The Skin Above My Knee

by Marcia Butler

  Central Park was just down the block, and Mrs. S. absolutely insisted that the children go to “the Park” three mornings a week, rain or shine. That exclusive patch of grass was an Upper East Side matter of privileged principle, after all. Hand in hand in hand, the children and I approached Fifth Avenue. Whitney was something of a rapscallion who had plans of her own. I knew it was coming but was never sure exactly when. At some point during the walk, Whitney would break from our pack. At times her method of disengaging from my hand was a kick or a bite, and she drew blood regularly. A trickster at heart, off she went into her blue yonder, leaving David and me first in the dust and then in pursuit.

  That girl could run, and I had David in tow, so I had to think fast. He was a tiny boy, so I tucked him under my arm, positioned as a torpedo. As we ran after his sister, he stuck his arms straight out in front of him and willed his body go rigid. David had the instincts of an Apollo rocket.

  Doormen on Fifth Avenue came to know us well, as the great chase replayed week after week.

  Evenings were the only hours I could practice uninterrupted. On the nights I was in charge, I settled Whitney and David into their bedrooms, kissed them good night, walked to the other side of the huge apartment, and closed the door to my cubicle of a bedroom. After soaking my reeds and beginning my warm-up exercises, I soon began to hear little children by my door, mice scuttling in the dark. I ignored them.

  My father bequeathed one gift to me as I left for college: his headphones. I threw them over my ears while the brats romped around the apartment, obviously trying to coax me out to play with them. But the dancing footsteps soon became loud bangs on my door, and their bedtime rituals were repeated over and over, eating up my precious practice time. If I was lucky, I began to practice in earnest at 10:00 p.m., and soon Mrs. S. would be home and the night was a bust. She needed silence to sleep.

  Because I took my child-care duties seriously, my practice routine never jelled. Whitney and David seemed to want me, but I did not want them. I was rough with them. At times I screamed and yanked their skinny arms to get their attention or to press my point, of course to no effect. As the weeks progressed I felt more and more anxious and on edge. I was missing out on my college life and neglecting my oboe, all because of these rotten kids.

  It was odd and somewhat unnerving to live with a woman who was open with her emotions, not at all like my buttoned-up mother. Mrs. S. seemed like a trout out of water, flopping about and in need of air: she vacillated between hopefully cheerful and despairingly sad. And she was understandably morose at times, alluding to marital war stories with oblique asides. The husband was “In California.” He was with “Another Woman.” It was all “Very Difficult.” What with “The Kids.”

  One night, Mrs. S. asked if I’d like to watch the movie The Way We Were on her video recorder. It had just been released in 1973, but she’d managed to get a bootleg copy from “The Coast.” I loved Babs as much as the next red-blooded American, but this story was way beyond my life experience. What did I know about female Jewish political activism and redheaded goyim? I knew about doomed love, of course, from Tristan and Isolde, but I couldn’t quite connect those dots to Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.

  At the conclusion of the movie and with a couple of martinis under her belt, Mrs. S. turned to me on the soft damask sofa, looking wistful.

  “She just had too much love in her. She just loved him too damned much.”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears, and I felt I should say something to let her know that I understood, which I didn’t.

  “Did you love your husband too much?” I asked. That broke her momentary reverie.

  “That bastard? He’s dead to me.”

  She was off to her silk sheets; I to my hovel, quarter tub, and headphones.

  Mrs. S.’s eyes grew large when I told her I would be moving out at the end of the semester.

  “But why? The children adore you, and I really need your help, Marcia.”

  “They won’t let me practice at night. You know how they won’t go to bed. I’m really sorry, but I need to practice twice as much, and I can’t because the kids are not behaving well.”

  “But they’re so attached to you. Can’t you see it?”

  “Not really…I wasn’t aware…”

  I saw myself as the evil babysitter, a real Marquis de Sade, silently gleeful, with a full-on case of schadenfreude when they scraped their knees or scratched each other while fighting. Apparently, those children saw me differently—as a new member of the family—and I was rendered speechless by Mrs. S. as she urged me to reconsider.

  Tears began to slide down my cheeks as she explained how they needed me and enjoyed my company around the apartment. I was wanted, maybe even loved. But I couldn’t do it, and I had a terrible sense of rejecting something—family—I spent my life longing for. I bawled for a few minutes while she stood with her delicate arms around me, our bodies not touching—the doyenne way.

  “Well, I see that you’re upset, and I guess we’ll just find someone else.”

  “I’m sorry. Thank you.”

  I went into my cubicle and crawled in between the silk sheets that Mrs. S. insisted I, too, sleep on. My eyes scanned the small bedroom, once nude of possessions, now jammed with all the stuff of a starting life, according to Mrs. S. Special soaps, lotions, and toiletries I never dreamed existed, much less knew were necessary, that appeared in my room when she made a trip to the high-end apothecary. A radio she’d purchased for me because she wanted me to tune in to the classical music station she thought I’d enjoy. A dress lying at the foot of my bed she’d surprised me with for my very first student recital at Mannes. My very own dress. The stack of programs she’d always left in my room from the Metropolitan Opera productions and the New York Philharmonic concerts she’d attended with her dates, so I could study the program notes. The empty plastic wrappers of the pocket-size Kleenex packets she’d jam into my purse each and every time I left with the kids to go to Central Park, so I could wipe their snotty noses. And some of those plastic dead soldiers were from the packets of tissues she’d quietly left outside my closed door when she heard me crying in my room (she never asked why, and I loved her for that), because Mrs. S. didn’t want me to use common toilet paper to wipe my own snotty nose. A full LP set of the entire opera of Tristan und Isolde that just appeared in my room one day. It was from her personal collection. The Flagstad version.

  I slipped the last side of Tristan out of its jacket and plopped it onto my small record player, also courtesy of Mrs. S., clamped my father’s headphones around my ears, and dropped the needle onto the grooves. As I turned up the volume, the “Liebestod” throbbed into my head. I lay back on the bed and sobbed for everything I didn’t understand and violently willed myself to revert back to my life alone with my oboe. During the last minute of the “Liebestod,” as Wagner finally allows the harmony to resolve, I sat up, rigid, and understood something: I was a terrible and hollow girl.

  Just a week or so later, at Christmas break, I left Mrs. S. and the brats. I saw her once more on the street in front of Mannes several months later. She had accepted a proposal of marriage from one of her suitors. The apartment was up for sale, as they were to move to Boston soon.

  See? I thought to myself on hearing this. She would have left in any case.

  Impressive

  Entering music conservatory on a full scholarship, you think you’re pretty damned good. The school asks you to take part in the first student recital of the semester. Held once a week, these are noontime performances during which students play pieces they’ve worked up to a fairly high level. Accepting the invitation, of course, you decide to play the first movement of the Hindemith Oboe Sonata.

  A few days later, you have your very first oboe lesson. You don’t know this man and are eager to impress him with your playing, just the way you seem to have impressed everyone else. As you play the Hindemith Oboe Sonata, to be performed in just one week, he guides you through
the movement and gives some suggestions. Then at the end of the lesson he says that you can go ahead and perform the Hindemith, but at the next lesson he will be asking you to play nothing but long tones. And he suspects that you’ll need to do this for months, possibly till the end of the semester.

  You crumble.

  Long tones mean that you play one note for as long as you can hold it. And then you play the next note for as long as possible, and on and on. He explains that you are going to have to go back to the basics, because he hears problems in your playing. You’re not quite as solid as you should be. Three months. Maybe longer, depending on your progress. You accept this news silently. Then you go back to your room across the street at Mrs. S.’s apartment and sob for the next four hours nonstop. Thank goodness it’s an off night for the kids. You wake up the next morning and set to crying some more. You cry on and off throughout the entire week and finally pull yourself together enough to perform the Hindemith Oboe Sonata. Everyone seems to be impressed.

  You walk into the next lesson and play the long tones for a solid hour with your new teacher. After listening and making comments and suggestions, he tells you to go home and practice nothing but long tones for at least three hours each day. No music at all. You go back to the apartment and cry a bunch more. But damn it, you play long tones for three hours. No music. That is hard to do.

  At the next lesson, he tells you to do the exact same thing for the following week’s lesson. The days move along slowly, and you don’t feel nearly as impressive as you did two weeks ago, before this whole long-tone thing cropped up. You’ve stopped crying by now, because it’s just a waste of time. The time spent crying could be used for playing the long tones. You do as you’re told.

  At the third long-tone lesson (after playing a bunch of long tones for him), he stares at you for about fifteen endless seconds. You think he’s going to lambaste you for sounding like shit. Instead he says that you don’t have to play long tones anymore. He says that you have made the most rapid and complete progress of any student he has ever taught. He says he is impressed. You go home and cry for a few minutes. Then you start to play music.

  Thief

  MY FINAL TAGLINE—“I have to get away from those kids”—was surely what resonated with her. My mother wholeheartedly concurred. Why hadn’t I started with that simple declaration?

  Instead I began with a typically well-thought-out formal proposal, as if for a doctoral thesis: “How I Might Die If I Do Not Leave the Free Digs of Mrs. S.” Written and rewritten, stated with irrefutable and lockstep logic as to why I needed to be released from my sweet deal with Mrs. S. Reasons: strong and weak. Alternative options: with footnotes as backup. Reverse psychology: Freud versus Jung. These necessary and well-documented lists, all committed to both paper and memory, preceded the nail-biting call to my mother, when I would present my orals, defend my position, and implore her for money to pay my rent.

  Always begin with the postulate: what you assume to be true and what you then hope to prove. It’s the heart of the scientific method, after all. My mother didn’t like children very much, and I’d forgotten all about that, even just four months out of the Butler household. I should have gone right to that mother lode—that we both hated kids—as I contemplated what I thought would be the most difficult problem to surmount: her worries about money.

  But she’d pay. Fifty dollars a month was to be my allowance toward the rent for staying in the apartment of a wealthy Korean American piano student who lived across town from Mannes on the Upper West Side. She had taken pity on me after witnessing several excruciating episodes with Whitney in front of the school. It was a mercy deal, pure and simple. She didn’t particularly need my money. But I gratefully paid and took up residency in a corner of her living room, sleeping on the small sofa.

  I had clothing. Now I had shelter. But I still needed food. My mother never asked how I was going to negotiate this third necessity of life and just assumed I would make it all work. I had some cash saved from money given to me by my grandparents, which held me for a few weeks until I figured things out.

  I was determined. I was methodical. I was hungry. So I became a thief.

  A fellow oboe student was producing blank metal slugs as a substitute for subway tokens and doled them out to all the Mannes students who didn’t see it as a crime to rob the New York City subway system of a fare. I gladly filled my pockets with the phony tokens: a savings of thirty-five cents per ride, the cost of subway fare in 1974. After several months, cops began to appear daily at the East 77th Street station. Policemen scrutinized the hands of passengers going through the turnstiles, and we had to be wily to slip past them. Many students gave it up for fear of getting arrested; a few unlucky pianists had been nabbed and booked. But I continued to take my chances.

  A life of hunger necessitated further deviousness. I took a three-pronged approach, with my roommate as my dupe.

  She was careless. Coins slipped out of her pockets, finding their way down the sides of the cushions of her sofa and club chairs. I searched the furniture crevices daily for loose change.

  Her kitchen was overstocked. I couldn’t just open her refrigerator and help myself, as I had with Mrs. S.’s newfangled Sub-Zero. But very carefully and incrementally, I began to siphon off food from her: just the right amount, so she wouldn’t notice.

  And only when absolutely necessary, I took a few single dollar bills from her wallet while she slept in the bedroom. I rationalized that taking the food and coins was not really stealing. After all, she would never look for pennies and dimes in her own furniture. And she would probably never notice the missing food. Perhaps. Taking the dollar bills? That was stealing. The guilt felt like another entity living in my belly, although it was easier to ignore than the hunger pangs.

  Fortunately my roommate and I shared a rigorous discipline for practicing, so we didn’t have much time for lounging around and getting to know each other. I avoided her eyes, because surely if we looked directly at each other, she would immediately finger the thief she’d let into her home.

  But my stomach still ached. As I tried to sleep lying on my back, with my legs draped over the arms of the sofa, the concave curve of my belly reached all the way to my spine. I pressed down hard with my fists, trying to confuse the hunger pangs that woke me throughout the night. I was hanging on, one saltine at a time.

  A brilliant solution emerged: Steve Adelstein, my oboe teacher and the man of the long tones. He was a quirky pedagogue—mildly misanthropic, failing at love affairs, obsessing over reed making, suffering from compulsive disorders, ballooning from overeating. How rare this man was for a young girl who grew up in a family where absolutely everything was hidden, undisclosed, and unspoken. Adelstein opened his veins and bled out, telling all his gory, unedited truths.

  How I loved Adelstein; and that is how all his students and I referred to him. He smelled of sweet vulnerability, yet there was not one whiff of male-female dynamic between us. We were more like neutered buddies, and he maintained the dynamic impeccably. Kindred spirits, we both presented to the world as teetering on weird. In fact, privately, I called him Adelweird.

  After the oboe, food was the subject on the tip of Adelweird’s tongue. He’d been obese on and off throughout his life and struggled mightily with his addiction. But he’d found a way to keep his weight in check. For lunch, he enjoyed a robust head of iceberg lettuce, cut into quarters with a low-calorie salad dressing and a diet cola. This “meal,” served at the Blue Skyline Diner, around the corner from Mannes, was enough to keep him going throughout his day of teaching. It filled him up, kept the hunger pangs away, yet had very few calories, which he counted assiduously.

  Eureka! I didn’t give a damn about those calories. While Adelweird was steadfastly trying to lose weight, I was desperately trying to fill up. My only meal of the day became an entire head of iceberg lettuce with the stem cut off. Unshredded. Unripped. Pure and unadulterated. With Russian dressing. On the side. I imagined tha
t the bits of pickle floating within the dressing were of added nutritional value.

  “Yes, miss, what would you like today?”

  “I’ll have a head of iceberg lettuce, please.”

  “Dressing? We have Italian, Russian, blue cheese, and oil and vinegar.”

  “Russian, please.”

  “The whole bottle? Again?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “HEADOFICEBERGLETTUCEBOTTLERUSSIANDRESSINGONSIDE—PEEEK UP!!!!”

  The waiters and I reenacted our formalized Greek diner performance every day. Shepherding me to the rear of the restaurant, where I sheepishly sat with my back to the door, my waiter presented the head to me on a large plate. Turning it upside down, I carefully fanned the leaves out to make space for the Russian dressing to dribble down into its deep crevices. The ritual was exacting: just a bit of dressing at a time, so that the head could be completely saturated with the “nourishing” creaminess that would keep me sated until bedtime. This took about a half bottle per meal.

  On occasion, when they felt generous, the waiters brought a few slices of Wonder Bread, and I smeared on as much oleo as possible. This starch and lard were a perfect complement to my vitamin- and carb-deficient roughage. And, rarely, my favorite Greek waiter took pity on me and laid a few strips of processed turkey on top of the head, like a few strands of hair on a balding pate. He offered bacon only one time, which I righteously eschewed. I was a thief, but I had my principles: I now practically fancied myself a vegetarian.

  By bedtime, my belly was still stuffed with a partially digested stew of Russian dressing, iceberg lettuce, Wonder Bread, and oleo. I slept like a baby, dreaming of pale green heads bobbing over the rough waters of my gurgling tummy.

  Hell

  First you contact a guy in the South of France who has a bamboo farm through which you purchase some stalks. They come in the mail in big boxes, and you store them, praying that the quality is good, very good. But there are no guarantees. It could be crap. You soak these stalks, called tube cane, in water for an hour or so to soften them up.