The first time she discovered me this way, Ada sat across from me and smiled as if we were playing a game.
“What are you doing?”
I didn’t look up. It seemed important to maintain focus on my nails.
“I have to wait for them to dry. Otherwise I’m going to mess them up.”
Ada made a small aah and came over to me, picking up one of my hands in her own. “So when will these be dry?” she asked. “They look dry to me.”
I scowled. “You can’t tell by looking.”
“So touch one.”
“I’m not allowed.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well.”
We sat quietly together for some time. The beams of sun coming through the window traveled across the waxcloth on the table and crept up my wrists. At last Baba Ada stood up and stretched her arms, pressing her nails into her palms and then wiggling her fingers, balling her hands up and then extending them so her arms looked like wings.
“Sitting here is making me stiff, lalka. I’m going to go get a hot chocolate,” she said. “I was going to invite you, but I can see that you’re busy. So I suppose I’ll just have to go alone.” She walked out into the hall, still talking back at me as she put on her coat. “It’s too bad. A long way to go by myself, since I don’t have a book to read on the train ride. And I’ll be awfully lonely if I have to wait for a table. But there’s nothing to be done.”
Before she had fitted her key to the lock, I sprang from my seat and threw myself against the door. Ada came back in and wrapped me up against the wind outside, making sure that my scarf and hat matched the new grown-up color of my nails. Sitting pressed together on the train, rocking back and forth as we traveled towards a bus exchange, Ada told me about Greta’s home in Poland: about what had been and what was to come. I leaned into her on the turns and let the words seep beneath my skin, as the light had in our small kitchen.
I knew that Ada was trying to make me feel better about the fact that my mother had left me alone. What I didn’t understand was that once upon a time, my mother had heard these stories too. That she’d been petted and painted and made to believe she was whole, until one day she cracked open and out I came: a smaller doll with a sleeker voice.
Ada taught us both that Greta’s magic set our family line in motion: women who came from women, women who came with music. Each woman a better singer, a more perfect form. When I was a girl I couldn’t see that in these stories, Kara was implied by my very existence. That I was required to improve on my mother, and that the day would come to improve on me.
My first major role was almost Mélisande from Debussy, and it was so boring that I cried the first time I ran through it with Baba Ada, who was at that point still my de facto voice coach. You barely need a soprano for the part, and I just think the libretto is ridiculous, with its all-too-fragile heroine and her darkly fated loves. I was an apprentice at the Lyric back then, allowed occasionally to fill in soubrette roles, like the Massenet, and pretend I wasn’t biting my fingernails to pieces every time a new show was being cast. So when they decided to give me a genuine debut, whispering the news in my ear and giving me a champagne toast, I was meant to be very grateful.
The only justification I could fathom for the casting was that I was young and knew how to hold back my sass onstage when the moment demanded it. They didn’t want a mezzo-soprano, they wanted someone really innocent, and after spending twenty years under Ada’s watchful eye, I suppose I appeared to qualify. She hadn’t been careful with Sara, because Sara’s voice is low and easy, waves against a boat and wine dripping down the neck of a bottle. But my voice is limoncello, steam from a kettle, flint. It can be dangerous if you turn your back on it, and Ada knew better than to make that mistake again.
The first day of rehearsal was a disaster. Or at least it started out that way. I’d been working over the role phrase by phrase, picking it apart with Baba Ada in our living room, while outside the snow melted and then froze back up in rigid bulges. We could have worked in my mother’s empty room — had, in fact, intended to turn it into a studio. But that didn’t pan out. Her absence shuddered through it, always. When I crossed the threshold I couldn’t sustain notes and started breaking out in nervous sweats. My throat closed up, growing thicker and thicker from the inside, and I swallowed with great glottal gulps until Ada couldn’t take it anymore and swatted my bottom. I felt smoke rising behind my eyes. So we moved back into the living room.
I stood onstage at the Lyric beside the piano and drummed it with the pads of my fingers. The pianist gave me a dirty look — I was nowhere near the tempo of the section we were rehearsing. Pelléas et Mélisande has no real arias, but there are two brief solos and one of them belongs to Mélisande. A foundling from the woods, she marries a prince and falls in love with his brother but is too stupid to understand quite what she’s done. Her song from the tower is all about her long and long-suffering hair — shades of Rapunzel — very waiflike and full of dull quavering. That was what we were starting our day with. I tapped out the rhythm but sped it up to triple the appropriate pace. In my rehearsals with Ada, I’d sprinted through the song to keep myself motivated, and it left us both rolling on the floor with tears in our eyes. My long hair awaits you in the tower—it sounds much better frantic, as maniacal as its meaning.
“Ehm, I think we should get started,” said Rick. These days, I’ve come to love Rick. I love that his name sounds like it should belong to a bricklayer instead of an accompanist. And that he can hold a casual conversation while playing Tchaikovsky’s first concerto. But that morning I did not love him yet.
“I am started,” I snapped at him. “All warmed up and nowhere to go.”
“Whatever.” Rick yawned. He’s used to dealing with divas, actual divas. I barely weighed enough to legally give blood.
“All right,” said the director, Martin. He was parked in the fifth row — not the house’s best seats but close enough to be audible when he wanted to start dissecting our work. Beside him sat Philippe, who was overseeing the whole season, and looked crassly intimidating in a black mock turtleneck and blazer. It was unusual for Philippe to attend a first run-through, and I pushed away the feeling that perhaps his presence had to do with me. The feeling that this was perhaps a test.
“From the beginning. We’ll run through the tower song a few times at least so we can”—he waved a hand above his head—“get calibrated, really make sure Mélisande feels right. She’s the key to setting the tone here. Remember”—Martin swiveled to face me directly—“in her head, she’s still lost in the woods, even though technically speaking she’s up in the castle. And she’s about to get a lot more lost, though she doesn’t know it yet.”
He leaned over and whispered something to Philippe and then settled back in his seat, hitching one ankle over his knee.
“Okay, Mellie, let’s take her for a ride,” said Rick. I glared at him but said nothing, just curled my fingernails up into my palm so I wouldn’t be tempted to tap them on the piano shell. I rested my other hand briefly on my stomach, checking my own posture since there was no ruler here to keep me in place. Then I breathed, and sang.
Mes longs cheveux descendent jusqu’au seuil de la tour;