Limbo (8 page)

Bach, Mozart, Rachmaninoff
—these names, though my mother had heard of them, must have seemed as unreachable, as unrelated to our lives as the names comprising the periodic table of the elements. She longed for culture in an abstract way, but it was a longing she could neither justify nor explain, and on those rare occasions she took a risk, attempted something new—bought a stylish coat, ordered a series of faux-leather-bound books on the Roman Empire, attempted a recipe from a magazine—her efforts were inevitably unsuccessful. They became the butt of family jokes. The coat's lining tore the first time she wore it. The books gathered dust on the shelf. My father came home to the stir-fry or curry—both radical departures from our standard meat and potatoes fare—and said the first thing that flew into his head: “Whew! What's that smell?”

Like Kafka's mouse, my mother didn't know what to imagine, so she kept on running in the only direction she could. But my piano teacher had seen something more of the world. She loaned me records. She took me to the Pabst Theatre in Milwaukee where, at nine, I heard my first concert. She organized public recitals, made each of her students practice walking across a stage without scurrying or slouching, taught us to bow gracefully, one cool hand on the back of our necks. She urged us to attend music camp at the University of Wisconsin-Steven's Point. I went for the first time when I was ten and, abruptly, college became a real place, a concrete pursuit, with solid walls, tables, and chairs, a bustling sense of purpose.

Each year, one or two children were chosen to give special recitals and receive master classes with the Japanese instructors. The summer I turned twelve, I was one of them. Speaking through a translator, the teacher had stressed to my mother and me the importance of exposure to concerts and recitals, opera and the ballet. We'd nodded as if such things were an option. Of course, we
could
have driven to Milwaukee, or even Chicago, but at the time such an idea—had it even occurred to us—would have been dismissed as outrageous, a sinful extravagance, evidence that we were putting ourselves above regular people.

I loved the years I studied with my first teacher. I loved her for her precision, her intensity, the way she always took
me very seriously, but also for her playfulness, her passion for the absurd. Sometimes, without warning, she'd drop a handful of music on the floor, trying to break my concentration. She'd stamp her feet, laugh raucously, sing out, “Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom!” Playing the piano required “absolute attention,” a phrase she would often repeat. Years later, I'd encounter that phrase again: the French philosopher Simone Weil's definition of prayer.

So it was with “absolute attention” that I worked my way through all the Suzuki books, the Chopin nocturnes, Bach preludes and fugues, sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven. I was thirteen when my teacher informed my mother that I needed more advanced instruction: I not only had a solid repertoire but I could withstand any distraction without missing a single note.

“You mean another teacher?” my mother said.

There was somebody in Skokie, Illinois, my teacher said. Just outside Chicago, about two hours away. Miss Williams had an excellent reputation; her students went on to attend the best conservatories. One had been a finalist for the Van Cliburn. She herself toured internationally with a chamber ensemble.

Chicago? my mother said.

I had been to Chicago once, on a field trip. My fifth-grade class had gone to the Museum of Science and Industry. We'd had to hold hands with our buddy the whole time,
and stay with the group, and not speak to strangers, and sound off by twos whenever the teacher said.

Think about your future, my teacher told me. Think about what you want.

My mother and I walked home together. She'd been coming to lessons with me, taking notes so she could help me with my practicing. Lately it had seemed to me, to all of us, that I had stalled somehow. I could manage the notes, but the pieces were exceeding my emotional capabilities. My sight-reading skills were terribly poor; I still played almost everything by ear. And then, too, there was the question of my technique, which my teacher feared might be causing my forearms to ache the way they did. A more advanced teacher might be able to see what was triggering the problem.

I wanted to go to Chicago for lessons every bit as badly as I wanted my mother to say it was out of the question, too expensive, time consuming, extravagant—which I knew was the truth. My mother had summers off from teaching, but she was getting more involved in my father's real estate company. She designed, wrote, and coordinated the weekly advertisement. She composed and typed most of my father's correspondence. She'd just started studying for her broker's license, which she hoped to earn before it was time to return to her classroom in fall. And in fall I, too, was going to be busy. At least, I hoped that would be the case. Surely, there'd be more homework in high school,
more responsibilities, more interesting extracurriculars, than there'd been in junior high.

Any of these were perfectly acceptable reasons not to go to Chicago. But I knew there was another, more pressing reason.

My mother was afraid to drive me there.

“What do you want to do?” she said as we turned into the driveway.

“I don't know,” I said.

“You'll have to do better than that,” she said.

We were each waiting, as we often did, for the other to say what
she
wanted.

“We could try it for a while,” I said.

 

Over dinner, during
a commercial break, my mother told my father about Miss Williams, repeating the things that my teacher had told us. That if I wanted a career in music, it was important to make these decisions now. That Miss Williams had placed students at conservatories like Peabody, Curtis, even The Juilliard. That I'd have chances to compete, to perform, that a local teacher could not give me. Even if I eventually decided against a career in music, my mother said, such experiences would be invaluable—didn't my father agree? They could lead to other opportunities. They would affect me for the rest of my life.

My father said nothing. His eyes were on the TV. I remem
ber that one of the commercials was for shampoo. I remember what we were eating that night: meat loaf, made with ground beef, stale bread, ketchup, egg, a packet of Lipton's onion soup. I felt like a character in a play, as if all of us were larger than life, significant, observed, and this self-consciousness embarrassed me. I tried to pray:
Dear God, make him say yes
. But that felt even more ridiculous. It was crazy to drive more than two hours each way for lessons that probably cost—what? My teacher charged seven dollars for an hour lesson that usually ran an hour and a half. I had, I realized, only been thinking of the cost in terms of time and gasoline.

“Skokie, Illinois,” my father finally said. He stabbed at his baked potato a few times. “I know Skokie very well.”

The news came back on.

This was a typical conversation with my father.

After supper, I cleared my father and brother's plates along with my own, clattering them around more than necessary as I rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher. My mother, who'd started the pots and pans, tried to catch my eye, but I kept my head down. I was furious: with myself, with my mother, and, especially, with my teacher. The whole idea was stupid. There had been no point in bringing it up in the first place.

And yet, I wanted my father to
acknowledge
that we had spoken to him. I wanted him to address the question my mother had asked on my behalf, even though I knew his
mind simply did not work that way. I knew because I was wired the same way. If something caught my attention, I could concentrate on it for hours, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else, and still emerge burning, hungry for more, irritable at the interruption. But if I wasn't particularly interested, or if I happened to be thinking of something else, I found it nearly impossible to focus, to narrow all the possibilities into a single, specific answer.

We always ate promptly at five-thirty. Tonight, we had the dishes finished by six.

“I'm going to practice,” I said.

But within minutes of completing my warm-ups, I broke a piano key. It was near the center of the keyboard, which meant that I wouldn't be able to practice again until the piano tuner had come. This could take up to a week. The piano was the same obliging little upright that my mother had learned to play on as a child, but lately it had been suffering under my relentless attacks. I stared at the deflated key as if I could heal it by the force of my will. I wished I knew somebody else who had a piano. I wished I could go out to the garage and get the heavy maul and break my mother's sweet piano into a thousand pieces.

When I looked up, I saw that my father was watching me. He had his shoes on and he held a clipboard in his hand.

“We need to call the tuner,” I said. But my father didn't seem to notice.

“Let's go for a ride,” he said.

When my father asked you to go for a ride, what he meant was that he wanted you to come with him on a property appraisal. I liked going on appraisals, walking through unfamiliar houses, holding the end of the tape measure. I liked hearing my father's assessment of each house: learning what was a selling point, what might be a drawback. But I hated getting in a car without knowing where, exactly, I would be going, and how long I was going to be. Forcing my father to answer either of these questions in advance was nearly impossible.

“What's the address?” I said, buckling my seatbelt. My father never wore his.

“The address,” my father repeated. He backed out of the driveway and we headed north, through town. It was a warm summer evening, and everybody was out, families riding their bicycles, children playing in the streets. My father drove slowly, waving like the president. He knew nearly everyone in town.

“Is it far?” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Not far.”

He pulled over to talk to a man who was thinking of putting his house on the market. He cut through a side street to check on one of his rental properties. “Tenant's home,” he said, with satisfaction. “They're good people. If I could find half a dozen just like 'em…” He didn't finish what he
was saying, for he'd been distracted by a woman across the street. She was standing in her front yard, a toddler tucked under one arm. My father tapped the horn as we passed. The woman waved.

“She was a real firecracker in her day,” he said, nodding with sincere appreciation.

“So the appraisal's here in Port?” I said.

“Oh, it's…” He trailed off, thinking about something else.

“Dad?”

“It's not so far.”

“Out of town then?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“
Dad
.”

“Let's just take a little ride and see.”

The appraisal, it turned out, was in Belgium, an unincorporated town that was little more than a crossroads. The house was a typical “starter home,” small and dark, set too close to the road. Half a dozen houses just like it stretched in either direction. Train tracks passed several hundred feet from the front drive. My father fished the tape measure from underneath the seat, and I grabbed the clipboard. We both got out of the car.

“Nice, level lot,” he said.

Petunias grew along the sidewalk leading up to the front door. I could already see my mother's ad:
CHARMING 3BR/1BA in quiet, country setting
.

“Twelve hundred square feet,” my father said, guessing. We measured the exterior and found it was exactly that. Inside, the house was vacant. The carpet was faded at the center of the living room, darker around the edges, and you could see where each piece of furniture had been: couch, chair, ottoman, TV console. I caught a faint whiff of septic, which my father had taught me to identify. I noted the lack of storm windows, the electric heat. I waited for my father to tell me, as he always did, that I should never buy anything with electric heat. But he was already measuring the rooms. He flushed the toilets, ran the faucets, checked the fuse box in the kitchen. The linoleum was curling up around the refrigerator. As my father emptied the overflowing drip pan, I stood at the kitchen window, staring past the limp curtains into the tiny, green square of lawn. There was a swing set out there, with dusty furrows beneath each seat, and a sandbox covered with sheets of black plastic.

A thought formed itself in my mind:
this could be your house someday
.

And with that, as if he'd been listening to my thoughts, my father said, “How would you like a house like this?”

The question startled me. “Never buy a house with electric heat,” I said automatically.

“But if you were just starting out, though,” he persisted. “With a family.” There was something like pleading in his voice; he was begging me to listen. I tried to imagine raising
children here, watching them play outside on the swings. My husband and I would paint the walls bright colors to hide the imperfections. We'd save money for a new refrigerator. We'd talk about replacing the carpeting.

“I'd be miserable,” I said. “I want to play the piano.”

“I thought you wanted to be a doctor someday.”

We both looked out the window at the empty swings.

“You could go to medical school,” my father said, “and become a doctor and then, after you've established a practice someplace, you could cut back on your patient load.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“So you could stay home more. With…little ones.”

He had really thought this through.

“But what if I don't want children?”

My father turned the faucet on, then shut it off.

“What if I don't want to get married?”