A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  The second floor is covered in carpets that muffle everything further, dusty things her parents brought over when they moved. Lorelei drops her backpack in her room, kicks off her shoes, digs her toes into the thick rug, and slides her feet back and forth, finding friction.

  She spins in a circle and takes it all in, the clean floor and bare walls. There are a handful of photos of her and Zoe and their friends tacked up over her desk, but otherwise: blankness. She takes the little ticket stub from the Roxy and tapes it up next to the pictures. Evidence of one more night outside, and away.

  Lorelei takes advantage of no one being home to indulge in a long shower. The ancient water heater warms up slowly, so she runs the water in the tub while she strips off her clothes and brushes her hair. The bathroom fills with pale, thick steam, obscuring her body in the mirror. It’s like being surrounded by cottony clouds, high up in the sky. She breathes in deep lungfuls of it: almost as much water as air.

  She takes twenty luxurious minutes to wash her hair and deep-condition it. She shaves her legs, working slowly over the knobs and valleys of her knees and ankles. She sings while she does it, humming tunes from last night and a song Zoe played while they were getting dressed this morning. It’s an old, absent habit, but last night’s dream makes her conscious of it. She wonders if she hums like this at Zoe’s or at school and doesn’t realize it; she wonders whether humming counts, or if Oma only meant real singing.

  Lorelei is curious, now. Something just under her skin makes itself known, like an itch, but a pleasant one. Oma’s prohibition was explicitly about singing around other people, and she’s all alone in an empty house. There’s no reason not to sing, now. Lorelei feels the itch resolve itself in the back of her throat, at the seat of her voice. She decides to let it rip.

  It feels good, like the vibration of the sound is relaxing each of her muscles in turn. Melody runs hot in her veins and when she sings up high, up into her nose, her whole head buzzes with the resonance of her breath. Lorelei turns off the water and steps out of the shower. She wraps herself in a towel and turns one quick, dramatic twirl, getting really into the belt of a song she half remembers. Why haven’t I ever done this before? she thinks.

  When she opens the bathroom door, her father is standing outside it, glassy-eyed.

  “Petra?” he asks.

  “No,” Lorelei says. “No, Dad, it’s—Lorelei, it’s just me.”

  Lorelei doesn’t look enough like her mother for the mistake to make sense. She wonders if something is seriously wrong with him. He’s pale and clammy and confused, white except where he’s flushed red. She’s never seen him like this before. His displays of deep feeling are usually reserved for her mother, who responds by keeping a cool distance. Now he looks possessed.

  “I heard Petra,” he says again. “I heard her singing. I heard her singing for me.”

  “That was just me, Dad.” Lorelei has never heard her mother sing. It’s impossible to imagine anything as lush and sweet as music coming from her mother’s mouth.

  “Petra,” he insists, coming in a step closer. He reaches out a hand and his fingertips brush against her collarbone, the top of her shoulder. They don’t find what they’re looking for. He starts to look past her, like her mother is there, hidden in the bathroom’s steamy air.

  Oma appears behind him in the hallway. She seems taller, somehow, all of her authority gathered up and held out in front of her. “Henry,” she says. Lorelei has never heard this tone from her grandmother before. It’s rough and low and primal. Her father blinks once, twice, and steps back. “It isn’t her.”

  He turns to Oma. He looks like a child: helpless and exhausted. “I know,” he says.

  Henry and Oma regard each other.

  “Lorelei, get dressed,” Oma says. She still sounds commanding, but whatever bone-deep power infused her words a moment ago is gone, and she sounds only as bossy as she usually does. Which is still plenty. “Henry—”

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

  Oma disappears down the hall, but her father doesn’t move. He turns to face Lorelei. His eyes find hers and then flinch away.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “You sounded—”

  “Like Mom,” Lorelei says. Water drips from her damp hair down her neck and the line of her spine. She shivers against the cool air and clutches her towel closer. “You said.”

  “I didn’t mean—” He stops and frowns. He’s staring fiercely at his shoes. “It’s been a long time since she sang for me.”

  “She used to, though?”

  “She did,” he says. He smiles. The mention of her mother’s voice instantly has him distant again. “She— All the time.” The memory stretches, extends itself, and captures him. Then it turns painful, and his expression turns dark. “I thought Oma talked to you about this,” he says. “About not doing that.”

  “She did,” Lorelei says. “She just said not in front of people. And no one was home when I got here, so I thought—”

  “You have to be more careful than that,” he says. There’s something burning behind his eyes, the embers of a fire kept banked for years. For the first time in her life, Lorelei is frightened of him.

  “Okay,” she huffs, and turns toward her room. “I have to go get dressed.”

  “Lorelei.”

  She turns back. He looks small, still, standing in the long hallway with his arms at his sides, palms turned up like he’s begging.

  “Don’t go messing with things you don’t understand,” he says finally. “Please just—don’t.”

  “I won’t,” Lorelei promises. Her father rarely asks for anything. He wouldn’t now if it wasn’t important. Right? “I won’t sing anymore,” she says again.

  Instantly, though, she can feel that her promise is a lie. Last night she was wreathed in the band’s songs, crowned by them. Chris came over to talk to her and he looked at her like he was thinking about her—only her. And singing just now felt like letting something long dormant inside herself put down roots and send up a stalk, a tendril, a bud. If music is magic, she wants to fall under its spell. She wants it so badly that it’s easy to pretend the wanting is all that matters.

  Lorelei passes her mother’s little office on the way to her room. Petra does the accounting for a fashion conglomerate headquartered nearby; she works long hours in Century City and brings the paperwork home with her. Her door is usually closed.

  Today, however, her mother is sitting in the middle of the room in her straight-backed wooden chair, the door half open, ajar as if forgotten. She catches Lorelei’s eye as she goes by. If her father looked blank and hollow, furious and then pleading, her mother is stricken, touched by an emotion too deep to name. She shakes her head just once as Lorelei passes, and draws a hand across her mouth, and presses there to keep it closed.

  Lorelei goes to Oma’s room as soon as she’s dressed. “Hey,” she says. She stands in the doorway, waiting to be invited in. Oma is sitting in an armchair by the dark window, knitting. The click of her needles doesn’t pause when she nods for Lorelei to enter. “Is Dad okay?”

  “You upset him,” Oma says.

  Lorelei doesn’t sound angry, but being blamed sets off something hot in her chest. “I didn’t know you were home,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to be rude or disruptive, or anything.”

  “I know you weren’t,” Oma says. She keeps at her work.

  The numbness Lorelei felt while it was happening is starting to wear off, and now adrenaline is kicking in. “What just happened, then?” she asks. “What even was that?”

  “Do you really want to talk about it?” Oma looks up from her knitting, finally, and sets it down in her lap.

  “I want to know why Dad was acting like—whatever that was. I don’t even know! I thought he was having a stroke.”

  “I told you not to sing.”

  “That was, like, years ago.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.” It’s not a question, exactly. The shadows on her face
deepen. Oma looks hunted when she says it.

  “No,” Lorelei admits. “I just—I don’t know, I never really wanted to, so I never thought about why. Or whether I could, or should. And I definitely didn’t think it would be because of anything like that.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll forget about it now,” Oma says. She sits back against her chair and puts her knitting on the table so that her lap is free. Lorelei wants to crawl into it like she did when she was little, when she still fit comfortably into her grandmother’s embrace.

  “Uh, yeah, probably not.”

  “Tell me why you were singing, then. Why you wanted to, all of a sudden.”

  Lorelei recognizes the opportunity to tell the truth, and doesn’t take it. There’s no need to add trouble to the trouble she’s in. “I like it,” she tries instead. “I was just— It’s fun, you know?”

  “Fun isn’t always the point,” Oma says.

  “Maybe in Germany.”

  “It has nothing to do with Germany. It’s everything to do with being young.”

  “I’m not so young.”

  “Talk to me in fifty years,” Oma says. She still doesn’t sound angry, or even upset. “Twenty, even. You will change your mind about how young you are, and about the singing, about whatever boy you think is worth singing for.”

  “What boy?” Lorelei says, too fast. She’s proud that at least her voice doesn’t shake. There’s no way Oma could know about Chris, but then again her grandmother has always been terrifyingly good at guessing. Almost as good as she is at steering conversations away from things she doesn’t want to talk about.

  “Whoever he is,” Oma says. “There’s always a boy. That’s always how it starts. Your mother—” But she cuts herself off, biting down on the words. “There is always a boy,” she says again instead. “You think you’re in love. You think you want to keep him. That he wants to stay with you. You sing about how happy you are, right, Lorelei? Your father said you were singing about love.”

  “It’s just a song.”

  “You have to be careful,” Oma says. “I know we talked about this when you were young, but it changes, of course it does. I had forgotten.” She rubs a hand over her eyes. “It isn’t enough, I suppose, simply to tell you that you aren’t to do it ever again.”

  “I just don’t understand why,” Lorelei says. “If it’s because I’m good, you shouldn’t worry—I don’t want to drop out of school and become the next Taylor Swift or anything. I just want to sing in the shower, to join the chorus, maybe, I want—”

  “No,” Oma says.

  Lorelei feels the word like a flash of lightning, like a grip at the base of her throat. The itch that’s been crawling under her skin, waiting for another chance to make itself known, flinches and disappears.

  “I know you grew up here, but let me tell you: what you want doesn’t always matter. There are things you don’t know about our family, things you don’t understand, things—” There’s a long pause. “Things you wouldn’t want to know. Trust me, Lorelei.”

  “I just feel like I should get to make that decision for myself.”

  “And I disagree.”

  Lorelei shrugs. Oma’s reserve is a long, high wall. There’s no point in throwing herself against it.

  “Dad said Mom used to sing for him,” she says, trying another tactic. “Is it— I don’t know, is it because of Mom?” It would make sense. Petra has never done anything but screw up all of their lives, anyway.

  “Not exactly,” Oma says.

  “Oh my god, it is! Look, whatever she did, I won’t do it. You know I’m more responsible than she is.” Responsible isn’t the right word, exactly, but Lorelei certainly isn’t going to get pregnant at seventeen and make her whole family move to another country because she’s embarrassed. Maybe her parents met at a concert, and Oma is, like, traumatized by live music now?

  “I used to perform, actually. I don’t know if you know this,” Oma says. “When I was young. Until I was thirteen, maybe fourteen. And then my mother made me stop.”

  “Great, so this is about your mother. That’s so not fair.”

  “She had her reasons, just as I have mine.”

  Lorelei tries to imagine what the reasons could possibly be, but she’s distracted by the thought of her grandmother as a young singer, standing in a white-hot spotlight and enthralling a crowd. She didn’t know this about Oma, actually. Her family’s life before emigration is contained in a couple of old photo albums she’s paged through dozens of times. There are no pictures of Oma singing in any of them.

  There are many things, it seems, no one has ever bothered to tell her before.

  “Was it worse?” Lorelei asks finally. “Losing it, after being able to, for so long?”

  “Like losing a limb,” Oma says. “Like losing someone I loved.”

  Lorelei has always known her grandmother as a widow: her husband died a year or two before Petra got pregnant with the twins. She’s always assumed that this was the loss that governed Oma’s strictness. Her grandmother had watched chaos whirl up at her and decided that from then on, she was going to keep it at bay through sheer force of will.

  Now, though, Lorelei sees that there might be something deeper, something she lost long before Papa. Her grandmother wanted something for herself, a space and a voice, and had it taken away from her. She misses it and refuses to want it back. That’s Oma, for sure, resigning herself gracefully to whatever there is to resign herself to, and putting a good face on it, and writing a thank-you card for the good parts as soon as she gets home.

  Downstairs they can hear the twins coming in, tumbling over each other, hushing their voices after a morning spent outside.

  Lorelei asks, “Do you miss it?”

  “Every day,” Oma says. “But it was worth it. It was the right thing, in the end.”

  “Will you ever tell me why?”

  “I hope I don’t have to. I hope you will find something else to do with yourself.”

  “But if I keep at the low end,” Lorelei says. “Like we practiced when I was little. If I don’t—”

  “It’s better that you don’t,” Oma says. “It’s better if you leave it alone. Let it go.”

  “Let it go,” Lorelei repeats.

  “You’re very young,” Oma says again. “Start early. It’s easier.”

  Everyone acts normal at dinner. Lorelei is surprised, and then not: her family specializes in acting like weird things are normal. Plus, the twins don’t know about what happened this afternoon, and now they’re too busy trying to get permission for something to notice any leftover tension.

  “Jens and I might miss dinner on Friday,” Nik says.

  “If that’s okay,” Jens adds. He’s carefully not looking at any of the adults in particular: Petra won’t say anything, so there’s no point, but Oma will always find a reason to refuse. The trick is to get their father to agree before that can happen, without letting him know that he’s the easiest mark at the table.

  “What’s so important that you have to miss a family dinner?” Oma asks.

  “Soccer team bonding,” Nik says. “Ollie is having some of the guys over—”

  “Jens isn’t on the team.”

  Jens says, “Ollie’s a good friend of mine from elementary school, though. Dad, do you remember when he had that birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese’s?”

  Henry nods vaguely.

  Jens says, “Where he threw up in the ball pit?”

  “Sure. Of course.” Lorelei can’t tell whether her dad is lying or not. “Be sure to tell his mom I said hi.”

  Jens and Nik exchange a glance that’s basically an invisible high five.

  Petra’s phone starts ringing. She pulls it out of her pocket and doesn’t apologize. “Work,” she says. “I have to take this.” She gets up from the table. Lorelei can hear her starting to argue with someone as she goes up the stairs.

  Oma turns to the twins. “You’ll want to get some studying done tonight, if yo
u’re going out this weekend.”

  “Absolutely,” Jens says.

  “You can get started on that,” Henry says. “I’ve got the dishes.”

  Oma says, “Lorelei, help your father.”

  Henry looks startled to be reminded that he has a daughter. His whole genial absentminded-professor thing falls away in the face of having to spend fifteen minutes with her, standing at the sink. He looks like a trapped animal.

  “No,” he says. “No, it’s fine. I’ve got it.” He grabs a few plates and hurries into the kitchen before Oma can object. Lorelei pulls her shoulders together and imagines shrinking down and down, so small that no one would have to see her or even think about her. She’s used to her parents basically ignoring her; actively avoiding her is new, and she’s surprised by how much it hurts. She really didn’t mean to screw anything up.

  Oma looks at all the empty chairs around her and folds her hands in her lap. She leans her head back and closes her eyes. Lorelei almost never sees her grandmother resting; she’s always moving, tending the garden or making food, cleaning the house, paying bills, knitting blankets. Oma comes off as spry and vital, but her hands are liver-spotted with age and her skin is almost transparent, tissue-thin.

  “I’ll clear, at least,” Lorelei says. She can’t disappear, but she can grease the wheels of the household’s working: be good and easy and helpful. That she knows how to do.

  Oma doesn’t say anything.

  Lorelei brings a stack of dishes to her father in the kitchen. The roar of the faucet makes saying anything impossible. When she passes back through the dining room, Oma’s eyes are still closed, and the expression on her face is one she would hide if she knew anyone was watching. Her grandmother looks exhausted, drawn and drained.

  She looks like my mother, Lorelei thinks, recognizing for the first time the way each of their lovely faces is marked, indelibly, by the signs of grief and loss.

  LORELEI’S PLAN IS TO avoid Chris at school, where there is no music or nighttime magic and she’s just another sophomore. He might not even recognize her without makeup, wearing boring jeans and a T-shirt and blinking through pale eyelashes.