HARRIET SMITHSON
I vibrate.
Yes, I vibrate. And when I
vibrate, I sing, and when I sing I talk to Lucy’s soul. But it is a higher vibration. Lucy is right when she suspects Zoltán is
Gypsy; he has the perception,and the scars to prove it. Lucy should never think she is alone in
feeling persecuted. Zoltán was
persecuted for having brown eyes and black hair. There is a little curl to this hair and
sometimes Lucy with her latent psychic gift can see him as a little boy. And
she has to fight the urge to brush that curl back off his forehead, as a mother
might.
God knows how he survived. A combination of wilyness and luck. But he lived to pass on the basic teachings,
as well as some higher vibrations of his own.
Let me give you an example. The
other day he felt she was ready to begin lightening her still-leaden bow. “You know the Humoresque?” he asked.
“Which one?” Lucy could think of at least two or three.
“The Dvorák.”
“Ah!”
Then she began to sing a song she learned from an old childhood 78
r.p.m. record:
“Like a bike but so much cuter
Is my tiny two-wheeled scooter
And I ride it ‘round and ‘round each day.
Though it has no engine on it
Once I place my feet upon it,
Merrily I’m on my way.
When I grow older,
I may be bolder,
And I’ll think of aeroplanes and
auto-mo-biles. . .
But right now while I’m outside,
I’m satisfied to guide and ride
My tiny little scooter with two wheels!”
Zoltán laughed with delight, his
dark eyes all a-silver. When Lucy sees
him in such merriment it is as if small bells are ringing on a horse’s harness. Then she sees steam rising from the horse. She sees a husky man lifting a child, and
hears the little boy say a word which she doesn’t understand. Then the small boy in the big man’s lap is
holding the reins.
“Now you try.” Lucy comes back to the room.
She assayed the piece, and naturally it
sounded like a clumsy frog hopping:
Dump. Ta-dump. Ta-dump.
Ta-dump. Zoltán never stops her,
just passes into a dreamy deep-listening state which is picking up every single
fumble-fingered mistake.
“Is one way,” he said kindly, and Lucy
tensed herself for the coming criticism.
“But you are too much influence by this small song from childhood. There is this way also.” And he lifted his instrument.
Lucy listened, struck dumb, as out poured
a graceful but highly unlikely Gypsy dance tune. The emphasis was completely different and the
piece danced with light feet. In the
middle section, when the mood changes to a moment of sorrow, Lucy could see a
man in mid-life who remembers his one true love, long-lost, a beautiful dark
girl with silver earrings. Then it was
back to the now slightly defiant-sounding Gypsy tune.
“I have never heard it played that way
before in my life. It’s a revelation.”
“Is how I play.”
“You opened this piece right up for
me. Where was this interpretation hiding
all this time?”
“You hear Americans play it. Or Canadians, even worse. They play it like frog jumping.”
Lucy burst out laughing. Dump
Ta-dump. Ta-dump. Her frog even had a wooden leg.
Zoltán loaned her a blue-covered book
called World’s Favorite Easy Violin Pieces (“Oh, easy for Leonardo!”, as Dylan
Thomas said about his Easy-Hobby Games for Little Engineers), which included
the Humoresque in a simple enough form for her to practice. She immediately violated copyright by
photocopying it, then saw other gems which she was sure she was ready to play –
Schumann’s melancholy, nostalgic Traumerie,
Saint-Saens’ The Swan,
Offenbach’s Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman, and even Bach’s most
primal melody, Air on a G-String. Then while Zoltán was out of the room she
rifled through his CD collection and found Music Minus One accompaniments for
these pieces. She’d show him. She was stealing music now, sneaking it,
cheating. It was wonderful. In no way could she keep up with the
orchestral accompaniment, but it didn’t matter.
She didn’t play the Bach properly on the G-string at all (in fact it
should have been retitled Air on G and D
Strings),but broke out in goose bumps regardless from the unimpeachable
greatness of the music. Even Lucy
couldn’t ruin it. I’m sorry to sound
harsh, but she is still like green, raw wood, full of bend and sap but almost
unusable for crafting anything. You
can’t make a table from a sapling. The
tree simply has to grow some more before it can become useful. She knows.
On the days when she is ready to throw me out the window, something
grounds her, some sacred tradition.
Perhaps it is even a memory of her father, so eager to play in his
impoverished boyhood that he made his first violin out of a cigar-box. This is a hard one for Lucy who has had to
unhook from him so completely in order to thrive. But she remembers, as one remembers the good
moments from a war. Zoltán is not the
only one who was imprisoned in his childhood.
You don’t have to be in
She plays the Schumann (her favorite; too
bad he didn’t write much for me), forcing her left hand to vibrate, sometimes
forgetting herself and doing it right, pulsating like new wings, butterfly
wings drying in the sun. Schumann, being
generous of soul, forgives her for the mistakes.
LUCY’S JOURNAL
Long, long phone conversation with David
last night. He sounded slightly
swacked. My God, is that man a
mess. He thinks Zoë’s pregnant already
but I sense there’s something funny going on.
This is like
Weeks, and even months whip along,
frighteningly fast. At the same time my
job drags its ass in the usual just-bearable way. Monika seems in an awful slump and is smoking
more. If life could only be more like a
novel, elegant and compact, multi-hued threads of story neatly braided
together, instead of this clueless sprawl of details. I meander and blunder like I’m in a field of
bumper-cars. “Don’t feel so
misunderstood,” David snapped on the phone.
He’s one to talk. He’s right, of course. No one is capable of understanding anyone
with that many contradictory layers of personality. But maybe he’s telling me from long and
bitter experience, from his own chronic disappointment, not to expect understanding.
Someone in church the other day asked me,
“So when are you going to play for us?”
Good question. I haven’t lost my
virginity yet. I quake inside when I
think of the prospects. Recitals come up
in June and Zoltán has a certain canny something-up-my-sleeve look, like a cat
with a plan, a juicy bird in his mind’s eye.
Then another stress: my father’s
birthday. It’s always a bad one. And I realize again with a thrill of shock
that I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.
I cut myself off so completely during those years of unutterable hell
that communication between us is now completely dead. Michael’s parents are still in touch with
them, at least peripherally. Or so
Michael tells me, when he tells me anything at all. He does call Kate regularly and usually talks
practicalities with me. Financial stuff,
mainly. I can’t believe I once centred
my life around this man. A good man, to
be sure, but I believe my sickness overwhelmed him. Sometimes I yearn to tell him, “Look, I’m
different now,” but I’m afraid he’ll say something too honest, such as, “Yes,
you’ve changed your obsessions.”
I’m also shocked to realize I haven’t even
mentioned Rafe. I don’t know if
it’s a Puritanical attack of conscience
or not, but I am thinking of breaking it off.
“It feels too good?” David commented acidly. (But this is why he is my best male
friend.) That’s it: it feels good with virtually no effort,
because the fact is we don’t have what you could honestly call a relationship. He smells good and stirs me to sexual depths
I’ve never felt before and when it’s all over he smokes in bed and picks his
toes and I wonder what in the world I am doing with this man.
Even Kate notices it. “The thrill is gone,” she wailed in B. B.
King-esque style when she saw me chopping vegetables with murder in my
eyes. All my life I’ve dreamed of a sort
of biological relationship where the passion is perfect and the commitment is
nil, and now I have it; therefore, it isn’t a dream any more. And therefore, it’s ruined. Now it’s part of grubby, toe-picking
reality. I don’t love him. Sometimes I wonder if I even like him. I think the only thing he’s ever read is the
AA Big Book. He’s one of those program
fundamentalists. And smokers taste
awful, all over. Maybe Monika should
have a go at him? She could use the
estrogen lift, I think. And the bad
taste wouldn’t matter. Like eating
peanut butter – fine so long as you both do it.
They could lie in bed with the sheets pulled up to their chins and puff
away, like Bogie and Bacall.
If I could combine Rafe’s libido, David’s
sensitivity and Michael’s stability, I might just have the perfect man. (Should I throw in Zoltán’s sense of
mystery? His scent, spicy as those
Speculaas Dutch cookies shaped like little windmills? Don’t think about it. Such dark chocolates are forbidden to my
tongue.) My luck, this composite
wouldn’t be able to stand me. I might
just be staring at Frankensteinian aspects of myself that still frighten the
daylights out of me. Zut alors. I must play Harriet, who misses me. Who sings no matter how she feels. This is the right attitude. Through war, through hell and exasperating
moments of high heaven, even through the obscene boredom of a relatively-happy
life, there is one throbbing constant, this dark-throated, long-lashed enigma,
this music.
CASSANDRA MARTIN
I wish I knew what the hell is eating at
David. He seemed more sour-faced than
usual last time we talked at the cafe, and even our wonderful news didn’t get
the reaction I’d hoped for. “That’s
nice,” he said blandly, as if he’d had nothing to do with it. “But aren’t you excited?” I said. “It happened so quickly! I thought it might take a year or something. You know how some couples try and try and
nothing happens.”
“Maybe Zoë’s unusually fertile,” he
commented flatly, gulping his tall decaf latte as if it were medicine or
something. It’s the end of the season
and we’re heading into summer doldrums, and David’s such a workaholic that
maybe slumps like this are inevitable.
But he still has his students (most of them really gifted), his
reedmaking and instrument repairs. God,
he did miracles with my flute that time when the valve was sticking. All this tinkering should keep his nimble
fingers out of mischief for the summer.
He didn’t even want to talk about Zoë who’s
in a snit of her own, complaining about the acne and the overactive bladder and
the bump that already shows through her slinky black bodysuits. I can barely even feel it. But that will change. Zoë’s so skinny that in a few months she’ll
probably look like that picture in Le
Petit Prince of the python who
swallowed an elephant. All David wanted
to talk about was his sister Leslie (who always reminds me of that character in
The Glass Menagerie – Laura, isn’t
it? The one with the club foot. I swear David’s family is Tennessee Williams
with a Slavic accent.) She’s back in
hospital, having delusions again.
Self-mutilating in grotesque ways.
Biting herself. I didn’t want to
hear about it. For some bizarre reason
David seems to feel responsible. Can you
help it if she has a chemical imbalance?
I asked him. I mean, look at
me. I’ll be on meds for the rest of my
life, and I never grew up with the Nazi regime David had to live under, his
father pushing him past the point of endurance.
Then there was his mother’s avalanche of smotherly affection, which only
reflected her own bottomless need. I am
amazed he didn’t turn out like David Helfgott, gibbering away to himself from
beyond the fringe. But for some reason
Leslie went crazy instead. There’s one
in every family, absorbing all the toxins from the environment. Almost Christlike, in a way, how that
happens. They try to take on the sins of
the whole clan. Usually they die, as a
sort of human sacrifice. But the
similarities to Jesus don’t end there.
Everyone claims to love the person in question, yet when push comes to
shove they treat them like absolute shit, abandoning them at the crucial
moment. (I can just hear the crowd
yelling “Crucify him!”) And just as with Christ’s death, the sacrifice never
works to redeem the whole rotten family system, which generally becomes sicker
than ever. And they can never figure out
why that one person went crazy and died.
Surely it had nothing to do with them!
I never knew this much shit would get
stirred up in me from hearing David talk.
This is stuff I haven’t thought about for years. I think he goes too far with the guilt thing
anyway. He went on and on about how
talented Leslie was. I think his father
may have been secretly disappointed that David didn’t pursue piano. Leslie did, but she was only a girl, and a
fragile one at that. Wonder if that thug
of a father got after her or something.
In any case, she was too frail for a
career, which takes real toughness of mind and an ability to not give a shit
about what anyone thinks. Half the
people I know don’t even think I work.
They think it’s “art” and I live on air or something. Else why would they keep asking me to play
flute solos at weddings and funerals and things like that, with no thought of
paying me? “You have to give off an air
of professionalism,” David says. They
don’t ever ask him. Maybe they know
they’d get farther asking a block of stone.
I wish David would consider
medication. He’s biting his nails again,
and looked paler than usual even though it finally stopped raining. It would be nice if our daughter-to-be could
have some sort of a stable father-figure, even though it’s entirely up to David
how involved he wants to be with raising her.
And of course we’re not asking for any money. Zoë’s father is quite well-off, though you’d
never think it to look at her. “What if
it’s a boy?” Zoë asked me the other day
when I kept on referring to the baby as “she”.
It never really occurred to me.
Probably he’d turn out to be some neurotic little
wuss with Coke-bottle
glasses and a perfect sense of pitch.
Woody Allen had a son, didn’t he?
But look what happened there.
God, what messes people get themselves into. I’m so glad I had all that therapy.
So now, if I can get Zoë to kick
cigarettes and at least cut down on her night life, and maybe start eating a
little better (she doesn’t want to get fat, which is about as likely as David
cracking a smile), we should have a sane and healthy summer ahead of us. Maybe I should learn how to knit.
Mums is going crazy again. This time it isn’t even a guy. I mean, that was sort of refreshing, my
mother having a boy friend, and for a while it seemed we could relate to each
other on sort of the same level. She’d
sneak in really late with this guilty look on her face. It was cute.
But I think she’s reverting back to that
men-who-needs-‘em mode of hers, giving Rafe the cold shoulder while he keeps on
phoning her and phoning her and tagging along after her at AA meetings like a
faithful puppy dog. I think she just
sort of got tired of a man with a great body and an empty crater where a mind
should be. Why doesn’t she go out with
that friend of hers, that David? Maybe
he’s gay or something, or kinky, who knows.
Musicians.
No, this time it’s Zoltán and his big
announcement that he thinks Mums is ready to play in her first recital in June,
which is not that many weeks away. It’ll
commemorate the end of her first year of lessons. Though to be honest I really don’t think she
sounds all that good. At least she’s
better than when she began all that scraping and groaning a year back. Her vibrato, such as it is, reminds me of an
84-year-old Russian baritone, a really schmaltzy sort of uncontrolled
wobble. What do I know about
violin? Exactly nothing. But I’ve got Grade 7 piano and can tell
what’s music and what isn’t. Mums really
plugs away and once in a while that violin of hers – Harriet, she calls it,
probably after that old TV sitcom with Ricky Nelson in it – hits a certain note
and she has something approaching a decent tone. In another year, who knows.
But here she is in a genuine lather over
this concert she’ll be playing in – with a bunch of little kids, most of them
technically way more advanced than she is.
Probably she’ll wear a frilly white blouse and a navy blue skirt and
black patent-leather shoes and give a little curtsy at the end of her
performance, like she did when she was nine.
So now all I can hear through the bedroom
door are the strains of
Now she’s preoccupied in an entirely
different way, so fat chance of me talking to her about anything important,
except violin. And I could really use someone to talk to right now when Brian
and me are having all these problems. I
think he sort of went into a depression after the baby thing, even worse than
mine actually where I couldn’t stop crying for about six weeks. Brian just gets sort of quiet and it reminds
me too much of how Dad used to be with Mums before they broke up. No juice flowing, no communication at all,
except sex which just isn’t what it used to be, mainly because Brian is now
totally paranoid about getting me pregnant again. I have a diaphragm and I’m really religious
about using it even though I hate that spermicide stuff. “If it happens again, we’ll keep it,” he says
to me, scaring the hell out of me. He
thinks it’s like a puppy or a kitten or something – “I’m keeping it,” like that
little boy with E. T. I don’t know how
anyone can raise a kid, even under the best of conditions, which these
aren’t. In fact they’re practically the
worst.
And I’m not at all sure yet what I’m going
to be doing for the summer. I know I
should look for a job but there just doesn’t seem to be anything too inspiring
out there. I might end up being a camp
counsellor again like last year but I don’t know if I can stand to listen to
two solid months of giggling and squealing and dirty jokes. And that’s from the other counsellors, never
mind the kids.
Or Brian and me could travel. Mums would probably kill us. Brian has been to
Can a violin detect drops of sweat leaking
from a clammy human hand? Yes it
can. We can even pick up on the
less-obvious signs of distress, like a certain odor, a nimbus of anxiety
hanging like a swarm of bees around a person’s head. Poor Lucy.
She doesn’t know yet what I smell on her. Naturally enough she was nervous – it was her
first recital. Zoltán had to almost
physically twist her arm to get her to agree to play at all. But when dawned the big day she felt a
curious mixture of delirious anticipation and sick dread.
The anticipatory side of her decided to
ask David if he would like to attend her first performance. Of course he begged off. Lucy is showing progress, God knows; the way
she plays me now is a quantum leap of improvement over the stiff-armed sawing
of a year ago. But to attain the golden
sound David holds in his fine-tuned ear as acceptable for violin would take a
lifetime, and a lifetime Lucy hasn’t got.
What she has is scraps – scraps of energy left over from her dull but
draining job, her worries over Kate and Monika and David, and her indefatigable
attempts to write a masterpiece novel or just any sort of novel at all.
Lucy sometimes tries to live too many
lives in one, or to cram in too much experience in as short a space of time as
possible, as if she is sure she will die young and has to somehow get it all
in. “Is killing you,” Zoltán flatly told
her after running his black-grape eyes over her at the end of a gruelling
lesson. Zoltán reads energy patterns
with those eyes, or with the surface of his skin or by some other method,
unanalyzable. He could sense the level
of her anxiety over this recital but also knew she was much more ready than she
consciously knew. And he told her
exactly what to play: “Anything.” Immediately Lucy thought of the easiest piece
in her repertoire, something she had long been playing on her own (with the
delicious thrill of thinking, “Zoltán doesn’t even know about this”). It was an easy arrangement of the Barcarolle from
So she practiced like a fiend for weeks,
with a schmaltzy recorded orchestral accompaniment playing in the background
(hiding, she hoped, a multitude of flaws).
Kate got a little sick of hearing it.
Lucy even forced herself to watch her still-stiff self in a full-length
mirror as she practiced, noticing how right Zoltán was in his comments about
her continuing rigidity. And thus, that
rigidity grew somewhat less. Then she
did something extraordinarily brave – she taped herself and listened to it carefully. By carefully, I mean avoiding the very real
temptation to retch at her rawness of tone.
I was happily surprised to find that along with the multitude of things
she found wrong, she did notice she was doing a few things right. As the result of this listening, she forced
herself to tighten up her embryonic vibrato, which up until that point had
sounded like an elderly contralto wobble.
Her sound is gradually getting younger, but it is only because she is
finding the courage to be rigorously self-critical.
Then she did something even nervier – she
played the piece for a few friends from her church who had come over to her
place for tea. A captive audience! She knew that if she could survive one
play-through with these kind and (thankfully) fairly musically uninformed
souls, she could make it through her big moment on Saturday. Then she went out and bought herself a new
dress for the occasion, remembering David’s advice: “Presentation is important. Always look as professional as you sound.”
Lucy was fairly far down on the program, a
surprise to her, as Zoltán said his less-advanced students usually played
first. It was no surprise, however, that
most of the students who played ahead of her were kids. The audience was made up of proud parents, a
few aunts and uncles, and Kate. Kid
after kid got up on the little stage and essayed pieces technically far in
advance of Lucy’s simple Barcarolle.
But she noticed something about most of them – a strange dearth of musicality,
a lack of maturity, which meant that their performances consisted of playing a
series of notes. And as even Lucy
realizes, that’s not what music is. She
was also surprised to find that tonally, she was the best one there. Bad as she sometimes sounds to herself, she
is improving, due to a precise ear and a passion for good sound. All those hours, nay, years of listening to
the best violinists in the world have both tortured her and instilled in her a
deep feeling for what good violin sound is.
Some of the others don’t yet have that awareness; some never will.
When she completed her three-minute ordeal
a huge wash of relief bathed her soul; then she allowed herself to enjoy the
quite enthusiastic applause. Zoltán
mentioned to the crowd that she had started violin only a year ago, then added,
“Now you know best time to start.” Lucy
sat there glowing as in the warm bask of post-orgasm, realizing she had broken
a kind of barrier. Kate snapped a
picture of Zoltán with his arm around Lucy (they are exactly the same height)
in which they grinned like conspirators, or at least very good friends. Lucy put the photo in her violin book, where
she looks at it often, wanting to remember and savor the intensity of that one
sweet moment.
So now will come the lazier season of
summer, and what remains to be seen is how she will sustain her level of commitment,
her passion. What pulls Lucy down
sometimes is the dailiness of life – the endless small routines, the tiresome
bodily functions, meals to prepare, messes to clean up – and practicing is part
of that dailiness, the discipline. She
tries to find the glory in it when some of it is about as inspiring as cleaning
a toilet. There is nothing I can to do
help her here, as virtually everyone, with the exception of a few real
prodigies, must learn in the same tedious, repetitive way. So Lucy brushes her teeth, does the laundry,
practices; grocery shops, eats and sleeps, practices. She breathes in and breathes out. Sometimes her soul thinks it can remember a
timeless time, a bodyless time, a life free of the bondage of the material
world. But a violin is quintessentially
material. It’s part of what keeps Lucy
anchored. She thinks of her hero Thomas
Merton in the Trappist seminary enduring years of disciplined prayer and ascetic
living, and practices, hoping that if she honors the practice, inspiration will
some day
follow after.
Oboe is all that is left of my objectivity. Playing transports me
to a better place. Very little
understanding of this in the real world. Thus I am viewed very strangely.
To me, it is the rest of the
world that is strange. Leslie underwent another course of shock treatments last week. ECT, they call
it. Give it three initials and it’s respectable,
and no longer barbaric. Did she go crazy for all of us?
Lucy had a crazy brother Andrew, but he died. Do they all die? Lucy thinks he’s still around, a guiding
presence. Is she out of her mind too?
Will Zoë’s baby be as crazy as all the rest of my family, a
defective gene which I will inadvertently pass along? Need to keep focused. Must practice. My
students all thick as planks. Drank too much the other night; lost a couple of hours, a complete blank.
Must watch it. Am behaving like Lucy before her so-called
epiphany. No cohesion any more. None of
my students learning anything.
I cannot instill a burning desire to play the oboe. Weight down to 158.
Lucy wants to be my mother. Or maybe to mother
the whole world. Must find the source of all this. In
six more months my son will be born. What sense is left?
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to sit down and think. My
skin is still prickling all over and my scalp is on fire, as if I’ve had some sort of electric shock.
Last night I had to take David to
Emergency after what looked to me like some kind of botched suicide
attempt. He’s denying it all over the
place, of course. No, he says to me, I
wasn’t trying to off myself, I was just making reeds and the knife
slipped. He has this knife, see – God,
this is so bizarre – it’s razor-sharp, quite heavy, and shaped sort of like a
miniature hatchet, meant to grind down oboe reeds to the proper
paper-thinness. What I’d like to know is
what he was doing making reeds at
Normally I would have slept right through
it. But something made me wake up when
the phone rang and go to the machine. My
stomach turned over. I couldn’t get him
to make any sense at all on the phone but he kept on saying, “There’s blood all
over the place,” which threw me into a panic.
“For God’s sake, call an ambulance!” I told him. But he wouldn’t. “You have to come.”
“David, it’s at least a 45-minute
drive. What did you do to
yourself?”
“Just a cut. But I need you here. There’s no one else.”
“David, are you sober?”
“I swear I am. I need you here.”
So I got in the car at 4:12 in the bloody
morning, got to his place about 5:00, and found him sitting there in his studio
in a pair of black silk boxer shorts (the man never ceases to surprise me),
with a big piece of black tape holding his leg together, looking dazed. Apparently he had been making reeds because
he couldn’t get to sleep and dropped the goddamned knife on his right leg,
where it stuck, the end of the blade lodged deep in the flesh of his
thigh. He pulled it out and sat there
watching it bleed for a while (he swore it didn’t hurt, not until later
anyway), panicked, called me, then recovered himself sufficiently to try to
stop the bleeding with a piece of duct tape.
I swear I’m not making this up.
Somehow or other I put clothes on him, got
him calmed down (slipped him a 25-mg. Mellaril which put him in a meek state
almost immediately), and got him into Emergency where I had to do quite a bit
of explaining. Surprisingly, maybe
because of the Mellaril, David was able to hold himself together enough to
appear almost normal, while they asked him all sorts of questions and sewed his
thigh back together with what looked like black fishing line. I think maybe they were considering putting
him in the psychiatric ward, that is until one of the doctors mentioned,
“There’s no beds” (triggering a hideous flashback of what it used to be like
for me to spend night after night after night on a cot in Emergency waiting for
a goddamned bed in psych.) At one point
a nurse asked me if my friend had been depressed lately and I wasn’t sure what
to tell her. Is he any more depressed these days than usual?
Round about
If
people knew all the advantages of being dead, there might very well be a huge
rush on knives, guns, hoses to pipe carbon monoxide into the car, and so
on. The supreme irony is that, while
it’s pretty sublime to be dead, human beings always want to hang on to life –
for dear life. Anyone who has been even
remotely successful at living will hold onto life beyond reason, beyond
quality, beyond even hope. And that’s
only right, for being “alive”, being deeply mired in a ponderous bag of flesh,
is a gift beyond price.
Believe it or not, even with all the
freedoms of being dead, there are things I miss about the bag of flesh. The senses.
Naturally we have music over here, but it’s different. I miss blowing into the flute, the sense of my breath creating a sound that has
the power to move other people. I miss
ordinary things like sweating and cooling off.
I miss the visceral joy of laughter, the really helpless kind where
you’re falling out of your chair at the absurdity of it all. The disembodied retain their sense of humor
(since humor is, after all, divine), but sometimes we miss the helpless,
teary-eyed, belly-shaking laughter of mortality.
I’d laugh over Lucy, or I’d cry, but I
prefer to watch, with a degree of perspective far beyond anything she’ll attain
in this life. Detachment isn’t her
thing. It never was mine, either, until
I passed over. God, what a relief it can
be to be free of the flesh! The
schizophrenia is gone, for one thing.
The pigs have been driven over the side of the cliff, Biblically
speaking. I’m no longer burdened with
the faulty wiring that caused such bent thoughts, such paranoia. I can see clearly now for the first time.
I can pull back and back and back from the
spiderweb-network of my sister’s complicated life and see the entire picture,
all the circles within circles that make up her sphere of influence. I can see,
quite literally see, warm red-velvet ties of love from Lucy’s big cracked
heart to her daughter Kate, to her best friend Monika, and even to this poor
befuddled David who doesn’t even know yet that what he wants isn’t to die, but
to live in an entirely new way. (This is
also known as being “suicidal”. How
differently we view things here.)
I can see compassionate waves rippling off
Lucy like the subtle wake of a dropped stone, lapping gently up against the
ones she so loves and hates, her AA comrades, her beloved violin teacher, her
friends at church who with all their human limitations have a kind of Quakerish
dignity, and a quiet respect for Lucy based on all she has lived through, and
all that she is today. How wrong she is
to feel so misunderstood.
How many lifetimes it takes
to grow up.
Lucy and Kate share a secret philosophy
that binds them together – the “I’m- surrounded-by-idiots” syndrome that makes
them feel they are head and shoulders above anyone else they know, at least in
intellect. Maybe they have a point, in
that high intelligence doesn’t grow on trees.
But it’s very isolating. Some of
the less intellectually-endowed types Lucy hangs out with (and secretly makes
fun of) are light-years ahead of her in wisdom, patience and kindness. She’ll have to come back a few more times,
for sure, though the very idea of reincarnation would cause her to sniff: “Well, where does that leave the
How I wish I could get it across to her,
breathe it into her ear, what Jesus was trying so desperately to convey during
that ludicrously short time in his
bag of flesh. He was trying to pitch the
unpopular notion to his rather thick disciples that heaven and hell are not
“places” so much as states of being; that they depend on the purity of one’s
connectedness (or lack of it) with God.
Not only that – these states can be willed, decided upon, chosen.
People do it all the time. I
did. I chose my own hell, made my own
prison, tailored to fit me perfectly, aided and abetted by “circumstance” which
is only another aspect of our own selected lessons. If people had any idea to what extent they
create their own circumstances, they’d shriek with shock. Lucy is masterful at creating hell and is now
becoming fairly adept at reversing the process, but has not yet quite caught on
as to how to create bliss. Yes,
create. She can make heaven happen for
herself any time she decides she is ready.
Moreover, her creation of the
The closest Lucy comes to bliss now is
gamely playing pieces which she knows are one step beyond her, Rubinstein’s
schmaltzy but lovely Melody in F or
Raff’s Cavatine, losing her towering
ego in the totally enthralling process of making music. She will forget she is an “incest survivor”
(and oh, how unfortunately humans have branded themselves with these
all-too-limiting labels) and an “alcoholic” (yet another poison tag). She will even forget for an instant that she
is a human being who sweats and farts and cries and bleeds and digests and
excretes. She will taste the fact that
an incandescent dove made of pouring vaporous light nests in the grubby, gutty
cave of her mere physical being, and come to the profound realization that she
is more angel than ape. Already. Not after she dies, but right now. The
I am fat.
No, I mean I am huge. Cassie keeps on at me about how I should be
gaining more, but it’s still only early in the second trimester and I’m already up seven
pounds. I have this thing like a
canteloupe sticking out of my stomach, this growth, unbelievably hard and
firm. I always thought a pregnant
stomach would feel like jelly or something.
The womb isn’t such a soft place after all.
We haven’t decided yet if we want to find
out the sex. Why should gender even
matter? Cass is supposed to be such a
feminist but I thought “feminism” meant gender equality, not the superiority of the female. (Isn’t that just reverse sexism?) I’m sure David would like a son but Cassie
tells me he’s in a bad depression now, and I’m thinking, Great. Just what we need. Everyone knows depression is genetic, and I
had a great-aunt who killed herself at menopause (“accident” my ass), so does
that mean I’ll pass depression along to this porr innocent munchkin growing in
my gut? Little No-name will get it from
both sides.
And that’s another thing. Names.
David might insist on having some sort of a say here and want to call
him Dmitri or something (he has a cat named Constanza, after Mozart’s wife, for
God’s sake). And what about last names –
Zwierzchowska-Martin or Martin-Zwierschowska?
And will any of this be legal?
How will the poor little bugger handle all that when he tries to write
his name in school? (I got away with
Susan Z. for a very long time.)
Come to that, if you’re a purist, it
should be Zwierzchowski for a
boy. I’m proud of being Polish (well,
half) and I don’t want to knuckle under to Cassie’s idea of just giving him
“Martin” for a last name, plain as a slice of Wonder Bread, though easy to
spell.
The babe will be born in December, a
Sagittarian like Cass, and who knows how the two of them will get along, being
so similar in temperament. And David –
just what role is he going to be playing here?
We should have figured all this out before we even decided to do it, but
maybe then we never would have gone ahead with it at all. Better sense would’ve prevailed Or we’d have adopted a little Somali baby or
one with multiple handicaps that no one else wanted.
Maybe we should’ve just bought a dog and
let it go at that. Trouble is, this
place doesn’t allow pets. When I said
that the other night Cass threw an absolute fit and slammed the door. This baby should be creating a special bond
between us but we hardly ever even have sex any more. I wonder if she still has a secret thing for
David? All her mother-hen instincts
have come surging to the fore since he developed this depression. Maybe I
should start working on one. Might be a
way to get a little attention. I guess
the old scars on my wrists don’t count.
Another thing that bugs me now. Cass keeps giving me books. I think it’s a subtle hint that she secretly
believes I’m going to make a rotten mother unless I “know myself”. (But isn’t this kid going to have two
mothers? Why does all the burden fall on
me? Cass of all people should know that
biology isn’t destiny.) She wants me to increase my “self-awareness”and
become all introspective and maybe even go see a therapist, for God’s sake,
which Cass did for years, and look how much good it did her. The latest book is
called “MOTHER LOAD: Detoxifying the
Mother-Daughter Relationship” , and it’s all about how your only chance of
being a good mother yourself is to sort out all the “mother issues” from your
past. It has a checklist for symptoms of
“mothering deficiency” which if anything makes me feel sort of sorry for my
mother, fucked-up as she was. Dying of
ovarian cancer at age 43 couldn’t have been much fun, now could it? And she was sick for so many years that it
was no wonder she couldn’t take care of us.
Yes, she “neglected my
emotional needs”. Yes, she was “in denial”, pretending the stuff with my Dad wasn’t
happening (and the alcoholism, and the psychological abuse, and so on,
and so on). Does it ever occur to the
authors of these books that the only way you can fucking survive an environment like that is to deny that there’s anything
wrong? People do what they have to do to
get through the day. I drank and drugged
for ten years and was carving up my arms with a razor blade and Mum acted
totally oblivious, even in junior high when I grew a pot plant on my bedroom
windowsill and went out with married men.
But I got through the day. I got
through. I’m down to a pack a day,
haven’t used in a whole month and only have a few beers when Cassie drives me
absolutely bananas with her self-help schemes.
So I’m doing okay.
At least I think I’m doing okay. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the
night and I think: Jesus God. I’m gonna have a baby. A baby!
Will it take one look at me and hate me?
What if it has two heads or a brain outside its skull or something? And why David for a father? At first he seemed like a good choice – a
close friend of both of us, intelligent, physically fit, tall, nice-looking
after a fashion, musically gifted. Now
he’s having some sort of an el foldo emotionally
and I’m starting to wonder what sort of genetic baggage we’ve dumped on this
kid. What about the “father load” (which
nobody ever writes books about because they’re too busy shagging their
mothers)? Maybe it’s too overwhelming a
subject to even touch. And no
wonder. Look what happened when sexual
abuse came out of the closet. The False
Memory Syndrome Foundation! The
Patriarchy Strikes Back! A whole movement to underline the very thing our
mothers were telling us all along:
“Sexual abuse doesn’t happen.”
And look how popular it all became.
God bless our mothers. They’ve always been so far ahead of their
time.
MONIKA
Haven’t seen Lucy in an age, and wonder
whose turn it is to call. We have to get
together to talk about the dreams I’ve been having lately. Extremely bizarre. I want to pray to whatever there is, “Send
these back. They’re not doing me any
good.”
First it was about Kate, but in the dream
she was only about eight years old and was dragging around a threadbare, frail
old doll with shreds of hair and no eyes, that looked like it dated back to
ancient Sumeria or something. Kate
stopped at a wishing well and made a wish, but instead of dropping in a penny
she threw her doll into the well. Then
realizing what she’d done, she tried frantically to get the doll out, first
using a stick, then finally hitting on the idea of lowering the bucket. But when she pulled the bucket up, it was
overflowing with blood that had something alive in it, writhing and squirming
around. She screamed fiercely and I woke
up with that scream reverberating in my ears.
Several months ago something happened with
Lucy and Kate, but she’s not talking about it and I’m not asking. Sometimes it has to be that way in a
friendship. You have to know when to
advance and when to retreat. It’s a sort
of dance and I suppose it goes on even when you dance away from each other for
awhile.
The Kate dream was awful enough, but then
I had an even weirder one in which Lucy’s friend David was being marched along
blindfolded to a guillotine. There was a
huge crowd waiting for his supposed execution, but instead of putting his head
in the guillotine he stuck his right leg in there. I woke up just as the blade was rushing down
to lop it off. There was this
fair-haired, frail-looking woman standing beside the guillotine crying,
“Mercy!”, and I couldn’t tell who it was.
She reminded me of Laura in Tennessee Williams’ play “The Glass
Menagerie”. I can’t make sense of this
one at all.
What probably bugs me the most is that I’m
beginning to feel like a character in Lucy’s movie – her life just seems so
much more, how shall I put it, colorful than mine. I’m even dreaming about her friends and loved ones, for Christ’s sake. (When I die, will her life flash before my
eyes?) I have a life. It’s pretty basic,
but I have one. I see clients, I
meditate, I go to the clubs, I practice my yoga, I try to cut down on smoking
and lose weight. These last two are more
than hobbies; they are the central organizing principles of my entire life, it
seems. What I “shouldn’t” be doing. What I “should” be doing is finding a
partner, even someone like Lucy’s Rafe who appears to have wafted back into the
beautiful dream from whence he came.
I wonder however if you “find” a partner at
all. Couldn’t it be equally possible
that they find you? And what about these
women who try and try and never get anywhere?
I even came close to putting a personal ad in the Georgia Straight, but
better sense prevailed. I’d probably
draw every sick fetishist in town like a veritable magnet. If it’s meant to happen. . . or so the
philosophy goes. But just what is meant
by “meant”? Are we talking
predestination here, a
LINK TO PART FIVE: A Singing Tree (Part Five of Six)
