The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff

Bay—that’s 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€œWhat happened?” Mommy asked.
    â€œWell. He suddenly remembered another Ph.D. he wanted to get and took off for somewhere. Geneva or somewhere. I don’t know.” 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, “Well, so much for romantic love.”
    â€œChapter dozen,” Deirdre said. She ate some grapes. Nobody said anything. Then she said, “Well? Fleur?”
    My mother got up and picked up a piece of honeydew and a napkin and went back to the piano bench. “What do you mean, ‘Well? Fleur?’” she said.
    â€œYou know exactly what. You. And Alan. The floor doesn’t keep sliding out from under you without warning. What is it?”
    â€œYou mean what holds us together?” Mommy said.
    â€œOf 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?” Mommy was chewing melon. She was just a mother sitting on a piano bench chewing her food. “What would happen if Alan refused to go to a concert of yours?”
    Mommy looked at her. “Deirdre, he hasn’t gone to lots of them. The season is terribly long. He doesn’t always have time, he…”
    â€œWould you care to hear this one? ‘Bruce, I’m singing a concert on Sunday, I have a ticket for you.…’” Her voice went baritone: “‘Deirdre, I can’t imagine how that could possibly benefit me.’” Her natural voice came back. “Did you ever hear one like that?”
    Nobody said anything. Then Mommy said, “Possibly ben efit me?” She said it again. “Deirdre, was that a human being talking?”
    â€œNo, it was Bruce in Rochester. But I’m a human being, and I had to listen to it.”
    I was thinking about how my friends Sarah and Jessica come to my orchestra’s concerts. They like them. I don’t even play solos or anything, I just play. And Jessica and I go to Sarah’s 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; we’ve already agreed on that.
    Deirdre was braiding the fringe on the rug.
    Mommy said, kind of slowly, “What is it about Alan and me? Hmmm. It’s hard to put in words. You know. Well, there was that handed-down instrument thing in both our childhoods.”
    â€œRight,” Deirdre said. “I love that part. I tell it to lots of people.”
    It’s 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, that’s a Jewish kind of jazz, and he just kept playing.
    Then Daddy and Mommy met each other when they went to Juilliard