Five years after my younger sister Barbara died of a malignant
brain tumor, I moved from Minnesota to California. I loved the soft
tilt of the large round hills, the unfiltered California light, the green
Irish spring and golden Italian summer. Being alone, without
Barbara, wasn’t what I had thought would happen. When she
died, both of us were in our forties and neither of us had married.
I had presumed that the two of us would age, visiting each other's
homes where we would both wash dishes with a sponge, not a
rag, use SOS for burned pans, and, like Mother, wrap everything in
plastic. Eventually we would end up in a nursing home, eccentric
old maids rocking side by side; I imagined her tormenting me with
her singing.
Instead I sat in my dusty studio in the Marin Headlands
overlooking the Pacific Ocean and just across the Golden Gate
Bridge from San Francisco. It was a 170 square foot garret in an
old army quarterhouse with rutted floor boards that caught my
chair as I rolled from one part of the room to another, and in the
inflated real estate market, I was lucky to have it. In summer my
room was often cold and smelled of the spit of the swallows that
nested in the eaves. If I opened the skylight, the resident cat
jumped out on the roof and attacked the swallows.
In this room for the next five years, I tried to resurrect my
sister. At times, Barb's spirit had given me a friendly wave, and at
other times, chastised me as it emanated from one vertical file
cabinet, then another, from Minneapolis to San Francisco and
places in-between. Now, a yellow folder sat at the front of the file
cabinet, luminous against the royal blue hanging file. When I
unpacked the files, I felt I was removing a body wrapped in fragile
papyrus.
I had Barb's dresser and desk, I wore her chartreuse harem
pants and her red and black striped socks. I had a soft leather
purse with her pink plastic comb, boxes of letters, and wads of
photographs in rubber bands. I had her sheet music and her
scribblings about the voice lessons she took. I drove her 86 Camry
across the country and back. I had her eulogy and three-inch thick
binders filled with notes and flip chart pages on which I had written
"What is the meaning?"
Perhaps our meaning was in singing, maybe even our faith,
certainly our hope was. The women in our family had been as one
with the Metropolitan Opera as Texaco, which sponsored the Met's
Saturday afternoon broadcasts from 1940 to 2003. My
grandmother in Massachusetts sang to those broadcasts and so
did my mother in Duluth, Minnesota, turning the volume so high
that the basses and sopranos rocked through the oak doors of
our house, from the den to the kitchen where, apron tied around
her middle, Mother sponged dishes and sang along with Leontyne
Price, even though a high school chorus teacher had told her to
mouth the words in chorus. Unless the opera were extraordinarily
long, broadcasts started unfailingly at 1:00 and my mother
refused any invitations for Saturday afternoon.
When each of the three sisters in the family reached fifth
grade, our parents took us to the Metropolitan Opera, which
toured every year in Minneapolis. Riding in the back seat of the old
Buick into downtown Minneapolis, I saw the Pillsbury and General
Mills factories stationed like sentries over the Mississippi River. To
me they meant, not farming and food processing, but opera and
food. In the Curtis Hotel, I walked importantly through the green
and red train style lobby, ate in the hotel coffee shop, walked
through Dayton's Department Store with my mother, saw the
sunset glow a deeper gold than in Duluth and sniffed grainer, less
piney smells. All of this was going to the opera. After I left
Minnesota and returned to Minneapolis for graduate school, by
which time the Curtis Hotel had been demolished, my feelings
remained the same about the opera and so did Barb’s, who had
entered law school in Minneapolis.
That year, the May of opera week was humid and hot and the
auditorium wasn't air-conditioned. Three times that week, Barb
and I joined the opera mavens, their long silk gowns rustling in
the soft night breeze, high heels clicking on the stone plaza of
Northrup Auditorium. The first night we dressed in black and white
and pretended to be ushers. The second night we wore our dress-
up hippie clothes, long, pink and black flowered skirts with peasant
blouses. The skirts would blend colorfully with the gowns the
wealthier patrons wore – we would fit right in, we were sure of it.
At the end of the first act, imitating the privileged patrons, we
strode to empty seats in the first row. Jittery, we eased into the
maroon velvet. A well-dressed matron stopped us and said,
"These are not your seats!" We stood up, smiled and walked with
injured dignity to the side of the auditorium, where we remained
until we found a seat for the next act.
The last night of the opera there were no empty seats in the
front rows. We stood at the side and as soon as the curtain went
up, Barb beckoned me, then walked across the first row of seats,
crossed the few yards separating the audience from the orchestra,
and casually walked towards the seven steps on the far left that
led to the stage. Praying that I was invisible I followed. There we
sat, on the fourth and fifth steps, nearly on the stage, twenty feet
away from the silver streaked hair of Cesare Siepi, who was singing
Mephistopheles in Faust, his tall lanky body packed into a red
jacket threaded with gold and silver. The dimension and timbre of
his bass voice slid into every cavity of our bodies in the same way
a morning jump into Lake Superior cuts to your vital organs and
makes your body tingle until nightfall. My ears reverberated and
my heart beat – in part I was afraid we would be asked to leave
but Barbara wasn't perturbed – she hummed along with the music.
I heard the music note by note, the melody almost fragmented,
each note becoming both more and less than it was alone as it
joined up with the others and strolled or marched or leapt toward
the end of the aria.
next page
brain tumor, I moved from Minnesota to California. I loved the soft
tilt of the large round hills, the unfiltered California light, the green
Irish spring and golden Italian summer. Being alone, without
Barbara, wasn’t what I had thought would happen. When she
died, both of us were in our forties and neither of us had married.
I had presumed that the two of us would age, visiting each other's
homes where we would both wash dishes with a sponge, not a
rag, use SOS for burned pans, and, like Mother, wrap everything in
plastic. Eventually we would end up in a nursing home, eccentric
old maids rocking side by side; I imagined her tormenting me with
her singing.
Instead I sat in my dusty studio in the Marin Headlands
overlooking the Pacific Ocean and just across the Golden Gate
Bridge from San Francisco. It was a 170 square foot garret in an
old army quarterhouse with rutted floor boards that caught my
chair as I rolled from one part of the room to another, and in the
inflated real estate market, I was lucky to have it. In summer my
room was often cold and smelled of the spit of the swallows that
nested in the eaves. If I opened the skylight, the resident cat
jumped out on the roof and attacked the swallows.
In this room for the next five years, I tried to resurrect my
sister. At times, Barb's spirit had given me a friendly wave, and at
other times, chastised me as it emanated from one vertical file
cabinet, then another, from Minneapolis to San Francisco and
places in-between. Now, a yellow folder sat at the front of the file
cabinet, luminous against the royal blue hanging file. When I
unpacked the files, I felt I was removing a body wrapped in fragile
papyrus.
I had Barb's dresser and desk, I wore her chartreuse harem
pants and her red and black striped socks. I had a soft leather
purse with her pink plastic comb, boxes of letters, and wads of
photographs in rubber bands. I had her sheet music and her
scribblings about the voice lessons she took. I drove her 86 Camry
across the country and back. I had her eulogy and three-inch thick
binders filled with notes and flip chart pages on which I had written
"What is the meaning?"
Perhaps our meaning was in singing, maybe even our faith,
certainly our hope was. The women in our family had been as one
with the Metropolitan Opera as Texaco, which sponsored the Met's
Saturday afternoon broadcasts from 1940 to 2003. My
grandmother in Massachusetts sang to those broadcasts and so
did my mother in Duluth, Minnesota, turning the volume so high
that the basses and sopranos rocked through the oak doors of
our house, from the den to the kitchen where, apron tied around
her middle, Mother sponged dishes and sang along with Leontyne
Price, even though a high school chorus teacher had told her to
mouth the words in chorus. Unless the opera were extraordinarily
long, broadcasts started unfailingly at 1:00 and my mother
refused any invitations for Saturday afternoon.
When each of the three sisters in the family reached fifth
grade, our parents took us to the Metropolitan Opera, which
toured every year in Minneapolis. Riding in the back seat of the old
Buick into downtown Minneapolis, I saw the Pillsbury and General
Mills factories stationed like sentries over the Mississippi River. To
me they meant, not farming and food processing, but opera and
food. In the Curtis Hotel, I walked importantly through the green
and red train style lobby, ate in the hotel coffee shop, walked
through Dayton's Department Store with my mother, saw the
sunset glow a deeper gold than in Duluth and sniffed grainer, less
piney smells. All of this was going to the opera. After I left
Minnesota and returned to Minneapolis for graduate school, by
which time the Curtis Hotel had been demolished, my feelings
remained the same about the opera and so did Barb’s, who had
entered law school in Minneapolis.
That year, the May of opera week was humid and hot and the
auditorium wasn't air-conditioned. Three times that week, Barb
and I joined the opera mavens, their long silk gowns rustling in
the soft night breeze, high heels clicking on the stone plaza of
Northrup Auditorium. The first night we dressed in black and white
and pretended to be ushers. The second night we wore our dress-
up hippie clothes, long, pink and black flowered skirts with peasant
blouses. The skirts would blend colorfully with the gowns the
wealthier patrons wore – we would fit right in, we were sure of it.
At the end of the first act, imitating the privileged patrons, we
strode to empty seats in the first row. Jittery, we eased into the
maroon velvet. A well-dressed matron stopped us and said,
"These are not your seats!" We stood up, smiled and walked with
injured dignity to the side of the auditorium, where we remained
until we found a seat for the next act.
The last night of the opera there were no empty seats in the
front rows. We stood at the side and as soon as the curtain went
up, Barb beckoned me, then walked across the first row of seats,
crossed the few yards separating the audience from the orchestra,
and casually walked towards the seven steps on the far left that
led to the stage. Praying that I was invisible I followed. There we
sat, on the fourth and fifth steps, nearly on the stage, twenty feet
away from the silver streaked hair of Cesare Siepi, who was singing
Mephistopheles in Faust, his tall lanky body packed into a red
jacket threaded with gold and silver. The dimension and timbre of
his bass voice slid into every cavity of our bodies in the same way
a morning jump into Lake Superior cuts to your vital organs and
makes your body tingle until nightfall. My ears reverberated and
my heart beat – in part I was afraid we would be asked to leave
but Barbara wasn't perturbed – she hummed along with the music.
I heard the music note by note, the melody almost fragmented,
each note becoming both more and less than it was alone as it
joined up with the others and strolled or marched or leapt toward
the end of the aria.
next page
