“Yes, sweetheart?” Noreen smiled at me and bent down, putting her hands on her knees. I tried to lean away imperceptibly, but this only caused her to move closer.
“Where’s the music?” I asked.
“Honey, it’s right there in your hand.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, honey, it is.” Noreen reached out and took the page from my fingers, wagging it in front of me. “See?”
I pinched my lips together and nibbled on them slightly. Ada was always telling me to be polite, but she never let me talk nonsense to her either. And this woman was talking nonsense.
“That’s just words.”
Noreen stood straight and looked at me.
“What’s your name, honey?”
“Luscia.”
“Well, Luscia, what a pretty name. You see, these are the words that go with the music. So I’m going to play the piano, and we’ll all sing these words along and make the song. Okay?”
She smiled at me again, and I could tell she thought that I didn’t understand. But as I glared with all my childish might, her face took on an aspect of bland menace, something shifting below the surface and recategorizing me as trouble. Noreen gave a short nod and turned back towards the group, opening her mouth to give further directions.
Well, fine, I thought. Or something like it. Some inarticulate, foot-stamping approximation of indignation and despair. If she wanted trouble I could certainly provide it.
My hand shot, shaking, back into the air, but before Noreen could so much as acknowledge it, it was grabbed by a larger, softer version of itself. Baba Ada stood beside me, looking severe, and tugged me to my feet. She turned to Noreen only when we reached the door.
“My apologies. We seem to be in the wrong place.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, once we were safely outside, safely on the train. My relief at escaping Noree and her sickly sweet voice had left me briefly giddy, and now I felt exhaustion creeping up. I was also a bit nervous, having openly and publicly defied my grandmother, rendering dead her plans for my choir career.
I had expected to be dragged straight to my room and left there to think about what I’d done. But we didn’t seem to be heading home. The car creaked below us and I leaned my face against the cool window, watching brief snatches of apartments appear and disappear as we barreled past. People’s lives, here and gone.
“What a revolting woman.” Ada sat beside me and squeezed my wrist. “Although,” she said, looking down at me, “you knew perfectly well what that sheet of lyrics was.”
I took my hand away and fiddled with the collar of my coat, so it pushed my scarf up, warm over my chin.
“I thought you might enjoy it.” Ada spoke as though in response to something I hadn’t said. Her brow was knit. “Your mother thought so too. We should have known.”
“Mama did?” My mother’s moods and choices seemed to come like weather, blowing warm, then cool, then gray. She could, even then, be gone for days at a time, and I held any scrap of information about her close to my chest in the hope that it would lend some sense to her inscrutable patterns. Stretched-out hair ties left on the sofa arm, a broken teacup thrown in the trash: they were all meaningful to me. But Ada, who understood her better than I did, wasn’t interested in my archeology. She gave me a look, and I changed my question. “Known what?”
We skittered past a brightly lit series of brownstones, and I made a mental list of what I saw. A man swirling something in a glass. A dog curled up on a blue couch, alone. Two women standing front to back, one pulling up the zipper on another’s dress.
“That little group.” Ada gestured upward, away. “Such a silly thing to do. You don’t need anything to belong to.” She put her arm around my shoulder. “You’re already part of something bigger.”
I saw a mostly dark building with one bright room. It appeared in the distance like a beacon and seemed to grow warmer and warmer as it approached. A radiant den in a stone tomb. Just as we slipped by, I saw there were gauze curtains hung across the window frame. Light blue curtains, moving slightly, as though unsettled by the train. I was seized by a sudden urge to reach out and touch whatever lay behind them, because it was alien, because it wasn’t mine. But though I looked hard, the world behind the curtains remained indistinct, and we were gone too soon for me to see if I could peer into the space between them.
At some point in our ride I fell asleep, my cheek crushed against the hard plastic window frame. I awoke to Baba Ada pulling on my elbow, ushering me quietly to my feet. In sleep I’d tucked myself up into a circlet, knees and hands all compressed into my coat for warmth. The train’s lights flickered momentarily off as we pulled up to an elevated wooden station, and I stood on creaky knees, trying to maintain my balance.
“This is Lawrence,” declared the car’s speaker.
“Hmm?” I asked Ada.
“I had an idea.” She tightened her grip on my elbow, and the cold night air rushed around us. When we reached street level, she stopped and instructed me, “Close your eyes.”
I was still only at the edge of consciousness and followed her lead through the streets as through lukewarm water, not really paying attention. Ada took care that I didn’t slip on black ice or ever feel the looming of a mailbox or parking meter in front of my forehead, and I trusted her to do it. As though she were my own subconscious, ferrying me across the boundary of sleep.
“Keep your eyes closed,” she said, as my senses were enveloped by a sudden breath of cigarette smoke and body heat and human noise. “Stay here for a second.”
I stood blind and still in the middle of a wooden floor, swaying with the crowd, locking and unlocking my knees. “Who’s that?” I heard from a strange voice nearby, making its way out of the general bubbling of conversation. But if a reply came I never heard it. Ada returned and took my hand again, guiding me forward. Whispering, “Excuse me, excuse me,” I brushed by soft, invisible bodies. I banged my knee on something hard. And then I found myself seated in a too-tall chair, instructed to open my eyes at last.
It was still like a dream. Except that around me every face was amused, as though my presence was some wonderful joke. I was in a large and low-lit room, surrounded by tables full of men and women in evening clothes, facing a stage. Behind me, as I saw when I craned my neck, stretched a long rectangular bar, backed by mirrors and stacked with many-hued bottles of varying heights.
The conversation stilled and the hushing of a drum brush called my attention to the front of the room. Somehow, without my noticing, a band had taken up residence in front of the red curtain. A bassist leaned against his upright, picking his teeth, while the trumpet player and pianist opened up the room with a low tune, tossing handfuls of chattering notes out over the drumbeat. The bassist cracked his knuckles and started plucking away, layering his soft haum haum haum under the present melody.
And then she came, slipping out from a slit in the curtains I hadn’t seen. Her dress green and shimmering with sequins. My mother slunk across the stage, saying hello with her hips. She leaned briefly over the piano, hopped forward with a smiling “Oh!” when the bassist plucked out a few loud notes behind her. She hummed along with the song, audible even though she trapped the music under her tongue, feeling it out like a hard candy.
“Mama,” I said under my breath. She didn’t see me, and didn’t hear me. Instead she sang and tossed her hair — just a lock at a time over her left shoulder, as though keeping inventory or marking time. As the song rose — crescendoed, ascended the scale — she ran her hands, fingers open, down her hips and then lifted them slowly into the air with upraised palms. I felt the song invade behind my shoulder blades. Imagined her fingers on my cheeks.