5

The Viola

JOANNE

Nobody had any reason to have any faith in my musical ability. At ten years old, my track record was awful. I had already given music lessons a try once. After epic bouts of whining and begging, my parents finally gave in, and when I was seven years old they allowed me to take piano lessons with Mrs. Hubbard, who came every Tuesday to teach my sisters. She was exotic, Mrs. Hubbard, with unruly dark red hair swept back into a disheveled ponytail, dark red lipstick, and armfuls of bracelets that jangled while we plunked out our scales. She dressed in flamboyant gypsy skirts in bright colors, and when you sat next to her on the piano bench and looked up at her face, you’d see the light catch on the downy trace of whiskers on her chin. Her clothes and her scent and her manner all spoke of bohemian living and Greenwich Village jazz clubs and unfiltered cigarettes smoked at dim café tables during poetry jams.

She always caused a frisson of excitement when she walked in for our piano lessons, the screen door banging behind her. We were a no-frills family. We didn’t go for lots of jewelry or flashy clothes or perfume. Our house was functional and orderly and spare; we hadn’t yet given in, as we would in the coming years, to the siren song of lime-green shag carpeting and metallic wallpaper. I was still wearing my sisters’ hand-me-down dresses—did I ever hate that brown jumper with the ugly felt gingerbread appliqué—and the sight of Mrs. Hubbard in her flowing riot of colors never ceased to fascinate.

For all her loud jewelry and gaudy colors and wafting perfume, Mrs. Hubbard was unfailingly gentle. She never yelled or called us “idyot!” or asked if we were “deaf!” She never told us we sounded terrible or disciplined us for not being prepared. She never banged a stick to keep time. She never even insisted that we practice. My parents didn’t remind us to practice, either—they figured that was up to us.

Perhaps that’s why, a year after I started lessons, I was so surprised when my parents suddenly told me I was done. No more piano for me.

“You never practice,” my mother said. “We aren’t paying for lessons.”

“But I want lessons!”

“Then you should have practiced.”

“You didn’t remind me!”

“I shouldn’t have to.”

My dad, interjecting: “Nobody ever told you life was fair.”

And that was that. No piano. No talking back. No discussion.

After a year of lessons, I still couldn’t read a note.

So there were no great expectations when, in fourth grade, the letter from Mr. K arrived. I had scored well on the school-wide music aptitude test, it said. I should consider taking up a string instrument the next school year, when I could get lessons in school for free. My parents were skeptical—that test must have been pretty easy, they shrugged—but they agreed to let me give another instrument a try.

We decided on viola pretty quickly. I liked the sound of the instrument, and it was appealingly unpopular in a neglected runt-of-the-litter kind of way. More to the point, I didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t allowed to play violin because there was no way I could compete with Michele, who was not only five years older but also demonstrably talented. Neither of the other two instruments Mr. K taught—the cello and bass—would fit in the trunk of my mother’s green Plymouth Duster. Viola it would be.

A viola is sort of like a violin but bigger. And lower pitched. And clumsier. And more embarrassing. You’ve probably heard of famous violin players like Itzhak Perlman and Isaac Stern and Jascha Heifetz. You’ve probably never heard of any violists. Violinists play the melody in great symphonies. Violists play the background notes, if they’re playing at all. Student violinists get kicked around by every kid above them in the social pecking order. Violists get kicked around by violinists.

Q: What’s the difference between a violin and a viola?

A: The viola burns longer.

Q: How do you get a dozen violists to play in tune?

A: Shoot eleven of them.

Q: What is the definition of “perfect pitch”?

A: Throwing a viola into a Dumpster without hitting the rim.

The viola has been around in one form or another for more than five hundred years, dating back to the invention of the viola da braccio in sixteenth-century Italy. For most of that time, it’s pretty much been a joke. Most charitably, it has been called the “salt in a meal: it’s not the main ingredient, but it’s indispensable.” More frequently, it is referred to as “neglected,” “ignored,” “awkward,” and “the butt of the orchestra.” The viola is an underdog, the least prestigious instrument in the entire orchestral repertoire. A step above a monkey grinder. Maybe not even.

Q: Why did the violist marry the accordion player?

A: Upward mobility.

“The viola is often merely a source of anxiety to the composer,” wrote British musicologist Cecil Forsyth in his 1914 book Orchestration. “We feel that he must have regarded its existence as something in the nature of a prehistoric survival. The instrument was there and had to be written for.” As a result, the great classical composers wrote orchestral parts in which the viola “either did nothing or something which by the ingenuity of the composer was made to appear as much like nothing as possible.”

Time has not mellowed that view. Type “famous violists” into Google, and until recently it would ask, “Do you mean famous violinists?” Type simply “violists,” and the top result was “Viola Jokes (part 1).”

It doesn’t help matters that the viola is ludicrously difficult to play. As with a violin, the instrument is held up not by your arm but by clenching it between your chin and neck. But because a viola is heavier than a violin, the strain of holding it up guarantees you a permanent backache, a throbbing between the shoulder blades that no spa day can soothe. The instrument is longer than a violin, too, which means you have to stretch your left arm far away from your body at an awkward angle to play it. It’s confounding to move your left arm, hand, and fingers in any coordinated fashion deftly enough to produce notes quickly and accurately. Altogether, it’s a lumbering, potentially graceless affair.

And yet when it is played well, there is no more beautiful instrument. Deep and mellow, the viola is the instrumental equivalent to an alto or a tenor voice in a choir. At its best, it conveys emotional depths and nuances that other instruments can’t. For me, it was perfect. As far as I was concerned, my three favorite violists—Paul Doktor, Raphael Hillyer, and Walter Trampler, all of them gods among viola cognoscenti—left the actual Three Tenors in their dust. Some of the great composers were violists themselves, from Johann Sebastian Bach—who was said to prefer playing the instrument above all others—to Antonín Dvořák to Paul Hindemith. So was Jimi Hendrix, before he switched over to electric guitar.

Mr. K had a special affinity for the viola, too. “I’m romanteek slob,” he often said, and he warmed to its soulful sound. It’s fashionable among music savants to be disdainful of melodic, romantic music. People who really know music will roll their eyes over the melodramatic excess of popular classics like the 1812 Overture by Russian composer Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky. They prefer instead the intellectually rigorous, often atonal, the-more-sterile-the-better challenge of contemporary music.

But Mr. K was unabashed. He programmed as many of the overwrought classic orchestral works as his kids could manage and often added in schmaltzy Ukrainian folk songs that he had written out and arranged himself. He would conduct them with great, grand sweeping gestures, throwing himself into the music with unapologetic abandon, stretching out one arm and shaking it as if to pull in more, bigger, sappier sound.

“Thees concert would not be complete,” he would tell the audience, “without raw Slavic sentimentality.”

As it turns out, if raw Slavic sentimentality is what you’re after, then the viola is for you. I never once heard Mr. K tell a viola joke.

My first viola lessons, with a group of other ten-year-olds, were in the summer after fourth grade, taught by two of Mr. K’s best violin students early each morning in the oppressively un-air-conditioned performance room at the high school. Each had a calloused, angry red welt under her chin, the badge of a violinist who practices hours each day. One had deep grooves etched permanently in the fingertips of her left hand, an imprint left by the strings of her violin.

Every morning, in shorts and a T-shirt, with my frizzy hair pulled into pigtails against the New Jersey humidity, I would laboriously fold my fingers into place as the teachers pushed my elbow out, my wrist back, my pinky up. One day, while practicing our bowing on the instrument’s four open strings—drawing the bow across the A, D, G, and low C strings, one at a time—I could feel the energy of the room change. Before I even turned around to look at the door behind me, I knew he was there. I straightened in my chair, focused on moving the bow as smoothly as possible, and looked up at the anticipation reflected in my teenage teachers’ eyes.

Mr. K strode into the room, wearing a white short-sleeved dress shirt with a tightly knotted tie despite the wilting heat. You could already see the muscles tensing in his forearms. With his trim mustache and fierce mien, he looked more like a union boss, or maybe an off-duty ironworker angling to pick a bar fight, than a violin teacher. He eyed us intently, unsmiling. Slowly, he walked over to the student to my right and jerked the boy’s neck into the proper position over the chin rest. Then he approached the girl to my left and jabbed her elbow. Finally, he walked over to me. I could feel my breath catching in my throat as he bent over to examine both hands and arms.

Here goes.

He gave my left wrist a sharp nudge.

Yikes.

He gave my right elbow a rough yank.

Ow!

He straightened up and fixed his cold, remorseless gaze on me.

Crap.

And then he spoke his first words to me: “Not bad.”

Clearly, Mr. K saw something the rest of us didn’t. With an unsharpened pencil in one hand, the better to poke and prod, he corrected me over and over again that summer, singling me out from the group. Then when my fingers were burning, he barked: “Again!”

When I look through my earliest music lesson books, they are filled with Mr. K’s handwriting in big red capital letters. Mostly, what he wrote was “AGAIN!” If you were to count up all the words he ever uttered in his entire life, I have no doubt that again would come out at number one.

It quickly became apparent that to Mr. K, there was no such thing as an untalented kid—just a kid who didn’t work hard enough. You are going to fix this problem, he said when he diagnosed whatever was wrong, and there was never any question. Of course you would. It was just a matter of trying and trying and trying some more. He yelled not because we’d never learn, but because he was absolutely certain that we would.

In the eternal debate over nature versus nurture, Mr. K came down unequivocally on the side of nurture. Admittedly, his students, including me, would have been hard-pressed to identify that quality in his particular brand of torture. But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear he didn’t care how much innate talent you had. He believed any kid could learn to play an instrument, even someone with a proven track record of failure like me.

“Now you listen to me, seester,” he would bark when he got frustrated. And eventually, no matter how much or how little God-given talent you started out with, you actually did get it right. You knew you did, because Mr. K would give you that highest compliment of all, the one that made you run home and practice even harder: “Not bad.”

There was already too much coddling of kids in school, as far as Mr. K was concerned. The school reform movement that started in the late 1960s had finally, in the 1970s, taken hold in East Brunswick, too. The women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the era of progressive politics all fed into a new paradigm of teaching that emphasized building up children’s self-esteem and that replaced discipline with praise. The teacher-led model of the classroom morphed into a student-centric model.

In East Brunswick, that translated into “open classrooms” presided over by sideburned teachers who wore Tom Jones–style shirts with tufts of chest hair peeking out and who you just knew spent their weekends at transcendental meditation retreats. The high school abandoned most of its rote learn-the-dates history courses in favor of fact-free seminars like “Racial and Cultural Minorities.” Years later I would say, only half jokingly, that I became a remedial history major in college—I needed to load up on so many courses simply to catch up on the basics that I ended up fulfilling most of the requirements of the major.

Mr. K had nothing but contempt for it all, sticking to his formula of discipline, repetition, and hollering. His insults were cutting; he didn’t care whose feelings he bruised. Once, when one of my classmates proudly displayed a Jackson Pollock–inspired abstract-art project on the rehearsal room floor, he called for the janitor, erupting, “What eez thees mess? Who let the dog een here?”

Yet there was something intoxicating about a teacher who had such absolute confidence—faith, really—in my ability to do better. Whatever I managed to achieve, he expected more. All I had to do was work harder. It was a simple formula, really, and it seeped into my consciousness without me even realizing it. If I imagined a ceiling on my ability, he raised the roof higher and then shattered it altogether. How far could I go? He gave me no sense of limits, so I set none for myself.

Mr. K required beginners to keep track of daily practice time. My first official “practice report card,” signed weekly by my father, documented my growing resolve: thirty minutes one day, sixty minutes the next, then ninety, then two hours. My determination was matched only by the patience of my parents, my sisters, and Skippy as I screeched and scratched my way through my exercises for hours at a time. Each time Mr. K doled out a criticism, I would go home and up my practice time by an extra half hour. A much more rare compliment, and I’d up it by an hour. I don’t remember now what I was practicing, but I do remember what I learned: Never give up. Never give in. Trust that I can always do better.

I’d been playing for less than a year when Mr. K approached my parents. I was sufficiently motivated, he told them, to study privately with him.

The first private lesson I took with Mr. K, in the sixth grade, is the first time I remember being truly scared, that kind of belt-choking-your-gut jitteriness that prevents you from eating your dinner. I went with Michele, who was already his private student and knew the routine. Mr. K’s house was on the other side of the highway. It was a plain house for such a grand personality: a slightly tired split-level with cement front steps leading into a small entrance hallway. Half a flight of stairs led up to the living quarters, where I caught a glimpse of Mr. K’s daughter Melanie clearing the dishes in the kitchen—the first time I had ever seen her not onstage and not holding a violin. Half a flight down led to Mr. K’s basement music studio. Both staircases were narrow, made narrower still by the chair lift that ran on a track attached to the wall, apparently for Mrs. K, whom I could hear doling out orders upstairs but could not see.

Michele had her lesson first. While I sat in the waiting room outside his studio, Mr. K’s younger daughter, Stephanie, darted down the stairs to introduce herself. She was a tiny scrap of a kid, giggling, her stick-straight dark hair flying every which way, her delighted expression looking like somebody just offered her an ice-cream cone, and she was holding out a crayon picture she had drawn for me. She plopped herself down on the arm of my chair, put her arm around my neck, and peered down at the book I was reading.

The book was called The Bog People, and it was about corpses that had been unwittingly preserved for thousands of years in Danish peat bogs. It had sublimely graphic photos—most of the “bog people” died macabre deaths from stabbings, hangings, throat-slittings, mutilations, and an assortment of other atrocities before being dumped by their Iron Age murderers into the bogs—and the photos showed bodies that were basically pickled, with everything preserved from their skin to their clothes to the last meals in their stomachs. I began reading aloud, forgetting my nervousness as we icked and eewed and shrieked our way from one deliciously grotesque photo to the next.

We were so immersed that we didn’t notice the studio door had opened, until Mr. K poked his head out.

“Stephanie, get your keester upstairs! You better practice, seester!”

“Sorry, Daddy!” She disappeared upstairs before he even finished yelling.

Clearly, this was a regular routine.

When my turn came, I was ushered into his studio, which turned out to be a small, cluttered room, overflowing with instrument cases and sheet music and metronomes and vinyl records pulled out of their sleeves, with no visible clear surface anywhere except the spot next to the battered upright piano where I was to stand. A rubber chicken dangled by its feet from one wall. When he rehearsed the high school orchestra, Mr. K regularly yelled at kids for plucking at their instruments’ strings while he was speaking. “Stop that cheeken plocking!” he would scream. One day, when he started going on about “cheeken plocking,” the rubber chicken came sailing toward him out of the percussion section. Mr. K had brought it home and strung it up like a hunting trophy.

Mr. K sat perched on his chair in front of the piano. One hand gripped a pencil, poised to jab at me as I played my lesson assignments. The other hand rarely strayed from the piano keyboard, where he would bang out notes to correct my pitch when I played out of tune.

I knew I didn’t have much to offer. I only had to compare myself to my sisters, both of whom were far more advanced on their instruments than I was. Sometimes I listened to recordings of their concerts. I had purloined one of my favorites from Michele’s room: a performance in Atlantic City a few years back, when Michele was playing with the junior high school orchestra and Mr. K’s daughter Melanie had performed Concertino, a solo written just for her. It was a spectacularly showy and difficult piece, full of complicated runs and ridiculously high notes that Melanie played at heart-stopping speed.

Meanwhile, I was just starting book two of the String Builder beginner series, written by pedagogue Samuel Applebaum. It had songs that were two lines long. The songs had names like “The Fishy Scales” and “The Elephant Takes a Walk.”

Mr. K sat coiled regardless, ready to strike as I played through the simple melodies. “Don’t crush bow een to strings!” he would say, stopping me. Then, “Sweep the bow!” Then, “Listen!”

While I was sawing my way through “Little Brown Jug” for the umpteenth time, trying to play with “smooth bow!” he barked into an intercom on the wall, connected to the kitchen upstairs: “Melanie, bring me my tea!”

Moments later, his redheaded daughter quietly opened the door, china cup and saucer in hand, silently handing it to her father. We had never met, though I had watched her perform many times before. Everybody in school knew who Melanie was. Probably everybody in town knew who she was, because the newspapers always wrote about her concerts and printed her picture. She was a celebrity. She may as well have been one of those child actors you saw on TV—remote, unknowable, not quite real, a world apart from the kids I played kickball with on the playground every day. It was hard to conceive of her doing anything ordinary. If Ali MacGraw had stepped out of the movie Love Story to hand Mr. K his teacup, it wouldn’t have been any more improbable.

I looked up awkwardly from “Little Brown Jug,” suddenly and acutely aware that I was playing out of tune.

She glanced back at me through a fringe of eyelashes and whispered an almost inaudible “hello” as she ducked out, closing the door quickly behind her.

Mr. K turned back to me and said simply, “Again!”

In music, the phrase double time means you play a piece twice as fast as before. With Mr. K, double time could also describe the speed with which he pushed me along.

Two months—and untold man-hours of practice time, pencil pokes, and shouts of “Again!”—after I started private lessons with him, I had finished book two of the String Builder series. Within a few months after that, I had moved on to my first “real” concerto, Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G Major.

I was named principal violist—the leader of the section—first of the beginner orchestra, then of the sixth grade orchestra. I would sometimes practice two hours or more a day. Every afternoon, I came home from school, raided the kitchen pantry, and wolfed down three or four packages of Yodels or Hostess cupcakes with a big glass of milk, stealing a glance at my mom while she scrubbed the potatoes for dinner, silently praying that she wouldn’t notice how much I was snacking and complain that I was ruining my appetite. Then I would rush through my homework so that I could have more time to practice.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the extra practice time affected my schoolwork. My teacher noted it the night my parents showed up for parent-teacher conferences that fall. Like all Lipman girls, I was expected to get good grades. This time around, my teacher wanted to talk about something else.

As my parents folded themselves into the wooden school desks, they waited for the usual set of adjectives teachers used to describe me. Shy. Tentative. I needed to become “more forceful,” as my teacher the previous year had written on my fall progress report. But now, the teacher was using an entirely unfamiliar set of words like confident and assertive.

Maybe it was thanks to Ronni, who outfitted me in her cool hand-me-down bell-bottoms. Maybe it was because of Michele, who brought home her high school books so I could write reports on Love Story and Animal Farm instead of Hardy Boys mysteries. But just maybe the music had something to do with it.

I was still in elementary school, but Mr. K told my parents he was going to promote me into the high school orchestra.

Still, I wasn’t prepared for what came next, when Mr. K somehow got it into his head that I was ready to play in a string quartet with his talented daughters.

MELANIE

Joanne comes flying into the rehearsal room in the shortest shorts I’ve ever seen, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a pop-top shirt, her hair in pigtails. Miriam follows, laughing, easily carrying her cello in one hand, her long hair loose and falling past her waist. Steph and I are already waiting. Despite the August heat, we both have on long pants—not blue jeans, of course—and modest T-shirts with high necks. My dad doesn’t approve of short shorts. He doesn’t like skimpy shirts, either, and is always yelling at his teenage girl students, “Cover up you belly boot-ton!”

It is the first full day of ASTA summer music camp and the first day of rehearsal with our new string quartet. My dad came up with the idea. He says now that I’m eleven years old and Steph is nine, it’s time to play with musicians our own age, instead of performing only with older kids. So he put together the quartet—two violins, a cello, and a viola—and chose two other girls in my grade to join us.

Steph and I will play the violin parts, of course. Miriam is a natural as our cellist. Besides officially being my best friend, she has been taking lessons with my father for more than three years. A gifted musician—she really does have strong, sturdy “cello hands,” as my dad noticed the first time he met her—she has made quick progress on her instrument. We already spend as much time together as my parents will allow, and this will give us an excuse to spend more.

For the viola part, my dad chooses Joanne. I don’t know her well. Among the four of us, she is the least advanced, having played for less than two years. She is from the other side of East Brunswick, where the homes are a little bigger, a little farther apart, a bit more luxurious than the houses on my street. Later, when she invites me over, I’ll see that her house is as neat and beautifully decorated as I imagined it to be, with a living room that kids are not allowed in and curtains we are not permitted to touch when we look out the window to check if our ride home has arrived. In contrast, Miriam’s house smells faintly of diapers and Clorox, and her living room couch is always covered with laundry from her five younger siblings. My house is orderly, but the walls are scratched from my mother’s wheelchair, and the first thing you see when you walk in is her mechanical chairlift.

Joanne comes from what I think of enviously as a “normal” family. Her dad tells jokes and always has a camera in one hand; her mom is pretty and stylish. She has two older sisters, which to my mind is an amazing stroke of good fortune, the next best thing to having a healthy mom. I’d give anything to have someone to help shop for clothes and give advice about rock bands and boys. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to go to a restaurant or a store with a family like Joanne’s, without people stopping to stare at my dad when he talks, or at my mom in her wheelchair, shaking their heads with pity while shushing their preschoolers who point and ask, “What’s wrong with that lady’s legs?” No wonder Joanne is so worldly and confident, the opposite of me. If we weren’t both studying music, it’s not hard to imagine that our paths might never have crossed.

Our first quartet rehearsal at ASTA is in a basement room that is as cramped and airless and hot as a dungeon. It is intended as a practice room for one person, and most of the space is taken up by a baby grand piano. We’re squeezed in tight. My dad is too busy to coach us and dispatches gentle old Mrs. Graffam, a teacher he has known for years, to instruct us instead.

Without him watching over us, we are free to giggle and joke. Mrs. Graffam—Miriam promptly dubs her “Mrs. Grandma”—hands us our first piece: Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Emperor” Quartet no. 62 in C Major, second movement. The melody is familiar—it’s the tune used for the German national anthem—and the piece isn’t difficult. I give the other girls a beat, and we play through the opening theme. I see Joanne and Miriam trading a look that is as pleased as it is surprised. We try once more, but Stephanie starts laughing at something Miriam says, and soon we have all dissolved in a fit of giggles. By the time we’re done with rehearsal it’s lunchtime, and we head off down the path to the cafeteria.

One of the quartet’s earliest rehearsals. Left to right: Joanne Lipman, Miriam Simon, chamber music coach Katherine Graffam, Melanie Kupchynsky, and Stephanie Kupchynsky.

We find a table together at lunch, where we amuse ourselves by trying to invent the most disgusting concoctions possible. Miriam starts with a glass of milk, then adds ketchup; Joanne pours in orange juice and Coca-Cola; I contribute mustard and Russian dressing with a dash of pepper and grated cheese. When we’re done, we have a foaming mess the color of pond scum that Joanne dares the cute boys at the next table to drink, while the rest of us look on, squealing with glee. Before the boys—John the cello player and Michael, Paul, and Jonathan, all violinists—have a chance to retaliate, we escape through the back doors of the cafeteria, running so fast and laughing so hard that we can hardly catch our breaths.

We sit together again at dinner, and at every meal after that, and at the concerts we are required to go to at night. For a whole week at ASTA, I forget about laundry and wheelchairs and feeling left out. I even forget that I am Mr. K’s daughter. It’s a relief to not be the only person carrying around a violin. I’m surprised at how much I have in common with girls like Joanne. During our free time we play pranks and make up nicknames for people. At night, after lights out, we whisper on walkie-talkies—me and Miriam on one, Joanne and her roommate on the other. For the first time since I can remember, I’m just like everybody else.

I am swimming up through a sea of sleep, fighting to break the surface. In my dream I hear an announcer giving the weather forecast, but his voice is distorted, the words barely recognizable.

I sit up abruptly, fully awake.

“Jerry!!!! Jer-ry!!!” My mother is calling for my dad, but he is not answering.

What time is it? Where is Daddy? The TV in my parents’ bedroom is turned up all the way, the volume deafening. I look over toward my clock; it’s almost midnight. I start to get up, to go see what she needs, when I hear feet pounding up the stairs. My father.

“What the hell eez going on? Turn down that goddamned television! You weel wake up the girls!”

“I turned it up because I got tired of yelling. Why didn’t you answer me? I’ve been calling and calling you! I can’t stand it when you ignore me.”

“Jean, goddammit, eet’s the end of a long day. Everyone wants something from me. Can’t I have a moment of peace without you nagging…” The door slams, muffling the sound of their voices.

I lie down. If I cover my head with the pillow I can’t hear anything. In the darkness, the door to my room opens and I feel Stephanie slide into my twin bed beside me. I scrunch over to make room for her, and wordlessly we fall asleep, our arms around each other.

For as long as I can remember, my mother has focused on what she can do as opposed to what she cannot. She taught me to read fluently before I entered first grade. When I was out of school for three weeks with bronchitis once, she homeschooled me so vigorously that I was well ahead of the class when I returned. She is a ruthless enforcer when it comes to practicing the violin.

But as time wears on, I notice that she is getting weaker. Her limited energy is increasingly consumed by her preoccupation with her disease. She has no reserves left and no energy to spare for mothering me, much less nine-year-old Stephanie. Steph will never stop craving love, attention, and nurturing, and searches for it from anyone who will give it to her. I’m just the opposite, shutting down that area of my heart and learning to make do with what I get from my dad, my sister, my violin, and myself.

My father isn’t equipped to relate to Steph and me the way a mother could. One morning when I’m in seventh grade, a dreary winter unexpectedly turns to spring, the weather unseasonably warm and sunny. All the girls at school will be wearing shorts, and I decide that I will, too. I’m in a good mood as I serve my mother her usual breakfast of coffee and Special K on a tray in her bedroom, then clear the breakfast dishes in the kitchen.

“Daddy, hurry up! I’ll get in trouble if I’m late again!”

My dad comes racing into the kitchen, buttoning up his suit jacket and knotting his tie, exuding a cloud of Aramis and hairspray. He grabs a cup of scalding hot instant coffee and begins to pour it from one cup to another to cool it, gulping it over the sink. We follow the same routine each morning, with my dad dropping me off at the junior high school on his way to work. I hate being late, having to walk in front of the whole class to my desk, wilting under the scrutiny of the pretty, disdainful girls already in their seats.

I suddenly feel my dad’s accusing eyes on me.

“What are you wearing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Those shorts are too short. You can’t wear them to school. Go change!”

“But, Daddy! They’re not too short! And I’ll be late…”

“No daughter of mine weel go out of house wearing shorts like that, like a harlot. Go change!”

“No! I want to wear these!”

I rarely defy my father. But honestly, must I always be the class dork? All I want is to look like the other girls.

THWACK!

An angry, red, hand-shaped welt appears on the pale skin of my thigh, where my father has slapped me.

I look at him in shock. Sobbing, I run to my room and throw myself on the bed. My father follows a few minutes later. He has calmed down. But when he sees the telltale mark on my leg—all five fingers and a palm—he sits down next to me and rubs the spot until his handprint is obscured. Soon it’s a shapeless patch of bright red spread out like a messy inkblot across my pallid skin.

I can tell he is ashamed of himself. He will never do it again. But he doesn’t apologize. I do.

“I’m sorry, Daddy!” Steph cries.

On a Tuesday night not long afterward, our quartet is working on a new piece, Haydn’s Quartet in D Major, op. 64, no. 5, better known as the “Lark.” It’s quite a bit trickier than the “Emperor” quartet movement we’d cut our teeth on last summer. But my dad still can’t understand why Steph has such a hard time figuring out how to count rests—the part where a musician doesn’t play.

“You dragging like dirty rag across rests!” he yells. He stomps from one foot to another for emphasis, to illustrate how her playing lags behind everybody else’s. His heavy galumphing isn’t helpful as she tries to navigate the delicate, prettily latticed music composed with eighteenth-century royal drawing rooms in mind, but I don’t dare point that out.

We struggle even more when we move on to the hardest passage in the piece, a series of triplets all four of us have to play in unison. It seems just about impossible for us to get it right. Every time we try, it feels like we’re jumping off a cliff: we start off linked together as if we’re holding hands but quickly fly apart in midair before we crash-land in a heap.

“Violin and viola not together! Sounds like huge spot of mud on white dress!” my dad says. My dad often refers to Joanne only as “viola” and Miriam as “cello,” as if that were actually their first names.

We try again, but the passage is still a muddy mess. You can see my dad’s mouth moving as he searches for yet another way to explain himself. Finally, he looks squarely at Steph. “You steek to viola like flea to dog’s tail!”

Time is running short. We have already played a few local concerts, with me performing a solo and the quartet running through a few simple tunes. Most are small events, at schools or at hospitals, where the patients are appreciative but in truth happier when we stop playing Haydn and perform what my dad calls slush music—easy, old-fashioned songs I enjoy, like “Begin the Beguine” and “Over the Rainbow.” But now we’re preparing for our major debut, at a national teachers’ convention in Philadelphia.

When the day finally comes, and we pile into the van that my dad has arranged for us, we’re so keyed up that we barely speak all the way there. At the Holiday Inn on Penn Square, just down the street from the Liberty Bell, teachers in suits and dresses are swarming through the lobby, some carrying instruments, a few looking bleary-eyed and hungover, all sizing each other up. The four of us set up nervously in the Thomas Eakins room, named for the Philadelphia-born realist painter, an ironic choice given the industrial-drab box we find ourselves in. The acoustic wall tiles are gray. The wall-to-wall carpet is of indeterminate color. There are no windows.

My dad sweeps in, directing us where to put our instrument cases and our coats, telling us to go ask somebody else where the ladies’ room is, and ordering us to get our keesters into our seats for a quick rehearsal. He turns straight to the passage that has given us so much trouble during our practices. Some curious passersby in the hallway stop to listen, a few of them edging toward the seats.

“Remember,” he says, turning to Stephanie. “Like flea to dog’s tail.”

By the time we’ve finished warming up, every seat is taken. Someone has sent out for more chairs.

“Breathe, everybody,” I whisper to the other girls. “This is going to be fun!” None of them smiles back.

Not long before, my dad had taken Steph and me to climb Mount Katahdin in Maine. Daddy loves mountain climbing almost as much as music. He spent weeks getting us ready—poring over maps, packing up the snakebite kit, and slathering waterproofing gel on his old Korean War boots and baking them in the oven overnight. But once we got to the trail, he took off ahead of us, practically running up steep ledges as Steph and I scrambled to keep up. “Daddy, wait for us!” we called. But he didn’t.

“You can do eet yourselves!” he called over his shoulder. “No turning back now.”

That’s how I feel now, with my dad off stage and the other girls looking at me expectantly. We’re ready; no turning back now. Nodding my head, I signal the start of the Haydn.

I can feel how nervous Steph is. She and Joanne play alone for the first few notes. Steph’s bow is wobbling. I suck in my breath and hold it, trying to will her to be calm.

But my dad is right. We are ready, and after the first few measures we settle in to doing what we have done so many times before. The music flows. The audience seems to recede into its seats, and even my dad fades into the background. We stop thinking about the crowd and focus on the music and on one another. I only have to nod slightly, or glance up from the music to lock eyes for a millisecond with the other girls, and we all lean in to the music, or play softer or louder, or dig in to a passage together. We really are breathing together. We really do feel the music as if we share one brain. Picture a school of fish, or a flock of migrating birds all moving seemingly effortlessly in sync. Okay, it isn’t exactly effortless. But it is at least as miraculous.

When we get to the end of the piece, we all exhale at once. This is something none of us has experienced before, a secret bond that we’re sure nobody else can understand. The audience is cheering, but it barely matters to us. We’ve discovered something even better: the indescribable pleasure of playing together. For us, it is our earliest exposure to the magical feeling of interconnectedness that sometimes happens when musicians perform together, when everyone onstage becomes one not just with each other, but with the composer and his music, the audience, and transcendently beyond.

When it’s all over, my dad hugs each one of us in turn. He plants a kiss on Stephanie’s cheek. Then, before he heads off to his next meeting, he presses a twenty-dollar bill into my hand and points us toward the hotel restaurant. “Go celebrate,” he says. “You earned it.”