Girl, Unstrung

by Claire Handscombe

  The other side of the park it feels like we’re back in a city – people are walking fast, faster than they did in Pimlico, definitely faster than they do in Pasadena, like they all have somewhere to be in a desperate hurry. Maybe they do. Maybe they all have very appointments at the Ritz, which I recognize from Notting Hill. It’s near the beginning of the movie, when Hugh Grant get on a bus which goes past the hotel and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is playing. For the millionth time in the last few months, I try not to think about Tim, but have you ever tried not to think about someone? It just makes you think about them more.

  “You okay?” Libby asks me. “You seem a bit down.”

  “Just tired,” I say. I wonder if dad and Ebba pre-warned her to be on the lookout for signs of depression. I’ve heard them talking about it in low voices, wondering if they should send me to a therapist. I’m fine. I can get over the one little (gigantic) setback that was not getting into LACHSA. I don’t want Libby to think otherwise. Plus, I’m dying to talk to her about Tim. Maybe she has some wisdom about that Whole Situation, what that was All About.

  “And thinking about a boy,” I add.

  “Oh?” Libby says. She’s trying to sound casual but I can see in every part of her body, in the way she whips her head round to face me, in the way she walks a little more slowly, that she’s desperately interested, that she wants to know everything, that she wants to talk about his from every possible angle and late into the night, with snacks. But there’s no way she’s waiting until late at night – and I’ll have passed out by nine pm anyway. Libby wants to start this conversation right now. I can tell.

  “Which boy? Tim? Actually, wait. Let’s get to Fortnum & Mason and get our tea and scones in front of us and then we’ll talk.” See? Snacks. And I’m pretty sure it’s late into the night somewhere. Back home, actually. Huh.

  We walk in awkward silence for the next couple of minutes, because there’s no point starting a different conversation when we know we want to come back to this one as soon as humanly possible and possibly sooner. We walk through the heavy wooden doors into Fortnum & Mason and it’s like some kind of wonderland in there. There are displays of tins of candy and a counter where it looks like you can buy toffee and other things piece by piece. There are so many pretty things I want to pick up and look at, like a whole array of teapots I can see further down on the left. But Libby is determined to get us seated with tea and scones and boy talk so I guess all of that will have to wait. We have time. We’ve barely begun our explorations, after all.

  “So,” Libby says. We’ve got a round table by the window. After we ask for afternoon tea, scones and small cakes arrive on stacked Tiffany-blue plates, along with tiny, perfectly symmetrical thin sandwiches made of different kinds of bread, with fillings like cucumber with mint and lemon butter, or ham with English mustard. Libby has ordered Assam for us, and it’s redder than any other tea I’ve seen. She says she wants to teach me about different teas, that the one she and Dan have at home is “bog standard” PG Tips, which is kind of like English Breakfast, but that there are all different types with subtly different flavors.

  “We have tea in America,” I remind her, blowing on my tea to cool it. “Remember the Huntington? They have great jasmine tea there.”

  “Yes,” Libby says. She looks wistful for a moment. Does she still think about my dad? She seems really in love with her fiancé, Dan. We left him at home to catch up on some work, or what he said was work, but it just looks like reading to me, though he’s in publishing, so I guess that makes sense. She looks at him the way Ebba looks at dad. Like, you are my whole world. Dan looks at Libby like that, too, even when he’s just bringing her a cup of tea and “leaving the two of us to catch up”. She seems happy with him. But do you really get over someone? From my limited experience, I’d have to say no. Not so far. I’ve tried to push Tim out of my mind as much as possible since the ski trip, and he never waits for me at my locker anymore, even though sometimes I linger there a bit longer than I need to just in case. I miss him. I’m still mad that he took me up that stupid mountain, but also I still want to kiss him even though I’m still mad at him. Is that even slightly normal?

  “I remember the jasmine tea at the Huntington,” Libby says. “I liked it a lot. But I’m talking proper tea. Proper British black tea.”

  She takes a long, satisfied sip, as if to demonstrate her point. Is it racist to think only British tea is proper? I know what she means, though. Libby is proud of being British the way I’m proud of being American.

  “Anyway,” she says. “Tell me about Tim.”

  I give her the basic rundown. Sophomore, very helpful in my first week of school, cute as all get out with the swoopy hair and the long eyelashes and the chin dimple and the blue eyes. Probably wants something from me, even if he claims not to know who Madison Harper is.

  And then the whole ski trip disaster, which she already knows about, though she didn’t know the part where the reason I wanted to go was Tim because he was supposed to kiss me and then I wouldn’t get to be fifteen without ever having been kissed, because it’s about time, and everyone (mostly Katie) is leaving me behind. And I don’t want my first kiss to be some random dude who’s not even attractive. At least this way I’d get to have my first kiss with someone impressive, and maybe wow him so much I’d impress him right back, enough for him to forget whose daughter I am and whose friend I am and the many ways in which I can be useful to him, and maybe he’d like me for me. Although, how I’m going to do that without any prior experience of the kissing thing is, as yet, uncertain.

  Once upon a time I might have wowed him with my viola playing and my admission to LACHSA and Juilliard and the Symphony (he’d look me up on social media years later when we’re so old we’ve started using Facebook) but that’s all over now, my chances of impressing him ruined by my attempts to impress him. And maybe I don’t care anymore. Maybe I’m too mad at him anyway.

  “Okay,” Libby says. “Take a breath. Have a scone.”

  I copy what she does – a layer of thick clotted cream and then a layer of jelly, on the cut-in-half scone. I bite into it. Yum. The scone itself isn’t as sweet as the ones you get at Starbucks, but with the clotted cream and the jelly, it’s just the right amount of sweet. My dad has a theory that a woman can’t cry with chocolate in her mouth. I’ve never been able to prove him wrong. I bet it’d be hard to cry with a mouthful of this scone too, and not just because you’d spit dust everywhere. It’s probably helpful for the purposes of this conversation if crying is impossible.

  “What do you think?” Libby asks me. I can tell by the amused look on her face that she already knows I think it’s amazing.

  “Scrhphm,” I say, through a sticky mouthful. She laughs and pours another tiny bit of milk and then more tea into each of our dainty, gold-flowered cups.

  “Here,” she says. “Perfect pairing. Like red wine and cheese.” And then she remembers that I’m fourteen and that we can’t even get all the cheeses she likes in America. “I mean, like fish and chips. Like Ron and Hermione. Or maybe like you and Tim?”

  I like the way she circles back like this. I was a little bit afraid we’d gone off topic.

  “Maybe?”

  “What do you like about him?” Hasn’t she been listening? The hair, and – “Apart from his hair and his eyes and his chin? What makes him crush-worthy? Does he play a musical instrument?”

  I shake my head. “No. He’s kind of a nerd, actually. He plays Scrabble.”

  Libby smiles. She’s into the idea of him. “A nerd. I like it.” This is not at all surprising, given her (past?) crush on my dad, who played a nerdy high school English teacher complete with nerdy glasses on that show everyone loved, and also given Dan, who also wears glasses and likes to read books for fun and for work. That’s a lot of books. And if you read them for work, wouldn’t you want to do something completely different when you get home? Like, play tennis or videogames?

  “And is he kind?
”

  I think about this as I spread cream on the next scone. “He brought me flowers after I broke my wrist.”

  “Nice ones?”

  “Yeah. But only because his mom made him.” I add the strawberry jelly, a thicker layer of it this time.

  “Still, it must have taken guts, don’t you think?”

  “Well, yeah. But he didn’t have a choice.”

  She frowns. “Are you sure you like him? It doesn’t sound like you like him that much.”

  “I have a crew of butterflies in my stomach that think I like him.”

  “A crew?”

  I chew and swallow my bite of scone. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. A gaggle? Or a flutter. A flutter of butterflies.”

  “Nice.” She laughs. “Okay, so you fancy him.”

  “Huh?”

  “Think he’s attractive.”

  What do you know, it seems the butterflies followed me to London. Or, I guess, since they’re inside me, they didn’t have the choice in coming too. Well, whatever. They’re clearly over their jet lag; they’ve woken up and they’re fluttering, is what I’m saying.

  “Yes,” I say. “I fancy him. And I want to kiss him.”

  “I have a question for you,” she says, pouring us both yet another cup of tea. “But you have to promise me you won’t get mad.”

  In my experience, it’s never a good sign when someone makes you promise that, but I want to know what the question is. “I promise.”

  “Do you want to kiss him specifically? Or is just that you want to kiss someone and he happens to be available?”

  “I don’t know if he’s actually available. To me. As such.”

  Libby looks at me, stern-teacher-style, over the top of her glasses. It’s clear that I’m not going to get away with not answering her question. Behind us, from another table, spoons clink on teacups.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Because you can’t be mad at him for using you to get to Madison Harper if you’re using him to get any old kiss.”

  “Hopefully it wouldn’t be any old kiss. Hopefully it would be an amazing kiss.”

  “I should probably warn you: they’re never that amazing the first time,” she says, and then lowers her voice like she’s about to reveal some great secret. “Everyone just swirls their tongues around and around and it’s a bit mechanical.”

  “What else are you meant to do?”

  “It’s hard to describe. I think everyone probably needs to start with the mechanical swishing. Kind of how you have to start with scales when you practice, you know?”

  “I do.” I get the scales part. The rest is fuzzier than it’s ever been. I feel weird asking for detailed instructions from Libby, and I can’t ask Katie since she thinks I’ve already gone way past that base. But now I’m even more nervous about the whole thing.

  “But after that,” she says. “It’s flippin’ amazing.” She’s lost in a daydream, suddenly. Please oh please let her be thinking about Dan and not my dad.

  “So anyway,” I say quickly, just in case she’s thinking thoughts I don’t want anyone thinking in my vicinity. “Back to me and Tim.”

  “Yes. Back to you and Tim. So, to recap: you’re worried he only likes you because you can get him into Hollywood parties. But it seems like maybe you only like him because you want to kiss someone and, well, he’ll do.”

  I think about the theme song to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Katie and I love that show. We love that all the songs still work if you substitute Pasadena for West Covina. “The situation’s actually a lot more nuanced than that,” I quote.

  “Well, maybe it’s more nuanced for him, too,” Libby says, not showing any signs of recognizing the quote, which is too bad. I think she’d like the show. I feel like, and this is going to sound unkind, but I don’t mean it that way, she probably has a lot in common with the hopeless romanticism of the main character, Becks. I hope Dan’s not the Greg she’s settling for because she can’t have her Josh, which in this analogy would be my dad. Disturbing thought. Dan deserves better than that. (So does Greg.) He’s sweet.

  “Maybe Tim does like you, and maybe he also wants to get into Hollywood parties. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  Like, I want to be kissed, by someone, and I want to be kissed by Tim, because he’s cute, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Those things can both be true and that doesn’t make me dishonest or a bad person. The situation actually is a lot more nuanced than I thought.

  “Huh,” I say. “I hadn’t considered that.”

  “That’s what on old wise friend like me is for. And for teaching you about scones and real tea. Waterstones next?”

  Sure, I’ll do the bookstore. I can think more about this newfound nuance while Libby worships at the altar of the bestselling paperbacks.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Sunday evening, after the parks and the afternoon tea, Libby asks me to play my viola for her. It’s a bit weird, playing for just her and Dan in their tiny apartment, sandwiched between the TV and the blue squishy sofa, but I’ve got to get back on the wagon sometime. It would be less weird with a piano accompaniment. They’ve managed to fit a piano in this living room, too, along the wall, and Dan plays a little piano, he says, but not enough to “do me justice” and certainly not well enough to sight-read a piece. (Which, by the way, I’ve always thought was a stupid name for it. What other senses are you going to go use to read? Yeah, sure, there’s Braille, but it might be tricky to read Braille with a finger while simultaneously using both hands to play a viola.)

  “But,” Dan says, scratching his chin. “Hang on a minute. Do you know Beethoven’s Sonatina for Viola and Cello?”

  “I do.”

  I’ve actually played both parts in the duet before, because cello music is often transposed up an octave for viola. It’s not quite the same, because the tonal difference between the instruments is a big part of what makes the piece, but there’s not a ton of music written for solo viola, so we’re used to making these kinds of compromises.

  “I’ll play it with you,” he says, and that’s right, how could I have forgotten? Dan is a cellist. Libby has good taste. The cello is elegant and gracious and the cellists I know tend to be sensitive types, strong in a quiet way. Each instrument has its own stereotype, and they’re often backed up by strong anecdotal evidence, though, sadly, not by actual data. Like, trumpet players are often shy little mice who only make noise when they’re playing music. Flautists can be a little haughty and attention-seeking, like they know that theirs is the instrument that catches the light on a stage. Oboists can be bossy – not unrelated to the fact that they’re the ones who give the all-piercing A note that the whole orchestra tunes to. (I’ve never totally understood that. Woodwind players’ notes wobble all over the place. And if we’re supposed to trust their ear to choose the right one of those wobbles, then we may as well each trust our own.)

  Anyway, cellists are lovely and Libby has chosen wisely. She’s a little melodramatic and a little idealistic sometimes – we’re always arguing about how much fact and logic actually matter – and maybe it’s good for her to be marrying someone quiet and calm who can ground her but who also gets her. And if she needs someone even more rational in her life, well: that’s what I’m for.

  “That would be fun,” I say to Dan. “I could get on board with that.”

  We each go to our rooms and free our instruments from their cases, then bring them into the living room with our silver music stands. We twizzle the ends of our bows and run their horsehair across cubes of rosin; Dan’s is darker and softer than mine. We unfold our music stands, adjust them to the right height, drag our chairs across the beige carpet, and sit. I feel – I don’t know, something. Something in my gut, like anticipation or excitement. Something I haven’t felt in a while. It’s the feeling I used to get when my teacher would set a new piece on the stand and bend it open, hold the pages with clips because brand new sheet music tends to always want
to close itself back up, like it’s shy. And it has that smell, and that crispness, and it all adds up to an invitation to discovery.

  I love getting something just right, I love that feeling of having worked and worked on a piece and getting it as close to perfect as humanly possible, but I also love the first run-through, the deciphering. The first encounter. The creation of something I’ve never created before. It feels like the first time I held a violin or the first time I held a viola. It feels, I guess, like anticipation and like pure joy. Like the look on mom and dad’s faces in the picture when they’re holding me as a tiny baby, full of hope and joy. I’ve never done anything to disappoint them and they have no-one and nothing to compare me to, they just know that I’m perfect and beautiful and all theirs.

  That’s how I feel as I sit next to Dan, even though I’ve played this piece before. I run my eye over the first page of the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonatina for Viola and Cello.

  “Ready?” he asks me. He has the kindest eyes, but they’re dancing too, like he’s excited.

  “Ready,” I say.

  “Just pretend I’m not here,” Libby says, which is funny, because her being here is why we’re playing in the first place.

  “Okay,” Dan says. We make eye contact and he counts us in, then he visibly breathes in and off we go, our music curling over and around each other’s. At times it feels like he’s the piano’s left hand and I’m the right, my melody soaring over his background hum. At other times we play in unison, and at still others we echo each other. We’re at the end of the first movement before I realize I haven’t worried about my wrist cramping. Libby claps, even though you’re not supposed to clap between movements, so we pause long enough to let her.

  “Want us to keep going?” Dan asks Libby, but he’s asking me too, and I nod. I’m enjoying myself. I don’t remember the last time I legitimately enjoyed myself like this. Just two of us, reading something familiar enough that there isn’t the adrenaline of sight reading but new enough that there isn’t the pressure of performing perfectly. And actually, I don’t know if I’ve ever in my life not felt that pressure, and it feels great, and I can hear my playing relax and open itself up. We’re playing for someone who loves us both and wants to be impressed by us both and will find every reason to be. Dan’s cello has such wonderful, deep tones, and something in his body language, in the way he leans over his cello, tells me how much he is loving this moment too. When we’re done we look at each other and smile, but really, even though my wrist is aching a little, I want to jump and down and shout Yes! That’s what it’s meant to feel like!