“Nothing,” she said. “I’m afraid there’s no one here who worked at CPS at the time Ariel was born, so no one remembers her mother. Our records don’t indicate mental illness or eccentricity of personality or anything of the sort. Is Ariel institutionalized at present?”
“No, she’s living with the Jardells.”
“Is she receiving psychiatric treatment?”
“No.”
“But your client is concerned about her emotional state?”
“Yes.”
“Ariel must be on the verge of puberty. A great many children find that stage a stressful one. Sometimes the answer is treatment, sometimes they just have to be allowed to grow out of it. But the problem’s rarely hereditary, Mr. Channing. Adoptive parents sometimes like to think a problem is hereditary in order to absolve themselves of blame. Perhaps you could find a tactful way to suggest as much to Mrs. Jardell.”
Twelve
The lilting song of the flute filled Ariel’s bedroom. But she was not playing now. She sat on the edge of her bed listening to a cassette she had recorded earlier. She heard it all the way through, sitting with her eyes closed, her body swaying very slightly with the music. Now and then expressions played over her face in response to something she heard.
When the music stopped she rewound the tape and let it play through a second time. This time she did not give the music her undivided attention. While she listened, she wrote in her diary.
This is very strange. Listening to myself on Erskine’s tape recorder. It’s like hearing myself for the first time. I can’t really hear myself when I play because I have to concentrate on playing.
The reason all of this is happening is I couldn’t play the flute for Erskine. He kept saying he’d like to hear me play and I kept saying he wasn’t missing much, and finally the other day I dragged the flute over to his house after school and we went up to his room and I tried to play. But I couldn’t make it come out right. I could hear the notes in my head but I couldn’t seem to find them on the flute.
So he thought of the tape recorder. It’s a Japanese one, portable, and you can plug it in or use batteries, and you get half an hour on each side of the tape. He said I could take it home with me and just put it on when I play, and before I knew it I would forget it was even in the same room with me.
“You’ve been on tape before,” he said, and he found a cassette and played it for me, and it was a conversation we had the other day about how he found out I have to be eighteen before I can try to trace my real mother. He had taped it without me knowing anything of it.
When he played the tape I got properly pissed. I don’t guess there was anything on it you couldn’t play in church but it was the idea of him doing it secretly that bothered me. I told him if he was President he could get impeached for carrying on like that, taping people without them knowing it, and then we would up running some jokes on the subject which took the edge off my pissed-offedness. (If there’s even such a word, which there is now!)
Anyway, listening to myself talking on tape was weird in the same way that listening to myself play the flute on tape was. That’s nothing like I always thought I sounded. Erskine says everybody’s voice sounds weird to them because you normally hear yourself differently from the way other people hear you, because of some of the sound being carried to your ears through the bones in your skull. Sounds travel differently through solid objects, he said, which I told him would apply more to his head than to mine.
He said he always figured mine was hollow.
What he should do is get contact lenses when he’s older. His eyes are very attractive.
Anyway, tomorrow he can listen to Ariel Plays the Flute. He says once that’s over and done with I’ll be able to play in front of him with no hassle, but I don’t know about that.
What’s funny is I can play with Roberta in the house and it never bothers me. Of course I don’t actually play in front of her. And the fact that I know she’s not listening probably makes it easier.
The following afternoon the two of them walked home from school together. Ariel had not brought the recorder to school so they walked to her house to pick it up. The maroon Buick didn’t show up. She thought she’d seen the car twice since the time she and Channing had taken a long look at each other, but there had been no confrontation since then.
Roberta’s car was gone when they reached the house. “Come on in,” Ariel suggested.
“It’s okay. I’ll wait out here.”
“Nobody’s home. Roberta’s out somewhere. You’ve never seen my house.”
“I can see it fine from here. Just get the recorder and we’ll go to my place.”
“We always go to your place.”
“I’m a creature of habit.”
She started for the door. Then she changed her mind and turned around. “The thing is,” she said, “I really want you to come in.”
“Fuck it,” he said. “I don’t mind.”
“The reason I like you is you’re charming.”
“I was wondering what it was.”
She led him into the house and up the stairs to the second floor. The tape recorder was all packed up in its canvas carrying case. He asked her if she wouldn’t like to play it then and there but she shook her head. “Listen to it by yourself,” she said.
“You’d be embarrassed?”
“I guess so.”
“Did you play it back or anything? Or haven’t you listened to it either?”
“I listened to it twice. Two and a half times, actually, and then Roberta came up and said maybe it was a little late for music. Meaning it was driving her crazy. Two and a half times that I listened to it plus the time I played to record it. She didn’t even know it was a tape and she said I’d be tired today from playing so long. Oh, and look at this. She gave me this the day before yesterday. Teach Yourself to Play the Flute.”
“Is it any good?”
“How would you like it if your mother gave you a book that would tell you how to turn the car radio on and off?”
“Oh.”
“It’s the worst. If you go all the way through the book you wind up learning how to play Go Tell Aunt Rhody and Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends. Just what I want to sit around and do. The thing is she thinks she’s being nice to me. I’m tons more advanced than the book but she doesn’t have any idea.”
“What song did you say? Not Web-Footed Friends but the other one.”
“Go Tell Aunt Rhody.”
“I never heard of it,” he said. “What are you supposed to tell old Aunt Rhody?”
“That her bird died,” Ariel said. She sang:
He looked at her. “That’s it?”
“There’s other verses telling what he died of and how broken-up Aunt Rhody is, but that’s it. That’s all the notes there are to play in it.”
“It’s got a nice beat to it,” he said solemnly, “and the words tell a story, and you could dance to it. I’d give it about a seventy-five.”
They went downstairs and she showed him through the first floor. In the kitchen she poured two glasses of milk and found a package of chocolate-covered graham crackers.
“It’s a neat house,” he said.
“I hope we don’t move.”
“Why would you move?”
“Crazy Roberta. She wants to sell the house and move.”