the only one in this park right now who’s forgotten how to write the Chinese character for old age,” Jessica said.
“Not counting the ones that never knew in the first place,” Sarah said. “I’m Neek by winning a pirouette contest last week.”
“How do you do that?” Jessica asked.
“I didn’t fall down till the fourth one. See my knee?” Sarah pulled her big lavender skirt up to show us. It was a big floor burn. “They were on pointe, too.”
Sarah was dancing when she was three years old. Or not much more than three. She was a Nutcracker Victim, that’s what she said in her school report last year. Nutcracker Victims are the little kids who watch the Nutcracker ballet every Christmas on television and get up on their feet and dance while they watch it. She said they eat and sleep Nutcracker and pretty soon they find out it’s hard work, but by then they’re addicted.
Our teachers call us the Three Weird Sisters sometimes in school, the ones in Shakespeare that say, “Double, double, toil and trouble.” “I’m Neek because I played a solo in a park last night and the girl who should’ve been playing it wasn’t beautiful the way she was in the dream I had about her and I feel guilty about that,” I said.
Jessica said I was the star of the show, and then Sarah told us about her roommates at ballet camp, one from Wisconsin who shaved her head and one from Arizona who had taken a vow of silence for the entire summer and would only whistle. Then we started to tell Sarah about the dancing man. Jessica said his name was Trouble, and she said, “I bet he’ll show up here. Watch. Allegra has seen him how many times?”
The Mozart Season Page 11