"LOOKING INSIDE"

       It was Wednesday afternoon and I was in a hurry to get to Aunt Alicia's. Every year in early November Aunt Alicia invited the town into her house to the Annual Alicia Brewster Young Artists Recital. It was looming large for next Saturday, with final rehearsal Friday.  I didn't want to miss even five minutes of my last practice run-through.

       I pedaled my flaming pink bicycle as fast as the curvy, bumpy streets would allow. When I was just a block away, I saw my cousin Harmony pedaling towards me.  Harmony and I had matching flaming pink bicycles, with matching streamers on the handlebars, matching pink fake fur seat covers, and matching horns that sounded like a semi truck barreling down the road. We thought the horns made a nice contrast with the flaming pink. As bicycles for girls our age, they were ridiculous, and we rode them proudly everywhere. . . . .

       "How did your lesson go?" I called out as our flaming pink bicycles passed.

         "Don't ask!" grunted Harmony.

        Harmony wanted to study ballet, not voice, but by now she was much too old to begin serious ballet. She had a fine, rich soprano voice.  I thought it could be a great voice, a voice that, with proper training, would get her standing ovations in the finest Opera Houses of the world. I wished I had a great voice, but we don't all get born with the same gifts.

       Harmony and I did both have the gift of perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is of more value to a piano tuner than to a piano player, but it is invaluable for a singer. Unfortunately, Harmony wasn't getting its full value. When she sang, her voice was like a bird in a big cage. It could do some flying, but it never soared the way I believed it could if only it could break out of that cage. It never did

       One thing that kept it caged was resentment about having voice lessons instead of ballet lessons. Aunt Alicia was the reason for that. She taught piano and organ and voice, but not ballet. Worse yet, Harmony did not get along with Aunt Alicia. In that, I'm sorry to say, she was not alone.

       My Aunt Alicia's three-story gray house, set in a generous garden with an iron fence, was of an overwhelming size from the outside. . . . My father and his three brothers and Aunt Alicia had all been born in that house. My father and Uncle Hank, being the two oldest boys, always had the two most popular rooms, the ones in the two round towers with the cone tops.... .      However, once inside this big house, you felt crowded. There was nothing mysterious about it. The effect came from all the things Aunt Alicia kept crammed in there, -- plump velvet chairs, satin striped sofas, brass statuettes, porcelain bric-a-brac, marble busts, crystal dishes, Tiffany lamps, low carved wood tables, tall carved bookshelves, leather hassocks, china cabinets, needlepoint footstools, even an old-style pipe organ and a beautiful golden harp.

       "They don't really belong to her," my mother usually commented after every visit. "Why does she want them all? Not to mention what she has hidden up in the attic."

       "Now, Abigail, it doesn't really matter," my father would reply. "Where would we put any of it?"

           "I wouldn't want any of it," my mother would sniff.

          "Alicia likes her students to pass by those things on their way to their lesson," said loyal Uncle Ted.   "She says it lets them glimpse the finer things of life."

       "Teddy, you know as well as I do that she simply wants to show them off.  Things she has that other people don't."

         Pretty little Aunt Thelma always disagreed with Uncle Ted, at least when it came to Aunt Alicia. I think she called him "Teddy" because Aunt Alicia called him "Theodore."  Aunt Thelma didn't get along with Aunt Alicia, either.  

       "Why do you insist on finding fault with her?" muttered Uncle Ted. He usually muttered to himself rather than argue with his pretty wife. 

       Ted was the youngest of the brothers, a gentle teddy bear of a man. Long ago he had been a musician. He and his saxophone had toured eighteen states with a jazz band.  Then he came home, married Aunt Thelma within a few months, and ever since had worked at the Post Office. Of all the brothers, he was the most incapable of saying "No!" to Aunt Alicia. 

     The truth was, none of her brothers flatly refused her and stuck by it.   Including my father.

       "She's our baby sister."  Even when my father said it, he knew it sounded lame.

“All those valuable things aren't rightfully hers," chubby Aunt Frances liked to point out. "There's a fortune in that house that should have been sold and the money divided up."

        Now, Aunt Alicia, the "baby sister," was anything but little. She was a tall woman of "generous proportions,' which was a kind way of putting it.  She wore flowing, form-hiding garments, silky in the summer, velvety in the winter, and year round she glittered with jewelry, mostly my grandmother's, and so much of it that a smaller person might have bent under the weight. She wore heavy necklaces and added in earrings, bracelets and rings. She swept her hair up high into piles of waves on top of her head. Like with her front doors, most people had to look up at her.  She expected them to.

        When Ted and Thelma had their first child, the second of the cousins to come and the only one to come a scant seven months after the wedding, Alicia decreed that they name her Harmony. "Harmony" to bring their marriage back into harmony with society and the way things should be.

      Aunt Thelma's second child was not "Symphony" either. The baby was a boy and hastily named Thomas for our grandfather before Aunt Alicia chose a different name. Lucky Tommy! He might have been Bassoon Brewster.

       As for me, the last thing my mother had said to my father both times before being wheeled into the Delivery Room was, "Don't you dare let Alicia name our child!"        . . .  So my brother and I were not "Symphony" and "Chord," Aunt Alicia's choices.  We are "Melinda" after my grandmother and "Gary"after my father's favorite actor, Gary Cooper.

       Gary did his name proud.  He outgunned Aunt Alicia, and he did it at an amazingly early age. He escaped her music lessons, the only one of us cousins who did.  Instead of paying attention during his lesson, he would drum his fingers on anything flat or moderately curved, with a rhythm and a volume that even Aunt Alicia found impossible to ignore.

       "He just has no music in him," she told my father. "His lessons are a waste of my time."

       I realized even then that Aunt Alicia expected my father to scold Garyand make him stop drumming with his fingers.

       Instead Father had said, "We can't all have the same gifts. Gary will just have to quit taking music lessons."

         "Lucky Gary," said Harmony.

       I knew my little brother better than that. "Sly Gary" was more accurate. '

      My mother says I worry too much and practice too much just to please Aunt Alicia. My mother has often said that I mustn't let my aunt take over my life the way she has tried to take over everyone's life.  My mother meant well, but she didn't understand. If Aunt Alicia considered me her star performer, that was nice, but it wasn't why I practiced so much.  I practiced all the time because I love filling a room with music.

       I couldn't remember a time when I didn't love to make music, and there is nothing like a concert quality grand piano to fill a room with music. It wasn't Aunt Alicia but the music of Chopin and Liszt and Debussy and Beethoven and Brahms and Rachmaninoff that had taken over my life, just as their portraits had taken over my bedroom walls.

       Luckily for me, ours is a small-ish sort of town less than an hour's drive from a good-sized city, so even as a senior I could like classical music and still have friends at high school. Most of us, except for Flo, while we liked popular music, didn't worry all that much about being"'hip" and "cool" and up to the minute on the current stars of MTV.

       My brother Gary, an 8th grader, did, not to be "cool" but because Van Halen was his hero. Gary might not have had any music in him according to Aunt Alicia, but he spent hours watching Van Halen on the TV, practicing riff after riff until he got it right.  He also got his own TV in his room so that the rest of us didn't have to listen to him practice until he got it right.

       "It could be worse," my father would joke. "He could have decided to be a drummer."

      Up in one of Aunt Alicia's piano rooms, Melinda plays the pieces she is to play at the recital, although the way she wants to play them is not the way Aunt Alicia communicates over the intercom that they should be played.  She is about finished with the third run-through of the Beethoven Sonata when....

 . . . .  the front door banged shut and boots tramped up the stairs. It was my cousin Tommy.   "That sounded good," he told me as he banged his way to the top of the stairs.

       Tommy couldn't help banging.  He was sprouting even taller. He was one year younger than his sister Harmony and me and weighed more than the two of us put together.   He was also the quarterback, and our school�s team is headed for the regional championship. He's another reason why I can like classical music and Harmony can love ballet and we can still have friends. The high school's star quarterback is my cousin and Harmony's brother.

      I gathered up my music and closed the keyboard. Tommy would be playing on the third best piano in the adjoining "studio room."  I imagined the poor piano was bracing itself for the assault on its keyboard. Whenever Tommy arrived, I could hear Aunt Alicia give a little gasp of dismay, whether she was in the room or merely audible on the intercom.

       Tommy had great hands. They could throw a long pass through traffic on a football field or make a three-point basket from either side of the court. They could not, however, do anything except pound a keyboard.  Tommy did not mind his lessons at all. He considered them tests of mental discipline, mind over matter, very necessary for success in any sport.

       "Like Coach says," he had explained to me, "after a certain level, everyone has learned the physical skills. At that level, it's the mental skills that count." . . .

      Melinda leaves Aunt Alicia's to the sound of Tommy's less than delicate interpretation of the Arabian Dance and pedals home.

       "How did the lesson go?" asked Mother.  She always asked and usually didn't turn around from peeling potatoes or icing a cake or whatever. Today, she not only stopped breading the pork chops but turned and looked at me with an odd expression.

          "Fine," I said. "I'll be ready for Saturday."

           "Alicia didn't say anything?"

       "I played the Sonata the way she wanted it, slow and measured. She did correct me about the phrase in Chopin that I want to play differently. And I just might."

       "Good," said Gary. He was always on the side of anyone defying Aunt Alicia. His early escape from music lessons had gone to his head and stayed there.

       Mother nodded. "Then she hasn't heard."

       'Heard what?"

     "Uncle Hank's coming to visit," gloated Gary. "Boy oh boy, will that ever get her panties in a bunch."

          "Gary, don't be crude."

          "It's just an expression, Mom."

     "Not one I choose to hear.  Coarse language is the refuge of the uneducated."

       "How about 'it will mightily annoy and discombobulate her'?"

     "Better. Silly but better," I told him. "Is that true?  Uncle Hank's coming?   When?"

       "This evening. Your father's gone to the airport to meet him."

       "Does that mightily annoy and discombobulate Dad?" I asked.

    "Not at all. Your father is very fond of Hank. They were best friends growing up."

       "Bullpuppies!"said Gary. "He hasn't seen him for years. Melinda and I've never seen him that we can remember. How 'fond' can that be? He sure can't be very fond of us. We never hear from him, except Christmas cards and birthday cards."

       "With money," Mother reminded him. "Which I'm sure was a sacrifice. Artists are not wealthy people."

       "So, why did he leave?" insisted Gary. "Running away from Aunt Alicia?"

            "That's quite enough, Gary."

        Gary could be upsetting. If you met him, you might think he was just another dumb kid, but he wasn't. So many times he hit the nail on the head. Like this time.

     Gary hopped down from the breakfast bar stool and bounced out the kitchen door.   "I was right! I was right! He's an Alicia refugee. I'll bet he's real smart."

       Mother paused again and looked towards where Gary had gone. Then she shrugged and smiled.   "Gary is right. I don't know how he figures things out.  He's not that smart."

      The first chapter ends as they prepare to welcome Uncle Hank, who is quite a surprise.  At the end of each chapter is a portrait of one of the classical composers whose works Melinda especially likes or whose life in some way reflects something happening at the moment in her.   In the Audio and CD formats there is also a brief 30-second excerpt of that composer's music.