Bayâthatâs in Maine, Allegra. Lobster and seaweed, and sand in the toasted marshmallows. And ooh-ooh over the beautiful mussel shells. The whole google-eyed thing.â
âWhat happened?â Mommy asked.
âWell. He suddenly remembered another Ph.D. he wanted to get and took off for somewhere. Geneva or somewhere. I donât know.â Deirdre slid down from the sofa onto the floor across from me. She picked up a bunch of grapes. Her shiny blue dress was getting all crinkled. She stared with her great big eyes at the grapes in her hand.
My mother folded her hands like somebody in an old-fashioned painting and said, âWell, so much for romantic love.â
âChapter dozen,â Deirdre said. She ate some grapes. Nobody said anything. Then she said, âWell? Fleur?â
My mother got up and picked up a piece of honeydew and a napkin and went back to the piano bench. âWhat do you mean, âWell? Fleur?ââ she said.
âYou know exactly what. You. And Alan. The floor doesnât keep sliding out from under you without warning. What is it?â
âYou mean what holds us together?â Mommy said.
âOf course. I mean, I know: you fell in love that day in Morningside Heights, and you have David and Allegra, and here you are. But what is it?â Mommy was chewing melon. She was just a mother sitting on a piano bench chewing her food. âWhat would happen if Alan refused to go to a concert of yours?â
Mommy looked at her. âDeirdre, he hasnât gone to lots of them. The season is terribly long. He doesnât always have time, heâ¦â
âWould you care to hear this one? âBruce, Iâm singing a concert on Sunday, I have a ticket for you.â¦ââ Her voice went baritone: ââDeirdre, I canât imagine how that could possibly benefit me.ââ Her natural voice came back. âDid you ever hear one like that?â
Nobody said anything. Then Mommy said, âPossibly ben efit me?â She said it again. âDeirdre, was that a human being talking?â
âNo, it was Bruce in Rochester. But Iâm a human being, and I had to listen to it.â
I was thinking about how my friends Sarah and Jessica come to my orchestraâs concerts. They like them. I donât even play solos or anything, I just play. And Jessica and I go to Sarahâs dance recitals. We clap like mad. And when Jessica gets to be an architect, Sarah and I are going to stand outside her buildings and applaud; weâve already agreed on that.
Deirdre was braiding the fringe on the rug.
Mommy said, kind of slowly, âWhat is it about Alan and me? Hmmm. Itâs hard to put in words. You know. Well, there was that handed-down instrument thing in both our childhoods.â
âRight,â Deirdre said. âI love that part. I tell it to lots of people.â
Itâs a funny coincidence. When Mommy was a little kid in Kansas, somebody died and left a violin to her parents. Nobody knew what to do with it and Mommy picked it up. She wanted to play it, but it was too big. At the school where she went, some teacher arranged to get her a half-size. Then they found her a violin teacher, and she had to go on a Greyhound bus to her lessons sixty-five miles away every Saturday. She kept playing and she grew into the full-size. That was how she started.
And when Daddy was a little kid in New York, somebody died and left a cello to his parents. Same thing: nobody knew what to do with it and Daddy tried to play it. Same thing at his school: somebody found him a smaller cello and he started that way. He took a subway to his lessons. His teacher was a really old man who used to play in the New York Philharmonic but he was too old to do it anymore. Daddy started playing klezmer music in high school, thatâs a Jewish kind of jazz, and he just kept playing.
Then Daddy and Mommy met each other when they went to Juilliard
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