Voice Lessons

by Cara Mentzel

  When I stepped out of the room, Dee was standing there.

  “You can sing,” she said with the same gentleness I’d just used to close the door. They were three simple words that, until that moment, I didn’t know I’d longed to hear from Dee. I knew right then I’d hoped she would hear me. My need for her acknowledgment was inescapable. I was over an inch taller than Dee and yet I felt like I was looking up at her, as if I were a little girl again. My thoughts took me back to the hallway mirror where I’d rehearsed for my elementary school audition and she tried to help, the mirror where part of me had been waiting a decade for her to turn back around instead of heading up the stairs.

  “Why didn’t you take voice lessons?” Dee asked, and I returned to the present moment.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, not far from a whisper.

  “Was it my fault?” she asked.

  Was it? I wondered.

  “You were the singer—singing was yours,” I said.

  “It could have been yours, too.”

  “No. I couldn’t sing like you.”

  “But you sing like you, Cara. Delicately, and it’s beautiful.”

  “It’s usually not, at least not when anyone is listening … except Avery, maybe.”

  We stood two feet apart and the tears came slowly for both of us. I could see the freckles over the bridge of her nose and the muscles along her clenched jaw roll beneath her skin. Her question, “Was it my fault?” was suspended in the air between us. I flashed on an image of myself as a little girl in my purple bedroom singing with arms outstretched in front of my daybed for an audience of stuffed animals, the way I often did back then. If I’d been an only child, I wondered, or if Dee hadn’t been a singer, would I have loved singing as much as I did? And if I did, would I have taken more risks, taken voice lessons? Was there any way to distill my true nature and desires from a childhood obscured by Dee’s influence? And was there any point?

  “Did I steal singing from you?” Dee asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, did I overshadow you, hog all the attention?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “But I was ‘the singer,’” she said with air quotes.

  “Dee, we were little girls. No one stopped me from taking voice lessons and I don’t know why I didn’t.” She was searching my eyes for an answer so I ventured a guess. “Maybe I thought talent was given, you either had it or you didn’t. You definitely had it. I didn’t.” My explanation didn’t feel entirely accurate, but it was my best guess at the time.

  “But that’s what I mean,” she said. “Just because I could sing didn’t mean you couldn’t. If you didn’t have to compare yourself to me, maybe you would have tried more.”

  “Maybe. But I didn’t. I don’t know, Dee, you didn’t overshadow me. There was nothing dark about your singing or our relationship. There wasn’t,” I assured her, but by then she was looking through me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said and filled a short silence. The shame in her apology bothered me. What could she have done differently? Was she supposed to play down her own talents to make room for mine? Besides, if she’d done that, we might have been standing there in tears discussing how I’d held her back.

  “I love you so much,” Dee said with a big sigh.

  “I love you, too,” I replied, relieved the conversation was over.

  But later that day, I recalled a conversation Dee and I had had years earlier in her New York City apartment. I can’t remember its context, but I can remember it word for word.

  “Why do you talk in a little-girl voice?” she asked me. “Speak from your diaphragm,” and she placed her hand under her ribs. “From here.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, hurt.

  “All high up and airy. You don’t sound confident. You should be confident when you talk. Confidence comes from down here,” and with the fingertips of one hand she pointed at the central spot directly under her sternum.

  “Oh. I didn’t realize I wasn’t doing that.” Her lesson on proper voice projection made me feel less confident, not more.

  “I mean, don’t worry about it or anything,” Dee added. “I just wanted to mention it.”

  But I was worrying. No longer was I concerned only about what I said to Dee, now I was also concerned about how I said it. I didn’t even know how to continue the conversation for fear I’d do it all wrong.

  “I’ll pay attention,” I told her—it would be hard not to.

  It’s true I was insecure, and I was aware of my social anxiety, but I thought I hid it well. I wasn’t some wallflower. I was outgoing. I was even vice president of Syosset High School one year. And I think Dee knew all that. But I also knew confidence was something that at best I portrayed but rarely—if ever—embodied, which made me think that maybe Dee, like that professor in college, had a point. To me, being confident was a risk. It made me feel exposed and easy to judge. Insecurity, though ugly and vexing, in some odd way made me feel safe. If I’d already judged myself poorly, no one else had to do it for me. A first-strike assumption of failure on my part provided a buffer from rejection that I sometimes relied on, the very buffer that was probably responsible for my not taking voice lessons. The truth was that I had a love-hate relationship with insecurity and that if Dee’s talent had cast a shadow in my direction, I stood in it willingly.

  When I sang “Rainbow Connection” to Avery and Dee listened, she didn’t judge me as insecure, and she didn’t try to correct me. She called my voice delicate and it was a compliment. I felt she understood me in a way she hadn’t before and that she understood us. Whether we were singing or talking to each other, she and I had different voices. Mine tended to be soft, sometimes tentative. Hers tended to be powerful, sometimes heavy-handed. We were different people.

  But I was changing. I was emboldened by motherhood. I’d always wished my children and their cousins would be close in age, but something about having motherhood “all to myself” was satisfying. I never patronized Dee aloud, but I wasn’t above thinking, You’re not a mother, when you’re a mother you’ll understand. Motherhood gave me the upper hand in disagreements with Dee, and the freedom to be self-righteous. Over time, Dee became frustrated with my all-organic, all-natural, all-knowing maternal disposition, but when she questioned my choices I didn’t retreat from her like I’d often done in the past. Instead, I consciously marched through my anxiety into our conversations armed with facts and an uncharacteristic show of confidence.

  Once, when Avery was still a baby, Dee was in town and asked if she could feed him.

  “Yeah, let me get you some food,” I answered and then sashayed into the kitchen with my babe snug against my chest in a sling. Dee followed me and watched as I took a bite of banana, chewed it thoroughly, and spit the slop into a little dish. I handed the dish to her with a baby spoon and a straight face.

  “Seriously, Cara?” she said and raised an eyebrow, an expression that made it difficult for me to tell if she was being critical or curious.

  “What? It’s called kiss feeding,” though in this instance I had to admit it looked more like “spit feeding.” Then Dee looked at me like she was plotting an escape route whereby she would flee with Avery and treat him to his first Snickers bar just to spite me. I tried to fend off any judgment with a comprehensive explanation of the benefits of kiss feeding.

  “There’s an enzyme called ptyalin in your saliva that begins carbohydrate digestion. Young babies don’t have it when they’re first introduced to food, so I usually feed Avery straight from my mouth like a mama bird to her fledglings.” Then I added, “Moms do it in Africa.”

  Another time, Dee asked about vaccinations.

  “Don’t you think you should vaccinate Avery?”

  “No, I don’t—at least not yet. Vaccines are all about greedy pharmaceutical companies. Did you know that the incidence of infectious disease was dropping before vaccines? Yeah, because of improved hygiene practices? Or that half the peopl
e who contract pertussis are actually vaccinated?”

  And yet another time, she asked about nursing.

  “You’re going to nurse for two years? Don’t you think that’s a long time?”

  “No. Why? Because I’m part of a culture that doesn’t support it. What do I care? Nursing secures the bond between mother and baby. It helps stimulate the growth of his cranial and facial bones. Breast milk is filled with nutrients and protects the baby from all sorts of bacteria and viruses in his early years.”

  There were a number of other points of contention between Dee and me regarding my parenting, including behavior management. I spent the first three years of Avery’s life employing a philosophy that encouraged parents to avoid the word “no.” To most outsiders, and to Dee, it appeared I had set no boundaries and he was running amok—and sometimes he was. What neither Dee nor I understood at the time was that at the core of my convictions was my need to feel in control of my life and my need to prove to her that I had control of my life. But it wasn’t easy facing Dee’s criticism, and the tension growing between us was thick like Floridian humidity.

  Of course, I didn’t always feel bold, either. Postpartum depression found me six months after Avery was born. It was like some parasite sucking the life out of me. I often felt like I was watching life through a windowpane; I could see the world and the people in it, but I was separate, disconnected. The depression was exacerbated by two miscarriages and the destruction of the Twin Towers. I wanted to be near my family again, and Jon and I opted to settle back in Colorado, where my mother still lived.

  We bought our first house in the urban sprawl of Erie, Colorado, a giant step up from our previous rentals. We were proud of our front porch, burgundy front door, and expansive western view of the Rocky Mountains. We built garden boxes in the backyard and I took up gardening. I was pregnant again. I’d made it through my first trimester and I finally felt confident enough about taking the pregnancy to term to start planning for the baby.

  I sat in a winged, claw-foot chair, with my feet on the ottoman, and talked to Dee on the phone. I was anxious because I needed to tell her that I planned to have another home birth. After hemorrhaging with Avery’s birth, I suspected she wouldn’t take the news well.

  With the phone pressed to my ear and my heart pounding, I took a deep breath and told Dee my plans.

  “I’m having this baby at home.”

  “What?” she said. It was only one word, but sufficient to convey her disapproval.

  “Yeah. I’m gonna have another home birth.”

  “But what if something goes wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing’s gonna go wrong. I’m young, I’m healthy, I have a much better midwife than I did the first time, and I trust her.”

  “But why take the risk? It’s not safe.”

  “It is. I actually feel safer at home. At home no one’s going to force me to have a C-section—they’re thirty-three percent more likely in hospitals, you know. At home, I don’t have to be on guard. I’m relaxed.”

  “But you never know. Something could happen.”

  “Something could always happen, anywhere.”

  She didn’t like my response. “Why do you always have to do things differently?” she asked. “It’s like you try to be extreme just to stand out.”

  “What? What does that even mean? Do you really think that?”

  “What I think is that you’re being irresponsible.”

  “Well, I disagree. I’m not irresponsible.”

  “Really?” she said. “’Cause you’re so responsible. That’s how you ended up pregnant at twenty-three?” And there it was, her truth, the allegation she’d withheld for years, but that I had sensed nonetheless.

  “I bet I was more careful than you were back then,” I argued. “I just happened to get pregnant.”

  “But you didn’t just happen to get pregnant. That’s my point,” she said. “Nothing happened to you. You wanted to get pregnant. You wanted to get pregnant even though you didn’t have the means to take care of a baby.”

  After all this time, after being an aunt, was she still suggesting that my pregnancy was irresponsible? I knew how much she loved Avery and she knew how much I loved him. I couldn’t understand how she could have the impression that my life had somehow taken a wrong turn because I’d become a mother. Did Dee really think she knew better than me what my life was supposed to look like?

  “You realize you’re talking about your nephew, right?” I reminded her.

  “I love my nephew! This isn’t about him. It’s about you. That’s so unfair.”

  “Well, you’re the judge,” I told her. “You’d know what’s fair.” I knew that calling her “the judge” was hurtful when I said it. She knew she was critical and hated it about herself. I knew I was hypersensitive and hated it about myself. But regardless of my sensitivity, the reality was that when Dee was upset, she was good at making words sting, and she didn’t even have to raise her voice to do it. I wanted words that could sting, too. For the first time, I wanted to hurt her.

  “Who are you to talk to me about motherhood?” I yelled. “Who are you to question my decisions?” I hadn’t realized that I was shouting. Until then, I’d never shouted at Dee. But yelling at her felt like a way to protect myself. Like if I screamed loud enough maybe I could stop her words midair and they’d never reach me, never hurt me.

  “Come on, Cara. Don’t you think you got pregnant because you needed attention, because I had Rent and you needed your own thing?”

  Her words hit me hard and the fight in me quickly faded. I thought about that year when Rent began and how proud I was of her. I pictured the deep plastic bin I still had in my basement filled with magazines and newspapers and clippings of her as Maureen in that black catsuit. I thought about how hard it had been, but how gratifying it was, to leave Colorado when I was buried in my thesis and fly to New York for a couple of days to watch her onstage, to share that success with her.

  I couldn’t bear to listen to Dee anymore and I’d lost the ability to shout her away. I said nothing, but she continued.

  “You’re impulsive,” she snapped. “You had to have everything right away. Have a wedding, have a baby. You needed to make sure people were looking at you, too.”

  I didn’t understand. Was she accusing me of jealousy? Didn’t she know how good it felt every time I saw her take the stage, or how good it felt to hear her belt out the last note of a show-stopping song, or jump to my feet for her standing ovation? But I quickly realized that she didn’t know. She’d never seen me like I’d seen her. She’d never felt that proud of me.

  Dee’s anger hurt, and once I understood what I’d done to make her feel that way it hurt even more than the anger that had masked it—I’d disappointed her.

  I started to cry gasping, audible tears and she heard them and stopped talking. As much as I could, I spoke through my tears.

  “You don’t get to decide what I do or tell me why I do it. You don’t get to tell me what mistakes I’ve made. What do you know about being me, Dee? I’ve spent my whole life rooting for you, being proud of you, watching you. Have you any idea what it feels like to hear how disappointed you are in me? And for the very thing I’m most proud of, my family.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I am proud of you.”

  “And to tell me you think I did it all because of you? Because you had fame and I didn’t.” I felt betrayed. I’d been loyal to her and she’d turned on me. I hadn’t just been her sister, I’d been Idina Menzel’s sister, and I believed I’d been really good at it. And the truth was that if I was desperate for attention, it was mostly from her.

  “I don’t think you did it all because of me,” she backpedaled.

  But I wasn’t finished.

  “Can’t having my baby just be about me? Does it have to be about you, too? I’ve never competed with you for attention.”

  There was another pause, like we’d just parked a car
and pulled the keys from the ignition.

  “My baby is my success,” I insisted, feeling as if I was reaching through the phone, begging for her to agree, begging for her to accept my choices, to accept me.

  “I know. I’m sorry, babe. You’re a great mom. I just … imagined so much more for you.”

  Another jab, this time unintended. I couldn’t speak. In Dee’s mind, my adult life was shaped around my need for attention, and that made me feel like my desire to have a family had been impure. In her mind, I was supposed to be more, and that made me feel like I wasn’t enough.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I know.”

  We hung up. Dee was gone, but the conversation stayed with me. Was she right? Did I have a baby because I needed attention, because she had Rent and recognition? I didn’t want to be the person who would have a baby to get attention, even unconsciously. The possibility haunted me. I desperately wanted the answer to be no. The answer had to be no, because if it wasn’t, then in some obscure way, Dee was the impetus for the best thing I’d ever done—have Avery. And I wanted Avery to be all mine. All my doing.

  After eight years of dating, Dee and Taye were getting married. Their destination wedding in Montego Bay was about six months away, and Dee and I were on the phone again. Several months had passed since The Argument. We’d talked, but we hadn’t revisited the subject. Maybe we’d said all there was to say, or maybe the matter was too sensitive to touch again. For my part, the hurt lingered, but it also didn’t hold any answers, so I kept moving forward, hoping to leave the interaction with Dee further and further behind until it was less a part of me and more a part of history.

  I was slouched in a loveseat in my bedroom with my hand over my pregnant belly, my baby big enough to kick at my palm. I watched as Avery pushed Thomas the Tank Engine’s Percy around fragments of train tracks and listened to Dee talk about her dress, which villa everyone would stay in, and how she was flying in her favorite wedding band—one she’d sang in years ago—and the karaoke party she had planned after the rehearsal dinner. Then she surprised me.