“I could say that Karl and I have junked our old classroom schedule, to our mutual relief. I could say that my voice teacher and I are confiding like conspirators of long-standing. I could talk at length about the evening I spent playing charades with Kay and company, and how I enacted the courting of two moose—mooses? But I don’t want to write a diary, although right now it seems all I’m up to. I feel like there’s some leap of faith I’m not making—a leap off the literal structure of my life into the airier realm of art.”

BEER BELLY

“The last few days have been novel. Instead of tucking in all sorts of questionable feelings, like an unsightly beer belly, I’ve been letting them all hang out. Karl laughed uproariously when he realized I was worried about sounding like a bitch. He kissed me on the cheek, saying, ‘We’ll make it.’ And afterward he looked as bashfully stricken as a Walt Disney dwarf. Even Lu and I gave each other a clumsy unpremeditated hug. So I’ve things to ponder with chagrin and relief. I wonder if this red-faced effort will make a difference. Sometimes I think that my being neither a singer, nor artist, nor writer, nothing can.

“To feel the pleasant cool spot of my own finger poised against my cheek, to savor everything a little, laugh when the crazy pampas grass stalk in my car lurched softly into my face, to pull my wool cap down to my eyebrows and rejoice that I’d found it on the seat of my car, to whistle Elton John’s ‘Yellow Brick Road’ and actually hit the high notes, to recall Ellen’s and Laurie’s joy at having me back at school, their almost forgetting to greet me with the usual, ‘Hi, Mrs. Coconut Ketchup Sandwich.’

“Slowing at the stop sign at Clayton Road on the way to the restaurant and wondering if I would be able to write tonight, feeling scared, like everything was hanging out, scared of my arrogance in assuming I would be able to write just because I’d made up my mind to, knowing that’s folly, that moods of confidence pass and I can’t honor the commitments I make in those moods.

“Ah, what can I say? I feel like I could write a novel—that the words are links in a chain extending from this page back into the most obscure recesses of my mind, and that by pulling hand over hand, I could eventually bring to light something astonishing.

“And how everything gives me pleasure—the gesture with which I pull open the prongs of a binder and slide out a new page, the sight of my own body as I curl in a hot tub. Today, I’m not embarrassed by excesses—my imperfect animality delights me. I feel pulses of power, a half-awaited something coming true.”

“This is the strangest day of illness of all. I am unaccountably fitful. One minute I spring up with an apparent surfeit of energy and pace about, restlessly reviewing plans and projects in my mind, the next I fall suddenly into a sleep, like a swoon, for five minutes or twenty, my mouth wetting the pillow like a child’s.

                                                                                …

“Another day, and I wake again to a sense of altered consciousness. I feel a savage restlessness, as though there weren’t space enough for me in this existence. In and out of moments I experience pangs, like hunger—feelings red and raw, like things new-born. I feel desperate or on the verge of tears, and at the same time, the quality of perception is so dear that I can’t believe I will be allowed to keep it. Surely it will be snatched away from me, and I will be as I was before.”

SACRILEGE

“I feel scared—like I’ve committed a sacrilege in opening my journal and reading the contents prematurely. I’d said I would wait, and I did, but not long enough. I had only enough distance to evaluate a little of it, and now I feel all the misgivings—the apprehension—of having unlatched a Pandora’s box.

“A short while ago, I felt so electric—an image occurred to me. I felt like I had been a scrap of cord severed from the main line, I’d blocked off so many memories of my past, and that at last, because the break had been mysteriously mended, I was feeling a power surge throughout my contemporary being. But now I fear reprisal, a fall from grace. Perhaps I’ve done it—destroyed the clarity. Sometimes I think I was better off before, for now there is a new dimension to anxiety. That all this may desert me. That’s what reading my journal has done—planted some queasy seed that is burgeoning in my garden.

“’Go to the typewriter and write to save yourself, if you can,’ I tell myself. And why do the images relate before I consciously see that they do? And what in me is writing? Now the tears are coming.”

Following my dream “Aerial,” I woke up in an altered state of consciousness—one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life—that I chronicled in a series of vignettes:

“Literally overnight, a startling change has come over me. I have incomprehensibly achieved a vivid sense of my life’s continuity. I am discovering the logic behind what I have done or tried to do that I didn’t perceive at the time, and I remember the bolder person that I was. She turns on like a light within me, illuminating my past. What I cried out was not, is today—my past is real.”

SPLINTER

“Don’t expect anything and you won’t be disappointed. I awoke with my throat so swollen it felt like a golf ball had lodged there. And speaking of lodged, I had the thought, as I lay there enjoying my new condition, that it was as though something had been dislodged in my brain, a great psychic splinter that had pained and aggrieved. The truth is, much of this time I don’t feel so different. But I keep passing before some door in my mind that stands slightly ajar and strikes me with an edge of light from within—the reality of my past, the coherence of my personality. I have been incredulous for years, like a pitiful, dumbfounded animal, over my total and unaccountable loss of vitality—capacity for intellectual assertion, effective will, rational control over my feelings. How could I have had these things and lost them? How could I have been loved and not experience a trace of the feeling that I had been? How could I have achieved, yet come to feel so small and drab? How could I, after attaining a measure of self-possession, have become stuttering, intimidated, and withdrawn? How is it possible that I could have worked through so many problems, only to find, years later, that the sum of my unhappiness was the same?”

And here, I feel obliged to observe in hindsight, “But I hadn’t been loved; I’d only imagined I was, after Britte’s declaration before I sailed off to Spain.”

“Last night I had this dream:

“It was evening in a room of my imagination. I discovered that with a bird-like stroke of arms, I could rise into the air and float above the floor. I called in passersby for a demonstration and found, to my mortification, that I couldn’t repeat the trick. I flapped about ineffectually for a time, feeling absurd, until the moment of giving up. It was then I beheld my feet, not planted on, but dangling inches above the floor. I dropped my arms with relief and floated to the ceiling, as gracefully as a helium balloon.

“I rose and descended many times more, embracing each of my audience in turn and lifting them up with me. It was as though we stood on an invisible pedestal that bore us up and down. When all had had a turn, I flew to the top of the wall to a row of small horizontal windows. I pressed through one of these and was momentarily out in a luminous night. There was another wall, another set of windows. Then at last I was free.

“A sumptuous landscape, more beautiful than life, rolled out before me. There were mountains just beyond touch whose shadows were every shade of violet. As I flew forth, there loomed up a haze of black winter branches that reached hundreds of feet into the air. They were hung with myriad icicles that sparkled in the starlight. I gasped with wonder at this celestial chandelier, and, as though one icicle had broken free and lodged magically in my heart, I felt pierced with joy, like the child I was beyond memory who first saw the rainbow iridescence of snow in the glow of an old street lamp. I began to sing as I flew. I saw a lighted arena and prancing horses that were animated drawings—not real. And I heard music that seemed to come from inside me as I dipped and turned on the wing.”

Once I was back at Cal for my senior year, I was able to see a therapist at the student hospital as I had during the spring of my sophomore year. Since Dr. Camarer had committed suicide, I was assigned to a new psychiatrist, Dr. F.

In A Patchwork Memoir I wrote:

It was several years after my death despair began that I first told my mother about it. I remember, as a teenager, sleeping downstairs on the sectional in the living room for a time rather than in my bedroom because I was afraid to be alone. When I asked my mother how people came to terms with death, she said when I was an adult, I would know.

Consequently, when I was twenty-two and officially an adult, the conviction took hold of me one day that I had to face my death despair—I couldn’t keep trying to ward it off. Dr. F thought that I was trying to punish myself for something, but I believe I was simply trying to prepare myself for adulthood—as I’d been doing from the time I tried to befriend Britte as a senior in high school. It was the reason I’d sought therapy in the first place, gone to Spain, and started voice lessons. I was trying to extricate myself from my dysfunctional family and prepare to be independent. Because I’d already experienced so much misery since sixth grade, I was determined to turn my life around. If only I were brave enough, I told myself, I could free myself from the depression and anxiety that hampered me. In particular, I imagined that this was the way to free myself as an artist.

So, by degrees, I tried to stay in the anguish longer and longer when it overwhelmed me. I began to go through the stages of a dying person that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross describes but that I didn’t read about until years later—denial, anger, depression, and finally acceptance. (I skipped “bargaining.”) I became so deeply depressed that if I’d been that depressed about anything else, I probably would have killed myself. It seemed to me that my denial of my mortality and my will to live were one and the same thing and that if I gave up the denial, I might actually die. I remember examining my body one evening as I soaked in a warm bath—arms, legs, hands, feet—and crying bitterly, knowing I would have to surrender it. Another day, riding on a bus, I remember saying good-bye to the sky and clouds and April trees, and going to bed that night utterly depleted, not expecting to wake up in the morning. I’d accepted the laws of nature, bowed to the inevitable…and stopped resisting, knowing that if I survived, my life would never be the same.

Then there came an hour when I could rest, finally, in the despair and no longer try to escape it. I didn’t reach any kind of equanimity about dying—only a cold, soul-numbing resignation. I emerged from this passage doubting that I would ever feel carefree or joyful again. Though I went through these stages over the course of many months, it was years before I completely recovered. Throughout my twenties I couldn’t undertake anything long-term because I no longer had the sense that I had any time.

The hour I described above would have happened soon after my twenty-third birthday. So it’s interesting to consider, all these years later, that my grandmother, Marie, also had to face death at age twenty-three, twelve days after giving birth to my father. Do I think there’s a connection? Probably.

From A Patchwork Memoir:

I started with two voice lessons a week, then went to three, then four. While jealous of the more advanced students, I felt a pugnacious competitiveness. “Just you wait,” I thought fiercely, “I’ll show you all.” Which I suppose I got from my mother; that was her attitude about going to college, in the face of her father’s opposition.

Mrs. Unruh didn’t want her beginning students to practice on their own. She felt they were liable to undo her good work. So after my lessons, still full of music, I did the only thing I was allowed to—whistle at the bus stop until my cheeks hurt. Unlike most students, I loved vocalizing and wasn’t at all impatient to get to the songs at the end of the lesson. I would have been content just to stick to my nee-nay-noo-no-nahs because as the months passed my range broadened and my voice became more supple and resonant, until it finally began to soar.

To get to Mrs. Unruh’s studio (only fifteen minutes by car, but I didn’t have one), I had to take three buses, a two-and-a-half-hour round-trip. I’d arrive late in the day after my university classes, tired, depleted—and sag on the piano bench.

Mrs. Unruh had her own way of developing a voice. She’d been a pianist and learned to train voices from her choral director husband; in the years before his death, they’d had a philharmonic chorus that had toured the country. Unlike other teachers, she didn’t stop and start you till—maybe—you got it a little better. Instead she played the piano fast and loud, forcing you to keep up while covering your bumbling attempts enough that you didn’t feel self-conscious. She had such a wonderful ear that, even above the din, she could hear where you were having problems—what needed fixing—and she would bark out instructions like “Relax your jaw!” and “More breath!” As the music swept me up, I would feel my tiredness and despondency fall away. I now believe I was inadvertently moving energy up through chakras, because I would eventually reach a state where I felt both wonderfully energized and deeply relaxed.

Though I was depressed at the time, I came away from each lesson feeling transformed, however briefly. Singing seemed to tap a spiritual wellspring inside of me. I felt when I sang that I became my voice, and because it was beautiful, I was beautiful. As my technique became more assured, I found singing not less but even more fulfilling than I’d ever imagined it could be.

I remember a day, shortly before I had to quit, when Mrs. Unruh ordered me up off the bench where we sat side by side and had me stand in the middle of the room. As I began, I heard an amazing volume of sound swell around me until it made the whole room throb, yet it felt so effortless, I had no sensation that it came from me at all—it seemed, instead, to issue from the walls.

A quote from Gone with the Wind has always stayed with me: Ashley says of Melanie at her death, “She was the only dream I ever had that didn’t die in the face of reality.” Singing was mine.

To say I was “heartbroken” after my friendship with Britte ended would be an understatement. “Annihilated” would be more apt. That’s the risk with a teacher-student relationship that becomes as deep as Britte’s and mine did. As in a therapist-patient or minister-parishioner relationship, there’s a power imbalance that renders the student/patient/parishioner vulnerable in the extreme. I’d felt unlovable until Britte took me under her wing—and it was only believing I was valued by her that had given me a sense of selfworth. She was the authority figure, after all. Not on an intellectual but an emotional level, her rejection reinforced my feeling of worthlessness, confirmation that I truly was unlovable.

Not knowing where to go after my friendship with Britte “destructed,” I went to my mother’s—but didn’t stay long. She and my brother had moved to El Cerrito during my time abroad. In the two years I’d lived away from home, they had reached an accommodation of each other, and I was the interloper whose presence disturbed the equilibrium of the household. As my mother once told me, she’d decided after the divorce that since she had nothing to give Doug and me emotionally, she would provide “services,” like doing our laundry and dropping us off at our friends houses’—a bargain my brother was happy to strike. He regarded our mother as crazy, he told me later, and didn’t want anything to do with her beyond these practical ministrations.

I, on the other hand, wanted to have a relationship with my mother. I’d felt an empathy for her from my childhood on and knew things about her my brother wasn’t interested in knowing. I wasn’t able to just write her off, and, unlike my brother, I felt anxious and guilty about being a burden to her.  

After Christmas of that year, I moved into a group house for several months, started back to school, and began voice lessons with Arlen’s teacher, Mrs. Unruh.

Joe Biden is our new president and Kamala Harris our vice president! Like many others, for the last four years I’ve lived in mounting anguish as I watched the machinations of a leader who lives in an alternate reality of his own invention, in which black is white, bad is good, lies are truth, danger is safety—and vice versa. And what’s been scariest of all has been seeing how many people he’s seduced into believing in his upside-down reality, convincing them that they must look only to him for deliverance, a tactic right out of the dictator’s handbook.