The Opposite of Music

by Janet Ruth Young

  “Oh, no,” Mom says. “No, Linda, this isn’t anything like that. Nothing in that video is going to happen to Dad.”

  “I saw the movie too,” I say. “One teenager intentionally drove into a brick wall with a car full of passengers.” The video said not “teenager,” but “teen.” This was like calling a middle-aged person a “middle.” It showed footage from the accident scene—sirens blazing, parents wailing as bodies were removed. I covered my eyes for part of the video, but it was the talk of school that week. The video also discussed copycat suicides, in which a musician or other celebrity kills himself and adolescents duplicate the act, choosing the same date and same method of death, or when one student in a town kills himself and others decide to do the same. While the video played I wondered, If copycat suicide is such a problem, aren’t they worried about giving us ideas? But everyone was so excited afterward, talking about this scene or that, that the teachers decided to dismiss us without a question-and-answer period. Among the student body it was universally agreed that the soundtrack was excellent.

  “None of that will happen to Dad,” Mom says again. Linda climbs on the bed beside Mom, and Mom strokes her hair. “Those kids in the movie, most likely no one cared about them. No one noticed that they were sick. No one tried to help them. In our case, Linda, we have the support we need, and we haven’t missed our opportunity. Dad’s being treated in plenty of time. And I honestly believe Dr. Gupta knows what she’s doing.

  “Dr. Gupta says that this kind of illness can come from a change in brain chemistry or from a loss or from a change in living situation that the patient has trouble adjusting to. It’s like they’re going through a crisis. So Dad will be taking medicine to help his brain, and he’s also going to get talk therapy to find out what’s going on.”

  “I have one question.”

  “What is that, Billy?”

  “When will he be better?”

  “The medicine should start working in about two weeks.”

  Linda has curled up under Mom’s hand, until she’s practically in the fetal position.

  “What I need from you right now is input about any problems or difficulties that could be causing stress in Dad’s life. Any possibility, Dr. Gupta says, even if it appears unrelated. Let your minds run free. Brainstorm. Think outside the box. Don’t censor yourselves.”

  I turn to a fresh page in my history notebook.

  Linda snuffles again. “You’re not gonna like what I have to say, Mom.”

  “That’s okay, honey, just go ahead. This is the time to speak freely.”

  “Maybe he feels trapped,” Linda says. “Maybe he never really wanted a wife and kids. Maybe he’d rather have a totally different life—like be an actor or a race car driver or something.”

  It’s typical that, right after a weepy outburst, Linda is becoming critical again. But Mom’s accustomed to Linda’s moods. Mom slides the wooden beads along the cord of her necklace, and they make a sound like bones clacking. “Let me reassure you of something, Linda: Your father loves this family more than anything on earth. You should have seen him the day you were born. He said, ‘A boy and a girl. Now I have everything I could ever have wanted from life.’”

  I look sideways at Mom. “I thought you said not to censor ourselves.”

  “Well, censor a tad. Use your judgment. Linda, I know you wouldn’t say something like that unless you were worried and upset. But maybe we can pursue the possibility that he’s dissatisfied with some area of his life.”

  I write “dissatisfied,” followed by a question mark.

  “You know,” I point out, “maybe Linda’s onto something. What about the fact that Dad never finished art school? Perhaps he thinks of himself as a failure. It isn’t anything like those people in the video, but just, you know, a little unhappy, like something is missing. Like things could be better.”

  “Dad really isn’t what you would call successful,” Linda agrees. “I mean, compared to some of the other dads, like Jodie’s dad. Not that I’m criticizing him or anything.”

  “Well, he chose his own path,” I offer. I heard this once and liked the sound of it.

  “That raises some interesting questions,” Mom says. “What is success? Perhaps Jodie’s dad did build a second garage for his collection of Italian sports cars, and he takes his family on expensive vacations every year, but does he feel successful inside? Is he truly happy with his life?”

  “I think so,” Linda says.

  “Well, you just don’t know, do you? You can only discover the truth by probing beneath the surface.”

  In fact, Dad is kind of unsuccessful compared to other adults. But he didn’t seem to want to climb the ladder of success. He got a job as a draftsman in a company that manufactures store fixtures. He opposed overtime as a matter of principle, tore off his necktie when he stepped into the house, and preferred to spend his extra hours playing tennis, drawing cartoons, and listening to opera.

  “Mom, are we poor?” Linda asks.

  “No, Linda, not poor, just lower middle class. But we’re well educated. I have a master’s degree and your father attended one of the most prestigious art schools in the country. That’s more important than money.”

  I suggest a different angle. “Mom, the important point is: Does Dad think of himself as successful?”

  “He is definitely more successful than Uncle Marty,” Linda points out. Marty keeps starting businesses with people, but it seems like either the businesses flop or he gets cheated.

  “But possibly less successful than other people he knew in college,” I add.

  “Well, what do you think they’re all doing now?” Mom asks. “I met some of them about ten years back. They were in their late thirties and living in divey apartments with six roommates, eating Beefaroni out of the can. They couldn’t even scrape up the money to visit the Museum of Modern Art, although any philistine with twenty bucks in his pocket can see the greatest collection of artwork in the United States or possibly the world. Paradoxical, isn’t it? Anyway, success, as I’ve said, is a highly subjective judgment. How do you define it? Some people believe success just amounts to whether you’re happy.”

  “But Dad isn’t happy,” I remind her. “That’s the problem he’s having right now, isn’t it?”

  I write the word “success.” Then I get another idea: the past.

  “What about Dad’s parents? How do they fit into the picture?”

  Mom cocks her head. “His parents?”

  “What I mean is how he felt when they died. When we couldn’t get there in time. Could that be considered a crisis?” Both of Dad’s parents, who lived in New York, died when I was eleven. My grandfather went first, suddenly, of a heart attack in the hardware store parking lot while moving lumber into his van. Then my grandmother had a stroke, and we visited occasionally to help care for her. But she took a turn for the worse and the hospital called. Dad left work, and we jumped into the car and raced toward Long Island. The engine overheated on I-95. When we arrived at the hospital she was gone. Linda and I bawled for hours. Dad never shed a tear, but he traded in that car the day after the funeral.

  Soon after that, for my twelfth birthday my father got me a three-speed from a used-bike shop. The bike was about fifty years old, painted black, with a two-tone treatment, black and white, on the seat and the back fender.

  Dad threw himself into fixing up the bike. We replaced the cracked tires and the gummy chain, hammered bumps out of the rims, and dripped oil into the hub. We rubbed the rust spots from the chrome with steel wool, then waxed the chrome to prevent it from rusting again.

  “What will you name your bike?” Dad had asked. “I named my favorite bike Pavarotti. You could call this one Seabiscuit or Rosinante.” We were brightening the cloudy paint with buffing compound and a coat of car wax.

  “I think I’ll just call it Triumph.”

  “That’s a good call.”

  The brand name “Triumph” appeared five places on my bike: on
the tube below the seat in colored squares like a kid’s alphabet blocks, in gold letters on the chain cover, in small white letters on the lower tube, and on two coats of arms on the front stem and back fender. With encouragement from all over my bicycle, how could I not triumph?

  Now Mom’s eyes water. “I don’t know, maybe I’m depressed. I haven’t felt like myself, anyway, since…” She’s remembering not only Dad’s parents but her own. “The world is a poorer place for the loss of all of them. That whole World War II generation. So brave. You know what they’re called now? The Greatest Generation. ‘Never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.’ Winston Churchill.”

  “God, now I’m getting depressed too,” Linda says, starting to cry again. “How are we going to help Dad if we can’t even keep it together ourselves?”

  Tears circle the room, contagious as yawning or nausea, but I’m determined not to give in. I write down the word “family.” “Mom, is this kind of thing hereditary? I mean, was there anyone else in Dad’s family who had…you know, mental problems, that you know of?”

  “I’m not sure. Dr. Gupta asked us that too. Maybe I should talk to Marty about it.”

  Linda lies on her back, staring at the ceiling. “Hey, isn’t Dad’s cousin Amy a bit, if you’ll pardon the expression, nuts?”

  “‘Nuts’ is not a word that we use in this house.”

  “We used to.”

  “Well, we don’t anymore.”

  “Okay, I’ll try again. Isn’t Cousin Amy a bit flaky or a bit off-kilter? The cats, the newspapers, the empty jars and jar lids, the smell? How many cats were there, anyway?”

  “I think the population reached as many as thirty-five or more at the point that they were taken away. Now she seems happy with just the seven.”

  “Ew,” Linda says.

  “It is a big house,” Mom reminds her.

  “Let me write that down. And I think I remember Uncle Marty saying that someone else on Amy’s side was a kleptomaniac and spent time in prison.”

  “One of your father’s cousins, you mean?” Mom stares. She may never have heard this story. Marty says he finds me easy to confide in. “Could that have been the one who returned a positive RSVP to our wedding but didn’t show up? I always thought he was terribly rude. Well, he missed a good meal.”

  Mom gets up and cracks the door, motioning for silence. “Your father’s up. Resume your normal activities. To be continued.”

  SHADOW

  You can see the highway through the slats in the fence behind our house. A tunnel runs under it, where the workmen used to cross back and forth while the road was being constructed. I was forbidden to go inside, but who could resist? A concrete-lined cylinder, cracked in places, rumored to have rats. By the time I had the courage to run through it, I was too tall to get through without stooping, making it a fast, uncomfortable trip with the sound of traffic close to my head. Every kid from the old regime has been through that tunnel and back once. The new ones probably will never even know it’s there.

  This is the oldest part of Route 128, north of Boston from Hawthorne to Gloucester, where the highway has only two lanes in either direction. The houses on my street were built all on one floor, and they’re all identical, although some are turned this way or that on the winding, hilly road. When I was little, you could walk into any house blindfolded and be able to find a box of cornflakes, a piece of chalk, or a Nerf ball.

  From the driveway (no garage, no carport, two economy cars), you walk in the front door (no hallway, foyer, or vestibule) directly into the living room. Here is a big plate-glass window ideal for leaning on for hours, when you were small, in case a rabbit or anything went by, and leaving your hand and lip prints on the glass like white stage makeup.

  A dining room with crank-out windows is behind the living room, and if it’s summer you have to decide whether to be cool and hear the highway noise or enjoy a sweaty silence. Next to that is a kitchen that looks into the living room over a partial brick wall topped by metal bars, so your mother could see what you were doing if it got too quiet. At one end of the house are a woody den with built-in spaces for books and your family’s one TV, then a small cement-floored room for your tools, sports equipment, winter boots, cleaning supplies, and so on. This room contains your oil tank, your clothes dryer and ironing board, and a pull-down ladder for reaching the attic crawlspace to get toys you’ve outgrown but like to visit, Halloween costumes, and all your grandparents’ things. Also a pink kitchen table with black legs, where your father keeps an ancient suitcase full of small hardware parts that he never bothers to sort. And which you open sometimes, on your own, to crunch the parts with both hands and hear them clank—like a sea that someone drained the water from, leaving only shells.

  At the other end of the house are two junior-size bedrooms and a hall bathroom, and one big bedroom with its own sink and toilet. Outside are a bicycle shed, a garden shed, and a patio made of concrete blocks.

  All perfectly adequate, you would think. But then in September, our uphill neighbors built an addition, a second-story bedroom the length of the whole house and a mammoth garage with a separate apartment above it for their son who is not much older than me, and just as the builders were finishing the parents’ balcony and the appliance store truck was pulling up with the son’s gas grill, our house was eclipsed. Mom stood in the shadow beside her rosebushes, shaking a fist at the neighbors’ house (although she knew they weren’t home at the time).

  “How could they do this to us?” she wailed.

  I’m not sure, but I think this shadow could be contributing to our problems.

  WORLDPAIN

  welt·schmerz 'velt · shm rts n, often cap [G. fr. Welt world + Schmerz pain, fr. OHG smerzo; akin to OHG smerzan to pain—more at SMART] (1875) 1: mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state

  Intellectual, no? It would be just like Dad to go for that one.

  NOCTURNE

  Just after one a.m. sounds begin in the hall. Two voices so familiar they could originate in my own chest. The rubbing swing of the door over carpet, and the swoosh of two sets of slippered feet. My curtains are partly open, and street-lights are reflected in our first snow. A column of light falls over my bed, illuminating me, Triumph’s front fender, and a thumbtacked Escher print of flying fish in formation, like torpedoes.

  The people switch lights on as they move through the house. These new lights seep under my door. The other lights cause my window to darken and my column of light to fade.

  In the kitchen, the woman talks more than the man. She speaks mostly in whispers. The man isn’t a good whisperer. When he thinks he’s whispering, he’s just talking but adding breath sounds to it.

  The refrigerator door opens and closes. A pan rattles on the stove. Liquid is poured. The fridge door opens and closes again. The burner clicks several times as it heats up. One person stirs the pot while the other pads across the kitchen floor. A cabinet door opens. Dishes click. Liquid is poured from the pot. The kitchen light goes out. Other lights go out. My window gets brighter. My column gets bigger. They stop just outside my door.

  “Billy’s asleep,” Mom whispers.

  “Good,” says Dad. “Billy’s asleep.”

  MACARONI

  I’m resting my head over a plate of macaroni and cheese when someone knocks my elbow.

  “Hey!”

  Mitchell Zane and Andy Bock sit down with their trays. Mitchell slides the wrapper to one end of his straw, where it crumples into a miniature Japanese lantern.

  “You fell asleep in chemistry,” he says.

  “Did anyone notice?”

  “Other than me, you mean?” He nods ominously.

  “Zwicker?”

  “No, not Zwicker. Just a couple of kids.” He dips the st
raw carefully into one corner of his milk carton.

  “Maybe I wasn’t asleep. Maybe I was just thinking.”

  Still, I could take or leave the sciences. The sciences have two flaws. One, they build from week to week, so if you space out for a few weeks, the train leaves the station and there’s no hope of catching up. Two, they rely too much on received wisdom. The reason I haven’t done well—and I’m not trying to excuse myself here—is that we were plunked down and expected to memorize the periodic table and all these formulas, and my true question just never got answered. Which is: How do we know all this? How do we know, for instance, that an electron circles around a proton (or whatever), or that carbon consists of five electrons and two protons (or whatever)? Has someone actually seen this with their own eyes? How do we know it isn’t all a scam? Had this been answered at the beginning, I may have invested more energy in keeping up.

  Now the arts—those are the subjects for me. No building from week to week. You can zone out for days, but as long as you jump back in before the deadline, read the book or look at the painting or listen to the music before that test or discussion, you will get it: the right insight, sometimes a brilliant one, all in a flash. And you don’t have to rely on received ideas. You can come up with your own. You can disagree: “No, Ms. Thatcher, I don’t think that’s what Zora Neale Hurston meant to say.” Try pulling that in chemistry!

  In the arts, you have a shot at coming up with something new too. While the chances of my discovering or synthesizing a new chemical element are about nil (Billonium? Morrisonium?), my chances of creating a mind-blowing original work are not bad. Even Dad, having dropped out of art school without getting his degree, could pick up his paints one day and do the painting of his career.

  I know myself. I will never be well rounded. I will never respond appropriately to meetings in which my guidance counselor tells me I’m not working up to my potential. I will never catch up in chemistry or biology. Instead, I’ll focus on music, and a flash of genius will save me. I’ll win a songwriting competition sponsored by some organization like ASCAP and find work as a songwriter in Memphis, Austin, or Nashville.