“Love,” he sings softly in a high thin voice behind Minna.
THREE
Minna Pratt is silent on the bus ride home. Emily Parmalee and McGrew are not silent. They sit behind Minna, making up nonsense songs about the bus passengers.
“A lady with a dog with its nose glued on;
The dog turns around and its nose is gone. . . .”
“Red dress, blue dress, a green dress, too.
The driver wears a dress and his name is Lew.”
Minna doesn’t watch people or count telephone poles or umbrellas or earrings. She thinks about WA Mozart and high third fingers and the elevator. Mostly she thinks about Lucas, defender of frogs and facts. Lucas with the lovely eye that wanders.
Minna stood outside her mother’s room, watching her write. Her mother wore a white oxford cloth shirt that belonged to Minna’s father. The sleeves were rolled up, her brown curly hair wild around her face. The typewriter clacked. Papers littered the floor. The television was on.
“Lance . . . I never meant for anything like this to happen. It started innocently. We went to the library to do research together.”
“Library, my foot,” said Minna’s mother to the television. “You were meeting at the YMCA long before the library.” She slapped the eraser cartridge into the typewriter.
By her mother’s feet there were laundry baskets, one piled on top of another, clothes pouring out, one basket filled to the brim with striped soccer socks. “One red stripe,” Minna had once heard her mother complain, “one red stripe with a blue stripe, one red stripe with a green, one blue, one blue and green, one tan, one black with a narrow tan, one tan with a narrow black!” Minna sighed, remembering her father saying that her mother was such a bad housekeeper that they were all in danger of death due to lint buildup.
It had been clear to Minna at an early age—maybe seven—that her mother was different. She hated to cook, except for toast and hot oatmeal that she enjoyed stirring into a mass of beige lumps. She avoided cleaning. Minna’s feet stuck to the kitchen floor sometimes, making sucking noises as she walked. You could eat off Emily Parmalee’s mother’s floor next door. Emily Parmalee once did. But all Minna’s mother liked to do was write.
Minna once complained to her father about it.
“Mom’s in the land of La,” her father had said, smiling, brushing lint off his suit. He stepped over a pile of books and papers to peer in the mirror at his tie.
“The land of La?”
Minna’s father was a psychologist. She had read some of his psychology books and thought he should be using words like “obsessive” and “deviant.” But her father didn’t use these words. Orson Babbitt would use these words, but Minna’s father didn’t.
“The land of La,” he said.
Minna saw his smile. She watched the way he looked at her mother. And Minna came to realize that her father didn’t care that her mother was in the land of La. The fact was, he liked her there.
Minna sat on the chair by her mother’s desk waiting for her to stop typing and begin to ask insane questions. Other mothers asked, “How was your day? Did you pass your math test? What did you have for lunch?” Not Minna’s mother. Minna’s mother peered into Minna’s eyes and asked such questions as, “Do you ever think of love?” Minna longed for her mother to ask something normal, but it rarely happened. “What is the quality of beauty? Of truth?” she would ask, her pencil poised. “Have you ever been in love with an older man?”
Today Minna waited patiently as her mother typed and muttered. At that moment she wished more than anything in the world for her mother to turn around and ask, “Did you fall in love today?” Today Minna could tell her. Minna waited. She looked over her mother’s head, reading the letters pinned on her bulletin board. Letters from her readers.
Dear Miss Pratt,
There is a mispeled word on page 14 of Marvelous Martha. I did not love the book.
Your fiend,
Betsy Brant
Dear Mrs. Pratt,
My class has to write to a book writer. I wanted to write to Beatrix Potter or Mark Twain but they are dead, so I’m writing to you.
How are you feeling?
Love,
Millicent Puff
Dear Mrs. Pratt,
Hi! Are you married? I’m not.
You seem very clever in your use of descriptive words (we call them adverbs and adjectives).
Regards,
Butch Reese
Her mother loved the letters and she answered every one. Tacked just below the letters, at eye level when her mother wrote, were her mother’s messages. Messages to herself, she called them. They changed often, though one had been there ever since Minna could remember, staring at her every day as if challenging her to understand what it meant.
FACT AND FICTION ARE DIFFERENT TRUTHS
Minna frowned. What did that mean? Facts were true. Wasn’t fiction invented? Untrue?
Today there were two new messages.
FICTION IS FACT’S ELDER SISTER—KIPLING
FANCY WITH FACT IS JUST ONE FACT THE MORE—BROWNING
Minna sighed. She didn’t understand those messages either, and she felt a sudden surge of annoyance with her mother for tacking them up. She looked down at her mother’s bare feet, watching them tap nervously on the floor as she typed. Her mother’s sneakers lay nearby, one without a shoelace. Minna looked at her own feet, her one sock, and wondered if what her mother had was catching, or inherited, like short fingers and low blood sugar.
“Ah! I see you there.” Her mother turned off the electric typewriter and slumped back in her chair, smiling at Minna.
Ask me. Ask me about love.
“How was chamber group?”
Minna stared. Of all times, a normal question.
“Fine. There’s a new violist. A boy,” said Minna. “Lucas.”
She waited.
“Lucas?” Her mother leaned on her typewriter.
Ask me.
Her mother wrote the name on a notepad.
“Lucas. A good name,” said her mother thoughtfully. She looked at Minna. “Do you ever think about . . .” she began.
“Yes?” Minna leaned forward eagerly.
“Names,” finished her mother. “Do you ever think about the importance of names?”
Minna stared at the written name. Lucas. She didn’t answer. She knew her mother wasn’t really asking her a question. She was thinking her own thoughts out loud this time. Answering her own questions.
Seeing the name written on paper was startling, almost as if Lucas were here in her mother’s writing room, sitting next to Minna. She looked around, trying to picture him here, sitting in the clutter of her mother’s room, surrounded by crumpled papers with bits and pieces of stories written there like coded messages. Minna shrugged her shoulders. It was not to be imagined. Lucas was neat and efficient. He wore two socks, one on each foot, and they matched. He was organized. Organized enough to have a vibrato. Organized enough to have a vibrato and to have a frog tucked safely inside his pocket. Was that the answer? Organization? No. There was a time when Minna had been organized. She had written in a journal, keeping track of herself on paper, reading herself from time to time. No, that was not all there was to Lucas’s vibrato. That was not all there was to Lucas.
Minna’s mother began typing again, slowly at first, then gathering speed like a ball rolling down a long hill. Minna sat for a while on the edge of her chair, watching her mother work. Her mother never saw her leave the room.
Dinner is quiet. McGrew hums into his whipped potatoes. Minna’s father smiles at Minna’s mother and loves her dinner, hamburger wrapped around dill pickles. Soon it will be time for dessert. Then Minna will go upstairs and close the bedroom door behind her. She will practice WA Mozart for the first time in a long time. She will practice and practice until she finds her vibrato, wherever it may be.
FOUR
The telephone call comes that evening at eight thirty, just as Minna
is finishing her homework. McGrew answers.
“What!” he says into the phone.
Minna grins. She loves the way McGrew answers the phone.
“Hold still,” he tells the caller. “It’s him,” he sings to Minna.
Him. Minna knows who him is, even though it is not the only him who has ever called her.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” says Lucas. “Which quartet do we have for tomorrow? I can’t remember.”
“K. 156,” says Minna. She smiles because she does not believe that organized Lucas would forget. “And the andante of 157. And don’t forget the Donizetti variations . . . Lucas,” she adds because she has not yet called him by his name. She remembers her mother telling her that for the first whole week that Minna was born her mother called her “baby,” “it,” or “her.” When she was home all alone one day her mother leaned over and whispered “Melinda” and burst into tears because it made her baby real.
“What?” asks Minna. “What did you say?”
“Dinner,” repeats Lucas. “We can walk to my house and eat dinner. Someone will bring you home. We could even practice together. Or not,” he adds quickly.
Dinner with Lucas. It sounds like a book title. Dinner with Lucas.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay,” says Lucas.
Then the phone goes dead. Lucas has hung up without saying good-bye. Minna hangs up and the phone rings again.
“Hello?”
“Good-bye,” says Lucas.
The bus was filled with sunlight and noise. Minna sat next to the window, McGrew and Emily Parmalee in the front seat swapping stories with their favorite bus driver, Lewis. Lewis was a stout pleasant man who had eight stout children who were also pleasant, and another on the way. Minna couldn’t imagine having so many children in one house. She pictured them bouncing off the floors to the walls and up to the ceilings and back again like a hot panful of popping corn. Lewis had brought some of them on the bus from time to time. They had non-stout names, like Rilla and Wesley and Blythe.
Minna took out her school notebook and underlined her vocabulary words: imaginary, listless, etcetera, vegetarian. She wrinkled her forehead. Her teacher, Miss Barbizon, always made the class write short stories using the words. It was, Minna thought, a very bad idea. The stories were also very bad. “Every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, remember,” Miss Barbizon would say with bright surprised eyes, as if the idea had just occurred to her.
Minna took out her pencil and licked the point because it made her write better. She wrote:
My bus driver friend, Lewis, drives a bus that is not imaginary. Lewis is not imaginary either, and he is not at all listless. What Lewis is is a vegetarian. This means he does not eat cows and sheep, turtles or toads. Et cetera.
The end.
Minna smiled. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Miss Barbizon would like it. The class would like it. Et cetera.
Outside the bus Minna stood for a moment on the street, shading her eyes. McGrew and Emily Parmalee climbed down the bus steps behind her.
“We’re going to a movie,” said Emily. “A foreign film. McGrew likes to sing the subtitles.”
Minna watched them walk down the street, picturing them fifty years from now doing exactly the same thing: McGrew with gray whiskers, humming, Emily Parmalee, her pockets loaded with jujubes for the movies, great whopper earrings hanging from her ears.
The sound of Mozart came from down the block—Willie on the street corner. The bus started up, sending warm puffs of exhaust after her. Minna picked up her cello and walked to where a group of listeners stood. Someone in the front row tossed money in the open violin case. A small brown dog sidled up, sniffed the case, then lay down and gazed up at Willie. Willie finished and the crowd applauded and slowly, reluctantly, moved off. He smiled at Minna and took a red handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the rosin off his instrument. He wore a matching handkerchief tied around his neck and a dark blue shirt with a button missing; the shoelaces on his boots did not match. Minna thought suddenly of her mother’s missing shoelace.
She took a quarter out of her pocket and handed it to Willie.
“Thank you for playing,” she said.
Willie bowed.
“You’re welcome.” He gave her back the quarter. “And I thank you for listening.”
Minna grinned. It was their ritual, as reassuring as the sounds of her father snoring at night, McGrew’s humming, the savage clash of pans in the kitchen when her mother began breakfast. Willie was always there when Minna went to the conservatory, standing on the same corner, like the gargoyles, playing music she loved. They never talked about anything else . . . only music. Sometimes they hardly spoke at all.
Minna left Willie and Mozart and the small brown dog in the sun and climbed the conservatory steps. Small children pushed past her, carrying small cases. She could hear a Suzuki class on the first floor, dozens of fiddlers playing variations of “Twinkle Twinkle” together. She could picture them in footlong skirts or jeans with reinforced knees, with cigar-box-size violins, all standing. She remembered her own quarter-size cello stored somewhere in the attic, a small piece of Minna’s past.
Minna pushed open the door to the rehearsal room and Lucas was there, just as Minna had remembered him. He waved to her.
Orson opened his music folder.
“Ode to Joy!” he exclaimed, peering at the sheet of music on his stand. “Blah. A lackluster piece. New word, lackluster,” he explained to Porch. “Dull and lacking in radiance. Why can’t we play the entire Ninth Symphony?”
Porch smiled wryly.
“You’re good, Orson, but you are not a symphony. And if you play it well you will not find it a lackluster piece.”
“Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” quoted Imelda.
Minna unzipped her cello case and took out her cello and bow.
“Speaking of doing things well,” said Porch, his hands behind his back, “did you practice, Orson?”
“I always practice,” said Orson brightly.
“Without your bow?” Porch held Orson’s bow in his hands.
There was a silence. Lucas crossed his feet, smiling faintly. Minna stood still, her cello leaning against her.
“I plucked,” said Orson.
“A canny boy,” said Porch. He handed Orson his bow and looked at them. “That means shrewd. Now we shall all be shrewd,” said Porch sternly.
Orson sat, a broad grin on his face, his hair wild as if a wren had flown in it and out again.
“Legato, remember,” Porch said, raising his violin. “One note connecting to another; smooth and big and”—he smiled at them—“full of radiance.”
Minna looks sideways at Lucas, who knows she is looking at him. He smiles at his music, his head bent, his hand placed firmly in place on the strings. His hair falls down over his forehead and Minna thinks about radiance. A good word. Minna feels full of radiance. Maybe it’s the music that makes her feel that way, Ode to Joy, after all. Maybe it’s Lucas’s vibrato. Maybe. Maybe not.
FIVE
“Elevator or stairs?” asked Lucas in the hallway.
Minna wanted to choose the stairs, but after a moment she reached out and pressed the elevator button. Inside she held her cello with one hand, grasping the handrail with the other so tightly that her knuckles turned white. The elevator bumped and began to move. There was no litter today. The wrappers and apple cores and empty soda cans had been removed. Minna read what had been written on the walls. MARSHA EATS GRASS. MARIO IS AN ICONOCLAST.
“What does that mean, iconoclast?” asked Minna.
Lucas shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. He smiled at her. “We’ll look it up.”
Minna thought suddenly about her mother’s messages tacked up on her wall for her to read but not understand. Could she look them up somewhere?
The door opened at the second floor and a herd of small children crowded in, arguing
about sharps and flats.
“Is so,” hissed a girl with only a scattering of teeth. “A G-flat is the same as an F-sharp.”
“Is not!”
“Is so!”
Lucas grinned at Minna over their heads. The elevator door opened and they ran off down the hall.
It was a short walk to Lucas’s house, past apartment buildings and stores: a book shop with a cat sleeping in the window, curled around a thesaurus; another window filled with china and glass. Street vendors sold hot dogs and roasted walnuts from pushcarts, buses and cars streamed by them, a woman pushed a stroller with a sleeping child, a balloon tied to his wrist. They passed a pet store.
“Sometimes I buy frogs here,” said Lucas.
They stopped to peer in. Gerbils slept in shredded newspaper, a parrot sitting on a perch opened its bill at them.
Minna counted twelve trees growing along the streets with twelve black cast-iron fences around them. Two children played hopscotch on the street, the outlines neatly chalked in white. They played with flat stones, and they were very serious. Lucas stopped to watch.
“I’ve never played hopscotch,” he said.
Minna looked at him.
“Never ever?”
Lucas shook his head. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters, you know.”
“But your parents could teach you,” said Minna. She had, until this moment, forgotten that it was her mother who had taught her. It had been a hot windless day, and her mother had drawn hopscotch squares on the sidewalk outside and been fierce about winning. Minna smiled at the memory.
“My parents are not the hopscotch type,” said Lucas beside her.
“What about kick the can?”
“No.”
Minna pushed her hair back behind her ears.
“Well, I’ll teach you then,” she said matter-of-factly, making Lucas smile.