Two-Part Inventions Read online

  Real did not mean the ability to alter, or even ingest, objects in the physical world, which might itself be a dream. Her own dream. Real, she imagined later on, was something else; it had nothing to do with things you could touch. Real was being seen, noticed, acknowledged, and later remembered. Real was people thinking about you when you weren’t in the room. If others thought about you, then you must be more than a made-up dream. You needed other people in order to be real, she decided. Otherwise you might be just a speck, an atom, inventing an elaborate story. It seemed like a paradox, yet it must be so. She knew other people were real because she thought about them. Her thinking of her parents and her brothers, her school friends, was proof that they were real. They were both outside and in her head. But how could she be sure she was in anyone’s head?

  When she played the piano, her doubts subsided. The music was undeniably real—it never occurred to her to question that. And if she was producing it, well, then, the music conferred its reality on her. Even more, her touching the notes in a certain way made something in the world happen—sound, music—and that in turn made something happen in people’s minds. They listened and heard, they nodded, they smiled with pleasure and appreciation. If they were more than simple clods, they even felt something. The sounds she produced changed them. The making of the music and the hearing of it, and what happened inside the listeners—that was all real beyond a doubt. That was the kind of reality she could trust and rest in. It was she who made it happen, and it was their knowledge of that fact that confirmed her existence.

  So when her father would summon her from downstairs, make her leave off reading on her bed or dressing her paper dolls, meticulously folding the little tabs at the shoulders and wrists and feet—the shoes were especially hard to do—and call her to entertain the visiting friends and relatives, even though she hated being displayed like a rare piece of merchandise that had miraculously fallen into his possession, she was lured as well. She slumped down the stairs slowly, like someone anticipating an ordeal, yet she knew that at the end of the ordeal would come the irresistible reward. It was not so much the attention, the astonished faces, the praise. It was the hugely satisfying certainty of her own existence—the music being heard, received, responded to. And so she colluded with her father at the same time as she resented his pressure, his vulgarity, his overweening pride in what he had nothing to do with. He was a musical dullard; the music genes came from her mother’s side of the family, all of them good singers, a distant uncle even a cantor in a Queens synagogue.

  There was no use protesting, in any case, at least not when she was so young. She could be stubborn but was no match for her father, older, bigger, with that deep hoarse voice. He never actually threatened her with any punishment if she refused—his worst punishments were the glares, the muttered words of his displeasure—but in the face of his badgering, sometimes accompanied by the badgering of the guests, her child’s will deflated and collapsed.

  When she was older, ten or eleven, she bitterly resented the command performances. The allure was gone; she no longer needed them. She could do it for herself, confirm her own reality, anytime she chose. But still she obeyed; it was habit, the easier path. And she was old enough and cunning enough to grasp that possessing her and putting her on display was her father’s way of reassuring himself of his own reality. Still, when the brief performances were over—one piece was usually enough to prove his point—she was flushed with excitement. Her eyes shone, her skin was lustrous. She was Suzanne, the prodigy, the child who had the special gift. Her gratification was utterly unlike her father’s, more inward, more simple, less selfish.

  Her mother had used that word, “gift,” when she first discovered it. “She has a gift. A natural gift,” she announced to the family. At the time, Suzanne was barely four. She thought a gift was something you were given on your birthday, wrapped in paper and tied with ribbons. A toy, a book, something to wear. You tore it open, shredding the noisy colorful paper, while people watched, and then you were supposed to say thank you whether you liked it or not. But this, she realized, was a different kind of gift. Something you already possessed without knowing it, something inside that you’d taken for granted as part of who you were. And there was no giver. It was just there, mixed in with the rest of you, the parts that were like everyone else’s, but not everyone else had this. It made you special.

  And so, after she played for people who recognized her gift, she could accept that she was real. It must be true. This was who she was: the girl with a gift. Then her native diffidence would peel away, she could smile and accept their praise and happily, even giddily, high on her own success, join them around the table to eat the platters of food her mother set out. And as she grew older she suspected that the food, which disappeared so quickly, to praise that almost equaled the praise for her music, was her mother’s way of confirming her own existence. The notion that grown-ups, even her parents, perhaps everyone, needed some display to assure themselves that they were real and not mere pretenses, was consoling. She was not alone in her doubts. She played, she ate, she chattered. She would do her part in the great game, everyone tacitly agreeing to grant one another their reality.

  They had begun, these command performances, a few years after the notable day her mother often referred to, talking to friends about Suzanne. Gerda was in the kitchen, singing as she often did as she went about her work, sliding a roasting pan holding a chicken into the oven. Gerda Stellman had a rich, husky voice, dense with emotion; the women she played bridge with urged her to try to get on one of the TV amateur shows, but she had no interest in performing in public. She was singing “Santa Lucia.” Near the end of the verse she reached the high note, then the melody took a series of steps down, then back to the high note again. That was how it sounded to Suzanne, playing with dolls on the floor in the adjacent living room. She could see in her mind the melody tripping down and then up a staircase. Lately she had experimented at the piano, trying to pick out tunes, nursery rhymes, “Three Blind Mice,” figuring out how the staircase of notes worked, how the white keys and the black corresponded to the notes of a sung melody, but she did it mostly when Gerda was out on errands, leaving her with her older twin brothers. They were willing enough to look after her but had an intense private fantasy life, replete with monsters, pirates, mercenaries, and the accompanying plastic paraphernalia, and so were glad when she could amuse herself.

  As she listened to Gerda sing, Suzanne went to the piano and found the note that was the top step and then moved the index finger of her right hand down the keyboard, making the notes imitate the song’s journey along the flight of stairs.

  Her mother stopped singing and came into the living room, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Gerda was a plump, fair-haired woman—colorful, Suzanne thought, with her pink cheeks and green eyes and not quite orange-gold hair. There was something doll-like about her—the creamy porcelain skin, the rounded cheeks, the wide-open eyes always looking surprised, or anticipating surprise, something like the dolls Suzanne dressed with care. Suzanne was nothing like her. She could see in the mirror—it might not be trusted for reality, but about appearances it did not lie—that she resembled her father, tall and olive-skinned, with black hair, the bangs reaching down to her eyes like a curtain. Sometimes her father’s rough hand brushed the bangs away. “How can you see with all that hair in your face?” Joseph Stellman’s body was heavy and coarse, though, and Suzanne was slender and would remain so.

  “What are you doing, sweetheart?” Gerda asked.

  “Playing the song.”

  “Let me hear it again.”

  “I don’t remember it exactly. Sing it.”

  The melody lasted long, with much climbing and descending, but Suzanne listened intently and made it stay in her head the whole way through. Reproducing it was easy. The hard part was keeping it all in her head, like a story with many turns of the plot.

  She couldn’t understand why her mother got so excited. Gerda
dropped her towel, hugged and kissed her and fussed over her. Then she asked her to play other tunes, simple ones: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “Frère Jacques.” All perfect! The ear of a musical genius! Gerda couldn’t stop exclaiming. How could she not have known until now? True, Suzanne could carry a tune remarkably for a four-year-old. But everyone in Gerda’s family could sing. Even the boys could sing, though they had never shown any interest in music; their piano lessons had been given up after two pointless years of fumbling scales and arpeggios. But this, Suzanne at the piano. This was special.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Joseph when he came home from work. He grunted, skeptical as he always was of Gerda’s enthusiasms, of most enthusiasms except those regarding business ventures. She was undaunted. Just wait and see, she said. Wait till after supper. In her state of exaltation, Gerda had left the chicken in the oven too long. Joseph and the boys, Fred and Gary, who were nearly fourteen, pronounced it dry.

  “What does it matter? It’s only a chicken. Dry!” Gerda said scornfully, though she was usually sensitive to comments about her cooking. “Do you realize what this means? She has a natural gift.”

  After supper, Gerda made Suzanne play for her father and brothers, who seated themselves patiently in the living room, indulgently, then listened in growing wonder. Tune after tune, with one finger: “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” In the midst of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” there came a whistle from the kitchen, ascending to a screech. Suzanne stopped; it was an adversarial music, ugly and unremitting.

  “Gerda, the teapot,” Joseph said.

  “Oh, I forgot all about it.” She’d been sitting entranced. She rushed into the kitchen and the noise stopped.

  “Well, how about that,” Joseph Stellman said at last. “How about that. Come here and let me look at you,” he commanded Suzanne, and she obeyed. He placed his hands on her shoulders and scrutinized her, as if he could locate on her face some physical source of the music. Then he hugged her roughly. “That was very good. That was really something special.”

  He was a hulk of a man, hairy, solid, and muscular, with thick impassive features in a face that looked always in need of a shave, and hazel eyes that studied the world with wary discontent, as though from long experience he expected it to fall short of his requirements. The youngest child of a large immigrant family, he chided his sons constantly for their lack of ambition. Drive, he called it, reminding them that America was the land of opportunity. “Look at FDR. You’re probably too young to remember, but he was a cripple. Did he let that stop him? No. And you have your legs and arms and brains, so use them.”

  He had taken pride in the birth of twin sons, as if the doubleness implied his superior potency, and from the start nursed the desire that they be special. Special. It was a word he used often, for people in the news, feats of diplomacy or athletics, popular entertainers. Most people were run-of-the-mill. Ordinary. Ordinary himself—and he knew this—he had contempt for the ordinary in public life. His sons disappointed him, easygoing good-natured boys, average students who didn’t appreciate their privileged lives—Joseph’s early years had been anything but privileged, in a cramped apartment on the Lower East Side—boyishly predictable in their interests, showing no unusual skills except for punch ball in the street and card tricks, their current passion. “Pick a card, Pop,” one or the other would say, and he would do so stiffly, grudgingly. They would proceed to execute quite extraordinary and baffling feats with the deck for which Joseph could muster no interest, while Gerda, looking on, was suitably amazed. He even found something sinister in such antics, as if they verged on the disreputable.

  The boys presented a united front at all times, a separate unit within the family, spending hours together in their room doing God knows what—learning more card tricks, probably; certainly not studying—although if Suzanne wandered in they accepted her willingly, as they would a family pet. Or they would disappear for hours on end, playing ball in the schoolyard, they said if Joseph questioned them. He had given up on them as far as special was concerned. They were decent boys who stayed out of trouble, so he was leaving them to grow up as they would. Now it struck him that it was the girl, whose birth was unplanned and greeted, by him if not by Gerda, with mixed feelings (more responsibility, more expense), who might turn out to gratify his yearnings for something special.

  And so he invested his hopes in her, small as she was. Special came to mean more than playing the piano. Special meant school as well. What good was having a gift if you didn’t develop the brains to deploy it properly? Suzanne was bright enough, everyone found her charming—she had a natural ingenuous grace—but she didn’t put herself forward. Piano lessons were all very well, but she must learn to be more aggressive, to stand up for herself, to compete. Life was a battleground. She had the weapons, but she must train her will to use them.

  She did well in school. Her quarterly report cards gave him nothing to reproach her with. Until, in the fourth grade, she presented a report card to him as usual for his signature. Gerda was cleaning up the remains of dinner, and the boys, by then sophomores at Brooklyn College, had gone upstairs ostensibly to study. Joseph was sitting in his shirtsleeves at the small desk in the dining room where he paid the bills. He gave the report card a cursory glance, a small folded four-sided document on stiff paper that attempted to look official. He was reaching for his fountain pen, when he noticed the B+ in geography.

  “Why only a B+?” he asked, as if it were a joke, yet not entirely a joke.

  “I was absent the day she gave the test. It was when I had the earache.”

  “And so?”

  “And so she said that was a fair grade, considering I missed the test.”

  “It’s not a fair grade. You don’t have to accept that. Go back to your teacher,” Joseph said, frowning at the world’s injustice, “and tell her your father said to give you a makeup test.”

  “I don’t want to. What does it matter? It’s not even a final grade, just the middle of the term.”

  “Do what I tell you,” he said firmly. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t have an A. You need to stand up for your rights. I’m sure you know your geography.” He handed the card back to her and turned away to uncap the pen and reach for the top bill on the pile, an envelope, Suzanne noticed as she was turning away, with a tiny picture of a telephone on it.

  She avoided arguing with him. His will was as ungainly and immobile as his body. She could be strong, too, in another way: She was able to withdraw and pretend that what was happening was not really happening, just a show she was enacting. In this way, she could do unpleasant things—like many of the actions demanded by school—and get through them with aplomb. The following day she approached Mrs. Gutterman and told her what her father had said about the makeup test. The teacher hesitated, then nodded.

  Late in the afternoon, after she had named the mountain ranges of North America, Mrs. Gutterman, a reedy woman in her fifties with gray clothes and wispy blond hair in a precarious pompadour, asked Suzanne to stand up at her seat. As one of the tallest in the class, Suzanne was in the fourth row toward the back of the room.

  “All right, Suzanne. We can make this quick. I’ll just ask you a few questions.”

  Not happening, Susanne thought. Just stand and give the answers. The real world is inside, where no one can touch. As the entire class turned to watch, Mrs. Gutterman asked her to name the longest rivers in North and South America, which Suzanne knew, and then the capital cities of several European countries, which she also knew, and then asked her what the prime meridian was, which Suzanne did not know. She remembered it had been explained more than once, but it had puzzled her the first time, and after that she had daydreamed. Now, in the kind of patient, teacherly voice that conceals impatience, Mrs. Gutterman said that the prime meridian was an arbitrary line passing through the town of Greenwich, in Great Britain, at which the earth’s longitude is zero. Suzanne s
till didn’t grasp what those words meant, but she did know that if she had memorized them and recited them back, her answer would have been counted as correct.

  “So,” Mrs. Gutterman concluded, “you can tell your father that B+ was not unfair after all.” She paused, then continued with a certain satisfaction. “Tell your father that a B+ is all you deserve.” Again she paused, as if reconsidering her words, and added more gently, “And that’s not so bad, really. It’s a good grade.”

  That evening Suzanne told her father about the test. “I didn’t know what the prime meridian was.”

  “The prime meridian,” he muttered. “Christ, I could have told you that. All right, then, never mind.” He picked up his newspaper and slapped its folds into place.

  Why didn’t he explain it, then, if he knew what it was? He must think it didn’t matter, Suzanne thought. He didn’t care whether she knew what the prime meridian was. What mattered was whether she could display her knowledge in public.

  For her father’s sake she didn’t repeat the teacher’s words. Their asperity was not lost on her, yet she knew they would humiliate Joseph more than they had humiliated her. But if the words struck her only lightly when she was nine, they stayed with her forever, gaining in density, to insinuate themselves whenever her performance fell short of perfection. They were less a mortification, she feared, than a possibly accurate statement of fact: B+ is all you deserve.

  But that came later on. Meanwhile, after the memorable day when Suzanne’s gift had been discovered, Gerda was quick to spread the word about it, as in the Middle Ages someone might report to the townspeople a sighting of a saint’s face on a crumbling wall or cast-off garment, and soon all the neighbors knew. In time Suzanne was taking piano lessons from Mrs. Gardenia, a canasta friend of Selma Gruber across the street, who extolled her mild way with young children. Mrs. Gardenia had short curly white hair fluffed around her head, pink cheeks, and small round wire-rimmed glasses. Her breath smelled of the wintergreen lozenges she liked to suck. She lived and taught in an apartment on Kings Highway, where Gerda accompanied Suzanne every Wednesday afternoon on the bus after kindergarten let out. Suzanne enjoyed the lessons. She liked learning new melodies, and liked reaching up to put her mother’s fare in the box on the bus, one dime.