Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir

  Around Christmas, a year after the piano lessons started, Peter and I learned our parents had signed us up to perform in a talent show at church. I received a beautiful new dress in stiff violet chiffon and patent leather shoes, which made me think the talent show might not be so bad. Miss Towler instructed me to smile at the audience before sitting down to play. She taught me how to do a grand curtsy, which I could make after playing, throughout the applause. I had to hold my skirt out wide, tap my toe on a flower pattern on the rug, and then sweep my leg out clockwise, dip down with eyes facing the floor, before looking up with a smile, then gracefully stand upright.

  I knew the stakes were high and I practiced my song, a Bach minuet, for the full hour each day. I also practiced the curtsy. Through such rigor, I successfully memorized the piece. It started off in a minor key, which sounded sad to me, but later the key changed to a major mode, which made for a happy ending. So it seemed to me. Before departing for church, I played the piece flawlessly three times. I was all set, excited but confident.

  By the time I arrived at the hall, my parents’ nervous assurances that I would do well were making me nervous that I might not. For them, so much was at stake, the sacrifices, pride, good parenting. The auditorium was an enormous echoing space the size of a basketball court, crammed with hundreds of restless people sitting on squeaky folding chairs. The church members were predominantly white, but there were also about twenty Chinese people and their kids, who would also be competing in the talent contest. Actually, it was not billed as a “contest” but a “talent show,” which carried the positive American message that every child was a bright little star who could shine in his or her own galaxy. But I had not been raised in the ideology of American constellations. Each star would be shinier or duller than the others. Only one kid could be the very best, and one would be the very worst, the worst being equivalent to the dumbest and least liked. I could not be expected to be the very best. After all, I was only six and had been playing the piano for only a year, and many of the kids were older. My goal, as put forth by my parents, was to play better than other kids my age and perhaps slightly older. Aim high.

  I sat in the front row with the younger kids and watched each of them take their turn on the stage. I do not recall the feats performed that day. But I’m sure they were the usual heartwarming acts one would have seen at talent shows of that era—baton twirling, ventriloquism, tap dancing, reciting “Hiawatha,” singing “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window,” or playing an instrument, like the violin, the song flute, or the piano. I remember my anticipation just before my name was called, the feel of my heart booming at a fast tempo all the way up into my throat. My mother’s hands fidgeted with a wad of tissue. My father politely clapped with equal appreciation of each child’s efforts.

  When it was my turn, I walked in a daze toward an unfamiliar piano, a tall upright that was so unlike our dainty black spinet or the majestic Steinway grand at my piano teacher’s home. It was unlike the short blond or walnut-colored spinets in the homes of family friends. In the past, the height of the bench had been adjusted with cushions or a thick phone book to enable my arms, wrists, and hands to be aligned over the keyboard. The bench I now sat in was too low, which made the keyboard too high. I could not ask anyone to change this. The piano also smelled funny, like the musty closet of a former house that we kids believed was haunted. I did not like the ivory keys. They had yellowed and looked like the bad teeth of old people.

  When I began, my fingers moved mindlessly, touching the keys by habit. The keys did not feel right. The middle ones had worn-in dips, and some keys were stiff and others were loose, like a tooth that was about to fall out. The notes did not come out as I had practiced. The pizzicato notes were too soft, then too loud. All at once, my fingers toppled over themselves and stopped. A mistake. The piano and audience were silent. I had already failed. I waggled a finger in search of the right key that would lead me forward. The problem was, I had memorized a whole song, start to finish, and not sections that would have allowed me to reenter at any point. There was no sheet music I could consult. Miss Towler was not sitting next to me to give me hints. I had no choice but to start over. My hands played mechanically and once again, I was aware that the keys looked like yellow teeth, that the bench was too low, that the notes were too loud, then too soft. And again, my fingers fell into a tangle in the same spot. I began again, this time pressing hard against the muffled keys, as if increased force and loudness could push me through this obstacle course. But now my fingers could not even get past the first two measures. Before I could begin again, I heard soft clapping, which grew into louder applause. This was not praise, but a signal that I was being dismissed and should leave the stage. I ran into a dark hallway, crying and shaking with terror. I had become a completely different girl—the dumbest. People would laugh at me the rest of my life. All the kids would be happy that I had failed. Worst of all, my mother and father would be furious. They would scold me for shaming them, for not practicing hard enough, for wasting their money on lessons. I wanted to disappear the way cartoon characters did. Before I could run off, I saw my mother and father quickly coming toward me. But when they reached me, I saw that they were not angry. They were smiling in a sad way. My mother held out her arms and I ran to her and buried my face into the folds of her skirt and cried hard. After a while, my father lifted me and gently told me that I did not need to cry anymore. That made me cry even harder. A few church members passing by patted my head and told me that trying was what mattered. And then I saw Peter. He stared at me with a solemn face then looked down, clearly embarrassed for me. I sobbed hard, gulping air until my lungs could not take in any more. In this hyperventilated state, as I flailed to breathe, people consoled me. “Shh, shh. No need to cry anymore.”

  At my next piano lesson, my teacher had me play the awful piece without looking at the sheet music. My fingers moved according to its new bad habit and were jammed at the same spot. She immediately saw the reason: incorrect fingering. It was simple to fix: with more attention to the fingering I would be able to play it perfectly the next time. But I knew that was not true. My fingers would betray me again, if not with this piece then with others. And there would be no next time. I would refuse. If I did not, I would again suffer public humiliation, which at age six was one of the worst feelings I had ever experienced. I told my parents I did not want to play the piano anymore. In fact, I declared I would never play again, and they could not make me.

  Over the next fourteen years, I played an hour a day. During that time, the piano bench acquired many scratches and dents. My mother grieved over the first few and blamed us, her careless children. That is what I remembered and confirmed recently as true when I read my father’s diaries. The bench continued to acquire chips and gouges, more as a result of being jostled from one new home to another. We moved often, and the piano remained the centerpiece in a succession of living rooms. I bore the sixty minutes with the same focus I had in completing homework or washing the dishes—as a chore. My parents continued to believe that one day I would love the piano, but they stopped using the word prodigy. I think they still held hopes I would become a concert pianist, perhaps only as a hobby. Aim high. Over the course of fifteen years of lessons, I went through a number of piano teachers, each with their particular tried-and-true teaching techniques. One woman made me curve my hand over a red apple so that I could play with preformed claws. Another teacher, who was a former conductor, pushed down hard on my right shoulder so I could feel the rhythm that my ear had stubbornly refused to recognize. None of them said I was unusually gifted. My mother had asked. Throughout grade school, I had to perform in piano recitals held in these different piano teachers’ homes, with the youngest going first, the oldest last, and me always in the interminable middle, where the comparisons were greatest. As I grew older, I learned that if I expected to do badly, I suffered no stunning blow when I did. On one occasion, as I neared the end of a long rondo, I realized with s
urprise that I had played the piece perfectly—until my fingers crashed down on the final chord in a different key. In high school, I was the accompanist for the Girls Glee and once froze, unable to start playing “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” The music teacher lifted his baton three times before he glared at me and commanded me in a tense voice to begin.

  My mind drifted during my solitary hour of practice. Whenever my mother interrupted me, I shot back, “How can I concentrate when you’re talking to me?” I used to imagine I was somewhere else. I saw scenes in my head, and they were shaped by the music—the ominous dark place signaled by the bass register in a minor mode, the full-chorded passages that led a royal procession, the pizzicato tiptoe forays into magical lands, the triplets dashing to a ball, a castle, the arms of a cartoon prince. The music was not just backdrop. It created the scenes in my head. I went to forests, and meadows, to a place underwater where maidens sang with floating hair. I saw through sidewalks, where there were jewels. The scenes were images from fairy tales. But the emotions were mine, and most of them wavered between hope and sadness. During the year my father and brother Peter were dying of cancer, I found refuge in gloomy music. I favored the largo funereal mood of Chopin’s prelude op. 28, no. 4. It contained solitary despair and the usual realization that life led to a bad ending. Every three or four weeks, I would be given a new batch of songs to learn. Some contained emotions that suited me, others felt as mechanical as arithmetic. Before I could perfect them, I had to leave them behind and learn new ones.

  During my sophomore year in college, I decided to drop my piano course. I was old enough to choose what I wanted to do in life and it had been clear for some time to both my mother and me that I would never be a concert pianist. My decision scared me. I was going to alter what had become part of me, the hated one honed by hard work and the burden of expectations. I had to acknowledge that fifteen years of piano lessons, tears, threats, and humiliation had led to nothing, and that, in effect, I had failed. My father had died three years before, and I was glad I would not see his disappointment when I made my announcement. I imagined my mother would cry. She would invoke my father’s name. When I finally told her, I laid out the reasons I had to stop—that I needed the time to complete required courses, that it took too much study time to go across campus to the practice room, that walking at night was dangerous. She did not become angry, as I had expected she would, nor did she heap guilt on me for money wasted on lessons. She said that she had expected that I would one day stop. Instead of relief, I felt a strange sense of loss that I can only now surmise as shock that she had long given up seeing me as being better than I was. She had expected little of my younger brother. She had expected less of me than I had thought. She was sad, I could tell, and she added that she only hoped that one day I would enjoy music. I assured her that I already did.

  My mother did not live long enough to see how much music would figure into my life. She would have been overjoyed to dress up and go with me to the symphony, to the opera, and perhaps even to a jazz concert. She would have discreetly bragged to people that I had written a libretto for an opera. “A true story,” she might have said, “based on all my difficulties with my daughter. She was awful.” She would have been pleased that I championed young musical geniuses, prodigies, who worked hard and loved to play music in front of audiences. To please her, I might have even sat down on occasion at the piano—a Steinway grand—to play a song I had practiced over and over again until I could play it with ease. I would have recalled with her all those terrible times when we argued over whether I had practiced long enough. We would have laughed.

  I would have told her that music has been freed from my fingers. It could accompany me wherever I went, even into my imagination, into the privacy of my mind and emotions. It was what I shared with others, what we talked about at the end of a concert. I had learned to enjoy music. More than that, I loved it. It had become important in my daily life.

  Last night I found my nemesis, the Bach Minuet in G Minor, which I had tried to play at the talent show when I was six. It was in a thin tattered book with yellowed pages, some of which had come loose. “First Lessons in Bach” the book said, “a study in accent and in obtaining a proper balance of tone.” The first piece was the one I had memorized, a simple melody with two flats, fluctuating between sustained notes and dotted pizzicato ones. When I tried to play it, I was astonished that I had been required to learn this at such a young age. And then I reached the same spot where my fingers tumbled into one another fifty-nine years later, and did so again. As then, I had used the incorrect fingering, putting the third finger on the black key instead of the second. I attempted to play it correctly, but the childhood memory of that mistake, enforced by terror, made it hard to overcome. I was overly cautious when I reached the notes that I had failed to play. They contained so many emotions: the reason I had hated public performance for many years; the reason I hate being forced into any kind of competition; the reason that I play the piano only when I am alone. The reason why I hate to this day any kind of expectation placed on me, including those having to do with books I am writing. My stomach lurches at the thought of public scrutiny whether expectations were met.

  I played the minuet for hours, trying to overcome an old habit and ingrain a new one. I went into memories of a church hall and its echoing sounds of applause, its odd-smelling piano, the cold folding chairs, the short bench, the loose-toothed ivory, the missing sheet music—all that kept me from moving forward. I eventually played it perfectly—again and again, until it was 2:00 A.M. and my fingers ached. I had overcome the mistake, and changed the habit. I remembered the folds of my mother’s skirt where I had hidden my face and had sobbed because I had failed, and sobbed even harder when I realized I had already been forgiven.

  Interlude

  * * *

  REORIENTATION:

  HOMER, ALASKA

  [From the journal]

  Homer, Alaska, June 9, 2005. We rowed several miles across Kachemak Bay, going past Gull Island and its mound of birds: kittiwakes, murres, corvids, puffins, cormorants, gulls, and pigeons of all sorts, tucked in crevices. At the peak, an eagle perched like a flagpole ornament. Any shift in its position set off shrill cries and wing beating of thousands of birds.

  We reached an island where our host lived—a lovely rustic house with sheltered patios and a living room with an uninterrupted view of the bay. He took us on a short walk to a beach and mentioned some sort of churning tidal action that created a whirlpool effect. It had the power to open up and swallow entire boats. I’m probably not remembering this correctly. But it was enough to scare me. Alaskan tales.

  He then told us about an occurrence in winter. A thin layer of fresh water spreads over the seawater and freezes. The sun’s rays cut through the ice and break the seawater sheath into ice shards that resemble candles. When they collapse and slide into the water, they make no sound. But if the wind pushes those ice candles against the land, the pieces slide against and over the top of those before them, until they are jammed upright, like sparkling glass, and as they tumble row upon row, they make the sound of tinkling bells.

  He invited me to come use the house as a writer’s retreat. If you come in winter, though, you’re stuck. You can’t row back. I imagined how lovely it would be to spend a month or two writing in isolation, playing their piano, looking at birds, and listening to the ice candles. He said you might have to put your ear to the ice to hear it. It does not happen that often. You might have to spend five winters on this island cut off from Homer Sound, everything. Out there, if you screamed, no one would hear you.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  GENUINE EMOTIONS

  In October 2004, I began to wake up daily with a great sense of happiness. This had not been my normal mood first thing in the morning when multiple alarms disconnected me from dreams before they could warp away on their own.

  When this happy morning mood started, my life
was indeed full and happy, and I lacked only the time and discipline to do all that I wanted. Of course, I had an assortment of problems and annoyances, as does everyone, like having our car spray painted when it was parked on the street, or getting our house skunked when our windows were wide open and guests were about to arrive, or dealing with a few achy vestiges of Lyme disease, a chronic illness I managed with medication so that I was now well enough to finally have a writing brain again. In the overall assessment of life, those things that truly mattered—family, friendship, meaningful work, a home, and dogs—made my life a happy one. But it was still not normal for me—or anyone—to wake up and want to say out loud, “Top o’ the morning to you!” What I felt was the kind of tipsy happiness that might accompany drunkenness, but without an alcoholic aftertaste. By noon, my mood settled into a less bouncy state. The garbage disposal broke during preparations for a lunch for ten and that definitely did not make me happy. By the next morning, the cycle began again. I’m happy! When I told my husband about these odd feelings, he said, “What’s wrong with feeling too happy?”

  Shortly after becoming too happy, I was at the airport, on my way to Sun Valley, where I was scheduled to speak at a writers conference. At the airline counter, the representative told me that my flight to Salt Lake City had been canceled. I asked for options. She typed in long strings of code and told me that the next flight was in an hour and a half. Great! But it was oversold. Oh. But if I could not get on that flight, there was another flight. Perfect. But I’d have to run to make my connecting flight to Sun Valley, which would also be the last one for the day. I joked that I could always sleep in the Salt Lake City airport. As it turned out, I did miss the connecting flight, but I flew to Boise instead and took a bus to Sun Valley, which got me to my destination only nine hours later than originally planned. While doing the airport shuffle, not once did I feel angry or upset. Even as it was happening, I thought it was surreal that I was so calm. I should have at least felt worried, instead of being as complacent as a cow in a field of endless grass.