Voice Lessons

by Cara Mentzel

  Eight years had passed since I’d graduated, and I was terrified to return. I worried that what I’d once excelled at, academics, had changed. That I’d show up with a pencil and a notebook and everyone else would be diligently typing notes on laptop computers. I worried that there would be a class of tanned and toned, blond and blue-eyed ski bum girls talking about the drinking they’d done the night before, and as the eager, older, single mother, I wouldn’t belong.

  Jon and I had only recently purchased our house, so it had no equity, and Dee, with a little help from Mom and Dad, gave me the ten thousand dollars I needed to sell it. I was relieved. I was ready to move on. But I was also grieving. I loved my home. I loved that I could watch the boys play in the backyard against the jagged skyline of the Rockies while doing the dishes, that the park was a two-minute walk away. I loved the tall ceilings and how the light found new windows to enter throughout the day so the house was bright until the sun went down. I loved knowing that I slept in the same room where Jacob was born. It was unbearable to imagine another person sleeping with our most intimate memories within those bedroom walls.

  The ten-thousand-dollar price tag for my freedom was humiliating. Of course Dee wanted to help, but taking her money felt awful. Maybe it was paranoia, maybe intuition, but I still sensed that as happy as she was to be in a position to help me financially, I’d become one more thing she had to deal with, a phone call she was reluctant to answer, a tiresome rescue mission. But I needed her nonetheless. It would have been okay to need her for a hug or a pep talk, but not for money. Internally, I berated myself. I called myself a spoiled girl from Long Island. I called myself naïve and lazy. I wondered what other women in my position did without a sister to rescue them. Did they stay with their soon-to-be-ex indefinitely until there was a better offer on the house? I didn’t know. I didn’t need to know. I had Dee, and I was shamefully eager to take her money and be done living in limbo. Needing Dee’s money was the ultimate admission of failure. Any empowerment that I’d gleaned from leaving Jon and making a fresh start evaporated whenever I remembered who was footing the bill.

  Yet, thanks to my family, the boys and I were able to move into a two-story, two-bedroom rental at one of the University of Colorado’s family-housing developments with a name that mocked me every time I drove past the sign: Smiley Court. When I first drove up all I saw were asphalt parking lots, concrete sidewalks, and brick buildings. Everything appeared cold and unforgiving.

  Our unit had a two-step stoop and a fenced patio in the back. It was an end unit with a view and very likely the nicest one in the complex, but that didn’t say much. I unlocked the door and was greeted by white cinderblock walls, the stinging smell of bleach, and a steep staircase that made my stomach flip when I pictured Jacob trying to climb it. There was a tiny kitchen, a lane barely wide enough to open the fridge, and a living room at the end of a small hallway. Upstairs, two bedrooms were set apart by one dank bathroom that had rubber moldings, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many times a filthy mop had sloshed against them.

  I looked into what would soon be the boys’ room and tried to find a seed of optimism inside myself. I remembered my rationale for moving there. There was childcare for Jacob and a bus that could take both Avery and me to our new schools, his conveniently located right across the street from mine. The rent—though not cheap enough—was cheap. But the new place felt more like a shell than a home, holding only the stale memories of its previous residents.

  I stared at the white wall in front of me and pictured a mural. In our house, I’d painted a mural on the wall in Avery’s room. He slept under outstretched branches, like open arms, of a beautiful tree with leaves painted in warm browns, reds, and even cool, muted blues. I was proud of that mural, and as I looked at the blank canvas in front of me, I wanted to paint something for the boys, somehow.

  The rental was a downgrade—no question—and I couldn’t bring the boys there until I was able to face our new reality myself. I headed back to my car like a zombie and then sobbed in the parking lot—I sobbed in the parking lot of Smiley Court, and then, because it was too soon to appreciate the irony, I secretly renamed the complex Self-pity Court.

  The last few weeks with the boys in our house were especially difficult. I was back at CU, acclimating to school as a grown-up and trying to get the house ready for the new owner. Packing was a challenge with a one-year-old. Jacob thought it was funny to drop little treats into open boxes of our belongings where I might never track them down again: keys, the garage door opener, the Candyland gumdrop card, a Sharpie without a cap, numerous pacifiers, and the occasional carrot stick or soggy biscuit. If I packed when Jacob was awake, my progress—or lack thereof—was dispiriting.

  But packing at night, when theoretically the boys would be sleeping, was problematic, too. Avery wasn’t feeling well. I woke to him screaming nearly every night. The first time, I raced into his room and found him curled up in a ball on his bed, crying. “My stomach. My stomach,” he said. “It hurts, Mommy.” The pain was recurring, so rather than get in and out of my bed all night, I stayed with him. I spooned him and stroked his hair off his forehead. He screamed during the day, too, suddenly doubled over in pain at the top of the slide or waiting with me for a table in a restaurant.

  Two weeks after Avery’s stomachache began, he was still struggling with acute pain. I’d taken him to the ER and to our family doctor. But no one could find anything physically wrong with him, and no homeopathics, herbs, or other alternative remedies worked either. Avery was suffering from an ailment that had no physical explanation, and Avery, of all the children I’d known, thrived on explanation. Even before his mysterious stomachache he’d been intrigued by the digestive system. At four years old he sat with me at the table finishing up dinner and he said, “I know there’s only one tube from my mouth to my stomach, but sometimes I really think there’s two.”

  “What makes you say that, boo?” I asked.

  “Well, because I think there are two bellies—a protein belly and a sugar belly. Like right now, my protein belly is really full, but my sugar belly is empty.”

  One night after one of Avery’s screaming episodes, I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I made myself a cup of tea and sat down at the empty kitchen table. I looked up at the angles of our vaulted ceilings, then over the railing that I’d dusted daily, and then into the living room with the chartreuse accent wall—it took Jon and me weeks to choose that color. It occurred to me that the boys and I were moving soon and they knew too little about where their kitchen table would sit, where they’d watch TV, sleep, or bathe. I’d been remiss. Amid my tornado of a to-do list, my resistance to change, and my fear that the boys would be disappointed when they saw their new home, I’d left them in the dark.

  The next morning I mentioned Smiley Court to Avery. I explained that our next home would be smaller and that he’d share a room with Jacob. I hoped he was too young to know that it was less desirable to share a room with your little brother than to have a room of your own, and thankfully, he was. I asked him what kind of mural he wanted in his bedroom and he told me he wanted to sleep in the clouds.

  “Can you paint clouds, Mommy?”

  “Sure, I can paint clouds. How ’bout a rainbow, too?”

  “A rainbow!” he responded, the words so big he needed to throw his arms into the air to properly transmit them.

  Motivated by Avery’s enthusiasm, I took secret trips to the apartment to get his blue sky with clouds and a rainbow just right. Avery was still screaming about his stomach, and I was still leery of disappointing him and his brother, when I took them on an overdue visit to the town house.

  “Boys,” I announced. “We’re taking a little field trip to our new home.” They lit up. We loaded into the car and drove the twenty minutes from Erie into Boulder.

  I pulled in to Smiley Court, slowed down for the speed bump, and made the first left turn into our parking lot. Avery hopped out of the car first.

  �
��Which one’s ours?” he asked, already running down the sidewalk off the lot.

  “Keep going, keep going,” I instructed, and walked around to Jacob’s side of the car to free him from his car seat.

  “This one, Ma? This one?” Avery shouted as he pointed to each one on his way to the end of the row. He responded to Smiley Court the way he responded to a visit to a new friend’s house where he’d get to play with all new toys. The toys weren’t necessarily better in someone else’s home, but they were different and different was exciting.

  Jacob followed after Avery and I shouted, “That one! The last one. That’s it, boo. Wait there for Mommy.”

  We used our new key and the boys helped me open the door. We walked into the kitchen. It was filled with balloons that I’d secretly planted earlier. The apartment was still sparse, but with the boys there I started to see its potential. I pictured where I’d put the couch and television, Avery’s train table, and all the toys and bicycles that would clutter the patio.

  “Alrighty!” I declared with a clap and surprising enthusiasm. “Let’s check out upstairs.” I let Avery go ahead of me. I held Jacob’s hand as he took his time with each step, looking up periodically to try to keep up with his big brother. When we walked through the door to their room, I saw the rainbow in the fluffy clouds; it looked good, really good. I gave myself a little pat on the shoulder as Avery said, “Mom, it’s wrong.”

  “What do you mean it’s wrong?”

  “The red goes on the top. The purple goes on the bottom,” and in that split second I realized he was right. How in the world could I screw up a rainbow? ROY G. BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet), ROY G. BIV, I’d said to myself over and over as I painted. I’d been so focused on the order of the colors I’d neglected to pay attention to whether the sequence started at the top or the bottom. I did the only thing I could think to do, lie.

  “No, sweetie. The violet’s on the top, the red is on the bottom.”

  “No, Mom,” he said, and if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought my five-year-old was being condescending. “I can’t sleep under a scientifically inaccurate rainbow,” Avery insisted—and that’s a quote.

  I rubbed my eyes and temples and lied again. “I’ll fix it.” I had no intention of repainting the rainbow; I didn’t have the time.

  I walked to their closet and changed the subject: “Look, boys! A movie theater,” and then stuck my head in the closet. To the left, two large steps were built on the slanted floor from the adjacent stairway, and spanned the width of the closet. The closet’s profile reminded me of a mini-auditorium.

  “Come on in here,” I said and they stepped into the partially lit closet. I gestured to the opposite end. “We’ll put your video player over there on the little end table, and set up pillows over here on those steps like seats. If you want it dark you slide the doors shut.” I could see the pink creeping into Avery’s cheeks and Jacob was already busy climbing to the top step.

  Then we discussed the layout of the room. Where should the crib go, the bed, the dresser? Jacob, with his limited language and his tendency to follow his brother’s lead, was amenable to all the arrangements. And so it was there, in front of a fucked-up rainbow, that the three of us stood together making plans, and I knew we’d be okay.

  We talked about our new place the full twenty minutes it took us to drive home to the old house. When we walked in, I took out the chocolate cupcakes and ice cream sundae fixings, the colored sprinkles, whipped cream, hot fudge, and even the red dye number 40–ridden maraschino cherries. I gave the boys one index card each and colored pencils. Avery and I drew lots of townhouses that resembled our new place. I helped Jacob color in a house, then I cut out the houses, wrapped them around toothpicks, and stuck them into our cupcakes. We set each cupcake in a bowl and added all the fixings of chocolate decadence. Avery and I happily stuffed our faces until the remnants lay like mud in the bottoms of our bowls, while Jacob spread the slop all over the tray of his high chair and periodically tried to take fistfuls of cake and shove them into his mouth, his fingers splayed as he licked the palms of his hands.

  Just when I felt sick to my stomach, Avery casually announced, “My stomach feels better, Mom.” I looked up at him, chocolate covering his mouth and the greater part of his cheeks. “I think my sugar belly was feeling really angry, and it’s not angry anymore.”

  I sighed and resisted tears.

  “I’m so glad, Aves,” I said, and then hoped to please my angry sugar belly with one more big spoonful of sludge from my bowl.

  We’d lived in Smiley Court for a couple of weeks when I was saved by the charcoal sky of an afternoon thunderstorm. A double rainbow reached across the horizon and I noticed that its colors were inverted.

  “Avery, look!” I shouted and pointed at the sky. “That rainbow has purple on the top.”

  “It’s a double rainbow, Mom. The second one always has purple on the top.”

  “Well then, that’s the kind of rainbow in your room.” He looked at me as if to say “you have a point,” then declared, “My rainbow is scientifically accurate after all!”

  “Yep!” I confirmed with a sigh of relief.

  I lay in bed that night and thought of my boys. I started to cry. This time it felt good to cry. When the tears dried, I fell asleep to echoes of my favorite lullaby, “Rainbow Connection.”

  Lesson 9

  HOW TO WANT TO WIN

  Dee wore a lavender gown with a deep V-neck and ruched bodice to the 2004 Tony Awards. Her hair was sleek, swept to the side across her forehead and pulled back into a bun. She was nominated for best actress in a musical for her portrayal of Elphaba in Wicked. She earned it.

  The Tonys took place inside Radio City Music Hall, where, a decade earlier, I’d seen the Rockettes’ famous kick line in the Christmas Spectacular. I was there with Mom, Dad, and my beaming grandmother. From my seat, the stage looked like the Looney Tunes insignia, a series of arcs, one within the other. The lighting was golden, and opulent scalloped curtains hung above the edge of the stage. Dee sat near the front with Taye, in a cluster of other nominees and their dates. We sat a distance behind them in the front row of a section toward the back.

  Needless to say, it was a big night for Dee. She was a performer and a nominee, a common coupling at the Tonys except that Dee would be in full costume for her performance. This meant that she would spend hours with her stylist, hairstylist, and makeup artist for her walk on the red carpet. Then, only shortly thereafter, she’d rush to a dressing room backstage and undergo a full transformation into the green girl for her “Defying Gravity” performance with Kristin, who was nominated for the same award as Dee that night. At the conclusion of which, she would quickly—that is, before her Tony category was introduced—return to a dressing room and retransform into the beauty in lavender. If she won, Dee would be onstage that night as both Elphaba and Idina. It seemed the perfect way to honor both her and her work.

  Hugh Jackman hosted the Tonys that year. I watched him kick higher than a Rockette as Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz. I watched him pelvic thrust for a few minutes in gold lamé pants with Sarah Jessica Parker. On any other night, the thrusting would have been the highlight of my evening. But alas, my sister was nominated for a Tony, and I couldn’t sit there without reflecting on how hard Dee had worked for her nomination.

  She had been starring as the third replacement for Amneris in Aida for months when she auditioned for Wicked’s Elphaba, and she needed a new job. More important, Dee was excited about the possibility of originating a role again and being part of a new production, like she’d done with Maureen in Rent. She loved collaborating and playing an integral part in the development of an interesting character and show.

  Dee prepared for the Elphaba audition. She read Gregory Maguire’s novel (I read it too). She wore green lipstick and a black pointy hat and she sang the stirring and melodic “I Know the Truth” from Aida. At the callback she’d prepared “Defying Gravi
ty” but botched the high note. As the story goes, she went to hit the note and her voice cracked, at which point she shouted “Fuck!” Then she took the line again, this time without piano accompaniment, and nailed it. I’ve heard Joe Mantello say that’s when he knew he’d found his Elphaba. But from the thrilling moment when Dee was given the role, she worried she’d lose it.

  Becoming Elphaba had been a challenging and at times a grueling process for Dee. In the months between the San Francisco pre-Broadway tryout of Wicked and the Broadway opening her self-esteem and fortitude had been tested in a way few other experiences had tested them before. I understood Dee’s struggle from conversations she had with Mom, Dad, and me.

  During that time, the creative team worked hard on rewrites to build a stronger, more active Elphaba. Among other things, the green girl needed a sharper wit and a bigger heart. But that meant a lot of trial and error for Dee as new script pages arrived and she needed to perform them on the spot. She didn’t feel cold readings were among her strengths, and the team’s sense of urgency put a lot of pressure on her to get things right the first time.

  Even without a changing script, Dee would have described her creative process as messy. To craft a part, she liked having time to digest her lines independently and to explore them in character with the cast. But that summer she was chasing a moving target, which made her process messier and more time-consuming. Sometimes she sat on the floor in rehearsals amidst a spread of new script pages. “I don’t just feel like a mess,” she said to me one day, “I literally look like one.”

  And yet Dee’s feelings of inadequacy drew her closer to Elphaba, who struggled with similar worries. In fact, Dee and Elphaba were alike in many ways. Like Elphaba, Dee was afraid and ashamed of her temper. She hated that she could be hurtful, that she’d say things in anger that she could never take back. Like Elphaba, Dee’s greatest strengths sometimes made her a target. Dee wasn’t ostracized for being green or for her magical powers, but growing up she’d been bullied. Her voice was a threat to many a faltering ego—that of a girl named Laura Wellen, in particular. Laura was a year older than Dee and an aspiring singer. They attended the same schools from elementary until Laura graduated from high school. Laura’s claim to fame was performing the national anthem at an NHL game. For Dee, getting a solo or a leading role, or just generally being exceptional, meant getting bullied by Laura. For Dee, doing her best—being her best—meant spitballs, name calling, and mean girls following too close behind. Dee may have been competitive, but like the rest of us—and like Elphaba—she also wanted to be liked. She was a fiercely loyal friend and worried that her talent, something she loved about herself, had the potential to alienate her from others. Dee’s and Elphaba’s greatest desire was to be their biggest, best selves and still be loved. (And let’s not forget that Elphaba had her younger sister, Nessa, and Dee had me. They were caretakers.) In so many ways, they were kindred spirits.