The Skin Above My Knee

by Marcia Butler

  Friday evenings—after she had concluded her week of teaching Latin to high school students—provided a few minutes of my mother’s golden solo attention while I received my weekly hair shampooing. She would lift my tiny body and set me onto my back right on top of the kitchen counter, my head draped deep into the kitchen sink. Hair moistened, I held my breath, preparing myself for a rough and vigorous scrubbing as her long red nails dug deeply into my scalp. In my captive, supine position, I was tacitly given permission for just those few minutes to gaze at her, examine her intensely, and not look away. Shampoo burned the eyes in those days, so I had about a minute before the stinging set in. Then, succumbing to the pain, I reluctantly closed my eyes and blindly felt her hands roughly flutter over my head. The ritual hurt and burned, but I took it without a whimper.

  Occasionally on Sunday mornings, with the Hoover safely wedged between us, I slacked off and let myself hope and imagine that she felt what I felt as I lay on the carpet and wallowed amid Isolde’s words through Kirsten’s voice. But that was all in my naive imagination. She dodged her young daughter’s body, occasionally sucking a few strands of my hair into the Hoover, which did push a yelp out of me. With no apology, she aimed the Hoover in the other direction, bringing about mixed emotions. I wanted her to see me, even if it hurt. But she was simply cleaning the rug. Chagrined, I saw my error and righteously banished her to a spot in the background chorus, blending harmoniously with her Hoover. Her psychic whipping umbilical cord receded, just a coiled-up prop to be thrown offstage. Kirsten retook center stage, planting her feet squarely at the threshold of my ears and young life. Kirsten was my mother.

  As I bode my time throughout the very long week while I waited for shampoo, heavy picture books, and Kirsten on Sunday mornings, a gauzy gray cloud washed over me. I was born a pint-size Sartre, my life’s purpose the unanswerable question. This quandary, which I did not understand let alone want to face, demanded frequent relief. Sleep became the stopgap I could reach for, perhaps control, and I slept hard, often, like a dead dog. Not, however, to achieve the usual sense of relief after a long and tiring day; rather, when I slept, I could mentally tuck myself up on a very high shelf. For a time, my brain unraveled and relaxed, temporarily deadened to all troubling ideas and perceived slights. Midday, or at any time at all, I crawled unnoticed into my bed.

  Everyone sleeps, but not everyone could use music the way I did. If sleep was an unconscious draft of lifesaving elixir, music was its waking counterpart: both offered me a way to forget my wearying existential dilemma and to shove aside the need for an answer, or for my mother. Wafting between one and the other, I could pry my eyes open for another day.

  Behind

  The principal flutist sits to your right; to your left, the second oboist. While playing, you sense their bodies shift to take a collective breath as the front row of the wind section performs a tutti passage. The string section fans out before you: violins, violas, cellos, and basses. But the musicians behind you are as good as invisible: the clarinets, the bassoons, the brass, and the percussionists.

  A languid duet, played as a unison solo during the slow movement of a Schumann symphony, brings you in touch with the unseen principal clarinetist. He’s a friend and musical colleague of many years, with whom you’ve shared the joy of the birth of his kids and the sadness of his subsequent divorce. And because of this close personal relationship, your inner eye is attuned to his musical life and particularly his artistic gestures during performance.

  As the solo begins, you can’t distinguish his sound from yours. At first, it’s unnerving. Your sounds are meshed, creating a new composite sound, and for several seconds you doubt you’re actually taking part at all. The intonation has no telltale beats, indicating pitch discrepancy—in short, it is perfect. Phrasing inflections ebb and flow as one. As you lose yourself in time, forgetting that you’re performing for an audience, the music seems to play itself: effortless, the oboe weightless in your hands. Yet all the while, you sense a pressure on the back of your head: the clarinetist’s eyes boring a hole into your skull.

  At the end of the solo the full orchestra joins in again, to conclude the movement.

  It was intimate; you feel slightly embarrassed and carry this memory and sensation with you for many years. It has rarely been duplicated. Transformation within the shifting universe of music is singular and dear, like a newborn with flexing fists.

  Proud

  “IF YOU DON’T practice, you won’t like it.”

  Mr. Proud repeated this gentle declarative warning often, and I was inclined to take him at his word. I was his somewhat dour fourth-grade music student; he, my deadpan first music teacher—and neither of us seemed to have much to smile about. The serious nine-year-old girl and the no-nonsense grown-up quickly developed an easy simpatico.

  When Mr. Proud demonstrated the flute, clarinet, and trumpet at the beginning of the school year, my eyes widened with recognition—a few puzzle pieces had just snapped together before me. Up until that moment, music was largely intuitive for me, but now the heavens ripped open as I connected the sounds echoing in the classroom with the orchestra that was so familiar to me on Sunday mornings. But I had to quickly select what was to be my personal steed. The trumpet was just too blaring; the clarinet too honking, with a spreading-out wheeze. I easily chose the flute because its sweet, open quality most resembled Kirsten’s burnished, silvery voice.

  In the first lesson Mr. Proud taught the flute class how to blow into, or over, the mouthpiece of the flute. The room quickly filled with what sounded like children blowing over the tops of Coke bottles. Disoriented from the cacophony, I separated myself from my classmates, faced the corner of the room, and practiced the exercise for several minutes. A strong hand on my shoulder broke my concentration. Startled, I turned around and met Mr. Proud’s intense brown eyes.

  “Why are you standing in the corner?”

  “I don’t know.…I can’t stand all the crazy noise.”

  “Neither can I. Okay. Show me what you can do.”

  I scrutinized his impassive face for a few seconds and then gave him four very long and steady hoots, in succession.

  “Good.”

  He must have recognized the musically starved child before him. I was promptly sent home with a fingering chart, and in one week I managed to learn all twelve notes of the scale. Mr. Proud looked at me inquisitively in the second lesson: I could actually play the thing, after a fashion, and I could name all the notes to boot.

  “Marcia, how did you learn all this in one week? Did you have help? Have you played another instrument?”

  “No. But I know Kirsten.”

  “Who’s Kirsten?”

  “She’s the lady who sings Isolde’s song in the Wagner.”

  “You mean the composer Richard Wagner? How do you know about that?”

  “She sings on Sunday mornings with the Hoover.”

  My cryptic explanation surely baffled him, but he left it alone.

  As the school year progressed, whatever he asked me to prepare, I would return having mastered the assignment. His comment never varied.

  “Good.”

  Nothing more.

  On a very subtle level, he was teaching me something profound, a concept that many never feel comfortable with. Mr. Proud showed me that I would be the arbiter of how “good” I was. That was a huge chunk of adult to be laid right at my small feet.

  The big event under Mr. Proud’s yearlong fourth-grade tutelage was my performance of “Greensleeves” over the radio in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Proud met me at the Pittsfield library, where I sat patiently with my flute in my lap. Stage—or radio—fright quickly set in. My heart pounded so hard I could feel the blood pulsing on my scalp, even out through my eyeballs. Slowly I got myself under control by closing my eyes and pretending to be asleep. Gradually my heart slowed down to an ordinary pace, and my sweaty palms dried up. And finally, saliva returned to my parched mouth.

  When M
r. Proud gently shook me awake, my eyes found the head of the microphone looming large in front of me. An old lady pointed to me and screamed in a whisper:

  “Okay, play NOW!”

  I blasted out “Greensleeves” to beat the band.

  Years later, when I was hired to teach smart and talented college kids at Columbia University (who were actually there for other reasons, like public policy and rocket science), I would echo Mr. Proud’s gentle warning: “If you don’t practice, you won’t like it.” They had terrifyingly full schedules, yet they still wanted to continue playing through their college years. My students initially tried to cram their practicing into one or two days before the lesson. There are no shortcuts, and I urged them to practice every day, even for just fifteen minutes, because sustainable progress comes from a dogged routine. Mr. Proud remained a heroic and steady beacon throughout my life by imparting one simple gift: the early understanding that anything challenging is only truly loved when engaged in every day. The getting-better part is the gravy.

  Mr. Proud would leave at the end of the school year in the mid-1960s to become a New York State organic farmer.

  “Marcia, I won’t be back to teach you next year.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m going to farm organic vegetables in New York State.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s what I really want to do.”

  “Don’t you really want to teach me?”

  “Yes, but I’ll be happier if I do this farming. Can you understand that?”

  “Which vegetables will you grow?”

  “Carrots and beets. Things like that.”

  “What’s a beats?”

  “It’s a red vegetable.”

  “But who’ll teach me my flute?”

  Having no idea what an organic farmer was, I was understandably concerned for him. What organs was he talking about? The heart, kidneys, liver? It sounded dreadful, really.

  As weeks passed, the end of the year closed in, looming ominously—and I was still optimistic that I might actually have some have sway over Mr. Proud’s decision. At nine years old I had unwittingly had my first experience with someone who was a true pedagogue. The word comes from the Greek, meaning literally “to lead the child.” To me it was simple: if he left, I might die. Death seemed an appropriate fear, because the future was dire. Surely he knew this.

  I tried again.

  “Do you really have to go do that farming thing?”

  “Yes, it’s all set up. It’s like a new job.”

  “But why can’t you stay here at your old job?”

  “Marcia, remember I told you that this is something I really want to do.”

  “But I really want you to stay, ’cause if you go”—I let my fears seep out, and the tears started—“no one’ll come to teach me my flute.”

  “The school will hire a new teacher.”

  “But who will it be?”

  “I don’t know, but the school will arrange it.”

  “But what if he doesn’t come?”

  “Someone will come. Just keep practicing. Every day. Like we talked about. Okay? You’ll be fine.”

  We went over the same territory countless times toward the end of the school year, and he patiently repeated his assurances. Throughout the endless summer, I remained morose and unconvinced.

  The next year we did indeed have a new music teacher, whose first name was Morris. Morris encouraged us fifth graders to call him, well, Morris. He had a comb-over, which I learned the name for only years later. (Oh, that’s what he was doing! He was bald!) Cast with a certain élan, his gestures were flamboyant and exaggerated. Morris was as far from Mr. Proud as could be imagined.

  At the first lesson of the school year, he dramatically whipped out some sheet music. “Greensleeves” had been in Method Book 1. Apparently Method Book 2 was not in my future. Instead, we learned the theme music to the movie Peyton Place and the theme song to a new TV soap opera called Days of Our Lives. Morris was dedicated to instilling in his students a healthy appreciation for the popular culture of the day. I remained wary.

  Wild and unusual, Morris’s peculiar mannerisms were hard to ignore, and over time I sensed he needed to be tamed, reined in, and perhaps tamped down a bit. So I became brave.

  “Morris, I was wondering if we could learn some classical songs.”

  “Sure. Like what? Something like ‘Moon River’? Give me an example.”

  “Well, what about Wagner?”

  “Who?”

  “Wagner…you know, classical.”

  “I don’t know any Wagner.…I know Jim Wagner down at the car dealership, but I don’t think he writes songs. We’ll learn ‘Moon River’—that’s a classic.”

  I realize now that Morris was the Pittsfield equivalent of a club-date musician. Popular music. Maybe even jazz! He talked to me as if we were buddies on the bandstand sharing a slightly off-color joke. He might as well have been smoking a cigar.

  Morris’s loopy personality grew on me, especially since he did know how to play the flute and taught me well. I progressed steadily, but my secret yearning for Mr. Proud still tugged, and I imagined he might pop up one day, listen to me play, and be proud.

  Pointe

  Plinkety-plinkety-plink. Chunk-cachunk-cachunk. Bam-bam-wham. Whap! That would be a waltz. From where you sit in the pit at City Center in New York City, you can’t see what’s going on, but you can hear it all through the floor of the stage, right above your head. This isn’t going very well, you think to yourself. It’s the first rehearsal for Giselle, and it sounds damned ugly—a cacophony of elephants galumphing above you, supposedly in unison. And they’re not with the music. Ever.

  Dancing en pointe is a noisy business. You can’t imagine there is any semblance of synchronization up there. It’s an aural freak show of pounding and banging and stutter-stepping. What kind of a company is this, anyway? They’re supposed to be world-renowned stars of the ballet world. Why did you accept this gig? Money, of course.

  But later in the day you’re able to slip out of the pit and into a theater seat during a ballet you’re not playing in, and you begin to see what all the noise is about. The beauty is simply astonishing. Tutus floating with ivory tulle, buoying the body, as if in slow motion with every movement. Sixty arms gracefully arch, and then, precisely on beat 3, thirty fingers move an inch, all in a perfect communal gesture. Women’s necks crane, suggesting swans on an imagined, almost frozen, glacial lake. Men lovingly grip their partners’ middles and lift them to a heaven you can only dream of. Bodies meld like mercury—shifting from side to side and up and down—fluid, yet at that cusp of almost solid. You say a quiet mea culpa for doubting what you did not understand. Sixty toe shoes land on the floor of the stage, all within about one second of each other. But those sounds are just the toes. So much more is an attuned alignment from someone’s God. Throughout the Dance Theatre of Harlem season, you fall in love with those clunks and plunks and whams, because those sounds are supporting thirty artists who are balanced in multitudinous ways—unimaginable to the once blind and faithless oboist beneath their feet.

  Oboe

  I WAS GAWKY at twelve, and certainly odd, but nothing prepared me for the onslaught of hideous teenage physical and psychic angst that blasted my way the first day in seventh grade at my new school. As I looked around, the concert-band room appeared to hold the most egregious offenders, boys with peach fuzz on their lips and girls who sported pointy bras. Everyone was unreasonably tall, embarrassingly spindly, and gravely ancient.

  The September weather was still warm and muggy, and I’d perspired badly through the wool sweater my mother insisted I wear. Putrid body odors undulated from those around me, but I realized to my dismay that I was a full-fledged contributor, too! And to top it off, foul, fetid breath emerged from the trumpet players seated directly behind me as the band began to warm up. I could barely cough enough air into my lungs to play the flute.

  But so much more was
terribly amiss. Shortly into the band’s warm-up scales, I saw that effluent oozing from pubescent and ripe teenagers alike was the least of my problems. The out-of-tune major scales, sounding like clusters of minor seconds, assaulted me as if on a grand moral scale. Mr. Fulginiti, our band director, put us through our virgin paces, showcasing the group’s awful pitch and nonexistent rhythm. I took a chance in between the tone-row clusters to peek down my row to the right and to the left. All I saw were flute players, with breasts, no less—there must have been at least twenty of us. Now I was just one in a cast of thousands.

  I went limp, defeated, wanting to jump up and run out of school, back to my living-room carpet, where Kirsten was waiting; or to my bed, where a solid nap would surely stamp out the disastrous future ahead of me. All it took was twenty voluptuous flute players and the smelly trumpet players who kept ogling them, with every single one producing noises from hell, for life to splatter on the ground before me.

  As the period ended, I could feel tears prickling. I tugged at the three joints of my flute, yanking the awful thing apart. Just then Mr. Fulginiti hushed the crowded band room and held up a slender black instrument.

  “I need a volunteer to play this. We only need one.”

  My hand shot up. Actually, I stood up, ensuring I would be taller than anyone else’s hand, just in case I had challengers. In that split second I understood that, while I wanted to fit in, I needed to stand out. This lone instrument just might be my ticket out of Faust’s band from the underworld. I didn’t care that I had no idea what it was or even what it sounded like. I raced up to Mr. Fulginiti, and he handed over the instrument with its case and a few plastic reeds.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Marcia Butler.”

  “Okay, Miss Butler, let’s see what you can do with this. Stop by my office at the end of the day.”

  He called it an oboe. We were sitting opposite each other in his tiny, cramped office, our knees almost touching.