The Opposite of Music (3 page)

“I'm not sure. Dr. Gupta asked us that too. Maybe I should talk to Marty about it.”

Linda lies on her back, staring at the ceiling. “Hey, isn't Dad's cousin Amy a bit, if you'll pardon the expression, nuts?”

“‘Nuts' is not a word that we use in this house.”

“We used to.”

“Well, we don't anymore.”

“Okay, I'll try again. Isn't Cousin Amy a bit flaky or a bit off-kilter? The cats, the newspapers, the empty jars and jar lids, the smell? How many cats were there, anyway?”

“I think the population reached as many as thirty-five or more at the point that they were taken away. Now she seems happy with just the seven.”

“Ew,” Linda says.

“It is a big house,” Mom reminds her.

“Let me write that down. And I think I remember Uncle Marty saying that someone else on Amy's side was a kleptomaniac and spent time in prison.”

“One of your father's cousins, you mean?” Mom stares. She may never have heard this story. Marty says he finds me easy to confide in. “Could that have been the one who returned a positive RSVP to our wedding but didn't show up? I always thought he was terribly rude. Well, he missed a good meal.”

Mom gets up and cracks the door, motioning for silence. “Your father's up. Resume your normal activities. To be continued.”

You can see the highway through the slats in the fence behind our house. A tunnel runs under it, where the workmen used to cross back and forth while the road was being constructed. I was forbidden to go inside, but who could resist? A concrete-lined cylinder, cracked in places, rumored to have rats. By the time I had the courage to run through it, I was too tall to get through without stooping, making it a fast, uncomfortable trip with the sound of traffic close to my head. Every kid from the old regime has been through that tunnel and back once. The new ones probably will never even know it's there.

This is the oldest part of Route 128, north of Boston from Hawthorne to Gloucester, where the highway has only two lanes in either direction. The houses on my street were built all on one floor, and they're all identical, although some are turned this way or that on the winding, hilly road. When I was little, you could walk into any house blindfolded and be able to find a box of cornflakes, a piece of chalk, or a Nerf ball.

From the driveway (no garage, no carport, two economy cars), you walk in the front door (no hallway, foyer, or vestibule) directly into the living room. Here is a big plate-glass window ideal for leaning on for hours, when you were small, in case a rabbit or anything went by, and leaving your hand and lip prints on the glass like white stage makeup.

A dining room with crank-out windows is behind the living room, and if it's summer you have to decide whether to be cool and hear the highway noise or enjoy a sweaty silence. Next to that is a kitchen that looks into the living room over a partial brick wall topped by metal bars, so your mother could see what you were doing if it got too quiet. At one end of the house are a woody den with built-in spaces for books and your family's one TV, then a small cement-floored room for your tools, sports equipment, winter boots, cleaning supplies, and so on. This room contains your oil tank, your clothes dryer and ironing board, and a pull-down ladder for reaching the attic crawlspace to get toys you've outgrown but like to visit, Halloween costumes, and all your grandparents' things. Also a pink kitchen table with black legs, where your father keeps an ancient suitcase full of small hardware parts that he never bothers to sort. And which you open sometimes, on your own, to crunch the parts with both hands and hear them clank—like a sea that someone drained the water from, leaving only shells.

At the other end of the house are two junior-size bedrooms and a hall bathroom, and one big bedroom with its own sink and toilet. Outside are a bicycle shed, a garden shed, and a patio made of concrete blocks.

All perfectly adequate, you would think. But then in September, our uphill neighbors built an addition, a second-story bedroom the length of the whole house and a mammoth garage with a separate apartment above it for their son who is not much older than me, and just as the builders were finishing the parents' balcony and the appliance store truck was pulling up with the son's gas grill, our house was eclipsed. Mom stood in the shadow beside her rosebushes, shaking a fist at the neighbors' house (although she knew they weren't home at the time).

“How could they do this to us?” she wailed.

I'm not sure, but I think this shadow could be contributing to our problems.

welt·schmerz
\'velt · shm rts\
n, often cap
[G. fr.
Welt
world +
Schmerz
pain, fr. OHG
smerzo
; akin to OHG
smerzan
to pain—more at
SMART
] (1875)
1:
mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state

Intellectual, no? It would be just like Dad to go for that one.

Just after one a.m. sounds begin in the hall. Two voices so familiar they could originate in my own chest. The rubbing swing of the door over carpet, and the swoosh of two sets of slippered feet. My curtains are partly open, and street-lights are reflected in our first snow. A column of light falls over my bed, illuminating me, Triumph's front fender, and a thumbtacked Escher print of flying fish in formation, like torpedoes.

The people switch lights on as they move through the house. These new lights seep under my door. The other lights cause my window to darken and my column of light to fade.

In the kitchen, the woman talks more than the man. She speaks mostly in whispers. The man isn't a good whisperer. When he thinks he's whispering, he's just talking but adding breath sounds to it.

The refrigerator door opens and closes. A pan rattles on the stove. Liquid is poured. The fridge door opens and closes again. The burner clicks several times as it heats up. One person stirs the pot while the other pads across the kitchen floor. A cabinet door opens. Dishes click. Liquid is poured from the pot. The kitchen light goes out. Other lights go out. My window gets brighter. My column gets bigger. They stop just outside my door.

“Billy's asleep,” Mom whispers.

“Good,” says Dad. “Billy's asleep.”

I'm resting my head over a plate of macaroni and cheese when someone knocks my elbow.

“Hey!”

Mitchell Zane and Andy Bock sit down with their trays. Mitchell slides the wrapper to one end of his straw, where it crumples into a miniature Japanese lantern.

“You fell asleep in chemistry,” he says.

“Did anyone notice?”

“Other than me, you mean?” He nods ominously.

“Zwicker?”

“No, not Zwicker. Just a couple of kids.” He dips the straw carefully into one corner of his milk carton.

“Maybe I wasn't asleep. Maybe I was just thinking.”

Still, I could take or leave the sciences. The sciences have two flaws. One, they build from week to week, so if you space out for a few weeks, the train leaves the station and there's no hope of catching up. Two, they rely too much on received wisdom. The reason I haven't done well—and I'm not trying to excuse myself here—is that we were plunked down and expected to memorize the periodic table and all these formulas, and my true question just never got answered. Which is: How do we know all this? How do we know, for instance, that an electron circles around a proton (or whatever), or that carbon consists of five electrons and two protons (or whatever)? Has someone actually seen this with their own eyes? How do we know it isn't all a scam? Had this been answered at the beginning, I may have invested more energy in keeping up.

Now the arts—those are the subjects for me. No building from week to week. You can zone out for days, but as long as you jump back in before the deadline, read the book or look at the painting or listen to the music before that test or discussion, you will get it: the right insight, sometimes a brilliant one, all in a flash. And you don't have to rely on received ideas. You can come up with your own. You can disagree: “No, Ms. Thatcher, I don't think that's what Zora Neale Hurston meant to say.” Try pulling that in chemistry!

In the arts, you have a shot at coming up with something new too. While the chances of my discovering or synthesizing a new chemical element are about nil (Billonium? Morrisonium?), my chances of creating a mind-blowing original work are not bad. Even Dad, having dropped out of art school without getting his degree, could pick up his paints one day and do the painting of his career.

I know myself. I will never be well rounded. I will never respond appropriately to meetings in which my guidance counselor tells me I'm not working up to my potential. I will never catch up in chemistry or biology. Instead, I'll focus on music, and a flash of genius will save me. I'll win a songwriting competition sponsored by some organization like ASCAP and find work as a songwriter in Memphis, Austin, or Nashville.

But it's good of Mitchell to watch out for me. We were born on the same day, although he looks sort of middle-aged. He's rotund, and he holds his pants up with suspenders that make him look even rounder. You can't help thinking that although the suspenders were straight when he clipped them on, now they look like the seventy-fifth and hundred fiftieth meridians on a globe.

In English last year, he would signal to me when he thought a poem we were studying contained a coded reference to masturbation. He sat ahead of me and would tilt his head at the appropriate time when one of our classmates read aloud. Andy tried to participate but was never good at it. He picked things that were either too obvious or off the topic, having to do just generally with sex. When we studied Robert Frost, Andy tilted his head at the book title,
You Come Too.

“How come you guys didn't laugh?” he asked after class.

“Too easy,” Mitchell said.

“But what about his horse being queer?”

“That has nothing to do with anything, Andy. The fact that a line makes everyone else in the class laugh doesn't mean it gets a laugh out of me.”

The killer came when we were reading “Desiderata” by Max Ehrmann. When Sandi Buscaglia read the last line, “Strive to be happy,” I saw the back of Mitch's head tilt very slightly, about five degrees, and I nearly had to leave the room.

Now Gordy drops his lunch bag on the table.

“You know, you were asleep in chemistry class.”

“I know.”

Mitchell drains his milk and opens a second carton. “Fortunately,” he says, “I took tremendous notes. I can come by with them after school.”

The cafeteria noise swells in my ears like a jet engine. I bite into a hard, whitish tomato slice that came with the macaroni. Mitchell waits for me to answer, and I look at Gordy but he doesn't give anything away. I don't want Mitchell at the house right now.

“I notice you haven't invited me over for a while. Are you secretly developing some kind of explosive in your room? Perhaps your ignorance of the difference between hydrogen and helium was just a smokescreen.”

“Ha!” Andy says. “That's right, he's developing a bomb.”

“Um, no.”

“You're writing something, is that it? You spend all your time with the headphones on, opening the door only to accept a tray of food and water.”

“Anybody, grapes?” Gordy takes a big bunch from his lunch bag.

Mitchell looks at Gordy. “Our mute friend here tells me you're into New Orleans jazz.”

“What I'm really looking into is funeral jazz.”

“Okay.” Mitchell picks up bits of paper trash and piles them in one corner of his tray. Normally he can find a way to make anything seem funny or stupid. But even he finds it hard to joke about this. The thing that everyone knows about Gordy, even if they've never spoken to him, is that his mother died right after they moved into town. “Well, could you recommend a couple of titles?”

“Yeah,” Andy says. “I'd enjoy listening to some of it.” He's doing his earnest Boy Scout thing that Mitchell calls his talking-to-adults voice. Gordy is worse off than I thought. His semi-orphaned state is making him not one of us.

“There's one by the Magnificent Seventh that gives you a good introduction,” Gordy says.

“And this is all music that gets played at people's funerals?” Mitchell asks.

“Uh-huh.”

Gordy grows even more in my estimation. He's taking the weirdness hit so I don't have to.

The pills Dr. Gupta gave Dad have given him what she calls an “atypical dermatological reaction.” This sounds much nicer than it looks.

When the rash started out on Dad's abdomen, no one paid much attention. We had gathered around him to wait for improvements, the way a family might pull chairs up to the TV when their favorite show is about to start. Dr. Gupta said not to be too impatient, because the medicine might not completely kick in for weeks. Dad stopped pacing and whistling for a day or two, and it seemed like he might be ready to go back to work.

But then the sores spread to his arms and face, and Linda and I made sickened expressions behind his back. Mom even told him to stop looking in the mirror.

I felt bad that I couldn't deal with the rash.

But one thing I've always liked about myself is that I know my limitations.