by Barbara Hall
I smile. “Why all this sudden passion for bluegrass, Franklin?”
“It’s not sudden. You know that. You know it’s my discipline. It’s the purest kind of music,” he says. “Outside of the blues. You know that.”
“It’s the hardest kind of music,” I say. “Outside of classical and jazz. To you, music is an intellectual pursuit.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Except that music isn’t really a thinking game. It’s a feeling game.”
“It’s not a game at all,” he says. “It’s a profession.”
“Fine,” I say, surrendering.
He stares at the stained industrial carpet for a moment, then says, “You’re the one who says bluegrass is about God.”
“Yes, that’s my argument. What’s yours?”
Franklin looks at me until he can’t. Then he stares at the wall, where dozens of beautiful guitars hang like icons. He says, “I’m pretty sure Patrick plays a horn. Saxophone, maybe. Or trumpet.”
“Trumpet? Really?”
The trumpet, in my book, may be the only truly impossible instrument to play. Franklin must think so, too, or he wouldn’t suddenly look so lonely and afraid. To be anything but the best is Franklin’s gravest fear. I think I’ve always known that about him. I think I’ve always loved it, too.
I LOOK AT PEOPLE’S WRISTS. I do it out of habit. The wrist is all-important in violin playing, in any kind of stringed instrument, I suppose. But in violin, it is the foundation of the vibrato, which is the highest skill you can acquire. The right wrist has one function: to remain supple. But the left wrist, the one in charge of the fingerboard, has to be in equal parts strong and flexible. It’s like yoga, I’m told. (In California, you are exposed to yoga against your will. It’s everywhere, like smog. Even my fat, drunken neighbor Ralph does yoga. He says it keeps him aware. Aware of what? I want to ask. But I don’t.) The left wrist has to be strong enough to hold the note but flexible enough to vibrate it. It’s not for sissies. In fact, this is the point where most of my students drop out—when I start examining the spirituality of their wrists.
Most people’s wrists are wasted aspects of their anatomy. I see it all the time. People (women especially) adorn their wrists with stupid things. Bracelets full of sparkling crap, or expensive watches that, because of their magnetic nature, actually inhibit the ability of the wrist to do its job. What is the job of the wrist? To bend and flex, then hold steady, then bend and flex again. Think of life without your wrist. You couldn’t open a jar, turn on a bath tap, steer a car, turn up the volume. You couldn’t wipe the sweat from your brow, or fan yourself, or type, or turn on the stove, or build a sandcastle, or tousle someone’s hair. You couldn’t throw a punch or shoot a gun. You couldn’t blow a kiss. All this fuss is made over the opposable thumb. But really, it’s the flexible wrist that makes human existence bearable.
Get me started on bracelets and watches, why don’t you. I will identify them as man’s last attempt to keep women down. (Long fingernails were a nice try, too. You can’t do anything with long fingernails except paint them.) I discourage any sort of adornment there. I give my students wrist exercises. I make them walk around the house, holding their wrists limp, then flexing them at a ninety-degree angle. Strong wrist, strong future. Weak wrist, weak future. I say these things without irony.
You see, in violin playing, as I think I’ve mentioned, it’s all about the bow. Just as with a stove, the gas might be turned on for hours, but until you light a match, nothing happens. The bow is the match. It ignites the sound. Sometimes—often, in fact—the student gets all hung up about the fingerboard, finding the note, finding the vibrato. But the bow is the living part of the instrument. The bow unleashes all the secrets. If the bow is stifled, music simply cannot be found. And bowing is all in the wrist.
So I saw the marks that day, when I was teaching Hallie. We were four months into lessons, and she was doing quite well. I had her playing some Bach concertos. She breezed through the notation as if it were written in baby language. Her left hand moved effortlessly through the motions, her wrist curling and extending, finding the vibrato. But her right wrist, which controlled the bow, was stiff and frightened. I touched her there, to make a point. She screamed.
“What?” I asked as she backed away from me, tucking her instrument under her arm.
“You scared me,” was all she said.
“I just want you to loosen your right wrist,” I told her.
“I will,” she said. “Just don’t touch me.”
“It would help if you would take off that bracelet,” I informed her.
She just looked at me, and in that moment I realized that she wasn’t wearing a bracelet. She realized that I had realized it. She backed away from me.
“Let me see it,” I said.
She hesitated for a moment, but when she saw I was going to reach for her wrist, she offered it to me. I sucked in a breath as it came into focus. The whole thing was purple. But there were specific indentations, the size of fingertips, going all the way around it.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I caught it in the car door,” she said evenly.
I lifted her arm into the light. This was not a car door injury. Her wrist had been grabbed and squeezed. The marks were as clear as a tattoo.
“Who did this?” I asked her.
She avoided my eyes.
“Hallie, tell me. I’m just going to ask your mother.”
“She’s not my mother,” Hallie quickly informed me.
“All right. But who did this? Dorothy?”
She shook her head, then lifted her sad, doelike eyes to me. “I have brothers.”
“Which brother did this?”
“Brian,” she said. “He’s almost sixteen. He’s very strong.”
“Why did he grab your wrist?”
“He didn’t. That is, he didn’t mean to. We were wrestling.”
I tried to think of what to say. Finally I came up with this: “Doesn’t he understand how important your wrists are?”
“He’s a man. He doesn’t understand anything,” she told me.
I sat down in my metal folding chair and contemplated her life. She saw me doing it and sat down as well.
“It’s not Christopher. He’s only my age. He doesn’t even talk to me. He thinks I’m weird.”
“If you’re getting hurt,” I said slowly, “I have to tell someone.”
“I’m not getting hurt,” she assured me.
“But look at your wrist!”
“We were wrestling!”
I looked at her. I thought of her house. Her strange, angry adopted parents and their strange, confused boys, trying to adjust to an unwanted, unexpected girl. Someone was grabbing her around the wrist and bruising it. I didn’t really care who it was or why.
“I think I’ll have to talk to Dorothy,” I said.
“No,” she said, quickly, desperately. “You can’t tell her.”
“Why not?”
“She loves them more than me. She’ll kick me out.”
“She can’t do that. She won’t. Besides, I’ve talked to her. She’s quite fond of you.” I wasn’t sure this was true, but I hoped it was.
She has recognized “it,” I wanted to tell her. She knows there’s gold in the hills.
Hallie looked away from me. “The family is all in place,” she said. “They’re a unit. They have church and everything. I’m an intrusion. Is that the right word?”
“I guess,” I said.
“If I’m trouble, they’ll make me leave. I have nowhere else to go.”
“They can’t hurt you. It’s not allowed.”
“No one is hurting me,” she said in a high, desperate tone.
Then she looked up at me with her sad, dark eyes, a look that was not so unlike Franklin’s worried gaze. “They’ll make me stop playing music. I can’t stop playing music. I can’t.”
This was a far cry from her original incan
tation: “You can’t make me play. I won’t let you.” I couldn’t decide if this was progress or regression or something in the middle, like guidance.
“No one can take music away from you,” I said in my institutional teacher’s voice.
And then she looked at me with a maturity I did not recognize in myself, let alone in my students. Her face was pale and as still as granite.
“Of course they can take it away,” she said. “They want to and they will. You know that. You know it’s always a breath away from being gone.”
“No, Hallie, I don’t know that. You have an ability. An understanding. No one can take that away. And this is unrelated to music. This is about you being hurt.”
“I’m not being hurt,” she said.
She swiveled her body away from me in her folding chair. She held the violin next to her chest as if it were a baby that needed comforting.
I said, “Look, I’m a teacher. I’m a mandated reporter.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means that if I see someone being hurt, I’m obligated to tell.”
She lifted her head. “Tell who?”
“People who care about things like this.”
She laughed. “Who the hell are those people?”
I was stretching the truth a little because I was only a music teacher. We weren’t officially mandated reporters like public school teachers. But I suspected that if I went to some kind of authority, they would listen.
I said, “Hallie, the world isn’t as indifferent as it seems. There are people who care about children.”
Her eyes grew sad when I said this.
“I’m not a child,” she told me, as if telling me she weren’t a person.
“You are.”
“Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay? If you’re someone who turns people in to authorities, I don’t think I can come here anymore. Because you sold yourself to me as someone who doesn’t believe in authority.”
“I did? How did I do that?”
“You’re a music teacher. That’s not about authority. What we do in here, it’s just about music.”
“Music can’t make you safe.”
“Of course it can,” she said. She lifted her violin to her chin. “Let’s keep going.”
We finished the lesson. I said nothing to Dorothy. The next week, the bruises had faded, and then there was nothing but alabaster skin. Her wrists grew strong, her bowing excelled, and I allowed myself to be lulled by the music, the eternal Pied Piper, until nothing else mattered but the sound of notes and chords and tones, drifting on the air like smoke from the chimney of the Vatican.
7
IT’S ON A FRIDAY EVENING, when I’m in charge of locking up the store, that I figure out the real reason Franklin wants to fire Clive.
My last student is late, so I’m half an hour behind, and it being a Friday, I’m eager to get out. Not because I have any special plans—it’s been a while since I’ve taken any orchestra or session work, and much longer since I’ve had any kind of social life to attend to. I’m just tired of being at McCoy’s, and I’m feeling a little cranky after a conversation I had with my ex-husband earlier in the day. He called me at the store to give me some good news and some bad news. He said, “Stephanie’s pregnant, and I’m not sure I can keep paying for your car.”
I let a cold moment of silence go past before I said, “Where’s the good news?”
“Stephanie’s pregnant,” he repeats.
“And who is that good news for?”
“Pearl, don’t do this. You knew we were trying.”
“I knew Stephanie was trying. You said you weren’t interested. Or did I dream that?”
“Well, it’s too late now, and I’ll get happy about it eventually.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. The point is, I have to start saving money.”
“How far along is she?”
“Two months,” he says.
I stop myself from saying the very mean thing. It’s early yet. Anything can happen. Clearly he has forgotten both of my miscarriages, one at ten weeks, one at fourteen. Maybe Stephanie’s uterus is stronger than mine. Maybe he loves her more than he ever loved me. But I can’t think about that. I have to focus on the possibility that she will encounter some kind of misfortune, that she won’t just move in and take over my life and do all the things I couldn’t do, such as keeping him interested. I’m pretty sure it’s okay for me to want bad things to happen to her. But if I want bad things to happen to her unborn child, that might be crossing a line. I try to stop just short of being a bad person. It’s harder than it sounds.
So instead of the very mean thing, I said the sort of mean thing: “Will Stephanie have to give up her work in telemarketing?”
“Pearl, don’t be this way. We don’t have any formal financial arrangement. I was paying for your car as a favor.”
“I see. And I suppose I didn’t ask for alimony as a favor. If all favors are off now, perhaps I should get a lawyer.”
Which is a hollow threat, because once you waive alimony, there’s no going back. Not to mention that I can’t afford a lawyer.
Mark says, “Look, the car is almost paid off. You’ll just have to pick up the insurance payments. You might have to do a little more moonlighting, pick up some extra students. Is that really the end of the world?”
No, it wasn’t really the end of the world. Nor is it the end of the world when the man you love starts looking at you like you’re a stain on the carpet and shortly after that starts sleeping with a college student.
The world doesn’t end, ever, apparently, despite all the warnings to the contrary. And that might be the bad news.
Probably what’s bothering me is that the world isn’t ending or even standing still. It keeps going with things like Stephanie’s getting pregnant and my having to pay for my car, and that means I’m going to have to keep going with it.
So I told him to stop the car payments, of course, stop the insurance payments, I’d get by somehow. In the end I was gracious, even congratulated him on his progeny, wished him well, and then hung up. I got out of the call before I revealed my truest fear, which was that the car payment was the only real connection I still had to him, and that now he would go away forever, and that it might be the best thing for me, and that I might have to let go of this long-held resentment, and that this long-held resentment was what kept me interested.
I didn’t love him anymore. I didn’t. I didn’t because I told myself I didn’t, daily, when I brushed my teeth and drank my orange juice and warmed up my scales.
Now I would have to find something else to engage me. Maybe it would be the Trailer Park Rogues.
All of this is going through my mind as I’m closing up the store, so it takes me a while to realize that Clive is still hovering nearby, pretending to arrange guitar straps on the wall. I know he has clocked out because I checked all the time cards as part of my closing-up duty. I say, “Clive, what are you still doing here?”
He grins at me. Clive is from Los Angeles, which is something that almost no one is, except for people his age. The Los Angelenos of his generation have names like Clive and Harry and Gerard and Simon, names that the rest of the country left behind in England, along with stiff social mores and colonial rule. Like most musicians of his generation, he tried a stint back east before figuring out that it is cold and unfriendly to Californians. Most places on earth are cold and unfriendly to Californians, as one of Joni Mitchell’s better songs taught us. (She was actually from Saskatchewan, Canada, which also no one is.) I played that song for him once, and I saw his eyes fill up with awareness. That’s why he always compares me to Joni Mitchell, because I played her songs for him and now he thinks we are one and the same.
Like most native Californians, he is baby-faced and scrubbed, his hair is naturally blond, though he has dyed it black (the blond roots peek through defiantly), and he has too many earrings in bo
th ears, which suggests that he is actually too chicken to pierce anything else. I like that in a person.
In answer to my question, he says, “I’ll walk you to your car.”
“My car is right out front.”
“Still, you shouldn’t be here alone. With all that money and stuff. It’s not safe.”
I am about to remind him that Franklin will walk me to my car, which he usually does, but tonight he is not here. Clive reads my thoughts and says, “Franklin took off early. Maybe he has a gig somewhere, with that new band of his.”
“No,” I say. “That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m in that band of his.”
“Oh, really? Can you get me in it, too?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Ask Franklin.”
He shrugs, looks at his fingernails. “Franklin doesn’t like me.”
“That’s not true,” I say automatically, even though I know he is fixated on firing Clive.
Clive, who is smarter than anyone gives him credit for, says, “He doesn’t like bass players. That’s pretty common.”
“He can’t dislike you because of your instrument. You’re good at it. That’s why he hired you. You have more students than I do.”
“More than Ernest, too.”
“And more than Patrick.”
“Who doesn’t have any.”
“That’s because he doesn’t play an instrument,” I say.
“Sure, he does,” Clive says.
“Oh? Which one?”
Clive thinks about it, then says, “I don’t know, but he must play one. He knows so much about music. Listen to him talk.”
“Franklin thinks he’s a theory nerd.”
“You can’t learn about music from theory. You have to play,” Clive informs me, as if I don’t know that.
“Well, no one can identify his instrument. If you want to take that on as your mission, then go with God.”
He shrugs again, stuffing his hands into his jeans pockets. “I just want to walk you to your car.”