This All-at-Onceness

by Wittes Schlack, Julie

  “No, I don’t care to wait,” she said, her little voice now furry as a peach. “I don’t much like it up here.”

  Then there was another brush of leaves, a sudden gush of water. Chevonne began slowly falling past the branches that jutted out like impatient arms on the hips of the giant elm.

  “Oh my god,” I heard the camp director, Billie, gasp behind me as we watched Chevonne float down and reach with her small pink palms toward the power line. She caught it and hung for what seemed like minutes, suspended like a piece of laundry on a still, muggy day. Then she dropped straight to the ground.

  I can still see Chevonne’s return to camp the next morning in a glistening white sling, a band-aid on her forehead, and watch the other kids crowd round her with new respect, exchange addresses and hugs and goodbye kisses. I see it like a long-ago Saturday matinee, not as anything connected to me. But that moment when Chevonne, through some miracle of will and coordination, firmly grabbed hold of that potentially lethal power line was as startlingly real as birth.

  I’d thought I was finally an adult, but I was wrong. I’d been gawking at Ian, gazing at the moon, contemplating my own place in the universe, looking everywhere but at the child in front of me who had spent her life slipping from a high, wet branch. Now I felt foolish and impotent, but also awake.

  When camp ended, Ian came back to Ann Arbor with me. My parents were moving to Boston, and my father had already left in mid-August to start his new job and meet the moving truck on its arrival. The plan was for Ian and me to pack up my mother’s car with the final batch of items to be moved, drive her to Boston, paint my parents’ new house, then take their car on a road trip through New England before going back to school.

  Ian didn’t drive, though, so I offered a ride as far as Boston to Mark, a guy I’d met in my Advanced Narration class. He wasn’t really my type—short, acerbic, and as combative as Ian was mellow—but I admired his writing, wit, and political passion. And he had a driver’s license.

  We’d really gotten to know each other a few months earlier in a production of a college musical, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Rowdy, sexual, revolutionary in both its form and content, Marat/Sade was a play-within-a-play in which mental patients in 1808 perform a pageant enacting the assassination of French revolutionary, Jean Paul Marat, under the direction of fellow inmate, the Marquis de Sade. As members of the inmates’ chorus, Mark and I spent every dress rehearsal and performance clad in torn institutional pajamas, cementing our friendship as we simulated sex while gaily singing “And what’s the point of a revolution/without general/general copulation, copulation, copulation” (performed as a round, of course.)

  When we weren’t on stage, we were talking poetry or politics. Mark had joined the Attica Brigade, and encouraged me to join his study group in Marxism/Leninism, which I saw as a sort of graduate program after majoring as an undergrad in mere anti-imperialism. Dialectical materialism, cultural revolution, women holding up half the sky—these were weighty ideas. This was “scientific socialism,” with all of the objectivity and inevitability that “science” implied to scientifically ignorant, would-be poets like me. It’s what you embraced, I was starting to believe, if you were committed to social and economic change, and not a mere dilettante.

  It was early morning when Mark, Ian, and I set off on what would be a very long drive with my mother. The trunk and roof bin on the turquoise Pontiac Catalina moaned as we forced them shut, and the tail pipe tickled the gravel as we drove down the dirt road away from our house in Ann Arbor for the last time. We’d decided to take the northern route through Ontario to shave an hour or two off the sixteen-hour drive. Crossing into Canada was no problem, but predictably, getting back into the United States at the Buffalo border was another story. Never once in those years, when I regularly travelled back and forth between the U.S. and Canada, was I allowed to pass through freely if accompanied by a long-haired male. We’d gambled that my mother’s presence in our entourage would spare us the customary search of our car and persons, but no such luck.

  “Where you headed?” the border guard asked.

  “Boston,” Mark answered. We’d made the mistake of not having my mother at the wheel for this portion of our trip.

  “Where is your residence?” he asked.

  “New York, Ann Arbor, Illinois, and she’s moving to Boston,” Mark answered, pointing to himself and each one of us in turn.

  The guard smirked a little, then jerked his thumb toward one of the inspection bays. “Pull in there,” he ordered.

  “Excuse me,” my mother piped up from the passenger seat, “but we had quite a job packing this car up.”

  “And now you’re going to have to unpack it,” he answered.

  “Officer, we don’t have any drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Her voice rose in exasperation.

  “I’m not going to ask you a second time, ma’am.” His face, pock-marked and florid, protruded through the driver’s side window, forcing Mark to lean away.

  “We better just do it, Mom,” I murmured from the back seat. To my shame, I was far more afraid of authority than she was.

  Two border guards made us unpack everything in and on the car. They opened and rummaged through the suitcases, inspected the inside of the teapot, peered in the sound hole of Ian’s guitar, even tore open and extracted a few tampons from their tubes to see what was inside. Then, with a wave of the hand, one of them indicated that we were free to go.

  “Bastards,” my mother muttered as they blithely walked away from the pile of personal and household possessions strewn around the car. “Just because you look like hippies. It’s discrimination—flat-out discrimination!”

  Resigned, Mark and Ian and I reloaded the car. My mother continued her rant until just outside of Utica. We thought she was adorable.

  Heading into the dusk just east of Albany, after we’d been on the road for about twelve hours, we heard a thunk, followed by an awful grinding sound. I pulled onto the shoulder and Mark got out.

  “The tail pipe’s broken and the muffler’s dragging against the road,” he said after a quick inspection. “We can’t drive like this.”

  “What are we going to do?” my mother asked.

  Mark looked at Ian and me. We both gazed back at him, speechless. Useless.

  “I can hitchhike to an exit and get a tow truck,” Mark said, “but it’s going to take a while.”

  “We’ll be here for hours!” my mother wailed. “Goddamnit! Fucking border guards!”

  “Let me look again,” Mark offered. We all got out. Mark lay down on his back and inched his way under the car, while my mother and I watched him. Ian carefully removed his guitar from its case, and facing away from the traffic so he could hear himself better, began quietly strumming.

  Mark emerged long enough to instruct us to gather up all the belts we might have on our bodies and in our luggage. Ian was clearly reluctant to part with his woven Guatemalan belt that went so well with the embroidered border at the bottom of his jeans. Then Mark crawled back under the sagging Catalina and created a series of harnesses with the belts to secure the muffler. His handiwork held until we got to Boston.

  “I like Ian,” my mother told me privately a few days later, “but you can do better. He’s in his own world. He just played his guitar. He didn’t even try to help.”

  Years later I would marry Mark. Our romance began not when we were feigning sex in an avant-garde play, but on that dusky stretch of highway. Impatient to get to his destination, Mark had flexed his imagination and his muscle. However imperfectly, he’d moved us down the road.

  I never went back to Circle Pines, though I visited Ian at school one last time in 1972. We went to a party that happened to be on the night that the draft lottery was held. The order of birth date
s pulled out of a barrel determined who would be conscripted and sent to Vietnam. Somebody turned the music down and flicked on the radio so we could hear the birthdays as they were drawn. But the drawing took a long time, and after about 150 dates had been read, somebody yelled, “Fuck it, man. Turn the music back on.”

  Ian’s birthday hadn’t been called out yet. He grinned. “Lucky Capricorn,” he yelled to me as “You’re So Vain” resumed blasting out from the record player.

  I shared his relief. I surrendered once again to his gangly charm as we danced. I didn’t know what to say to the guy born on Christmas Eve who sat all alone on the dorm’s dirty couch, his future just recast as Number 2.

  In that first heavenly summer at Circle Pines—when we were all friends and our days were sunshine and mulberries and our nights were passed skinny dipping and singing—we were nostalgic for those days even as we were living them. Perhaps we sensed that the world was turning darker. Three Days of Peace and Love at Woodstock was followed only a few months later by gunshots and killings at Altamont. The Beatles broke up while Led Zeppelin had the poor taste to endure. In rapid order, the Chicago Seven were found guilty of inciting riots at the Democratic convention, and the U.S. invaded Cambodia. The year after that, on September 11, a military junta in Chile, backed by the CIA, overthrew the democratically elected socialist president of Chile, then rounded up and murdered thousands of political opponents in a soccer stadium. Many of them were students, people my age. Every day in my dorm, we read about it and wrote flyers. We raged and hated our own helplessness.

  Still, we were “we.”

  Early Movements (1967-2015)

  In symphonic music, tunes aren’t exactly in order because they’re complete in themselves. Tunes don’t cry out for development, and development is the main thing in symphonic music, the growing of a melodic seed into a big symphonic tree. So that seed mustn’t be a complete tune, but rather, a melody that leaves something still to be said, to be developed….

  — Leonard Bernstein, Young People’s Concerts,

  December 21, 1962

  A segment of Our World opens with the fractured face of one of Picasso’s women gazing impassively down on a rehearsal room in the Lincoln Center where Van Cliburn, winner of the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition and young darling of the classical world, and Leonard Bernstein, composer and conductor of the New York Philharmonic, practice for an upcoming performance. The piece is Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3. They sit facing one another at gleaming pianos. Bernstein is playing some version of the orchestral score, as Cliburn, young and impossibly perfect in his posture and sculpted hair, solos over him. Bernstein, eyes squinting from the cigarette that dangles from his mouth as he plays, is also dressed in a suit and tie, but his tie is loosened and a wavy lock of hair falls over one eye, and though he is older, he is unquestionably cooler.

  The Maestro does not love how Cliburn is playing. He stops, stands, and walks over to the prodigy. “At the moment, where we’ve just arrived, it’s marked più mosso,” he observes, his tone carefully curious,” but you hold back there—”

  “Yes, I think it sounds better.” Van Cliburn is unrepentant. Back then I vaguely recall sneering at Van Cliburn, largely because I confused him with Liberace, but also because the only other “Van” I knew of was Van Heflin, B-Movie star of the 40s and 50s, and as square as they came. Now he just strikes me as an arrogant twerp with his clear eyes and shiny cheeks.

  “Yes, but that’s not what Rachmaninoff says…” Bernstein’s display of benign authority is masterful.

  “These are the bells, the old church bells.” Van Cliburn is almost condescending in his explanation.

  “Yes,” the Maestro concurs with steely congeniality, “but they don’t have to go so slow.”

  Young Turk meets Old Guard. But in this case, Van Cliburn, a church-going, right wing, closeted homosexual who, to this day, opens every performance with The Star Spangled Banner, was the Establishment, and Bernstein, once an icon, now strangely marginalized, was the rebel in ways I couldn’t begin to fathom.

  When I was a kid, my family and my Aunt Anne, Uncle Herbie, and three cousins all shared a summer house on one of the hundreds of lakes in the worn but still wild Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal. Both families were strapped for money—it is only now that I realize that this co-housing arrangement was born of necessity, and not just out of our parents’ selfless desire to amplify our summer fun. The house had electricity and indoor plumbing, but was otherwise quite rustic, with wainscoted walls, Depression-era linoleum floors, a party telephone line that we shared with practically every house built around Lac La Croix, a small but thunderous washing machine, and a wring dryer that I assumed was far more fun for our increasingly muscular mothers than an electric one.

  My uncle sold mid-range radios and stereo equipment, and seemed also to be able to buy LPs at discount. As a result, we had many record players in that house—a console in the living room that only the grown-ups got to use, a portable record player in the girls’ room, and another in the “little house”—the wooden garage next to the house that our parents had converted into a sleeping and play space for my brother Bobby and cousin Paul. We girls had all the LPs, largely musical comedies and folk music albums. The boys had all the singles, the 45 RPM records that were the main distribution form for pop music in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While they lorded that fact over us, they routinely let us into their lair, where we’d pile on to the built-in bunk beds and take turns playing records and performing the tunes.

  Choosing a good sequence of songs was an art, but actually playing them was an acquired skill. First, you had to properly insert the swirly plastic yellow disc in the oversized record hole so that the record would fit on a spindle meant for the much smaller diameter of 33 RPM album. Then, you had to place the needle exactly in the first groove of the vinyl, avoiding the pulse of scratchy static caused by a needle being stuck on the ridge between grooves, but still managing to lay it down before the song began.

  And then we’d hear it, the bells, strings, and groggy cha-cha beat introducing “Johnny Angel,” or the military snare drums opening “The Battle of New Orleans.” The three of us girls would sing the chorus, while my brother or cousin Paul took the lead, both of them singing in a peculiar, unnatural, and unpleasant nasal tone that faintly mimicked the adenoidal stylings of the Shirleys and Lesleys and Tommys and Genes at the top of the charts. Though we couldn’t have articulated why, even then we recognized the pure awfulness of early ’60s pop music, with endless songs about parties ending in car crashes or heartbreak; with Connie Francis bathetically warbling about following the boys (soldiers, I now realize, but that nuance was lost on me then), and Bobby Vee, Bobby Vinton, and Bobby Van all fusing into a single pompadoured, Brylcreamed personification of teen patriarchy. It’s not surprising that Peter, Paul, and Mary or My Fair Lady seemed downright gutsy in comparison.

  While I loved belting out “If I had a Hammer” (though now the idea of hammering out love between my brothers and sisters sounds too much like a team-building exercise), it was the prologue to West Side Story that got under my skin and kept drawing me back. Edgy and aching, it was as far from Oklahoma as a musical could get. In the prologue, brassy, dissonant horns blared out a warning, then stopped, to be replaced by a cool, swinging summons from a saxophone, answered by the strings. But then it changed again—a whistle, and what was an easy pace turned into a bass-driven balletic chase, bongos and timbales and blaring horns pounding out the traffic on the glaring avenues and silent runners in the alleys between them. Every turn of the music was unexpected, danger and ease, joy and fear melding together in something I found absolutely riveting. At eight or nine years old, I had no idea that I was hearing a fusion of Latin, jazz, and symphonic music. I certainly didn’t know what it meant to stay Cool, but the snapping fingers, tense, percussive bass line, and sexy, insinuating piano compelled me to
want to find out.

  Take it slow, and daddy-o, you can live it up and die in bed.

  I don’t think I realized that the Leonard Bernstein who composed West Side Story was the same man whose Young People’s Concerts I watched on television, listened to on records, and once attended live. It didn’t matter, though; I loved them both. He reminded me of my father—a dreamy, reluctant and unsuccessful business man who was gentler than the other fathers I knew; he related almost conspiratorially to kids and made us feel that together, we’d find the humor in the actions of others, and nobody would notice us noticing them. And just as my father turned arithmetic into play, helping me to arrange multi-colored rods and cubes as a way to make sense of the decimal system, Bernstein made the complex swell of an orchestra both accessible and grand.

  By 1967, our shared country house was long gone. My family had left Montreal and moved to the United States three years earlier. And, of course, as I got older, the men of my dreams got younger. John, Paul, and George took turns supplanting one another in my affections (though not Ringo—I wasn’t looking for cute), then Eric Burdon of The Animals, with his raw voice and proletarian passion, and the bedroom-eyed, honey-toned Jesse Colin Young.

  By then I’d also deemed classical music irrelevant, musicals corny, and older people trying to be hip, pathetic. (It was around that time that my father, like many fathers, grew sideburns, and my Uncle Herbie, bald his entire adult life, temporarily took to wearing a toupee and learned to play the banjo.) But though I’d stopped listening to him, Leonard Bernstein never lost his cool in my mind’s eye. He was my idea of an artist. He had longish hair that didn’t look stupid on him, even though it was gray. He looked like a poet when he smoked cigarettes, like Jean Paul Belmondo but with better skin. When he conducted, it was with open arms and wide, sweeping gestures, not all hunched and tight and prissy. He was not just a pathetic striver.