The Metropolis by Matthew Gallaway Page A

still craved the operas her mother played in the living room after school, and she would surreptitiously crack her door to hear, at least until Bea walked by and accused her of doing just that. Or on Saturday afternoons, during the Met broadcasts, when she would sit on the end of the couch and flip through a magazine—or absently blacken in the eyes and teeth of the people in the ads, which she knew her mother hated—as though it were a punishment to be there. She could hear melodies in the flipping pages of a book or the scuffing of her feet against the floor, and could feel musicin the midst of her sexual fantasies, in the warm caresses of unknown hands and fingertips that would ultimately deliver her away from her angry restlessness for a few seconds.
    Gina paused and took a deep breath. She felt fragile and lifeless and barely intact, like an egg whose insides have been blown out through a pinhole. It did not occur to her that what she said to Maria was truer than she could have imagined, and that, as long as she wanted Maria to escape, there was a part of her that would not resist pushing her daughter away in the most effective way possible. “Maria, you can be so much more than I was.”
    Though moved enough to wrap her arms gingerly around Gina, Maria felt shocked and even a little affronted. Did this mean that Gina’s effusive cheeriness was just an act? Was she really miserable? And even if she was, was it Maria’s fault? Why couldn’t her mother just leave her alone? Or better, why couldn’t her mother just acknowledge the ambivalence Maria now felt toward everything—including, or especially, music—particularly if she felt the same way? Maria was suspicious, as if she had recognized a complacence in her mother that would have to be overcome in herself.
    M ARIA WAS HALFWAY through tenth grade when the music teacher was replaced by Kathy Warren, a trained soprano who created a sensation thanks to her straight blond hair, bell-bottom blue jeans, and turtleneck sweater. It was unimaginable to the student body that someone so young (in truth twenty-eight, despite a rumor that she was seventeen) could be a teacher, and they watched her every movement in collective astonishment until she was officially introduced at assembly, after which most of them vacantly stared at their shoes or at the cotton-ball-size snow flurries floating around outside.
    Later that day, Kathy stationed herself outside the chorus room, where she stopped students to lobby them to sign up for her class.Maria—late for geometry but in no rush to get there—drifted past, and Kathy did not hesitate to step in front of her to make a pitch. No longer as thin as she had been, Maria at sixteen possessed a body that called to mind the sleeping hills and valleys of Western Pennsylvania; her hair was as black as her skin was pale, while her large eyes had been transformed into pools of jade. If her fellow students still hated her, they left her alone; there was a sense that if sufficiently provoked, she might ignite their own pubescent insecurities into wisps of smoke she would brush away with a flick of her outcast wrist. Maria gritted her teeth and glowered at the petite and slender Kathy, whose cheerful expression repulsed her. “What? Really? No.”
    “Come on! A bunch of other kids have signed up—including a few cute guys—”
    “I don’t like music,” Maria uttered, being more deceptive than untrue, given that it never left her alone.
    “Okay, what about guys?”
    Maria scowled. “In chorus class?”
    “Yeah. You’ll see, it’ll be fun—singing is good for the soul!” Kathy leaned in and spoke in a more conspiratorial tone: “Plus I told everyone else if they don’t like it after two weeks, they can drop and go back to study hall—no questions asked.”
    Maria’s lips creaked into something closer to a smile. Whether it was Kathy’s diction or her posture—or even that “good for the soul” business—Maria suspected