The Mozart Season (15 page)

I laughed. I'd heard the story before, but it was still funny.

“This sleeping performance is not our objective for the competition, however.…”

As I left my lesson, he put his hand under my chin and said, “No reason for you to be a 'fraidy cat, Allegra. Mozart didn't want you to be one.”

And he also said, “Have you been doing anything for just plain fun this summer? Anything irresponsible?”

I thought about banging on the metal sculpture in the Rose Garden with Deirdre and all those people. And messing around with Heavenly Days. And going bike riding last night. “A little,” I said.

“Well, why don't you do more than a little?” he said. “Give yourself a day off—do something different? Tomorrow.”

“You mean not practice?”

“Indeed. I mean not practice. Do something away from your violin.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn't really know what to do.

When I got home, Heavenly had a mouse on the lawn and I stuck my tongue out at her for doing it. I used to get berserk when she killed things. But I've gotten myself under control and don't do that anymore. I made myself think of it differently: Heavenly was doing what nature taught her to do. She wasn't a maniac being made happy by murder. Nature didn't plan on a whole species running to the sound of electric can openers; cats were designed to get their own food, and they kill things because that's their law.

But that mouse had had such a short life.

I went upstairs to my room to take a nap.

I was supposed to run like an athlete and make snow melt and make everybody want to dance. Menuhin could play the violin while he was asleep, and I was supposed to be as divinely inspired as the Boston Celtics, and I was supposed to take a day off and not practice, and Mozart didn't want me to be a 'fraidy cat, and I was supposed to take longer on that low A and have more quiet elegance, and I was supposed to be ME: Allegra Shapiro—I'M playing this concerto, and there was a mouse being chewed up on the lawn that just thought it was going out for a walk. I think I was bewildered.

Sarah called and woke me up. She was back from her ballet camp in California. We should celebrate.

The concert that night in the park was another orchestra that both my father and mother play in in the summertime, called the Festival Orchestra. It's not against their union rules to play in it. People, including Daddy, had been kidding Mommy about how she might never play again after this concert so she'd better enjoy it. In fact, if the Oregon Symphony players didn't get their contract for the next season, they'd be “locked out” and the Youth Orchestra might have to play the concert in Waterfront Park that my mother's orchestra was supposed to play on Labor Day weekend.

The calendar dates suddenly hit me. The Bloch Competition would be on Labor Day. The Oregon Symphony was scheduled to play in the park on Labor Day night. If my mother's orchestra got locked out, I'd be playing the competition in the afternoon and playing a concert that night. I braided my hair and said to myself that it wasn't fair to have everything crowded together that way and then have to start school the next morning. And I'd have a completely new stand partner; I wouldn't be anybody's Little Buddy anymore.

And I wondered: When do you stop being a seventh-grader and turn into an eighth-grader? Is it on the day when you get your report card in June, or the day after Labor Day, when you start in a new grade? Or is it on Midsummer Night or some other time?

I met Sarah and Jessica where we usually meet, by the violin side of backstage in the park. My parents weren't as strict this summer about where we could sit, because we were twelve. Last summer we'd had to put our blanket exactly beside at least one other symphony family if we didn't have our own grown-up along. This time they said we could sit anywhere if there were only three rows of blankets between us and the stage.

Sarah said, “Parents lie in bed at night and think these things up, the same way teachers do. You really have to work to think up that three-rows-of-blankets rule.” It was great seeing her again. She thought the Bloch Competition was nifty. “Nifty. Sure. How many people in the whole world are finalists for something like that?” She put on her little kid pose and said, “Totally awesome.”

We walked up one side of the park and down the other, smelling the food. You can get a whole meal if you want to spend a lot of money. Chinese food (“very un-Chinese,” Jessica says), and shish kebab, all kinds of pastries, pasta salads, grilled sausages, bagels, ice cream. We had to walk around the long lines of people waiting to get into the bathrooms, and every once in a while we saw somebody we knew and said hi, and stuff stuck to our sandals, and we just walked along in the summer evening.

Sarah had her own food in a bag; she wouldn't eat any from the booths. She said, “You know what's
in
those things? You know what they dip the chicken in? That cooking oil has forty-one percent saturated fat. You know what a fat-filled cell looks like? The nucleus and the cytoplasm are all squinched up; there's no room for anything but fat. If you get a whole bunch of fat cells you can have a stroke and brain failure.” But she still wanted to go along and smell. Sarah is an extremely healthy person. She doesn't get colds or anything and she hasn't been absent from school in three years. She gets these embarrassing Attendance Awards and has to get up in front of the school and receive them at the end of the year.

We were reading the signs on the food booths, all the various kinds of cappuccino you could buy, and all the things you could get with a plate of fried noodles, when we saw
QUITE BROILED SALMON.
Jessica and I decided we wanted that. “How do you ‘quite broil salmon'?” I said. It smelled fabulous.

Sarah said, “It's probably a British expression. You ever hear it in Hong Kong?” she asked Jessica.

“No. Never,” Jessica said. We stood and stared at the sign. Quite broiled salmon. Sarah walked up close to it and burst out laughing. “It's partly covered up.” She pointed. Hooked under a board was the beginning of the sign, “Mes.”
MESQUITE BROILED SALMON.
We roared. Mesquite is a smoke flavor from a mesquite tree.

While Jessica and I were eating Quite Broiled Salmon and fried noodles and chicken and Greek gyros and Sarah was eating her healthy food and taking bites of the salmon because it passed her Healthy Test, we played I'm Neek. Somebody taught it to us in school in second grade, and we still spell it that childish way. It's called I'm Unique: everybody has to tell unique things about themselves. It was supposed to make us more thoughtful when we were little.

“I'm Neek because I'm the only one in this park right now who's forgotten how to write the Chinese character for old age,” Jessica said.

“Not counting the ones that never knew in the first place,” Sarah said. “I'm Neek by winning a pirouette contest last week.”

“How do you do that?” Jessica asked.

“I didn't fall down till the fourth one. See my knee?” Sarah pulled her big lavender skirt up to show us. It was a big floor burn. “They were on pointe, too.”

Sarah was dancing when she was three years old. Or not much more than three. She was a Nutcracker Victim, that's what she said in her school report last year. Nutcracker Victims are the little kids who watch the
Nutcracker
ballet every Christmas on television and get up on their feet and dance while they watch it. She said they eat and sleep
Nutcracker
and pretty soon they find out it's hard work, but by then they're addicted.

Our teachers call us the Three Weird Sisters sometimes in school, the ones in Shakespeare that say, “Double, double, toil and trouble.” “I'm Neek because I played a solo in a park last night and the girl who should've been playing it wasn't beautiful the way she was in the dream I had about her and I feel guilty about that,” I said.

Jessica said I was the star of the show, and then Sarah told us about her roommates at ballet camp, one from Wisconsin who shaved her head and one from Arizona who had taken a vow of silence for the entire summer and would only whistle. Then we started to tell Sarah about the dancing man. Jessica said his name was Trouble, and she said, “I bet he'll show up here. Watch. Allegra has seen him how many times?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Lots.”

“I've only seen him once,” she said. “But I'm Neek 'cause I danced with him. You should've been doing it, not me,” she said to Sarah.

“I'm Neek because Andy liked me for eight whole classes last year before he went on to somebody else. He's such a jerk he only likes somebody for three or four classes usually,” Sarah said.

Jessica and I'd had to listen to how wonderful Andy was after all eight classes too. “I'm Neek 'cause I knew he was a jerk before you did,” I said.

“No, you're not,” Jessica said. “We both did at the same time, so you're not Neek that way. Remember when he told her he'd never look at another girl? That was when, and we both knew. He was already a jerk then.”

Sarah sat quietly with her legs in a complete lotus position and said, “It sounds like you're both trying to make me feel stupid at the same time.” I felt terrible. The three of us are friends because we don't usually do that. We all know which buttons not to push with each other. With Jessica, we don't push the button about her mother going to the cemetery every single day and making Jessica or one of her sisters or brothers go with her to see her dead husband's grave. With Sarah, we don't push the Nutcracker Victim button; we don't give her a hard time about how crazy and intense dancers are, especially dancing boys. And with me, they don't push the button about never having a single boyfriend since Teddy in kindergarten or the one about being a maniac for practicing. And we never ever argue about who's pretty or who's ugly on which day.

Jessica said, “We're not trying to make you feel stupid, Sarah. Nobody can tell if a guy's a jerk close up. Not at first when he's all friendly and whispery. It's only if you're away from him. Then you can tell. You have to get perspective.” She looked extremely serious. I thought of Deirdre and the man who suddenly remembered another Ph.D. he wanted to get.

Sarah looked at her and thought about it and then she laughed. “Thank you, dear Abby,” she said, and we all put our arms around each other and swore our friendship “in thunder, lightning, or in rain” again, from Shakespeare about the Weird Sisters.

The music started and the dancing man appeared, as usual, out of the air.

He was wearing his same brown clothes, or ones just like them. But he had a different shoe on; it didn't flap open. It didn't match his other shoe. He did his same dance from before. We watched him, and Jessica and I partly watched Sarah watching him. She was fascinated. He turned, and half turned, and moved in his sort of circles, and he looked that same stiff way but his dancing still had a nice feeling in it, and he had his same kind of part smile on his face, and his same dance went on and on until the piece was over. Then he bowed to the orchestra.

During the applause, Sarah said, “He's got no stage fright at all. Absolutely zero. That's a fox-trot he's doing. Kind of a waltz–fox-trot.”

“I want to know who he is,” I said.

Sure enough, Sarah wanted to dance with him. “I'm gonna do it,” she said. She hopped around people's blankets just as the music was getting ready to start, and took a position right near him but not too near.

At first, it was just two people moving in a sort of parallel way, the way it had been with Deirdre and with Jessica. But pretty soon Sarah started moving around him and he started following her, and her lavender skirt was sliding back and forth in the air, and she made their dancing area bigger by slowly stepping farther to both sides. Eventually, they were using the whole front of the grass, coming very close to some Stem People and just missing stepping on people's blankets but never once doing it.

The sun was going down and the bright, almost orangy light from the stage was on them, and for a little while it was like the old lady's music box in Kansas again, and the whole world could be happy if those little minutes could go on and on, music and dancing on the grass everywhere in the world and everyone would stop fighting each other and people could just listen and watch.

It even made the concert a better one. I secretly think they gave the audience a better show.

After the concert, people were getting up to leave, and calling to little kids, “Stay right here. Don't you go one step away,” while Jessica and Sarah and I grabbed our blanket and picnic stuff and followed him.

He was already slipping around to the back of the stage but Sarah caught him. She put her hand on one of his arms.

“Is your name really Trouble?” she said.

He turned around and looked at all of us. Up close, with the lights from the stage, the little holes in his face were very big. Looking at his face felt a little bit like looking close up at Heavenly's whiskers and mouth. Different and fascinating. “Yeah,” he said. He really had almost no teeth that I could see, just two in the front, one up and one down. “They know me on the block.”

I heard all three of us breathe in at the same time. He started to duck around the side of the stage. There was a smell of dirty laundry. Of fried food and dirty laundry together. People were coming down the steps from the stage, carrying flutes and oboes and violins and horns.

“Wait a minute,” Sarah said to him. He looked back at her without turning all the way around. Part of him was in the dark where the side of the stage cut off the light. “I never had a dancing partner just disappear before,” she said. He kept looking at her. His face began to open up and then it closed again. We must have looked to him like a committee.

Jessica said, “You're a very good dancer.” He turned around to face us.