Limbo (11 page)

“She had a number of successful students in the past,” Miss Williams said. “But by now she must be in her eighties, at least. I didn't think she was still teaching.”

This comforted me. I imagined somebody like Grandma Krier, somebody completely unlike Mrs. Gall. And I liked the idea of Milwaukee. With my new driver's license, I could get there by myself, without inconveniencing my mother. To our surprise, Miss Martinique had openings in her studio schedule. I auditioned and was accepted.

At a glance, Miss Martinique looked about seventy, but when she sat down beside you at the piano, you saw she could easily be a thousand years old. Her skin was the color of a jack-o'-lantern, waxy-looking beneath a truly remarkable layer of base makeup and powder. Whenever she nodded, or gestured with a small, gnarled hand, a powdery aura shimmered all around her. Her auburn-colored wig had tendency to slip, covering one ear. Every now and then she'd poke a long-nailed finger underneath it—
sckritch, sckritch
—and it seemed as if the sound itself, rather than the delicate movement, was what released yet another marvelous cloud of dust. I have no doubt that, in her time, Miss Martinique had been a wonderful piano teacher, but at this point in her life she had forgotten nearly everything she'd ever known about the instrument. Her fingers could
no longer function on the keys. She couldn't see well enough to read music. Her vague comments on my scores frequently wandered off the page altogether.

“Lovely, that's quite lovely,” was her only comment when, at our first lesson, I sat down and ravaged the first two movements of the Waldstein Sonata. I'd learned them on my own, since leaving Mrs. Gall. Though I'd longed to be told that I played it wonderfully, I knew in my bones that this wasn't so. The piece was too difficult for me. I'd learned it just to be rebellious. I had fully expected to get knocked back down to size.

As I was driving home, two syllables rose into my throat:
uh-oh
.

Each week, Miss Martinique tried to pass our sixty-minute lesson in conversation. How was my trip into Milwaukee? Were the roads all right? And where was it I came from again? And did I have brothers and sisters? Her studio was filled with black-and-white photographs of former students, and soon I knew each of their stories by heart: how long they'd studied with Miss Martinique, what contests they'd gone on to win, which orchestras they'd eventually performed with. I might have half an hour left by the time we got down to the Waldstein. Miss Martinique had seen nothing wrong with assigning the third and fourth movements. She offered no guidance when it came to technique, interpretation, fingerings. “Lovely, that's really quite
lovely,” she'd said. At the end of each lesson, she'd tell me to “concentrate on your articulation.” And that was that.

I knew I was in trouble, but I couldn't bear to admit to my parents how terrible Miss Martinique was, especially after my mother had spent so much time trying to find her. And the drive to Milwaukee was so much easier than going all the way to Chicago. And, frankly, saying I took lessons at a
conservatory
sounded so much more impressive than saying I took lessons in somebody's house or rented studio. The conservatory sponsored frequent recitals, with printed programs to be circulated among relatives and friends, press releases to be sent to the local paper. My parents were pleased with the attention I was getting, proud of the compliments they received on my behalf.

And, last but not least, there was the matter of the grand piano, which my parents had bought for me when I was still studying with Mrs. Gall. The moment she'd heard I was playing on an unreliable upright, not even a reputable Yamaha but some brand she'd never heard of, she nearly melted my poor mother with one of her withering looks.

“No wonder the child is always in pain,” she said. “Ruining her fingers on a stiff, uneven keyboard! She must have a decent instrument, something with a lighter action, a consistent touch.”

My mother dared to wonder how much a “decent instrument” would cost.

“My dear,” Mrs. Gall said to her. “A good piano is not an
expense
. It is an
investment
.”

She called several dealers who, in turn, made several calls, who in turn set us up to see several used pianos. Only a Steinway grand would do, and it had to be built before the Depression, when the construction materials had been first rate. The most appropriate specimens seemed to be stored in Chicago warehouses, and these warehouses were located down in the Loop, where the buildings had boarded-up windows and the streets were strewn with trash. The piano dealers guided my mother and me into huge, creaking service elevators, led us though mazes of stacked furniture, unveiled pianos so massive I wondered how on earth they would fit in our living room. I'd had a shining black instrument in mind, but the one that felt and sounded best was a 1927 Steinway L, with a mahogany body and slightly yellowed, ivory keys. It had been fitted with a device that had turned it into a player piano; you fed what looked like Braille scrolls into a box underneath the keyboard, and the piano, as if by magic, played. Fortunately, this device, coupled with some other cosmetic damage, had made the piano less expensive than others we had seen.

“Excellent,” Mrs. Gall said.

By then, my father's real estate company was established, and he'd built several apartment complexes that he
managed himself, collecting his own rents, doing most of his own repairs. In the morning, I might see him in suit and tie, heading out for a meeting with the city planner; I might see him in a sports coat, about to take clients to a showing; I might see him in work pants and an old flannel shirt, setting out for a day of roofing, or digging a new sewer line. There was no job he wouldn't do himself if he had the skills to do it, and there were few skills that his years on the farm had not taught him. He worked seven days a week, often twelve hours a day—except on winter afternoons when the Green Bay Packers played.

There was nothing in the hours either he or my mother kept to indicate they'd become financially secure. The son and daughter of farmers, the children of the Depression, they had kept all the habits of people who still hear the wolf outside the door. My mother saved all the slivers of soap and squished them into a lumpy, new bar. My father watered the ketchup until it was pink, the orange juice until it turned pale. The cords of our lamps and appliances looked like snakes after a meal, swollen fat with duct tape. Kids at school made fun of me for wearing the same clothes over and over again. As a child, my mother had only owned one dress, and it had been made from a cotton feed sack—to her, my three sweaters, three shirts, and two pairs of pants (plus my “nice dress” for Sundays and recitals) bordered on what she called “excess.” I owned one pair of
shoes, plus a pair of gym sneakers. I owned one winter coat, and a light jacket for spring. My brother, being a boy, made do with even less. People, after all, were starving in the world; it was sinful to have too much. My father's car, though well maintained, was still the same old Chevy. My mother's Pinto had no heat and a broken radio.

But when my mother understood that I needed a better piano, she discussed it with my father, who considered it in his abstract way. One day, without warning, he wrote out the check and placed it in my hand.

“The key to doing good work is having the right tools for the job,” he said.

The piano took up three quarters of the living room, sprawling there like a Bengal tiger beneath the rummage sale prints, the silvery floral couch inherited from one of my father's tenants. Whenever I thought about what it had cost, I vowed that I would never, in my entire life, ask for anything else again. So what if Miss Martinique was no rocket scientist. At least she didn't hit me with a flyswatter, or rant and rave because I knew nothing about Impressionist painters. Besides, if I abandoned yet another instructor, perhaps my father would think I'd changed my mind, that I wasn't really serious about music, that he and my mother had spent all that money on the grand piano for nothing.

It was a gray afternoon in May, three months since my last lesson with Mrs. Gall. I was butchering a Rachmani
noff étude when the telephone rang. Once, I wouldn't have heard it; now, I leapt up to answer it, eager for the distraction.

“Hello?” I said, crimping the phone between my shoulder and neck so I could rest my arms.

It was Mrs. Gall. She did not bother with preliminaries. She'd happened to run into the teacher she'd recommended for me, the one at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. She was calling to find out why I'd never contacted him. Did I have another teacher?

I did.

Was I happy with this teacher?

I was silent for a moment. Then it all poured out. Mrs. Gall listened, then let me know, in no uncertain terms, how disappointed she was in me. Of course, I must immediately tell my mother about Miss Martinique. Why on earth would I think my mother—or my father, for that matter—wouldn't want to know that something was the matter? Hadn't my poor mother driven me hundreds of miles every week? Hadn't my parents bought me a gorgeous piano? And here I was, wasting my time and their money. I was a junior in high school. Didn't I realize my college auditions were only one year away?

“I'm going to make a few phone calls,” Mrs. Gall said, and hung up.

“Who was that?” my mother said, coming into the
kitchen. Then she saw my face. “My goodness! What happened?”

I told her everything.

That night after supper, the phone rang again. I picked it up, cringing, expecting Mrs. Gall. Instead it was a soft-spoken man who greeted me by name, then asked to speak with my mother. His name was Mr. Celeste, and he taught piano at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. He also taught private lessons out of his home, in a suburb only thirty minutes south of Port Washington. He understood from Mrs. Gall that I was looking for a teacher who could help me prepare for college auditions, and he had an opening in his studio.

Would Ann be interested?

I was back on track.

H
ow do you
discipline yourself
? people asked, but discipline had nothing to do with it. The music I played was like an itch in my throat, a question to be answered, a story to be told.
Discipline
: a word that never entered my thoughts until somebody tossed it into my lap, set me up to walk beneath it as if it were a bucket of cold water. Though sometimes I could hear the word foreshadowed in the tone:
My goodness, Ann, why you are so disciplined? Why do you work so hard
? I'd stare straight ahead, embarrassed, in the same way my friend Dee was embarrassed by her boyfriend, a sweet, strange boy who didn't comb his hair and spoke in a language he'd invented himself.

Even now, it's hard to explain what drew me to the piano with such single-mindedness.

Let's say it is late on a Thursday night, in the fall of my senior year. Let's say I've just finished practicing for the day, so I turn on NPR. Perhaps, tonight, there's a Brahms intermezzo I've never heard before, shimmering in the air like an ornament, an apple, something that was placed there just for me. I've already wiped down the keys and closed the piano lid. I've filled the kitchen sink with cold water, dumped in a tray of ice, and lowered my arms into the soothing chill. Now my arms lay across my lap: humming, satisfied. And yet, I cannot help myself. I move to the piano, finger the keys. Soon, I've managed to rekindle a good portion of the A melody, but the next thing I know, there's my dad in his droopy underwear, blinking at the light, reminding me that there are other people in this house, people who need to get some sleep.

During the night, the scattering of notes I've skimmed arrange themselves into a single idea, a line I can hold in my head like a prayer. In the morning, I comb through this line as I lie in bed, listening to the familiar waking sounds of the house: the thud of the bass from my brother's bedroom, the morning show laughter from the living room, the scrape of a plow going past on the street. The line—I understand this now—is not complex. There's another just beneath it, lumbering and full, bumping up against the sur
face like a turtle trapped under ice. I am certain I can free it. I only need a few minutes, half an hour, maybe an hour at the most, but school starts at 7:10, early enough so the older kids can work the three to eleven shift, and my father has put his foot down—no piano before seven in the morning or after nine-thirty at night. A rule I understand, even though I resent it. A rule I agreed to a few days after the new piano was delivered.

How people shake their heads at that piano, which cost as much as a good used car. They say that my parents have spoiled me. They say it is no wonder if
that Ann
is too big for her britches, no wonder if
that Ann
always has her nose held up in the air.

That Ann, That Ann
, like a first and last name.

I rise, shivering in the icy room, and kneel on the carpet to say my morning prayers. I am seventeen, and so I do crazy things like sleep with my window open. I deny myself: the best seat, the first choice, the biggest piece. I turn the other cheek. At school, it's a sport to tease me, trip me, knock my books out of my hands, because everybody knows I won't tell, and I don't have a boyfriend to protect me. Am I too big for my britches? Do I have my nose in the air? These are the complaints my teachers have made: to me, to my parents, to the other kids who agree. It's a terrible thing, to believe you're good at something. To believe that you could be, for heaven's sake, a
concert pianist
. Who ever
heard
of such a thing? Where does
that Ann
get these fine ideas?

Here comes the queen
, one of my teachers likes to say.
Make way for the queen
.

I take my seat, arrange my books, pretend I do not hear.

My piano teacher, Mr. Celeste, has told me all about the Greeks, how they believed that music had the power to transform the human soul. I desperately hope this is true. I probably
am
too big for my britches. I probably
am
arrogant, vain. And then there is my mind, which is often unruly. Thoughts fly into my head that are so frightening it is easier to pretend they are not mine. One day, I passed the antique crucifix in the hall between my bedroom and my parents'—the one my mother took down to show me when I was very young, explaining how to unlatch the back, take out the blessed candles, the scroll with instructions for Last Rites—and, for some reason, it caught my eye as if I'd never seen it before. As I studied the agonized line of Christ's mouth, it occurred to me that I was looking at, well, a dead guy, and that he was hanging in the middle of my house, and that this was as weird as the weirdest thing I'd ever read about in
National Geographic
. In fact, we had the most remote populations beaten, hands down. I saw that everything was simply a matter of perspective, meaningful or meaningless according to custom alone. I took the crucifix off the wall and buried it under the towels in the linen closet. The next day, it was back on the wall.

My mother looked at me funny for days.

Without music, without the line that now plays in my head, I am certain such thoughts would overwhelm me. The tidy truths that have formed my life, like the neatly shaped hedges around my house, would be mowed down, torn away. And then there would be no point to anything—would there? There would be no reason to pray, to get out of bed, to move through the day. There would be only the chlorine smell of the shower, the yellow quiver of eggs on my plate, the chill puddle of dread in my stomach at the thought of another school day. The green tile lining the corridors, voices cut by the razor-slash of locker doors, the tin-whistle shriek of the school bell, the crackle of daily announcements read by giggling seniors over the intercom. Even these sounds can be transposed, rearranged into an indifferent song that shields me as I slip out of homeroom to the drinking fountain, which I call
a bubbler
, to linger as long as I can. As I rush down the steps that lead to the locker rooms while the boy who insists even teachers call him Boner steps on my heels, shouting, “Flat tire!” as I enter the sprawl of the cafeteria with its pounding jukebox, its stale odor of American cheese.

Lunch is at 11:10. Too early for anybody to be hungry, but we all shovel it in. I slide my tray in at the edge of the table where my friends sit dipping tater tots into a substance Ronald Reagan has declared a vegetable. These
friends are good people: I know this. These friends are much better people than I am. They are firmly grounded in the world. The girls talk about their diets; the boys tease the girls, speak in shrill, falsetto voices. The popular kids call them “art-fags.” I am an art-fag, too. It is a relief to be something, even an art-fag. It's a relief to rest at the edge of this group of friends who sign their notes “love always” and who, for the most part, after graduation, I'll never see again.

I try to pay attention, try to laugh when a boy throws a perfectly aimed tater tot down the front of a girl's shirt. It is funny. It is also not there. I am not there, distracted as I am, working the line like a needlepoint, in and out, up and down, revealing it piece by piece. My first teacher taught me to play music by ear. My next teacher, Miss Williams, taught me to memorize music by reading it and hearing it in my head. My new teacher, Mr. Celeste, gives me articles by sports psychologists showing that athletes who think through their actions—not as observers, watching themselves, but as if they are actually experiencing their movements—excel over those who do not. I am teaching myself to practice this way. I re-create the sounds I have heard, transcribe them onto the page. I see the notes before my eyes, feel the keyboard under my hand.

Lunch is over by 11:35, and as I separate my paper products, my silverware, I realize that I can't bear to face the afternoon. I tell a friend that I feel sick, that I'm going to
head home—would he tell my biology teacher? My friend rolls his eyes.

“What should I tell him this time?” he says. “The intentional flu?”

“Rabies,” I say, and I bite him on the neck.

“Bitch,” he tells me pleasantly. The other kids think we are sleeping together, a deception that benefits us both. He is a homosexual. (We pronounce the word seriously, diligently, emphasizing all the syllables.) And I—well, I'm not sure what I am. Maybe some kind of eunuch. After all, I could have dates, but I turn them down. Turn up my nose, the other kids say. It will serve me right if I never get married. It will serve me right if I spend the rest of my life alone. Only music can save me. Only music has the power to transform my soul. Dimly, I am aware that it is prayer—devotion to Christ—that I should be endowing with these magical properties. But prayer leaves me feeling anxious, leaves me feeling that no matter how hard I try, God will find me wanting. I am neither bad nor good but something in between. I am what the Bible calls
lukewarm
. I am what God will spit from His mouth.

I collect my coat from my locker, where somebody has scrawled WET DREAM in thick black permanent marker. Perhaps it is the same person who has been shoving notes through the vents, saying that he is going to give me the bloody fuck I need, stuck up cow, you better watch your step. In the pocket of my coat, I've tucked a paring knife I
have pilfered from the kitchen; in my purse, I keep a slender bottle of pepper spray I ordered in secret from a catalogue. Who is writing these notes? It could be anybody. The wrestlers who made my sophomore year hell have all graduated, gone off to who knows where. Perhaps it's the boy who sits behind me in art class, bragging about how he and some friends broke into an elderly woman's apartment one night. “I don't know why she was crying,” he says, laughing. “All we wanted was for her to cook us some eggs. But she was fuckin' crying so hard she kept dropping them on the floor.” It could be the boy who, at a bluff party in September, teased and twisted and dragged a girl who liked him into the bushes, forced his way into her one hundred feet from the open trunk of the car where the rest of us had gathered to drink beer. Later, I found her sitting in my mother's car. Please, she begged, don't say anything. Please just take me home. It could be a member of the basketball team, which has pledged to beat up the school's single black male student—a transfer who has just started school that fall—if he thinks about looking at a white girl. It could be the anonymous figure who jumped my friend Dee's boyfriend in the park one night, calling him queer, leaving him with cracked ribs and a broken jaw.

Weekends I work at my parents' real estate office, where potential buyers from Milwaukee talk about how they want to move to a small town for their kids, for the safety, for the
good schools, and I wonder what on earth they are talking about. But then, I often feel this way. There is the surface of things—the shining lake, the church on the hill, the sweet-faced women in the downtown shops—and then there is the way things are. There is the little town with its clean, well-lit streets—and then there is the knife in my pocket. The God who is Love—and the God who condemns homosexuals, people of other faiths, people who have abortions or use birth control, people who have sex outside of marriage, people who get divorced and remarry. The single, sanguine story everybody agrees to tell—and the stories like my own, trapped beneath that stifling weight.

Who frightens me more—the boy who writes me these terrible notes, bearing down so angrily that I can trace the impression of his letters, understand their meaning, with my fingers? Or the God who, like the boy, is bent on controlling me, keeping me in my place, keeping my mind on Him?
Better watch your step
. If only I can make it until Christmas break. If only I can make it through the six weeks after that, when my first round of college auditions begins. If only I can do well enough to get into a good conservatory. If only I can survive until August, without something terrible happening.

If only.
Da-DEE-dum
.

That Ann. DA-DA.

It is familiar, it is Brahms. The line is back in my head.

I slip out of the school by a side door, cross the athletic
field. The chill licks away the fog of the classrooms, the over-heated hallways and dull, fluorescent lights. Heading north on Holden Street, I pass the neatly kept houses, the snow-covered, geometric lawns. Christmas trees twinkle in every front window; lights hang in crisp, bright strings from the porches and mailboxes. A plastic Santa glows on a rooftop, holding up an arrow that points to the chimney. I am starting to feel better. I will make hot chocolate and work on the intermezzo, sounding it out until three o'clock, the hour I usually start to practice. Then I will switch over to what I should be working on, my audition pieces: the Bach suites, the Chopin ballade, the Beethoven sonata, the Bartók variations. At my lesson tomorrow, I'll tell Mr. Celeste about the intermezzo, play what I've been able to come up with. He will grumble a bit before rising, combing his bookshelves for the music.
This is dessert
, he will say, tucking it into my satchel.
After the Beethoven. After the broccoli and carrots
.

I will make it till Christmas. I will make it to the end of the school year. Tonight, I will tell my mother,
I took another sanity day
, and she will write my excuse on a piece of the thick, creamy stationery she receives from her own students every year, along with the bottles of perfume, the fruitcakes, the knickknacks, and homemade ashtrays.

 

Of course, there
is another side to all this. There is the part of my life that is neither school nor church, the
part that I love, the part that I sense I will lose for good if I ever step out of its rhythms. There is my maternal grandmother's kitchen, and her hundred-acre farm, and the gentle swell of fields, fringed with woodlands. There is the color of the landscape, the tans and browns and winter-whites, the spectacular greenness of springtime. There is my mother and father. There are my uncles and aunts, cousins and second cousins, the hearty clamor of reunions and holiday suppers, Grace that swells like a symphony:
Bless us O Lord and these Thy Gifts
. There is the shared language of absolute faith, the shared reason of people who have lived out their lives within twenty miles of the place where they were born, the land beneath them like the heart of a single organism, a vast and powerful drum. There is the comfort of such numbers, the ease of being swept along with the tide, of giving yourself over to the seasons of marriage and birth, and birth, and birth, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, land and a house and a garden behind it, a kitchen like my grandmother's, humming like a hive.