Like A Song: Essays

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PART ONE

Performance

1

My daughter sings in the shower. She sings in the backseat of the car, at the table waiting for her soup to cool at lunchtime, while walking the dog or changing the bedding in her guinea pigs’ cage. She sings along with the stereo and she sings a cappella; she sings songs she knows by heart and songs she’s determined to teach herself, sheet music in hand. She sings the same line of the same song over and over again until she’s sure she’s got it right.

She has made up her mind—this time for real, she tells me over dinner—what she is going to be when she grows up. She is going to be a pop star.

She is serious about this. She is serious, always, about everything.

It is 2003. Grace is ten years old, and she has three times before made such pronouncements. The first, when she was eighteen months old, was the plan to be a farmer (actually, she insisted she already was a farmer—on an apprentice basis, I suppose). Afterwards, for a time, when her father would say, teasingly, So, you’re a farmer, are you? she’d say, No, I used—but she pronounced it oohst—to be a farmer. Now I am not sure what I am. She sounded wistful. You’ll figure it out, I told her. Her father rolled his eyes, but I couldn’t help reassuring her. Even at two, I could see, it worried her to be rudderless.

By the age of three, she had settled on paleontology. Dinosaurs had been a big part of her life since before she was a year old—her first complex phrase had been armored plates—but now, she made it clear, she was through playing around. She might have been majoring in dinosaurs for the hours she put in over the next few years, grouping and regrouping her collection of authentic-looking model dinosaurs by era, eating habits, size, speed, and types of armor, poring over what grew to be two long shelves full of dinosaur books, and writing her own speculative—and speculatively spelled—accounts of dinosaur behavior/coloration/extinction.

That was the kind of little girl she was. An alter kop, my grandmother would have called her—a child with an old head. 

•

When she was six and a half, we made a trip to Chicago, and she watched the paleontologists at work behind plate glass in the Field Museum. A sign posted there (So you want to be a paleontologist?) listed the courses a prospective paleontologist should take in college—mathematics, sciences, foreign languages, art, writing—and Grace asked me if all of these could be taken at Ohio State, where I’d been teaching all her life. I told her they could. Phew, she said, and pantomimed wiping her brow, as if she were making a joke. But then she turned serious. I’ve got to tell you, I’m just not crazy about the idea of going away to college.

I laughed and put my arm around her. Well, it’ll be a while, sweetie.

Not that long, she said darkly. 

Before I had her, I’d always thought that time seemed longer—seemed endless—to children. But my daughter thought like an old person. She thought like my own grandmother, whom she’d never known. Time flies away, my grandmother used to say. She’d flap one hand like a bird flying around her as she sat at the kitchen table. Just like that—the hand dropped to her lap, out of sight, and then she would shrug—it goes. I couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. Time was no thing with feathers. Time was a boulder to be pushed uphill. Days passed every morning while I waited for my mother to wake up and join me in the living room, where I’d been watching Farmer Brown cartoons since dawn. But my daughter would have understood my grandmother perfectly, would have sighed and nodded and sipped her own cup of hot water and lemon.

Maybe for graduate school, I said. You never know.

I doubt it. She sounded grim.

Because that was also the kind of kid she was. An alter kop, yes—but at the same time showing no sign of readiness, let alone eagerness, for the separation from her parents that other children her age were starting to make, or at least to think about making. Not even in the distant future—or what might have seemed distant to another child—could she imagine a life apart from us.

Midway through second grade, she decided, not without regret, that she was more interested in live animals than long-dead ones. She packed up her collection of model dinosaurs, CD-ROMs about dinosaurs, dinosaur-fact games, and dinosaur skeleton puzzles, and rearranged her books to make room for the new ones she began to collect in light of her new vocation: zoology.

This time she was old enough to check out the course offerings on Ohio State’s website herself, if not quite old enough to take it in stride—she was tearful, then outraged—when she discovered that zoology was one of the few subjects one could not major in at Ohio State.

You know, Grace, I said, "you might want to leave home in nine or ten years."

Yeah, right, she said. 

•

But three years later, she is ten years old and everything has changed.

As soon as she’s old enough, she tells me, she means to move to Hollywood. "That’s where all pop stars live," she says.

And I can’t keep myself, though I know I should, from asking if she understands how far away that is.

Of course I do, she says. I have a map, don’t I?

Indeed she does. A big magnetic puzzle map of the U.S. was one of the Chanukah gifts she’d asked for when she was five, and she has played with it so often in the years since that she knows exactly where each state belongs and how it fits into the states around it. It occurs to me that she’d probably be able to tell me, if she chose to, how many miles there are between Southern California and central Ohio—and this serves to remind me of the difference between us, of the plain fact that she is not me (and I do need reminding, regularly; I am reasonably sure that many mothers of daughters need reminding). For I have never been good at geography. I can never remember where anything is relative to anything else, or how the states are shaped. I’ve never been good at using a map key to determine distances. I don’t even have a good sense of direction. So when it comes to figuring out where I am and where I’m going, I tend to guess, to equivocate, or to pretend it doesn’t matter—to pretend that getting lost is just an opportunity for an adventure. That’s how I’ve managed all my life. 

I’ll keep in touch, she says. Don’t worry. I’ll call and write letters. It won’t be so bad. 

I know, I say. It won’t.

And anyway, she says then (I must be looking sad, or anxious), "I don’t mean right now. Right now I’m not going anywhere. I just mean, you know, eventually I’ll have to move there."

I suppose you will, I say. 

And that’s all I say. I don’t mention what I am thinking—that it had taken me a very long time to leave home, or at least to go far away from home, far enough so that I had to make an effort to keep in touch. I was twenty-nine when I told my family almost exactly what Grace has just told me. I’ll call and write. It’s no big deal. Please don’t be sad.

2

My ten-year-old daughter approaches her singing career with the same dedication, the same solemnity, the same ferocity she had once applied to learning everything there was to know about dinosaurs, horses, dogs. The principal difference: this time nothing she is doing strikes her friends or classmates as peculiar. On the contrary, her single-minded devotion to the ideal of pop stardom incites only admiration in the other girls—as does the full-throttle approach to personal grooming that kicks in at the same time.

"A pop star needs to look good" is how she explains it to me.

To that end, she starts every day now with her beautiful, long, dark red, formerly wild hair tamed—neatly curled or almost straight, twisted up into a topknot with a few tendrils carefully pulled free, or loose and parted on the side, a sleek-looking curtain over one eye. For half an hour, sometimes longer, she will disappear into the bathroom with an arsenal of three hairbrushes ("They’re all different, Mama) and an assortment of what she persists in calling products": creams (cremes) and sprays and pomades and straightening balms she has selected herself at CVS. Before she steps out to begin her day, she adds the final touches to her look (that’s what she calls it—this child who until recently refused to brush her hair at all, or to let me do it for her; this child who cried, "It looks fine the way it is! I like it messy"): she applies pink lip gloss, body glitter—and, if she’s feeling daring, or itching for an argument, mascara (which she knows I’ll make her turn around and take off).

Ten years old—zeroteen, to quote Beverly Cleary’s Ramona—or, as Grace herself says again and again, as if it were necessary to remind me (as if it were possible for me to forget, even for a second), "a preteen, practically a real teenager"—and, for the first time in her life, she is just acting her age.

•

I am accused of dissembling when I tell people how much pleasure Grace’s sudden infatuation with herself and with the superficial trappings of pop culture give me. I can’t possibly approve of the teenification of ten-year-olds! Of the way my daughter stares at herself in the full-length mirror in my bedroom, assuming one pose after another, practicing smiles and the placement of her hands on her hips. Or of certain suggestive songs she sings without any idea what she is singing about.

And in the abstract I am against it—I am against all of it. 

But I’ve spent years worrying about Grace, and feeling anxious and guilty about my role in the clash, or fissure, within her. Old for her age in all matters intellectual, she has lagged behind, always, in matters of the heart. That she is enjoying herself—and I don’t mean just having fun, which she has had before, but literally, for the first time, taking joy in herself—that she is acting like a normal kid (normal with a bullet), is a source of pleasure for me.

And not only pleasure, but relief.

She feels this way, too. She is amazed to find out that she is part of the human race. The kiddie race, the one she’d had the feeling she was permanently locked out of.

She’s going to be a pop star when she grows up, I cannot resist telling people.

But there are a lot of things I don’t tell anyone. I don’t say that I am grateful to be witnessing, at last, the marriage of my daughter’s head and heart. Or that I believe performance to be an essential part of living in the world. That Grace’s discovery of herself as performer is a discovery of what it will mean to live in a world outside the one in her own head. That I want her to be able to live in that world as well as her private one.

And there’s something else I don’t say. It’s that this is a dream that makes sense to me.

I don’t mean that it is a sensible one. I mean only that it’s one I identify with. Because there’s hardly anything I like better than to sing in public. Even though I’m not that good at it. I’m just good enough to imagine being better. I could be better, I tell myself, if I gave it half a chance. If I took it seriously enough, if I practiced—if I gave up everything else. 

•

My own earliest memory involves singing—singing and dancing. I am standing in my playpen, holding on to one of its sides, and Hound Dog is on the radio. I love that song! I sing along, as best I can. And I rock back and forth, side to side, up and down. My parents are laughing, on the other side of the divide.

At three, I sang along with Perry Como on the first 45 in my collection: Catch A Falling Star. At five, riding the bus down Coney Island Avenue, I’d sit on my knees, facing the window, singing Where Is Love from Oliver! or Real Nice Clambake from Carousel. At six, at seven, on the long road trips my family would take in the summertime, driving from Brooklyn to Quebec, where we had friends—a couple my parents had met on their honeymoon, and their children, the eldest of whom was a boy exactly my age—I’d sing out the open car window: Let them stop and stare/they don’t bother me. By the time I was ten, I was singing with my best friend, Susan, as we walked along Sheepshead Bay Road (I’ve got the world on a string) or sat on her terrace overlooking East 13th Street (No more hunger and thirst—but first be a person who needs people). Grownups walking down the street looked around, looked up—I remember that; I remember how gratifying it was, how glad we were to be admired, how much we wanted to be admired, but we weren’t singing to or for an audience. Not primarily—not yet.

In school, Susan and I sang the leads in our class plays. She was five months older, a year ahead of me in school. The year she was Dora in a version of Cinderella in which the stepsisters, Flora and Dora, were the good guys, I was a fifth-grade Carmen (Love is like a wild bird you catch). We took drama and elocution lessons, too—enunciating, projecting, learning to jettison our Brooklyn accents—in a small, narrow room off Marjorie Mazia’s dance studio, where we also had weekly lessons, one flight up from the candy store where we bought our romance comics, and DuBarry’s jewelry store, where we had our ears pierced. We wept when our teacher, Irene Malin, decided to return to England, her home.

Susan, who was serious about acting, moved on to lessons at Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse. My own theatrical career ended in the seventh grade, but I never quit performing. My teaching career is about (not all about, but very much about) performance. The Michelle Herman Show, one of my undergraduates once called it, and although I blushed, it wasn’t news to me. My pedagogical style is part evangelical, part confessional, part free-associative story-telling stand-up comedy. And it all tends to be played at a pretty high pitch (so that afterwards I am exhausted—as exhausted, I imagine, as any performer when the curtain finally comes down).

I get my students to rise to the occasion of theater, too. They offer up comedy and drama and the surprise of confession and sudden revelation—all of them, that is, but for a few stubborn cases, three or four that I can remember over a long teaching career. My husband, as it happens, was one of the stubborn cases. He took a writing class with me when he was a graduate student in the art department—it was how we met—and he almost never volunteered a spoken word. Sometimes I’d call on him and ask him to comment—the stories he wrote were so beautiful and strange, I was deeply curious about what he might have to say about the other students’ stories—and he would say, politely, I’d prefer not to. Later, when we were first getting to know each other, I asked him if he’d been consciously quoting from Bartleby, the Scrivener, and I mentioned that the Melville story was one of my all-time favorites. He shrugged. He couldn’t remember if he’d been quoting. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever read the story.

He doesn’t remember anything—that’s one difference between my husband and me. Another is that he not only dislikes speaking in public, he dislikes being in public. Glen is the anti-performer. He can’t imagine for the life of him why anyone would want to put on a show—any kind of show. At his own art openings, he hangs back, hoping not to be noticed. It’s a standard family joke (except that it’s no joke) for him to say, as we’re getting ready to leave for New York for an opening, that he’d really like it better if Grace and I would get dressed up and go to the opening for him and let him stay home in his painting clothes. Then you can tell me all about it later.

So I understand perfectly if our daughter’s latest idée fixe is incomprehensible to him. He often points out—always out of Grace’s earshot—that she can’t really sing. I tell him that whether or not she can really sing doesn’t matter.

How can it not matter if she wants to be a singer?

Well, for one thing, I say patiently, this is just a stage she’s going through. A perfectly normal stage. Like when you wanted to be a professional baseball player when you were a kid.

Football.

But you see what I mean.

No, I don’t, he says, because when I was her age, I wasn’t a bad football player.

"She’s not a bad singer, I tell him. She has a nice enough voice. She can carry a tune. It isn’t painful to listen to her."

Sometimes it’s a little painful.

Oh, come on, I say. "She’s ten. She might turn out to have a voice. It could be that it’s just too early to know for sure."

Glen shakes his head. Both of you, he says. Living in a dream world. 

•

I was a kid who could really sing. I had a good, strong, sure voice even at eight or nine—a great big voice, it was said. And continued to be said, for years. One of my most humiliating childhood memories: the drama club advisor, in junior high, after my audition—it was the first week of seventh grade; I sang Cabaret, a cappella, urging my audience to admit that from cradle to tomb wasn’t a very long stay—looking amazed, saying, My, what a great big voice you have for a little fat girl! I wasn’t that fat, but even if I had been, all these years later I still can’t believe she said it. If I hadn’t wanted so badly to be in drama club I would have turned and walked out of the room then and there—but I wanted it desperately, enough to thump back down into my seat and clasp my hands and manage to keep from crying, even though all the kids in the room, fellow petitioners for the drama club, were laughing. I didn’t know any of those kids. We’d just moved into the neighborhood. I was lonely, I was frightened, I missed Susan, I had a terrible new Sassoon haircut with bangs and curled sideburns I Scotch-taped to my cheeks every night. I was short, I wore thick glasses, and I was fat. But I wanted to sing, and I could sing, I knew it.

I always imagined that Grace would sing (it never even crossed my mind that she wouldn’t). But as natural as performing has always been for me, I hadn’t thought about her as a performer. Well, she wasn’t a performer—not until now. It wasn’t natural to her until suddenly it was. It’s as if the gene for performance, my gene, was encoded with a time-delay mechanism. I tell this to Glen.

"And this is good?" he asks. All irony and disbelief.

I consider quoting from a poem by Mark Halliday: Is it good? It’s life. Is it good? It’s life. But all I say is, I don’t think it’ll hurt her any.

Still, he persists, it’s kind of surprising, don’t you think?

I keep quiet. In fact, it doesn’t seem all that surprising, really. Especially not to her. I have never seen her so composed, so confident, so cool.

How can I not be glad about this?

Thus, when she emerges at last from the bathroom each morning, a cloud of competing scents trailing behind her as she glides down the hall, bending to plant a regal kiss on her dog’s head, I don’t raise an eyebrow, I don’t make a crack. Even when I have to send her back into the bathroom to remove the mascara I can see she’s put on (I can’t take it off! she cries, I used the waterproof kind! and I say, Use Vasoline, then), I am not dismayed, I am not even a little bit annoyed—although, as in the matter of the mascara, I am perfectly capable of putting on the appropriate act, since it is clear to me that I am supposed to be annoyed, that that is part of the pleasure, for her. So I do my best to do my part—to perform, as it were—and make the whole show worth her while.

Over the pop music that has overnight become the soundtrack to our home life, however, I can’t work up even the pretense of irritation. In the car, when a song she likes comes on the radio, I turn it up obligingly. I even sing along if it’s one I like, too.

Her response to this varies depending on her mood. Some days she sings along with me—we are just two happy singers, rolling down the road. Some days she is merely tolerant and amused. Some days, darker days, she hushes me furiously. If her friends are along for the ride, knowing glances are exchanged—I can see them in the rearview mirror. But I don’t know what the glances mean. Do the kids think it’s weird that I cede radio station choice to them? Are they grateful or puzzled that I crank it up upon request? Do they envy Grace? Or are they wishing I would act my age?

The looks they flash one another in the back seat are unreadable to me—another sign (as if I need one) that they have entered the world of the preteen, that they are no longer, or no longer just, little girls.

I used to be able to interpret every glance, translate every coded word. I’d taught them some of the coded words—taught Grace my own secret childhood language, G-talk, so that she could teach it (tidigeach idigit) to her fridigiends.

Now the mysteries and ambiguities are setting in. I remember what this felt like—the dawning of these mysteries. How things that had seemed clear, straightforward, ordinary, had turned into puzzles to be solved. 

Remember? I don’t have to remember. It doesn’t ever go away, once it sets in.

This is the beginning of life as a grownup, when meanings are shaded, paradoxes are everywhere.

3

I never made it to the first drama club production, The Boyfriend, despite having been cast as Maisie and despite how much I loved my big song: Safety in Numbers (a girl who knows a lot of beaux is never likely to grieve). I quit drama club halfway through rehearsals, when I realized that I hated the teacher even more than I loved performing (which was saying a lot). And later, sitting in the auditorium, watching another Maisie sing my songs, speak my one line of French—Excusez-moi, Madame, je n’avais pas aucune idée que vous êtes ici!—dance the Charleston and kiss the boy I was supposed to kiss, I was miserable. I didn’t belong in the audience—that was how I felt, sitting there, surrounded on all sides by other twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, invisible.

Are there people for whom singing in private is enough—is plenty? Surely there are. My mother, I believe, sings only for herself and always has. I haven’t heard her sing in years, but when I was a child I listened closely—I would hear her in the next room, singing quietly, singing to herself—and it was beautiful.