John stands up and carefully passes the baby to me.
“I’m going to take a shower,” he says, “now that the bathroom’s free.”
I nod, and am just about to sit back, quietly baffled at our conversation, when he turns back and asks, “Is your mother going to be at the christening?”
His tone is so casual I almost don’t hear the way it’s laced with ice. But he says the word mother with such emphasis that I cannot miss it. He is still angry about my outburst then, Brie or no. I pale a little. The christening’s in three days, and the last two people I want in a room together are John and my mother. I can’t see how it will help to lie now though.
“I told her about it. So, maybe.”
“That’s just great, Lu.” He’s going brittle again as he walks away. “Because now it’ll really be a celebration.”
“She might not come,” I say to his back. He barely shrugs an acknowledgment, which is just as well. We both know that Sara will do what she wants. I can’t be certain about anything with her, except that she likes to stir the water. Even now, just the mention of her name causes ripples. What will happen when she sees my daughter and my husband, side by side? Eye to eye.
I shiver, thinking about the wave of chaos I felt chasing me down the street, away from the florist’s shop. And the chaos of my own making that I feel chasing me now.
14
All throughout my pregnancy I sang furiously. My agent was concerned for my health, but assured me that audiences would love it. “Like a cellist who throws their bow because they’re playing too passionately,” she said. “It’s kind of weird. Aficionados like that stuff.” So I booked small concerts and private performances — the birthday of a Japanese seafood exporter, a party celebrating the IPO of a software company in Silicon Valley.
I did seem to inspire a strange sort of passion. As soon as my belly began rounding out, I heard whispers in the audience when I walked onto a stage. Michelle shrugged when I told her. “That’s what you wanted, I thought.” She sent me designer maternity wear on loan, favoring pieces that accentuated the bulge Kara elbowed ever outward. The only one I refused to wear painted me up like a bull’s-eye, with a dot of red at the pregnancy’s crest.
“This is crude,” I said. “People will find this really vulgar.”
But on a night not long after I sent that dress back, I stepped out next to the piano in a simple black smock — my favorite accompanist, Rick, was with me, on loan from the Lyric — and a wave of enthusiastic gasps broke out, inspired by a problematic spotlight resting momentarily on my stomach. It had been contracted down to the size of a single face, and as it dilated out from my navel I felt uncomfortably vaudevillian. The applause — the frenzied, wolf-whistling adulation — nearly knocked me over. I hadn’t yet sung a single note.
Rick must have seen me going green, god bless him. He whispered, “They’re not here to look, they’re here to listen. They’ll remember.”
And I made sure that they did. In the early weeks of my pregnancy, my body had made a few adjustments without my say-so: unexpected notes popping out of my mouth during warm-ups; hands growing numb in the late afternoon as if a smaller set of fingers were rooting around in them, looking for a way out. But at this point, seven months in, the inconsistencies had quieted down, and I instead gained a modicum of power and range. Sometimes I felt as though no one was in my stomach at all and it was a hollow bell made to resonate like a gong.
Nodding to Rick, I rapped my thanks onto the piano and breathed as deeply as the changed real estate in my lungs would allow. We have a little code, Rick and I, in those knocks. We use them to alert one another to changes in tempo or octave — or even our choice of song. He looked at me, a question in his eyes, and I answered with a curt nod. Yes.
No one ever begins a performance with the Reine de la Nuit aria, because after that there aren’t many places to go. But this audience made me angry. In the dark, I could imagine them rooting around for popcorn or munching on candy smuggled into the ballroom at the bottom of overlarge purses. A warm, bland mass. The first notes cracked through them like a foot through spring thaw — I was the chill in every spine, the soft “Oh!” bitten back between freezing lips.
Death and despair blaze all around me! I sang. Disowned forever! Forsaken forever! Shattered forever! No one breathed. My daughter never. Nevermore! My audience for the evening was comprised of investment bankers. Maybe five among them spoke German, and one or two had familiarity with opera that extended beyond attending Carmen from a sense of guilty obligation when a boss lent out his box at the theater. In their experience, music was an excuse to wear a tuxedo or, if they were saucy, a fitted blue three-piece suit. The women wore gowns.
I undid them by the buttons. I burned off their clothes. The ones who understood the words I was singing looked at my belly and took it the worst, drained completely pale by the time the aria ended. The piece has never been outside of my range, but that night I felt my tessitura stretching and my throat throbbing like a frog in front of those thin-skinned business faces. If I’d tapped them with an egg spoon, the lot of them would have shattered into unusable fragments.
When my voice died away, the air in the ballroom felt thick. There was a shell-shocked silence in which one man adjusted his tie; a lady in the first row slipped her shoes off her heels. I certainly wasn’t going to be the first one to move, and held my show posture — air sucked carefully into my diaphragm so my shoulders wouldn’t visibly rise and fall. For a second I was worried that nothing would happen at all and that I was still invisible. Nothing but a belly. Then there was a small creak from the back of the room and the door popped open. A head peeked in, a small head. It was a tiny girl, no more than six, and after sweeping her eyes back and forth she blinked at me. Like an emissary from the future, or the past.
“Wow,” she said. And, as if they’d been waiting for her opinion, the audience burst into thunderous applause.
I thought Ada might disapprove of my continuing to sing when she heard my choice of repertoire. But she was happy as a fat seal in the sun. She fed me up on rich oils and leafy greens and a weekly glass of wine that she claimed would stir the baby’s blood. Once she sat with me in my living room, stroking the foot I’d placed lazy on her lap, and suggested stretching headphones out over my stomach.
“Oh god,” I said. “No Baby Einstein.”
She raised an eyebrow and, when I explained, swatted the idea aside like a gnat.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I just mean for her enjoyment. All the rest of that curriculum”—the word boiled on her tongue—“is for people who don’t already know what their children are going to be.”
I laughed, but inside my heart shrank back. Better than me: that’s what she meant. Although she wouldn’t have said it quite that way, I could hardly miss her meaning. She might have said the same thing to my mother, once.
I say that Sara loved her troubles, and that’s true; she didn’t have to tell me the stories she did, didn’t have to try and splinter my heart. But I should also be fair: Sara had plenty of troubles to love.