“Grand,” said Porch, leaning back in his chair, his legs stretched out in front of him. “Quite grand, in fact. Minna, much better, that difficult part.” He spoke a musical code. “Press hard, those fingers, left hand.” He looked at Orson. “I do think that the presto was a bit too presto.” Orson smiled.
“Now,” said Porch. “I have an announcement.”
Everyone looked up.
“There is a competition eight weeks from now. Eight, a long time.” He stood up and folded his arms across his chest. “For the first time this competition includes musicians of your age. About ten quartets will perform. Less experienced fiddlers.”
That’s us, thought Minna with a cold flash of fear. Less experienced.
“And,” said Porch with a smile, “I think you are ready. I know you are ready.”
Even me with no vibrato?
“I don’t know,” said Orson in an uncertain voice.
Imelda frowned. Lucas leaned over to hang his bow from the music stand. It swayed a bit, then stopped.
“There is,” said Porch, “an added incentive besides beautiful music. A prize of one hundred dollars each, if you win, to be used, we all hope, to further your musical careers.” Minna looked quickly at Lucas. Not Lucas, she thought. Lucas would buy glass aquariums. Dead flies. Do frogs eat dead flies?
“Well,” said Porch, “what do you think?”
Silence. Minna wanted to shout “No!”
“It is,” said Porch, “a wonderful experience. Not winning,” he added, “playing.”
More silence, except for Imelda’s foot tapping nervously on the floor.
“Could we use the money for something else?” asked Imelda suddenly, her foot tapping faster. Orson’s music slipped off his stand.
Books of facts for Imelda, thought Minna.
“Anything at all!” Porch exclaimed. “Does that mean yes?” His eyebrows raised, he looked at them. He smiled then and leaned down to pick up Orson’s music. And looking pleased, he made the decision. The decision that made Minna’s skin prickle.
“We’ll play the Mozart,” he said softly.
Silently they picked up their music, packed up their instruments, and filed out. They were in the elevator, riding down, before Minna realized where she was. She shivered even though the elevator was warm.
“Maybe I’d buy a new bow,” said Orson. Minna was suddenly aware they had been talking about the competition, about the prize money.
A new bow? Orson, who gags through all chamber music?
“A good permanent, extra curly,” announced Imelda as the elevator jolted to a stop.
Imelda with her wonderful shiny-smooth hair? Who are these people?
They walked outside, blinking in the light. Willie was tuning. Money clinked into his open case. The dog was there looking wise and knowing, like a music critic.
Minna stopped on the steps. Lucas put his hand on her arm.
“What would you buy with the money?” he asked.
Minna shook her head. She thought about plaid skirts and bicycles and cellos. And vibratos. But you couldn’t buy a vibrato.
“I wish,” she began. “I wish I didn’t have to tell my mother and father about this. I won’t tell them. They’ll just make a big fuss.”
Lucas smiled.
“That’s nice, a fuss. My parents have never come to hear me play a recital.”
“That’s nice,” said Minna. “They leave you alone.”
“Yes,” said Lucas so softly that Minna almost didn’t hear. He bent down to pat the dog.
Willie tucked his violin under his chin.
“What’s your pleasure?” he called to them. “Happy or sad?”
“Willie?” said Minna.
“Yes?” The violin dipped a little as he looked at her.
“What would you do with one hundred dollars?”
Willie looked surprised.
“A question about something other than music?” he asked, smiling.
Lucas stirred beside her.
“Or two hundred,” he added.
“Two hundred dollars?” Willie tucked his violin under one arm. “That’s easy. I’d go visit Mama. Back home. She likes to sit on the porch and hear me play. She says it makes her garden grow.” Willie tuned his violin and peered at them. “And you know what? It does.”
Minna had never thought of a mama for Willie before. But of course everyone had one at one time or another, a mama. She had one.
Is that why he plays on the street corner? Getting home to Mama? Minna peered up at Willie. How old was he? It was hard to tell. He had curly hair and was tall. He didn’t have any wrinkles or gray hair, so he must be younger than her parents, who were beginning to develop both. Did he live nearby? Did he have brothers or sisters? She closed her eyes as he tuned. She didn’t even know what he thought about. She wondered if he ever thought of . . . Minna’s eyes blew open. Just like my mother, she thought, shocked. I am thinking just like my mother. It is catching!
“Happy music or sad?” repeated Willie.
Willie played a few notes, wandering across the strings. Lucas pulled on Minna’s sleeve, gesturing to his pocket. The frogs. Minna had forgotten.
“Happy,” she told Willie. “Happy!” she called, walking backward as Lucas pulled her toward the pond. Someone stopped to pat the brown dog. Minna and Lucas waved good-bye to Willie, who raised his eyebrows good-bye back to them. And then he lifted his bow with a great flourish and played an arpeggio so bright that it seemed to call out the sun to follow them down the street and away.
SEVEN
Spring appears violently, rain and sun and rain again. The earth is muddy and Minna’s mother, wearing heels, sinks into the front lawn as she walks to the car. Minna practices. She practices on and on. She practices so much, so often, that her mother stops writing to listen. Her father comes out of his study to stand at her door. He carries a textbook on adolescent behavior. McGrew hums and smiles and begins spring baseball.
Minna’s mother had gone to the dentist. Minna walked into her mother’s writing room. Her mother had begun to clean but had stopped midway, leaving behind a strange combination of chaos and order. In the typewriter was a page, a page numbered 1 with two typed sentences, double spaced. It was, Minna knew, a book beginning. She sat down and read.
Leila fell in love at noon. The boy was tall and slim and distracted.
Minna frowned. “Distracted.” Did that mean grand looking and nearly perfectly organized? With a vibrato? With corn-colored hair?
Minna looked it up in the dictionary.
Distraction: 1. A distracting, or state of being distracted; perplexity, confusion, disorder.
Not Lucas, thought Minna. Her mother, maybe, but not Lucas.
2. Agitation from violent emotions; hence, mental derangement; madness.
Her mother. Definitely her mother. Minna leaned back and read the signs above her mother’s desk. The old ones were there, the confusing ones. Minna leaned forward. There were two new ones.
THE WRITER WRITES ABOUT THE WRITER
ALL SERIOUS DARING COMES FROM WITHIN
—EUDORA WELTY
The writer. Her mother? Minna read the two new sentences in her mother’s typewriter again. She thought of her mother falling in love at noon. She closed her eyes, trying to picture the scene, her mother young, in shorts and braids, falling in love in the midday heat. Her father, sweating, leaning on his bicycle, both of them confused and perplexed. As hard as Minna tried, all she could see was her mother’s room, half clean, her father in a suit, tripping over books, all of them, the lot, in danger of falling into distraction. Minna sighed, opening her eyes. There, almost magically, as if she were seeing clearly for the first time, were two matching red-striped socks, hanging over the side of the clothes basket. She gathered them up, rolling them into a tight neat ball.
“Are my glasses here?”
Minna’s father stood in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
> “Sorting socks,” said Minna, looking around for his glasses. His glasses were “eternally lost,” as her mother put it. McGrew had once drawn a picture of their father looking for them, a line drawing of a man with a candle in the night, bare feet, a nightshirt, and a lost expression.
“Sorting socks to keep from becoming distracted,” Minna added.
Her father bent over the clothes basket and came up with a black case. He grinned at her.
“Ah, distraction,” said her father, putting on his glasses. They were half glasses, ones he could look over or through at her. “You mean like messy rooms? And lost glasses?”
“Is it a disease?” asked Minna.
“No,” said her father, putting his arm around her, “it’s a condition. More like freckles or night blindness.”
“Not fatal,” said Minna.
“Not fatal,” he echoed.
“I’ll tell you something about distraction,” said her father, smiling. “Once, just before I asked your mother to marry me, I opened her closet door and looked inside.”
“And?” asked Minna.
“And,” said her father, “it was like a look into the future. A hint of things to come.”
“That bad,” said Minna, smiling.
“I closed the door again,” he said.
“Papa?”
“What?”
“Did you fall in love at noon?”
“At noon,” said her father promptly, “and every day thereafter at 3:00, and at 5:30 and again at 6:45, 11:10, and 4:22, and at . . .”
“Minna?” McGrew poked his head in the doorway. “Baseball practice today. And Emily Parmalee’s got her feathers,” he sang. “Want to come?”
Minna looked up at her father. He shook his head and, having found his glasses, went off to his books and his patients. Minna closed the door of her mother’s writing room and left. Away from distractions and closets and laundry baskets and love at all hours. She went off with those she could count on, McGrew and Emily Parmalee. Off to the spring mud.
Minna sits in the grandstands. They are not really grandstands; they are three tiers of bleacher seats, scattered with parents and brothers and sisters watching practice. Her parents should be here, but they aren’t. McGrew waves to Minna from left field. He likes left field because he can hum without interruption. Emily Parmalee is behind the plate, hunkered down in her uniform and face mask and cleats. Minna sighs and thinks about facts. Baseball is simple. There are facts there. You either know them or not. Hit. Bunt. Run. Slide. Baseball is not like love, which is confusing. It is not like Mozart, which Minna cannot play the same way twice and never perfectly. Baseball is not like her mother’s messages above her typewriter, which Minna does not understand.
Minna watches Emily Parmalee. Her uniform is dirty, the bill of her baseball cap turned up. But as Minna leans forward to look more closely, she can see, just below Emily Parmalee’s cap, two more facts. Nearly hidden by the face mask and next to a dirt smudge are bright pink feather earrings.
EIGHT
Minna, McGrew, and Emily Parmalee walked home after practice, McGrew singing the national anthem one beat off:
“Oh . . . oh . . . oh say can you
See by the dawn’s early
Light what so proudly we
Hailed at the twilight’s last gleam . . .”
Their team, the Moles, had played well, with Emily making a final dramatic out at home plate. McGrew, lost in thought, had dropped the one fly ball that came to him.
“I was thinking about my science report,” he explained to Emily.
“Didn’t you wonder what all the shouting was about?” asked Emily kindly.
“No,” said McGrew. “I didn’t hear the shouting.”
“Did the sunlight get in your eyes?” asked Minna.
“There isn’t any bright sunlight,” he pointed out.
Honest McGrew.
“Dad should teach you how to catch a ball the right way,” said Minna. “He should!”
“Yes,” said McGrew. “But I don’t know if Dad can do it.”
Minna looked sharply at him, suddenly thinking of Lucas’s words: My parents are not the hopscotch type.
Minna put the end of the middle finger of her left hand in the palm of her right, moving it back and forth absentmindedly.
“What are you doing?” asked Emily Parmalee. She took off her catcher’s mask and her feathered earrings blew back like beagles’ ears in the wind.
“I’m practicing my vibrato. I have a lesson this afternoon.”
“Vibrato? Is it a trick?” asked Emily.
“Yes,” said McGrew. “Vibrato,” he recited, “is a tremulous or pulsating effect for adding warmth and beauty to the tone in music.”
Minna smiled. McGrew sounded like Imelda.
“It makes the music sound better,” he sang, shaking his head to show the vibrato effect.
Emily nodded thoughtfully.
“A trick,” she agreed.
Minna sighed.
“Lucas has a wonderful vibrato, Orson’s on his way. Imelda soon. I want one,” said Minna, still practicing in her hand.
Emily shrugged. “Some people can do things that others can’t.” She looked at McGrew. “I can catch,” she said wisely.
“True,” sang McGrew.
They walk up the sidewalk to Minna’s house, past a rake lying in soggy leaves left over from last fall; past brown, crisp flowers in pots that Minna’s mother forgot to bring in for the winter; past three huge green trash bags sitting on the porch, something oozing from one. Minna thinks about Lucas’s neat brick pathway through his neat brick courtyard. They walk through the kitchen, where there is a saucepan with last night’s baked beans crusting over, a sink full of dirty dishes. Spilled sugar crunches under their feet. There is a note on the dining room table next to two dirty coffee cups, a pile of underwear, and the morning mail.
Gone shopping,
Ma
Beside the note is a letter from one of their mother’s readers. It is typewritten with many x’s and a curious pattern of capital and lowercase letters.
DEar Mrxxs. PRatt,
I have TWo questions that only you, a WRiter, can ansxxswer because I know that writerxs know the anSwers.
1. HOw much does a tripewriter cost?
2. How do moths FLY?
Love,
Kiki
Minna stared at the letter. She knew her mother would spend a long time thinking about her answer. She would call typewriter stores to ask for information.
“The moth question will take Mama days of research,” said McGrew, as if he had read Minna’s thoughts.
“How come?” asked Emily Parmalee. “All moths do is move their wings. Up and down, you know?”
Minna and McGrew laughed, but Minna’s throat felt tight. There was a sour restless feeling in her stomach. She left Emily and McGrew arguing quietly about moth wings and fly balls and wandered into her mother’s writing room.
I have, thought Minna closing her eyes, memorized the mess. Just as Mozart, so Imelda had informed them just this week, could identify chords and tones blindfolded when he was a child. Maybe I will be one of Imelda’s facts someday, thought Minna: The Lone Cellist Left in the World Without a Vibrato. She moved around boxes of books and papers until she bumped against her mother’s typing table. She thought of Lucas’s house, where she could, if she wished, dance wildly, blindfolded, without bumping against anything. Minna opened her eyes and looked at a sheet of paper in the typewriter.
Dear Kiki,
Thank you for your letter . . .
Minna sat down slowly.
. . . regarding typewriters and moths. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I can tell you that the price of typewriters depends on whether you use manual or electric. Manual, of course, are less expensive and you can often get a second-hand typewriter. Electric cost anywhere from $149.95 plus tax to . . .
Mama had surely done her homework, thought Minna.
&nb
sp; . . . $900.00 for the more expensive. And there are word processors. As for moths, I have consulted several science books, but need more information . . .
The letter stopped there, and it came to Minna in that moment, quite suddenly, that her mother had not gone shopping at all. She had gone to the library to look up moths. To find the answers.
Minna skimmed her hands quickly, gently, over the typewriter keys. There were several other letters on the table.
Dear Mrs. Pratt,
I love all your books but one.
Please write back,
Emma Jane Van Winkle
Dear Mrs. Pratt,
My dog, Frank, ate page 27 of your book A Day in the Life of Petunia. Did I miss much?
Respectfully yours,
Tuli Kiplinger
Dear Mrs. Pratt,
Do you ever get ideas from your children? My mother says she gets lots of ideas from me. If you need some ideas I’m sure she will send them to you.
Best regards to your family and to your pet (if you have one),
Maurice Choi
P.S. My lizard, Lurlene, died yesterday.
Answers, answers. Questions and answers. Do you get ideas from your family? Writers have all the answers. Minna stared at the typewriter. It was quiet in the mess. Peace among the socks. Very carefully, Minna removed her mother’s letter about typewriters and moths and put in a fresh sheet of paper. She thought a moment, her fingers frozen above the keys. Dear Mama. No. She took a breath. And then, with two fingers, very slowly, she began to type.
Dear Mrs. Pratt,
A door slammed. The front door. It was the exuberant sound of her mother returning. Her mother had never been known to close a door quietly. How much time had gone by? Quickly Minna rolled the letter to her mother out of the typewriter, folded it, and put it safely in her pocket.