Later that night I climbed out of bed onto my toes. Hair still wet and starting to curl. He slept, the stranger, his face crushed against the pillow, while I pulled on snagged silk stockings and tugged a dress down over my nose. I picked up my purse, made sure my own hotel key was inside, and left him sleeping, empty and new.
Now I clutch Kara, water rushing around my feet and down the drain, and beneath me my legs quiver with the unaccustomed strain of crouching. Resting the heel of my hand against the rim of the tub, I hoist myself into a standing position and wrap a towel around Kara, tufting it up the back of her head. I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt so keenly the various strengths and pressures of my toes against the ground, the balls of my feet against the tile. I could easily slip.
For some minutes I stand still, taking shallow breaths, afraid to move lest we both fall down.
My daughter’s face reminds me of past lovers. How do you live with that? How do you let yourself feel that complicated rush of adoration and not lose your mind? It happens every day, every time.
And of course she also calls to mind the better people I have known, the ones who wouldn’t cringe away from the task of singing to a newborn baby. The ones who were glad to sacrifice what they had so their children could live. Kara and I, we go on in spite of them. We breathe the air they gasped out with their last exhalations, swallow their dust by the happy accident of being in the world.
So, I tell myself, think of a lesson. Something Ada taught you about living. I remember being six and frankly annoyed that my babenka had signed me up for the children’s choir at a church in Pulaski Park. Up to that point I’d only sung for her or my mother at home, and I wasn’t entirely sure that music should be so widely shared. Not when it made me feel so open, so undone.
“It will be healthy for you, darling,” Baba Ada told me, “to sing in front of a crowd. You need to learn presentation.”
She was right. Sight and sound have a natural link, since sound is a primal trigger, an indication of where to look for signs of danger, water, food. We peer into trees to find hiding predators and watch dancers to see how their limbs correspond to the strain of a cello, the beat of a drum. A deaf man, if properly trained, could track the progress of a song by the flicker of a singer’s throat, the clench of muscles around lymph nodes and collarbones.
But I was young and single-minded and didn’t want to learn. Walking from the train on the way to my first rehearsal, I dragged my feet, scraping the toes of my once-polished Mary Janes. It was March, and gray snow still gathered in the corners of the streets where it had been thrown by snow blowers over the course of the winter. The sidewalk was perpetually wet and salted, and my shoes were already near ruin, white-streaked and saturated.
Baba Ada seemed to have decided to ignore my attitude and walked in brisk steps, her nose pointed upward into the crisp air. She held my hand, my cotton gloves sticking against the mended suede of her own. And she quizzed me on sounds, quick, like a drill sergeant.
This was a game Ada had devised, based on her assumption that my whole body — mouth, lungs, brain, and tiny ear bones — had operated as a precision instrument from the time of my birth, and perhaps before. Very likely she whispered to my mother’s pregnant stomach and listened for phantom reactions, as if her very hope was sonar.
The game was simple. If we were sitting in a restaurant and someone accidentally struck their knife against a glass, Ada would turn to me with an expectant gaze until I said “B minor?” Or whatever the note might be. That was how I won.
Perfect pitch, to Ada, was part of my birthright, written in my blood. Which wasn’t to say I could be casual about it. She was irritated if I hummed a song just a shade flat in her presence, even if I was mimicking something I’d heard on the radio. And since she was proud, she liked to show me off. In church I named the organist’s key changes; walking down the street with Ada and one of her friends, I called out the different pitches of car horns. People laughed and admired me and handed me candy. Adults, anyway; none of the hauteur or exactitude I learned from Ada earned me many friends at school. But I didn’t mind, because I had her. Once, when I was ten, a waiter in a café dropped an entire tray of glasses near our table, and when the shock in the room wore off I said to Ada, “Shostakovich?” She stared at me for a moment and then laughed so hard her eyes leaked tears, which cut tracks through the pale powder on her face. Then she signaled the clumsy waiter back and ordered a piece of chocolate cake, which we shared, occasionally breaking into renewed giggles.
On this day, however, as I sulked along the sidewalk, she pointed to things — a squeaky gate hinge, a bookshop’s entrance bell — without so much as a command, and I named them in an insolent monotone.
Near the entrance to the small rehearsal room, which we reached by way of an alleyway door and a dusty hallway that wove through the church, a round-cheeked woman stood, taking names as each participant arrived. She was particularly tall, milling around with the adult chaperones, so I could see the ribbed archway inside her mouth when she threw back her head and laughed. In the middle of such a laugh, without warning, she sneezed three sharp reports from her nose, and I felt a creeping sensation up the back of my neck. I turned to glare at Ada, hoping that my expression would communicate something cutting. See, I’m going to catch my death of cold. But she just shooed me forward.
I placed myself on a low stool and watched the other children. The boys had formed a pack to one side, leaving only their backs visible from where I sat. The girls simply looked uninterested — one was zipping and unzipping her jacket, while another slowly unraveled her glove.
“All right!” The sneezing woman, who seemed to be in charge, looked at her watch and walked to the front of the room, hopping up on a small wooden box. “I’m Mrs. Baker. You can call me Noreen, or Noree.” She beamed at us and wiped her nose with one finger. My stomach pinched slightly, but I stayed still. Baba brought me here, I thought. She must have known this woman, must have trusted her.
“Hi, Noree.” The children around me all spoke in unison, as if they’d been prepared for this exact interaction, this bubbly woman standing before us. The boys had assumed seats, interspersed with the girls, and looked calm and composed.
“Now tonight we’re not going to start with anything too tricky. Remember, we’re here to have fun.” I shifted in my seat. “I know it’s almost springtime,” Noreen continued, “so first I thought we’d do one of my favorites. You might know it. It’s called ‘I’ll Be a Sunbeam.’”
As she spoke, Noreen hopped off her box and walked around the room with a stack of pink and yellow mimeographed papers. She handed one to each child and gave a few to the adults who were shifting from foot to foot in the back of the rehearsal space. My paper was yellow and slightly smudged. It smelled like old silverware. In the top right corner was a picture of a grinning sun, and below that was a list of verses intercut with the chorus.
Ada was only beginning to teach me to read, but I didn’t need to read to see that something was wrong. I raised my hand.