Big Girl Small (10 page)

Ms. Vanderly knew I practiced down there more than anyone else. But she couldn’t have known why. She was almost as popular with us as Ms. Doman. Ms. Vanderly was black with long, braided hair, broad shoulders, and a walloping alto voice. She had wanted to be an opera singer, but maybe that industry’s as racist as every other, or her voice wasn’t good enough, or she had had kids. Or maybe she just wasn’t pretty in the right way. It’s surprising to some people, but video killed the opera star, too. It used to be enough to be morbidly obese and have a fantastic voice, but now you have to be ravishing, too, or you can’t get cast in an opera. So Ms. Vanderly, who’s a huge person in every way, became a huge teacher. Unlike the skinny Ms. Smith, who considers herself too good for us, Ms. Vanderly used to be a fanatic about her own career and now she’s one about ours. And she isn’t bitter about the whole thing. She loves us and takes us seriously. In fact, now that I think of it, the teachers at Darcy were really good. Ms. Doman was like that too. Unpatronizing, I mean. I wish they’d gotten to have what they really wanted—Ms. Vanderly to be a professional singer and Ms. Doman to teach at the University of Michigan. I think they’d both have been good at those things. It’s a horror that I also disappointed them.

I worked really hard those first few weeks of voice, singing my butt off and getting the best solo spot in the fall show. Ms. Vanderly announced that Carrie and I would walk out first, start the jazz medley, and then the rest of the group would join us, snapping and singing backup. Then, after that number, six of us got to do “real solos,” and I was first. I swear, when Ms. Vanderly said my name, Amanda looked over at Carrie and sighed like, “More of this affirmative action bullshit?”

But then Carrie talked to me after class, so maybe I was just being paranoid. She walked out with Chris Arpent. He was carrying a cardboard box, and she said, “Thanks for hauling that around for me all day, Arp,” and I couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to call him “Arp” and have him carry my things around like a 1950s boyfriend. He said, “No problem,” and then she saw me, and said, “Hey, Judy!” And I looked up like, no way is she actually going to talk to me, and what if it’s to say something mean? And in front of her handsome senior Arp? I sucked a lot of breath in and got ready, and then what she said was: “That’s really cool that you got the first solo—are you nervous?”

So maybe all that time she’d just been waiting for a chance to be nice. I have a good sarcasm radar and I couldn’t detect even the smallest hum of it, so maybe she was just friendly or shy and I’d been wrong. Chris shifted his weight around with the box, and said, “Hey, Carrie, I’m going to go put this in my car—I’ll take you after school,” and she nodded, but stayed there with me, like she was going to finish the conversation. Alan and Amanda were already long gone. I didn’t want to respond to her question if she was going to rush after her friends, but she made it totally obvious that she wasn’t in a hurry.

“Thanks, Carrie,” I said. “What are you going to sing?”

“ ‘Summertime.’ I love that song.”

“Yeah, wow, that’s hard.”

She smiled. “I’m going to do it all Janis-style,” she said, and then she put her hands on her hips, thrust them forward, and shouted out, “Your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good-looking!” Her voice sounded like a ton of gravel. It was pretty amazing. I mean, I knew she could sing a nice, clear soprano line, but I’d kind of thought she was a lightweight. This made me think she had real pipes. I laughed.

“Eat your heart out, Janis!” I said. “I’d love to hear you do ‘Bobby McGee.’ ”

“I love that song!” she said.

We stood there for a moment, feeling cool together.

“So, what are you doing?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I lied.

“Oh, really? There’s a bunch of sheet music in the library, if you want to look through things. I could help you.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks for offering. I—”

A cell phone rang in her purse and she pulled the phone out and looked at the number. Then she rolled her eyes as if to say, “Ugh, but I have to,” and picked up. “Oh my god, no way!” she said, “I’ll be right there!” She waved to me and took off.

I hurried into the stairwell and down to the first practice room in the row. I closed the door and sat at the piano, feeling so safe in the quiet it was like sinking into a bathtub. I took out my sheet music and pink pen, and plunked out a few notes. My voice was still warmed up from class, and the truth is, I had picked my song—Rickie Lee Jones’s “We Belong Together”—and been practicing it in my bedroom the entire year before I even got into Darcy. I used to imagine auditioning for
American Idol
with it, knew every note so well I could have done the entire thing a capella and not been even slightly pitchy.

I also had two other songs absolutely polished, in case Ms. Vanderly turned down “We Belong Together.” They were “Blue Velvet” and “Blue Valentines.” Something about the texture of those songs was so longing that they made me feel old, wise, deep. Every time I listened to Tom Waits sing “Blue Valentines,” I cried. I never played it in front of anyone, because that way it was like my own private blues. Plus, I had found it in my parents’ moldy record collection, so I hardly wanted to arrive at D’Arts all like, “I love my parents’ old favorite, Tom Waits; don’t you dig his records too?” “Blue Velvet” was from that horrifying movie about the guy who huffs gas and molests Isabella Rossellini, who looks more gorgeous and heartbroken than ever. I saw that when I was like ten because Chad was watching it once when my parents were out.

I lied to Carrie about my songs so she could feel like she was helping me. I knew I would even take her up on the offer of the library, would look through sheet music with her, lead her to the Rickie Lee or Tom Waits, and make her feel she had picked them for me. Then she’d have something invested in my doing well. I turned my iPod on and the first chords came into my ears: the light, hollow drums, then the twinkling piano notes, more chords. I started with the second verse, because it had my favorite part, about the girl who wrote her name forever:

And now Johnny the king walks these streets without her in

the rain

Lookin’ for a leather jacket

And a girl who wrote her name forever

A promise that—

We belong together

We belong together.

I knew the piano parts, had studied classical piano with my bizarre teacher Mr. Mivicks, who came to my house twice a week from first grade until sixth grade to teach me scales and études and Suzuki studies. Then in sixth grade I graduated to a new teacher, named Mrs. Rosenstock, whose house always smelled warm and tasty like meatloaf. She taught me “Ragtime” and “The Entertainer” and Chopin nocturnes until last year, when my mom managed to convince Rashid Karim, a musical prodigy at the University of Michigan, to be my private teacher. He came to our house, since my parents had bought a used grand piano with money they scraped together for years.

I like Rashid, because he told me to call him Rashid right away, and because whenever he plays, he hunches his shoulders and his hair flops all over the place. He’s always dressed immaculately, but his shoes are never properly tied. He loves music so much that even now that I’m almost seventeen and know better, I still have that little-kid suspicion that he never leaves the bench. Like in kindergarten when you’re shocked to run into your teacher at the grocery store, because doesn’t she live at school and sleep behind the chalkboard? Rashid always appears to have climbed straight out of our piano, and to live on concertos or nothing at all. My mom is constantly trying to feed him during our lessons, but he’s not interested in food. He’s thin as a pipe cleaner and has superhero ears. Since Rashid started teaching me last year, my mom has had to have the tuner come four times, even though he used to tune the thing once every four years.

On Friday, I showed Rashid my sheet music for the Rickie Lee Jones song, because I wanted to be able to accompany myself. It was pretty easy anyway, but I thought I’d play it for him and see if he had any pointers. He was not impressed.

“You should be focusing on the nocturnes we’re doing,” he said.

“But I have to do this for senior voice, for our upcoming concert.”

“Why not sing opera? At least something classical? Verdi?” he asked me. I shrugged, put the song away, and vowed never to tell him anything about school again.

On Saturday I woke up early, brushed my teeth before putting three pieces of spearmint Eclipse in my mouth. I did some stretching exercises while I chewed, and then finished
The Great Gatsby
, all before nine. I had nothing to do. My parents were at the Grill, so I put a parka on, and an old Michigan hat of Chad’s, got my bike out of the garage, and rode down Londonderry to Devonshire, turned right, and took Devonshire all the way to Geddes. It was cold and bright out, Ann Arbor crisp. I crossed Geddes and rode into Gallup Park, still orange and red from autumn. I sat for a few minutes on the chilly bank and watched ducks attack toddlers holding bags of bread. By eleven I was freezing and hungry, so I walked over to the concession stand and bought popcorn and a hot chocolate. As I was pouring loose change back into my purse, I saw Amanda Fulton and Gary Sorenson walk by. I ducked behind the door and watched them—they were laughing and holding hands, headed for the pedal boat docks. She had a white parka on, with a fur collar, and a striped hat. What a cute date, paddling around the cold pond at Gallup Park. They would have to snuggle in the boat to keep warm. I imagined myself in a boat with Kyle, trying to reach the pedals, failing, and having to sit on the floor, pedaling with my hands. Perhaps not for me. I felt suddenly embarrassed to be in the park alone, even though I often rode to Gallup by myself. I had never before thought it was a sign that my life was a terrible black hole but now that seemed obvious. I didn’t want Amanda or Gary—or anyone else—to see me. I sneaked back to my bike, finished the cocoa in one gulp, poured the popcorn out for the overfed ducks, and rode home.

No one called me that night, so I called my friend Stacy from Huron. She didn’t pick up. I began to think I had made a giant mistake going to Darcy, that I would never make a friend, and that I might die in isolation my junior year of high school. Of course I never even factored in the possibility that it would happen at a creepy dump in Ypsi where they once found a dead baby. (Did I forget to mention that there was once a dead baby thrown behind the Motel Manor?) In those, my more innocent days, even dying of loneliness took place in a cozy purple bedroom with books and a beanbag chair.

My mom came home from the Grill and asked what I was doing, so I lied and said I didn’t feel well. I went to my room, where I read
The Bluest Eye
, even though that unit was still three weeks away, looked up
theme
,
figurative language
,
symbolism
,
imagery
,
characterization
,
flashback
,
tone
, and
style
. I identified passages that ex-emplified the terms. It would save me time then, I thought, in case I was hugely popular by the time we read Morrison. I mean, what if by then Kyle and I were in love and I was the star of the huge winter show and had no time for homework? At 8:30, I finished rewriting 1 over x to the seventh and 6 over x to the fifth and –4 over 2x to the third as expressions that didn’t look like fractions. I looked around my room: lavender walls left over from when I was seven and asked for a purple bedroom and my parents compromised; curtains my mother had sewn, with tiny buds on the fabric blooming into a line of actual flowers across the top. She had added lace to the bottom edges, and my bedspread matched. There were teddy bears flopping off the top shelf, books on the first tier, and on the middle one, a Hello Kitty alarm clock, my cell phone charger, and a framed picture of Chad and Sam and me at Mount Tam in California five years ago. Chad and Sam have me on a little chariot they made by crossing their wrists and hands into a seat. I look pretty, in a pale pink T-shirt and white shorts, my hair pulled back by a pair of cat-shaped sunglasses. I also have a garland of wildflowers around my head, tangled into the glasses. I am laughing, and so are my brothers. I can still feel that day; we bought dried kiwis and strawberries from a fruit stand on the way up the mountain, but I can’t remember what we were laughing about. I looked up at the
Little Shop of Horrors
poster from my eighth grade at Tappan; I had played a shabop girl and our drama teacher, Ms. Bickle, had the brilliant idea that in the opening scene, I should be carried in by the two other girls, on a kind of sedan chair they made out of their arms, like the one Sam and Chad made on Mount Tam. But the two other shabop girls, Christie Krutchen and Liz Schaberg, had no confidence that they could hold me, so they were terrible at it, plus they were supposed to be singing and dancing while they were carrying me. It was obvious from the first rehearsal that the whole thing was just a disaster. We were all panicked that I would fall off, but Ms. Bickle couldn’t let go of her directorial vision, so we did it, and missed half the notes in the opening sequence because our throats were tight with fear.

I went to sleep at 10:30, listening to James Taylor. I would never tell anyone at Darcy that I like James Taylor, by the way. It would be incredibly embarrassing.

The next morning, my room was so bright at 6:00 that I sat straight up in bed wondering whether the house was on fire. As soon as I realized the only emergency was that I was awake that early on a Sunday with nothing to do except practice nocturnes for Rashid, I went downstairs and poured myself a bowl of cranberry nut crunch.

“Hi, honey,” my mom said. She was in her nightgown, drinking coffee.

“Why aren’t you at the Grill?” I asked.

“Dad’s there. I have stuff to do here today. What are your plans?”

“Um, some homework. Whatever. Not much.”

She picked up a copy of the
Ann Arbor Observer
from the counter in a gesture that struck me as overly casual.