Playing Scared (26 page)

Take risks. Push the edge. Wondering what it would take to jar me out of my comfort zone, I thought of what had happened to my friend Mary, who in her twenties was dining at a fancy restaurant when she choked on a piece of meat. Her face swelled and turned beet red as she gagged for breath. Her date stared at her, frozen. She gestured down at her rib cage: Didn’t he know the Heimlich maneuver? He reached across, as if waking from a dream, and grabbed her by the breasts. Mary gasped in shock, and the chunk of meat flew out of her mouth and across the table. Somehow I, too, needed to be saved.

“No more negative self-talk,” Greene ordered. “What you think is what you get. What you fear is what you attract.” Nobody needed to convince me about the power of the mind, but when Greene warned me that my fear could manifest its very object, something in me fought back. “Banish all doubt!” he advised, to which I mutely answered, “Ye who enter here.”

“You’ve been watching the same negative horror films for too long,” he insisted. “Burn them. Let them go.”

Day after day we talked, and as the library recital got closer, the conversations got longer. The process was repetitive and exhausting, and I sometimes wondered whether my time would be better spent at the piano. Greene sensed my doubts. “I’m used to resistance,” he said. “There are two things holding you back, and that’s fear and negative thinking.”

That was hard to argue. All I had learned and practiced over the past year—the psychological insights, the meditation, not to mention the Brahms, the Bach, and the Debussy—hardly mattered if I couldn’t break through my wall of fear. I had to believe in myself enough to stand before an assembly and demand its attention. To say,
Listen to me as I speak through this music
. To assert,
I have something to say
.

I had, for the first time in my life, begun reading self-help books.
The Magic of Thinking Big. The Tools. Live Your Truth. The Power of Intention.
I began each one thinking it might have something unique to tell me, some nugget I was missing and hadn’t understood: a secret truth that would be as eye-opening and revelatory as a grab for the breasts.

None of them helped me as much as one of my last conversations with Greene. “How many years have you been
playing?” he asked as we approached the ten-day mark. “How many lessons have you had? You’re well trained. You’re a good student. With my help, with Noa’s help, it’s going to go well. You can do anything you set your mind to. If you took up rock climbing, I’m sure you’d figure that out. But my money’s on you with the piano. Say it with conviction: It’s going to go well.”

That was what he said to me the day before my recital, but the words that stuck were: “You can do anything you set your mind to.” I recognized those words. They were the very words my mother said to me throughout my childhood, into my adulthood, and well into her senility. They were the words that brought me full circle.

The night before the library recital, I scribbled a detailed description of how I wanted it to go. No, not “wanted.” Intended. Want, as Greene informed me, was a dysfunctional word. “Wanting creates more wanting. Life is not a discovery. It’s a creation.” There was a time I would have dismissed this as just another platitude, but now I embraced it as a motto, another good-luck charm for my growing stockpile. My most important charm was the blurry black-and-white photograph of my late aunty Maddy—my quintessential audience—that I kept on the piano rack. Now a little wooden totem sat next to it. I placed it there after attending a workshop by Margret Elson, a pianist and psychotherapist in Oakland, California, who specialized in the problems of artists and performers. I liked her integrative approach and the way she used both physical prompts and meditation to help overcome stage
fright. When she suggested that we use a cue or physical prompt to enter into a state of relaxation—hers was a polished green stone—I immediately recalled the totem that my best friend, Kathie, gave me in high school. For years, I wore it around my neck like an amulet. As soon as the workshop was done, I went home, found it in an old shoebox, and added it to my stockpile of talismans.

The morning of the library recital, my hands were cold and unresponsive as I warmed up at home. As I played slowly through my pieces, the errors mounted, and I was grateful that Greene had insisted on scheduling a final phone session. “It’s going to go well,” he assured me. “And no matter what happens, keep playing. If the legs of the piano fall off, keep playing. Never stop playing.” I thought of Vladimir Horowitz’s injunction as he accompanied the young Gitta Gradova to
a solo performance with the New York Philharmonic. “No matter what happens,
don’t stop playing
!” the famously jittery Horowitz told her on the cab ride to Carnegie Hall. “Remember, no matter what happens, keep on going! Don’t stop!
It’s prowincial to stop!
”
¹
The last thing I wanted was to be provincial.

Picture of Aunty Maddy that Sara kept on her piano
(Author’s family photo)

“I can do anything I set my mind to,” I muttered as I climbed the stairs to the library’s recital room, my husband, Rich, and son Max in tow. They’d been hearing a lot of these affirmations over the past few days and offered some of their own. “I love to play with you, Mom,” Max said. He was joining me for a Haydn violin sonata, the first piece on the program. “It’s going to go well,” I said to myself, sounding a little grim. The recital room was adjacent to the children’s room, where I’d spent so many contented hours, searching (unobserved, I now remembered wistfully) for books, with Max, then a toddler, curling up in my lap at story time. I stared at the piano, a decent upright that I had tried out a couple of days earlier to get a feel for the keys and the acoustics of the room. Now as I sat down to warm up, half a dozen mothers and children wandered in to listen. It made a nice first audience. Rich set up his iPad to record the recital, and when I looked up a moment later, there was Lynn Kidder, my erstwhile coach. She wore a huge smile. She had heard me play through my pieces a few days before and, if anything, was more positive than Don Greene. I was a different pianist from the one she had met a year ago, she said. Rich, of course, had told me the same, but he was my husband and I wasn’t sure I could believe him.

Kidder led me to a backroom corridor, where she had positioned a couple of chairs. She wanted to share a preperformance ritual with me. I had accumulated so many performance rituals by this point: the photograph, the totem, the belly breathing, the beta-blocker. Oh wait! I forgot to take my beta-blocker. I should have taken it at least an hour ago; now, it was only twenty minutes to showtime, not nearly enough time for it to kick in. What if my hands turned wet and clammy? What if my foot shook so badly that I couldn’t control the pedals? What if I was poisoned by adrenaline? I ran back to the recital room, where I’d left my handbag with Rich, rooted around, found the prescription bottle, and gulped down one of the little pills. Just another ritual, I told myself, returning to the corridor where Kidder was waiting. Following her lead, I crossed my left ankle over my right knee, placed my right hand on my ankle and my left hand under the ball of my left foot. Five long breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth. Then I did the same on the opposite side. I made a tent with my fingertips and smoothed my forehead, like wiping away the wrinkles. Max leaned against the wall and watched. Now twenty-seven, he had wrestled with his own bouts of stage fright. In his first year of conservatory in Toronto, he was so undone by anxiety that even his violin lessons became exercises in fear. He took solace in knowing that several of his teachers and coaches over the years had their own problems with stage fright. One was so cocky about his abilities that he hardly read over his solo before a rehearsal with a major orchestra. When on one occasion he flubbed his part, he felt so mortified that he was never
again able to play in public without a beta-blocker. What was the harm in a beta-blocker?

I breathed deep belly breaths, and now, with the door to the recital room open just a crack, I heard the announcement of my name and the applause of the audience. It was time. “People don’t enjoy watching someone playing like they’re being led to the gallows,” Greene had admonished. I walked through the door, Max behind me, Kidder, my page-turner, behind him. And there was my teacher, Ellen Chen, in the second row, next to my friend Mary. They were both beaming. I bowed and smiled at the audience. Maybe I should have taken a longer bow? Would I never stop second-guessing myself? Yes, but wasn’t it Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, who said that coming out onstage and bowing was the hardest part of his job? Stop! I commanded myself. Shut up.

I sat at the piano and looked at Max, whose violin was raised and ready. I stared down at the lettering on the fall board of the piano—a Knabe. Just below eye level. I waited. I centered. There was no hurry. It was like that long, sustained moment when you’re at the top of the roller coaster after the slow climb up the tracks, and you wait for the gravitational pull that sweeps you down with all that energy and danger. I can do anything I set my mind to, I told myself one last time. I took a deep breath.
Fasten your seat belts
, I wanted to shout.

I gave a sharp nod at Max and we launched into the Haydn. It was at once fluid and easy. Halfway through, I skipped a bar. Max understood instantly and jumped ahead to meet me. Such a maestro, I thought, and felt an outpouring of love and
gratitude for my middle son. It was so comforting to accompany him, to play in the background and let him sing. The second movement was a soft adagio. I felt myself relaxing into the music, which was so plaintive, so clear, so goddamn lovely. Was that a little mistake I’d made? I wasn’t sure and I didn’t care. I sang the notes in my head as I played, and when, too soon, it was over, all I wanted was to hear the music again. I think I yearned to hear it more than I yearned to play it. When the applause began, I felt stunned, the way you feel after awakening from an unexpected nap. Max and I hadn’t planned how we would take our bows, but we naturally linked arms and bowed clumsily.

Now it was just me and the piano. I had intended to start with the Bach Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, but there was something about Bach that made me feel exposed. I changed the order of the music and began with Debussy’s
Reflets dans l’eau
. I took another deep breath, let it out slowly, and reached for my center. Was that it? I waited and searched for that evanescent sense of core. Yes, there it was. I breathed into it and began—a music of dreams, a feeling of fluidity beneath my fingers, of reflections rippling in the water and moving within the keys. I thought, perhaps, there was a glitch in a crescendo of arpeggios, but it was soon far behind me, like a branch in white-water rapids. Deep in the rhythm of it, I told myself to just sing. The runs were softer, faster, more liquid, than any I could remember having played before. A thought broke through the ripples: I’m doing very well, I wonder what people think of me? I swatted it away like a gnat. And then, almost as soon as it had begun, it, too, was over. Between
pieces, I could hear the hum of a happy audience, which sounded to my ears like the hum of diners at a restaurant. I was having fun. Starting the Brahms rhapsody, I felt under a spell, watching my fingers moving over the keys. I seemed to drift like a balloonist above the room until there were no more notes to play and I came down for a landing, wishing I could keep going. As the applause began, I had an urge to raise a hand and tell my audience,
Wait, I can play more
. I looked over at my husband and realized that he was tearing up. I smiled at my teacher, who was grinning. A five-year-old girl laid her head on her grandmother’s shoulder and said loudly, “This is just like
Young Einstein
.” I was elated. I had never played so well.

It was June 30, 2013, and I was lying on the only available floor space in the green room, a Sunday school office in the basement of Christ Lutheran Church, just a few miles from my house. I stared up at the shelves crammed with Bibles, children’s activity books, and boxes of colored pencils, reminding myself to breathe and center. Directly overhead, a growing hum of voices filled my ears like the slow roar of the earthquake that ran through my house in 1989, announcing itself like the New York subway. There had even been a long suspended moment during which I wondered stupidly what the subway was doing under my house on the California coast. It was a flimsy house back then; we called it the Jolly Roger because of the shredded canvas awnings that flapped around on the decks. By the time I realized what was happening—not just an earthquake, but the promised Big One—the ground was shaking and I was screaming for my children, running down the hall, flung bodily from wall to wall. The exhilaration of survival stayed with me for days afterward. Now I anticipated that my performance, for which I’d been preparing the
past year, would also exhilarate. I was pretty confident that I would survive.