Tempo Change (2 page)

“My training isn’t formal. But neither was the training of any of my heroes. Paul McCartney can’t read music.”

He smiled at that, then interlaced his fingers and stared at me over the tops of his glasses.

“Do you sing?” he asked.

“Well, you know, like most people. Around the house.”

“Do you perform in public? On the guitar, that is.”

“No.”

“So you’re really just a music
fan.”

I bristled. “I’m a music critic.”

“Oh, dear,” Dr. Morleymower said, and his face looked
truly stricken. Let’s just say he didn’t get more handsome when he did that. “Do you really think that’s a worthy calling in life?”

“Somebody has to do it.”

“Yes, I suppose somebody does, but it seems to me everyone rushes at that calling. ‘Anti’ is not actually a philosophical credo.”

“Look, I can see where this is going,” I said. “You want me to join some group. I’m not a joiner. And I seriously do not play sports.”

“I see. Well, I’m your guidance counselor, so what good would I be if I let you cling to that position? I’m afraid I must insist you join something. I’m going to take away one of your free periods and add Madrigals to your busy schedule.”

I sank into the Victorian armchair. I suspect that waves of heat were coming out of the top of my head like in cartoons. It was bad enough to join something, but a chamber choir that called itself Madrigals was just humiliating.

“I will alert Mr. Carmichael that you will be joining them for E period.”

“Look,” I said, “do we have to take such drastic steps? What about debate team? I’m good at arguing.”

He shook his head. “You are a sophomore. By this time, most students have found their niche, and spaces are filled. We have quite a promising debate team, and there are no openings. Glancing at your options, I see the following: Equestrian. You don’t happen to have a horse, do you?”

“It’s a pretty small house. I think I would have noticed.”

“Chess club. Do you play?”

“No, but I’m a fast learner.”

“And Madrigals. Despite your denial, I suspect music is in your blood.”

My spine went up, which wasn’t an altogether rare occurrence for me.

“Why don’t we get a blood test and see?” was my response.

Dr. Morleymower frowned and said, “Miss Kelly, if you weren’t such a good student and if I were of a less sanguine disposition, I’d take offense at your tone. I might even give you a demerit. Call your mother, perhaps?”

I swallowed hard. I liked to think of myself as a rebel, but I hated getting demerits and I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone calling my mother.

I looked at his watery blue eyes, and there was a deep well of determination in them. I knew I wasn’t going to win this battle, so I figured I might as well take the path of least resistance.

“Madrigals,” I said.

“Yes, you’ll fit right in.”

Fit right in.

Somewhere in the world, my father was feeling a pain deep in his chest.

H
E LEFT WHEN
I
WAS SIX
.

I remember that day because I knew it was going to happen. It wasn’t that my parents’ fights had gotten louder or scarier. It was that they had stopped happening. Even as a kid I knew that was a bad thing. It meant they weren’t even talking. It meant they had given up.

We lived in Silver Lake then, which was a hip part of East L.A., multiethnic and full of artists and all kinds of people with alternative lifestyles. The ladies who babysat for me next door were a couple and they were foster parents to about ten kids all of different colors, some with things wrong with them, and there were all kinds of animals, including lizards and raccoons. I loved it. I felt like I was living in a happy circus. We put on talent shows and worked in the garden and dressed the animals up in doll clothes and
jumped on trampolines and there was a tree house. Somebody was always falling out of it and there were broken bones and trips to the emergency room but it all seemed normal and fun.

My house had its own kinetic energy. There were always musicians coming and going. When the musicians left, sometimes my parents would argue. Sometimes they wouldn’t, they would just laugh and talk. Sometimes my father would go out to the small guesthouse behind where we lived and he’d stay there all night. That’s where his studio was. I wasn’t allowed to go in. Sometimes I’d peek through the dirty window and see the panels and the soundboards and the amps and the guitars and the keyboards. It looked fun but I knew it was serious.

I knew my father was famous. I just didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know that famous was a rare thing to be. I thought the ladies next door—Mimi and Joss—were also famous. I thought their million kids were famous and that my mother was famous and I was, too.

When my father left, I realized that it was only him.

The musicians didn’t come around anymore.

The house was quiet.

Famous had gone away.

My mother tried to soft-sell it at first. She said he was going away to think. Since I often went to my room to think, and it only took about twenty minutes, I kept expecting him to walk back in, refreshed and ready to play cards or read me a book. He sometimes did those things but it was always unpredictable. For days at a time he was in the mood for us and he’d act like a normal dad. Then he’d get a
broody expression and he’d go into the studio behind the house and my mother and I would do things alone and quietly. We’d watch movies or play board games. She tried to pretend we were having normal days, but I knew we were waiting for him to come back and be cheerful. Sometimes his disappearances, or his thinking spells, would go on for what I now realize were weeks but felt like months.

When he did come back, though, it seemed like Christmas. He’d play us the songs he’d written and then his musician friends—his band, I suppose—would come over and there would be all-night jam sessions. I was able to sleep through the noise because it was happy noise. Those were exciting times, but they weren’t the best times. The best times were when he was immediately finished with a project and waiting to hear from his manager or the record label, and that’s when he’d play games with me and act like a dad.

Sometimes he’d go on tour with his band, and those were pretty good times, too. He was always happy when he was touring and he’d call home a lot and my mother was cheerful. Sometimes we’d fly to nearby cities to see him—San Francisco or Portland or Seattle or Las Vegas. When he came back from a tour, my mother would make him a special meal and I’d make cheesy banners and he appreciated it all for a few days, and then he’d fall into a funk and disappear.

I thought that was how all families lived. With these enormous hills and valleys, everyone tiptoeing around the unwieldy nature of talent, knowing there was a great force in the home and that force always had to be served and understood and given a wide berth. I had no idea that in some
houses, most houses, every day looked pretty much the same.

I remember going to my best friend Tammy’s house in kindergarten and her parents were both teachers. They came home at the same hour and they talked and they made dinner and we ate it and then we went to the den and watched television. At a certain hour, one of them would say, “Bedtime.” And we’d go to bed. When we got up in the morning, they were exactly the same people they’d been the night before and there was no chance of excitement.

I felt very sorry for Tammy, and I was sure she and her family envied my family and felt inferior. Then one day Tammy and I had an argument while we were playing, and Tammy went and told her mother. I was standing outside the doorway of her shiny clean kitchen and I heard her mother say, in a low voice, “Don’t be so hard on Blanche. Things are tough enough for her at home.”

That was the first time it ever occurred to me that things were tough for me at home. And about to get tougher.

When my dad left, he wrote a note to my mother saying that he had to go find himself. This she explained later, not right away, and I’ve never seen the note, so all I have is the hand-me-down version. He said (according to her) that his priorities had gotten shifted around because of his success and he couldn’t hear the music in his head anymore, and without that, he had no idea who he was.

He went around the world for a year and we’d get the occasional postcard. He finally landed in Bali and said that
was where he intended to stay. He said it was a magical place and the air was clear and he could think. He sent instructions for us to join him. My mother actually started making the plans, and then she got another letter and it said, “This is no place for you two. Hang tight and I’ll be home when I can.”

My mother hung tight for a while and then she dropped me off at Joss and Mimi’s and went to find my father. I was certain she’d be able to bring him home. She was going to pick him up, the way she picked me up from school. My mother back then was feisty and determined. She had tattoos. Small ones, where you mostly couldn’t see, but this was way before anyone was doing it, let alone girls or mothers. She had short hair and it always changed colors and her eyes were green and had laughter and mischief in them. Back then. Not so much as time went on.

She didn’t bring him home.

In fact, he wasn’t even in Bali when she got there. He had moved on. She hadn’t found him. For a long time after that, she didn’t even hear from him.

It’s hard to talk about the next few years. Her not leaving her bedroom. Us getting kicked out of the house. We went to live with Joss and Mimi, which felt entirely different from me just staying there during the daytime.

There was so much going on I couldn’t understand. I didn’t even know my mother was drinking in her bedroom and that was why she couldn’t leave it.

I didn’t know what had happened, either, when she suddenly got sober. Joss and Mimi, turned out, were able to
help make things improve. They dragged her to AA meetings and then she started eating again and then she started talking in rhymes and slogans but she was able to leave the house and get a job.

Finally, when she moved us to Santa Monica, I felt we’d left Los Angeles altogether. Gone was the edgy feel of being in a city, the crazy loud landscape and the odd collection of people. Santa Monica was like a small town, like the one she had come from somewhere back East, and later she said she moved us there because it felt like someplace she could manage. We rented a tiny house a few blocks from Main Street and the ocean. Main Street was exactly what it sounded like, a quaint little stretch of stores and restaurants. Mom worked in a clothes store and then she became a manager. She had pulled it together (not expecting any help from my father). Eventually she opened her own place. It was called Biscuit. This clothing store took all of her time, and she said it was our future.

She decided to look into sending me to private school because she was worried about me not getting into a good college. She wanted me to have a life with choices. I took tests and scored high enough to become a scholarship kid at LaHa, and that was how my life was shaking out. LaHa wasn’t a great school, Mom had a career but not really, Santa Monica was in Los Angeles but so far from it you could barely get a glimpse of the fancy life. We were on the periphery of everything.

Now that I think about it, it was probably part of the AA program that made my mother forgive my father and not
say anything bad about him. She never said anything about him at all.

The last really negative thing I heard her say was on Christmas Eve when I was twelve. They had been talking on the phone and he must have made some vague commitment to come back for the holidays and then he’d backed out. She said to me, “That’s just typical of your father. He never wants to have the hard conversation. He just drifts away and depends on everyone else to call it fate.”

I remember lying in my bed that Christmas Eve, thinking about when I believed in Santa Claus. I mainly believed in him because my father used to put on a big show, making footprints on the carpet and creating reindeer tracks in our front yard and writing little notes from Santa on my presents. I knew he was doing it but part of me still wanted to believe. So I decided that because he, Santa, was famous, he knew my dad, who was also famous. They traveled in the same circles; they understood each other.

As I was crying in my bed that night, thinking about Santa Fraud (my new name for him), I thought also about the other big headliner of Christmas, which was God. It was all a big act. My parents didn’t believe in God, really, but because they occasionally made references to Him in the early days, I bought it all. Big fat guy who brings presents, big loving Dad in the sky, why not?

Santa leaves, my father leaves, why wouldn’t God leave?

My life was an evacuation site.

I
CAN’T TAKE YOU RIGHT INTO
M
ADRIGALS CLASS
. W
E’RE
going to need to stop by the lunchroom first, where I spent an hour complaining to my best friend, Gigi.

If you think this is going to be a story about how I came to love Madrigals, then keep reading. You haven’t found the toy surprise.

Gigi was sitting at one of the two long Victorian tables at LaHa, studying for AP biology, even though we were three days into the semester.

Gigi was feeling a lot of pressure from her parents to become president. I’m not talking about president of the class, either. Though they were hoping for that, too. They were making her run for class office in the spring because they said any career in politics starts early. Bill Clinton, they said, was president of his class all the way through his various
schools. Hillary didn’t make it, but she left eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling. Gigi was supposed to make it.

Gigi didn’t talk back to her parents. They weren’t that kind of parents.

She was going to be the first female minority president. She was some beautiful exotic mix of Latina, African American, and Native American. No one could be entirely sure, since Gigi was left in the parking lot of a hospital, in a basket with a note attached to her. It said: “I can’t handle it.”