The Skin Above My Knee

by Marcia Butler

  “How do I put it together?”

  “Well, before we get into that, why don’t you play the flute for me? The oboe is a very challenging instrument, and I want to be sure this is a good fit for you.”

  I played my best pieces for him, including “Moon River.”

  Mr. Fulginiti was quiet for a few minutes, nodding his head without speaking. My head sunk into my shoulders; I wasn’t good enough.

  “We might have a problem here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You play extremely well; too well, actually.”

  “What do you mean too well?”

  “No, no. Sorry. Not too well for you, but too well for me. I can hear that you’re very gifted, and there’s just no one around here who can teach you the oboe to the level I anticipate you’ll need. Let me think about this for a minute.”

  I sat quietly. Still stinging from the morning band session, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to play the flute, let alone this oboe. Life was simpler with just my Kirsten—and she didn’t have breasts, at least as far as I knew.

  “Tell you what. I can start you off, and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

  “Can you play it?”

  “No. I play the clarinet. But I’ll learn it along with you.”

  I relaxed my shoulders, and my head popped up from its retracted position. For the first time during that first day of school, I gave a doubtful smile.

  “Really?”

  “Don’t worry, Miss Butler. We’ll work this out. You can come to my house and I’ll give you lessons. Do you have any questions?”

  “How do you pronounce your name?”

  He was a gently gregarious, roly-poly Italian man, married but childless, so different from the dour Mr. Proud and the outlandish Morris. His name, initially an odd rough object I had to roll my teeth and tongue around to master, quickly smoothed down like rocks in a streambed. Mr. Fulginiti’s teaching style was relaxed, and I quickly forgot that he was making it up as I progressed. Over the next two years we grew to love the oboe, side by side.

  Once I could get around on the oboe, having learned the fingerings, Mr. Fulginiti stopped trying to play it himself and began to just teach me music through fundamentals, demonstrating occasionally on the clarinet. A flat line became an arc, with a soft beginning, growing to a fat middle, and diminishing to a whispered end. Notes could be held out (legato); or very short (staccato). An interval of two notes had to be perfectly in tune so that a potential phrase could grow from it. He focused on technical concepts, but always in service to music. We broke the melodies down and then, once each point was mastered, rebuilt them. Mr. Fulginiti had an odd character combination of determined and maniacal whimsy—kind of the “best of” Mr. Proud and Morris. And somehow we fit.

  A bonus was his love of opera, particularly Puccini, which always seemed to be playing when I entered his home for my weekly lesson. The beginning of La Bohème, whose first twenty minutes run like the blazes, left me breathless. Puccini expertly wove those snippets of lyrical phrases through a rapid-fire orchestral backdrop. I imagined the singers gasping to keep up.

  Mr. Fulginiti always reserved the last fifteen minutes of my lesson for listening to the likes of La Bohème and Madama Butterfly, and I left each session gratefully exhilarated by the dizzying possibilities of music. Yet my living-room carpet still beckoned when I returned home, and I dove deep into my honey of a diva: to my Kirsten. Terra firma. Land ho!

  Saturday morning oboe lessons posed a hurdle for my parents, not only because Mr. Fulginiti lived thirty minutes away but also because my mother couldn’t help with this weekly driving chore. Left-hand turns were not in her repertoire of skills. For some reason, she could only make a right-hand turn in our car, which led to looping, long trips wherever she went. For expediency’s sake, my father became house chauffeur, but agreements had to be worked out first. He wanted to meet this Italian guy who had suspiciously offered to teach me at no charge.

  An affable man to neighbors and strangers, my father was well built and handsome in a Waspy, steely-blue-eyed, Chiclet-toothed, Wonder Bread kind of way. But public persona aside, he had neither the warmth nor the flexible latitude of understanding necessary for children and their peculiarities. He was not quick to smile. But when he did, it appeared as a rigid-lipped slash across the face. I didn’t trust him or his grim grin and worried that just because he could, he would undermine my agreement with Mr. Fulginiti.

  We drove to the first scheduled lesson. As we pulled into the driveway, the front door swung open; Mr. F. beckoned to my father, all smiles and goodwill. My father entered the house, frowning and sour, obviously prepared to reject a “too good to be true” proposition. I waited in the car. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes, on to thirty minutes. And with each passing second my future receded back onto the far horizon as I stared straight ahead out the windshield of the car. That future was still a mental smear of something that had not yet even occurred to me. But it was there. And the possibility of that unknowable something was in my father’s tight fist as he negotiated with Mr. Fulginiti inside a house I wanted very much to enter.

  The door finally reopened, and my father emerged with his rigid smile stamped above his chin, while Mr. F. simply looked at me, ashen-faced.

  “Come on in, Marcia. Let’s get started.”

  A deal had been struck behind Mr. Fulginiti’s front door: my father agreed to drive me to my oboe lesson, thirty minutes away, every Saturday morning. Not a cent changed hands between them. But I would pay.

  Tit for Tat

  MY FATHER AND I floated around the house, eyeing each other from a distinct distance. Our cautious détente was set in motion very early, my father the skilled raptor, me the baby mouse. Our truce, always on view, was easy and limpid. I lazed on his lap in our Pittsfield living room, at first naive to what would become my important role. An easier mark could not have been found. Still, there were many negotiations along the way yet to be ironed and flattened out.

  I sucked my thumb incessantly and furiously, years past the age when children usually give up such soothing habits. At any given moment, one thumb or the other was wedged in my mouth, sodden and badly wrinkled. Shaming was my father’s aim, and brutalizing barbs were his weapons.

  “Get that thumb out of your mouth right now! You’re much too old for that stuff and you know it. If I see you suck that thumb once more, I’ll just sit right down next to you and suck mine along with you. I’m warning you. You’ll never get rid of me. And get that rag off your face or I’ll burn it!”

  That rag was my beloved and filthy undershirt, secretly known as Undy. It wasn’t just the egregiously wrinkled, sopping-wet thumb that bugged my father but also its indicted co-conspirator, my smelly undershirt. I liked to keep it near my cheek while I sucked, so I could inhale its wonderfully used odor. This tandem comfort seemed to soothe my titrating needs.

  He threw down many gauntlets over the years, and I never knew when they might surface and grab me with pincers. My lifelong habits felt impossible to crack, and he knew it. In public and at home, he dug into me without warning.

  One day, returning from one of my lessons, my father and I stopped off at a local bakery to pick up some rolls and brownies. Standing in line for the checkout, I was sucking and sniffing and daydreaming, clearly unaware that my thumb was front and center and Undy had made its cameo appearance for all to see.

  He screeched a stage whisper that could have been heard in the balcony of Carnegie Hall.

  “Marcia. That thumb. Out. That rag. Gone.”

  I quickly dropped my hands.

  “Dad, I was thinking.”

  “Don’t think. Just get that thumb out of your—”

  “I know, I know. I did. But I wanted to ask you…”

  Under duress, my thumbs always seemed to levitate to my mouth, as if a master puppeteer were controlling my digits.

  “Thumb. Out. Rag. Gone. NOW.”

  People standing in the long line be
gan to look the other way or up at the ceiling. Anywhere but at the uncomfortable father-daughter scene unfolding before them. I started my own urgent stage whisper, just to save some face.

  “Dad, I have an idea.…What would you think—”

  “Why are you whispering? Speak UP, for goodness’ sake. I can’t hear you when you talk with your thumb in your mouth while facing the floor, you know.”

  My thumb had popped back in. Those thumbs really did seem to have a life of their own.

  “I know, but just listen for a minute.…”

  We had reached the cashier, and my father was pulling out his wallet to pay while I continued my bargaining efforts. In one fleet gesture, he swiveled around, planted his face three inches from mine, and bellowed.

  “WHAT?!”

  The cashier stopped midmotion; the entire bakery—silent. An ocean roared in my head, filling a quiet vacuum as I tried to offer a solution that might resolve all our problems. Or at least one of them.

  “Okay, so what if I stopped sucking my thumb. But…I-kept-Undy?”

  The last three words ran unbroken out of my mouth, perhaps a potential new word in the Queen’s English. A puzzled look emerged on the cashier’s face, surely uncertain as to what an “Ikeptundy” was.

  With his face still pinned close to mine, my father’s dead, blue-eyed stare burned into my pupils. My mother hated it when I looked at her. But an unbroken gaze was required with my father. That’s just the way it was; you had to go through with it. His way. And always the eyes.

  “That sounds fair.”

  Done. It was surprisingly easy. We left the store in silence as I imagined the eyes of the bakery patrons burning a hole in the back of my head.

  My father was unpredictable; even conventions of politeness were brushed aside. Trying to cobble together a daily plan of action with him was often hit or miss. But as I grew older, I began to understand a bit more how he viewed the world. If I sacrificed, something in turn might be delivered. Also known as tit for tat.

  The musical love of my father’s life was the pop singer Vikki Carr, his girlfriend from the suitable distance of an LP. During occasional moments of reverie, he plunked himself on the corner club chair in the living room and listened to Vikki’s albums as she sang the words: “Oh dear God / It must be him / It must be him.” Even as a small girl, I could tell Vikki was a woman on the brink—of what, I couldn’t fathom. But before too long I actually began to appreciate Vikki, too. She really could sing and had that “on the brink” wobbling vibrato in her voice that made for wonderful tension. Though much less refined than Kirsten, Vikki definitely laid her vocal chops on the poker table.

  But this musical alliance between Vikki and my father did not sit well with my mother. She detested Vikki Carr. In fact, music was a wonder of nature my mother had trouble connecting to in general—Wagner on Sunday mornings the inexplicable oddity. Our home was devoid of melody, with the exception of a burgeoning oboist. To keep the peace with her, my father did his own little tit-for-tat dance and began to use headphones. Vikki’s wobble now seeped out from the cans.

  He beckoned to me. What little girl could resist those outstretched arms and not walk gingerly across the living room to cozy up on her daddy’s lap? He stretched the headphone strap to the limit, and we each took an ear.

  In my selective memory, there was that day, then the dulled sepia blur of what felt like every single minute after. I squirmed uncomfortably in his lap, as I tried to figure out what I was feeling. My father took hold of my shoulders to still me. He looked into my sweet little-girl blue eyes with his steel-trap blue raptor eyes.

  “Are you comfortable?” he asked.

  The very first word I learned to read in the first grade was balloon. Balloons always held my careful attention: I would track them as they floated up and finally disappeared past the clouds. I also clearly remember the bright, stinging sensation of snowflakes when they first touched my cheeks and eyelashes. Children will flatten their faces to the sky, anticipating that first flake of winter for the rest of their childhoods. Naming the color red is another early childhood rite of passage. Red is not orange or scarlet, but only red.

  A child ticks off these discoveries with her small hands, finger by finger. But where in my childhood journal of firsts would I inscribe this particular rite of passage? On the first page or the last? In the dedication or the acknowledgments?

  Our eyes locked. My hands crimped into tightly balled fists. Now I was aware, and he knew I was aware. With a small, snapped nod of my head, our binding and sickening pact was sealed. I had already been performing an innocent’s lap dance for years, but I had just connected the awful dots, and we were now in conscious collusion.

  “Yes, Father. I’m comfortable. I’m fine.”

  “Good girl.”

  My father was my epic Wagnerian Wotan. I was his dutiful daughter Brünnhilde. In Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, a set of four operas lasting fifteen hours, Wotan rules over his kingdom, Valhalla, and all the gods and his family with the tightest of fists. Wotan has been ennobled by pacts set up by the gods and connives with everyone around him, including his faithful Brünnhilde, to ensure they do his bidding. Sanguine and easy, I was determined to do my own Wotan proud. I became the best little Brünnhilde this side of his Valhalla, a mythical place that would become my childhood prison.

  It was so simple and yet unimaginably urgent: I needed him to drive me to my oboe lessons with Mr. Fulginiti, thirty minutes away by car. Brünnhilde sacrificed her childhood for something essential and lifesaving. Wotan gave up a few hours of his weekend.

  We quickly settled into the routine. On Saturday mornings he drove me, sat in the car for the hour, and waited for me to learn how to play my oboe. We signed in blood, and I kept the count: one lap, two laps, maybe even three laps for one lesson. However many he wanted, I sat rigid—knowing, silent, and stricken—for the remainder of my time under his roof.

  Kirsten sang:

  In the wafting Universe of the World-Breath

  Drown.

  Speed

  You do it because you can get away with it. That is, if everything lines up precisely and no one screws up. Booking a concert on a Sunday afternoon and an evening concert on the same day is nothing out of the ordinary for New York City freelancers. Except when the afternoon performance begins at 3:00 p.m. and the evening concert begins at 6:30 p.m.—and the concert venues are in different cities. Then things just might get interesting.

  The afternoon concert in Stamford, Connecticut, will end at 5:15 p.m., leaving you about one hour to make your 6:30 p.m. downbeat in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. If there’s no traffic and if the gods are with you, the car trip can come in at forty minutes flat. But there is another complication—the first piece on the program in Tully Hall is Rossini’s overture to La Scala di Seta, which has one of the most famous and devilishly difficult oboe solos in the orchestral repertoire. You will need steely nerves for what you pray is the perfect car ride and what you hope will be a memorable performance.

  Three other musicians have accepted both concerts as well, and the contractors who’ve hired for the two orchestras have been alerted to your risky road trip. They don’t like it at all—and you could be jeopardizing future work if you are late and responsible for holding up the start of the evening concert. But the urge to try to be literally everywhere, and play every concert, takes over rational thinking. And you really want to play that Rossini overture.

  The Connecticut concert ends on time, at 5:16 p.m., and the four of you pack up quickly and run to the car, which has been strategically positioned in the parking lot for a fast exit. Then a surprise wrinkle quickly develops once you get on the road. The cellist, Brian, is driving, and as you head up the ramp to join I-95 south, he pulls a bottle of Jim Beam from his jacket and takes three long gulps. The excited chitchat in the car immediately ceases. You turn to him and say, “What the fuck, Brian?” He looks at you with dead eyes and tells you, very calmly, that
he needs to be loose so he can drive fast. With that statement he floors the gas pedal and begins to weave in and out of traffic at ninety miles an hour.

  You sit back and look straight ahead. You go inside yourself, to that familiar flat and parched landscape where sensate danger is held at your brain barrier. No one talks, and the car becomes as quiet as coffins waiting for bodies. You look at the backseat just once to see four eyes slammed shut. With deep, regularly paced swigs of bourbon, Brian finishes off his bottle just as you get to the 96th Street exit off the Henry Hudson Parkway. Running red lights on Broadway, he pulls up to the Tully Hall stage door to let you out, because he knows you have to run in to warm up. The wheels squeal as he turns the corner to park in the lot under Lincoln Center.

  That evening the concert isn’t your best, but it’s not the worst, either, and you don’t remember much of the Rossini at all. Your big solo moments are over before you can allow yourself to unwind and feel anything. Just like Brian, you are on automatic pilot—loose, feeling nothing—so you can speed to the conclusion of the concert.

  Jinx

  BEING A NEOPHYTE negotiator, I was terrified to tip the balance of my hard-earned peace between my father and myself, because his outstretched arms could reverberate with another energy. He had that pent-up, clock-block, Robert-De-Niro-playing-Jake-LaMotta anger, which he unleashed regularly onto my older sister, Jinx, her nickname. A few years apart in age, we were polar opposites in temperament, and tit for tat wasn’t a game she bothered to play. Whether they were driven by her choice of boyfriends, staying out too late, running away from home, not cleaning her room, or just general sassiness toward my mother, my father’s fists were out in front to meet her, clutching metal crops. I heard those whapping slaps from behind her bedroom door when my father had had enough and wanted to teach her the way he preferred: through force. Those awful sounds stabbed into my discerning ears and guts, and no matter what room in the house I sought for relief, I heard all of it.