Song so wild and blue, p.2
Song So Wild and Blue, page 2
Both Sides Now
In 1967, a seven-year-old boy in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, sat before an upright piano, sounding individual keys. He’d walked by that piano a dozen times a day, but it had never occurred to him before to touch it. Maybe because it seemed too heavy, four times heavier than his own weight. Though his mother had recently painted it the color of a Spanish olive, it still conjured up solemnity, grief. It had been his grandmother’s instrument, and the way his mother talked about it, his grandmother was the piano: she’d transferred into its hammers, wires, ivories, and keys the moment she’d fallen and broken her hip. He was afraid of his grandmother, but she was gone before he was old enough to remember her face. It was enough to know that she’d pounded on the instrument so hard after his uncle Paul’s death that she’d worn the brass finish off the pedal with her shoe. Every time the boy looked down at the pedal, he saw it: a half-inch crescent-shaped gash. It always looked fresh, fresh enough to give off the fragrance of a penny handed from palm to palm. What kind of sorrow would make her pump the pedal like that? Maybe it was why his mother shied away from the piano, as if she’d already closed herself down, deciding she’d never had the depth to be a saint. For her it seemed preferable to behave as if the instrument were a graveyard between the kitchen and the foyer: the most traveled highway in the house.
When did I feel individual notes coalesce into a song? I couldn’t tell if it happened all at once or over a matter of days, weeks. Every time I sat down on the bench, I stayed a while longer. It probably helped that it wasn’t cordoned off in a separate room, away from the kitchen—otherwise, playing would have seemed precious, would have come with expectations from me, from others. It would have been too tempting to fail at it, to turn it into an assignment. The piano was out in the open, and it didn’t matter if I played well or finished anything—more often than not, I played fragments—though I wanted my music to make my mother put her utensils down, walk over to me, kiss the back of my head, let her lips stay until they went dry. In a matter of time, I turned the instrument into a companion, an object as light as a guitar. I didn’t want to do anything else but play, and if I did my homework or accompanied my father to the nursery, I couldn’t wait to get home and be absorbed by it again. It was time to start including the sharps and flats, the low notes and the high. The center keys had already started to feel a bit too easy.
Somehow the hard work of it didn’t feel like work. It didn’t give me a headache, didn’t make my stomach churn like so much else about being a solitary boy who had a hard time making friends, though I wanted them. I was making something only I could make. I felt important to myself, which was of a piece with sensing that my playing might make me important to others. What else did I have that would make someone else pay attention to me other than that I was sick all the time? Mononucleosis, mumps, chicken pox, German measles. Had Dr. Boguslaw mentioned cystic fibrosis? He was going to request some tests, and days later, even when they came back negative for that and other conditions, my mother treated me for the rest of my life as if I were endangered: a bluebird flown into a window. Yet this didn’t stop her from being mad at me every time I told her my forehead felt hot. She lay her palm above my brows. Again? My head felt hotter. Her eyes filled with angst as if she now had to accommodate the ritual of possibly losing me again, which simultaneously managed to suppress my immune system, more out of worry for her than for myself.
She asked me questions from the kitchen, and I answered back, talking right over my playing. What was I playing? The folk songs I’d heard in church, bits of the pop songs I’d listened to on the radio or in the supermarket aisles. All I needed to do was to listen, absorb, and my brain recorded what I’d heard. Patterns of sound traveled to my fingers, the left hand approximating a bass line, though I didn’t yet know that was what I was after. There’d be mistakes—I’m not saying there wasn’t awkwardness or fumbling, but if I heard an A, I played an A. F? Same. Music was a picture or a sequence of images, a movie that didn’t quite connect to itself, and it was just a matter of time before I was giving sound to the shapes.
Not once did my mother—or anyone—tell me to stop. Even back then I was thankful for that. They took for granted that I was the soundtrack of the house, but they never made a fuss over me or put any pressure on me the way they would to get all As in order to skip a grade or attend some gifted child program. My grades were already starting to slip. My playing was outside of that lust, which was always more about themselves than it was about me.
For my mother, my music might have sounded like the sonic equivalent of cooking, which she did on the other side of the half wall between us. It involved stops and starts, changing electric burners, shaking in some salt and pepper, maybe some olive oil, and didn’t involve a preordained path.
“It’s time for you to take lessons,” she suggested one day.
“I have an idea,” she said, though much later she’d insist that I’d begged for them. I went along with it if only because she sounded proud whenever she told the story to friends and relatives. It changed the sound of her voice, which went fuller, deeper.
* * *
I walked down a long sidewalk, stepped down the five steps past a concrete retaining wall stained bright green with moss. Inside the door: finished paneled basement. Four rows of empty folding chairs before a baby grand. Mr. Otterman waved me into Studio One with his usual grin, flyaway salt-and-pepper hair, mad scientist glasses low on his nose. As usual, we dispensed with sight-reading and scales and started playing, which involved making sure I didn’t look down at my hands and kept my eyes up on the music rack. I was giving every note my attention, leaning in closer, moving my head from side to side—expressively. I was making it all up, with the exception of the melody. Did it bother me that after two months I didn’t know the difference between a half and a quarter rest, a sixteenth note and an eighth? I was hoping that Mr. Otterman wouldn’t notice if I played well enough, and when I reached the final chord, he cried, “That sounds better than the original.” I half believed him, half sank in disappointment, as he’d already said these words seven times over the last eight weeks. Maybe he wasn’t taking me seriously. Maybe he didn’t take anyone very seriously, least of all himself, which accounted for the fact that I never showed up for lessons with cold hands or a groaning stomach. When I pulled out my assignment, a Top 40 song that I’d picked out in hopes that it would make me popular, he drew in closer to examine the lyrics my mother had crossed out for their suggestiveness. His lips moved in silence as he tried to make out words that seemed dirtier now for their half obliteration.
Sometimes I wondered why my parents hadn’t taken me to study with Clement Petrillo, who lived around the corner from us, on Edgewood Drive. Clement Petrillo was one of the most respected piano teachers around, known for his classical rigor and feared for his punishing standards: he was the dean of the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts. My mother believed that I was too sensitive to work with such a figure, but those thoughts seemed to have more to do with how she thought of herself. For her it was dangerous to aim too high. Aim too high and your wings of wax could melt into syrup. Aim too high and you could be humbled into a version of yourself that you couldn’t possibly live with.
When Joni played her first composition for her piano teacher at seven, the teacher hit her across the knuckles with a ruler, the learning method in vogue: Why would you want to play by ear when you could have the masters at your fingers?
* * *
It always came on me like a rogue wave on a calm sea. Not music, but as mysterious as music—and definitely connected to it. The desire that said, I have to say it. I have to get it out, give it words, and someone—anyone—has to hear, and it doesn’t even matter if they listen, but I hope they do. Usually the news was ridiculous: The Thorns painted their front door blue. Or there’s a bright red street sign on Middle Acre Lane. The terrible compulsion to share what I saw, and if I held it in, I’d drown in the sewer of it, smelly. Holding it in was like holding in pee, or holding my breath when an inner tube was around my waist, and the top half of me was pointing down to the bay bottom, and my legs were sticking up, kicking. My father, right beside me, thought I was making a joke. He didn’t approve of jokes about such things—the boy who cried wolf a frequent example—and it didn’t occur to him, even after he inverted me (choking, breathing, snot flying), how close I’d been to dying, an entire bay filling up my lungs with salt water.
* * *
In 1952, a nine-year-old girl in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, was walking home from Miss Fulford’s fifth-grade class when a wave broke over her, ready to pull her under. Headache, tiredness, neck and back stiff. Euphoria? She thought she was going to throw up. “Oh dear,” she said, “I’m getting old. I must have rheumatism, ’cause my grandmother had rheumatism.” The day before, she’d looked into a mirror and thought, You look like a woman today. Her face had redistributed itself, more leanness, less fat. The circles underneath her eyes unsettled her, and the child she’d been was no longer reachable. Goodbye, child. She was an adult now.
She sat down on the curb, unable to go forward in her pegged gray slacks, the red-and-white gingham blouse she’d picked out herself. She pulled the back of her blue sweater around her shoulders for warmth, but still she heard her teeth chattering.
In hours she was airlifted to St. Paul’s Hospital in Saskatoon, the polio clinic. Flying engines. The drone of them. If only she could move, look out the window, and see her house down there. The church where she sang in the upstairs choir, the movie theater. Little checkerboard town all by itself in a sea of wheat.
The next day there was an empty desk in the classroom, an empty chair pushed under the desk. Did the room feel different without her? Did it register her absence? Would everyone pretend the light was still the same through the windows? The person who drew well—did anyone miss her pictures of forests and animals? Or was she just a number as the room grew larger and the people in it dwindled? Another soldier down.
She shared the room at the polio clinic with a little boy. The air was sour, suffocating, and to pass the hours, he and Joni watched the snow falling against the windowpane. Snow was beautiful, but it kept everyone inside and turned instantly to water as soon as it touched hot glass. Winter, which lurked all year, even on a cold morning in the midst of summer.
She lay flat on her back as directed—she didn’t want to end up in one of those big cans. Lungs, they called them, as if its job wasn’t to make you a part of a machine. Stiffness, stillness. Clock on the wall, tissues. Drinking glass stained with orange juice. When would she walk again? If she couldn’t walk again, how could she leave her parents’ house? How could she watch birds and deer, put her hands down in the earth when it thawed in April? How could she lie down in the leaves, look up, and let the sky in?
* * *
Parents weren’t encouraged to visit, and so they left her alone, except the one time her mother came by with a Christmas tree with lights strung on its boughs. Her mother wore a mask, her eyes haunted, already attempting to take in what she believed to be inevitable. After she left, the girl didn’t pray to God but prayed to the angel at the top of the tree. “If I could get my legs back . . .” She prayed so hard. Prayed against her doctor, a polio survivor who used a wheelchair, who told her she wouldn’t be able to return home for the holidays. Prayed against the nurses, who should have smiled more. And so she submitted to the scalding rags and gave in to the therapist’s request to bend her stiff body. She sang Christmas carols at the top of her lungs and didn’t care when anybody flinched, turned their heads away from her shrieking.
If I’d been sixteen years older and grown up not in New Jersey but in Canada, I might have been the little boy who shared the room with her. I might have been afraid. I might not have known what to do with all her fury and will, her disinterest in being nice in all the socially expected ways. But I wasn’t so interested in people who were conventionally nice. I was drawn to the effort of having to win over such a person, and people like that always loved me more for it, treated me as if I were special. Maybe if I kept quiet, maybe if I listened to her, she’d talk even more, and I’d have someone to watch and listen to—better than all the movies I was missing, all locked up in a hot room. Maybe when she felt better, she’d give me orders. This clown, this page. Take that yellow crayon and color in his hat. Put a pom-pom on that hat. And when I handed it back to her, she wouldn’t have looked at it strangely, disparagingly. She would have nodded and offered encouragement. Don’t be afraid to press harder. The pom-pom deserves color. Wouldn’t you want color on you if you were a pom-pom?
When all was said and done, her spine “looked like a freeway after an earthquake,” as she told Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone. It got her right leg too.
Five years later she’d go out dancing with her friends on weekends. None of them would have guessed that she’d come so close to being paralyzed, that she hadn’t always been some good-time Charlie.
* * *
For chorus we stood in four neat rows. It was a relief to be neat after the chaos of the playground, where someone was always ready to come up from behind and punch you, make you look stupid, no matter your response, whether you looked hurt or ashamed, or ignored it. These horrors weren’t the same horrors of my previous school, a Catholic school, where a lay teacher had the principal’s okay to hit you if you talked back, or embarrass you if you hid between the wet coats of the cloakroom.
I was a tall boy, which meant I was in the back row. I didn’t yet know that I was tall. I’d just assumed everyone else could see over the heads of their classmates. I didn’t know what others seemed to know: that I had an advantage and could get special favors for it. In my innocence, I experienced my height as a liability. It made me stand out when I didn’t want anyone to lay their eyes on me, make fun of me.
If I did have to stand out, I wanted it to be for something I did well, a project that required practice and dedication, a skill no one else could do. I wanted to do it so well that people couldn’t help but love me and say, We were wrong about you; will you forgive us? All that talk about your ears sticking out too far from the sides of your head, your complete ignorance about games and their rules. What were we thinking? How can we make it up to you?
In return, no one would train their floodlights on me again. They wouldn’t categorize and rank me according to how I fit inside some outline. Clumsiness, the wrong walk or vocal pitch. Sissy: vicious sting out of nowhere. Instead, they’d look at me as if all those qualities were part of my special gifts, and they’d decide to love me all the more for them. But I knew none of that came without work, in spite of my ability to play by ear. I had to be front and center on the stage, offered up like USDA Choice beef for inspection. I had to risk embarrassment and failure and show others I could win the song I set out to play. And if I had to try four times harder than other people?
Love didn’t come without tests. Anything of worth demanded a test.
* * *
Mrs. Hill pushed the upright piano through the fourth-grade classroom door, a feat she accomplished once a week, every Tuesday, in the hour before school let out. There was a mightiness about her, which I might have missed if she weren’t so short and her blond hair weren’t so high, pretzeled on top of her head. Her miniskirt came up higher than it should have, and she pulled it downward as she talked to us, as if its crawl were merely bothersome, even natural. No one shared mocking expressions behind her back as they did when other guests came to visit the class. Maybe because she was bringing music, and music calmed us. It was a gift; it dissolved rivalry, a chocolate cake she’d carried into the room and cut into twenty pieces. Mrs. Hill made music feel like it was meant for everyone, not just those with special talents, even if she appreciated those with talent—she didn’t play her favorites against anyone. Thus people who didn’t have the remotest concept of pitch yelled out the songs she taught us as if they were getting to know their lungs, lips, and breathing for the first time. I could live with their enthusiasm if it turned the whole group of us toward a good mood.
Usually Mrs. Hill picked songs in which children were supposed to sound like children. The songs were often about weather and generally upbeat—“Windy,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” “Let the Sunshine In”—which was another way to say that children were supposed to be happy. If the children weren’t happy, then what did that say about their teachers and parents? Perhaps it suggested that they hadn’t done a very good job, that they’d screwed up something that was too far gone to fix, and so it was up to the children to make sure the adults in charge felt successful in every way they knew. We’d show them that they’d taken good care of us.
But today’s song was different. It sounded happy on first listen, but on closer inspection, heartbroken at the same time. The person who had written it had lost things, I felt that, but the source of that sadness was deeper than merely growing up, changing, leaving a house and hometown behind. Maybe it was just that angel hair and ice cream castles were trying so hard to say that lightness lived alongside darkness. When I sang the song, my face grew long. The skin above my upper lip felt weighted.
I hadn’t known that I’d missed that feeling until I realized it was something to miss.
And when I came home, I played the song by ear until it sounded like I’d always known it, and I couldn’t hear all the erasures and repetitions that went into its making.
* * *
Joni sat by the plane window, looking out at the clouds. Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King lay open on her tray table, but she kept orbiting the same paragraph, because she was more interested in the clouds outside in all their layers and dimensions, the range of colors from slate to fog to purest white. How could they be described? Muscular, Michelangelo—she thought of naked Adam touching God’s outstretched finger. Maybe she’d already gotten what she’d wanted from the book—the picture of the narrator, Henderson, looking at a similar view on a flight to Africa—and to read beyond that would obscure what she wanted her heart and mind to hold. Henderson’s insight? He was living during the first time in history when humans could look at clouds from above and below. Sometimes a book said all it needed to say in a picture. Sometimes a song did as well.
