Limbo by A. Manette Ansay

Author:A. Manette Ansay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Knowing what I now know, I see we had many options. There were excellent summer workshops at places like Oberlin and Bloomington; there were boarding schools, such as Interlochen. It is very possible that Mrs. Gall tried to tell us about such things, but the information would have been lost in the general cultural avalanche she released on us each week. And even if I had applied to Interlochen, or a summer workshop, I doubt my parents would have let me go. I was the sort of sixteen-year-old girl who looked like she was twelve, who spent weekends on her grandmother’s farm playing Scrabble and working in the garden. I served at church suppers. I dotted my i’s with little hearts. Drugs frightened me—I refused a Tic-Tac once at a party, afraid it might be something illegal. Occasionally, one of my friends got hold of a bottle of Tickle Pink, but I wouldn’t even take a sip after I’d read that each swallow of alcohol killed millions of brain cells. If I was going to be a concert pianist, I’d need every one.

Mrs. Gall had given us the name of someone at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, a man who no longer performed very much because of crippling arthritis in his fingers. However, neither my mother nor I was eager to take Mrs. Gall’s recommendation, and we decided, without ever discussing it, that we’d find another teacher on our own. My mother called every public school music teacher she knew, music directors at Catholic churches, youth orchestras around the Midwest. The name of one teacher kept coming up, a woman at a music conservatory conveniently located in Milwaukee. My first teacher had warned me away from the place, saying it was too large, too commercially oriented. But Miss Williams, who we’d contacted as well, had heard good things about Miss Martinique—though she was surprised to hear Miss Martinique was still teaching.

“She had a number of successful students in the past,” Miss Williams said. “But by now she must be in her eighties, at least. I didn’t think she was still teaching.”

This comforted me. I imagined somebody like Grandma Krier, somebody completely unlike Mrs. Gall. And I liked the idea of Milwaukee. With my new driver’s license, I could get there by myself, without inconveniencing my mother. To our surprise, Miss Martinique had openings in her studio schedule. I auditioned and was accepted.

At a glance, Miss Martinique looked about seventy, but when she sat down beside you at the piano, you saw she could easily be a thousand years old. Her skin was the color of a jack-o’-lantern, waxy-looking beneath a truly remarkable layer of base makeup and powder. Whenever she nodded, or gestured with a small, gnarled hand, a powdery aura shimmered all around her. Her auburn-colored wig had tendency to slip, covering one ear. Every now and then she’d poke a long-nailed finger underneath it—sckritch, sckritch—and it seemed as if the sound itself, rather than the delicate movement, was what released yet another marvelous cloud of dust.

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