Ghost Country

1
The Diva Warms Up
 
SOMEWHERE IN THE distance a bass viol vibrated. She struggled to remember what it meant: an angry person coming who wanted to hurt her. She tried to get to her feet but the floor was so heavy it pulled her down. Or maybe someone had attached weights to her legs while she was kneeling in front of the Madonna. The bass sounded more loudly and she panicked. She wrestled with her nightdress, which bunched above her waist as she thrashed about. Then saw the man leaning over her, his face red-black with fury.
 
“No, don’t kill me! I didn’t do it, it was someone else, they put weights on my legs!” She could hear herself laughing as she exposed herself to him, her voice bouncing from ceiling and walls and echoing over and over. “Look: I’m not hiding anything!”
 
“You goddamned bitch!” he hissed. “I wish I could kill you!”
 
He grabbed a pillow and pushed it toward her face. Someone else wrapped her flailing arms and legs in sheets and tied them tight around her body. She was coughing, gagging, praying for air, and then she was awake.
 
She fingered her throat. The muscles were so tense that it hurt to touch them. She couldn’t remember the dream now, or even the events of the previous night, but the shadow of the ominous hovered below the surface of her mind. She stretched an arm out for her robe and snatched at empty air. Fear choked her: she was in a twin bed, not her own canopied throne, and she’d gone to bed—been put to bed?—in her clothes. Her silk skirt had bunched up as she slept, making an uncomfortable knot against her lower back.
 
She flung the covers away and jumped up, much too fast: the room rocked around her and her pantyhose-clad feet slid on the floorboards. Her stomach heaved. She looked about and found a waste can just in time. She hadn’t eaten much recently; all that came up was a sour mouthful of green fluid.
 
Shuffling along on her knees, she scrounged on the bedside table for a Kleenex. A clock radio caught her eye. One o’clock. Could that be right? The blinds were pulled but sunshine seeped around their edges: it couldn’t be one in the morning, but what was she doing in a strange bed in the middle of the day? Unless the clock was wrong.
 
She had been going to La Bohème. It might be amusing to see what a community company could do with it, that was why she was wearing her black shantung skirt. She remembered dressing, and even, if she concentrated hard, having a drink with her escort before they set out. That had been around six. She had a vague recollection of the restaurant, of a waiter being rude to her, but none whatsoever of the performance. Maybe they’d skipped it. What had her escort’s name been? An admirer, there were too many to remember them all. This man had even opened his home to her for the last six weeks, but he often drank so much at dinner that he couldn’t stay awake through the theater.
 
Next to the clock radio was a family photo: Becca dressed as Queen Esther for a Sunday school pageant, dark curls springing in wiry corkscrews around her head, Harry gazing at her with mushy fondness. Becca was a ringer for Harry, the same round face, dimpled cheeks, but pretty—on Harry those features looked like a frog’s. She herself had always preferred Queen Vashti, the beauty standing up to the king’s pointless commands, over the bleating, vapid Esther.
 
So she was in Harry and Karen’s guest room—silly of her not to recognize it straight away when she’d lived there after Harry forced her to leave Italy, yammering as he always did about her extravagance. If only she were home—her real home in New York, not the apartment where she’d been staying the last few weeks—she could send someone for tea and a masseuse.
At least she could take a shower. She pulled off her pantyhose and dropped them on the floor. The guest bathroom was at the other end of the hall, so she couldn’t undress in here, but she could take off her bra: it had slipped up on her in the night and was digging into her breasts. No wonder she felt as though she were being choked.
 
There was a large stain down the front of the blouse. Had that been there when she put it on? She hoped she hadn’t embarrassed herself by wearing dirty clothes to a restaurant.
 
She draped the blouse around her shoulders, the silk cool against her nipples. Maybe it was long enough to use as a dressing gown. As she measured the ends against her thighs Harry’s bellow sounded.
 
“Is she going to sleep all day? Where does she think she is? Goddam New York in the goddam Plaza Hotel?”
 
A female murmuring, too soft for her to tell if it was Karen or Becca, and then Harry’s bellow again. “Go in there and get her up. She’s been asleep since four, which God knows is longer than I have, and I want to talk to her royal highness.”
 
A diffident knock followed by Becca’s head poking around the door. “Oh! You’re awake. Daddy wants to talk to you.”
 
She pointed to her throat and shook her head.
 
“You’ve lost your voice?” Becca asked, coming all the way into the room. She was fourteen now, her teeth white behind the barricade of braces, but her hair still a wiry cloud. Instead of Queen Esther’s blue flowing robe she wore layered tank tops over shorts and combat boots.
 
“Janice? Are you up? We need to talk!” Harry’s blare made her wince.
 
“She’s lost her voice!” Becca called back, enjoying the drama.
 
“Then she can goddam find it.”
 
Harry stomped into the room, but seeing her breasts exposed beneath the draped silk blouse he blushed and looked away. He grabbed Becca and tried to frog-march her from the room.
 
Becca wriggled free. “Oh, Daddy, you act like nobody I know has breasts. We see each other naked all the time after soccer. I look at my own, for pity’s sake.”
 
“And don’t talk to me like that: I’m not one of your classmates.” It was an automatic plea, lacking conviction. “Janice, button up your damned shirt and come into the kitchen. We’re going to talk.”
 
Someone had dumped her jacket and purse on the floor by the dresser. She picked up the jacket and made a great show of arranging it neatly on the back of the chair, pulling on the sleeves to straighten them while Harry snapped futilely behind her. Another show of fussing in her purse for a pen. HOT TEA, she wrote in block capitals on the back of an envelope that she found on the dresser. SHOWER. She gave Becca the envelope and went down the hall to the bathroom, drowning Harry’s protests by turning on the taps full blast.
 
When the room was filled with steam she stepped under the shower and started kneading the muscles in her shoulders. She let the spray bathe the back of her throat, gargling slightly, then turned her back to the water and gently trilled her tongue along the edge of her front teeth. Using the trill, she moved up and down a half scale in the middle of her range, barely making a sound. When her neck muscles started to relax, she began a series of vowel exercises, still staying in the middle of her range but letting the sound increase a little.
 
After perhaps twenty minutes of vocalizing someone hammered on the bathroom door, but there wasn’t any point in responding: it was undoubtedly Harry. Not only did she know what he had to say, she’d only get a chill and have to start over again if she stopped now. For another ten minutes she eased her voice into shape within the protective steam, until she deemed it safe to get out of the shower and finish exercising in the music room.
 
She carefully wrapped her throat in a towel before leaving the tub, keeping her neck covered as she dried herself, then kicking the used towels into a pile in the direction of the clothes hamper.
 
A cotton dressing gown hung on the back of the door. Karen’s, no doubt, judging by the vivid magenta flowers and tiers of lacy sleeves, but no one she cared about would see her in it and it was better than putting on that soiled blouse again.
 
The gown had a complicated set of ribbons; she tried to tie it up high enough to protect her chest from the air conditioner’s drafts. To be on the safe side she took another clean towel from the shelf and draped it across her neck. She held her silk blouse over the heap of damp towels: surely Karen would have enough sense to dry-clean it instead of throwing it into the washing machine? She’d remind her as soon as she finished her workout.
 
Of course, Harry didn’t have a real music room, but the family room held a badly tuned piano, the one from her parents’ house she’d used when she first started singing. As she walked back past the bedroom and down the half flight of stairs she hummed, letting the sound fill her head with the tickling that told her her breath was flowing well. Becca ran up behind her and handed her a mug of tepid tea. She didn’t break stride or stop humming, but did nod a regal thanks.
 
In front of the piano she let the humming turn back into vowels, and then into trills. At the end of half an hour she was sweating freely but feeling pleased with her flexibility. Partway through she had gulped down the tea and held the cup out for a refill. When Becca didn’t respond she turned, surprised, to find the room empty. The child used to like to listen to her practice. Still humming, she walked back to the bathroom and filled the cup with hot water from the tap.
 
Karen popped out of the kitchen as she passed. “Oh! When you’re done will you put the towels in the hamper? I’m not doing a wash until Tuesday. Do you want some lunch? Harry had to—”
 
She turned her back on the nagging voice, not interested in anything Harry might have to do, and returned—still humming—to the family room to finish her workout. In the past she always concluded with “Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca. Her own voice, soaring to that final high D, exhilarated her with its freedom and power. But today she knew at some unacknowledged reach of her mind that she would never manage the aria, and that failure to do so would crack her self-control in front of Karen and Becca. She contented herself with a couple of German art songs that did not place great demands on the voice.