Interlude
As I learned at the age of four—leaning my rib cage against the window sash and stretching my neck into the dirty Chicago air—sound is a product of its environment. Anyone can test this with a pop bottle and a small amount of embouchure control: flatten your lips and blow across the top of the bottle. When it’s full you get a whistle. As you drink the soda down, the sound deepens.
The principle is just as true inside your body as out in the world—a soprano is born, and you can see it in her silhouette. More often than not she’s small, like me. Her thin neck means that her vocal cords are slender and tightly packed together. They resonate at a high frequency when air rattles through them. Her jaw is strong, the mouth an echo chamber. Every tuck and fold a part of the instrument.
As a singer you have to be careful with your body the same way you’d be careful transporting crystal or glass. When the temperature varies too drastically, molecules shift and expand. Things shatter. The pen in my purse spills ink everywhere during altitude changes; and after plane rides longer than two hours, I need to avoid citrus fruits for a week, drink only herbal tea.
Travel, then, has always been dangerous for me. It can affect a performance in unexpected ways—hemming my voice in with static from the dry velveteen seats on the train into a new city, and desiccating it with the train’s hot, recirculated air. High elevation breaks sounds into brittle sheets of paper; the color and texture of grain bins in a city’s street markets bleed through into my tonal quality. Resonance comes from a barrel of smooth red quinoa seeds you can stick your hand in up to the elbow. Sharp color from hard, ridged bulgur wheat. Airiness from vats of flour that feels like silk when you lay your palm on top—if the frowning merchant will let you handle his wares so freely.
A voice is spongelike. It can absorb, and it can be wrung out.
When I step off a plane, I need to take a long walk in open streets to shake off the tin can aura of my transportation. Without the walk, without the wind to flush me, my lungs remain compressed and I can’t go onstage—I hear the atonal ding of the seatbelt sign when I should be hearing the key changes my accompanist is running through on the piano, and I become convinced that the audience in the recital hall will be populated by duplicates upon duplicates of my fellow airline passengers, shifting around their neck pillows and cricking their knees.
What I mean is this: sound is never described with the density or complexity that it deserves, because we imagine it as separate from the texture of the rest of our lives. Words like crystalline and booming, full and sharp, reduce music to decoration, something adjectival. When in fact it’s more like an animal. Living. Hungry. It sucks up atmosphere, emotion, experience. Pushes you to feed it by doing things you wouldn’t otherwise do.
It’s the whole of life, round and plump as a planet. Ample as a memory or dream.
Mongolia held its first opera festival in Ulaanbaatar and unwisely scheduled the festivities in December to appeal to the singers’ sense of a snowy Christmas. At least that’s my best guess at their intentions. We arrived during what’s called the Nines of Winter: nine sets of nine days that each hold a special place in a hierarchy of bitter chill. The nine days when vodka freezes upon contact with the air. The nine days when you can walk up to a baby ox and crack its tail off in your hand.
I was not yet pregnant. Back then, I was only vulnerable in the ordinary ways. I descended from the plane already wearing silk long johns, lined pants, a sweater, a scarf, and my Chicago winter coat, but the weather hit me like a frying pan to the back of the skull. A man named Zhenjin met me on the tarmac and immediately wrapped me in a fur cloak the size of a bear. He grinned.
“You need to gain at least two inches.” His gloved hands indicated a bubble around his waist. “On all sides. Then you will be a proper Mongolian woman prepared for winter.” The bearskin, he explained, would stand in as my two inches since I didn’t have time to gain the weight au naturel.
I’d been invited to sing an aria from The Snow Maiden. Rimsky-Korsakov. Very Russian in its sense of tragedy. The maiden in question seeks human companionship, a communion of souls, despite being unable to actually feel affection. Then, when she does find love—having begged her enchanted mother to grant her the capacity—it kills her. Some versions of the myth have it that she, a girl made out of ice, tries to impress her beloved by jumping over a fire. Some just say that her ardor brings forth the spring. Either way, she melts.
Standing there, freezing in my winter clothes, I felt for the first time that she made the right decision: anything for a touch of warmth.
Zhenjin ushered me into a car that smelled like diesel on the outside but was reasonably clean within and did not stutter when he turned the key. I held my mittened hand over the nearest radiator vent and then retracted it sharply—the air blasting from the vent was arctic.
“Have to wait for the engine to warm up,” Zhenjin said, and then took my hand, peeled off the mitten, and cupped it in his own. He blew onto my skin. All this in a quite businesslike manner and with no hint of hesitation.
We sat that way for a minute or two, him occasionally switching my hands between his soft grip and my pockets. Finally the car heater coughed, and I felt warm air spill out over my wrist.
“Now,” my companion said, “we are ready.”
Ulaanbaatar is not a soft place. On the drive to the hotel, Zhenjin warned me not to walk around alone, especially at night, since many of the streets were still without proper lighting, and an unaccompanied white woman would be a target for muggings. Out the window I saw street merchants hawking yak-wool socks and camel-skin gloves, wearing what looked like felt booties over their shoes to insulate against the layer of ice on the sidewalk. Many muggers carry knives, Zhenjin said, but they will use anything they have at hand: some throw bricks or, in the time-honored tradition of men, just use the weight of their bodies to throw you against a wall.
We pulled up to a curb.
“Okay,” Zhenjin said.
The hotel’s exterior appeared to have been wrought by a civilization long extinct. If anything’s going to be dangerous to me, I thought, it’s this. Stucco crumbled from the façade; bare patches of brick were visible where the siding had calved off slabs large enough to kill a man in falling. I looked at Zhenjin. Over the course of our twenty-minute car ride he’d become important to me, arbiter of street chaos and purveyor of furs. He smiled. “You’ll like it,” he said. “Inside.” He climbed out of the car and held a hand out to me, and we ascended the three steps to the door while the wind did its best to freeze off my ears.
With a cracking sound—icy rubber separating from icy rubber—the doors opened up and I let out a gasp. The interior of the hotel was a sea of marble, a pristine palace. I couldn’t have been more surprised if it was made entirely of cut gems. There were no windows, just a cavernous well of veined columns, and without sunlight the brass bell on the reception desk shone only beneath incandescent lamps. But the room was so grand I could imagine candles, could almost see the bulb light lick and flutter like a flame. The bell was polished to a high gleam and seemed to be waiting there for someone to ring it and magically summon back the hospitality of nineteenth-century travel—diplomatic cocktails and colonial balls.
I shook my head, feeling out of place in my animal hide. Disoriented and savage. A dark corner of my mind turned to lineage: Greta, Ada, Sara, me; beasts into ballrooms. Something always lost along the way. I tucked my hand into Zhenjin’s elbow, and this alone seemed to keep me from losing my grip on time and place. First I’d stepped off a heated airplane onto the dusty snow of tundra, and then into a car that whipped through streets blooming with apocalyptic decay. And now this.
At the door to my room I waited for a moment, half expecting Zhenjin to enter ahead of me and clear it of any obstacles or danger. He could do that, it seemed. Keep me safe. Like a girl keeps safe her dolls, needlessly brushing their hair and caressing their cold porcelain cheeks. Brushing away an errant eyelash
and saying, Look, make a wish. But he didn’t walk in and undress me, fold my clothes in neat stacks on a chair. He didn’t wash me with a soft, drenched sponge. Instead he bowed and walked away, his black hair wafting slowly against the back of his neck. His brisk steps those of a man acquitted of his duty.
I was surprised to feel a twinge of annoyance. How dare he, I thought. But then: how dare he what?
Once I’d showered I felt better for a while. More myself. At home I take two baths a day, and if I go swimming in the magnificent pool at the gym I might take three. As I stripped off layer upon layer of clothing, I began to feel giddy, unwrapping the gift of my actual form, scrubbing off even the thin film of grit and sweat. But when I was pink and dry, I made the mistake of tunneling into my bed to read through the libretto and then the score of the role I would be singing. I’m very susceptible to the instinct of hibernation when I’m touring. Things started well enough—I marked emotional shifts in purple, suggested breaths in blue, and used red to let myself know that a troubling passage was upcoming. The blanket weighed down on me, melting over my shoulders and breathing hot air onto my back.
But the thought of getting up brought dread, increasingly. Especially the thought of Zhenjin, his low bow at the door, his antiseptic eagerness to please. What are you doing, I asked myself. What do you want from him? Not his embrace, his mouth on mine. I just felt that he was holding something back from me—that beneath his crisp shell beat a heart I could not reach. And that was a problem. At home I could count on John to feed me his intimate secrets and stories. But here, I would get out of bed and things would spiral out of my control. Instinct would take over, pushing me to show my good side for photographs, smiling with teeth as sleek as sculpted ice.
Zhenjin had warmed my hands in the car, held them very gently. But he also walked away instead of being asked to go. What if, then, I walked onstage and found myself without the strength to sing? Wouldn’t it be better to stay here, where I needed nothing? To jump up just briefly and lock myself in with the duvet curled around my neck? I could remain in the bed until the fire squad—if such a thing existed in Ulaanbaatar—came and axed my door to smithereens, dragged me to the airport. I could walk into the hall and discover I’d been transported home, that John was in the kitchen cooking risotto.
A knock stirred me.
“Yes, hello?” It was Zhenjin’s voice, polite and inquiring. “Am I disturbing you?”
“One minute,” I called. Look at yourself. I ran a hand over my face. You’re just jet-lagged. Put on a sweater. Put on pants. Slowly I pieced my outer shell back together and recovered my gown from the closet, where it had been transported from the car by unseen hands, still zipped inside the whispering black garment bag. I inquired at the mirror—I was more or less composed—and threw open the door, nodding to Zhenjin.
“Good,” I said. “You can keep me honest.” I tossed the garment bag over his shoulder and buttoned my coat. “Let’s walk to the opera house.”
“We have a car.”
“No, I need the walk.” I tugged on my mittens. “It’ll bring me back.” I paused. “I mean, wake me up.” Zhenjin looked at me, stern, and I thought, No, your job is to give me what I want. I took his hand and pulled him down the hall, feeling the soft catch as his shoulder extended. Zhenjin made no move to resist, or hold tighter.
The festival organizers had planned well enough to book rooms in a hotel mere blocks from the National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, a pink Romanesque building studded with white colonnades. The Opera House, as they called it, was another surprise: an Easter egg shell filled with a Samarkand mosque. The doorways were embellished with gold filigree and the lobby was filled with arches and domes. Inside, I released Zhenjin and sent him, blushing slightly while he opened and closed his hand, to deliver my gown to the dressing room.
Singers are not ballet dancers. We breathe into our bellies. Expand the diaphragm and keep it expanded. Do not be afraid of a little pot belly, because it indicates power. This type of breathing also affords you the feeling of appetite.
I walked through the Opera House hallways and ran the pad of my index finger over a crashing, cascading loop of gold painted onto the wall. It appeared to be flecking off, so high was the glisten, and I rubbed my finger against my thumb, looked at both, surprised for an instant to find no golden powder there. Butterfly wings. John sometimes catches moths off the dandelions that grow up through the cracks in the sidewalk, presenting them to me as a magic trick—ta-da. His hands are always dusted, after. But John wasn’t there, and in his place was a hollow orb I had to fill myself. I breathed in the gold, imagined myself licking the entire hallway clean, gobbling down the sugar cube façade of the Opera House in hungry gulps. To eat something is to absorb its power. Many cultures have thought so. I strolled around taking in everything I could see and everything I couldn’t, all the music that had ever shown there: inhale Handel, exhale Liszt.
The stage itself was familiar, as stages tend to be worldwide, the ceiling hung with acoustical beams and curves, the flat dark wood of the stage floor swept clean. I took in the scent of dust and polish. The wire tang of the piano.
I fished my phone out of my purse, warming the near-frozen electronics against my chest, and turned on the metronome application so it ticked and tocked like a clockwork heartbeat. To sing, your breath must be steady and controlled. You must always be shoring away air for later use, never expending yourself to the last gasp. This keeps your voice from becoming vulnerable. You have something on hand: a socket of oxygen, the smile of a near-stranger who warms your fingers and has thin eyes and skin like wrinkled paper.
That night I stood before an audience of colleagues in tailcoats and gowns, plus locals who bought tickets whether they were interested or not, to encourage the Ulaanbaatar city council to organize more international festivals. All day I had been keyed up by fear or exhaustion or desire for something that I couldn’t name. But now everything that had filled me rushed out. Rinsed off. As simple as that. I sang the dirty gasoline smell of the snow, and the holes in the road that Zhenjin swerved casually to avoid. I sang the cold that leeched up through my shoe soles like water and froze the balls of my feet, the tips of my toes. I sang the broken outer windows of hotel towers and the gold light of the lamps within, the silver brads on the uniforms of the bellhops who lined up in the lobby on the way to my room. I sang the gruff mumbling of the bear I imagined was furnishing me with his skin, and the snowy backsides of yaks I was told were kept on farms on the city outskirts. I was relieved, so relieved to sing. I sang Snegúrochka the snow maiden. I sang her fifteen years of winter, and then I sang her melting into spring.
I look back now on that period of my life with terrible jealousy. So recent, and yet so distant. Three years ago I was in Mongolia, and my body was still the body I’d been born with, tightly packed. Tightly wound.
Because sound is so rich with texture, it is endangered by travel through time as much as it is by travel through space. Look at me: once all I wanted was to have enough energy for my own life, enough control of my lungs to make each note clear. Now my body has changed allegiances. Now my heart has. There is Kara to contend with, and instead of wanting to take something from her, I’m afraid of all I want to give.
Part Two
11
Taking me to the opera was my mother’s last attempt to make me her own. Like everything she does, she went about it in a strange way: not many parents would choose to bring their daughters to witness a tragedy to which they are namesake. But whatever her insufficiencies, my mother understood my sense of pride. She knew that seeing the name Lulu on the tickets would thrill me more than the character’s death would undo me.
The show was a matinee on one of those magical Chicago days that are clear and bright, so the cold doesn’t seem so punishing. Walking outside reddened our noses, and my mother pinched mine with her gloved fingers—I could feel the faint pressure from her long manicured nails beneath the leather.
“Let’s pretend we’re orphans,” Sara said to me. “Only not really orphans. Children abandoned at birth who discover that they’re really royalty.”
“And magic?”
“Yes.” She smiled. “And magic. This will be our first time out in the world in our new clothes, and no one will recognize us. They’ll all be impressed with how pretty and fancy we are, and even people”—her face darkened—“who’ve been terrible to us and shunned us because of our orphanhood will love us and sing our praises. And we’ll be kind to them.” The darkness lifted from her like a cloud in the wind.
We took the O’Hare line to the Loop, then transferred to get to Washington and Wells—it was a long ride, but to us each train was a royal carriage. My mother and I pointed out all the special touches that had been left inside for us: the clean blue pair of seats in a beam of sun, the advertisements for a local jeweler showing pictures of a diamond-studded necklace and bracelet. We might consider getting our tiaras refitted there, we said. If the store had sufficient dignity upon inspection. The other passengers received our scrutinizing attention as well: there was the café owner who’d refused to sell us hot chocolate because the gold coin we’d found to pay with was dirty. Beside her, the spoiled twin girls we always saw in the park whose dresses and hair ribbons threw us into fits of jealousy, which we quelled thanks to our superior breeding.
A blind man with a cane and a threadbare hat sat in the handicapped seats a few feet away from us, and he rocked with the rhythm of the train, singing softly to himself.
“That,” Sara whispered to me, taking off her gloves, “is the royal madrigal. He recognized us for what we were long before anyone else, but he couldn’t tell us for fear of retribution from the evil queen. She wanted to keep us poor and wretched. But she couldn’t fool the madrigal: he sensed our greatness through the sound of our voices. He can tell a prince from a hog farmer by hearing them speak a single word.”
The Daughters: A Novel Page 12
