Voice Lessons

by Cara Mentzel

  Dina came to visit me during my second semester. She was fighting a cold and her voice was hoarse.

  “I get the whole Boulder hippie thing,” she said and looked at my shoes, then up at my frizzy ponytail, “but who says you can’t take a shower?”

  “I showered on Wednesday,” I assured her.

  On Long Island I’d worried that someone might notice if I wore the same pair of jeans twice in one week. In Boulder, a city listed as one of GQ’s worst dressed in the country on more than one occasion (though as a fitness mecca, it has earned recognition for having the best-looking naked people), nobody seemed to care about my clothes or my appearance, so I didn’t either. For what felt like the first time, I was comfortable.

  I was excited to show Dina around Boulder. I took her to Norlin Quad, off of the library. We grabbed a snack and sat on the steps around the University Memorial Center fountain. We walked along the red brick of the outdoor mall on Pearl Street. It felt good to be the one who knew whatever there was to know—the school, the town, anything. And then for some reason I can’t remember, Dina and I decided to roller blade.

  I’d bought a pair of Rollerblades before I left for college. I’d planned to cruise around corners and weave through pedestrian areas agilely, like an athlete. I’d made my Rollerblade purchase using the same criteria I’d used to make most purchases throughout high school—the most expensive item must be the best. This was a standard takeaway from an adolescence on Long Island. Despite my vision of swift Rollerblade grandeur through campus, I’d barely put mine on. At the time, Dina was even less skilled—she’d later cruise down NYC streets like the expert I aimed to be, but back then, we borrowed a pair from a friend of mine, and Dina and I were off.

  By the time we were ready to Rollerblade, Dina had full-blown laryngitis. She could barely whisper so I gave her one of my campus whistles to hang around her neck in the event she needed to get my attention while we were out and about. Slowly, side by side, we found our footing. We bladed over sidewalks, slick new asphalt, and bumpy bike paths patched with tar and cement. We laughed at each other’s wooden awkwardness as we passed through the student parking lots, behind the campus’s Fiske Planetarium, and down into a tunnel underpass beneath Boulder’s Twenty-eighth Street.

  In my minimal Rollerblading experience, I’d learned to stop via local lawns. I’d get going and when my speed exceeded my comfort zone, I’d hop off the sidewalk or street onto an adjacent lawn. Lawns provided the right amount of deceleration, and in the event I needed to fall, a lawn was a soft place to land.

  We arrived at a frontage road that ran the length of a steep hill and ended on the outer side of a main intersection. Dina experimented with her heel brake. I attempted to do the same, but I had picked up too much speed and couldn’t bring myself to lean on the brake out of fear I’d falter. Dina disappeared from my peripheral vision. I peeked down at the rough asphalt as it whipped by beneath me. The friction between my wheels and the street sent a vibration up through the soles of my feet that tickled in the worst way. I checked to my right for a handy lawn, but there were only parking lots. Petrified, I raced toward the bottom of the hill where a Stop sign stood like a moot point at the edge of Colorado Avenue, a four-lane cross street. The hill leveled out and I held my breath as I cruised through the Stop sign, took a wide turn, narrowly avoiding a median, and then crossed back over two lanes of traffic toward the curb on my right. I cut off a city RTD bus in the process. I took a quick step up to the curb, hopped my wheels over a strip of grass along the sidewalk, and then slammed into the concrete on my hands and knees. The bus whizzed by, pounding its angry horn.

  I was sitting on my ass in the middle of the sidewalk, squinting, and pulling a small glass shard out of a scrape in my palm when I heard the whistle.

  “Toot toooooooot. Toot tooooooot.” Dina came rolling down the sidewalk. “Toot tooooot.” She smiled and the whistle dropped out of her mouth. She was animated and excited when she tried to speak, but her voice wouldn’t cooperate. It only worked intermittently. “Oh—gosh, you’re awe—! You’re like—pro!”

  I was confused. Didn’t she know my collision course through traffic was a mistake? I looked up at her and the whistle that hung from a string around her neck. Before I could set Dina straight I exploded into a soggy mess of snot and tears.

  “I almost died,” I managed to say.

  She sat down next to me and whispered, “Well, at least you looked great,” and we burst into laughter. “Let me get th—stupid—ings off—you.” She unclasped one of the buckles and then croaked, “Whose idea was—anyway?” We walked back to my place in our socks, carrying our Rollerblades in protest.

  Maybe I remember that day because I almost died, that’s certainly good enough reason, but I think—at least in part—I remember that day because it was symbolic for me. My sister, whose voice had defined so much of my life, had come to visit me and shown up without, of all things, her voice! Then, she watched me successfully (successful perhaps, only because I lived to tell the story) tackle a huge hill and, despite my fear and flailing, she was impressed. I’d moved a thousand miles away from home to a place where her voice was quiet enough for me to begin to hear my own, and it seemed like Dina knew that was what I needed to do. It seemed like she was proud of me.

  * * *

  I fell in love with an aerospace engineering student, Ken. He was tall and skinny—too skinny, he’d say. He had warm brown eyes and an even warmer smile. We moved in together. He wanted to be an astronaut. An astronaut! I didn’t know people still wanted to be astronauts. Wasn’t it a cliché straight out of a career-day presentation in elementary school? I had a boyfriend who wanted to venture into the stars and a sister who wanted to be one. Dina was willing to face repeated rejection, something that would be unbearable for me. And Ken was willing to suffer through differential equations, something that would be impossible for me. I envied their clarity. I envied their drive. And I worried that without an extraordinary goal, I might never be an extraordinary person. Am I destined to be ordinary? I wondered. Am I okay with that?

  It was about the time Ken taught me how to drive a stick that I unearthed my hair dryer, reintroduced black boots and tights to my wardrobe, and started to feel a bit like a badass. I declared a major in psychology and planned to attend graduate school to become a clinical psychologist. My interest in psychology was simple and honorable: I wanted to help people. Then someone told me that psychology was the largest major at CU. Because it had the fewest science requirements, many students deemed it the easiest route to a degree. I couldn’t confirm the accuracy of their claim, but true or not, “easy” bothered me. I hadn’t come across the country to join a throng of people with a reputation for being mediocre. Suddenly, I didn’t feel as much like helping others as I felt like outperforming them. Honorable? Definitely not. On the upside, I’d found some drive.

  I loved my neuroscience classes most of all and excelled at them. One day, I was in the elevator of the Muenzinger Psychology Building with a few classmates and one of my neuroscience professors. We were talking about our future studies.

  “I’m pretty sure physics and I are incompatible,” I said. “I mean, I still struggle to borrow and carry when double-checking the bill.” I giggled. My professor looked me square in the eyes and said, “Don’t do that. Don’t act less intelligent just because you’re a pretty girl.” His use of the imperative was jarring. I’d never heard the words “intelligent” and “pretty” spoken in such a severe tone, and I didn’t know how to react. Had I been insulted, reprimanded, complimented? All of the above?

  “Okay,” I said, “I won’t.”

  “I’m serious,” he pressed. “You’re too smart for that.”

  I swallowed hard to clear the lump in my throat. “Okay,” I repeated.

  I walked to the bus stop replaying the brief interaction in my mind. I hadn’t intentionally acted less intelligent. Sure I was exaggerating—I mean, I can borrow and carry—but my earlier
statement wasn’t an outright lie. The quantitative sciences had never been my strong suit, and I’m embarrassed by how long it would take me to calculate a 15 percent tip. But maybe my professor was on to something. Maybe I put myself down a lot. Maybe giggling was a sign of insecurity. It felt like a reflex, a way of sweetening my delivery. A little giggle or nervous laugh was my way of ensuring that whatever I’d said would be well received. Though I didn’t quite understand what that had to do with being “a pretty girl.” The truth was I didn’t always feel smart and I certainly didn’t always feel pretty. But intellectually, at least, I had no doubt a woman could be both. If not because my mother and my sister were great examples, then because Working Girl was one of my favorite movies. Every now and then I called upon the image of Melanie Griffith on the Staten Island Ferry and Carly Simon singing, “Let the river run, let all the dreamers wake the nation,” for inspiration.

  The following semester, when, as a junior, the same professor asked if I’d like to teach recitations for the lower-division Biological Psychology class, I wanted to bat my eyelashes and say, “I’m not sure my pretty little brain can handle that.” But I was too excited about the opportunity to teach my favorite subject to make a joke.

  Dina came to visit the semester I taught Biological Psychology. She’d been working as a reservationist at a popular restaurant in Chelsea, auditioning in her off-hours, gigging with some of her own music, and trying to find an alternative to singing at weddings and bat mitzvahs on the weekends. She came to class to watch me teach. She sat toward the back of a sunny classroom behind a U-shaped configuration of tables where a class of approximately thirty students sat facing a large green chalkboard. I stood in front of the class and reviewed the week’s content from the professor’s lectures on synaptic transmission. Dina listened as I answered questions, drew diagrams, and offered detailed explanations of, but not limited to, the propagation of action potentials, the depolarization of cell membranes, calcium channels, and the difference between excitatory post-synaptic potentials and inhibitory post-synaptic potentials. I was knowledgeable in front of the class, poised and confident. And Dina saw me. In the back of a room full of college students begrudgingly fulfilling their science requirement, Dina sat beaming. On our way out of the classroom, she locked her arm in mine and said, “Holy shit, I’m so impressed. How do you know all that stuff?” I didn’t have an answer. I was too busy soaking up her praise.

  That night, Dina, Ken, and I went out for dinner at Sushi Zanmai. Back then it was the only place to get sushi in Boulder. Sushi Zanmai is a relatively small restaurant with one of those tiny bathrooms situated inappropriately close to the kitchen. There was a sushi bar on one side and tables scattered around the bar’s perimeter. On Friday and Saturday nights patrons might wait an hour for a table. We were seated around 8 P.M. To our surprise, around 9:30 the staff started rearranging the chairs and tables to clear a corner for karaoke. Apparently, Saturday night was karaoke night. Truly, I hadn’t known.

  Some people would have reached for their sake or Kirin and begun a mental search for the song they’d sing. Not me. Not Ken. Not even Dina. Dina rarely sang in public unless there was an official performance. When we were younger and family or friends asked her to sing—just ’cause—like at a family friend’s house on a Saturday night—Dina resisted. She wasn’t a show-off and making herself the center of attention in an unofficial capacity made her uncomfortable. But making her the center of attention in an unofficial capacity didn’t make me uncomfortable, and there in the corner of the restaurant a microphone on a flimsy stand waited for a singer, my favorite singer.

  “Come on, Dina. Sing something,” I said.

  “Why don’t you get up there?” she asked.

  “Oh right. That’s not happening.”

  “I get to sing all the time,” Dina said. “Seriously, I have my own mic. Let someone else sing, someone who doesn’t get to do it otherwise.”

  “Fine,” I conceded.

  Then, with comedic arrogance, Dina added, “Besides, I doubt it would be in my key,” and dramatically flung her hair off to the side.

  Boulder didn’t know Idina Mentzel like Syosset did, and while I appreciated the anonymity and the chance to be Cara—whoever she was—I still wanted the world to know that my sister was special. Of course, at the time the world may have been an ambitious goal, so the patrons of Sushi Zanmai had to suffice. But Dina was adamant.

  The lights dimmed until the room was almost dark, and we stayed and watched drunken college students slur the words to “Livin’ on a Prayer” and “California Girls.” Occasionally, there were brave souls with the microphone who were very serious about their performance, but struggled to stay on pitch. These were the people I watched while in search of an appropriate facial expression, something authentic that acknowledged their courage and concealed my discomfort. But the harder they tried and the worse they sang, the worse I felt; I was convinced that I couldn’t have felt more embarrassed if I were up there myself. And yet there was nothing empathetic or noble about my feelings. Me, the girl who was afraid to get up there herself because she might suck, was embarrassed for those who had the gumption enough to try—or better yet—would enjoy trying; I didn’t need to be a psychology major to know that my discomfort was all about me and not about them. It was a projection of my self-consciousness onto innocents who would soon be too busy selecting their next song to care about my uneasiness. Painful as it sometimes was for me to watch, I envied them.

  Then there were the karaoke die-hards who wanted to be singers and, unlike Dina, used karaoke as an opportunity to take center stage. They may not have been able to make a career of singing, but they were eager to get up there for three minutes of local stardom and two minutes of post-performance accolades. Some people wanted their fifteen minutes of fame, but would settle for five minutes of karaoke. I remember one such person from that night who fit this description.

  I returned to our table from a quick trip to the restroom and the restaurant was cheering as a woman, close to my age, was taking the “stage.”

  Ken leaned over to me and explained, “Apparently, this woman won the regional karaoke contest last month.”

  “There’s a regional karaoke contest?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders as the first notes of Gloria Gaynor’s feminist anthem “I Will Survive” began.

  “At first I was afraid, I was petrified.”

  She wasn’t fabulous, but she was good, and unlike her predecessors, she could hold a tune. She had pitch and hints of vibrato. More than talent, though, she had stage presence. I think she’d grown accustomed to having an audience. She was probably used to solos in high school. I caught myself thinking Dina’s so much better, and immediately coached myself to be a better person. Be kind, Cara. Root for wanna-be Gloria Gaynor. Wish her the best. Still, all I could think was that I wanted my sister to get up there and put that girl in her place, show her how it’s really done. Oh my god, I’m an affront to feminism. I’m a terrible person. At the same time, I was shamelessly proud of my sister, and wasn’t that a good thing?

  I leaned over and tapped Dina’s arm.

  “Please,” I said.

  Dirty look.

  “All I’m askin’ … is for a little ‘Respect’?” I was begging, but I was careful. I didn’t want her to get annoyed with me.

  She smiled and I felt relieved.

  “Just a little bit,” I added and smiled back. I knew I’d won. If there was a surefire way to make me happy, Dina would do it.

  Before long, Dina stood in front of the mic, dotted with the colored lights of a cheap disco ball. I scanned the crowd, then looked back at her. I was the only one in the room who knew what was about to happen. Not even Ken, who had heard her on cassette tape, knew the power that the unassuming girl at the mic with the poufy hair was seconds from unleashing. Horns played the first couple of measures of “Respect” and then Dina began.

  “What you want! Baby I got it.”

  A
ll table chat ended. There it was, the best feeling. The reason I wanted to put Dina on display that night. The satisfaction of a stunned audience. The meteoric force and unique texture of her voice and the way it charged the crowd. She drew her head back, instinctively measuring her volume and her distance from the mic, and continued. When Dina sang I was fully immersed in her performance. She made it impossible for my focus to wander beyond that moment and I loved the feeling of being 100 percent present.

  Finally, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Take care. TCB.”

  When Dina finished, the audience whistled and applauded. I’d done nothing but sit there, shout a few whoos, and dance in my seat, and yet I felt triumphant. When Dina performed, she both inspired me to be my best and reminded me that I didn’t need to be the best to be happy. In fact, with Dina onstage, I could feel better than ever as one of the many faces in a dimly lit crowd.

  A little while later we grabbed our coats. On our way out, a woman stood up from the sushi bar and stopped us.

  “You could be a singer,” she said to Dina, as if recognizing talent in Dina were rocket science. I tried not to laugh.

  “Here, I’m a voice coach,” she added and handed Dina her card. Had this woman made a practice of scoping out potential clients at karaoke night? Smart.

  “Thank you,” Dina said and took the card. Then, as we walked on, Dina turned back and added, “I do a little singing back in New York.”

  * * *

  On a long weekend in the fall of my senior year at CU, I arrived at the Newark airport and stepped on the Down escalator, heading toward the baggage claim. I could see Dina and Dad waiting at the bottom and imagined the hugs in the seconds before they happened. Dina was good with a hug, but she was more of a kisser. I loved that even as we grew up, she still kissed me, usually on the lips. There’s an old photo of us—a favorite that I opted to feature on this book cover. I’m four—our ages are carefully noted in my mom’s script on the back side—and Dina is seven. I’m in my little red-and-white sundress with the strawberries on it and there’s a matching red yarn ribbon in my hair. Dina’s in a bedazzled short denim skirt, a future favorite hand-me-down. She’s squatting down with her arms wrapped around my waist, her head level with mine as we smooch. Kissing Dina is a special kind of kiss. It’s a split second that manages to say, “I love you. I’ll take care of you. I see you,” all at once. At the bottom of the escalator a kiss waited for me.