Chapter 3 F.A.Q.S #3
A young woman and two small boys were struggling to carry a stroller with a sleeping baby up the stairs.
Phoebe rushed to help. She picked up the crosspiece of the stroller and together with the mother and the children, got it to the top.
Everybody thanked her, as the baby slept.
“No problem,” Phoebe said. She sauntered back to her bench at the bottom of the stairs.
Wait. Her heart jumped. The violin was gone.
How could that be? It wasn’t true. The whole thing was a dream—the station, the woman with her stroller and her children.
Phoebe stood bewildered, looking up and down, but, of course, she wasn’t dreaming.
She was an idiot. That’s how fast she lurched into self-loathing.
Seriously? Seriously? Had she left Jeanne’s gift in the subway?
Had she fucked this up too? At which point she realized that she had returned to the wrong bench.
Her violin was one bench over with a security guard hovering.
“Do not leave bags unattended,” he intoned, even as she snatched the instrument. She clutched Jeanne’s gift to her chest and ran away.
As soon as she was out of sight, she knelt, unzipped the case, unfolded a piece of green velvet, and took out the violin to check for injuries.
There were two bows in the case, and Phoebe tightened one, stood up, and started tuning.
She closed her eyes and listened to the whoosh and roar of trains, the tide of people all around her.
No one stopped and no one looked as she played scales.
Mercifully, no one could hear her blunder through folk songs and scraps of Bach, Mozart, Lalo, the music she had known.
Her fingers were thick, her bowing scratchy.
After a few minutes, Phoebe stowed the instrument again.
The next day, she went back. Once again, she took the train into the city.
This time she didn’t even make it to the subway.
In the station, there was a guy playing an amplified acoustic guitar, so she drifted farther down.
Passing commuters drowned her out. Unamplified, her music could not carry, and that was a relief.
Nobody heard and nobody cared how rough she sounded.
Scales, arpeggios. She practiced until her hands grew warm. One by one, she played pieces she had learned at five, “The Irish Washerwoman,” a Hanukkah medley. Snatches of Vivaldi returned to her. Bits of Corelli.
Glancing down, she was embarrassed to find seven dollars and change in her violin case. She had not exactly earned the money. Her first thought was that someone had felt sorry for her.
Thinking she would give the cash away, she looked for the guitarist near the bench, but he had disappeared. The morning crowds had thinned, and it was lunchtime now. By the station clock she saw that she’d been playing for two hours.
She took her cash out to the concourse and went to a doughnut shop to buy some water. She should have brought her own. She was against disposable bottles, but she was so thirsty she bought one anyway.
“Anything else?” the cashier asked.
Phoebe gazed at the racks of muffins, crullers, doughnuts, cronuts. “Just one of those.”
“The glazed?”
“Yeah, that one,” Phoebe said.
She had read that nutritionally, doughnuts had no redeeming value; that they were literally nothing, empty calories—but as sugar melted on her tongue, the pillowy doughnut filled her. She had eaten real food for so long, she had forgotten how good nothing tasted.
—
She began spending any money thrown her way on cheap treats in the station. A cookie or a cup of super sweet hot chocolate. She earned only a few dollars, enough for a cruller or a candy bar. Even so, she enjoyed spending the cash.
She was rusty. She almost returned a ten-dollar bill because she thought it was too much.
She was ridiculously overpaid. That was why she began working through a Bach partita—so that she would be worth people’s time and money.
This is practice, she decided, even though she played in public.
This is practice and this is practice. She rehearsed her Bach for hours and days until she got some of it back, the double stops and the cascading phrases.
Then, right after a train announcement, she decided, now I am performing.
She stepped into her music and her heart pounded.
She felt a strange stage fright. No mistakes!
This was her recital, although she told nobody.
She performed at least once each day. She would set up and practice, playing at half speed, rehearsing one passage at a time.
In slow motion, she would play each phrase.
Safe in all the noise, she did her work until she decided she was ready.
Then she would take a breath and start. Sometimes two, sometimes three people gathered.
She tried the cream doughnuts, the jelly-filled, the chocolate sprinkles. She purchased orange soda. She went to the greasy pizza place and bought calzone. At home her mother said, “A healthy young woman can’t live on almonds!”
Her father said, “I don’t understand what you do all day.”
“I’m thinking,” Phoebe said.
They looked at her. “What are you thinking about?” her mother asked nervously.
“Right now?” Phoebe deflected the question. “I’m thinking about you.”
They were touched, but they weren’t satisfied. “We want you to be safe,” her mother said.
“I want you to take public transportation,” said Phoebe. “You don’t need two cars.” She showed her parents the bus schedule. From where they lived, her father could get to the office on two buses. Her mother could just take one bus if she walked 1.9 miles—and that would be exercise!
Of course, her parents didn’t listen. They argued late at night instead.
Dan was tired of Phoebe’s dogmatism. Melanie thought Phoebe seemed more herself.
“I think she’s doing better!” Melanie insisted on this point, until Phoebe began cleaning out the closets.
All through the weekend, Phoebe gathered piles of old coats, forgotten shoes, discolored T-shirts.
She left most of the stuffed animals, but she stacked up games and puzzles to carry downstairs.
“I’m not sure about this,” Melanie began, and then she said, “No, not the solar system!”
“Thank you,” Dan said. “Yes,” he cheered softly when a YMCA van pulled up to cart the pile away.
Two days later, Melanie returned home to find Phoebe sitting on the couch with a young man!
A high school friend? A new acquaintance?
Melanie did not recognize him, but he and Phoebe were talking eagerly.
It took Melanie a moment to see that they were working through some papers on a clipboard.
Phoebe had contacted this guy for a free estimate on solar panels.
“They’d barely cost you anything,” she told her parents at dinner.
This time, Melanie was the good one, studying the paperwork. Dan was recalcitrant and wouldn’t look, even after Phoebe took a magnet and posted the estimate on the refrigerator. Dan said solar was ridiculous because their roof had the wrong angles. Even so, he didn’t throw the estimate away.
It’s a process, Phoebe thought, as she took the rattling, swishing morning train. Little by little, she told herself, arriving at the station. She had her parents composting again, although Dan told her straight out: No new chickens.
Melanie thought that Phoebe’s eyes shone brighter.
Dan was afraid she had a manic look. Both her parents sensed a shift.
They studied Phoebe’s face, her battered shoes, her hands.
Melanie glimpsed calluses, the old grooves on Phoebe’s fingertips.
“Are you playing again?” she asked, and she was sure of it when Phoebe didn’t answer.
It couldn’t last, this secret life, this music in plain sight. One morning she heard a man calling her name.
“Phoebe?” It was Uncle Steve standing in disbelief with his coffee and bagel. He worked in the city, and, inevitably, even in the crowds, he’d found her. “What are you doing here?”
What does it look like? Phoebe thought, but she said, “Just practicing.”
That was the end. She knew Steve would tell immediately.
Even before she arrived home, her parents pounced. On the train, her phone lit up with questions. Where was she? Was she really busking in Penn Station? Was it true? Was it safe? Was she okay?
That night they sat her down and asked what was happening, and how long this had been going on.
Their words were anxious, but their voices eager.
Initiative! Hadn’t Dan predicted that Phoebe would return to music?
Hadn’t Melanie said don’t rush her? Well, that’s what she’d been thinking, anyway.
Drifting off to sleep, Phoebe heard rueful laughter, a wistful conspiracy to follow her.
For two days, she evaded them. She played near the escalators—ready to run. She tried a spot outside, but the humidity wasn’t good for Jeanne’s violin. Phoebe retreated to her usual place.
On the third day, while playing Bach, Phoebe saw two phones held high—her parents filming.
They’d found her. Run her down at last! She bent into the music, but they saw everything, loose coins in her open case, a bag of—were they gummy worms?
Turning away, Phoebe missed her parents’ wide eyes.
Really? And she had them eating pumpkin seeds?
Phoebe played on, as far as memory would take her. To be honest, she had been better at fourteen. As a young child, she had been quicker, sweeter. Where she was patchy now, she had been sure and true. Her tone had been deeper, although she’d felt the music less.
Even so, she had Bach in her hands. Her parents heard that, despite the trains. Phoebe finished her partita with a flourish, and her father punched the air. Her parents whooped and clapped so that people turned around, even in their hurry.
“Stop. You guys!”
“What?” Melanie asked, all saintly, unconditional.
“Good job, sweetie,” Dan said.
Phoebe just shook her head.
One more piece, Dan and Melanie pleaded, as she packed up the violin. Just one more. But it was time, past time to go home.
“Come on.”
“Where to?” her father asked.
“Let’s get lunch,” Melanie suggested.
They were all set for a day out in the city, but Phoebe told them no. She had to pack, and figure out her housing, not to mention classes. “Winter break,” she promised. She loved her parents, but she couldn’t take care of them forever.