Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter (6 page)

Because I still existed in that glorious but oh-so-brief phase of childhood graced by unselfconsciousness, I thought nothing of holding a little viola between my legs and sawing off one brutalized note after the next. I even attended several rehearsals of the Peterborough Youth Orchestra, sitting at the end of the cello section, eight-year-olds towering around me, my mother at my side. I joined them for only one or two pieces, both requiring little more than a couple long bowed notes and a few shorter ones, and was invited to play in their upcoming concert.

The day of the first Youth Orchestra concert is a shard of a memory, pointy and uncomfortable to hold. My dress was tight around my neck, my tights itchy and pulling at the crotch. There was a lot of yowling and straining of string instruments being massacred by children with hopeful parents in the audience, mine among them. When it was my turn to join the orchestra, I remember not wanting to play and being gently coaxed to sit down. The guillotine dropped when I set my very
wee instrument between my legs and heard the snickering, looked out at the small audience and noticed people watching me, some of them pointing, many of them laughing quietly behind their hands. The phrase
awfully cute
sounded above the rest of the whispers, but I heard it as “awful, cute” and the rest is a hot-faced blur. I don't believe I played a note.

So much for the “cello.”

I did take up the full-sized instrument later, at the roaring age of seven, alongside my father, who decided it would be fun to learn together. I don't know how long it lasted—a year at most—but I remember it as a laboured period punctuated by fatherly frustration, a lot of sighing and
no-no-no
s and
try-it-again
s.

One might assume that two pianistic parents would produce three little Mozartesque offspring with the same ease and inevitability that two Mexican parents produce a Spanish-speaking brood, but that was not the case in our family. We all had music spun into our cell tissue, but we sloughed off any attempts at lessons and teaching as soon as we were old enough to protest. My parents didn't insist; neither was the pushy type, fortunately for us. My mother spent her days giving piano lessons to children, so probably did not have much inspiration left at the end of the day to wrestle her children through more of the same. And my father was busy making other music.

I knew that my father was a professor of political studies at Trent University, but what he actually did was a mystery of books, papers and unbearably boring discussions about elections,
Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal Party. In the evenings, however, he would often return to the university to do things that were exciting and made sense, like conducting chamber choirs or Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Though he didn't lead a choir or direct an operetta every week, his heading back to Trent in the evenings for rehearsals was a fairly common occurrence.

No doubt my mother resented him for dedicating himself all day to intellectual pursuits, coming home to eat, then dashing out to dedicate himself to musical pursuits—although I detected no such resentment at the time. Her own intellectual and musical aspirations were so routinely and consummately consumed by the demands of domesticity that none of us noticed it when that happened, and no doubt it did, daily.

So while my mother stayed home washing dirty dishes, playing bingo with Flip, and wishing, perhaps, that she could have been channelling Chopin at the piano, she shipped Paul and me off to rehearsals with my father, and we were happy to oblige. Or rather, my dad adored taking Paul and me to rehearsals with him and we were happy to oblige. Not sure which. Either way, we loved going.

Trent University at night was this: long, empty hallways, silence, and air that smelled like sand. Endless hiding places. Tall, heavy doors that opened onto rooms that went
hush
. Wide carpeted expanses where we could run wild, diving into imaginary pools until we came away with rugburns on our elbows.

Once we'd exhausted ourselves with exploring, Paul and I would heave open the door of the university's Wenjack Theatre and hear music rising up from the stage. We would
wander through the amphitheatre's row upon row of cushy seating, running our fingers along the fabric until we found just the right spot to settle in and watch our father bob around the stage inspiring people to sing silly songs about silly things. Pretending to fall in love. Pretending to be rejected. Pretending to be gondoliers. Pretending to be Japanese. And all of them daft, no matter who they were pretending to be, because that is the nature of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

It was better than television.

On the way home, my father would sing an assortment of ridiculous libretti that made the drive go by like a finger-snap:

On cue, Paul and I would rise up in the back seat (pre-seat-belt era), Paul conducting with the same verve and enthusiasm my father had displayed earlier in the evening, and the two of us chiming back the chorus:

By the time the performance dates arrived, Paul and I had attended so many rehearsals, we knew everyone's lines, spoken or sung. We loved the thrill of the performances, the costumes and excitement, and we refused to miss a show, sometimes attending two in a single day. Apparently the actors found it helpful to have us seated in the front row, for if their memory lapsed they had only to glance over to where Paul and I were sitting and, completely unaware that we were doing so, mouthing the words to the entire operetta.

For months following the shows, we would insist on listening to a recording of the performance as we were falling asleep, placing a small tape recorder in the upstairs hallway between our bedrooms and turning up the volume to near-distortion level so we could all hear. Who knows what effect listening to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas
ad
-well-beyond-
nauseam
has on impressionable children, but we did, all of us, grow up to be as silly as we are musical.

Throughout my life, every three to six months or so, a blind man would come to our house to smooth out the air. It wasn't always the same man, but they were all blind, their eyes like marbles lodged at strange angles in their heads. They were also shy and soft-spoken and they all carried the same wide leather bag. In general, my parents' friends were a boisterous lot, people more apt to cackle than titter, so these quiet, blind men with the wide leather bags were a rare curiosity for me. I was both fascinated and frightened by them.

They would sit alone in the living room, sounding squiggly lines into the air and then gradually working out all the kinks. Sitting at the grand piano with its long lid raised high, the internal harp of wooden felted hammers and coiled metal strings exposed, the blind men would play the same notes over and over and over again, reaching into the quivering belly of the piano with their small wooden instruments and adjusting the corresponding pegs with slow, creaking precision. When they were satisfied, they would move to the next note. It took hours.

Somehow they never got bored, though the same cannot be said for my brothers and me, required as we were to
be quiet
for the duration of the piano tuning and inclined as we were to stray to the rabble-rouser end of the behaviour spectrum whenever silence was requested. Often we were sent outside, a relief in itself, for the act of tuning involves feeling around in the dissonance for the space where the note sings free, and it is not a euphonic exercise.

In fact it's agonizingly tedious. Except if you're blind, I concluded.

Eventually, an unfamiliar car would arrive and take the blind man away. My brothers and I would stream back inside, kicking our boots off in all directions and listening to my mother spinning grand, looping arpeggios from the soundboard like invisible cotton candy.

“There are no bumps in any of the notes anymore!” Flip once commented.

And it was true. After the blind men visited and tinkered with the piano, the air in the house felt all smoothed out.

“Their hearing is more refined,” my mother explained when I asked why it was that our piano tuners were always blind. “When we lose one sense, the other senses often compensate by developing more acutely.”

“Schools for the blind teach piano tuning because it's a skill the blind can develop well. And it gives them a profession,” my father added with a sort of jolly conviction, dusting his rolling pin with flour and rolling out pastry dough on the counter.

The Blind
. It was a category I hadn't yet created in my mind. It sounded a bit like
The Catholics
(a term I had learned from my grandmother, who never spoke about them without letting her eyeballs circumnavigate their sockets) or
The Tories
(a group of bald men, in my imagination, with pot-bellies and hair coming out their noses) or
The Bank
, who sometimes called when my dad was at work.

“The Bank called,” my mother would say. And I would
picture a long line of people in black hats all dialing our telephone number at once.

“Can The Blind hear as well as Ida?” I asked, sitting on the floor with the black Lab's head in my lap.

“No, no.” My father laughed, peeling his dough off the counter and explaining the phenomenon of high frequencies.

My mother sighed and cut in. “It's not really about hearing anyway. When those guys are tuning the piano, they're not really hearing so much as
feeling
the sound.”

“Yes, that's true,” said my father, sprinkling more flour onto the counter.

Now, hearing my father say (or sing) silly things was certainly not a novelty to me, but normally my mother was more sensible. Tuning the piano by
feeling the sound
? I couldn't find a way to understand that.

So I decided to investigate.

Months passed. I was skipping on the front porch when the strange car arrived. A woman with a flowery orange dress that looked like our kitchen wallpaper led the blind man to the front door. I said “Hi” in that robotic way kids do when they know they're expected to speak, and then I called my mother. Ducked behind the dining room door and peeked through the crack.

The blind man was tall with waxy grey hair that glistened. It was all brushed back so that it looked like those rippling marks that waves leave on sand. (After his last visit my mother had told me that his hair was probably as curly as mine but that he used something called
Brylcreem
to “tame it down.” Excited
by the phrase
tame it down
, I had gone straight to the bathroom and applied some of my dad's shaving cream—Brylcreem, shaving cream, what's the difference?—but to my distress, I created more of a frothy-wave-crashing-on-rocks look than the wave-textured-sand look I was after.)

My mother settled the ripply-haired blind man at the grand piano and offered him tea, which he softly declined. He sounded the first note. Slowly, I stepped out from behind the dining room door and began to creep into the living room, freezing several times mid-step when it seemed he had heard me. “Hello?” he called once, his lopsided marbles pointing in my direction, a smile on his face. I held my breath. “Hello there,” he said playfully, as though he knew it was me, a child at any rate, not my mother. And for a moment, I wondered if he really was blind; I felt sure he could see me. Maybe he was just
pretending
to be blind so that he could tune pianos.

But eventually he turned back to the piano. I exhaled. A bit louder than I'd hoped. (I'd developed asthma, so often wheezed when I breathed.) And he returned to his tools, playing octaves over and over again, drawing up the sound from below, adjusting, re-sounding, adjusting. Until he was satisfied. Then he moved on. I watched him carefully but couldn't find any evidence that he was “feeling the sound.” He just seemed to be listening.

I decided to get closer. With what I felt to be the stealth of a professional spy, I lowered myself to the ground, crawling along the soft fringe of the oriental carpet until I was directly beneath the soundboard of the piano. I did not have a plan as
such (many professional spies do not), but as I crouched there I became aware of a tingling in my back as the blind man played.

I closed my eyes. And there they were: all those notes, underneath my skin all this time. Resonating in my body as though I were the piano and my ribs the strings. I folded myself down over my thighs and plugged my ears with my fingers. The notes were still there, even stronger than before. Like a thousand purring cats all over me.

I stayed so long I fell asleep, my cheek hot against the carpet when I awoke. From the open window, I could hear a game of kick-the-can starting up in the backyard with some neighbours, so I got to my hands and knees and crawled out of the living room, down the back hallway and out through the flap of Ida's doggie door, until I was safely outside.

I never spoke to anyone about “feeling the sound.” It was a discovery that I kept to myself, perhaps my first exploration into the sanctuary of solitude. Whatever it was, music danced into me in a new way that day. I never listened to it the same way again.

The forests and fields at the end of the road soon became my roaming ground and I delighted in walking through them alone, and for hours. Those moments are castings of light across my memory, sparkles of ever-dancing details, impossible to grab at or isolate. What I remember most is that I would hum. And that I felt as much a part of the place as a note to a song.