i texted Nora before Oscar, since she’d been the first to invite me. She wrote back, Brilliant, Ruby, BRILLIANT! which did make me feel brilliant for all of six minutes.
I was making too much of this. It was a party. In a world I knew. A chance to try out the other side, get dressed up, eat tiny food, report back on it to Jules.
Nobody would whisper behind their hands about my non-debut or my Amberley audition. Or my mom. Or my date.
It would be fine.
I’d planned to tell Oscar I was up for the party in person, but our paths didn’t cross all day. On Saturday morning, after Dad left for the airport, I texted: Hey do you still want me to come to that donor event? I bought a dress.
I hit send before I could double-guess it. Then I read it back—and buried my head under a pillow. I bought a dress?
My phone beeped with a reply. But it was Alice.
Free for brunch?
I should have expected the text. Alice always invited me for one-on-one time when Dad traveled so she could reassure herself that I was alive and well. In the past year, it had become a revolving date.
Dad jetted off at least once a month for quick engagements—but this trip was longer than usual, and I’d forgotten to ask him why. It was a long flight. Maybe he wanted some time to decompress on either side of his gig at Royal Albert Hall. He was getting older, after all.
We met downtown, because that’s where Alice insisted on living now, even though the philharmonic was up by us. I liked visiting her in SoHo. It felt like a different city from the Upper West Side, and transformed Alice into a more contemporary person, which meant I was cooler by proxy.
The sidewalk café she chose was a Brazilian place with unlimited weekend mimosas, which everybody but us was taking advantage of. Alice wasn’t a drinker. She did, however, eat a basket of cheese bread within the first five minutes of sitting down.
“What’s going on in your world?” she asked between buttered bites. “I have to admit, I’m kind of fascinated by you right now.”
“Only now?” I shot her a mysterious look.
“You’ve gone civvy. What do you do with your free time?”
“Good question.” I searched for answers in the zigzag pattern of my T-shirt. “So far, I’m experimenting.”
“Oh yeah? Do any of these experiments involve our young genius?”
“What young genius, I don’t know any young . . .” I yawned broadly. “Oh, do you mean Oscar?”
She raised an eyebrow.
I squeezed lime into my water. “I don’t like calling him a genius. It’s othering.”
“Look at you, little miss not-even-an-undergrad.”
“And . . . maybe.”
“Maybe? I knew it!”
Before I could hide my grin by sliding all the way under the table, her phone beeped—and her neck went red.
She blinked up at me. “Tell me more. When did this start?”
I took a massive bite of papaya French toast, forcing her to wait while I chewed. “You first.”
She stared, expressionless.
I stared back.
“Fine. His name is Daniel. He’s a public school teacher.” A smile started to spread across her face. “He bought his grandmother a season pass and he takes her to all the Meet the Orchestra events. It’s their thing. And he chats with me afterward. I mean, it’s been years of this. And . . .” She leaned way back in her chair. “I always wondered if there was more to it—didn’t want to be presumptuous. But last month, he asked me out. He was so shy about it.”
She slumped, as if she’d run out of breath thinking about him.
“And?”
“I freaked out. I said I had a busy rehearsal schedule before the season starts again, which is true, but . . . ugh, I don’t know.”
“Why? Because he’s a teacher?” I grinned, teasing her. “Too nerdy for you?”
I had a flash image of Mrs. Swenson’s piano studio—a Carnegie Hall program from her concert pianist days proudly displayed over a framed cross-stitch of a bear playing a baby grand—and felt my heart clench.
“Not at all.” Alice leaned over the table. “I love that he’s a teacher. It’s . . . noble. And the way he talks about the kids . . .”
She was going to explode like a party popper if we kept talking.
I stirred my water with the lime. “So why didn’t you say yes?”
“Because I’m crazy and weird, like the rest of this ridiculous family. Win’s a wrecking ball, Leo’s talking to burning bushes, Dad’s out to lunch, Mom’s unmentionable . . .” She leaned on the table. “Can you please turn out to be a normal person, Ruby? For the sake of the rest of us?”
“That’s the working plan,” I said drily.
“Good,” Alice said, perky as she put her phone away. “Full disclosure, I saw him again and asked him out, and it’s now a verified thing and it’s lovely and that’s all I’m going to say for now.”
I smiled around my straw. She seemed happy. Flustered, but in a good way—waking up to a racing heart every morning, wondering what was around the corner, when she’d see him again . . .
“I’ve been thinking about you, you know,” she said. “What it would be like to make the same call.”
The sunlight shifted. I shaded my eyes. “What call?”
“You know.” She ran her fingers through her chin-length curls and gazed across the narrow street like her future was beckoning from the Williamsburg Bridge. “Walking away. Choosing normal.”
Choosing normal? Why would anyone choose normal?
“You’re first chair viola at the New York Philharmonic.”
“I know. It’s amazing. And all-consuming. And it’s making me kind of deranged, I think? I keep daydreaming about taking a break. What if I went away for a few weeks, somewhere tropical?” She lifted her mango iced tea as if to demonstrate what she would drink on vacation. “We have a recess coming up, I could do it. But would I bring my viola? Could I take a couple days off from practicing or would I lose my edge and my chair and my will to do it in the first place? Is there even a way for me to do something else, or is this it? Am I just—trapped?”
Her voice got louder and louder, like now that she’d told me one thing going on in her personal life, everything else was fighting to come out.
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” I said. “I always thought your life was . . .”
“What?” She leaned in.
“Perfect.”
“Fair enough,” she sighed. “But let me say, it’s easy for a life to be perfect when there’s hardly anything in it. Anyway, I don’t know how I feel yet.” She cut her omelet into triangles. “So tell me. Are you happier now?”
I considered the question, then took a bite of my brunch, closing my eyes as the papaya topping burst against my tongue. “I feel more awake. More like a real person.”
Jules might not have understood what that meant—but Alice did. She watched me for a moment, quietly nodding, then changed the subject. “Any wild plans for the weekend?”
Perfectly on cue, my phone pinged, and I picked it up to see a reply from Oscar to this morning’s awkward text: THANK! GOD!
I grinned. “I’m going to a young donors’ event at the Wing Club.”
Alice put down her fork. “For Amberley?”
“Yeah, with Oscar.”
“Huh. Well, have fun but, whatever you do, don’t give that woman any money.”
I laughed at the very suggestion, then squinted. “That woman? You mean Nora?”
Her mouth was set in a tight line. “I’m serious. I know she’s your godmother, and Dad said you’ve been spending a lot of time together—”
“Not that much time . . .” I frowned at my lap, marveling at how quickly Alice had managed to put me on the back foot.
“Listen, just be careful. Those two are wearing Dad out as it is. Sometimes I wish he weren’t so attached to that school.”
“You went there.”
“Like I had any choice!” She nodded as if I’d proven her point. “All I’m saying is . . . I know Nora’s all cotton candy and bunnies in a meadow—”
“Ha-ha, what?”
“But she’s a lot smarter than she lets on. And don’t forget how close she and Mom were for all those years. There’s a reason those two got along so well.”
I winced, thinking of the word she’d used for Mom. Unmentionable.
I didn’t want to ask. Needed to know. “Are you still not talking to her?”
Her eyes shot to mine. “Are you?”
My mouth opened. “I . . .”
“When she calls you, I’ll call her,” Alice said, shut-down mode. “Until then, somebody needs to hold her accountable.”
I wanted to talk Alice back from the brink like the last hundred times we’d had this conversation, tell her it was no big deal, it didn’t bother me, she didn’t need to be my champion, Mom was not toxic, she just had emotional baggage to struggle with, dead-mother-young-age etc., etc., but I couldn’t gather the energy this time. And something else was gnawing at me, her “wearing Dad out” comment—but before I could rewind far enough to ask about it, my phone pinged, another text from Oscar.
I bought a new suit! Well, my dad bought me one. Got it UPS—it’s sharp!
My mood went from slate gray to midday sunshine, picturing Oscar’s dad picking something out for his son to wear to a swanky Manhattan fundraiser, packaging it to be delivered . . .
“Look at you,” Alice said quietly. “You like him.”
I started curling back into a ball.
“It’s okay to be happy, Ruby. It’s sort of the point.”
I watched her push her omelet around her plate, her mind swooping up and away. She was thinking about her public school teacher, but I wasn’t going to tease her about it.
Not when she’d finally cracked the vault and allowed me a glimpse inside.
“Stop moving!” Jules growled, her curling iron dangerously close to my ear. “Is this what you do at whatever one-percenters salon you go to? I hope you tip well.”
I scowled. “I haven’t even gotten a haircut since last year.”
“So that’s the problem.” She set down the curling iron and shimmied to the side, bobby pins sticking out of her mouth.
I sat staring at Jules’s cracked cabinet doors to keep from squirming, and a memory sprang to mind. Mom, getting me ready for my eighth-grade dance. She’d built it up in her mind for some reason, insisting on staying behind while Dad traveled to a conducting clinic in Japan, going to four shops with me to pick out just the right dress, doing my hair and age-appropriate makeup, taking pictures of me and my date, Wally Lew. We were firmly Just Friends—he would come out to me and Farrah a few months later—but Mom had acted like we were getting married, hands clasped to her heart. It was too much. She was trying so hard that I’d felt a weird kind of vicarious exhaustion that I couldn’t shake the whole night. I didn’t go to any dances after that. I think she was secretly relieved.
If she were home now, would she be ready with her camera?
I never even saw the photos she took of me and Wally. She’d probably deleted them.
The realization hit me like a slap, forcing a blink—so I didn’t notice Jules’s scissors heading for my face until they were already snipping, hair cascading in black spirals to the floor.
“What are you—?”
“Shhhhh,” Jules whispered, snipping the other side. “This is all we’re doing.”
She gathered my hair high, set it into some odd position with the pins, and once her mouth was empty, picked me up by the armpits, pivoting me like a puppet until the mirror loomed—and there I was.
My hair hung in loose ringlets, not frizzy-curly tangles. My face was fresh and rosy, eyes huge and smoky. I didn’t look anything like that little girl playing the piccolo or the one going to the eighth-grade dance. Maybe, just maybe, nobody would recognize me. I could just be Oscar’s plus one.
Before I left, I added one last touch—a silver pendant in the shape of an oak tree, a gift from Nora when I was ten. After the Lincoln Center photo shoot with the piccolo, etcetera, all the usual Amberley suspects had come here for drinks. Later, while Mom performed, Nora drew me into the kitchen and handed me a blue box, whispering, “This reminded me of you. All the incredible ways you’re growing up. Wonderful shoot today, sweetie—I am really, really proud.”
It was a tiny moment, no more than a minute, but it had saved me that night. I wondered if she knew how much.
Oscar was sitting on my stoop when I made it down the street from Jules’s. He stood, seeing me, and dawn broke over his face.
I glanced at my electric-green dress and new high heels. “Do you like it?”
He stood still, hands calm at his sides. “You’re perfect.”
I let out a white-hot breath of a laugh.
Tonight was a good idea. Being brave, showing up—it was the right call.
I turned, searching the street for a taxi, but Oscar pointed to a familiar black Bentley heading our way.
“Oh my gosh, that is so—” I started to say, as Oscar explained:
“Ms. Visser’s loaned it to me while your dad’s gone. I have this frenetic schedule right now, so the driver stays on top of where I need to go.”
“Oh, that’s helpful.” I nodded, thrown for no good reason. Of course he had a rapport with Nora—even if he did still call her Ms. Visser.
Oscar held the door for me, then slid in with a “Hey, Jerry!” to the driver. They chitchatted the whole way, Oscar feigning interest in local sports teams while stealing glances over his shoulder that betrayed how clueless he was. I tried not to laugh.
And then I saw it ahead—Corinthian columns up-lit in blue.