Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (3 page)

"You never asked me if I wanted a car."

His face got tighter, like a clenched fist. He said, "It's been driven very little. I suppose the dealer might take it back. Not for the full cost, of course. They couldn't resell it as new."

"Oh rubbish, what a notion," my mother said. "How is Owen to get back and forth from State every day next year without a car of his own? It would take him an hour each way on the bus. For goodness sakes, Jim, don't expect him to start living in the car right off! If you want to drive it to the office, do. But it'll get plenty of use next year!"

That was fine. My mother is a highly intelligent person. She had just given my father his first practical reason for giving me a car—his excuse, his justification. State University is clear on the other edge of our city, about ten miles from where we live. I would certainly need a car to get to classes there next year. The only trouble was that State was not where I wanted to go to college.

But if I brought that up, if I said, "What if I go away to college?" I'd have blown it again. We'd have had two quarrels going instead of one. Because it was my mother who was dead set on my going to State. And I do mean dead set. Shed gone there, she met dad there, she quit as a junior to get married. Beverley, her best friend, was a sorority sister. She knew State. It was safe. The places I wanted to go weren't safe. They were far away, and she didn't understand what went on at them; they were full of communists and radicals and intellectuals.

I had applied to MIT, Cal Tech, and Princeton, as well as State. My father had filled out the scholarship applications and paid the application fees. The forms were incredible, all in quadruplicate, but being a CPA, he rather enjoyed filling them out clearly and honestly, and he didn't mind the fees because I think he took some pride in my shooting for the moon. I expect he mentioned to his friends at the office that his son was applying to Princeton. That was something to be proud of, especially if I didn't actually go there. But he said nothing about it to my mother, as far as I know, and she said nothing about it to either of us. If we wanted to throw away ninety dollars on fees, all right. But her son was going to State.

And she had a practical reason. A very sound one. They could afford to send me there.

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. My jaws locked. I couldn't swallow the piece of pot roast I'd been working on, either. It just lay there in my mouth, a fibrous sort of lump. I couldn't chew it. I worked it over to one side, and drank some milk around it, and after a long time I managed to chew it some and swallow it. After a longer time dinner was over. I went up to do homework.

It was no good. Why should I study? What for? I could get to State without studying. I could probably get clear through State without studying. I could probably go on and become an accountant or a tax auditor or a math teacher and be respectable and successful and get married and have a family and buy a house and get old and die without ever studying, without ever thinking at all. Why not? A lot of other people did. You think you're so special, Griffiths.

I couldn't stand the sight of any of the books in my room; I hated them. I went downstairs and said, "Going out for a drive," around the ghost of that piece of beef, which still seemed to be in my mouth; and I went out and got into the new car. I had left the keys in it, Sunday. Even Dad hadn't noticed. It could have been stolen any time during the last two days. If only it had been. I started it up and drove very slowly down the street. Breaking it in.

At the end of the second block I passed the Fields'house.

OK, now I know I was sick—really sick, a little past the breaking point—that night, because of what I did. I did what any normal car-loving American teen-ager would do if he'd met a girl he liked. I stopped and backed up and parked in front of the Fields' and went up to the front door and knocked and said to Mrs. Field, "Is Natalie here?"

"She's practicing."

"Can I see her for a minute?"

"I'll ask her."

Mrs. Field was a good-looking woman, older than my parents. She had the same severe expression Natalie had, but she was handsomer. Maybe Natalie would be that handsome at fifty. Kind of worn and polished like a piece of granite in a creek. Mrs. Field wasn't friendly or unfriendly, welcoming or off-putting. She was calm. She just stated the facts. She stood aside—it was still raining—and let me into the hall; didn't ask me in any farther; went upstairs. As she went, I heard Natalie practicing. It must be a violin, I thought. A tremendous noise, even though the Fields' house was bigger than ours and older, with thicker walls. A big, sweet, hard, rushing noise, rushing down the scales like a creek over rocks, bright and fierce—and then it stopped. I'd stopped it.

I heard Mrs. Field upstairs say, "It's the Griffiths boy." She knew us mainly because mother had hooked her last spring for the March of Dimes, and she'd been at our house for the planning meeting.

Natalie came downstairs. She was frowning, and her hair was all messed up. "Oh hi, Owen," she said from a distance roughly equivalent to the orbit of Neptune.

"I'm sorry I stopped you practicing," I said.

"That's all right. What's on your mind?"

I had been going to ask her if she'd like to drive around some in my new car, but I couldn't. I said, "I don't know."

And the ghost of the piece of pot roast came back and filled my entire mouth.

She looked at me, and after this long, horrible silence she said, "Is something wrong?"

I nodded.

"Are you sick?"

I shook my head. Shaking it seemed to clear it a bit. I said, "I'm upset. It's something to do with my parents. And stuff. It's not terminal. But I. But I wanted to talk. But I. But I can't."

She was kind of floored. She said, "Would you like a glass of milk?"

"I just ate dinner."

"Camomile tea," she said.

"Peter Rabbit," I said.

"Come on in."

"I don't want to interrupt you. Listen. Can I sit and listen to you practice? Would it bother you a lot?"

She hesitated, and then she said, "No. You want to? It's dull."

We went to the kitchen, and she poured me a cup of extremely weird tea, and then we went upstairs to this room. What a room. All the walls in the Fields' house were dark, and it all looked kind of bare, kind of calm and severe like Mrs. Field, but this room was the barest. It had in it one Oriental rug worn down to the warp or whatever you call it so you could hardly see what colors it had been, and one grand piano, three music stands, and a chair. There were some stacks of music under the windows. I sat down on the rug. "You can sit in the chair," she said "I stand up to practice."

"I'm fine here."

"OK," she said. "This is some Bach. I have to cut an audition tape next week." And she picked up her fiddle off the piano and injected it under her jaw in that peculiar way violinists do—only I figured out from the size that this one was a viola not a violin—and rubbed her bow with rosin and stared at the music on the music stand and started playing.

It wasn't your standard concert performance. For one thing the room was so high and bare that it made the noise loud, hard, so that it sort of rang in your bones (she said afterwards it was a perfect room for practicing because she could hear all her mistakes). And she made faces and muttered a lot. And she would play the same bit over and over and over. That crashing run she'd been doing when I came in, she must have done it ten or fifteen times, sometimes going on from it, but coming back to it again, starting over. And every time it was slightly different. Until finally it came out the same twice in a row. She'd got it right. Then she went on. Then when she played the whole movement over, that part sounded the same the third time in a row. Right. Yeah.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

They talk about the patience scientists have to have, and how scientific work is 99 percent drudgery and repetition and neatness and making perfectly sure. And it is. I had a very good bio teacher last year, Miss Capswell and she and I did some lab work after school in spring term. We were working with bacteria. It was exactly the same thing Natalie was doing with the viola. Everything had to be right. You didn't know for sure what was going to happen when you finally did get it all right: you had to get it right to find out. Miss Capswell and I were trying to confirm an experiment reported in
Science
magazine last year. Natalie was trying to confirm what Bach had reported to some church congregation in Germany two hundred and fifty years ago. If she did it absolutely right, it might turn out to be true. To be the truth.

That was maybe the most important thing that happened to me that day—understanding that.

After about forty minutes of practicing, she started on a sticky fast part and fought with it for a while and got mad at it and went YAARKHH! on the strings and quit. She sat down on the rug too, and we talked. I told her what I had been thinking about music and thinking, and she liked it; but she asked didn't a scientist have to keep feeling out of his thinking, whereas in music they were the same thing. That didn't seem exactly right to me, but we couldn't figure out just what did happen in science. I told her about working with Miss Capswell and how neat it had been, because this was the first person I had ever met who just took it for granted you were interested in ideas. Working with her in the lab had been just about the first time in my life I didn't feel like an outsider, or self-conscious, or fake; and it was really because of that that I'd realized that no matter how I tried, I was never going to be an extravert, or popular, or one of the group, so I might as well quit trying. But Miss Capswell got transferred to another school over the summer, and when I came back in the fall, school was even worse than it had been before, in a way, because I wasn't even tormenting myself with trying to be part of it anymore, so there wasn't anything left at all. I didn't tell Natalie all that, that evening, of course. But we did talk some about school, about conformity and why it is hard to be different. She said it seemed like the only choices offered were to want to be what other people were, or to be what other people wanted you to be. Either to conform, or to obey. And that got me onto the car, and college, and my parents. She listened, and she understood perfectly about the car, but not so well about college. She said, "Well, OK, but you wouldn't actually give up going to the place where you belong, and go to a school you don't want? I mean, why?"

"Because they expect me to."

"But they expect wrong, don't they?"

"I don't know. There's money, too."

"There's loans and scholarships."

"There's a lot of competition."

"You're telling me!" she said, fairly sarcastically. "So you have to compete. All you can do is try, isn't it?"

She was hard to answer. But not the way my parents were. They were hard to answer because you could never get to the real point with them, and she was hard to answer because shed got there first. But at least she didn't leave me fighting a piece of phantom pot roast. Her mother brought us up some other kind of weird tea, and we talked some more, just sort of nothing, friendly talk; and at ten-thirty I left, figuring she might want to practice some more, because she'd said she tried to practice three hours a day. I drove around a few blocks and got home and went to bed. I was really tired. Like I'd walked a hundred miles. But the fog was gone. I went to bed and straight to sleep.

A
LL THAT WAS
on November 25th, like I said. Between then and New Year's I got to know Natalie Field a good deal better. We got along well. Whenever we got together we started talking, and we talked like crazy for as long as we had. We didn't often have very long, because she was really busy. She gave lessons after school five days a week, and on Saturdays she worked from nine to two at a music school, teaching something called Orff Method to little kids. Nights she practiced, and Sundays she played in a chamber group, and practiced, and went to church. Mr. Field was a very religious man. No, I withdraw that. Mr. Field was a very churchgoing man. I don't know if he was a religious man or not. Natalie was a religious person, and she probably got it from him, but she didn't like church at all. She went, though. She had thought a lot about it and decided it was more important to her father than it was to her, so she'd give in on that point, as long as she lived at home. She thought things like that out. Sometimes going to church made her resentful, but she didn't get all bogged down and tied up in her resentment, the way I did over the car. She just swore some about the dumb minister and went on with what she had to do next. She had her priorities straight.

She was almost eighteen, older than me. That can make a big difference at our age, especially since girls are supposed to mature faster psychologically than boys, but it didn't matter to us. We just got along well. She was the first person I ever met I could really talk to, and talk with. The more we talked, the more there was to talk about. We both had last period free, and we could hang around and talk then till she had to go to her lessons; and sometimes in the evening I went over, and then there was Christmas vacation.

I think it wasn't till vacation that I found out she wasn't studying to be a professional violist. She played viola and violin and piano, but what she wanted to be was a composer. She worked on the instruments so she could earn money teaching, and get into music schools, and later on teach or play in an orchestra for a living, but that was all just means to an end. It took me quite a while to find that out, because she was shy of talking about it. I'm not sure she'd ever told anybody about it except maybe her mother. She was so self-confident and realistic about her playing, I didn't realize at first that that covered up a whole area where she wasn't self-confident, and was ambitious and idealistic and ignorant and unsure, so that it was hard for her to talk about. But it was the real center of her whole life.