Chapter Text
My earliest memory was of my mother telling my brother to “watch the baby”. Maybe I had an earlier memory, of where the windshield-wipers carved a shark’s fin shape from the rain drops on the car windshield, or the mild shock at waking up after dreaming about a stuffed toy that were a bunch of other stuffed toys combined. I didn’t know yet what time was in any of these, so let’s agree that “watch the baby,” was my first memory. I knew the meanings of the words even back then, or maybe the sounds stick in my mind and I learned the meaning later, and the meanings of everybody else’s words thread through me so deeply that I forgot a time that I didn’t know what the sounds meant. Sometimes I wish I could return to that imaginary back-then when everyone's words were noise and didn't matter.
My mother was talking to no one. I crawled out of the playpen, got a limb pinned or tangled in the accordion wall, and cried like a baby because I was one. Mother’s feet. Father’s shoes. Mother’s voice (“I told you to watch the baby! Ugh,”); father’s voice (“He’s not here. You know that.”)
Part of that earliest memory, learning the meaning of silence, or the way the air pulled taughtly between the three of us, and I stopped crying because I could see them right there and not making any move to help me get out of the tangle.
By the time my dad started leaving me at daycare, I had enough experience to turn time into a background noise. Now I think of every day as like a bar of musical notation, reset to the same tempo. Back then, I didn’t have the barriers in my mind that sorted noise from music. Sometimes other kids from day care had brothers or sisters. Sometimes other kids from grade school had brothers and sisters.
This all led to another early memory of my asking my dad if I had a sister or a brother. Maybe I meant to ask ‘will I’ and not ‘do I already’ and my father looked really scared, and he looked right at me while he looked it, and he answered loudly, “No you don’t. You don’t!” I was sorry to have asked him, and I started to cry. He hugged me, not even too tightly, but by then I was afraid of him, and he said to me, “Your mother’s…imaginative.”
In his hug, trapped there and stifled, all those moments of memories that I was forming began to make sense. I couldn’t escape it. My mother would leave me trapped by a playpen wall because she believed her imagination. I remembered waking up, devastated that the toy I dreamed about didn’t exist; my mother would never wake up, she would always look for that toy.
My father spoke again. “You’ll do better than that, won’t you? Better than either of us,” he pulled away so I saw his face again, and I didn’t want to be there, but there was a part of me grateful that he wasn’t standing by like when I was stuck on the playpen wall. He was holding me and talking to me, so I was here to him, even if I felt trapped and stifled and didn’t like what he was saying and how: “You’ll be perfect,” with the same desperation and stress that some parents have on their faces when they beg their children to ‘be good’. Other kids would be begged to ‘be good’. I had to be perfect, their perfect plan, the redemption of imperfect parents. I had to be perfect for them. For myself, even, because what if I got trapped in an accordion-wall playpen again and this time dad would just stand there? I couldn’t count on his hugs, and I didn’t even really want it if he was going to be like this, but what if this was the only sign of care that I ever got? I’ll take it, then. I decided then. I’ll be perfect.
Nobody warned me that was impossible.
I keep thinking that I could have made it if only this, or if-only that, but I can’t turn back time. Not only that, but I get the feeling that I don’t really mean it when I say ‘I should’ve practiced more instead of flirting with some jazz stoner.' I couldn’t have practiced more. Somebody else can learn from their mistakes and get better in the future. Everyone else can hear noise and improvise music. That’s their life. In the meantime I have to play what’s on the page.
My life has a composer, and he wrote Botch This, Fortissimo over sixteen bars of my life.
My dad says they didn’t know when it was. I look at his face and I know that’s what he really means: he didn’t know. I told them when my recital would be, I asked them if they could make it there, mom said she would schedule it…I told them, I asked them, I followed up, that morning even, and still they didn’t know. If he even said the words “it slipped my mind” I could understand that. Instead, I look at his face when he says he didn’t know, and I know that he’s telling the truth. No matter what I say, how many times I say it, I’m not even here to them.
They knew I’d botch my recital, I think that to myself, only the words because I knew it wasn’t true. If they knew that I would botch something so simple and straightforward, and didn’t go to my recital because of that, then it would mean that I was on their mind after all. I try to tell myself that ‘They knew!’ like ‘they almost cared, too!’ but the words clatter in my thoughts like noise, they’re nothing, they mean nothing.
There’s something wrong with us, I think that to myself, and this time something juicy drips from the words. I think to myself, I can’t be perfect because that’s impossible when there’s something wrong with us. Whatever makes organs slimy, that’s what’s pouring out of the words that I tell myself. It’s like inhaling underwater, how these sting. Why can’t ‘They knew I’d botch my recital so they didn’t go,’ be true? Why does it have to be that ‘There’s something wrong with us’ when I can’t fix that. I can’t do better than where I grew and how I was tended.
There’s something wrong with me, I think that to myself. Why can’t I be made of clockwork, or tuned strings and precisely-carved hammers, glossy ivory and ebony. That’s perfection that turns noise into music. Blood pounded in my ears, erratic and off-tempo, flooded blush over my face and arms in humiliation, and maybe there was a lot going on but what should have been my final thought was this: Get it out of me, all of it, get this blood away from me.
I’ll never be perfect, that’s impossible with this blood. After the recital I cut my losses, and some body parts, and woke up in the hospital bed with such a headache.
It was recognizing the hospital room that got me trying to parse the boy by association. I thought he was one of those nurses in training, at first, or what do they call it on television medical dramas? They do residencies. He should be in some medical professional-student’s uniform, though, shouldn’t he be? I got the feeling that the hoodie he wore wasn’t there before I wondered why he wasn’t in surgical scrubs or a lab coat. Whatever, he wore it now, the young man with short hair the color of my dad’s hair in old pictures, and wavy like my mother’s hair, with the jaw that made both of us too angular to be pretty.
Coincidence, I thought to myself. He’s a stranger lost in the hospital building.
He mouthed, “Natalie?” and I thought he threw his voice because this boy was right beside me but I heard my name somewhere out the corner of the room.
I was already awake, I’m sure of that, but I sat up ready to punch or claw at him. This was weird. This was wrong.
“You’re awake,” Henry said from the corner of the room. His eyes were bleary. I couldn’t hear the rest of what he was saying because something in my ears made a sound like mic feedback when the jack isn’t properly in the plug and the electrical signals make a sound like eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!
“Where is he?” I asked, because I didn’t see that first boy with the wavy russett hair move from my bedside, but I looked away for two seconds and he was suddenly not in the room.
Through the fading tinnitus, Henry’s voice was saying, “...took your mother to see her doctor, and told me to watch you.” He straightened out the corners of a small paper bag in on hand, so that the opening was open, and he offered it to me.
I said, “That better be drugs or booze.”
He said, “Grapes,” which they were, seedless green grapes and a bottle of water.
He drew up a chair, and after I munched on half a bunch and drank enough water that the headache went away with the last of the tinnitus, Henry told me that it was like a speed-run of the what-are-your-intentions-with-my-daughter talk. Henry said he got this whole speech prepared about how amazing I am, and was even going to tell my dad off for not being there at my recital to watch me shine, but he barely got the introduction out and half of the first sentence when my dad told him “nice to meet watch Natalie call if something comes up,” and then my dad didn’t leave Henry any contact information.
That sounded like him. I sank back into bed and sulked. “You could’ve raped me while I was unconscious and alone here.”
“And let the grapes get squished??”
I lowered my voice, dad-like. “Is that what kids are calling it these days?"
“Yeah I can’t rape you today. Can it just be my turn? You rape me?”
“I’m anemic,” I whined. “Maybe later.”
Henry checked his watch and we scheduled my raping him for after the hospital took me off suicide surveillance. And after I got settled in at his place, because I didn’t want to go back to my room and clean everything up. And after the iron and folate supplements kicked in.
By then neither of us were in much of a mood but Henry did get around to telling me that maybe it’s disappointing to me that suicide didn’t stick, but that he was really happy to have me stay alive for one more day.
Also that if I were unconscious or a corpse, I couldn’t give him any input regarding his performance, and then he couldn’t get better as a beginner.
It’s impossible for anybody to be perfect. I can’t help being charmed, all right and smitten too, that Henry would try. For once, just once in all my life out of billions of people in the world, somebody else wants to be perfect for me. Not me trying the impossible for parents who don’t try at all.
A platitude echoes in my mind, with the same falseness as thinking ‘My parents knew I’d botch something so simple’. The platitude was, ‘They try their best.’
My recital didn’t slip my dad’s mind. He just didn’t know. My parents aren’t trying, they can’t, they don’t know the first thing about how.
Henry was going to fail so hard at being perfect, I knew that because failing perfection was all that I knew too, but him I could see trying. That second batch of seedless grapes had seeds. He was trying.
I tried to break up with him, now that he knew what the rest of my life was like. I didn’t want him to know, and I think Henry was going to tell me his big speech about how amazing I am when I interrupted him, wondered aloud why that other boy from the hospital was following us.
No more weed, Henry decided. It was making me paranoid.