People looked at me strangely when I said loved to practice the piano. Were my parents pushing me to do it? Wasn’t it hard to rush home from school, day after day, instead of spending time with friends? Two hours a day, three hours a day. I’d sit down at the keyboard, and blink, and somehow the time had passed. I loved to practice in the same way that someday, as an adult, I would love to write. Only then it would be publication that left me uneasy. As a child, it was performing I disliked.
I’d stand there, in the wings, in the deep black box of all that might happen, all that could go wrong. The curtains swayed slightly, humming with the sound of the audience, a sound that is strangely like a rookery, a flock of birds arranging themselves for the night. Sometimes, though I wasn’t supposed to, I’d peer out from the edge of the stage and there they’d be: strangers stepping over each other’s knees, unbuttoning coats, opening programs. When I stepped back into the darkness, I’d see purple and yellow rings. And then, gradually, the piano, lit like an altar at the center of the stage.
If there was time, I’d duck out to the rest room and soak my hands in hot water. Bending over the basin, I stared at myself in the mirror: beetle-browed, long-jawed, absolutely serious. Cropped fingernails. Gold cross at my throat. I was twelve, I was fourteen, I was sixteen. Dear God, I’d pray, help me to stay focused, help me to concentrate, help me—yes, I prayed this as well—to be a better person. It all seemed connected somehow. If I was good, if I was worthy, I’d perform well—how could I not? I prayed until the water in the basin cooled and I felt the familiar lightness enter my bones, illuminating me with such weight, such absolute purpose and calm, that I could see the notes spread out before me as clearly as I saw the wrinkles in my fingertips. I believed that this feeling was Grace. I believed that it came from God, the way I believed that all good things came from God, the way I believed that all bad things came from within myself, my flawed human frailty. If anyone had suggested to me, then, that I was summoning my own strength, my own capabilities, I would have been horrified.
Somewhere between sixth and eighth grade, I had fundamentally changed. At school, I’d stopped arguing with my teachers; I no longer bothered to raise my hand. At home, I shrugged, said little, kept my opinions to myself. I was weak, I was nothing—or at least, that’s what I was trying to be. And whenever I failed, asserted myself, began a sentence with the words I want, a voice in my head was certain to chide me: Watch out what you want, or you’ll get it. It was arrogant to want, to expect, to choose. Only God, all-knowing and omnipotent, could know what was best for anybody. I put myself in His hands. I turned myself over to God.
The moment any child, male or female, first learns to envision God as male, some crucial part of his or her imagination is forever damaged, limited, changed. The moment a female child credits a male god for all that is beautiful and good while simultaneously accepting responsibility for all that is sinful—literally, all that “misses the mark”—she has internalized a particularly dangerous self-loathing. As a little girl, I’d wanted to be the fastest, the smartest, the strongest; now, instead of leaping forward, I held back, prayed for guidance, and whenever I listened for an answer, it was a masculine voice I longed to hear. As my body matured, and I began to think of myself less as a “kid” and more as a “girl,” I felt myself to be growing apart from God, more differentiated from His image. If God was perfection, then my adolescent female body was an exaggeration of imperfection. The only course of action was to abandon myself whenever possible, to become by choice an empty vessel, like the Virgin Mary, for whom I was named, and upon whom I—like so many Catholic girls—was encouraged to model myself.
A virgin and a mother as a teenage role model?
For those who do believe, no explanation is necessary, I was told. For those who don’t believe, no explanation is possible.
Throughout my adolescence, I lived in two worlds that could not be reconciled: the world as it was presented to me, a world I was told to accept on faith, and a second world, the world of my reasoning, the world of empirical experience. I did the best I could to shut out the second world, to be a good daughter, a good Catholic, to become that empty vessel for Our Lord. Yet what to do with everything I felt: passion and violence, wonder and despair? Music was a means of being simultaneously empty and full-to-bursting. Music gave voice to everything I wasn’t permitted to feel and think and say. When I finished playing, I’d simply close the lid and walk away. I considered myself His instrument. I claimed none of that joyful noise as my own.
I dried my hands, stretched my fingers, rubbed my tender forearms. Warm-ups, my teachers said, prevented tendinitis, but it didn’t seem to matter if I warmed up or not. If I spent the weekend at my grandmother’s farm, where there was no piano, the tenderness went away. But it always came right back as soon as I started to practice again. I was proud of my pain, my ability to take it. I thought it was romantic. It was only natural that God would ask you to suffer for something you loved. Jesus, after all, had loved Mary above all other women, and Jesus had allowed Mary to suffer more than anyone—as a sign of His favor, Father Stone explained. It was Saturday catechism. It was nothing we hadn’t heard before in that overheated basement room. We stared dully at Father, lined up in our rows, puddles shining around our boots. He smiled at us encouragingly, as if there were no contradiction in what he’d just said, as if it made perfect sense. “Does anyone have any questions?” he’d always ask at the end of each session, but none of us ever did.
Love was pain. Suffering without resistance was proof of devotion to God. You did not think about the way such beliefs would undercut your ability to protect yourself, assert yourself, excel. The meek, after all, would inherit the earth. The saints wore their mortifications like jewels about their murdered necks.
Sometimes there’d be an introduction before the performance, sometimes not. Sometimes I’d be one of several performers, one of many performers, one of any number of variety acts that could range from religious recitations to a duet played on kazoos. Sometimes I’d perform at luncheons, at schools and colleges, at fund-raisers and churches. Sometimes I’d play in master classes, in which case the audience would consist of other musicians, all of them older than I was. Afterward, there’d be questions for the teacher, and I’d be asked to repeat certain passages so the teacher could reiterate my weaknesses, assign technical exercises, suggest particular additions to my repertoire.
Sometimes I’d play in competitions, and sometimes these competitions were “blind,” meaning that the judge or judges were not supposed to know who was playing, and so they’d be seated behind a screen. But if you looked, afterward, you’d see them peeking, see in their faces where you stood. Sometimes the pianos were exactly what you’d expect: a beat-up Kawai at the back of a school cafeteria; a buttery Steinway L in the lakefront home where I entertained a private party at Christmastime. And sometimes, the pianos caught you off guard: at the Milwaukee cathedral, another Steinway, this time with the brassy intonation of a jackhammer. At a run-down recording studio, a honey-colored Schimmel with an exquisite, piercing treble—even now, eighteen years later, I can reproduce that tone in my mind. A sturdy little Yamaha in an airport hotel where, at seventeen, I would run through my college audition pieces one last time.
Each piano is unique. Each feels different beneath your hand and yields a new geography of sound. Each room or hall accepts that sound in a completely different way, and if, within that room or hall, the piano is moved, the sound will change, as it will if the hall is full of people in thick winter coats, or half full of people in light summer dresses. You must adjust your touch, your tone, your range; you must listen, for even the most familiar passages can become unfamiliar, challenging, strange. Performing on an unknown piano means making these adjustments instantly, fluidly, anticipating how to handle the upcoming measures based on the few you’ve just played. A light touch that on my home piano created a nimble pianissimo could result, on stage, in galumphing gap-toothed runs, the fourth fingers slurring notes, the weighty thumbs oversounding. What were full, ringing chords in my teacher’s studio might become, in regional competition, a battery of gunshot slaps.
“You were banging,” my teachers would tell me afterward, or else, “What happened to your singing legato?” Perhaps my staccato was lazy. Perhaps I got too excited and my mezzoforte came out forte or, worse, fortissimo, and I still had a true fortissimo coming up—but I hadn’t been able to deliver.
“You held nothing back,” my teachers would scold. “You left yourself nowhere to go.”
I was twenty-five when I first encountered a one-page story by Kafka in which a cat chases a mouse down a long hall. The walls are narrowing, narrowing—the walls of any nightmare—until at last they meet and the mouse is trapped.
“It’s not fair!” the mouse cries. “There was nowhere else to go!”
“All you had to do was change directions,” the cat says.
And then he eats the mouse.
It is always a question of imagination, of knowing which direction to turn, how to interpret what you see.
I taped a postcard of Carnegie Hall to the white, quilted headboard over my bed, just beneath the prayer card Grandma Krier had given me, printed with the twenty-first Psalm. On my nightstand, next to a porcelain figurine of Mary holding Baby Jesus, I kept a hollow bank in the shape of a Tootsie Pop, stuffed with my baby-sitting money, and labeled JUILLIARD FUND. I practiced finger exercises on my desk at school, got permission to carry my sack lunch to the music room, where I disrupted the harassed choir director’s only peaceful hour. When I practiced well, I felt light and sober, clean. The very air seemed to shine. When I played badly, I felt as if I were moving underwater, weighed down, distorted by all the things I could not say, questions I was not supposed to ask. Because one question led to another, and suddenly the entire fabric of your faith, your life, began to unravel before your eyes.
Away from the piano, I moved like a sleepwalker through the honey-brown molasses of each day: prayers before and after meals, prayers again at bedtime, Wednesday night devotions, Sunday morning Mass. The clock in the steeple of Saint Mary’s Church stared down on us all, merciless and unblinking, from its perch overlooking the town. In January, spit froze when it hit the sidewalk; in July, the air was hot, damp, still. Schools of alewives washed up on the beach, the stench like a shimmering cloud, buoyed by the roar of flies. Nights, when lightning carved up the sky, we hurried down to the basement with blankets and a crackling transistor radio. Too soon, summer passed back into autumn, that brief, brilliant fire; I dozed through the long, empty hours of school. By the end of October, there were snow flurries, and soon the white walls of winter descended: smothering as God’s will. The lake froze. Fishermen dragged out their shanties. On New Year’s Day, people drove their cars out on the ice. There were two grocery stores in our town, a bowling alley, a row of struggling shops on Main. There were seven churches. There were nearly a dozen bars, but I wasn’t old enough to drink.
At the end of each summer, my mother drove my brother and me to Milwaukee to shop for school clothes. She made us sit in the backseat and put our seatbelts on. As soon as she’d entered the city limits, she turned off the radio and forbade us to speak, hugging the right lane so she wouldn’t have to pass. Her foot rode the brake. When we got to the mall, she circled the parking lot until she found a space beneath a light. Inevitably, we all had to run back to double-check that the doors and windows were locked.
We rarely left the Port Washington area. “If Port don’t got it, you don’t need it,” people said, and for our purposes, this was true. Even my piano lessons had always been in town. My teacher was the music director at our church; I came to her when I was six, studied with her until the summer before I started high school.
When I was three, when we’d still lived in Michigan, my mother had tried to enroll me with another piano teacher, but was told that a child too young to say her alphabet was far too young for the piano. In fact, I could say the alphabet, but one of this teacher’s rules had been that parents could not be present during lessons—too distracting—and as soon as my mother left, I promptly forgot “Silent Night” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and the melodies I’d gleaned from a boxed set called Beethoven’s Best Piano Sonatas.
Rainy afternoons, I’d slide the cool black records from their sleeves and listen to what I called dizzy music. My mother pulled the coffee table out of harm’s way, shoved the couch back with a well-placed bump of her hip, and my brother and I would spin until we staggered and fell to the floor. There we continued spinning on our hands and knees, the tops of our heads pressed to the carpet so that when the record ended and we sat upright, our fine hair rose and crackled with static electricity. Hour after hour we listened and spun to the Moonlight Sonata, to the Pathétique, to the Appassionata, but mostly—especially—to the Waldstein. I remember how badly I wanted more dizzy music, how I begged for it. But at Christmastime, I received a copy of Burl Ives’s “The Lollipop Tree” instead.
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 remember 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?”
“The washer on this faucet is shot,” he said. “See how she leaks?”
“I don’t think I want to study medicine anymore.”
“She’s missing the aerator, too,” he said. “That’s how come the pressure’s so strong.” Then, abruptly, he sighed. “I just wonder if there isn’t somebody closer than Skokie,” he said.
I looked at him. So he had been listening after all.
“My teacher recommended this teacher,” I said.
My father tamped down the curled edge of linoleum with his foot, but it sprang right back up again. “Let’s get a picture,” he said.
Outside, the sun was still strong, though the shadows from the windbreak across the road were lengthening. My father took his old Polaroid Instamatic out of the glove compartment. He shot several pictures of the house from different angles, then spread them on the hood of car, waiting for them to develop.
“You can’t make a living playing the piano,” he said.
“I could play chamber music,” I said. “I could work as an accompanist. I could teach at a university, give private lessons on the side.”
My father touched each photograph with his fingertip.
“Or I could just marry for money. Some rich older man.”
The corners of my father’s mouth twitched upward.
“Which of these pictures do you like best?” he said.
I pointed to the one that showed a peek of the backyard.
“Me, too,” he said, and he smiled at me, pleased. And though neither of us said anything more about the lessons, I knew that I would be going to Skokie, if that was what I wanted. Watch out what you want, I reminded myself—but no. For once, the words had no power.
I wanted this. I wanted this desperately.
Driving home through the splintering twilight, I watched the ghost-shape of the ranch house fade. Fireflies blazed in the ditches. My life was going to change.