Last, she handed me a separate piece of paper. “This is a copy of your contract for behavior that you signed.”
I nodded. The first time I’d seen it, it hadn’t seemed very important. I would never dream of doing ninety percent of the things they expressly forbade. I wasn’t entirely sure what the other ten percent were. Public displays of affection? Me?
I trudged up the stairs, found the room I’d been assigned and opened the door. Another girl was lying on one of the two beds, napping. When I came in, she opened one eye and saw me.
“Wonderful.” Her voice was different than what I expected looking at her. It was like a TV person’s voice: warm and soft. Glowing.
I gestured at the empty bed. “Is that one mine?”
“That’s the only other one here. I guess so.” She sat up and I could tell a lot more about her.
She was much older than I was. Probably, I thought, a high school senior. She was a couple inches shorter than me -- heavier but not fat, though. She had a cascade of honey blonde hair, clear blue eyes that seemed to take in every detail about me. I was tolerably sure that she sniffed in derision at my skirt.
“Cellist?” she said as I put the cello on the bed.
I looked blandly back at her, “Actually, it’s a miniature string bass.”
She grinned and I saw her eyes dart to a cello case across the room. “Me, too. Oh well, more cello fodder for the rest of us to pummel.”
I stopped thinking for a second. It took a moment for my thought processes to move forward again. Rachael and Mrs. Walker had been blunt.
“You are going to the state orchestra competition. Except it’s not competing orchestras. There is only one orchestra, but a very large number of musicians. The seating you received at the audition is more like a seeding in a tournament. Different judges will evaluate how you play during the competition and pick a final principal for each instrument. The principal will win a thousand dollar college scholarship.”
I’d shrugged, aware that that amount wasn’t hardly enough to cover food for a year, much less tuition and fees at a good university.
“More importantly, if you win, you get to lord it over everybody else for the next year,” Rachael had contributed. “Let me tell you, it feels good, really good, to win any music competition.”
I had no intention of competing. I was simply here to play the cello as best as I could and let the chips fall where they fell. I wasn’t going to see how many other cellists I could defeat. Music wasn’t like that, I thought, it wasn’t like that at all.
As usual, the other girl could read my mind. Sort of. “Hey, being cello fodder isn’t so bad! And look at it this way: you’re starting young! You’re going to have a lot more chances! Believe me, practice being here helps. This is my third time. The third time will be the charm!” she said.
“I’m Kira Kinkaid,” I told her, wondering if she would react.
“Irene Farber,” she said with no change of expression. “I’ll warn you now: Second Chair.”
I wasn’t sure why I felt the way I did; something evil was loose in me. I’d teased her mildly earlier; I hated it when people teased me. I wanted to do it again.
“Is that good?” I asked, trying to sound innocent.
She looked at me steadily. Well, that hadn’t worked.
“Not as good as First Chair, obviously.”
I smiled brightly. “Just so long then, that we know where we stand in relation to each other.” I paused, and added, “Er, make that sit.”
For a second, the girl had no expression on her face; then an expression I couldn’t begin to describe.
Without a word she got up, went to a pile of paper on one of the desks along one wall, picked one of them up. “Kira Kinkaid. Principal Cellist,” she read. Her expression was sour. “Good ol’ Irene. Foot in it, again.”
I smiled slightly. “Just be sure to tell me where you stepped in it, so I can miss the mess.”
She doubled up with laughter and shook her fist at me. “I could knock you on the head! I could tell them you got lost. If I can find a step ladder to get up that high and didn’t get a nose bleed from the altitude.” She motioned at the cello. “First Chair?” She shook her head. “And you’ve been playing how long?”
“Not quite eight months.” At first, I hadn’t understood why everyone asked. Eventually I realized that most other cellists had played for years and years. They took great pride in how long they had been playing, not how short.
“Well, gosh wow!” Irene said, “I started violin when I was five and then I had this humongous growth spurt when I was eight.” She looked me up and down. “Not as humongous as yours.” We both giggled. Why did I like her?
“That’s when I started playing the cello. Not quite nine full years now.” She looked at me. “And you think you’re better?”
I shook my head. “The judges thought I was better.”
She laughed again. “Now that, Kira, was a low blow! How is it such a young person has learned to fight so nasty?” She waved at me. “Why the skirt?”
The change of subject threw me. “I like wearing skirts and dresses.” Well, it was true.
“I guess,” Irene sniffed, then waved at the door. “I wondered when I checked in this morning why I was singled out for a lecture from the Queen Mum about proper behavior, the importance of being an outstanding and upstanding role model for other students, and so forth and so on. You’re what? Thirteen?”
“Soon... another three months.” I told her.
“At our age, soon and three months aren’t synonyms. All sorts of things can happen in three months.”
I was speechless at my own stupidity. Three months? That was the interval between my first picking up a cello and being asked to play for the Arizona Symphony! She was right!
Irene took my hesitation wrong. “Just rat me out to the Queen Mum; she’s hated me from the start. I’ll be out of here.”
“Who,” I asked, ignoring the content of her comment, “is the Queen Mum?”
“Why, that would be Michelle Queen, the University Event Director, in charge of this event. She’s about 95 years old and her mind is back in the Middle Ages.”
“My mind is back there too,” I told Irene.
“I noticed.” Irene waved at the cello. “First Chair, eh?” I nodded, unsure why we were back to that again. “Are you really that good?” I nodded again. “Talkative, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t come here to compete against you or anyone else. I play for myself.” I played for the trees, but that was for me to know and for her never to find out.
“I never even looked to see who was First Chair,” Irene said. “Edgar is so...” She made a mincing gesture, her hand flopped over. “He has like totally no use for women at all.”
I followed that this time and blushed but she kept on.
“I knew it hurt him horribly to name me Second Chair. I never thought he’d give away First as well to the Awful Gender. That's his name for us,” Irene went on.
I remembered something on a radio show my dad listened to now and again. “I understand languages have gender; people have sex.”
“And how!” Irene said, laughing. I wanted to die; that hadn’t come out at all like I expected! Irene went on, “Grammarians! What do they know? What can they be thinking of? What’s the world coming to?”
I shrugged. After a second Irene grinned again. “I have to call my father; he’s going to go wild! At long last the expensive prep school I go to pays off! I actually know something about English that eludes an otherwise intelligent woman!”
Grammar? Think of... coming to... oopsie! Not right! “You go to a prep school?” My brain short-circuited the rest of my thoughts.
“Oh yeah! Red Bluff Academy, in Sedona.”
“Cool!” I said. “I wish my school was harder.”
“Harder? You want hard?” Irene laughed. “You know what we did, the week after New Years? We played Strip Aeneid in the snow.”
I
looked at Irene. What?
She smiled. “It’s not as risqué as it sounds, since you couldn’t lose your boots, pants or shirt, but let me tell you, standing in the snow with just boots, pants and shirt quickly reminds you to pay attention! Prof Marblebrain would give the first two lines of a stanza from the Aeneid and you had to give the rest -- or give clothes. Mukluks, scarves, hats, parkas, gloves, ear muffs -- all the while standing in two feet of snow. You can learn really fast,” she said “really” with some emphasis, “motivated like that.”
Irene looked at me and repeated once more, “First Chair?” I nodded. “Want to get something to eat?” she concluded.
X
We went down to the cafeteria. The food was the worst I’d ever eaten in my life. We went back up to the room after we’d eaten; there was supposed to be a kick off meeting at 8 PM, followed by a “social.”
We’d hardly gotten back to the room when someone knocked on the door. Irene was closest, stood up and got it. I didn’t see who it was, but I heard her say, “I don’t think you’re supposed to be in this part of the dorm.”
I turned and looked and saw it was Mr. Ford.
He saw me and smiled. “I came to see if you were doing okay, Kira.”
“Fine, Mr. Ford. Thank you.” I remembered the rules; men weren’t supposed to be in our rooms. “You really aren’t supposed to be here.”
He laughed. “I passed two chaperones; both of them know me. Neither of them had the nerve to tell me to stop. Besides, I’m not in your room, I’m standing in the hall.” He nodded at Irene, “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Me? I play second cello.”
Mr. Ford smiled at her. “You seem -- adjusted to it.”
“I haven’t heard her play,” Irene said prosaically. “She’s better than me -- or not. Either way, what can I do?”
“Play better,” I said firmly.
Mr. Ford sketched a bow in my direction. “The secret of your success, Kira.” He paused before saying, “Usually I pass events like this up; I do have a full schedule. But now and again it’s worth it. I decided that this of all years was likely to be worth it. If you do a tenth with the State Orchestra as you did for the Symphony, it will be their grandest concert!”
I blushed, and Mr. Ford changed the subject. “And how goes your fight?”
That at least, I didn’t blush about. “There’s a land use hearing this coming Wednesday. Dad says we probably won’t even win a small victory, but that in the long run it will be the sum of all our efforts.”
“Your effort, Kira,” he told me. “Yours. Not that others of us aren’t willing to pitch in. But this is your battle, Kira.” He smiled at Irene. “I had better go. They will be talking about this for months, anyway. Good luck, both of you.” He left, and I could see Irene’s eyes following him.
“Taylor Ford?” Irene said, “That was the Arizona Symphony’s Taylor Ford?”
I nodded.
“And he came to see how you were doing?” she said forlornly. I nodded again.
Irene sat on her bed. “I haven’t a prayer, do I?”
“I won’t say that I haven’t asked for help, a time or two, but mostly I practice.” I motioned to my cello. “There’s nearly an hour until this ‘social’ thing. Would you mind?”
“Me?” Irene said. “Not hardly!”
We both practiced.
Afterwards, as we were freshening up for the affair, Irene nodded towards the cello. “The way you play...” She shook her head, “I can only dream of playing like that. But the cello hurts; it really hurts. I mean -- that’s like the best cello in the world.”
“My dad has some recordings of Pablo Casals,” I told her. “I like his almost as much.”
“Almost!” Irene exclaimed, shaking her head. “Almost! Jeez! My father told me once that even though Sedona was small, it has almost everything a big city has.”
“Except a few million people,” I said and Irene nodded in agreement. “It makes a difference when you want to find something in particular.”
“Oh, yeah!”
The evening wasn’t the social disaster I expected. Taylor Ford was at the podium and he announced the principal players of each section. He gave me an extra plug, as having played with the Arizona Symphony as a soloist.
A lot of the people danced to music afterward. I sat to one side, eating some of the ice cream that had been provided. Irene was much in demand; evidently she was well known and very popular.
Twice Irene tried to get people to dance with me. The boy would take one look at me, towering over him and obviously a seventh grader. They all found something else to do.
“They’re short sighted,” Irene quipped after the second time. We exchanged grins.
“I’m just thankful they didn’t actually ask,” I told her. “I never learned to dance.”
Two seconds later, Irene was leading me out to the dance floor. For half an hour she wouldn’t let me go. One dance flowed into another, quite thorough instruction. I’m not sure what she said to him, but one boy finally danced with me. It was interesting, but not earth-shaking.
The next morning we were up early and rehearsing for real. There had originally been two pieces we were supposed to practice, but a little bit into the rehearsal Mr. Ford simply announced there would be a third.
It was the first movement of Tree Symphony, “Snow Melting at My Feet,” the one we’d played with the intermediate orchestra. He rehearsed us for about ten minutes and then motioned to me.
For an hour I conducted with him criticizing everything I did. It reminded me a lot of my first few rehearsals with Rachael, although she had never singled me out for criticism like Taylor Ford did, however much I knew Rachael had been talking to me.
In the afternoon I got another twenty minutes of conducting practice. Afterwards I saw Mr. Ford talking to a lot of the adults who were running things; it wasn’t until dinner that he came and explained.
“One of the advantages of being famous and important,” he told me, “is that people have a hard time telling you no. You do have to be careful how you spend that capital, but if you don’t, eventually you lose it. So, Kira, the first two pieces, you play cello. For your piece, you conduct. Irene can play your part.”
“Me? Conduct?” I’d only had a few practices at conducting, I didn’t think I was nearly good enough. I had learned enormous amounts about music and the cello; more than anything else I’d learned the need to practice.
Mr. Ford nodded. “Oh, you have some ways to go yet as a conductor. Conducting first class musicians is right up there with the Seven Labors of Hercules and slightly less difficult than herding cats. I watch, you know. Don’t you think I don’t! Conductors add nuance and timing to a composer’s work. They work on expression, tone -- all the details that set apart one rendition of a piece of music from all the other versions of it. You do that in full measure, young woman! And you deserve the credit for your labors!”
I contemplated Irene and her transparent desire to finish ahead of me, even if she knew it wasn’t going to happen. “Will this detract from my scoring in the competition?”
He laughed and shook his head. I knew he’d thought the wrong thing. “Irene -- she’s good, really good,” I told him.
“And needs a scholarship slightly less than John D. Rockefeller. She’s a competitor, Kira. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but you play the music. She plays to be best. There is a difference.”
“I wouldn’t mind if she won,” I told him.
He looked at me hard for a moment. “Kira, if she played better than you, she would. Fame is fickle, girl. If ten people came along tomorrow who were better than you today, day after tomorrow you’d be back playing for Rachael. But that’s not going to happen. Just because you like someone, doesn’t mean you should let them win.”
“I wasn’t going to play badly,” I tried to explain, a little upset he’d even think it. “I just wanted you to know that if she was better, I wouldn’t mind.”<
br />
He surprised me. He came and stood in front of me, then he clicked his heels and bowed, reaching for my hand. As he had done once before, he kissed my fingers. “Miss Kinkaid, you have my assurance: the very first instant I hear someone play the cello better than you, you become a second class cello player. Perhaps your son or daughter or your grandchild.”
I blushed. That wasn’t in my world view!
Sunday morning was the final rehearsal. By then it was evident to everyone that I would conduct one of the three pieces. Most of the kids thought it was cool, but there were a few people, mostly adults, who didn’t like it. It was people like Edgar I-still-couldn’t-remember-his-last-name who were upset.
My parents were pleased that I’d won the scholarship, and then surprised when the judges announced I’d won a second, a special award for “Overall Excellence.” Irene gave me a hug, then vanished with her father. I rode with my parents back towards Phoenix.
I broached the subject of school next year. Irene had said that her school taught Seventh Grade and up and that if you placed, you got in, whether you had the money or not. Mom was obviously upset, Dad was quiet. I grew desperate, I wanted them to at least let me try.
Finally, I mentioned “Strip Aeneid.” I was startled that when I finished Irene’s story, when my dad pulled the car off the road, got out and went outside. After a second I looked at my mom; she too had no idea what was going on. We got out and she went up to him. “Dennis?”
“Sorry,” Dad said. “I had to stop driving, I’d have wrecked us for sure. Strip Aeneid in the snow?” He was laughing, I saw.
“That’s what Irene said,” I told him. “Maybe she made it up.”
“No one could make up anything that bizarre.” He turned to me. “Please, Kira. You say you know the name of the school?” I told him and he nodded. “Okay, fine. We’re going to make an appointment. Soon. This next week is kind of busy, but definitely as soon as I can make the arrangements, we’ll go up and visit.”
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