by Deb Caletti
“Stop, stop, stop.” This I heard loud and clear. Dino’s authoritative voice could be heard two states away.
“Technically nearly perfect. But purpose. There is feeling, yes. But no purpose. You must have it. Without direction, you will drown. You may be young, but you don’t need to hesitate. If you don’t give everything to your playing, Ian, you will go hungry.”
“I know.”
“Hungry.”
“All right.”
“You know what I am talking about.”
“Yes, I do.”
Ian started to play again. The paintbrush stroked the canvas. I peeled that tangerine, broke off a sticky segment and popped it into my mouth. It was juicy and warm. The juice trickled into the tiny hammock between my fingers. I watched two old Italian women cross the street while arguing. One wore kneesocks that had given up on the job and gathered in clumps at her ankles. The other had a bad dye job—her hair was blacker than a briquette while her face was older than time. Everyone knew her hair hadn’t seen that color since dinosaurs roamed the earth.
The music filled me with vivid-dream drowsiness. I watched two teenagers snitch a bicycle from the street, running like anything to the canal where they would toss it. Just like Dino’s stories. When it was summer and the boys had too much time on their hands, the canal was filled with bicycles. A grandfather leaned down to speak to me. His breath smelled of a wine-soaked cork, his chin had a dent in it that split it right in half….
I fell backward suddenly, jolting before my head hit the ground. Shit, I had fallen asleep, right there against the door, and Dino and Ian came out of the office and nearly stepped over my tumbling body. Oh, God, I could be such an idiot. I had fallen asleep, right there, and the first impression I left with Ian Waters was my body rolling into the room like the corpse in some Agatha Christie novel.
“What have we here?” Dino said. “Either a very bad Romanian gymnast or a spy.”
Oh, the humiliation. I gave him the black-tongue curse again, added an essential part of the male anatomy.
“Guilty on the spy thing,” I said. I hoped to sound casual, which is tough to do when you are reclining on one elbow and your face is hot enough to ignite a Bunsen burner. I struggled to stand. “Actually I was listening. I’m sorry. It was really beautiful. I must have fallen asleep.”
“Rule one. Keep your audience awake,” Dino said.
Ian grinned. I wondered if I should hate him for colluding with Dino. Then he said, “Classical music can do that. Someone ought to put lyrics to it.” He smiled.
“Ah!” Dino said in mock horror, and pretended to strangle Ian. “This is Cassie Morgan, astronomer. Ian Waters, talented, struggling musician. And heretic.” All right. Since Dino attempted to restore some of my dignity, he could have his penis back.
“Astronomer,” Ian said. “Wow.” His eyes were a very gentle brown; his black hair threatened to swing over them. An angular face, long legs. He was tall and thin. In spite of performing before what must have been hundreds of people, he seemed shy, poetic.
“Still learning,” I said.
“Tuesday, then?” Dino said.
“Tuesday,” Ian said. “Thanks for listening,” he said to me.
“Next time I’ll stay awake,” I said.
“No problem.”
God, I was still kicking myself. That feeling of something being done wrongly, left unfinished, needing to be recaptured and played again, started churning inside as they headed out. Jesus, I should be put on some island for the terminally socially inept. Fuck-Up Island. It could be another perverse reality TV show. Mom came down the stairs, called a good-bye, and checked them both surreptitiously for blood and scratches.
Dino clapped Ian on the shoulder three times at the door before Ian left. Dino shut the door behind him, looked up at my mother, and smiled. “His mother is Italian,” Dino beamed.
I went out to let Dog William back in. He was peering through the slats in the fence, no doubt watching as the figure of Rocket got smaller and smaller in the distance. I took a spot next to him, and through the narrow slat watched the black speck of Ian until he was gone. Dog William sighed through his nose as if saying farewell to the most interesting day of his life. I patted the top of his ugly head.
“I know it,” I said to Dog William.
My father’s house is also on Seabeck Island, and both of my parents live here to Minimize the Impact of Divorce. We all used to live together on a street not far from here, but Mom sold the place after she got together with Dino. Dad now lives in the house he grew up in, right on Outlook, one of the nicest streets in town, where a row of Victorians sit overlooking the waters of the Puget Sound. From his porch you can see the ferries gliding to and from Seattle, and he has a front-row seat every March, when some thirty-two thousand gray whales migrate down the coast and a gazillion tourists come to town to watch. Dad bought the house from Nannie, his mother, who now lives at Providence Point Community for Seniors. But Nannie comes over a lot and rearranges things back the way they were when she lived there. She’s been forbidden to empty the dishwasher after she reorganized every kitchen cupboard when Dad was out mowing the lawn. He couldn’t find the cheese grater for two weeks. Once we caught Nannie in the living room, trying to shove the couch back against the window where she’d had it for forty years. She did pretty well, too, for someone who must weigh about eighty pounds—she had it about halfway across the floor.
Mom and Dino bought the house we live in now on Mermaid Avenue (yes, it’s really called that) shortly before they married. It’s bigger than our old house, which was materialistic consolation for about a week or so, until real life set in. The divorce, the wedding, it all happened quickly. So quickly that you sometimes got the feeling that Dino was looking around with no small amount of resentment, wondering how he got from there to here. There being New York City, where he lived with his third wife, to here, a small island in Washington State, tucked far away from the center of the music world, married to a good but not great cellist, with a daughter who didn’t appreciate what an astounding human being he was (i.e., hated his guts). How they got here was a tempestuous affair from what I have heard, although you don’t want to think of your mother that way. It’s okay to think of mothers in the same sentence as lunch box and garden gloves, but not in the same sentence as passionate and tempestuous. I will spare you the gory details of that time, the craziest, messiest kind of hell and chaos you never imagine for your life. Okay, one gory detail—my father, who takes insects outside when he finds them in the house, who rides them out on an envelope or some other handy airborne insect express material and gently lowers them to the ground, actually smashed his fist through his car window at the height of his anger and loss. Glass shards poked from the skin, sent blood down his Dockers.
Not that I blame my mother, not really. First, she’s my mother and I love her and she’s mostly a terrific person. But aside from that, it sounds like Dino chased after her with the determination of those dogs that travel thousands of miles to find their way back home after they tumble out of the back of a pickup. My mother, Daniella Morgan Cavalli, is, after all, a rather beautiful woman. Not in the sexy Barbie way, but like a medieval princess. Long, dark, curly hair. Dark eyes, a serenity that seems mysterious. People look at her, I know that. I have her eyes, I am told, but my hair is brown like my dad’s, and is straight but not long enough to quite hit my shoulders. We both tend toward being full and curved and have to watch what we eat, but I distinctly lack that serenity people seem to find so alluring. She and Dino met when she was substituting for a cellist on maternity leave with the Seattle Symphony, and he appeared as a guest for three nights, performing Amore Trovato (Love Found), written for his third wife. In spite of this, my mother fell for him as if she had been kidnapped and brainwashed, and my father was sure this is what had actually happened. Dino’s charm must have been intense, as prior to then my mother was a practical person who barely sniffed at a sad movie. My mother’s
charm mustn’t have been too bad either—Dino stayed for three weeks, went back to New York only long enough to pack up his things. Lesson learned—charm is a one-way ticket to hell. Better to fall in love with a man who is dull as a pancake than one with charm.
Still, if I’m honest, I can’t exactly blame Dino entirely either. Blame is so satisfying that you can forget it’s actually useless. The truth is, there are a thousand reasons my parents aren’t together anymore, and nine hundred ninety-nine of them I don’t even know about or fully understand. I do know, though, that there are essential differences between them that I’ve noticed over the years: my father reads a map, while my mother doesn’t mind getting lost; my father is consistently a believer, while my mother uses religion like some people use vitamins—when they feel an illness coming on. Before he paints a room my father tapes the edges and covers everything as thoroughly as an Egyptian mortician, while my mother’s only preparation for the same job is to put on old jeans and take off her socks so she can tell if she’s stepped in a paint drip. He cuts a peach; she bites it whole. The practicality I thought Mom had was maybe more an adaptive response to living with Dad, rather than her original, true self. Something like those fish that go blind after living in a dark cave.
Whatever the reasons for their split, I now go back and forth between locations, same as a letter with a bad address. I refuse, though, to be a messed up Product of Divorce, which some people think should be stamped on the side of you MADE IN MALAYSIA-style before they stick you in a crate and pack you off to the Land of the Damaged. Broken home, remember? The message being that because a marriage is broken, everything in the home is broken too, including you.
But there is one thing that I would say about the going back and forth, and that is, you wonder if the adults would ever get divorced if they had to be the ones to change homes every week. This is all supposed to be all right, and we are required to be okay about it, but it’s not okay. Not really. We can handle it, don’t get me wrong. But the truth is, it’s not okay. The truth is, you just start to get comfy, when suddenly you’ve got to pack up and remember to bring your book and your favorite earrings and your notes for your paper for Humanities. You’ve got to readjust to your surroundings—the parent, the pet, the step-siblings or lack of them, who has bagels, who runs out of milk, which drawer to reach for when you want a spoon. The truth is that you have a day on either side where it feels as if you’ve just come home from vacation. You’ve got to remember where things left off. Oh yeah, that’s right—my room’s a mess. Oh yeah, that’s right—my CD player’s batteries are dead and I haven’t read my new magazine yet and I’d gotten in a fight with Mom before I left. And the truth is, as soon as you arrive “home” you are too often pulled into the perverse divorce game, Who Do You Love More. It begins with what looks like an innocent question: “How did it go at Mom’s/Dad’s?” It ends with this reverse Sophie’s Choice, where instead of a mother choosing between children, you are asked to choose between parents. If anything, all this divorce stuff made you feel that if you were anywhere near love you ought to don one of those suits those people wear from the Centers for Disease Control.
That’s why I was trying to get thoughts of Ian Waters out of my mind that day I went to my dad’s for the weekend. Real simply, I didn’t want to get hurt by the power of my own emotions. I wasn’t doing a very good job of erasing him from my head. I’d stooped to the lowest depths of thoughts, pictured him kissing me deeply before leaving on a plane for Curtis, me sobbing miserably in an airport chair as his plane pulled away from the doorway. I mean, I knew how this story would have to end, if there was even to be a story at all. It was not an end I wanted to willingly walk toward.
Dad wasn’t home when I got there, so I went out to the porch and sat in the swing and looked out toward the sound. At that time of year you had your occasional humpback, otters, and sea lions, and I watched for the odd shape in the waves, a break in the pattern that meant some creature was there. It was colder than hell outside, and everything was painted in the Northwest’s favorite color, gray. The water was steely, and the sky a soft fuzz, but it was still beautiful out there. A kayaker with a death wish was bobbing around on the water, his boat a vivid red spot in a silver sea. For the millionth, compelling time, I saw those fingers stroke that violin case.
“Look who’s here!” my father called out.
I went inside. My father had one arm around Nannie and the other around a fat bag of groceries.
“He thinks he’s made of money,” Nannie said.
“I bought her a People magazine,” Dad said.
“That’s hard-earned dollars you spent on that trash,” Nannie said. I kissed her cheek, helped her off with her coat, which wasn’t too necessary. She was flinging it off like an alligator wrestler in her eagerness to get to the bag Dad had set on the counter. She fished around inside with one thin arm, plucked out the magazine, squashing a loaf of bread with her elbow in the process.
“I don’t even know who these trollops are,” she said as she eased into a corner of the couch and stuck her nose in the pages.
“Hey, Cass. How about sweet-and-sour chicken?”
“Yum.”
Cooking was one of Dad’s post-divorce hobbies. Before that, his specialty was cornflakes with bananas on them. Now he was really into it. He cooked better than Mom ever had, which was probably the point. He has all of these fancy knives and pots, and various, curious utensils good for only one weird purpose—skinning a grape, say. I could have written a confessional My Father Had a Spring-form Pan. He built a shelf in the kitchen for all of his cookbooks, and Nannie kept bumping her head on it. Who put this thing here? she’d grouse, knowing full well who did it.
We had dinner and watched a movie, some PG thing about misfit boys who go to camp, which ended with the two parents who’d both lost their spouses deciding to marry. Of course there were two white kids (one good, one evil), a black kid, an Asian kid, one fat kid, and one girl with glasses. It was worse than those movies where a dog wins a sports championship.
“Sex, sex, sex,” Nannie said when the happy couple kissed at the end. “That’s all you see in movies anymore.” I guess that’s why we weren’t watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “I’m going to bed.”
“Dishes await,” Dad said after Nannie’s flowered housecoat disappeared slowly up the stairs. “Would you go and check on her? I’m worried that by the time you get there Grandpa’s photo will be up on my nightstand and her Poligrip will be in my medicine cabinet.”
“No problem,” I said.
I trotted upstairs, checked the guest room, but didn’t find Nannie. I went to Dad’s room to see if he was right. I was expecting to catch her red-handed, an unrepentant criminal of living in the past.
That’s when I saw it—part of the cover of Dino’s biography sticking out from under Dad’s bed. It was splayed open to keep his place. I was sure he’d read it before, when all of the awful stuff was happening, but why was he reading it now, three years later? I walked over to his bed, looked underneath. There was a nest of papers, notes in Dad’s handwriting, other books. Composers Speak—Part 2 in the Young Musicians Series, with that famous picture of Dino on the cover, looking sultry and young, during his days in Paris. And there was Culinary History—Authentic Tuscan Recipes. What was he doing, writing the Dino Cookbook? I wrestled with my conscience about sitting down right then and reading those notes. Guilt convinced me that Nannie would fall and break a hip or something if I did, so I left to find her. I saw the light on under the bathroom door.
“Are you okay in there?” I called through the door.
“Yes, thank you,” Nannie said primly.
I waited until she came out and got settled into the guest room bed. She was propped on the pillows as if waiting for visitors when I kissed her cheek and turned off her light.
“What a day,” she said.
“Good night, Nannie,” I said.
“Good night, my special dear,” s
he said. She was always a little sweeter at night. Maybe it was the nightgown with the bow.
I wanted to go right downstairs and confront Dad about his under-the-bed project, but when I got there he was drying a pan with a kitchen towel and whistling, having such a cheerful father moment, I couldn’t stand the thought of breaking it. His T-shirt was loose over his jeans, and his hair had gone from polite to playful. He looked so happy I decided I didn’t have the heart for a confrontation just yet. It would have to wait.
The next day I went to the movies with a couple of my friends, Sophie Birnbaum and Nat Frasier, Zebe and Brian Malo. Zebe’s real name is Meggie Rawlinson, which sounds like some fifties cheerleader and doesn’t fit her at all. We call her Zebe after her favorite zebra-stripe boots. We try to get together most weekends when there isn’t a play, as everyone but me is in drama. Sophie and Brian usually are the leads and we give them crap because sometimes they have to kiss. They love each other like brother and sister, which apparently means they sometimes want to tear out each other’s throats. Zebe does stage managing, and Nat is happy when he gets more than a couple of lines. Last year, every time we saw him, we’d say “This way, sir,” after his Oscar-winning role as a waiter in The Matchmaker.
It was turning out to be Crappy Movie Weekend, as what we saw was basically one long boob joke. It was all girls in tight shirts with enormous buttlike cleavage and boys falling over their own tongues hanging out their mouths, the kind of thing that makes you wonder if there’s any truth to evolution after all. Sophie got in a fight with Brian when he said that a little lighthearted movie with lots of tits was occasionally refreshing.
“We can help you hold him down,” Zebe said.
“Hey, I don’t want to touch him,” I said. “Stupidity is a disease.”
“I’ll wash my hands afterward,” Zebe said.
When I went back to Dad’s, the house was quiet. It was so quiet that the refrigerator humming was the only noise, and I got that has-a-mass-murderer-been-here-and-now-he’s-in-the-closet-just-waiting-to-jump-out-at-me feeling. Instead, I found that Nannie’s coat was gone, taken back with her to Providence Point, I guessed, and I noticed that a couple of pieces of toast had popped up from the toaster and had long ago grown cold. The coffeepot was on, with no coffee left in the pot, just a burning smear of brown. I always worried that this was how Dad really lived when I wasn’t around, that the good cooking and orderly house were a show put on just for me and dropped the moment I left. I’ve come by unannounced before and saw unopened mail stacked six inches high, and egg yolk permanently wedded to the dishes it was on. That’s the other prominent thing about divorce—you worry about your parents when they are supposed to be worrying about you.
