Mr Amos’s playing was gentle now, though I knew he was only working up to the point where he’d be banging on the keys with such gusto that my singing would be intruded upon by fantasies of attaching thick rubber straps to his hands to restrict the altitude of their bounce.
“Mommy-made-me-mash-my-m-and-m’s…Mommy-made-me-mash-my-m-and-m’s…”
Every time we sang this absurd line the note went an octave higher until it took on a siren-like wail. Our seventh-grade choir’s one and only warm-up.
I felt the vibrations of our mismatched voices ring out over the sturdy back of that upright piano. What a pack of waifs and strays we were: there was Jodie, who had been over-exposed to Broadway as a kid, and whose distinctly Muppet-like alto could be heard above everyone else’s. And there was Hooda in her silk headscarf whose naturally perfect teeth were the first thing I noticed about her. Trinity, whose need to ad-lib the chorus of Killing Me Softly (“One time, one time…two times, two times”) made me on moodier days want to choke her out. And Evelyn in her conspicuous precocity always had a suggestion as to how the score of this or that musical could be improved upon.
Looking around at us all standing together, singing off the same lyric sheets, gave me a sense of bemused removal from my life. It helped me find peace from the noise of other people abiding by their own strange and intimidating rhythms within that middle school, that beige prison of white-painted brick and linoleum.
The nascent sense that I was living in the last, long inhale of childhood as I had come to know it, that I would soon have to exhale and become something else, brought an anxiety I’d never spoken of to anyone. There were just too many variables to consider, too many potential pathways that seemed to fork and branch in infinite directions. It was like looking straight into the sun’s impossibly bright rays, especially when, at the best of times, I felt like a muggle. I was a muggle about to be revealed as being a witch, who wore Birkenstocks with black socks and men’s band t-shirts made with heavy cotton. One was printed with a giant gargoyle and was dense with the smell of clove cigarettes and dragon’s blood incense. Even I was spooked to see it folded in the shadows of my drawer, crouching, waiting to pounce.
That day we were singing a song from the sixties by Simon and Garfunkel. It was the first time I had encountered the song and our first time practising it. I was standing next to Monique. Monique filled the back pages of her social studies notebook with drafts of stories written in blue erasable ink, marked up by cross-outs and the carets needed to squeeze extra words into a line. I got a special feeling when she would read them aloud to me like I was tramping through a dense forest in which no pathway had been cleared with the mist of impending evening caressing my face.
I didn’t think much of those delicate pop lyrics during the first go-around: something about being blinded by the light of truth and God. The words were a thin wash on the surface of my attention. But in the interval before we began again when there was always room for chatter, Monique turned her face to me, her large, liquid brown eyes humorous and thoughtful, her voice abrupt. Her breath when she leaned in smelled of peanut butter: “Have you ever noticed the way the words God and light are, like, always in the same sentence?”
There was something so casual about the way she’d said it as if she could have also just said:
“Have you ever noticed that Annika’s textbook cover is really a stretched-out pantyhose?”
We were about to start the song again, from the top.
“Why don’t we save that conversation for later?” I said, but there was already no time. And besides, we weren’t looking for when later would be. Twelve years deep into this life, we already knew that later would never come. How could it? What sort of conversation could possibly follow a cosmic wink from that great mystery who had briefly spoken through my school friend?
The glow of that moment granted my already restless mind a new momentum. My gaze bounced away from the lyric sheet and the faces around me and out the window, where the trees were slotted with a warm saffron yellow light. And it seemed that, just as my awareness touched it, an auburn leaf in the shape of a little fish came twirling down from one of them. It danced toward my eyes in a loose spiralling motion. Then the leaf and everything else in my vision was split by a sunbeam, gleaming and golden as a pillar of heaven. And for that moment, in that glittering field of light, I was blind.
