The Music Room by Laura Kalpakian

Author:Laura Kalpakian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 2015-08-12T14:47:12+00:00

Andantino

The eager-to-please Marcella vanished with Rose-Renee’s death, and she took on her little sister’s surly mantle. She was wary, self-absorbed, remaining resolutely an outsider at the various schools she attended, a stand-off socially, a stand-out academically. In high school she was a competitive solitary swimmer, competing only in solo events. She excelled at the piano, not genius, perhaps, but talent, and a vast capacity for practice – not rehearsal, she knew the difference. In keeping the solemn vow she and Rose-Renee had sworn not to be like Valerie, Linda, or Gloria, Marcella groomed herself to be like Dorothea, the champion: she set her sights on attending Scripps College for Women. Valerie, who knew nothing of Dorothea’s connection with Scripps, laughed and teased Marcella. Really? Scripps College for Women? Was Marcella a dyke, or just a snob?

The autumn following Rose-Renee’s death Marcella moved with Valerie to Vermont where Valerie got a teaching credential, and had affairs. After a couple of years Valerie fell in love again, this time with a man who was moving to take a job in Reno. Valerie and Marcella went with him, living with him till that broke up. Valerie became an emotional train-wreck: noisy, needy, indulging in alternating bouts of tears, drama, and drinking, until the next manlit her romantic fires.

Eventually – and to some extent, on the strength of the name – she had kept Denham – she got a job as vocal studies instructor at a lacklustre community college in central California, a vast suburban sprawl of pastel stucco, strip malls, and smoggy palms. In a community theatre production of Guys and Dolls Valerie met her second husband, Gary, a Lockheed engineer, generally inoffensive, but odious to Marcella. As a sneering teen, Marcella had cruel words for her mother, for Gary, for the community college Valerie wanted her to attend after high school.

To attend Scripps, a private college, Marcella would need more than good grades: she needed scholarships. She used the writing skills she’d once lavished writing novels about pirates to write essays, florid, evocative pieces, variations on the Heidi-esque tale in which the narrator went to live with her late lamented grandmother, how they had changed one another’s lives, the narrator bringing joy to the shut-in grandmother, the grandmother inspiring the girl to achievement, especially in music. In the scholarship interviews Marcella took a page from Mitch, and all but looked heavenward when she spoke of her sweet grandmother, the famous violinist who had. … Not a dry eye in the house. Augmenting her scholarship with loans and a summer job in the Tanglewood ticket office (thanks to nepotism and Linda, who had by now married her boyfriend, Mike), Marcella McNeill put greater San Jose behind her for ever, and in the fall of 1976, she enrolled at Scripps.

Like a wagon train encircled by hostile Indians, Scripps, a women’s college, was surrounded by men’s colleges. Men everywhere. Marcella tried out a number of these men, and while the boodling was fun, she didn’t fall in love, and she had lost the instinct of tarting up her words and actions to please others.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.