My Beautiful Hippie (11 page)

“Oh, bummer! It's killing me not knowing when I'll see Martin again, or what he's doing.”

“You know that saying, ‘If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with'?”

“Oh! Rena! Don't tell me that!”

She laughed. “What are friends for?”

When the lunch bell rang, she tossed her whole brown-bag lunch in the garbage. I guessed that was how she stayed so skinny.

Before my first private lesson with Dr. Harold, I attended a master class with all his other students. My mom insisted on driving me the first time, and there was some confusion getting there that Saturday morning. When we got to Dr. Harold's studio in Pacific Heights, his wife answered the door and explained that his master classes were held in the Nob Hill residence of a music patron, Mrs. H. H. Hamilton.

“The man ought to make up his mind where he does his business,” Mom complained, leaning over the steering wheel as she maneuvered though traffic. No two places in San Francisco were farther than seven miles apart, but my mom acted like she had to drive through two states. “This is all nonsense, Joanne,” she ranted on. “You can
walk
to Mrs. Scudder's.”

I bit my lip to keep from sassing back, and when she drove up to the curb in front of Mrs. Hamiliton's mansion, I leaped out of the car before it had rolled to a stop. The piano playing had already begun by the time a maid led me into the spacious music room. Embarrassed to be late, I sat in the back. Mrs. Scudder only taught kids, and I had been one of her oldest students, but Dr. Harold's twenty-five students were high school kids, college students, older adults, and one eight-year-old prodigy.

The pianist I had walked in on was playing a brilliant Debussy prelude called “Fireworks.” His hands moving up and
down the keyboard were pink blurs and a flash of his gold wedding ring. How strange for me to be a part of a class with a
married
person in it. It made me feel grown-up.

After the student finished playing and everyone clapped, Dr. Harold rose from his seat at the front of the room to lead a discussion. He was a lean man with a trimmed black beard, horn-rimmed glasses, and wavy hair. His movements were energetic and graceful. Already I loved watching him and listening to him talk.

Although I couldn't think of a thing wrong with the dazzling performance I had just heard, Dr. Harold and his students had plenty of comments. They said the pianist had rushed in the middle section, his hands were not playing exactly together at times, and he needed to bring out the melody in the fiery section of cross-hand movements.

Suyu played next, the fourth and most difficult Chopin ballade, with an opening melody so rich and warm, I felt like a giant Hershey kiss melting in my chair. I fell into a rapture, not only enjoying her beautiful playing, but thinking that under Dr. Harold's guidance and with lots of hard work, I would someday play that well.

The critiques that ensued after Suyu's performance made me fume. Why were these snotty people picking apart such wonderful playing? I shifted in my seat, anxious to be a part of the discussion and defend Suyu.

Finally I raised my hand and blurted, “I thought it was really good!” My boisterous acclamation echoed in the sonorous room.

Everyone turned and looked at me. No one agreed or disagreed. I slid down on my spine, thinking my stupid, superficial comment had revealed my ignorance.

Dr. Harold pressed his hands together and rested his chin on his fingertips. “Could you tell us what in particular was good?”

“Hmm . . . just everything. The melody was as smooth and velvety as chocolate icing.”

Everyone laughed, and suddenly I was too warm in my sweater. Why couldn't I learn to keep quiet?

“This is Joanne Donnelly, the newest member of our family,” said Dr. Harold. “Please stand, Joanne.”

I rose slowly from my seat, flushing even more. Applause and smiles erupted. I took a bow. It felt awkward to bow for doing nothing. Then I realized it was for something: acceptance, and for that I felt relieved and grateful.

Next, the little kid rattled off the first movement of a Mozart sonata with his lightning-fast fingers. This elicited a lengthy discussion about how a pianist projected expression in his playing. Didn't expression just happen? Wasn't that, in fact, the easiest aspect of playing?

Finally Dr. Harold ended the formal part of the gathering with announcements. As usual, his students would be performing a holiday recital at the Palace of Fine Arts to benefit the San Francisco Symphony. “I'll leave the sign-up sheet here on this chair. Be sure to include the title of your piece.”

I almost knocked a few people over getting second in line for the sign-up sheet. After I wrote my name and Beethoven's “
Pathétique
” sonata behind it, I noticed Dr. Harold watching me, his lower lip curled into his mouth and his teeth biting down thoughtfully. I thought he was going to say something to me about signing up, but then the moment passed, and I forgot about it. I couldn't wait to get home to brag to my mom that I would be performing at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Dr. Harold was married to another Dr. Harold, a child psychiatrist. Students taking their piano lessons in Dr. Harold's studio could often hear children shrieking on the other side of the wall, just as the patients of his wife could hear piano playing while they were in therapy. The two Dr. Harolds shared their waiting room, which was packed with toys. Waiting for my first lesson, I was more excited than nervous. I yearned to get down on my knees and play with the little kitchen set along with the little kids.

At last Dr. Harold invited me into his studio and adjusted his bench to the precisely right height for me. I handed him my music, took my place at his ebony Steinway grand, and pounced
on the opening chords of my Beethoven sonata. I made it to the fifth measure before he stopped me to lecture on arm weight and relaxation. He instructed me to play a C major scale to demonstrate what he meant. On each note I was to drop my wrist, which would lead my arm weight to the key bed.

Every time I tried to do this, he said, “No, no.”

Next he told me to play the C scale in contrary motion, and showed me how to stretch my thumb under my hand, then whip my hand over the thumb when going in the opposite direction.

I tried to follow his instructions, and he said, “No, no.”

He came behind me, pressed down my shoulders, told me how tension was gathering there, which obstructed a warm, singing tone. The minutes of my precious hour with Dr. Harold ticked by. I glanced forlornly at my Beethoven sonata, discarded on his chair. Would we ever get back to it?

No. Besides the Beethoven, he assigned me a Bach prelude and fugue, a Chopin nocturne, and Debussy's “
Claire de lune
,” which I had played in the sixth grade. “But mostly I want to you concentrate on the C scale, Joanne,” he said in the last minutes of my lesson. “You'll be able to apply these techniques to your pieces once you understand them in playing the scale.”

I nodded and smiled wanly, feeling spasms at the corners of my mouth. It wasn't until I got home and was sitting at the kitchen table with my parents that I allowed my disappointment to burst forth in tears. “Dr. Harold treated me like a beginner. He made me start all over with the C major scale!”

“You know a lot more than that!” said Mom. “Mrs. Scudder told me you knew
all
your scales years ago. He thinks if he starts you over he can make more money off us!”

“No, Mom. He's teaching me technique. Of all his students, I'm the worst one!”

“He told you you could play Beethoven at the Palace of Fine Arts. Now, at the Palace of Fine Arts, you're going to play the C scale?” One side of Mom's nose wrinkled up and her mouth hung open.

I remembered then that Dr. Harold had not given me
permission to play; I had merely signed up. Recalling the look on his face when I had done so, I gasped for breath in the middle of a jagged sob.

Dad couldn't bear to hear his girls cry. It always made him start yelling. He folded his newspaper to say, “Quit your blubbering, Joanne. And stop this damn piano nonsense. It takes talent, and no one in this family has got any talent.”

“Don't tell her that, Dick!” exclaimed Mom.

“Someone's got to. Take up typing, Joanne, so you can get a good job like your smart sister.”

I should have known better than to confide in my parents. They never understood anything about me. I ran upstairs, threw myself facedown on my bed, and muffled my sobs in Snoopy's fur. My fantasy life had just had a head-on collision with reality, and I thought I'd die of the injuries. I could no longer gloss over the hard parts and speed through the easy parts and shine on Dr. Harold the way I had Mrs. Scudder. I was going to have to take his instruction, apply it to my playing, bend to his will. The whole time he was talking, I'd kept thinking, This is stupid, a waste of time. When am I going to get to play my Beethoven? I'd understood practically nothing of my first lesson, and not once had Dr. Harold said anything good about my playing. It hurt me to think that I was going to have to do everything his way. It hurt more to doubt that I actually could.

All the rest of the week, I read and reread Dr. Harold's notes in my assignment book and practiced the C major scale the way he'd told me to. One afternoon, I was startled to find Dan standing in the foyer near the front door, leering at me.

“Dwight could do better than that.”

Dwight was Pete's Mongoloid brother. I leaped from the bench, and all my frustrations came out in a windmill of fisticuffs thumping soundly on Dan's back. He covered his head with his arms, laughing and shouting, “Mom! Mom!” until she came in from the kitchen with a wooden spoon in her hand. “What are you doing home, Dan? I thought you had class.”

“Couldn't find a parking place so I just came home.”

“Take the streetcar if there's no parking.”

Dan loped off to his room without answering her. I'd overheard him tell Pete that he cut class a lot.

On another afternoon, I dashed home from school, anxious to practice, only to hear Mom's bridge group in the den, cackling and talking all at once. I couldn't just play the dumb C scale with all of them in earshot, so I worked on Beethoven. Out of the corner of my eye, I was startled to see Maxine Fulmer seated on the sofa. Apparently Mom's bridge group were on their bundt cake break.

“Oh, am I distracting you, Joanne? I just love to listen to you play.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Fulmer.”

“Maxine, honey, remember? And how is that beautiful sister of yours doing?”

“Okay, I guess. We don't see her that much.”

“It's a shame she cut her education so short. Your mother was so proud of her for getting into Cal.”

“Really? She never told Denise.”

“Your mother may not always show it, but she's proud of you kids.”

Neither of my parents had gone to college, but ever since we were little kids, they'd told us we would be attending nearby San Francisco State College.

“I adore being back in school again,” continued Maxine. “I've changed my major to a new offering—women's studies. It's just fascinating, and it gives Quentin and me so much to talk about.”

“How's he doing?”

She shrugged and gave a pert smile. “Trying to find himself. One day he's a poet, the next a politician. He's young, you know, but he's such good company.”

When the bridge party was over, Thelma Newman and Leona Dunbar loitered in the kitchen to help Mom clean up, I figured just so they could gossip about Maxine. I resorted to my C major scale, playing
pianissimo
so I could eavesdrop.

“
Women's studies
?” shrieked Mrs. Newman. “What
is
that?”

“What's there to study about cleaning and cooking that we don't already know?” asked Mom.

“And she's shacked up with that
boy
,” said Mrs. Dunbar. “It's one thing to be discreet, but she's simply brazen about it.”

“Apparently he's living off her, and they're both living off her alimony,” said Mrs. Newman. “I thought women's libbers wanted to be independent of men!”

“Considering what that son of a gun Ronald Fulmer put her through, Maxine has earned every penny of that alimony,” said Mom.

Hooray! I was glad at least one of those clucking hens had stuck up for Maxine, and I was proud it was my mom.

On Saturday, Mom plopped four quarters in my hand and sent me to pick up Dad's two pairs of suit pants at Li's Laundry and Dry Cleaners. I waited until late afternoon, hoping Suyu would be gone by then, because I didn't want to answer any embarrassing questions about my first lesson with Dr. Harold.

At twenty to five, Mom called, “Joanne! Haven't you gone to the cleaners yet? Do you expect your father to go to work Monday morning in his undershorts?”