A Scene from The New Story (Not the Final Version)

 

“There’s a Place for Us”: South Miami Senior High School/Music Department Wing, Chorus Practice Room

 

I entered Room 136 shortly after the last school bell of the day – the “dismissal bell,” as it was officially called – rang at 2:30 in the afternoon. As always, the hallways in all three floors of South Miami High School’s yellow bunker-like building were full of 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th graders skedaddling from their sixth-period classes and, with the exception of those of us who participated in after-school activities and clubs such as yearbook production, the then-new Cobra Media Production club, basketball, baseball, and other spring term sports teams’ practices, and music students who needed to practice their instrument or singing, were eager to either go home or go to their first part-time jobs outside of school. For five, maybe 10 minutes, the hallways and staircases echoed with the sounds of (mostly) sneakered feet pounding on the floor and loud, cheerful teenaged voices, male and female, all talking at once as the first post-holiday back-to-school day, at long last, came to an end.

Normally, I would head home, either by myself or, more frequently than not, with my best friend Mark. We lived only two houses away from each other, but because I was on the college-bound Advanced Placement track and he was on the straight-into-the-workforce (and possible business education) one, we didn’t take any classes together – we only had the same lunch period and our walk home to socialize. And since Mark was gregarious, funny, and had less anxieties about asking girls out on dates than I did, we weren’t hanging out as much on weekends. So “the brothers from different mothers,” as we’d dubbed ourselves, often left Cobra Country together after the dismissal bell had rung.

Oh, but not today, I thought, feeling a mix of excitement and nervousness as I opened the heavy door to South Miami High’s spacious, brightly-lit, and – in my mind, anyway – homey chorus practice room. Today, it’s going to be just Marty, me, and the piano in here.

I stepped inside, hoping that Marty was already there, but Room 136 was empty, aside from the Kawai piano, the rows of chairs on the raised clamshell dais where we students had done our morning routine of vocal exercises – singing scales, shouting “Foo!” in different musical notes and using our head voice rather than our chest voice, practicing our breathing exercises, and whatnot – several class periods before, and the metal music stands, now empty without songbooks to sing from. Damn, I thought sourly, I hate being the first one to arrive – it makes me nervous.

I walked over to my usual seat in the bass section – second tier on the raised dais, third from center left – shrugged off my backpack, placed it on the floor in front of me and wearily sat down on the metal folding chair. I sat there, nervously twiddling my thumbs, and gazing anxiously at the round-faced clock as I waited to see if Marty would show up for our first run-through of “Somewhere.”

What if, a timorous, fretful voice very much like my own when I was younger whispered in my mind as I watched the red second hand on the clock tick off time, Marty doesn’t show up?

“She’ll be here,” I said aloud.

Hmm. You don’t sound too certain of that, bucko.

“She’ll be here,” I repeated impatiently, almost angrily.

We’ll see, the voice sniggered.

“Shut up,” I said.

I was about to grab my backpack and rummage through its contents for my dogeared paperback copy of Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far, one of my favorite books about a World War II battle, when I heard the squeaking of the chorus room door swinging slowly open. By now, of course, I was beginning to think Marty had either forgotten about our practice session or, worse, had changed her mind about singing the duet with me. It’s probably just one of the custodians coming to tidy up and turn off the lights, I thought glumly.

Still, I stopped searching for A Bridge Too Far and placed my backpack on the floor again. I looked toward the door…and my heart skipped a beat as the newcomer walked into my field of vision.

It was Marty, clad in a pair of slightly faded Lady Levi’s jeans, a gray sweatshirt with rainbow-colored stripes above her midriff and a faint outline of a cobra – our school mascot – in the center, and white Keds sneakers. Her long chestnut colored hair was done up in a ponytail, like it usually was on most school days, although I’d seen it cascading down past her shoulders on several occasions, mostly when we sang for our fellow Cobras at our twice-a-year series of concerts. A big brown leather purse hung down from her right shoulder.

“Hi, Jimmy,” she said presently as she smiled at me. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long.”

“Oh, no,” I said in what I hoped was a reassuring tone. “Not at all.”

“I would have been here a bit sooner, but I ran into a couple of friends on my way down from sixth-period English with Ms. DeVargas – “she said apologetically.

“That’s okay, Marty. You don’t need to explain. I’m glad you’re here. We’re just gonna practice singing a song, after all.”

Marty smiled again, and I felt my heart do an Immelmann turn inside my chest cavity. Oh, if you only knew how beautiful you look right now, how much I want to say I love you, I thought but didn’t say.

“Did Mrs. Quincy give you a xerox of the score?” she asked.

“I’m sorry – what?” I shook my head to clear it of the thoughts that were bubbling up from my subconscious as I realized that this was the first time Marty and I had been alone together since she had auditioned for Mrs. Quincy on the same day I’d joined the Men’s Ensemble back in in January of 1981.

“Did you get a copy of the score for ‘Somewhere’ from Mrs. Quincy?” Marty asked again, her eyebrows knitted in a frown that was half-puzzled, half-annoyed.

“Oh!” I said when my head cleared, and I’d come out of my lovelorn reverie. “Yes, of course she did!” I picked up my backpack, unzipped the smaller compartment on its front, then pulled out the neatly folded photocopy of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s “Somewhere.”

“Great!” Marty said happily as she fished her own smartly folded copy out of her brown purse. It looked, I thought, almost like a Japanese origami.

“Too bad,” I said, “that Mrs. Quincy or Marva aren’t here to play the piano for us. You know that one of them will be our accompanist at the Spring Concert.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Marty said. “I can play the piano a bit if you want to practice with the accompaniment.”

 “Wow!” I said, trying – and failing – to hide my thunderstruck surprise. “I didn’t know you played the piano.”

She laughed, probably more at the comical look of amazement and unabashed admiration that graced my face than my efforts to not sound flummoxed by this revelation. “I am no Alicia de Larrocha or Mitsuko Uchida,” Marty said, amusement in her voice, “but I have taken piano lessons since I was nine. My big sister – she’s at university now, back home in London – is a better player than I’ll ever be. She wants to make a career of it, too.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” I said, a bit glumly.

“Well, we don’t often get to talk like this. In fact, this is the first time we’ve ever spent time alone together, you know,” Marty replied in a gentle, reassuring tone. “I don’t know much about you, either, except that you sing well, and that you’ve always been nice to me.”

I blinked, not sure how to respond to this statement. Well, I could tell you that I think you’re quite possibly the most beautiful girl I’ve ever known, and that I wish we could be more than just singing partners, I thought. I bit my lip to squash the impulse to say something like that.

“There’s not much to talk about me,” I said instead. “I’m just a history nerd who likes to sing on the side.”

“So, ‘just a history nerd,’ eh?” Marty said with a mischievous twinkle in her hazel eyes. “I’m sure there’s more to you than that. You know what they say: ‘Still waters run deep,” or something along those lines.”

“Well, maybe I oversimplified things a bit, but I’m nothing special,” I said, looking down at my shoes as if suddenly I needed to know if my shoelaces were untied, or my socks were mismatched. And, as I often did when I thought about Marty or saw her walking past me in the hallway on our way to class, I felt a hot flush rising from the back of my neck up to my cheeks and to the tips of my ears.

“Don’t say that, Jimmy,” Marty admonished me in a quiet but firm voice. “You’re one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, and one of the smartest. Plus, you’re a good singer. You should be in the Advanced Chorus, too. At least, I think you ought to be.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” I said. “About Advanced Chorus, though…I’ve already got a lot on my plate. AP classes, writing for the school paper, applying for scholarships and Pell Grants. I would have loved to sing at District competitions, sure, but I’m not a music major. I’m happy enough to be in our group.”

“I forgot about the Serpent’s Tale,” she admitted. “You’re right, of course. That’s a lot of balls to juggle in your senior year.” She paused, then looked me sternly in the eye. “But promise me one thing: that you won’t ever say that you’re not special. Cos,” she added with a softer tone, “that simply isn’t true.”

“Okay, I promise,” I said quietly. Then, wanting to change the subject, I held up my copy of “Somewhere,” and in a deliberately bad imitation of Mrs. Quincy’s voice, I said, “Enough palaver, not enough singing!”

 

Marty laughed, filling the chorus room with unrestrained mirth and happiness. Then, unfolding her sheet music, she bounded over to the piano like a gazelle. She pulled back the bench a bit, then sat down on its right side. With her left hand, she patted the empty half of the bench, as if to say, “Sit next to me!”

As if to emphasize the point, Marty began playing a stanza from “Red River Valley,” an old cowboy song that Mrs. Quincy had had us practice for a while for the previous year’s Spring Concert before replacing it with a medley from The Pajama Game.

As her fingers danced across the Kawai piano’s white and black keys, her voice rose up in song like a lark in the morning:

“Come and sit by my side if you love me

Do not hasten to bid me adieu

But remember the Red River Valley

And the girl who loved you so true.”

I bit my lip and looked away, trying not to react to the lyrics of the song, especially the first line of that stanza. I knew, of course, that Marty wasn’t suddenly making a declaration of her love for me; this was, as she had observed only minutes before, the first time we’d ever been alone together. I also knew that most girls had a love radar that could detect guys’ intentions toward them, and I had learned over time how to not be too obvious when I fancied a particular girl. The only person I’d ever talked about Marty with was Mark, and he wasn’t about to rat me out, either.

It's just a song, bucko, I told myself. Nothing more, nothing less. Chill out.

And, as casually as I could under the circumstances, I sat down next to Marty, trying to focus on what Marty and I were in the chorus for and not on what I wished we could be doing.

I felt her body heat next to mine and smelled her perfume – a blend of orange blossoms and jasmine – that made my head spin. She looked stunning, even though she was just wearing faded jeans, a South Miami High Boosters Club sweatshirt, and girls’ Keds sneakers.

Marty turned slightly toward me and smiled shyly. “See? The bench is big enough for us two,” she said. “I’m comfy. Aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, avoiding eye contact and fidgeting with my hands.

“Well, then,” she said as she took the photocopy of her “Somewhere” score and placed it on the polished piano’s music stand. “Let’s take it from the top, shall we?”