By NADIA GHENT
That summer before my mother lost her mind for the first time, I started to learn a violin concerto.
An abridged version, a simplified reduction, a student concerto, nevertheless impressive, if only to me. In the style of Antonio Vivaldi by Ferdinand Kuchler, suitable for the kind of 10-year old that I was, dreamy, silent, impractical.
I would be just like my mother, a child prodigy, next the Mendelssohn Concerto, next my debut in Carnegie Hall. I had progressed well through the elementary books of Tune-A-Day despite my fearfulness to learn new things. A tentative technique, a little shaky on the note-naming.
I didn’t like to practice. But my teacher had confidence in me, hoped that this would make me want to practice more. Something to keep me occupied while things began to unravel. The comparison with my mother was inevitable.
Every violin lesson would begin with tuning the strings, the pure sound of the note “A” vibrating 440 times a second. Waves of invisible sound that would undulate in a frequency I could feel.
My mother could tune my violin without a tuning fork because she had perfect pitch. Perfect pitch, and other things, can run in families. And then you place the bow on the A and D strings at the same time and listen for the interval of the fifth, the relationship of vibrations, the way the two pitches fit together into resonance. Notes, like people, embracing each other.
I would try to practice in the silent afternoons after school ended in June. The hours of women and children tethered to home, but now I was home by myself. My mother was out; my two younger sisters were at the playground, enjoying Good Humor bars, splashing in the sprinklers.
My stepfather, at work, always at work. All the windows in our apartment were open, curtains blowing in the cool wind that came off the Hudson, boys outside playing baseball in the street. Nobody to tune my violin.
There was something about the words “violin concerto” that made me think of loneliness, that thin sound I made on the violin like being by myself in a forest.
Find me, I’m lost. The way you stand before the music looking for a path, for the way in. How do you read a language that is made up only of circles and lines? That creamy yellow cover with “Schirmer’s Music Library” on the front, holding in all those notes I still didn’t know the names of.
I thought that libraries of music were like books on shelves beyond my reach. I wasn’t a skilled sight-reader the way my mother could play anything in any key, in any clef.
We went to the country in August, the heat shimmering off the lake and air as still as rocks. A summer rental in New Hampshire, mothball smells in the closets, fraying bedspreads, a creaky screen door. We drove up from the city, a U-Haul attached to the car with all our suitcases.
My stepfather would take the train back to the city, would return every weekend. My mother was very quiet during the trip. I brought my violin, but hardly practiced. There were blackberries in the brambles down the hill that I liked to pick, my fingers sticky and slit by thorns. This was my vacation: books to read, daydreaming, afternoon swims, and the quiet shame of the silent violin.
My mother was depleted that August, withdrawn, her face fixed with absence. The least exertion a wall of impossibility. She smoked Salems, packs at a time, sat in the living room with the curtains drawn, the heat of the day billowing in from the outside. Always sitting, always immobile, while we played in the meadows and swam in the lake.
During the week, my sisters and I had Pop-Tarts for dinner and milk that was going sour. She could never get the shopping done. I was the oldest, adept at being bossy, sanctimonious. I liked to pretend that I was in charge. They never listened to me.
My sisters ran around like wild children, barefoot, faces dirty, hair tangled, the wildness of no rules and no bedtime, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, except they were girls. “We’re not really sisters, “ one sister will say to me. “He’s not your father. He doesn’t love you the way he loves me.” My family, connected by the thinnest of filaments.
My stepfather would appear on Fridays, walking in from the train station after a week of work, his jacket slung over his shoulder, sweat stains under the arms of his button-down shirt. He called it “New Hampster” as if everything in life was a silly joke, but
we laughed when he said it, my sisters climbing on him like monkeys. Did he really not love me? He would bring us fruit in a splotched paper bag, cherries, plums, or peaches, the fruit hot from the train trip, most of it bruised.
We had cookouts on Saturdays. He’d use lighter fluid, sparks from the grill rising into the evening sky. He always burned the hot dogs. We ate on paper plates that went limp with ketchup and hamburger grease. Nobody had to do the dishes.
When it got dark, my mother and stepfather sat outside. I could hear only murmuring between them, couldn’t hear words, and from my bedroom window upstairs I watched the tip of my mother’s cigarette, a small red glow in the darkness, shaping the air in extravagant gestures. My mother, talking with her hands, but I couldn’t see them move.
“She’s unhappy,” my stepfather said one Sunday morning, making pancakes from a box of pancake mix. My mother, inside, now staying in bed. My sisters, outside, hunting for frogs.
“Your grandfather’s death. The killings at Kent State. The war.” As if reasons were enough to explain. “I should have taken that rental in Cape Cod,” he went on. “She likes the beach so much more.” As if words could fill in for her absence.
He poured the batter onto the griddle. Silence drifted between us. I set out the forks and knives. The obvious was not mentioned: he will leave her, he doesn’t love her. “But she’ll get over it,” he said.
“Be a good helper.” He flipped the pancakes, burning the last one. My sisters rushed in, the screen door banging shut.
“Yeah, O.K. I will, dad.” I put the plates on the table. Naming my stepfather “dad,” feeling the shape of that word in my mouth, a hunger like longing. We ate. What was left over was set out for the birds.
We would walk him back to the train station on Sunday afternoons, my sisters and I, the road into town dusty and hot. He would give each of us a dollar to get soft-serve at the Tasti-Freeze for the walk home.
When the train arrived, and he went back to the city, another week had passed. I thought that if I could start to practice again, every day, if I could learn to translate those notes into music, I would find out where my mother had gone.
