Increasing Awareness

Chapter 6

            It never occurred to me as a child that I had choices.  Mom decided everything for me, and I simply accepted that this was the way of things.  One of her ideas was to get me some musical training.  My first piano teacher was Mrs. Doane, a pink-cheeked, happy lady, who thought I was wonderful.  She gave me my first book songs.  I warmed to her enthusiastic encouragement and memorized all my pieces for her with keen determination.  I excelled for the short time I knew her.  Because she was expecting her first child, she decided to give up teaching, and Mom went in search of a new instructor.

            I was soon introduced to the New Woman from the Big City, who came out once a week to give lessons.  She was as starched as Mrs. Doane was lithe.  There was no personal touch in her style of teaching.  I think she hated doing it.  She was strict and uncaring.  Lessons began to be a dreary experience, and I put off practicing as much as possible.  This led to failure week after week under this Miss Strang. My shoulders sagged in a depressed kind of defeat each time I reluctantly showed up for the next lesson. I told my mom I didn’t want to do it anymore, but my words evaporated before they ever got to my mother’s ears.

            Soon Miss Strang had us all in line to perform in our first recital.  I knew my piece backwards and forwards and even looked forward to showing off a bit when the time came.  However, the week before the recital, Miss Strang gave my piece to another girl, and gave me a new one.  There wasn’t enough time for me to learn it, and when the recital came and I was called on, I marched to my impending doom, knowing I was going to fail.  It seemed that I made ten thousand mistakes.  When I finished, I couldn’t lift my head, but stood by the piano while people politely clapped for me.  I made a hasty exit feeling shamed, angry, disgusted and heartbroken.

            After that, I couldn’t bring myself to attend any more lessons from Miss Strang.  My mother was deaf to my pleas to stop this misery, so I took matters into my own hands.  I’d learned about paper cuts working with certain class papers, and when no one was watching, I slit my fingers just under the fingernail with my homework.  This caused the nail bed to fill with blood.  When I showed up at my lesson, I told Miss Strang I hurt my fingers playing soccer, and I couldn’t have a lesson. Mother must have gotten the message, that her dream of me playing piano at parties simply was not going to materialize, and I was liberated at last.  How easy it can be to some parents to dismiss the discomfort of a child, insisting on behavior that is counter-productive.  I still struggle with nerves to face the public and perform, although I’ve been a teacher most of my life.

            Summer would sooth over any disillusionment, and soon I my friend, Noreen and I were chatting on the old lawn swing just outside our back door.  We wasted away a long, hot afternoon, our “to and fro's” causing the swing to protest with rasping scrapes and cranky squeaks.  It must have been a Sunday afternoon when Dad was not at work, because suddenly he was standing at the battered, screen door yelling at us, “Cut out that noise!  I’m trying to sleep!”  If his unexpected appearance wasn’t enough, he was standing in his underwear with his private parts hanging out the left side of one leg.  I froze.  I don’t know what Noreen thought.  I felt like we were tumbling down Alice’s rabbit hole with no end in sight.  The only coping mechanism I had then was to pretend the whole thing never happened.  Children in alcoholic homes become expert at pretending.  I just sealed the whole thing off in a deep, dark inner room. It never happened.

            Later that summer when I was somewhere around ten or twelve, Mom and Dad enlisted me to fill in for a lady who couldn’t make the square dancing practice at my Aunt Marie’s and Uncle Lin’s next door.  I was dressed in a fresh outfit, a dress with a full skirt, all clean and starched.  Feeling excited and looking forward to the fun, we ran down the alley behind our house and into their backyard.  I remember the music, the words of the caller, the “do-see-dos,” the “allemande lefts,” and “promenade homes.”  My feet never touched the ground, my head in the clouds.  I was a princess at a country-style ball, never missing a beat, belonging, welcomed, having the time of my life.

            In the fall, after the first freeze, our parents would put paper bags, old kettles and rags in the trunk of the car and pile us kids in for an adventure in the pine nut hills south of town. I loved being outdoors with the astringent smell of the pines, the dusty scent of the sage-brush air, the crunch of pine needles underneath my feet and being able to go off by myself. We’d bump along dusty, dirt roads, coughing all the way, taking a left fork here a right fork there until we were out in the middle of the high desert forest.  Stopping the car, we leapt out, grabbed our bags, and ran off to search out the pine nuts that had fallen from the trees.  I liked the nuts raw or roasted, so a good half of all I found went immediately into my mouth.

            Sometimes we picked up the green cones themselves, stuffed with nuts and full of pitch, which blackened our hands and clothes.  Mom and Dad were the ones who actually got enough pine nuts to take home.  Some of the nuts were last year’s and hollow, and would float to the top when Mom washed them in an old pot later.  The nuts would be boiled briefly then roasted with salt in the oven.  Because of the pitch, the same pans were used every year so our every day pots were kept nice.

            One Tuesday it was Mom’s turn to have her bridge group over.  My brother, sister and I were all enlisted to get the house in perfect shape—window washing, dusting, vacuuming, curtains taken down, washed and ironed, bathroom (just one for the five of us) polished and shinning.  It wasn’t the work so much that we hated, but the constant finding fault with everything we did, the yelling, the disgust thrown our way, “Do I have to redo everything you’ve done?  Can’t you do it right for once?  I’ve told you a thousand times…!”  We breathed a sigh of relief when Mom finally let us take off.

            That night, as I lay in bed just down the hall from the festivities, I heard Mom telling her friends my secrets, things I’d shared with her in confidence.  Freezing was getting to be one of my normal states, and I punctually became an icicle.  I spent the night increasing the size and thickness of my cocoon, insulating myself from further betrayal, but also building up greater defenses toward love itself.

            Also overheard that night was Mom talking to someone about Diane’s mother.  Diane and I were constant companions.  Words like, “lost her mind,” “that female operation,” were tossed around.  And, the next day, I was told to be very quiet when I went to get Diane to play.  I had a kind of feeling that something very sad and mysterious and dark was taking place in that house.  Year’s later when I had “that operation,” I would understand about hormone imbalance, but at the time, it was a dark, shameful mystery.

            One warm fall morning before school, Dad grabbed two fishing poles, “ Get yourself into the car.  I’m going to teach you how to fly fish!”  This was a first. Curious and feeling pleased to be singled out from my brother and sister, to be asked to do something with Dad, just the two of us; I bounded out to the car and hopped in. It only took fifteen or twenty minutes to get to the west fork of the Carson River.  I took to my lessons like a pro, casting the line out from the low railed bridge and making the fly skip on the water back to me.  I felt elated when an eight-inch trout broke the water tugging on my line. I pulled in a nice trout. Dad showed me how to clean it.  I wasn’t bothered a bit by the blood and guts, focusing more on not slitting my own hands. I was very impressed with the way my dad handled his knife. We took several fish home for Mom to fry up for breakfast.  It was my first newly-landed trout from a fresh water river, and my mouth watered with anticipation. That rainbow tasted better than any food I’d ever eaten.