Singing Lessons

SWEAT DRIPS DOWN MY NEPHEW EZRA’S FOREHEAD. He throws himself onto his side, gasping and kicking. He knees me in the back of the leg, and knocks one of the quilts off the bed.

He’s having another nightmare. I put down my phone, and place a hand on his shoulder. I had been texting my boss about a customer who stole $450 worth of makeup during my last shift at Sephora, but Ezra, who has been sleeping in my bed since my older sister Kristie and her husband Leonard were shot in a movie theater two months ago, takes priority.

He grimaces. He moans. I pick up the quilt and smooth it over him, start rubbing his back in silence. My touch makes him flinch, but when I tell him that it’s just his aunt Ivy, he relaxes.

I stroke his thick black hair, and pull it out from between the pillow and his face. I do my best to humThe Real Folk Blues, which isend theme to Cowboy Bebop. I’d finally watched it last week after Kristie had spent the last seven years insisting I do so. It’s too late to tell her that I loved it, but Ezra’s seen it at least five times. Maybe the similar tune will comfort him.

He rolls over and grafts himself onto my side. At fourteen, he’s already much taller than me, but I can still get my arms around him. His tears and snot streak onto one of the sailboats the dot my nightgown.

When he was a baby soaking Kristie’s shirt with spit-up, I told her that this was why I didn’t want kids. She’d laughed, wiping Ezra’s mouth with his pale yellow bib, and said I wasn’t cut out to be a mother, anyway.

“You’re supposed to be a singer,” she’d said. I’d laughed her off and said the hormones were making her delusional. My voice is pretty, but it’s weak and it peters out instantly. Her voice was the best punch in the gut you ever got.

Though she was only a year and a half older than me, Kristie was light years ahead of me in every category. She got through dental school in the time it took for me to get a driver’s license. Despite having a newborn baby she was still cooking dinner with her husband every night while I was ordering from Dominoes at 2 AM after forgetting to eat all day.

Before she died, she’d been balancing her dental practice and her side gig as a guitarist with helping Ezra with his high school applications. I was working part-time at Sephora and part-time at Trader Joe’s, and I spent way too much money on alien-print dress that I couldn’t wear to either job.

Kristie was everything I wasn’t. Now she’s gone, and I’m somehow supposed to be her teenage son’s new mom.

Smoothing his plaid pajama shirt over his exposed belly, I ask him if he wants to tell me about his dream. He shakes his head, and I’m so grateful I could puke.

I don’t want to know about his dream. It could feature Kristie’s corpse slumping to the movie theater floor as her back was sprayed with bullets, or Leonard trying to shield Ezra with his body, only to nearly crush him when a bullet was lodged into his brain. It could feature the flicker of a grin on the gunman’s face, the text of his manifesto, or the articles that talked about his troubled childhood. It could be about nothing but blood.

I brush his hair away from his damp, swollen face, and wipe his eyes with the top quilt.

I ask, “Can I tell you a story?”

“Yeah.” His voice is scratchy.  I reach under the bed for my purse, and grab the lemon ginger water I got from work. They’re better cold, but he doesn’t care – half the bottle disappears down his throat within seconds.

“Should it be a story you’ve heard already, or a new one?” I ask, pushing a coil of hair behind my ear. He says he wants an old story, one with his mother in it. I’m relieved—lately, I don’t know how to talk about anything else except Kristie.

Elbows grinding into the mattress, I say, “back when your mom and I were going to college, we used to go to this music festival called Amp Power—or, well, I went anyway. Your mom performed.”

Sometimes, Ezra tells me that he remembers running around the lawn near the Amp Power stage when he was a toddler—we used to go there every year on an alumni discount before the festival lost funding. He doesn’t say anything, this time.

“Your mom’s band was called Daring Ostrich Rescue, and nobody had any idea what genre it was. Somebody played a koto and somebody played a zither and none of it really worked together at all, but it was a lot of fun.”    

Ezra’s breath begins to even out, and I push back his hair, exposing the clammy white of his scalp. “What happened next?” he asks, nestling further into the nest of greying quilts. I pull them up around his chin, and sling an arm around his chest, hoping that the weight will soothe instead of scare. His limbs are limp, his tears drying. Wiping them away along with a nugget of eye crust, I keep talking.

“On the day of Amp Power, your mom woke up with a cold. She sounded like a chain-smoking chipmunk with its nose pinched closed. Naturally, she couldn’t sing. Well, she could have, but it would have sounded awful, and it would have been—”

I’m about to say murder on her throat, but I catch myself. Instead I say, “not fun.” The language may not be as vivid, but murder isn’t a word we can say anymore.

Ezra wreathes his fingers through mine, and at me with damp, dark eyes. I keep talking.

“Your mom needed a singer and she didn’t have much time to find someone. Nobody else in the band could sing. So she showed up at my dorm with her nose buried in a fistful of tissues, and asked me to do it.  She said I had a beautiful voice, and if anybody was going to take her place, it should be me. As you may have noticed from listening to me sing in the shower, I was not a good choice for this. But I couldn’t say no to my big sister, so I agreed.”

“I know where this is going,” laughs Ezra, rolling his eyes. The laugh sounds manufactured, but I’ll take what I can get.

“And yet, it’s a surprise every time. Let me finish the story. Unless you don’t want to hear the part where I totally humiliate myself.”

“No, I do.”

His eyes slip shut, and his breath comes in, quick, fluttering breaths.

“Are you sure you’re not falling asleep?” I ask, poking him gently in the cheek.

“I’m fine,” he says, pawing at the smudges under his eyes. “Keep talking.”

“So, I’m on stage in front of 5,000 drunk college students, your mom is in the front row sniffling and praying, and my friend Micah’s there holding a sign with my name written in glitter glue. The rest of Daring Ostrich Rescue has no idea who I am, so she has to get up on stage and explain that I’m supposed to sing. At this point, I’m so scared I’m ready to pee.”

I pause, in case my light-hearted handling of fear has upset Ezra. His lips, plastered in a straight line, stay put. He asks what happens next.

“Well, the drummer, who has these electric blue dreadlocks and zebra-print leather pants, very stylish, tells me I have to sing Mary Madgalene Does Denver. Which is a song about Mary Magdalene, you know Jesus’ girlfriend? Jesus’ girlfriend rising from the dead and having, let’s call them ‘intimate experiences,’ with everyone in Denver, Colorado. The first line of the song is just obscenities. It’s a punk song, kind of, except it has a koto and a zither, and it’s terrible.”

Ezra tells me he’s heard it, which I know. He tells me that he burned my Daring Ostrich Rescue CDs onto his laptop and transferred the songs onto his phone, which I also know. He says that he likes Mary Madgalene Does Denver, which I didn’t know.

“I liked Poseidon is Beside Himself better,” he says. And then we’re just listing track names, Cartography for Beginners, Lovers at Clown College, A Murder of… it’s crows, the next word is crows, but Ezra’s face is scrunching up anyway, so I drag him into the bird’s nest of my arms and I tell him the rest of the story.

“I stumble to the front of the stage, pick up the mike and drop it. It’s on, so you can hear the feedback. The musicians are waiting for the initial burst of curse words, but I can’t remember which ones I’m supposed to use or in what order, so I’m just standing there mumbling f-f-f-fuck into the microphone. Then the girl with the zebra pants whispers something that sounds like cup.”

His lips quirk upwards, while I swallow past a tightness in my throat. The girl in the zebra pants is now a high school teacher, and she had shown up at my sister’s funeral with a baby on her hip. She had squeezed my hand and expressed her sympathies, then warned me that taking in a teenager was more than I could handle. She had recommended that I send him to foster care. I had recommended that she go to hell.

I take a sip of water, and continue the story.

“She didn’t say cup—she said a rude word for female genitals. But I’m nervous, so I just yell CUP!! Into the microphone. The audience bursts out laughing, the band looks like they’re getting ready to kill me. I don’t know what to do—I can’t sing Mary Magdalene Does Denver after I just yelled cup. So I start making up a song about cups. Cups baking casseroles, cups doing jumping jacks – whatever nonsense that came to mind.” 

Ezra’s cracking teenage voice rings childlike with laughter. I say, “It was awful, but somebody recorded it, and from then on any time your mom’s band played I had to sing The Cup Song. When I finally graduated, she gave me a cup. It’s—”

Ezra angles a puffy thumb toward the blue mug on my desk. It has a musical score banded around it. “There,” he says.

Rubbing his shoulder, I say, “When your mom gave it to me, she said ‘The Cup Song was funny Ivy, but you should stop treating your singing ability like a joke. You’re a true artist.’”

Snorting back a tinny laugh, I add, “that was its own joke, since I can’t sing.”

“It sounded good before when you were humming The Real Folk Blues,” says Ezra, leaning into my hand. “Maybe Mom’s right – maybe you could take lessons or something. We can take them together, if you don’t want to do it by yourself.”

Ezra had always refused singing lessons when his parents offered them, on the grounds that they were, quote, “boring and stupid.” But we were going to have to do a lot more things together from now on. Things that Kristie wanted us to do, and things she never even contemplated. I’ll never sing the way she sang, and I’ll never raise Ezra the way she would have.

But if Ezra wants me to, I can sign us both up for lessons. I can hum The Real Folk Blues until he falls asleep.