Chopsticks

 [A little vignette about Helen, after the operation, and her loss of memory.]

Chopsticks

This is a story that has been left out of the Helen collection of stories, about a famous violinist, Helen, who is discovered to have total amnesia after brain surgery.

Helen is the foster-mother of three girls (one of whom is away at college, and does not figure in this story), and the biological mother of one little boy, the youngest child.  Just before the surgery, she had begun to teach the girls the violin.  (An older, college-age girl, Elly, the daughter of a friend, who had lived with Helen at one time, was an accomplished violist, and had joined the other kids for lessons.)  Right after the surgery, they had tried to give Helen a violin, just to see whether any of her violin skills remained, and that had triggered a violent negative reaction, and Helen had sworn never to touch a violin again, because she thought the main instigator—Amy Salvatori—had ulterior motives.

In this segment, the characters are Erin and Alison, the foster-children, James, Helen’s little boy; Elly, a family friend; Jeannie, another family friend; Maryssa Brooks, Helen’s partner (with whom she had successfully fallen back in love), Sita, another family friend, and Sita’s nephew, Suresh.

At the time this story begins, Maryssa, Helen and the children were still living in Maryssa’s family home, in the Primrose neighborhood.  Maryssa worked part-time at the library in Newberry.  One afternoon, when Maryssa came back from work, Helen had been looking at the piano.  Maryssa’s heart had leaped up (because everyone wanted to urge Helen to ease back into musical activities).

“Shall I show you something?” Maryssa had asked.  Helen had nodded, her eyes lighting up.  She liked Maryssa, and Maryssa was grateful for that.  Maryssa sat down and played Chopsticks, something the old Helen had forbidden her to do on the new piano.  But this Helen didn’t care.  Pretty soon Helen was playing Chopsticks as well as Maryssa.  “Come play it any time you like,” Maryssa invited.

“You want to see if I can play other stuff,” Helen accused.

“Oh, I don’t care,” said Maryssa.  Unlike Amy, she managed to convince Helen.  “I was teaching myself; now we can do it together!”

“Yeah, we’ll surprise everybody!”

 

 

Maryssa’s family had a cook and a maid, and the cook tended to prepare things that Maryssa had eaten for years, based on ancient French recipes, which looked very suspicious to Helen.  Helen, who could only recall the basic meat-and-potatoes fare of her childhood, couldn’t be easily made to eat the Brooks family diet.

Helen related well to Elly, and the Brooks cook and Maryssa conscripted Elly to take Helen out to the grocery store, and bring home whatever she would like to eat.  So Helen and Elly went out to the grocery store in Helen’s van (which Helen has forgotten about).

They went in, and Helen looked around at the shelves with considerable interest.

“So, what would you like to eat?” asks Elly.

“Oh, I don’t know; what have you got?” replies Helen, thinking they were about to have lunch right there.

“No, I mean, what shall we buy, to take home and get Bridget to fix?”

A thoughtful look came into Helen’s eye.

“Hmm.  I really like those hamburgers,” she said softly.  “Can we make hamburgers in the house?”

“Sure!  Okay,” she said, leading the way to where the hamburger patties were on display.  “What else?”  She efficiently snagged some rolls to go with it, and cheese and pickles.

“Hot dogs?”

“Fine.”

 

Soon the cart was piled high with soda, ice cream, and the wherewithal to make grilled-cheese sandwiches, popped corn, pizza and smores.

“You sure like a lot of junk food,” Elly said, looking over the cart a little doubtfully.  “How about salad?”

“I hate salad,” Helen said.  Elly looked at her reproachfully, and she said, okay a little salad would be all right.

“What about chicken?”  She liked that, she said.  She liked roasted chicken, with a lot of garlic.  That was the first sign of something in line with Helen’s adult tastes that Elly could remember.  As far as she could tell, some inhibitions that seem to have made Helen a sweet-natured child had been removed.  Elly mourned for the Helen who had been shaped by those experiences.  It had been the fire of sorrow and grief that had forged the Helen they all loved.  If it had been those bitter experiences that had been inadvertently removed, what was left, presumably, was the raw material, the dull, untempered base metal that the universe had started with, to make its masterpiece that had been Helen.

“Are you getting tired?” Helen wanted to know.  She liked Elly, and she was concerned about her.  The universal concern for others that had driven Helen was now restricted to just a few individuals.

“No, I’m great; Helen, you are taking your diabetes pills, right?”

“Oh yes,” she said, wincing.  “Every night, at supper.”

“Good.”

“They taste horrible!”

“Even better.  You know they’re good for you, then.”  Helen nodded, wide-eyed.

Helen was acutely embarrassed when Elly paid for the food.  “I should pay for it,” she said, red-faced, “but I don’t have money right now.”  It broke Elly’s heart to see the shifty-eyed teenager in the 40-year old body.

“We’ll find a way for you to make money,” she promised.

 

 

Helen related best to Elly and Trish, and a little less to Sita, and Lalitha (Sita’s older sister).  She adored the children, and was partial to little Jeannie, who was thoroughly amused by the development, though Peggy made Jeannie feel guilty about enjoying others’ misfortunes.  “The poor woman has lost her memory, for heaven’s sake!  How can you laugh about such a thing?”

“But she’s so funny!” Jeannie cried.  “She wants me to take her to the mall!  That’s hilarious!”

“So take her!  Take Erin, too.”

“Oh, good call!  I’ll say yes, if Erin can come along!”

It took a few days to clean up the new house they were planning to rent.  Helen helped Maryssa, and Suresh, an engineering student, to re-wire the house according to code.  There was a lot of painting that was needed, and soon, the house was looking spic and span.  They began to move Helen's, Maryssa's, and the children's things in, which took a while.

Helen could not teach the music class she had been teaching up to when the surgery took place.  Helen could not continue the violin lessons she had been giving Erin, Alison and James, and actually Elly, too.  But now, Elly had to take it over. 

 

Helen watched bemused as Elly took over teaching the children the violin.  It was awkward to lead the lessons with Helen watching, but she did it.  Helen could hardly believe how well the kids played, especially Erin.  “Do it again!” she said over and over, listening to simple tunes like the Twinkles,[1] until the children were bored to tears.  But it was an education for her, and they had to let her watch.  Elly hoped she would ask to be taught, but she never did.  Everyone could see that she loved music.  She went up to watch Lalitha do the classes at the community college at least once a week, hiding out in the hall.  (This was the music appreciation course that Helen had been teaching, and which Lalitha had to take over.)  Unlike the old Helen, this new Helen was full of energy, eager to work.

She worked a couple of days at the instrument factory, learning laboriously from scratch.  But she learned by watching, and was very quickly handy with a spokeshave and a chisel.

 

Finally, the weekend of Halloween, the piano was moved ceremonially in by professional movers, and that signified the end of the move.  Everybody had helped, including Matt and Jess, (Maryssa’s brother and sister-in-Law,) and Lalitha was happy to see the pleasure in Helen’s face.  The children were delighted with their rooms, and instead of the extra rooms Helen had wanted to create (before the amnesia, of course), the attic had been finished and wired for electricity, and Erin was moved there, with the understanding that when the weather became cold, she would come down to the warmer floors.

Helen was polled about every detail of decoration of the room she would share with Maryssa—the color of the walls (light yellow), the curtains (blue), the bed (anything, as long as it was “comf’table, and roomy for two.”)  They had kept the old rugs; without Helen’s help, they gave up the idea of replacing the rugs, or restoring the hardwood floors.  Sita, who had often said she loved to hear the piano being played, was invited especially for Helen’s celebratory performance of chopsticks.  Helen glowed at their applause.

One day, Erin was talking to Maryssa, alone in the kitchen.  Maryssa was asking her whether she had made a lot of friends in school.

“Auntie Maryssa?”

“Yes sweetheart?”  Maryssa sounded so sweet, more like an older friend, than a parent.

“Mom …”

“What did you say, Erin?”

Erin’s eyes filled with tears, and they poured down her face.

“What if Mom never gets any better?”

Maryssa took a deep breath.  How could she explain to Erin that she had given up hope?  There was no what if; Maryssa had come to realize—or at least to believe— that Helen’s memory was gone for good.  Her memory would never return, and furthermore, her mental capacity had been permanently impaired.  It was a miracle she was functioning so well.  Anyone else would have become a gibbering idiot.

Erin could see all this in her guarded expression.  Erin collapsed lifelessly, her legs turned to jelly.  If Aunt Maryssa had come to that conclusion, then there was nothing more to be said.  Erin knew her mother would never be normal again.

While Maryssa was able to look on the positive side, on the fact that Helen was alive, vital, in good spirits, for the most part, and reasonably healthy, the child Erin could only see her loss.  To be fair, she thought of it as Helen’s loss.  Perhaps Erin had a perception of the importance and the genius of Helen that vastly surpassed the understanding of most others, including Maryssa herself.  Maryssa’s attitude towards Helen was based on her human qualities, while Erin also knew her true worth as a teacher and a musician.  Erin had listened with pleasure to Helen’s recordings of organ music, and in her instinctive feel for musicality, had been convinced that Helen was on the way to being a phenomenon at the organ.

But nothing was left.

“You mustn’t be like this,” Maryssa told her, her eyes full of sorrow and concern.  “She depends on you, Erin.  If you don’t believe in her, how will the little ones deal with it?”

“But you even don’t believe!”

“Of course I believe in her!”

“No, you don’t!  You think she’ll be this way forever!”

“She might not be the way she was, but she improves, doesn’t she?  She’s learning things every day!  Isn’t she?”

But Erin would not be comforted, and it was the first time Maryssa had to deal with a sobbing Erin.  She took her to her room, without alerting Helen to the problem.  There she held Erin until she had finished crying.  Maryssa was fond of Erin, and it was painful to have held her while she wept, and painful to regard her now, the life gone out of her, defeated, hopeless.

“I wish you would cheer up,” she said, sniffing a little.  Maybe she depended on Erin for moral support more than she realized.  Child psychology was something she was learning slowly, and she worried about how to handle Erin in the least destructive way.  Feeling sad, herself, she wondered whether it would aggravate things further if she allowed herself a little cry.  While she was considering, a little tear managed to escape.  She wiped it away, with the natural grace that imbued all her movements.  “I’m happy I can do something for her, after being … such a helpless person since mother died,” she continued, more to herself than to Erin.  “But people expect so much from Helen and me,” she said, her sniffs becoming louder.  The soft brown eyes appealed to Erin helplessly.  “Look at all the help I need!  Everybody’s here, looking after Helen, but—they’re really looking after me, because I’m still a baby, a child, in a grown woman’s body!”

She stopped abruptly, aware that she was causing more consternation in Erin.  But her words had had some effect, possibly not the best effect, but Erin was moved, all the same.

“You’re doing great,” said Erin, softly.

“You’re a good girl,” Maryssa sighed.  “I can depend on you, I know.  Maybe you’re right, maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe she will get better.  I’m not very religious, but I pray, sometimes, you know?”  Erin nodded.  “I say: God—I know it isn’t fair, because it’s for me, but … if anyone can do it, it’s Helen!”  Erin put her hand on Maryssa’s arm in a gentle touch of love and friendship.  “That’s my prayer,” she said, her voice fading out.  “And I thank him that she’s happy.  If she stopped being happy … it would be very hard for me.”  Unintentionally, she made Erin feel very small.  But that was part of growing up.  It was her first realization that others made bigger sacrifices than she did, and the lesson wasn’t lost on her.

 

One weekend, Amy came to visit.  (Helen and Amy had patched up their disagreements, and Helen was very fond of Amy’s little foster-daughter, Ruth.)

Amy noticed that Helen was squinting.  She found out who Helen’s doctor was, and insisted that Helen have a full check-up.

Her weight was just a little less than at the large (post-surgery) checkup, her blood sugar was more or less under control, her reflexes were fine, but her vision was poor.

“You need new lenses,” he said, musingly.  “Still, not too bad.  Goodness, what have you been doing to these?”

“They keep getting dirty,” said Helen, “so the kids and I keep washing them!”

“See, this dull area right in the center?”

“Yes?”

“You’ve been wiping them with paper towels!”

“Oh.  Is that bad for it?”

The doctor nodded.  Just soft cloth, he told her.  They were sent away to the eye-doctor.  The glasses were not too expensive, and Helen selected a very conservative style of glasses, wire-rimmed, which wrapped around the ear, because of all the woodwork she was doing.

The look on her face told the story.  “It’s so clear!” she exclaimed.  “I can see!”

Helen went about the next few days inspecting everything closely, making little exclamations of surprise.  Amy and David and the little girl finished their business and headed home again, leaving Helen to reacquaint herself with the joys of 20/20 vision.  A lot of her discovery took place out in the yard, while Lita, the dog, watched with what appeared to be amusement.  Certainly she had a grin on her face that suggested it.

 

Helen played the guitar often.  Elly, home for Saturday afternoon, listened without appearing to be studying her too closely.  Helen was trying to work out the harmonies for a song Allie had been singing.  The music teacher at the Quaker school was new, a middle-aged woman from Georgia who seemed to know scores of old songs, and Allie was picking them up, and singing them about the house.  The kids were playing out in front, today, and Helen was seated on the steps with her guitar.

Erin came to sit near Elly.  “She’s so awkward, the way she holds that guitar!” she giggled softly.  Helen, hunched over the guitar, immersed in trying out this chord and that, could not hear them.  “At least she’s trying,” Erin said with a note of resignation.

“Before, she would have just played the song.  Right off.”

“Yeah, before,” Erin said, and Elly glanced at her, hearing the frustration in her voice.  Erin sighed with a catch, almost like a sob.

“You ready?” asked Elly, feeling strange.  This was uncharacteristic of Erin.  The kid had never been bitter about anything in her life, and there could have been so many things that could have made her that way.  Elly wanted to get started on the lesson, before Erin’s mood worsened.

“How can we begin with that going on?” she asked with a smile that made her look like an old cynical woman.  “Shall I tell her to go outside?”

Elly stared.  “Just tell her we’re starting!  You know she comes over and listens!  What’s wrong with you today?”

“I’m fine, Elly, no need to get all upset!  I’ll go tell her, okay?”

Erin’s face was dark, and Elly could see that it hurt the kid to argue with her.  She was taking the whole thing with Helen very hard.  But somehow she had to keep a good relationship with her, because Erin needed the practice.  In the absence of Helen’s teaching skill, Elly had to keep Erin at it.  Because Erin promised to be the greatest violinist of them all.  Already, skill-wise, the kid was flawless.  She was as good as Elly, she knew, and she had no illusions about her own ability: she was destined for greatness, but as a violist—which she determinedly was—she would never be the celebrity Helen had been, and Erin surely would be.

When Erin spoke to Helen, it was affectionately.  Helen immediately put away her guitar, and came towards the corner where they had their lessons.  She murmured something about getting Allie and James, and headed to the front door, to call out in her high soprano, all the way down to the little circle where they were playing.  Erin shared a look with Elly and giggled.  She was at the age when the weird things Helen did embarrassed her.

Soon they were doing their routine exercises, with Helen watching patiently.  Her attention wandered, but they knew she wouldn’t leave until at least James was done.  James was learning a new piece he had asked to be taught, and which Elly had got for him from the music store.  The music store took all her extra cash, because the kids were insatiable in their thirst for sheet-music.  Elly was determined to dig through Helen’s personal music library, which they had not yet done.

“Good work, Jamie!  You’ve been practicing!”

“Naw,” said he with a sly grin, “It’s getting easy.  I just played it once, on Tuesday!”

“You’ll never be a great violinist that way, kid,” Elly reproached.  “See how good Erin is?”

James just grinned at her.  He knew better than to get into an argument with Elly.  He was done.  At one time, he would stay and listen to Allie, but now he wanted to play.  They let him go after he had put away his violin.

Allie did beautifully.  There was some magic in the house that made all the children take to the violin like ducks to water, Elly thought.  Then it was just her and Erin, and they played a duet, wishing Helen could play the orchestra reduction of the accompaniment for them.  Elly was saving up for a music-minus-two for the piece, after which they could play it as though they were playing with a complete orchestra.

 

“I wish I had a violin.” Helen sighed.  “It looks so easy!”

“But …” began Erin, picking up her jaw, her eyes wide.

“Oh, we’ll get you one, if you want to try,” said Elly quickly, before Erin could stick her foot in her mouth.  Helen had managed to forget that she had been a violinist, and had sworn never to touch one again.

Helen, of course, had a number of violins, including several original seventeenth and eighteenth-century instruments given to her by Pat Wallace.  Elly went to the attic and brought down her own violin, one that Helen herself had made, witnessed by a little H in the back of the peg-box.  Erin held her breath, while Elly tuned the violin up, and Helen watched, fascinated.  When Elly was done, she reached for the instrument awkwardly, her large hands hungry for it.

It took a long while to make her comfortable with the violin under her chin, and Erin’s excitement quietly faded.  There would be no miracles that afternoon.  She watched, expressionlessly, managing to maintain a minimal interest in the proceedings.  Elly taught her the basic notes, and Helen did no better than any talented child would have done.  She could get the left hand and the right to go the way she wanted no better than if she had never laid hands on a violin in her life.  Worse, her guitar fingering was getting in the way of her violin fingering.

Erin switched her attention to Elly.  How infinitely patient she was!  Erin’s eyes shone, as she imagined herself in Elly’s place, dealing with Helen, trying to suppress the frustration she felt.

“Oh!” Elly exclaimed with disappointment, at one point, “You almost had it!”  She smiled apologetically, and let the disappointment slowly leach out of her expression.

 

Elly stopped after half an hour, though Helen begged for more.  “I feel as though I’m just about to get it!” she exclaimed, her face glowing.  “It’s just like playing guitar!  It is!”

Elly nodded and smiled, shrugging non-committally, and Erin knew what it cost her to allow even the slightest comparison between the two skills.  But after that half hour, Elly needed to recuperate, and Helen had to be left wanting more.

 

Erin told everyone at dinner, while Helen had stepped out to check on Lita, that Helen had started the violin.  Immediately Maryssa’s eyes lit up.  “How’d it go?” she asked the two girls.  (Elly had stayed for dinner.)  Elly began to say cautiously that it would take a while, but Erin had jumped in, cheerfully saying that it was a disaster.  “She can just about play a scale,” she said.  “It’s chopsticks, all over again!”  That got everyone laughing, except Elly, who tried to signal that they should be quiet.  They heard steps lightly running up the stairs.

Erin’s face changed in a moment to dismay.  “Was she there?  Did she hear me?”  Elly slowly nodded, her grim smile leaving no doubt about her opinion of the younger girl.  “It was a joke!  Just a joke!”

“I know,” said Elly, “and she should know, too.  Finish eating, kids.”

“Shall I go up and see?” asked Maryssa.  They all looked up to Elly, now, in tacit recognition of her inheritance of a kind of stewardship over Helen and her children.  Maryssa was the undisputed authority over the children for most things, but for matters of music and education, Elly and Lalitha were the ones they looked to.  And for certain matters pertaining to Helen, though Maryssa need not have asked her.  Elly only shrugged.  “She hasn’t finished eating,” Maryssa said thoughtfully.

“I’ll go,” said Erin.

 

“Don’t you like how I play chopsticks?” asked Helen sorrowfully, coming straight to the point.

“I love how you play chopsticks,” Erin said, apologetically.  “I just meant that … it would, like, take you a long time to learn the violin, just like, …” she swallowed, “… it’s taking you to learn … the piano.”

“I’ll never be as good as you, sweetheart,” Helen said, and it was too much for Erin.  She buried her face in Helen’s shoulder and wept, in high, soft keening notes, the sound of bitter regret and remorse.  “Don’t cry, now, sweetheart, … I should have come straight to dinner! … I thought —I guess I knew— that you kids were making fun of my violin-playing.”  She sniffed.  “I’m such a great big kid …” Helen said mournfully, “… I ought to be able to take a little fun at my expense.”

Erin calmed herself with a great effort.

“I’ll go look,” she said, her face a mess.  “I didn’t finish eating either.  And the stew is real good!”  Helen smiled affectionately.

Erin took a reconnoiter, and reported that the coast was clear.  They had all gone somewhere.  Helen and Erin finished their supper in companiable silence.

 

Erin was proud to be asked to help Helen practice on Monday evening.  “Finish all your homework, and then I’ll be ready,” Helen said, eagerly.  Erin agreed, equally excited.

With great patience, she taught Helen something she would like, a song she could play with just the notes she knew.  In later years she would say that it was one of the most rewarding moments of her life, as her foster-mother played the tune with good intonation and rather wonderful tone.  The corner had definitely been turned!

Once Helen got the hang of playing with good tone, she wanted to play more and more, and always popular tunes, light classics, and folk-songs.  Try as they might to get her to read music and play the classics, even the little tunes that James and Allie were playing, she preferred to learn them by ear, and play them in her own way, with her own —often awkward— fingering, and not looking at the notes.  It was as though she had a deep-seated dislike of reading music, though she could easily sing from music.

“It’s what she likes,” Elly concluded.  “If there was a song she wanted to learn to play badly enough, she’d get it from the music, I’ll bet,” she said.  But, after Elly adjusted her fingering, she would play along with the kids, her expression blissfully content.

“This isn’t hard at all,” she said to them.  “I mean,” she quickly corrected herself, being an amateur psychologist, now, “it’s hard, but I’m getting it pretty well.”  James gave her the evil eye, and Allie bit her tongue, and Erin nodded, wooden-faced.  Elly alone agreed with fair enthusiasm.  To be honest, she was learning the physical part of violin-playing moderately easily.  She had the strength and the control of her big, strong hands, even if hardly a vestige of her old skill remained with her.

 

Twice, already, they had gone to concerts of the Impromptu, to hear Erin do her stuff.  As always, Helen sat ramrod straight, looking over the shoulders of the people in front of her, eager to see everything.  They had stopped telling her about her career in the past, to make it easier for her to bear her handicap.  She had forgotten that she had been the founding conductor of the ensemble, and was, in fact, the owner of the building in which they performed and rehearsed.

 

 

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[1] “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” a main exercise of one of the violin-teaching methods.