Husky Read online

  As I walk, I feel lost in it. I swing my arms, not conducting, but following the motion of the music. These are the moments when I’m the happiest, I think. The happiest I get when I’m alone. It’s only me and this humongous music. There’s no room for anything else. And I feel safe in it. Safe is totally the wrong word, I guess, but only kind of. Safe because I don’t care about anything else. The whole world is this music. And I’m part of it, and I’m pounding my arms with the trumpets or stepping with the kettle drums, and nothing else matters, not even that old lady who sits outside her wineshop staring at me, hard, and probably thinking to herself, I may be old and crazy, but that fat kid is just nuts.

  It’s just me and the music, and we’re alone. And safe.

  It doesn’t happen all the time. But today I’m listening to “Casta Diva” from the opera Norma by Bellini. This one always gets me. Mostly because it’s Maria Callas. She’s Great. In the opera, Norma is a druid priestess in Gaul, which is France before the French, and she is calling down the moon goddess to bring peace to the land. I know Norma is a silly name for a druid, it sounds more like a Lunch Lady or Nurse, but this Norma is a priestess, and she has a secret husband who has fallen in love with one of her handmaidens. It all gets really messed up by the end, and Norma goes crazy too and sets herself on fire, but that’s all later. Right now, she’s just asking for peace in one of the best ways I’ve ever heard. The song—they call them arias—“Casta Diva,” starts with this little flute solo that plays most of the melody, but then Norma sings, and it’s so beautiful. It’s this winding song that curls around itself and builds into these big notes that just get higher and higher until the chorus when the other druids join, and you have to give her peace. You have to. You have no other choice. It’s one of my favorites, and it almost always takes me away a few times. But my bag is heavy, so I start counting the blocks to Mom’s bakery to distract myself.

  Mom likes to tell the story of how I got into opera, because she thinks it’s funny. She leaves out a lot of parts, because she wants it to be cute. But it wasn’t all cute. It was sort of sucky too.

  It started because Mom wanted to get rid of my dad’s records. My grandfather, Jock, had put them in the living room, because he always knew the right place for everything. So that’s where they went. But it was still sort of strange. My dad had already been gone a long time, I didn’t even remember him, so why was there still his stuff around the house? It was because of Mom. Every once in a while you would pick up something that didn’t belong to you and you couldn’t figure out who it did belong to, and it would be his. Then Mom would get real quiet about it, and it would be gone. No one ever mentioned it again.

  All of his stuff slowly disappeared like this, everything except for the records in the living room. They were the last to go. Records are pretty awesome, they’re big squares and the pictures are great. You can almost see what the music is about. Other records are cool, my dad’s weren’t. They were just a pile of brown junk with a bunch of bearded dirty guys sitting around and smoking cigarettes. I thought they were all brown. They all looked brown in a dirty way. So I just left them alone. And then one day when I was nine, Mom, out of nowhere, said, “I need to get rid of those records.”

  Nanny and Jock didn’t say anything but looked at each other and waited.

  “They’re not bothering anybody, love,” Nanny said first.

  “I know, but they need to go,” Mom said.

  “Well, there’s that shop on Fifth. You could sell them there,” Jock said slowly, seeing if it was okay to offer help. We all were really careful when talking about my dad, or even his stuff, with Mom. Mentioning him or that he had ever been a person was always a scary thing to do. You never knew what she was going to say or how she was going to take it.

  “I’ll take them now.” Mom smiled.

  And I sort of don’t know why, but I asked, “Can I come?”

  And she said, “Sure, we’ll take them in the schlepper.”

  Maybe it’s because when you’re nine, getting to go anywhere is awesome, but also getting to do something when you get there is pretty major. So I raced around getting ready while Mom packed the records in a big pile in the grocery cart. I totally forgot that getting rid of the records was a big deal. That was sort of sucky right off the bat.

  The record shop was this cramped little store that was filthy and smelled like kitty litter, dried up for exactly the wrong reasons. Mom showed the records to the tiny old man behind the counter, and I got to look around. At first I thought it was going to be a store filled with the dirty brown things like my dad’s we brought from home, but no way. No. Way. This shop, this gross little shop, had Amazing records in every color you could think of. Pink smiling faces, and girls in Bright Green dresses. Some of them dancing in Blue or singing in Orange. And even one lady was on fire, Bright Red. They were awesome, and I loved looking at the pictures and trying to figure out what the music must be like.

  And then I saw her. Leontyne Price. Well, I didn’t know her yet. But there she was. This lady dressed in a beautiful long green cape, looking right at me with this stare—it was half-mean and half-excited, it was lots of things—and I couldn’t stop looking back at her. She had this huge fro, which I just thought was so cool. She was looking right at me almost like she was daring me to do something. Right At Me. I thought she was the greatest person I had ever seen. Honest. I would have done anything she asked. I didn’t even care what the music was, I just wanted to look at this lady and find out everything about her. So I picked up the record—it was thicker than I thought, like a big book, a big important book—and took it over to Mom. The old man behind the counter saw me and said to my mom, “Your boy’s into opera?”

  Mom turned around and saw me with it, with the lady. “Now put that back before you break it.”

  How could I break it? I wasn’t going to break it. I wouldn’t ever, it was Too Good to break. I needed to know what it was.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  The old man said, “It’s an opera called Aida.”

  “A-EE-da,” I said back, repeating it over and over again in my head thinking that that was the lady’s name before I even knew what or who an Aida was.

  The old man took the record and opened the front to show me and Mom that it was three records and a book. “It’s six dollars,” he said. Mom told me to put it down. But I couldn’t. I knew I had to have it. I had to. How could I leave this Aida? I didn’t even know what she was yet.

  “Please, can I have this? Please?”

  “You won’t like it. It’s for grown-ups,” Mom shot back.

  Even I know that is a dumb thing to say. Why do adults never get it? Never. When they tell us this stuff is not for you or too hard for you to understand, it just makes you want it more. Honest. Everything Mom has ever told me I wouldn’t like, I have loved. Everything except soccer camp and chai tea, those are the only two times she’s been right. Everything Else. Loved. Including Aida.

  But because she said No and I didn’t know what else to do, I started to cry. It was really a baby move for being nine, but I couldn’t think of what else to do and I didn’t want to leave Aida here in this smelly store. So I didn’t just cry a little, I went full tears. Huge. Ugly-Face Crying. Breathing Hard. I couldn’t or wouldn’t imagine leaving the store without this lady, Aida, never finding out who she was and what she sounded like. She was daring me to take her home.

  “It’s three records, that’s so much more than one,” I huffed out at Mom, wet.

  “No.”

  “It’s a good thing, opera. I bet Nanny would like it.”

  “Davis, no. You won’t like it. It’s in Italian,” she said.

  “So what?” I asked.

  “You won’t understand it.”

  “I will, I promise. I promise.”

  Now, how I thought that I would instantly understand Italian, I don
’t know, but I would have said anything to take home Aida. Even after all this time, I still don’t know Italian, I’ve picked up a few words, but that doesn’t matter. I wasn’t giving up, and Mom was getting angry. She had to come in close. Coming in close is this thing Mom does when she wants you to know just how serious she is. It’s the last warning before she goes ballistic, which she’s never really done, but she’s warning you she might. She gets in real close, so close that our foreheads touch, and she speaks really slowly and safely, saying my full name and everything else with this little growl in her voice. If the voice doesn’t give you the message, I think she thinks that maybe the touching heads will pass the thought from one brain to the other and tell you to really Knock It Off.

  “Now, Davis Anthony O’Brien, that’s an opera. It’s loud and in a foreign language and even though you like the pretty lady on the cover, it doesn’t mean you will like or understand the music or the story. Please put it back now. I do not want to argue with you anymore.”

  At any other time, coming in close like this would have shut me right up, but this time, that was impossible. So I did something really sucky. It’s the only way I can say it. Just sucky. I looked right at her and I said, “You don’t want me to have this record, and you’re selling my dad’s records too? That’s not fair. I never get to have anything. Not Even A Dad.”

  Sucky.

  I had never mentioned my dad to my mom. I knew I shouldn’t, and I knew it would just hurt her. I had never really even called him “my” dad before. I never met him or couldn’t remember him if I did. But I knew it was a mean and rotten thing to say, and I said it anyway just to get what I wanted. I knew how much she missed him, I guess, or was upset he wasn’t around. But in that moment, it didn’t matter. I did a sucky, mean, and totally selfish thing. My mom never tells that part of the story. It would embarrass me or hurt my feelings, like I did to her that day, and she’s too nice to do that. My mom is too nice for a lot. I wish I was.

  When something really hurts Mom, it almost knocks her out. Her eyes get real big, like she’s trying to see everything around her to figure out how it happened. She never expects it. And she looks around, trying to find out what it is and why it happened. She’s a good person and she didn’t—doesn’t—deserve that. It’s hard for her to figure out, but usually the thing she is looking for is right in front of her.

  Like me.

  And my mom just said, “Fine. But you will listen to the whole thing tonight and nothing else.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said.

  Mom sold all of Dad’s records for forty-six dollars. Aida was six. We didn’t talk most of the walk back. Aida sat alone in the schlepper.

  When we got home, Nanny immediately asked her usual roster of questions, but we didn’t answer, we just walked right past her. We were both still pretty upset. Mom walked me upstairs to the living room and sat me down in front of the record player, right above the empty shelf where Dad’s records had been. She took out the first record of Aida and put it on. She handed me the book that was in the record too, but I didn’t look through it yet. I just wanted to listen. I sat in front of the record player with my arms crossed, and the music started.

  Once the needle touched down on the record, I never moved. The music was Gigantic. It’s the only way I can say it. Gigantic. I had never heard anything so big in my whole life.

  “What’s this, now?” yelled Nanny from downstairs in the kitchen.

  “Aida. Davis is a very big opera fan,” Mom said, trying to get me to sort of say something back. But I didn’t. Nanny and Mom talked and talked about me and the opera and everything, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t. There wasn’t anything else in the world except Aida.

  The violins, in big stretches of music. And the violas and the cellos too. Strings in big waves, just moving all around me. Then the whole orchestra. Drums and trumpets and flutes. Huger and huger and huger until it stops and goes soft again. So soft, almost like all those instruments are whispering together at the same time, keeping the secret of what comes next. And then it builds again, stronger like fists, stronger until horns are hurling at you. It was the biggest thing I’d ever heard, and nobody sang a note yet! Not one word of Italian or anything else, but I didn’t care. I wanted this and only this.

  And then Radames, he’s the prince in Aida, sings in this deep big voice, almost as big as the band sounds. And the chorus comes in, so many voices, so many people and instruments and everything. How could all this be here? And there were still two other records.

  Nanny tried to talk to me the whole time. But Jock just batted her away.

  “Do you like this?” Nanny yelled.

  “Leave the kid alone, he likes it,” Jock said back, fussing with his TV.

  “What are they saying?” Nanny tried.

  “How does he know? Let him listen,” Jock offered.

  “Now that’s a pretty bit. I like that song, but it’d be better in English.”

  “Well, I agree with that, Davey boy,” Jock said with a smile.

  Jock was the only person to call me Davey, I liked it a lot. I miss it.

  Nanny kept trying to talk to me. But I wouldn’t answer her. I was so focused on listening. I really didn’t want to do anything. And I guess I was trying to imagine what was happening. When the music speeds up, are they angry? Is something bad happening? What’s wrong? And since I didn’t know anything, I could sort of make it all up. That was the best part. Honest. Imagining these people with big wide mouths saying words I didn’t even know, and the high notes and the getting louder all had a meaning just for me. I had to figure them out. So I started to follow in the book. And then she sang, the woman from the cover, Leontyne Price. She had dared me to pick this up, and to take her home, and I was hooked.

  There’s this aria in Aida called “O Patria Mia,” where Aida, who’s been sold as a slave to the Egyptians, misses her home country of Ethiopia, and she calls out to it. It’s sort of too hard to say what it means, but it’s about a place you want to go but can’t. A place where you know you belong but where you can’t be anymore. You miss it, and you wonder if it misses you. I heard it that night, and I read along, and I sort felt like it was the opera calling out to me. And from then on, I loved it.

  I listened to the whole thing, all six sides, that night. And again the next night, and the next and the next, until Mom took me back to the record shop and bought me another opera, just to stop the endless Aida. Jock cleared out the shelf for me and said all my operas could always go there. There was a spot for me.

  By the time I get to Sweet Jane, Norma and the druids have peace, twice, and the bakery is closed. It’s time for the Big Bake.

  CHAPTER 3

  On Sunday nights, Sweet Jane closes early for the Big Bake. We need to get started. I say we, but I only help a little, barely any. I just like to say we because it’s nice to feel a part of it. All week Mom makes breads and cookies and cakes for our store, but on Sunday nights, she does the Big Bake, where she makes all that stuff for other places. Rolls for six Italian restaurants, desserts for three. Biscuit mix in a big plastic tub for a Southern restaurant in Crown Heights, and there are a bunch more, but I can’t remember. The Big Bake is also for special orders by regular people too. Stuff like birthday cakes, special desserts for people when they want to feel happy about something. Mom loves that stuff. Anniversary cakes and graduation cakes, all of it. She likes making something for a special occasion. And I like watching her do it.

  I knock on the glass door twice to let Jules, the girl who works the register, know to let me in. It takes Jules a while. She’s really cool, so she moves really slow. She even talks slow. Jules has this thing with her voice that she doesn’t need to say words like everyone else, and she’s annoyed that you think she does. So she takes her time because it is her time, and you can just wait. Even for the door.

 
“H-EY. Your mom’s in b-ack,” Jules says as she unlocks the door. I start to go in when right behind me I hear, “Hey, little man, hold that door for me, okay?”

  It’s Paolo. Paolo is sexy. At least Jules thinks so, because she gets flushed when she hears him and straightens her bangs. Paolo is one of the other bakers and the only person anywhere who calls me man. Mom hired him about three years ago, when he had moved to New York with his girlfriend, Stacy, from Brazil. Stacy met him on vacation, and I think it was like a Hermit Crab thing. You want them so bad when you’re there, because you’re at the beach and it’s fun and you need to get something because everyone else is, but when you get it home, it’s just this ugly crab that does nothing and you wonder why you ever wanted it in the first place. So Paolo was the hermit crab, and he got dumped. Not that Paolo is ugly. He’s not at all. He’s nice and funny and he has an accent that makes even Jules smile, which happens with no one else. My mom had to talk to her about it.

  With me, Paolo jokes a lot but mostly about things I don’t think are funny. I laugh anyway because I don’t know what else to do. He always starts in with, “So are you married yet?”

  “No.” I sort of shrug and laugh as he squeezes past me and says hi to Jules. Jules actually laughs too, which is crazy.

  “Really, a handsome guy like you? I bet all the girls are chasing after you,” asks Paolo again. “Don’t you think so, Jules?”

  Jules says yes, but it’s a yes about him, it has nothing to do with me, so she laughs. And I laugh again because I still don’t know what to do.