Thursday, December 31, 1998
Tempo: rubato

Last night of 1998. Mark is at a friend's house, where there are parents; I've checked. I'm home with a pot of tea, the Christmas tree lights and the radio.

What a year. In February I was dissolved. In March I was a cigarette girl. In May my mother put out her last cigarette on the bottom of my shoe. In September my son drove away from me in my own car. In between I learned to breathe into somebody's hand.

Rubato is the right marking for tonight. It means robbed time. You stretch one part of a phrase and pay it back in another, so it all comes out even in the end. That's how this year felt.

And now the news. At the last Butterfly, Galen pinned a notice on the board by the stage door. The spring production is Aida. The small role of the High Priestess will be cast from within the chorus. Interested sopranos may audition on January 27.

The High Priestess sings in the temple scene at the end of Act I. She's never seen. She sings from offstage, calling on the god, a long winding line with harps under it, and the priests answer her. It's a few minutes of music in a three-hour opera. It's a solo.

I've never sung a solo in my life outside the shower, the firm's Christmas party and the ladies' room at the Belmont, which has wonderful acoustics.

I told Mrs. Weaver about it at my last lesson before Christmas. She said, "You're doing it." I said I'd think about it. She said, "Think about it while you learn it." The music is on the piano.

Sunday, November 15, 1998
Tempo: adagio

Butterfly opened Friday the thirteenth. Nobody in the theater would say the date out loud.

Our Butterfly is a young soprano from Philadelphia, twenty-six, who sings it like she's fifteen and also like she's a hundred. In Act I we come up the hill behind her with our parasols, singing, and I get to watch the back of her head and hear her voice float up over all of ours. That's the best seat in the house.

For the Humming Chorus we stand in the wings, stage left, thirty of us in kimonos and socks, squeezed between the fly rail and a rack of paper lanterns. We can't see the conductor, so we watch the assistant conductor, who watches the conductor on a little black-and-white television and passes it along to us with one finger. Friday we were perfect. I mean it. Sharon held my hand through the last chord, and when we cut off, not one of us breathed until the lights went to black.

A story every opera chorus tells itself on a bad night: when Butterfly opened at La Scala in 1904, it was a disaster. The audience jeered. Puccini took it back and revised it, and a few months later it opened in another city and was a success, and it has been a success ever since.

Mom came Saturday, with the cane she hates. Six months without a cigarette. She didn't cough once all evening. She says she was concentrating.

Jay and I have coffee after every rehearsal now. Sharon calls him "your tenor." He is not my tenor. He's a tenor.

Friday, September 18, 1998
Tempo: allegro con brio

Mark is sixteen today. He took his driving test this morning (I let him miss first period) and passed, and drove himself to school, alone, in my car, while I stood on the front walk in my bathrobe and watched him go to the corner and signal and turn and disappear. Then I went inside and called in late to work, which I have never once done, and sat at the kitchen table for twenty minutes doing nothing at all.

Rehearsals for Madama Butterfly started Tuesday. The women's chorus has two jobs in Butterfly. In Act I we're Butterfly's girlfriends, coming up the hill behind her on her wedding day, offstage at first and then on. And later, in the long night when Butterfly and Suzuki and the little boy sit up waiting for Pinkerton's ship to come in, the chorus sings offstage with closed mouths. The Humming Chorus. No words, no vowels, just a long soft line hummed in the dark, with nowhere at all to hide. If one person sags flat, everyone in the building hears it.

Galen rehearsed it for forty-five minutes Wednesday, and we never once got to the end without his stopping us. He said, "You're humming like people waiting for a bus. She is waiting for her whole life."

Butterfly is fifteen on her wedding day. I knew that, the way you know things about operas. This fall it sits differently. I came home from rehearsal Wednesday and Mark was eating cereal at the counter at a quarter to eleven, all elbows and ears, and I thought: fifteen.

Sunday, August 9, 1998
Tempo: allegretto

Every August the company re-auditions the whole chorus. Everybody, even the ones who've been in it since the Carter administration. You go into a rehearsal room one at a time, sing about a minute of something for Galen and the music director, sight-read a few lines they put in front of you, and go home and wait for the letter.

I sang "Caro mio ben." Galen usually stops people after eight bars. He let me go to the end. Then he wrote something on his pad, looked up, and said, "Jane, what happened to you?" I said, "Lessons." He said, "It shows. Keep going." The letter came yesterday. I'm back. Second soprano, back row, where I like it.

Then, in the parking lot after the audition, Jay Bauman, who sings tenor (one of the good ones, which means he comes in on time and doesn't sing at you), asked if I'd like to get a cup of coffee. I haven't been asked to coffee by a man since 1980. I said yes before I'd thought about it.

We went to a diner on Lorain Avenue and sat for two hours. He's divorced too, three years. He teaches chemistry at a high school on the east side. He has a daughter who's fourteen and won't talk to him about anything but her cat. We talked about Puccini and our kids and whether either of us knew what we were doing. Neither of us does.

That's all it was. Coffee. I'm writing it down because it was coffee.

Sunday, June 21, 1998
Tempo: moderato

Summer. For a chorus singer, summer is the long rest between movements. The company is dark until August. I miss it the way you miss a noisy relative.

Mark has his temporary permit and drives me everywhere I'll let him. He's a careful driver, which he gets from his father, and he brakes like he's angry about something, which he gets from me. Tuesdays he drives me to Lakewood for my lesson and sits outside in the car with a library book about the space program and the windows rolled up so he doesn't have to hear me.

What he'd hear: the old Italian songs, the ones every voice student in America has been handed since about the Coolidge administration. "Caro mio ben" this month. A handful of words in a language I'm only pretending to speak. It's a love song. Mrs. Weaver says it's also the whole of singing in under three minutes: breath, line, the vowels, the long phrase over the top. She says, "Everybody sings this at nineteen. Hardly anybody sings it well at thirty-seven. Let's be the exception."

Mom hasn't smoked since May 12. Forty days. She dreams about it, she says. She chews cinnamon gum, she's mean as a snake, and I have never loved her more.

Tuesday, May 12, 1998
Tempo: grave

Mom's doctor said the word today. Emphysema. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, if you want all of it, which I wrote on the back of an envelope in the waiting room so I could spell it later.

It doesn't get better. It can get worse slowly or less slowly, and how slowly depends partly on her. Two kinds of inhalers. A machine for oxygen at night, which they'll deliver to the house. Walking, the doctor said, every day, which made Mom laugh until she coughed. And she has to stop smoking. Today.

Mom sat in the doctor's office with her purse on her lap and said, "Well, I'm sixty-five," as if that settled something. In the parking lot she lit a cigarette, the way she has ten thousand times, took one puff, looked at it, and handed it to me. I put it out on the bottom of my shoe. That's the last one, she says.

I didn't cry until I got to Mrs. Weaver's at six-thirty. She opened the door, looked at me, and said, "No scales tonight." She made tea and we sat at her kitchen table, and she told me about her own mother, in Toledo, a long time ago. At a quarter past seven she said, "Now sing." I sang. It was the best I have ever sung in my life, which doesn't seem fair to anybody.

Sunday, March 22, 1998
Tempo: allegro, then ritardando

Carmen opened Friday. It's the best thing this company has done since I've been in it, and I'm not saying that just because I'm in the back row of it.

Mark came Friday with a girl from his biology class whose name I am not allowed to put on the Internet. They sat in the balcony. He told me afterward that Carmen was "actually pretty good," that the girl liked the bullfighter, and that I should not ask any more questions. I didn't. I'm learning.

Mom came last night. She's started carrying a handkerchief everywhere and holding it to her mouth. In Act III, in the smugglers' camp up in the mountains, which is quiet, she had a coughing spell she couldn't stop. People turned around. An usher brought her a cup of water. Afterward she said she was mortified, and in the car going home, with her eyes on the windshield, she said, "I'm going to see the doctor. Don't say anything." I didn't say anything. I drove home with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, like I was taking my test.

One more thing. At notes after the final dress, Galen said, "Who is that, the tall one in the back on the left, in the fight? Giving it some voice?" Sharon pointed at me. Ten weeks of breathing into a stranger's hand.

Sunday, March 1, 1998
Tempo: allegro vivace

Carmen is a chorus singer's opera. Bizet keeps us busy. In Act I alone we're the townspeople in the square, then the cigarette girls on their break, then the factory women in a fight, and in Act IV we're the crowd outside the bullring cheering the procession in. Practically every time the curtain goes up, somebody from the chorus is under it.

My cigarette girl comes out of the factory at the noon bell with the others, in a cloud of smoke, and we sing about smoke: how it curls up and drifts away, the same as the sweet things men say to you. (The smoke is a fog machine. The cigarettes are paper tubes with nothing in them. Sharon checked.)

Then the fight. Inside the factory, Carmen gets into it with another girl, Manuelita, and we all pour out into the square taking sides and shouting over each other. Half of us swear Carmen started it. The other half swear it was Manuelita. Bizet wrote it so the two halves tumble over each other until the officer can't make out a word, which is the point. I am Team Manuelita. Sharon is Team Carmen. In rehearsal Thursday she grabbed my shawl so hard it ripped, and Barb sewed it back on me during the break while I stood with my arms out like a scarecrow.

What I keep thinking about: Bizet died three months after Carmen opened, in 1875, before anybody knew what it was going to become. He was thirty-six. That's my age. I've been walking around all week doing that arithmetic.

Wednesday, February 11, 1998
Tempo: senza misura (without measure)

It's final. Yesterday at a quarter past two, in a hearing room in the same building where I've filed a thousand papers for other people.

In Ohio, when two people agree on everything (the house, the money, the child, who gets the good casserole dish), it isn't called a divorce. It's called a dissolution. That makes it sound like an aspirin in a glass of water, and honestly, after seventeen years, that's about how it went: a little fizz, and then nothing to see.

Randy and I sat at the same table with our lawyers. The magistrate asked each of us whether we had signed the agreement freely, whether we believed it was fair, and whether we wanted the marriage dissolved. We each said yes three times. It took eleven minutes. I've typed hundreds of these. I knew every word she was going to say before she said it, and I wasn't ready for any of them.

Randy isn't a bad man. He's a quiet one, and he wanted a quiet wife, and for a long time I was one. Then in 1994 I answered an ad in the paper for opera chorus auditions, because I'd sung in choir all through school and missed it like a tooth, and I came home from my first rehearsal and sang in the shower. That was the beginning of the end, I think. Not because of the opera. Because I'd forgotten I was somebody who sang in the shower, and he had married somebody who didn't.

After the hearing I went to the first music rehearsal for Carmen and sang my heart out with the cigarette girls. Sharon had her thermos. Carrie had brought cupcakes, for no reason. Galen said, "Sopranos, a little less passion, please, it's only page six."

Tuesday, January 13, 1998
Tempo: andante

New year, new feature. Mark says real online journals put a "Mood" at the top of every entry. I told him musicians already have a word for that, and that from now on I'll put a tempo marking instead. He said, "Whatever, that's the same thing." It's the most sensible thing he has ever said about music.

First lesson tonight with Mrs. Weaver.

She lives in a narrow brick house in Lakewood where the front room is all piano: a big black grand with a fringed shawl over it and photographs all over the shawl. Most of the photographs are of her, younger, in costume. She sang for twelve years in opera houses in Germany in the 1960s. "Small houses," she said. "Where you sing four nights a week and learn your trade." She must be sixty-five. She stands as if somebody's about to take her picture.

She had me sing a scale. Then another. Then she said I breathe like a secretary: high and quick, up in the shoulders, the way you breathe when the phone rings. She put her hand flat on my back, just below the ribs, and said, "Here. Breathe into my hand." For forty-five minutes I breathed into Norma Weaver's hand. I think we sang twelve notes, total.

On my way out she said, "You're not a second soprano. You're a soprano who's been standing next to second sopranos." I wrote it down in the car so I'd have it exactly. I don't know what it means yet. It scares me a little.