Sunday, September 26, 1999
Tempo: adagio, then a tempo

Sunday night. The ironing's done. Mom is asleep in the dining room with the concentrator humming. Mark is upstairs doing calculus with the radio on. Jay called at nine to say good night, which he has started doing, and which I have started waiting for.

Two years ago this fall I started this page with Mark sighing over my shoulder. I was thirty-six and separated and selling oranges. Since then I've been dissolved. I've been a cigarette girl and a friend of the bride and a priestess, and once, for four nights, a voice in the dark that nobody saw. My mother lives in my dining room. My son is seventeen and wants to build bridges. I have a teacher who puts her hand on my back and tells me where to breathe.

I sing second soprano in the back row. This season I'll stand in Sarastro's temple and look devout, and I'll love it.

But I'll tell you something I haven't told Mrs. Weaver yet. Last week I went to the music store downtown and bought my own vocal score of The Magic Flute, the whole opera, not just the chorus parts, and one afternoon when nobody was home I sat down at the piano in the dining room and played through Papagena. Just to look. Mom woke up halfway through and said, from the bed, "That one. Do that one."

So: a tempo. It means go back to the speed you started at, after you've slowed down for a while. It means, more or less, onward.

The Magic Flute opens November 12. If you're in Cleveland, come. I'm the tall one, back row, on the left.

Thursday, September 23, 1999
Tempo: allegro

First music rehearsal of the season, Tuesday night. The union hall with its knocking radiators, fifty-some people with new scores and sharpened pencils and travel mugs, and Galen in what Sharon calls his first-day cardigan. Hugs all around. Who got married, who got divorced, who had a grandbaby. Two new altos, a new tenor who's going to be good, and a new soprano who stood next to me and asked, "Is it always this friendly?" I said, "Wait till tech week."

We read through the end of Act I. After a summer of Italian, German feels like walking in somebody else's shoes. The vowels are all in different places, and the consonants pile up at the ends of the words like snow at the end of a driveway.

The chorus that ends the first act is the whole company hailing Sarastro, the wise high priest of the temple of Isis and Osiris. Isis again. Last spring I was her priestess in Aida, beside the Nile, singing in the dark. Now I'm back in her temple, in another century and another language, and this time the men do most of the singing to her while the sopranos stand at the back and look devout. I'm good at that. I've had practice.

Galen stopped us twice. The third time he didn't stop us, and when we got to the end he put his hands down and said, "There it is. Hello again, everybody."

Sunday, September 19, 1999
Tempo: andantino

Mark turned seventeen yesterday.

We had his birthday dinner here so his grandmother could come to it, which meant Randy came to this house for supper for the first time in two and a half years. He brought a cake from the bakery Mark likes, and he and Mark talked about the Browns, who are back this year after three seasons without a team, and who lost their first game 43 to nothing to Pittsburgh. Randy says it builds character. Mark says they don't need any more character.

Mom gave Mark her father's pocket watch. It's gold, from 1919, and it doesn't run. She said, "It stopped the year my father died, and nobody ever had the heart to fix it." Mark held it in his hand for a long time, and then he said he'd find somebody who could. Mom said that would be fine, that would be just fine, and then she had to adjust her tubing for a while.

Seventeen. When I started this page he was fifteen and couldn't stand to be in the room while I typed. Last night, after everybody had gone home and Mom was asleep, he sat on the arm of the couch and read the whole thing over my shoulder, all two years of it, and didn't say a word until he got to the end. Then he said, "You should have put in more about the oranges."

Sunday, August 29, 1999
Tempo: allegretto

Mark started his senior year on Wednesday. He drove himself, of course, in the car we bought him in June from a man Randy works with: a 1989 Escort with a hundred and ten thousand miles on it and a tape deck that only plays out of the left speaker. He loves it more than he loves either of his parents.

He wants to be an engineer. Civil, he says: bridges and roads. He's been saying so since he was nine and built a bridge across the bathtub out of Popsicle sticks, and I thought it would pass, and it hasn't. He's looking at Ohio State, and at Case, and at a school in Michigan that has already sent him three envelopes.

Tuesday night Randy came over, and the three of us sat at the kitchen table with the college brochures spread out between us like a jigsaw puzzle. It was the first time the three of us had sat at that table together since the spring of 1997. Nobody mentioned it. At the end of the evening Mom called out from her bed in the dining room, "Engineering. Good. They never go broke."

It was a nice night. I want that on the record.

Sunday, August 15, 1999
Tempo: allegro

Re-auditions were Thursday. The letter came yesterday. I'm back.

The new season: The Magic Flute in November, a small chamber opera in February with no chorus at all, and La Traviata in April, which was the first opera I ever sang with this company, in 1994, as a party guest with a feather in my hair.

The Magic Flute is Mozart's, from 1791, the last year of his life. It's in German, with spoken dialogue between the musical numbers, the way a Broadway musical has. There's a prince and a bird-catcher, a magic flute and a set of magic bells, and a Queen of the Night who sings high F's, which nobody should ever ask of a second soprano. Most of the chorus music belongs to the men, who are the priests in Sarastro's temple. The women's chorus comes in for the big finales and otherwise waits. Galen calls this "the year the sopranos rest."

He also told me in the hallway that the maid, Annina, in Traviata will be cast from the chorus in the spring, and that he'd like me to look at the music. He walked away before I could say I'd think about it.

Jay and I don't have coffee after rehearsal anymore. We have dinner on Thursdays. Every Friday morning Mom asks how it went before she says good morning.

Sunday, July 25, 1999
Tempo: cantabile

Carrie got married Saturday before last, at a Lutheran church out in the suburbs, to a band director she's been going with since college. I sang Schubert's "Ave Maria" during communion. My knees were steadier than they were for the High Priestess. My eyes weren't. Half the chorus came and sat together in a block, and when the congregation stood for the last hymn they sang it in four parts without discussing it first, and the bride's grandmother turned all the way around in her pew to see where the sound was coming from.

Tuesday at my lesson Mrs. Weaver said she wants me to start auditioning for small roles. Not here: other companies around Ohio, the smaller ones that cast local singers. A Papagena, she said. A Frasquita. "You're thirty-eight," she said. "That's young for this." I said I'd think about it, which is my answer to everything she says, and which she knows means yes, later.

But here's the thing I couldn't get out right in her front room. I love the back row. When it's going well, you can't hear yourself at all. You hear the section. You match your vowel to the woman on your left, you breathe when she breathes, you lean into the dissonance together and come out of it together, and fifty people make one sound bigger than any of them. Being one-fiftieth of that isn't settling. It's a different thing to love.

I'll look at Papagena, though. Just to look.

Sunday, July 4, 1999
Tempo: allegro moderato

Mom has been living in my dining room for eight days.

Things I've learned: You can't vacuum around Mom without vacuuming her tubing. The concentrator hums all night, and after three nights you stop hearing it, and after four you can't sleep without it. Mom gets up at six, like always, wants coffee, like always, and wants to make it herself, like always. Now she can, because Mark measured right.

Mom also has opinions about my practicing, and they come through the doorway. "Flat." "Better." "Do the one from the wedding." (She means "Caro mio ben." It's not from a wedding. I've stopped explaining.)

Tonight we watched the fireworks from the front porch, the tops of them anyway, over the houses, coming up from downtown. Mom in the lawn chair at the very end of her fifty feet of tubing, Mark on the steps, me on the glider. Jay came by with a bag of sweet corn from a farm stand out past the airport, and grilled hamburgers in my backyard without being asked, and then cleaned the grill without being asked. Mom has decided she likes him. "He cleans the grill," she said, as though that settled it. Maybe it does.