Sunday, September 26, 1999

Tonight Appa closed the store fifteen minutes early. That has never happened. Not for graduation, not for Christmas Eve, not ever. He turned the sign around at 10:45 and turned off the front lights and said, "Okay. Now."

Last week the doctor said I can add the chords back, carefully, a few at a time. So I've been doing the Sarabanda from the D minor Partita, in pieces, all week in the practice room at school, twenty minutes and then stop, and today I came home on the 7 and asked if they wanted to hear it. The whole thing. In Practice Room B.

Umma sat on a sack of rice. Halmoni had the stool. Danny sat on a box of Choco Pies with the Mets on the radio, and then, when I lifted the bow, he turned it off, which is the most love Danny has ever shown me. Appa stood in the doorway in his apron with his arms folded, the way he stands in front of the orange pyramid when he's deciding if it's level.

I tuned to the cooler. I played it slowly, slower than Mr. Aronov likes, and I kept my thumb soft the way Pat taught me, like it was holding a paper cup of coffee without denting it. The chords leaned on each other the way they do. Somewhere in the second half I realized that nothing hurt, and I nearly stopped just from that, and didn't.

When I finished nobody said anything for a while. The cooler hummed. Then Appa said, "Good." Halmoni said something in Korean to God. And Umma, on her sack of rice, with her coffee-burned hands in her lap, said, "Again."

So I played it again.

Practiced: 20 min in the morning + the Sarabanda, twice. Allowed: 40 min, in two pieces. I stayed inside the lines.

Friday, September 24, 1999

Chuseok, the harvest holiday, the Korean Thanksgiving. The store stays open (there is only one day a year, and it isn't this one), but I came home after class and made songpyeon with Halmoni at the kitchen table: rice-flour dough, rolled into balls, pressed flat, filled with sweet sesame, pinched shut into little half-moons, and steamed on a bed of pine needles. Halmoni says the girl who makes pretty songpyeon will have a pretty daughter. Mine were lumpy. She says I'll have a lumpy daughter and love her anyway.

The pinching, it turns out, is exactly what Pat has me doing twice a day with a blob of green therapy putty. Press, fold, pinch. I made forty. My left hand did its share, and afterward it didn't complain. I told Halmoni this is my physical therapy now. She said Korean grandmothers invented physical therapy.

Danny has the Mets on the radio in the back of the store every night. They're in the wild-card race and he won't talk about anything else. Appa doesn't understand baseball, but he asks Danny the score every inning, which is its own kind of love.

Thursday, September 16, 1999

First quartet rehearsal. Hannah on first violin (the girl from next door last year, the best one in Oregon), Luis on viola, a cellist named Grace who hums while she plays, and me, second violin. Mrs. Rudnick gave us Haydn, the "Emperor" quartet, Op. 76 No. 3, and said we'd spend the whole first rehearsal on the slow movement.

The slow movement is a hymn tune, very simple, the one that later became the German national anthem, and then four variations on it. And in the first variation, the melody goes to the second violin. To me. The first violin plays these quick, delicate ornaments above it, but the song is underneath, and it's mine. For one whole variation, everyone else in the room is listening to me. And then it moves on. The cello gets it next, then the viola, and I get to play the harmony underneath them and listen to the song being handed from person to person around the circle, like a candle.

I've been playing alone in a room since I was seven. I didn't know this is what it could feel like.

Fifty minutes, with a break halfway, doctor's orders, and Mrs. Rudnick set her wristwatch alarm herself.

Practiced: 20 min alone + 50 min Haydn. Allowed: the same. (The doctor said rehearsal is fine if I stop when it says stop.)

Thursday, September 9, 1999

Mrs. Rudnick stopped me in the hallway today. She coaches chamber music here: a violist, older, with gray hair like a cloud and reading glasses on a chain. It was her, it turns out, who said "Bach, please" at my audition. She'd heard from Mr. Aronov about my hand.

She said, "You can play twenty minutes alone, yes? And you are going crazy, yes?" Yes. "So. Come play in a quartet. Chamber music is not less. It is listening. Your hand needs rest. Your ears do not."

I thought chamber music was what you did when you weren't going to be a soloist. I said something like that, carefully. She laughed and said, "Esther. Most of us are not soloists. Most of us are the music anyway."

Mr. Aronov, when I asked him, sighed for a long time, the Russian sigh, and then said, "Haydn is good for everybody."

Tuesday, August 31, 1999

Moved back into the dorm. Meredith is back from Houston with a new haircut and a jar of salsa for the refrigerator, next to Umma's kimchi.

The practice room floor is full again. You can hear all of it, through every door: Paganini, the Tchaikovsky, the Sibelius, someone doing three-octave scales in D-flat major, my least favorite, at a tempo I could only dream of. Six hours of it, all day, from everyone. I have my kitchen timer from the store's housewares shelf, the white plastic one, and I set it for twenty minutes, and when it rings I stop, in the middle of a phrase if that's where I am, and put the violin away, and go sit on my bed and listen to everybody else.

That's the hardest part. Not the not playing. The listening to other people get better while I wait.

Practiced: 20 min. Allowed: 20 min.

Saturday, August 21, 1999

I said it tonight. I'd been practicing saying it for a week, the way I used to practice the Paganini.

After closing, at the kitchen table, I told them maybe I should stop. Transfer to a regular college. Study something with a job at the end of it, pharmacy, accounting, something where your hands don't matter. Because what if it doesn't get better. Because they've paid for all of it, Mr. Aronov and the violin and the tuition and the doctor and Pat, and I can't stand to be the thing that it was all for, if the thing is broken.

Nobody said anything. Then Appa got up and went into his room and came back with a folder I've never seen, and took out a piece of paper, and put it in front of me. His engineering diploma, from Seoul, in Korean, with a red seal. He said, in Korean, "I had this. I came here anyway, and I sell oranges. Do you know why?" I shook my head. He said, "So my children could choose. You chose. So." And then he put the diploma back in the folder and went to bed, because it was eleven-thirty and he gets up at four.

Umma stayed. She got out a photograph from her wallet, which I'd never seen either, a small black-and-white one with soft corners, of a girl of twenty in a white dress sitting at a grand piano on a stage. She said, "I stopped. Nobody made me. It was the right thing then." She tapped the table. "If you stop, you stop because you want to. Not because of money. Not because of us. Understand?"

I understand. I don't want to stop. I never wanted to stop. I was just afraid of having to.

Practiced: 20 min. Allowed: 20 min.

Tuesday, August 10, 1999

Bach again, for the first time since May.

For four weeks my twenty minutes have been open strings and slow scales, whole bows, like when I was seven years old and Umma sat on the edge of the bed and counted out loud. Today Pat and the doctor said I could try real music, as long as it was slow and without chords. So: the Allemanda from the D minor Partita, which is almost all single lines. Half tempo. Eight bars, and stop, and shake out the hand, and check the thumb. Eight more.

It sounded like somebody else. Somebody careful, reading it for the first time. But it didn't hurt. I kept waiting for the thread in my wrist, and it didn't come. And then I was crying, in Practice Room B, with a box of Shin Ramyun at my elbow, over the most boring performance of the Allemanda in the history of the world.

The timer rang in the middle of a phrase. I stopped anyway. That's the rule. Bach will be there tomorrow. He's been there for almost three hundred years.

Practiced: 20 min (10 scales, 10 Bach). Allowed: 20 min.

Saturday, August 7, 1999

I went to a Mostly Mozart concert at Lincoln Center tonight, by myself, in a cheap seat way up high. The soloist in the Fifth Concerto was a violinist not much older than me.

I watched her left hand the entire time. I couldn't help it. I didn't hear half the concerto. Her thumb was so loose. Her hand floated up and down the fingerboard like it wasn't attached to anything, like it didn't know it was supposed to be afraid.

At the end, in the slow part, I cried. First because it wasn't me up there. And then, which surprised me, because it was so beautiful, and it didn't matter whose hands it was.

On the 7 train home, coming out of the tunnel, I turned around to look at the skyline like I always do.

Practiced: 20 min. Listened: 2 hrs.

Wednesday, July 14, 1999

Follow-up with the hand doctor. Better. Much better, he says. Pat's report says I've actually been resting, which surprised both of them.

New orders: twenty minutes a day. Not twenty-one. Open strings and slow scales only for now. No Bach chords, no Paganini, no Mendelssohn. Ice afterward. Keep the splint at night. Come back in a month.

Twenty minutes. I used to practice twenty minutes before I even took the violin out of the case, just scales in my head on the train.

I took the white plastic kitchen timer off the housewares shelf at the store, and Umma rang it up, forty-nine cents, and then took the money out of the register and gave it back to me. In Practice Room B I set the timer and tuned to the cooler and played open strings, long whole bows, G, D, A, E, the way you do when you're seven. The sound was a little dusty. But it was mine.

Practiced: 20 min. Allowed: 20 min.

Saturday, July 3, 1999

Holiday weekend at the store: charcoal, hot dog buns, watermelons stacked by the door, ice by the bag. I'm on the register, right hand only. I'm getting fast.

This morning Halmoni took me to the acupuncturist on Union Street, an old man with a white coat and a radio playing Korean news, who took my pulse at both wrists for a long time and then put tiny needles in my forearm and the back of my hand. It didn't hurt. I lay there for twenty minutes looking at a calendar from a Korean bank. I don't know if it works. Halmoni believes it does, and she held my other hand the whole time, and that part definitely works.

Practiced: 0. Allowed: 0. (Four weeks on Wednesday.)