I quit the violin when they took away my fingerboard tape

I used to take violin lessons. One of my teachers gave lessons at her house, in her living room, which was blandly pristine in that way that seldom-used spaces are. To protect the cream-colored carpet, she spread a trail of throw rugs down the center of the room.

She placed two round rugs in front of the big arched window, where sunlight streamed in on the music stand. I would stand on one rug and she would stand one the other, looking at the music over my shoulder and counting the measures to keep me from losing my place.

I always had to remind her to switch rugs with me so she would stand on my right side of me, my ‘good ear’ side, so I could hear her.

I think the lessons lasted half an hour, maybe forty minutes. When I was ready to stop, I would lower my violin and shake out my right wrist a little and roll my left shoulder forward and backward, never taking my eyes off the music, as if I were bracing myself to push through the fatigue. It was during my very first lesson that I discovered that trick—every time, my teacher would say, empathetically, as if she were exhausted herself, “think you’re about done for the day?”

My convulsive stretches began incrementally earlier and earlier each week. I told my mom I wanted to quit the private lessons before I started walking into the living room with a crick in my neck.

For a while, I went to Ridgefield Music after school once a week. The carpeting in those cramped practice rooms in the back was probably due for an asbestos test. After my lesson, I would stand in front of the sheet music display and memorize lyrics, one verse at a time.  “From a Distance.”  “The Rose.”  Joan Osbourne’s “One of Us.”

I wanted to like the idea of God on a bus, just another slob among the rest of us.

Just like I wanted to like the violin.

I lay awake wondering what I looked like when I fell asleep

For years after my parents stopped tucking me in, my mom or my dad continued to look in on me after my lights were out. I think a lot of parents do that, take that moment to make sure all is safe and sound, that their child isn’t staying up too late to read under the covers, to say a silent goodnight, to see peacefulness on a sleeping face.

I got caught reading under the covers. I was also known to sit up until all hours, unable to put down a crafty project, trying on all my dress-up clothes, or sifting reverently through shoe boxes of toys and trinkets, taking inventory of treasures the way children do.

While I played in the dim light from my closet, I listened for a parent’s footsteps. I learned the warning groan of the floorboards a few steps shy of my bedroom door, and I learned to leap into bed and feign sleep with minimal mattress creaking. Oh I got caught, but sometimes I fooled the watchdogs.

And yet, there were nights when I took comfort in knowing that I’d have company for just a moment in the night. As I got even older, I would remind my mom to “come check on me” every now then. When something upset me and I felt vulnerable, I wanted someone else to stand watch. I guess I’d be the type of cowgirl to sleep with one eye open unless I could count on someone else to look out for trouble on the prairie.

There were nights when I couldn’t fall asleep anyway. My mom would crack open the door and I would say, “Mom,” because I’d been expecting her but she wouldn’t expect to find me lying awake in the dark.

“Why are you still up?” she’d ask.

“I don’t know. I can’t sleep.” She would tuck the covers tighter or press both thumbs in circles against my forehead or kiss my cheek right up next to my ear and tell me goodnight again, hoping it would take. I remember one night when I called out to her before she closed the door again.

“I’m craving something. But I don’t know what.” Her silhouette braced itself in the doorway and she sighed. “I think it might be coffee.” I was maybe nine. Maybe ten. I don’t remember what she said; I don’t even know what I would say to a child who told me she was having indefinable cravings in the middle of the night.

I’d probably tell her, “Nice try, but you’ve had your last glass of water, your last bedtime story, and your last goodnight kiss. Go. To. Sleep.”

But I maintain to this day that I wasn’t just stalling that night. I really craved something—something—whatever it was.

I felt what New Yorker writer Judith Thurman expressed when she wrote, “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for a familiar ground.” Or Frank O’Hara, who wrote, “When do you want to go / I’m not sure I want to go there / where do you want to go / any place / I think I’d fall apart any place else” in ‘Metaphysical Poem.’

I was maybe nine. Maybe ten.  My first restless night of metaphysical angst.

Sometimes I wonder what miracle saved me from natural selection.

A few years ago, I went kayaking with a couple of friends. I mostly planned the trip; I was the one with experience.

About four paddling hours into our weekend, the other girls want off the ride and I’m not sure we’ll all make it through to the end. Someone is going to drown herself if she doesn’t start following my instructions. Or I might leave them all for dead. Or they’ll mutiny and try to go on without me and not one of us will live to tell the tale.

As navigator, I’ve taken responsibility for our itinerary and taken possession of our maps. I am also in charge of our supply of iodine tablets. Iodine is naturally-occurring chemical element used to purify water, ridding it of giardia and other creepy-crawly parasites. I concede to the eleventy-millionth request for a break when we get close to a water source.

I have the brown bottle iodine tablets ready in the dry-sack in my lap. I also have the yellow bottle of neutralizer tablets that come in the same package. They’re supposed to return iodine-treated water to its natural color and taste. They don’t work—they make water taste like powdered plastic—and also, they’re for pansies. I’ve decided that I’m tough enough to drink water with a metallic-tinge to its aftertaste, and I won’t tolerate otherwise.

We shore up our boats and hunt around for the spigot. Its caked in green corrosion so thick in some spots that the chemically-tarnished water has solidified layer by layer in drip-drop form. There is an advisory fixed to the faucet—the screws that hold it in place are green, too—right by the handle so that I have to wrench my wrist backward and kind of slip my thumb out of the knuckle-joint to reach around it and work the pump.

The sign says: NON-POTABLE WATER NOT TO BE USED FOR DRINKING, WASHING OR COOKING PURPOSES. CHEMICALLY TREAT OR BOIL NON-POTABLE WATER FOR 30 MIN BEFORE DRINKING, WASHING OR COOKING.

I’ve always resented water-purification. I resent the waiting. I resent that I can’t trust natural water sources. I resent tainting something that looks and smells and sounds so pure.

I fill up my pink Nalgene and break out the iodine. I tap out two tablets from the little brown bottle and pass it around to the others. Explain their purpose. Glance at my watch and note the time. Happy to comply. Ready to CHEMICALLY TREAT NON-POTABLE WATER FOR 30 MIN BEFORE I sip it or brush my teeth or even rinse the gravel out of my bikini bottoms, Girl Scout’s Honor.

I have two tablets bleeding in my damp left hand. What looks like undiluted Easter egg dye stains the creases in my palm, my life line, my wealth line, all my whatever-else lines, as I fold them in there and use my left fingers to push the sippy-top away from the mouth of my Nalgene, which is slippery in my right hand.

Left hand: tablets. Right hand: bottle. Left hand: tablets. Right hand: bottle.

This pose is so familiar to me, I could be blessing wafers and wine at Sunday Eucharist. Only instead of crossing myself from shoulder to shoulder to forehead and down, I’m conditioned to pop the pills and swallow. I smack the iodine tablets into my mouth and gulp from my water bottle. From my water bottle filled with non-potable water.

Of course.

I glance at my friends, grimacing at the chalky line down the back of my throat, thinking don’t look at me, don’t look at me, don’t look at me.

I hope they don’t choose this moment to follow my lead.

Everyone is distracted by the chemical reactions taking place in their water bottles. The jar of iodine tablets comes back around to me and I discretely drop two more tabs into my bottle, pretending just to fuss with getting the cap back on. We shake our bottles to encourage the cleansing. We wait.

“Let’s get back in the water,” I suggest. “I’ll keep an eye on the time.”

When thirty minutes have passed, I let everybody know that their water is safe to drink. We pause and sip. I concentrate on my stomach, trying to figure out if half an hour is enough time to be lethally poisoned by iodine overdose and impure water. I’m feeling pretty okay, mostly just nervous. I think I’m going to make it. But just in case.

“If anybody really hates the taste, I have these neutralizer things. They sort of make the color go away.” Is there any other vital information I should share now, in case I keel over within the hour? “I put the marshmallows in with my clothes. We should make s’mores tonight before they get too smooshed.

We all made it through the weekend alive and I managed not to accidentally swallow any other foreign objects. But I’ve gotta tell you, sometimes I wonder what miracle saved me from natural selection.

Getting dressed for work is no longer as easy as flip shorts and I’m okay with that

It’s gotten warmer out, officially too warm to wear wool, so naturally it was just last week when I decided that all my woolen clothes are my favorites. The olive cashmere t-shirt, the tweed pencil skirt, the fitted black cardigan, the aubergine sweater with the deep vee. Also all my opaque tights, my flannel sheath dress, my ugly, filthy winter boots and the long brown coat that my mom bought for my birthday are obsolete just as I got cozy.

And now I have to remember all over again how to carry off my summer wardrobe. It’s like having to break in a new skin—every season, whether I’m covering up or stripping down, I resist this transition. I feel like I get dressed in the morning and I’m out of my element, like I don’t know what to do with my hands until I’m back in my perennial pajamas again at the end of the day.

The summer before my freshman year in college, I was a camp counselor who lived, day in and day out, in four pairs of cotton YMCA-logo “flip shorts,” the kind with the elastic waist that folds over. The boy I dated, where “dated” means “chased after, pushed away, let toy with me, let coddle me, bickered with, and crept around in the woods after dark with” hated those shorts. He nagged me at practically every other meal for dressing the same way every day.

He made me self-conscious but I kept wearing them. There were days when I’d change out of a different outfit and pull my flip shorts back on just to disprove any suspicion that I might care what he said.

Sometimes, we would sit cross-legged facing each other and he would pinch at the inside of my knee as he kissed me. Right where my leg folded under, there was just enough skin to grab between two fingers. I don’t know if he was conscious of it. I was. I started wearing jeans when we met up after lights out.

Sometimes, I approach myself in the mirror over the bathroom sink at work or pass myself by in a pane-glass storefront and I feel like Lucas in Empire Records for a second, with somebody purring that one line from the beginning of the movie in my ear.

Baby, you are sex.

It’s my own voice in my own head. And I always listen. I love that voice.

So I’m saying “goodbye, winter wear!” and happily flaunting the bony ridge on my shoulder that I love* and baring the dessert plate-sized birthmark between my shoulder blades where appropriate, even if I am still covering up my inner-knee pudge.

* So much so that I just got up to admire it in the mirror before I finished typing that sentence.