Big Girl Small

by Rachel Dewoskin

  I tried to breathe deeply as I went into the auditorium, and visualized the sheet music, since that always helps focus me. I thought how unfair it was that they made us do our placements back to back. I mean, I was still nervous from the dance one. The director of the music department, a wiggly noodle of a guy named Mr. Gosford, was sitting with Ms. Vanderly and Mr. Stenson, the two voice teachers. I was thinking, “Please, just let me get into Ms. Vanderly’s section, so when I come out, I’ll have good news.” I didn’t even know what difference her section made, but I wanted to come out proud. And no one liked Mr. Stenson. He was new at the school, and had a bald head with some scabs on it. Mostly, he had no power to put you in senior voice halfway through the year, which was apparently the best thing that could happen to a person. Unless of course you got in right away, which was practically unheard of.

  The teachers were all in the front row of seats, right in the middle. It reminded me of that crappy movie Flashdance when the girl from The L Word has to audition for everyone even though she’s a small-town girl who’s never had professional training. They’re all really skeptical until she runs up and down the walls, dancing all over them. Then they love her, of course. That’s after the money scene, the one where she goes on a dinner date and sucks lobster out of the shell like an animal while fondling her boyfriend’s crotch under the table with her foot. When I watched that movie with Chad and his high school girlfriend, Kate, I thought that scene was like the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. And so did Kate, apparently, because after that whenever she stayed for dinner, she ate with her hands and played footsie with Chad under the table like they were in Flashdance. My parents found this cute, grinned at each other, probably remembering when they used to play footsie in high school. Gross. Sam was the only one who never noticed, of course. He just gobbled his spaghetti and talked about his day at school while Kate picked red peppers from the salad and licked her oily fingers between each bite.

  At my audition, I had one of those anxiety visions where you do something totally crazy in your mind, just to torture yourself with the possibility, just to wonder what would happen if you actually did it. I used to feel that same unbearable urge at Chad’s swim meets. I’d imagine running down from the risers, tearing my clothes off, and leaping into the pool during a race. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, the terrifying question of what would they do so huge I was almost elated to consider it. I think the thrill of contemplating that kind of thing is related to an idea my dad once told me when I was crying on the ski lift at Mount Brighton—that vertigo isn’t the fear of falling off a cliff, but the fear of jumping. His point was to comfort me, to be like, “You know you’re not going to jump, so why be scared?” But it only made me more scared because how do you know you’re not going to jump? I mean, how can you know who you’ll be twenty seconds from now? What evidence is there to prove that you’ll know the upcoming you? What if the Judy I become in two minutes does a striptease for the voice coaches, shocking everyone in the room with her dwarf sexuality? What would they do?

  I wonder if they would have noticed my body. This is conceited, but I think I have a get-out-of-jail-free card, so I’ll just say it straight out. It’s not only my face that’s cute—I also have a cute-looking shape—I mean, I may be too small and my arms and legs are a bit short, but I have a little waist and kind of big boobs for someone my size and a nice round butt. Sometimes, I can tell that boys look at me and think “Wow,” before they think, “Oh my god, did I think ‘Wow’ just now about that tiny person? And if she’s such a kindergartner, then how come she has a great butt?” I can see the transition on their faces, because I’ve seen it so many times. Achons like me tend to have hourglass bodies; it’s like a concession prize or something. That guy Joel at the Little People conference told his friend Ian who told Meghan who told me that I was the closest thing he’d ever seen to a living doll, with my long eyelashes and hot body.

  So what would have happened if I had torn my clothes off and danced a wild flashdance at my Darcy Arts voice audition? I’ll never know, because what I did was walk out on stage, stand as straight as I could, and open my mouth up to the lights like I might drink them. I had the feeling I always do when I’m singing, that the notes come from someplace other than my body—an underground current rising through my feet and up my legs, taking shape inside my lungs and diaphragm and then trumpeting out of my throat. Like, not to be too cheesy or anything, but my voice makes me nine feet tall. Because it’s huge, and no one, including me, can believe this body contains it. My parents knew my singing was crazy from the time I was a toddler, so I was always in every chorus, had private lessons, and like I said, they splurged on the piano even though they couldn’t afford it, so I could have more music in my life. Anyway, like this wasn’t obvious anyway, I owe it all to them, because unless you study and practice there’s no point in having talent, right? Someday I’ll try to remember to thank them. Because I wasn’t even that nervous during the voice audition, even though the dance one had gone badly; I mean, I knew they weren’t going to be able to believe it when they heard me sing. Partly it’s just an expectation thing—it’s like when you see a book with a really stupid cover and then you’re surprised it’s deep or good or smart or whatever. When you see me, you’re like, okay, there might be things she’s good at, but having a huge, bellowing voice probably isn’t one of them. But it is. It’s just one of those things.

  So I sang the old jazz standard “Four,” with its terrible, rhyme-lunging lyrics and achingly beautiful melody, and hit it right out of the place. I could feel how well it was going; my voice soared through the auditorium. There was a stunned silence when I finished, like no one even knew what to say.

  Then Mr. Gosford, the director of the music department, said, “Judith Lohden, that was incredible,” and Ms. Vanderly and Mr. Stenson said nothing, but just beamed at me like we shared some great secret. Then they nodded at each other, congratulated me, and told me right away without even talking it over privately that they were putting me in the senior voice class, even though “such a decision requires a great commitment on my part.” Maybe it sounds trivial, but at Darcy, it was a huge deal. And everyone knew about it right away. By the time I walked out of the auditorium, people in the hallway waiting to go next were like, “Holy shit—did you get into senior voice? Congratulations.”

  All I could think of was the certain fact that Kyle would hear about it. I mean, his best friends, Alan and Chris, were seniors, so they’d definitely know. They’d be in the class with me. Maybe Kyle would even get in! I wondered how good a singer he was.

  I woke up Wednesday morning giddy with it, wondering if he would say something in American lit, or better yet, while passing in the hallway or at lunch. And he did. He walked by with Ginger, actually, and they both stopped and were like, “That is so cool about you getting into senior voice; it’s been like five years since that happened.” I even told my mom about it on the ride home, that’s how excited I was.

  Speaking of my mom driving me home, my parents promised me a used car of some sort once I’ve had my license for a while, but if I’d held my breath about it, I’d be dead. I mean, even to run away, I had to take the AATA bus. The truth is, I feel guilty about the expense of them doctoring the car so I can drive it—raising the pedals or buying extenders. I bet they were planning on doing it for my birthday. My parents work really hard and they have to pay for U of M for Chad, which is still expensive even though it’s in-state and everything, and they made a huge thing about not making him live at home, even though it would have saved them money. He got into Cornell, too, but he didn’t go. And I think maybe it was because he didn’t want my mom and dad to have to pay that much more. He never said that, he just acted like it was too far away and all his friends were going to Michigan anyway, but I think he would have liked it in Ithaca. After he did a college visit there, he told me there were tons of cliffs. And that sometimes kids there paint bull’s-eyes on the rocks below, because appare
ntly lots of Cornell students kill themselves. But I think the suicide thing was a generous kind of sour grapes by proxy, Chad’s way of saying to my parents that he didn’t want to go there anyway, so it was okay if they couldn’t really pay that much money and he ended up here instead.

  Anyway, it’s possible that my parents are still working on the car thing in secret, actually, that they plan to have it ready by my seventeenth birthday, which is in two and a half weeks, incidentally. It seems very sad now, if they are. If you’d told me I was going to spend my seventeenth birthday at the Motel Manor, with no chance of finishing high school or showing my face in Ann Arbor again, I wouldn’t have believed you.

  Sometimes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I swam at school in the mornings. Mrs. O’Henry and Mr. Grames had okayed this unusual arrangement, and I loved those mornings of getting to school before anyone else (except Kyle and Elizabeth, who were already there rehearsing). I would eat breakfast in the car, a Power Bar and a Naked cherry-pomegranate juice, and then my mom would leave me at the back door, which the custodians knew to leave open for Kyle and Elizabeth and me. I would go upstairs to the second floor to drop my books in my locker, which I had begun to decorate with ribbon and lanyard. I wove six-foot strands into friendship bracelet patterns at home, beaded the ends, and then borrowed a ladder from the custodian, Mr. Nicks, so I could climb up and Krazy Glue the beaded parts to the top of my locker. So far I had finished only one strand, because it was long enough to reach from the top of my locker to the bottom, and it took forever. I can imagine exactly the sound of the metal door locking shut, beads clicking against it.

  Then I’d head down to the pool, on the level below the practice rooms, with my swimsuit and towel and goggles in a bag. When I walked around the school those swimming mornings, all the hallway drama was still potential, the school itself somewhere between asleep and awake. It felt conquerable to me when I was alone there during the quiet, felt like I belonged and like maybe even D’Arts belonged to me.

  Sometimes, if I was early enough, I would walk by the auditorium and peek into the doorway where no one could see me from the stage. I could watch a few seconds of the beginning of Kyle and Elizabeth’s Fool for Love rehearsals that way, before slipping down to the pool. I must have seen them in it at least a dozen mornings before the show went up, so when it did, for its skinny week of performances, I felt like his girlfriend even though everyone was talking about whether he and Elizabeth Wood were having sex for real. They almost had to have sex to do the play, so it wouldn’t have been a big leap. I couldn’t even entertain the thought, just stuck to the fantasy where I was her, in the play with him, leaning on his arm, kissing him, screaming at him, even. And offstage they flirted, sure, but I never saw him kiss her or hold her hand in the halls in a boyfriend-girlfriend way. He was nice to everyone. Especially me.

  This might sound boring, but I loved those days, loved that I knew exactly where I’d be each morning, that my time was neatly stacked like unit blocks. That the hours couldn’t surprise me, except with emotional drama. I dislike logistical surprises, because it’s already complicated for me to do normal things, like find the right place to sit, or make my way through a crowd, or reach the Naked juices without taking my grabber out of my backpack. It’s fine when I have to use it, I just like to know when I’m going to have to do those kinds of things.

  The first time I walked into senior voice, I had to count my breaths to make sure I was still breathing. Chris, Kyle’s big, handsome senior friend, was standing right in the doorway doing some kind of comedy routine for Carrie Shultz. Then Alan walked up, looking slippery, like he’d just gotten out of the pool. It’s funny how we become the things we do, even start to resemble the places we do them. I mean, it’s not like Alan swam all day, every day, and even I had been swimming that day, but he just looked like a pool. He had big blue eyes and the summer hair on his arms and legs and a green, chlorinated tint about him. He stalked over, his equilateral torso balanced on skinny legs, and Amanda Fulton came up from behind and put her arms around his pointy waist. I took a long time walking up to the door, because I was hoping the four of them would disperse, but even though I moved as slowly as I could, they were all still standing there when I arrived, so they had to kind of move over to let me by. I had the unsavory thought that I could probably have just squeezed right through their legs. Alan and Chris were enormously tall, even if you weren’t me. Alan was wearing a short-sleeved white T-shirt with a picture of a pigeon that said, “Ceci n’est pas un pigeon,” and gesturing with his arms, so that muscles rippled up and down them. It’s funny. I never wondered what it would be like to be Alan’s girlfriend, but I sometimes found myself wondering what it would feel like to be Alan himself, or in a body like Alan’s. To be a boy, I guess, a lanky, wiry boy. Did his body just snap along as he walked? Or glide through the world? Did it feel good to be as athletic as Alan? Or as handsome as Chris? There was an effortlessness about Kyle, though, that neither of the two of them seemed to have. They were always thinking about being themselves. I know, because I’m that type too.

  I wedged in between them, closing my eyes until I was safely inside the auditorium, where I climbed onto the stage and took a seat in the back row of risers. I felt faint. When the bell rang, Ms. Vanderly shushed us all and then made an impassioned speech about what a big deal senior voice is and how the fall concert is one of the greatest prides of the school, as important as the shows, and how that’s why we get to have class in the auditorium even though freshman and sophomore and junior voice use a regular classroom. When she said “junior,” she looked over at me. “I think most of you are aware that we have a junior in senior voice this year. Judy Lohden will join us because, as some of you may already know and all of you will find out, she is a huge talent.” I think she flushed slightly when she realized she’d said “huge,” but I was busy trying to tell whether Chris and Alan were paying close-enough attention to my glory that they could remember it and tell Kyle later. But when I looked over, Chris was throwing something—a wadded-up piece of paper?—at Amanda Fulton, and she and Carrie Shultz were giggling. I tried to smile graciously at Ms. Vanderly without looking like an ass-kisser. But she wasn’t watching me anymore. She had sat down at the piano and begun playing scales. She turned to us and we sang up a scale with her notes, and then back down. I started to relax, worked on not looking at anyone else, and finally heard us singing. It sounded glorious to me, even though we were only doing warm-ups.

  Getting to SV and leaving always sucked, and whenever Ms. Vanderly made me sing alone, I had near-death, pulse-racing moments. But when we were all singing together, I forgot about everyone—even Chris and Alan and Amanda and Carrie—and just listened to us, sounding like one big person.

  My love of routine is part of why the Motel Manor life is not suitable for me. There are too many variables and too few systems. This morning, just like every morning now, someone knocked gently on my door again, and again I didn’t answer. But later, when I woke up from a tortured nap with the TV on, there was an unmarked envelope under my door. I could barely bring myself to touch it. I looked at it for a long time, as if it were something alive and dangerous, a mail bomb or monster. Eventually I went over and picked it up carefully, using my index finger and thumb as if they were sterile tweezers. I felt unequivocal, didn’t even smell it or look at it up close. I knew, whatever it was, I couldn’t handle it yet, so I put it, unopened, into my diary, which I was keeping on the nightstand for when I felt like writing an entry. When that day comes, maybe I’ll also feel like I can open the envelope. Right now, I can’t imagine ever doing either.

  Tonight I have no plans, except to eat SpaghettiOs, watch TV, and cry. Maybe I’ll order pizza and ask Bill to hang out in the hallway and listen to me whine. The sound of my own whining makes me miss my mom. And Ms. Doman. Come to think of it, I really miss Goth Sarah, too. Maybe even Kyle. It’s funny how when someone betrays you, it ruins your idea of the person, but doesn’t make you s
top loving him right away. Or ever, maybe.

  5 I picked a Rickie Lee Jones song for my solo in the fall voice concert, and practiced it every day for an hour after school. I did this not because I was especially disciplined, but because I loved the D’Arts practice rooms. They were tiny cinder-block caves in the basement, one level up from the pool, which was in an absolute dungeon next to the gym. The practice rooms reminded me of monk dorms I once saw at a church in New York, during the same trip when my mom took me to see Saturday Night Live. The monk quarters were cool, marble, and simple. Likewise, each D’Arts practice room had its own piano, two stools, two chairs, and two music stands. And that was it. But it was everything you could need, even if you were doing a quartet, in which case two people sat on stools and two on chairs. Mostly, one person used the room at a time; there were signup sheets, but there wasn’t much competition since most kids were rich and had way nicer pianos at home. But I loved them, and frankly, going from those quiet vaults straight to the Grill every night to meet my parents felt perfect. The private to the public, artistic hunger to greasy spoon. I looked forward every day to both, and to the moments between them, my mom or dad pulling up in the car, ready to hear about my day and take me to the Grill, where a plate of whatever special they’d made would be hot, waiting. My mom always played Bruce Springsteen, my dad Ella Fitzgerald. I liked those ten-minute car rides alone with one parent, detailing for my mom or dad my tidy high school days. There were rumors that people used the practice rooms to have sex, but I had a hard time imagining that, considering that they had windows in the doors. I guess you could have hung a shirt or towel, but any teacher walking by would have knocked the door right down if you covered that window.