Concert

It’s Christmas time in my sixth grade year, and for me there’s nothing better than the sounds, the feeling—the very fact—of my mother, out of bed, standing in the bathroom, getting ready to go to my orchestra concert.

I’ve been playing beginning violin in the middle school orchestra for three months; Mom’s cancer has been back for longer. My teacher invited me to join a small group to perform an adaptation of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. When we rehearse together, I get goosebumps. Mom says she wouldn’t miss this concert for anything.

She’s coming! She’s putting on clothes and brushing her hair. She’s sitting in the front seat as my dad steers our wood-paneled station wagon through slushy winter streets and I shiver in the back with cold and excitement. We’re normal.

And here is the middle school, windows alive and inviting. Our everyday orchestra room feels more valid, somehow, with rows of chairs set up, parents buzzing in, and dressed-up students on their best behavior. My own parents wish me luck and I sit in the front with my classmates, violin and bow on my lap, a bubble of contentment filling my chest.

Now we play. Violins, violas, and cellos creak out their separate parts but they all come together in simple harmonies that make my heart race. We’re squeaky and we’re new, but it feels like making magic. It’s over too soon. I search for my mom to see if the music did to her what it does to me.

There she is, sitting at the end of a row near the back. She looks so diminished from here, her long, purple-gray coat still wrapped around her fragile shoulders, her slightly matted head tilting to rest against the wooden door of the cabinet where we store our sheet music. The bubble inside me deflates and the music in my mind cuts off. Can’t she even hold her head up to listen to me play? Can’t she just pretend to be normal for a minute?

I can feel, or maybe just imagine, all my classmates looking at my mother, looking at me. I know what it is I have seen in the gentle eyes of my teacher—compassion. Pity. So she knows? Did she choose me for this ensemble just because she felt sorry for me?

My mother’s lips are pursed in endurance and her shadowed eyes are shut. She almost doesn’t look alive. Now the ache of realization. Oh. She can’t even hold up her head. She shouldn’t have come here for me.

I wish she weren’t here.

Twenty-nine years later, I walk into the bustling junior high gym to watch my daughter’s first band concert. She’s been playing the clarinet for two months, and she’s excited for me to hear how it sounds when all the instruments play together. I sit with my husband and two younger children on the front row of the hard, backless bleacher seats and wait for the music to start. Kids are running around on the gym floor, the squeaks of their shoes and the hum of the crowd filling the thick, heavy air. I take off my jacket.

Without warning, the beginning class starts to play and I jump up to film them with my phone. I focus on my second-chair girl, whose eyes are fixed on her music. Her cheeks puff in and out and the jumbled sounds collide, creating something new. Her face glows with the effort of making magic. She stands, I cheer, and I think of my mother.

Mom. She moved her feet out into the freezing night, two short months before the end, to sit on a hard chair in a confining crowd and listen, through her haze, to the scratchy attempts of her daughter’s first concerto. To clap for her girl. To give me a memory that she knew—and I tried not to know—would be one of our last.

I’m standing straight, my head is clear. My heart is strong but still it aches.

I wish she were here.