4
T
hat afternoon, as I sat across the table from yet another shiny-faced prodigy, I longed for a pretzel stick or a lollipop or a flaming sword to take away the yearning for a cigarette, the yearning for a reason to escape this meeting and hang outside the door of Oscar's while collecting my thoughts.
Instead, I sat in a booth facing my lovely Japanese subject, Yoshiko Abe, and her mother, both of whom had bowed when I introduced myself. Sitting across from them might have been a mistake, as it was the position of confrontation. In deference, Yoshiko and Mrs. Abe kept their eyes averted from mine. I'd done interviews like this countless times, and I wasn't looking forward to an hour of trying to extract personal information from a woman and child who for cultural reasons could not allow me to make a connection.
“Would you like to order?” I offered.
Yoshiko lifted the menu politely, her long fingers elegant against the laminated card. “Oh, I don't know.” She turned to her mother and said something in Japanese. The mom answered back in Japanese, pointing to various items on the menu.
Trying to appear attentive, I waited for the answer.
Most foreign musicians pose a challenge, especially the young ones. There is the language barrier, of course, though most of my musicians speak English and I am fluent in French. These brilliant children also tend to focus exclusively on their craft with a level of discipline unmatched in the United States. Consequently, prodigies like Yoshiko often have no lives beyond their musical aspirations.
“My mother,” Yoshiko said, “she would like to try the prime rib very much, but she worries that she had a very large lunch.”
Was that a yes or a no? I wiggled my toes in my boots, wishing her mother would make up her mind. “The prime rib is delicious,” I said. “And how about you? Something to eat?”
“Oh, I don't know.” Shyly, Yoshiko lowered her head to the menu once again.
I felt annoyed by their passive aggression and in no mood for a dance of semantics. Then I recalled that the Japanese language does not include a polite word for “no.”
“How about if I order some appetizers that we can share?” I suggested. “The sampler platter?”
Yoshiko translated and Mom nodded. “Yes,” the girl said, “that would be very nice.”
With that taken care of, I told Yoshiko that I had been researching her accomplishments. I knew that she had begun studying violin at the age of two, had performed her first concerto when she was just five, and had been touring since she'd turned eight. Last year, at the age of fifteen, she was the youngest violinist to win the Irving M. Klein String Competition. I asked how that accomplishment had changed her life, and Yoshiko shrugged.
“Not much different,” she said. “Same old, same old.”
“What do you do when you're not playing the violin?” I asked. “Do you have any hobbies? Ways to relieve stress?”
“I travel on tour,” she said, skittering over my question. “From the concert to the hotel. I plug in my laptop, then must do homework and e-mail it to my teachers.”
Nose to the grindstone, I thought with a smile. “And how about fun? What do you do for fun?”
“I have my violin,” she said, her eyes bright. “A del Gesus. It's fantastic.”
If I was going to dig through to her favorite TV show or a secret passion for pistachios, I was going to need a new angle. “What's your favorite snack?”
She squinted. “Potato chips?
“Your favorite outfit?”
“Sweats?” Again, a question, as if she were unsure of her answer.
“You like comfortable clothes?” I asked. “Sweat pants and loose jackets?”
She frowned. “Oh, those are fine, but I like the big woolens. You know? Sweats, with reindeer knitted in?” Her fingers flew through the air like prancing reindeer.
“Sweaters.” I tried to smile encouragingly, but my face was still stiff with sinus pain. “Do you have a favorite movie or TV show?”
She frowned, touching her little pin. “I like TV but I don't have time to watch. But I do love Brad Pitt. Do you know him?”
“I know who he is,” I said. Our appetizers arrived. As Yoshiko and her mother sampled the spicy wings and fried mozzarella sticks, I decided to stop the interview for now. It was tepid at best, which, considering my physical health and Yoshiko's lack of life experience, was not a surprise. Oh, I could write up some history, throw in some facts, even describe the way she had brought tears to my eyes in her performance of a Stravinsky concerto. But there was more to life than single achievements, and it was the
Herald's
mandate to provide a thorough picture of the celebrities we profiled; to cover the subject's grand achievement, and yet to paint a fuller portrait with his or her passions and fears, idiosyncracies, and personal sense of style.
A crush on Brad Pitt was just not a lasting facet of Yoshiko's personality, but when I thought of her world, I realized how much of it was spent in concert halls and hotel rooms and airports. In a way, it was not a life at all, but a relentless stream of rehearsals and performances.
As Yoshiko and her mother nibbled on appetizers, I chomped on celery sticks and tried to gather a clue from her clothes. Yoshiko wore a snappy little black blazerâlooked like a Liz Claiborne to meâover a chiffon-print shirt with velvet trim at the waist. Her jeans looked well worn, as did her chunky Steve Madden boots. Nothing remarkable about this teenager, though I did admire the little pin on the lapel of her jacket. It reminded me of a model of an atom.
“That's a very nice pin,” I said.
Yoshiko smiled, touching the pin. “Thank you very much. I made it.”
“You did?” It wasn't a real hook, but it was a nice detail that might prove to be an inroad to her personality. “You make your own jewelry?” I leaned forward to admire the pin, a spiral of silver wires looping around three polished stones, two green and one purple. “How interesting. Do you use wire cutters?”
Her eyes lit up, and she put a hand over her mouth in a coy gesture that was almost comical. “I use blow torch,” she admitted.
Beside her, mother rolled her eyes and shot a disapproving comment in Japanese.
I shot Yoshiko a smile. “Do you have any other jewelry creations?”
She nodded. “I have many now. It started when my uncle brought in the torch to work on a pipe, and I played with bending a piece of metal. After that, it sort of happened. I keep the torch in my room at home. My mother is worried that I will harm my fingers, but I am careful.”
Mother shook her head, but I enjoyed the light of defiance in Yoshiko's eyes.
At last, I had the beginning of a story.
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After the interview I strolled up Lexington amid the blur of rushed commuters and shoppers and Christmas lights, trying to weave in my mind a fine mesh of Yoshiko's distinctive qualities. The strong tendrils of her mother's hold were a consideration. Was her mother the force behind Yoshiko's disciplined genius, or the tyrant who held the girl captive in hotel rooms around the world?
That was the thing about mother-daughter relationshipsâtoo difficult to read in one sitting, too complex to summarize in a tidy three-hundred word bio. The very woman we relied upon for our survival could also reach into our souls and squeeze so hard that we spent the rest of our lives reeling in pain. Not that my mother had consciously tried to wrap herself around me. On the contrary, she'd backed away, claiming to be lacking in the maternal gene, and though my father enjoyed nurturing his job as an archaeologist kept him away from New York for extended periods of times. Hence, I'd experienced a different kind of pain, the sort of the swollen soul, a conscience throbbing with neglect and lack of use, the eight-year-old who brought Oreos in for the class party because my mother didn't bake, the ten-year-old who lied about her birthday to get a free sundae from Applebees, the teenaged girl who slept around because she was the only girl in the class whose parents thought sex was no biggie.
It wasn't until those difficult months around my mother's deathâwhen I'd penetrated the wall of denial to glimpse the inevitable panicked endâthat I realized she did care about me. Of course, my mother loved me. However she had spent a lifetime exercising restraint, trying not to appear vulnerable, not to meddle, not to direct my choices. And all along, secretly, I would have loved a little meddling. When you're passably pretty and sure you know it all and growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, your survival relies on meddling from your mother.
But Alice Conner defied convention. When Dad died she quickly sold his beloved country place upstateâthe mud hut, she called itâand she renovated the two-bedroom co-op Ricki and I had grown up in. I was just out of college, toiling in a sterile contracts job for an insurance consultant because I needed rent money, and I made the trip uptown to Mom's place thinking I might reclaim my old bedroom for awhile now that she was alone. Turned out I was “Way wrong” on that assumption. The room Ricki and I once shared had been turned into a den, our twin beds replaced by a sofa and entertainment center. And that wasn't all. The chipped, patterned tile of the master bathroom had been replaced by clean white marble with pristine trim for the new Jacuzzi tub and double vanity. The worn carpets had been torn up, the wood floors buffed to a sheen, the walls painted in deep hues so unlike my mother. I remember walking through the newly decorated living room in shock, wondering at the transformation of the white walls into the gem-tones of a Victorian manor house in India with walls and drapes and rugs in ruby red, indigo blue, royal purple. Velvet curtains were swathed over the arches. Votive candles flickered in glimmering clusters of color, and two stained glass pieces hung on the sliding glass doors to the balcony. “Early bordello,” my uncle pronounced with a wiggle of his eyebrows, causing Alice to slap his shoulder and show him the books she'd used for research.
“I love the gem-tones,” my mother said, running her fingers over the purple and red mosaic tiles of a heavy vase. “These colors make me happy.”
But I couldn't believe the outlandish cave of color. “Where did this come from?” I'd asked, thinking of my failed pitch to paint my room blue when I was thirteen. My parents had vetoed paint the color of a robin's egg, and now I was walking through the facets of a medieval jewel. “All those years of white wallsâ”
“That was your father,”Alice had said as she lifted a votive candle to light her cigarette. “His reaction to his mother's tendency to cover everything with souvenir plaques and cozies and doilies. White is very pure, but eventually it fades to gray.”
“Oh, don't we all,” Uncle John remarked with a shrug, and I had laughed along, pretending to be jaded and grownup and independent, pretending that I didn't care that my mother had painted me out of my old room, out of my old life. Twenty-one, and I had just lost my father, and yet my mother was pushing me through a rite of passage I didn't feel ready for, but the renovations had taken place and there was no turning back. “We can't live in the past,” Ricki told me when I called her at Brown to complain. “Dad is gone and Mom is moving on.”
Gripping the phone, I had swallowed back tears, reluctant to let Ricki mother me. That was my role, my job. I had stepped in to do the mothering when I'd realized Alice wasn't cut out for the task. I was the one who'd told my sister the nitty-gritty of sex, the truth about boys, the warnings about over-plucking eyebrows, blue eyeshadow and the girls who wore their popularity like a crown.
Mothers and daughters, sisters, missing parents . . . relationships were a morass of struggle and complexity. Thinking back to Yoshiko's situation, I wasn't quite sure how to separate my subject from her mother's projections and dreams.
Sometimes you need to wade through the crap and you can't find a decent pair of boots.