Girl, Unstrung

by Claire Handscombe

  “Two,” I say. Conservative estimate so she doesn’t think I’m crazy. High enough that she is still suitably impressed by my dedication.

  “And have you noticed anything different since the accident?”

  Um. Yes. Plenty. My arm gets tired quickly from holding my viola. My fingers don’t seem to do exactly what I want them to. And then there’s the pain.

  I shrug.

  “Clara,” dad says. Just that one word, my name, said right.

  “My arm is weak.” So is my voice. It’s about to break. “My fingers don’t respond as fast. And of course my wrist. It –” I’m crying now, but I get the last word out. “It hurts.”

  “Weakness in your arm is probably nothing to worry about,” the doctor says. She’s speaking softly, reassuringly. “That’s pretty usual after five weeks in plaster. Responsiveness issues might be due to nerve damage, though. We’ll have to run some tests.”

  I understand the word clinical better than I ever have. She’s delivering her verdict like it’s purely scientific. Like it doesn’t have a destructive impact on my life, when actually everything is coming crashing down around me.

  Dad hands me a tissue from a box in the corner and I wipe my nose. “That’s not permanent, though, right?” I ask the doctor.

  “We won’t know until we’ve run the tests. And it looks like you have the beginnings of RSI in your wrist.”

  Repetitive Strain Injury. The dreaded destroyer of string players. It eats them alive. Us. Eats us alive. I didn’t know that was what this was.

  “No,” I say.

  “Remember when the PT told you to take it easy?” dad says. “This is why.”

  I can’t hold it together anymore. I’m a mess. Dad can’t hand me tissues fast enough.

  “No more viola for a month,” the doctor says. “None at all, strictly, if you ever want to play again. And to have a functioning wrist.”

  “But my audition is supposed to be—”

  “I’ll take your viola away if I have to,” dad says.

  “This is serious,” the doctor continues. Like that isn’t obvious. I don’t say anything. What could I possibly say? She scribbles out a prescription and hands it to dad. It’s probably for Percocet. Not that it matters now anyway.

  Chapter Forty

  I don’t talk to dad in the car on the way home. I don’t talk to anyone when we get back to the house. I go straight up to my room, kick off my shoes, and get into my bed, under my covers, because that’s comforting, somehow. It’s over. Everything I’ve ever worked for. Everything I’ve ever wanted. No LACHSA, no Juilliard, no Symphony. I cry and I cry till I don’t think I have any more tears in me. Then I’m bored of crying but I’m also not ready to go downstairs and face everyone.

  So I put on Glazunov’s Elegie and sit up in bed, because posture doesn’t matter when you’re playing the air viola. I close my eyes and imagine my left hand is doing what it should be doing for several hours every day, first position fourth position fifth. I sit on my bed, air-bowing, with the Glazunov on blaring so loudly that I almost can’t hear myself crying. (I did, in fact, still have tears in me.) Ebba cracks open my bedroom door to call me for dinner. She probably knocked first, but I wouldn’t have heard that, either. Her face kind of crumples when she sees me, like she’s going to cry too.

  “Oh, baby girl,” she says, and I don’t hate it, I don’t hate her calling me that, even though I’ve hated it for years when anyone has called me that, let alone someone who didn’t know me when I was an actual baby girl and therefore has no excuse, no nostalgia or whatever. Ebba sits on the edge of my bed, and I don’t hate that either, and I extract myself from my covers and scootch over to sit next to her and rest my head on her shoulder and cry some more. I can smell her perfume again, the jasmine of it. It’s not what I’d wear, but I like it. It suits her. She puts her arm around me and then with her other hand she plays with my hair, tucking the same strand behind my ear over and over. Usually I only like it when mom plays with my hair, but it’s soothing and I let her.

  “I know,” Ebba keeps saying, “I know,” and then eventually I stop crying and she says, with her arm still around me, “did I ever tell you what happened when I was seventeen?” and I know this story, of course I do, but I shake my head because I want her to tell me anyway. I want to know that I’m not alone in feeling what I’m feeling.

  “I was a ballerina,” she says. “I was good. Really good. And I had all these big dreams. The San Francisco Ballet. We were rehearsing for Swan Lake and I was doing the thirty-two pirouettes and I was dizzy and I landed funny and snapped my Achilles tendon.”

  “Ouch.”

  “It’s so clinical to say it like that. I snapped my Achilles tendon. But to me it sounded like the earth being split open. And the pain. I can’t even begin to describe the pain.”

  She looks like she might be about to describe it anyway, but then I guess she realizes she doesn’t need to, because I know what pain like that feels like. Not just a part of your body breaking, but your heart breaking, too. Your dreams snapping like an over-tuned string. Just like that. Years of hard work. All of it, gone.

  Ebba doesn’t try to tell me that it will all work out. It worked out for her in the end, I guess, because she became an actress and a writer and she teaches ballet, but all of that was Plan B, and Plan B is never an adequate substitute for Plan A. That’s why you have to work so damn hard to make Plan A work.

  “I know,” she says again. “I know it feels like your life has ended.”

  Damn it, just as my eyes are dry, they start to leak again. I’m so grateful that she’s said it. I didn’t want to be the clichéd teen you see on TV, wailing that my life is over. But that is what it feels like. I turn my body toward Ebba for a full-on hug. She lets me cry. I don’t know how long we sit there for, but I hear footsteps come and go – dad, to see if we’re coming, I guess, then deciding not to interrupt – and we miss dinner and that’s okay, I needed this more than I needed food. Plus, that’s what takeout is for.

  Chapter Forty-One

  I don’t know how I make it through the next month, but somehow I do. I have to learn what life is like without at least three hours a day of viola practice. I don’t know how to fill my time. My social media feeds are full of orchestra friends and string player memes; my hands ache from not playing: constant reminders. I watch a lot of TV. I even pick up a book. I do the exercises the PT gives me obsessively, perfectly, squeezing the red ball, putting elastic bands around various parts of my hand and then stretching out my fingers, pushing against the resistance. I want my wrist back. I want to be able to play again.

  On week five, the beginning of March, the PT gives me permission to try. Just a few minutes a day, she says, looking at mom, like, make sure she’s compliant. (Compliant: they use that word to say you’ve done the exercises they’ve set you. It sounds so dramatic, like they’re going to lock you up if you don’t. They don’t need to do that to me. Not being able to play already feels like prison. They’ve already done the worst they can do.) And it feels okay when I try. I start by holding my viola in guitar position and go up in increments of five minutes every few days.

  By the time I’m packing to go to Libby’s in London for spring break the last week of March, I’m up to twenty minutes at a stretch in the right position, the bruise under the left side of my chin purpling nicely. I could probably do more, but I don’t want to push it. That’s new: I’ve always believed in pushing myself. But this time pushing myself might actually destroy me. Not to be dramatic, or anything. Destroy my ability to play, is how the PT puts it. But, you know. Same diff.

  Libby asked me to bring my viola with me to London, but she didn’t really need to ask – I know this might sound weird, but I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it to languish at home without me. Even when I wasn’t playing it last month, I could look at it, open the tin of rosin and breathe in the foresty smell of it, imagine myself back at orchestra, hold the bow in my right hand
and play the air viola. I’ve never really been apart from my viola for more than a night at a sleepover, because even on vacation I’ve needed to play for a few hours a day.

  My mom always jokes that it’s my security blanket. Before we go anywhere we have to check that Harry has his stuffed rabbit and I have my viola. Not that anyone needs to check, exactly, because I can look after myself and I’m more than capable of being organized without any help. But still, it’s on the list: Harry’s stuffed rabbit: check! Rosie’s huge pile of novels: check! Juliette’s ballet videos: check! My viola and sheet music and music stand: check! Inside my viola case: rosin, bow, extra bow: check, check, check! Okay, kids, let’s roll. Somewhere on the list there’s underwear and a toothbrush and all that, but all of those things can be replaced on site wherever we’re going. Not my viola. And even though I can’t play it like I used to, I get cravings for it still, and it’s not like Libby’s going to have an extra viola kicking around that I can just pick up to (ahem) scratch the itch.

  So I store my viola dutifully in the overhead bin on the plane, adjusting people’s jackets around it for extra padding, and pray we don’t hit too much turbulence so it doesn’t get knocked around up there. The case is pretty sturdy, but still. I worry. It’s kind of like my baby, after all.

  We joke about this at orchestra: that some people are cat moms or dog moms or just normal moms, but we’re viola moms or flute moms or clarinet moms. Like, I’m so pleased with how my viola performed today! And then we also get to pat ourselves on the back and brag and congratulate ourselves, and it doesn’t even seem like self-congratulatory bragging because really it’s the instrument we’re bragging about, they do the work, we’re just pointing out how wonderful they are.

  Exactly like the ballet moms from Juliette’s class. They watch their kid through the window, but you know they’re also watching the other kids to see how theirs compares: are their arms as rounded above their head? Are they standing as straight at the barre? They’re watching to see how well their kid performs as if that will somehow validate them as a person. Like how well your kid dances is really any reflection on you. It might be a reflection on your genes, I guess, do you have the right kind of foot arch or the clichéd willowy figure (and trust me, some of these women definitely don’t now, if they ever did), but your genes were just passed down to you from your own ancestors anyway. It might be a reflection on you having the excellent foresight to send your kid to ballet class (which isn’t exactly rocket science). It might be a reflection on your ability to pay for all the best ballet equipment, although can you even take the credit (ha) for that if your money is your husband’s or passed down from your parents. It might be a reflection on your daily nagging, your encouragement to practice, to never skip a class. That, I will concede. There’s a dangerous stretch of time somewhere around the second or third year of learning something when it’s not new and exciting anymore and it can feel like drudgery and you can’t really see yourself progressing the way you could in the beginning, when one day you walked into class not knowing what a plié was and now here you are: knees! Knees! Knees! That’s when parents need to be strict, in that time when you’re better than a beginner but not good enough to be carried along by your own – what did Ebba call it? – creative abandon. My parents weren’t strict enough with Rosie when she said she wanted to give up piano. They were like, are you sure, honey? Well, okay, if you’re sure. When I have kids, I won’t let them do that.

  So anyway: the dance moms, they can take credit for that. But otherwise, it doesn’t really make sense to treat your kid as an extension of yourself, as if when they succeed you succeed. It’s the kid doing all the work, and yes, once upon a time they came out of your vagina, and yes, there you go, you can have all the credit you want for that, because: how? But the credit for the dancing belongs to the child actually doing the dancing and if your kid is a great dancer, it doesn’t make you a better person or a better mother than the other mom standing next to you whose kid can’t quite get her feet into a perfect fifth position, so there’s no need to be all smug and self-congratulatory.

  But with viola moms, it’s a different story. We actually are the ones doing all the hard work. We nurture our instruments by feeding rosin to the bow, and then making sure to wipe the viola clean of that same rosin at the end of practice. We lay them carefully down to sleep in their velour or silk or polyester beds. And we treat them with love and respect. It is true, though, that some days they seem to perform better than others, like they’re feeling determined or in a good mood that day. You can do everything you’re meant to, some days, and still nothing feels quite right, and other days you can do exactly the same thing and you feel like you’re Nobuko Imai. So it really does feel like our instruments are their own little people, that we’re their moms. Trust me, I know how crazy that sounds, but there you go.

  Libby says she wants to hear me play, so that seems like a plausible reason for taking it with me, much more plausible when I’m talking to my dad to convince him it’s a good idea than theories about my viola-as-sentient-being. And he can’t really be all, like, I don’t care what Libby thinks, since he’s also used the you have to like Ebba because Libby does argument. Either you care what she thinks or you don’t. Or, I guess you probably can, but good luck convincing me of the Libby As Valid Argument trope ever again.

  WE LAND IN LONDON AT 4.03 pm, which is 8.03 am back home. It was pretty cool to have a bed in business class, so I slept on and off in between all the announcements and stuff, but I still feel really weird and lethargic even though I’m stoked to be here. I had a window seat and it was so cool to watch London come closer and closer into view, even though Heathrow is a way off from the city center so we didn’t see Big Ben or anything like that. There were more tall buildings and skyscrapers than I expected; they don’t show you that in the movies, the parts that basically look like New York. It takes a while to get through customs and baggage claim but finally I’m there, and Libby practically pushes people out of the way so she can run to meet me.

  “You’re here!” she keeps saying, hugging me.

  She asks me if I want to take the Tube or a taxi, and the Tube sounds kinda cool and Londonish, so I opt for that. My case and backpack and viola are easy enough to manage between the two of us. We hear the train coming way before it gets there, and wind rushes in to the station ahead of it, warm on our faces. Inside the train, the blue seats look like they’re made of carpet.

  With the change at Green Park onto the Victoria Line, where the blue are patterned with white crosses and red dots and the poles are light blue instead of dark, it takes well over an hour to get to Pimlico, where Libby lives with Dan, her fiancé. By the time we’ve eaten and watched a “bit of telly”, it’s bed time for them, even though it feels like 2 pm to me – a groggy 2 pm, like right after a power nap. Luckily, I’m prepared with slow-release melatonin; Libby warned me you can’t get it in England without a prescription and that I’d need it for jet lag.

  I ask Libby to wake me up by 10 am the next day, because we have plans. Buckingham Palace, the parks, afternoon tea at a fancy department store called Fortnum & Mason. She also wants to show me this big famous bookstore right down the block from it. I don’t know why, since I’m not really into bookstores, but okay, whatever. I think she wants to show me her happy places, the places that are meaningful to her, as well as the touristy stuff.

  We walk through Pimlico, where the trees are in bloom on Regency Street, and then through St James’s Park, where we stand on a bridge with low arches and blue railings and take selfies with Buckingham Palace in the background. We watch as little kids throw bread to the ducks and they all converge on it, quacking, each of them hurrying to be the first to each piece. I mentally store up this ammunition for the next time mom rolls her eyes at me for my competitiveness. Survival of the fittest, mom! Even ducks do it.

  Buckingham Palace isn’t quite what I expected.

  “How so?” Libby asks me.

>   “I thought there’d be more gold.”

  Libby smiles, like she’s got her own private joke about this. “More announcement of its own importance?”

  I nod. I guess that’s it. There is the Queen’s Guard, who are guards in red uniforms with weird tall black hats that are made of bearskin from Canada and must be super heavy and hot in the summer.

  “Does it even get hot in the summer here?” I ask.

  “Yes. Well, you know. Hot-ish. Once in a while. And we don’t have air con in houses so when it’s hot there’s nowhere to go to get away from it.”

  “I can’t imagine not having AC.”

  “People have it in cars now, but no-one really drives in London.”

  That seems crazy to me. I’ve never thought it was possible to live without driving or being driven. “How do people get around?”

  “The Tube. Nowhere you’d want to go in central London is far from a Tube stop.”

  Huh. I try to imagine my life without drives to school and drives home from school and drives between my parents’ houses (sorry, I mean, my two homes) and drive to the beach in Coronado or Santa Monica and drives to downtown LA for plays and movies and Hollywood parties and my mind is kinda blown. It’s the first time I think about how much time we spend in cars. Mom and dad say they can’t wait till I can drive myself to some of these places and I’m like, you know what, mom and dad, neither can I.

  The sun weaves in and out of the clouds and the light filters through and catches on the water, and I can see why Libby loves St James’s Park. We walk though and cross a super quiet avenue (maybe British people actually hate cars?) called the Mall, but it’s nothing like the Mall in DC, which is the only other Mall I know about that isn’t built for shopping. We walk through Green Park. The name of it strikes me as funny, like Sandy Beach or Wet Water, but it is pretty green, with a bunch of trees, so I guess at least it’s apt.