I began my daily practice by setting the kitchen timer by the door, like a prison guard. Then I’d start with interpretive freestyle, something like my brother would do. Only mine sounded less like music, more like special effects. Or murdered babies.
“Quit!” barked my mom through her shut door, stuffing the foam earplugs deeper into her brain.
Fifteen minutes to go. Hunched over my violin so that no muscle was unduly taxed, my hair falling in my eyes, I climbed the dull StairMaster into hell known as scales, do re mi fa so, twenty-six times. They were so easy that I could do them while reading about whale blubber, if only I could just slide that National Geographic a little closer with my toe. There we go.
Six minutes later, when I was done reading the article and/or practicing scales, I had to man up and face the inverted climax of my day: Pancetta in E or Vibrata Piñata or whatever life-snuffing seventeenth-century masterpiece assigned by Pulowsky, my brilliant Russian teacher.
Pulowsky had defected from the former Soviet Union by rowboat, with nothing but a black turtleneck and a Stradivarius, to seek out the American dream: teaching me. While he imparted the secrets of his brilliant and acclaimed techniques, I stared over his shoulder at the TV.
“What is over there?” he would ask, always smiling, even when strangling me with his eyes.
“Sorry,” I’d say.
“Yes, you sorry. Very sorry, ha-ha. Must be good show.”
Five years ago he had combed his toupee forward from the back of his neck and it had come to rest in a little wren’s nest by his forehead. He wore the same black turtleneck he had defected in, flecked with fifteen years of dandruff. But whenever he played my violin for me, I realized with horror how the concerto was supposed to sound.
The family crept out of their hiding spaces to listen at the open door. Perhaps Mom was paying him all this money so he would occasionally entertain us and thus infuse me with greatness, like essential oils.
“Brilliant,” my mom said, clapping as he finished Bach’s Gavotte No. 2. “By the way, would you like some pie?”
“Oh,” I said, nodding, reaching for my violin. “Oh, I get it now. Thanks.”
He handed it back and everyone took cover.
On Thursday nights, it was piano. My three-hundred-pound bipolar piano teacher crawled out of the abyss and slouched toward our subdivision.
Mr. Fretel spent ten minutes dislodging himself from his LeCar. He mounted the front steps, heaved into the wooden chair beside the piano, and spent another ten minutes trying to control his ragged breathing. Then he strained over his belly, grabbed his shin, pulled it up and stuffed his legs into the crossed position. I fidgeted with excitement, trying to keep from staring at him as he slipped a flask out from the chest pocket of his blazer.
“Cheers,” he said, tipping it back and dribbling a little pink goo on his beard.
“What’s that for?” I asked, scooting closer.
“Antacid,” he said. “I have a hole in my stomach. From teaching kids like you all day.”
If he was in a good mood, he would torture me only a little.
“Did you hear about the tornado?” he asked as I opened my music book. “It’s coming straight for us.”
“Huh?” I wheeled around to look out the sunny window, bracing for my greatest fear. He slapped his knee.
“Ha! You are so gullible, my God. Wow. Do you believe everything people tell you?”
But on bad nights, it wasn’t just my naivete. It was my lack of technique.
“Terrible,” he’d mutter. “Your positioning is the worst I’ve ever seen. Hold your fingers like this,” and his hands arced over the piano keys, floating from note to note like prissy, bloated butterflies. His upper body swayed curtly, like he was feeling the music. But how? How could anyone in his right mind truly feel inspired by a song titled “The Merry Farmer”? Proper technique would require not only proper technique but also apparently an assload of artificial soul.
My musical motto had always been, “If it sounds good, who cares how it looks?” But since I couldn’t get the sounds-good part down, I figured Mr. Fretel was probably right. I tried hard to mimic his form, frying every last doughnut in my brain, and still—my wrists collapsed, my knuckles hardened into right angles.
I looked over cautiously at his reddening jowls.
“Didn’t I tell you to practice this?” he asked, reaching for his flask. “Do you realize you are wasting my time?”
I felt guilty and semiworthless. He was right. I was wasting his time. But I did practice. That was the thing: six years of piano, practicing five days a week, and I had reached the pinnacle of my ability, plonking “Farmer in the Dell” with two index fingers.
“God,” Mr. Fretel sighed. “I’m kidding. Don’t look so sad. You’re gonna die of brain cancer if you keep stressing out.”
“Worrying?” I breathed. “Worrying can’t make you get—”
“Brain cancer. Sure it can, kid. You’ve probably got a tumor the size of a melon in there.”
As I palpated the base of my skull for possible malignancies, he played a melody at the top of the keyboard as sloppily as he could, hands flat and sunken.
“Who does this look like?” he asked.
“Me,” I said, full of gloom.
“That’s right. This is you. Is that what you want to look like?”
“No.”
I started the song again, positioning each hand like an octopus with rigor mortis, pinkie aloft. I inhaled for the first chord and went totally blank. Little tumor seeds were blooming all over the anxiety-ridden garden of my gray matter, right this very minute.
Mr. Fretel stared. He bored holes into the sides of my head as he waited. He waited a very long time, but with my hands taking these technically appropriate shapes I could no longer remember what a piano was.
“This is ridiculous,” said Mr. Fretel with a sigh.
But what was ridiculous was anyone thinking that I could actually improve. What was ridiculous was the myth that if I practiced hard enough, I would somehow morph into first violin. Or an accompanist. Or Billy Joel. My heart wasn’t in any of those things. And when my heart wasn’t in something, it didn’t matter how well I was taught, or how often. My body simply would not comply.
What my music teachers didn’t know was that I did have other talents, other very special talents. I had God-given abilities, abilities far beyond belting out “Woman in Love” in the shower. In fact, they were completely noninstrumental. But, unlike violin or piano, there was no recital for children who filmed graphic Barbie porn and wrote stories about unicorns humping.
My BFF Margaret dialed in for my services. She knew that when it came to fulfilling preteen fantasy, I was a maestro.
“Did you finish the chapter about me and Brian?” Margaret would ask. In real life, Brian was kind of a jerk. But in my capable hands, he was Bruce Wayne.
“Yes,” I said, stacking the papers. “Twenty pages of pure lovin’.”
“Yes!” she’d say. “Did we…?”
“Everything but,” I assured her, “everything but.”
It was everything but because I had a block on what the big It was, the actual magical conception part. Tonight, though, maybe I would break through. I was dabbling at another project, the story of Morgan and Macy, two unicorns who’d fallen in love on Noah’s Ark. I closed my bedroom door and settled down at my desk in a T-shirt and underwear.
I wrote with colored markers to make up for the absent plotline. There was this delicious tension building, what with all that time in close quarters. Their unicorn love was drawing to some kind of unexpected pinnacle, something that couldn’t exactly be included in a classic children’s Bible story.
I stared at my bed, wondering.
How did horses do it, anyway?
I really didn’t know how people did it either. I knew the penis went in the vagina, but in the name of God how? That was the sketchy part, and field research was not easy in 1986. There were no
search engines. There was only a pamphlet about the mystery of menstruation in my underwear drawer and a vaguely worded romance novel stashed under my bed. Downstairs, the shelf of aging Encyclopedia Britannicas could be counted on for disappointingly benign photos of everything. Cross-sectional diagrams of the human pelvis were not going to cut it. I needed positions; I needed blunt, eye-popping visuals.
I pulled out paper from a desk drawer. When in doubt, draft your own. I readied a cover sheet in case Mom burst in suddenly, you know, with clean laundry or something. Locking your door was only asking for it. What does an eleven-year-old have to hide from her family?
I penciled the woman with big round basketball breasts and dark-colored nipples, and everybody knows about the triangles of curly hair in the crotch. As for the details of his member, there was no telling. Just a pale, snaky thing that hangs. So it goes in the vagina… hmm… well, however it goes in. Obviously, she must have to angle around down under it, but like Santa Claus and the chimney, there was a degree of voodoo involved. I drew their legs laced together, their heads at opposite ends of the page. Still didn’t reach. He had bumpy, tumorlike arm muscles, but her breasts were perfect, and I stared at them until it was almost too much. Then I picked up the debauchery and folded it until it was nothing but a tiny cube of paper. I went over to the toy baby carriage beside my dresser, lifted up the quaint, lacy dolls and blankets, and considered all the other cubed-up drawings hiding there. This was getting out of hand. I needed to find another hiding place. I returned to the desk and wedged the illicit sketch under my pencil mug, for now.
Back to my unicorns.
At last we were free on the new earth. Both of us were galloping as fast as we knew how. Our love, the source of energy. Her mane whipped in the breeze and her white figure pulsed at the thunder of her hooves against the earth.
Then her shimmering wings unfolded and lifted her up to the sky. With a heave of strength I unfolded mine and joined her.
A pleasant ache was now growing between my legs. The sounds of the house outside my bedroom faded into the flapping of mighty wings on sweaty skin.
The wind caressed us and we glided faster. Then we eased to the ground and I folded my ebony wings tightly to my back. She joined me and I felt uncontrolled. I stretched my neck and brushed her delicate face with mine. The touch of her mane made my heart shiver. As she settled herself on the ground I did the same, easing my body next to hers.
That’s stupid. They weren’t going to, what, hug with their legs? But he needed to get his parts touching her parts. Where were her parts exactly? Maybe I could walk downstairs and sort of casually ask Mom, as an afterthought, while I’m grabbing a snack. Um, so, with horses, like, how do they make love, anyway?
Make love, are you kidding? Please. I wasn’t going to ask her that. We’d had the Talk, but there were still a thousand gaps I’d rather she not fill.
With one last look, I urged her up and then followed my soul. We positioned ourselves for the moment we had waited for much too long. Within a few moments, all of our dreams were coming true. I forced myself to work harder to find the utmost crest of love for this mare. And together we rode it.
I read it over ten times. So sinful, and yet: so much like heaven. All things were possible at the tip of my pen. Churning out page after tawdry page, I didn’t need a timer, I needed more time, more paper. Hours didn’t drag by, they sailed. My tunnel vision was on the prey, on the love scene to end all love scenes. This was my practice makes perfect, my divinely channeled symphony. This was me feeling the music in my hands. This was my version of soul.
But the fact was, when the masterpiece was done, it didn’t look like much. Just a naughty dream scribbled on crumpled medium-ruled paper, hidden underneath a box of appropriate pink stationery in my bottom desk drawer. Nobody got trophies for wishful thinking. Especially not this kind.
I put the paper down and adjusted myself on the seat, found it slippery. Sweet Jesus, I was leaking. I popped up to see if I had somehow peed in my underwear. Was it sweat? Romance-induced sweat? Bizarre. I was ravenous.
Needed Lucky Charms.
I went downstairs and annihilated a few bowls, leaving the marshmallows for last, then went back upstairs to work on the story. I was surprised to find the light on in my bedroom. I turned the corner slowly, horrified to find Mom standing over my desk. My throat seized up, as I tried to act casual, stay calm. But it was too late, my paint-by-numbers porn had already been exposed. She was having a good chuckle, not the least bit appalled, smoothing out the latest intercourse drawing under the light of the desk lamp. I snatched it away.
“Mom, what are you doing! Where did you get that?”
“I was just cleaning up this mess on your desk.”
“No!” I said, crumpling up the paper, horrified at the amount of perverted attention I had apparently given the pubic hair. “Don’t!!”
I grabbed my strewn novelette in handfuls as the red-flag words jumped off the page: uncontrolled… urged… positioned. I threw it all into the bottom desk drawer and kicked it shut.
“Mom!” I whined.
“Oh, c’mon, lighten up.” She had already moved on and was putting clean socks in my drawer. “Have you practiced violin tonight?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s getting late.”
“But MacGyver’s on tonight.”
“No, no. Don’t tell me that now. You had all afternoon to practice.”
There was no point in arguing. I was too embarrassed anyway. I went downstairs and set up my music stand in the doorway of the den so I could do scales and still keep tabs on how to blow open a locked tractor trailer with a pair of panty hose.
But tomorrow, I’d do what I’d always done, play fourth violin at Regional, make people yawn at the piano recital, and stand third back from the left at choir. I’d look down enviously at that sight-reading pianist, sitting at the grand piano in her pretty dress, and wonder what it was like to be a child prodigy. To elicit the oo-aa from a sea of grown-ups. Compared to me, she was so much better. And yet, at that moment we looked exactly the same, frowning through the applause, wishing we were somewhere else.
7 | Reflections of a Mirror Addict
“Can a virgin forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire?”
—JEREMIAH 2:32
At Avon Middle School, my oversize self-hatred bloomed right on schedule with my undersize breasts.
I figured what I needed was a perm. Yes, my undeveloped mind plotted, a perm—then, THEN they’ll finally love you.
However, the beauty tech at Sheddin’ Sam’s had other ideas, like tipping the scale in favor of my preteen suicide.
After washing out the putrid chemicals and blow-drying my coiling mullet into a hair helmet, she spun the chair around and I wept openly.
Where is your sense of duty? my wet eyes implored. I looked exactly like the geek from Sixteen Candles. No, worse, I was my grandma. I looked like my grandma. Only Grandma was prettier than me.
At home I stuck my head under the bath faucet to try to start over.
But with bodies, you couldn’t just start over. You pretty much had to work with what you were given. And there was nothing about mine that was obeying the predetermined, primordial Christie Brinkley mold I had prepared for it. It was pudgy and skinny and huge all at once, all in the wrong places. My face was the antithesis of symmetry, my midsection the sworn enemy of svelte.
Svelte was a peculiar but all-important word that I gleaned from Dad’s vocabulary. Everything on a svelte woman was miniature, tightly contained, and doll-like, particularly her butt and her waist. She looked naturally made of plastic. And it never mattered what she wore, you could tell she had nothing to hide under her clothes. Except maybe that stamp on her crotch that said MADE IN CHINA.
Sveltes were everywhere, and my dad always seemed to notice them first. At a family restaurant one night, he eyed our petite waitress and nudged Kyle in the booth.
“What do you think?” Da
d asked him. “Huh? Very svelte?”
There it was again. Annoyed, I wiggled up next to Kate in the booth and pinched a hunk of her padded bra.
“Very svelte,” I said.
She locked my wrist and grabbed the belly hanging over my pants. “No, that’s a hunk of svelte.”
It was such a relief to have Kate. At least we could be huge and wrong and mediocre together.
“Stop,” said Mom, eyeing the elderly couple in the booth behind us.
“Why don’t you ask her out?” Dad poked an elbow at Kyle, trying to kid him to life. “Huh? Huh?”
“No! She’s too flat chested,” Kate whispered.
“She wasn’t flat, was she?” said Dad, looking concerned.
“That’s every pirate’s dream,” Kate said. “A sunken chest.”
“Is that what you tell yourself these days?” asked Kyle.
Mom: “Hurry up and order.”
“I’d say seventeen. And cute,” Dad went on, sizing her up. “What’s to stop you from asking her what high school she goes to, at the very least?”
Kyle said nothing.
I didn’t know why this was an issue. All the girls loved my brother. His last girlfriend was Miss Teen Connecticut, for God’s sake. He went to prom with a girl you could fit in your glove compartment. Big bro was a waif magnet, and Dad a lover of svelte, surrounded by a booth of genetic Amazons.
“He’s ashamed of his family,” I explained, spraying crackers out of my mouth as I chewed. My white plastic earrings were as big as tire irons and banged against my jaw.
“She’s got a nice figure,” Dad went on. “Very svelte.”
Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth Page 9