By
Ariel Smart

"He wants me to play it. I can't. I can't do it," I repeated to myself as I anxiously hurried toward the school auditorium for orchestra practice, my violin case tucked precariously under my arm; the case's middle lock clasp had sprung. Mr. Mendelssohn, the music teacher, had asked me to be the soloist at our eighth grade graduation ceremony. To perform solo violin, when I was so myopic I had to fake reading notes of music, was compounded by other worries. I feared the threat of a bully's assault upon me and the sexual and racial tensions that were commonplace at our school. Though I could not have known at the time, these tensions were rife all over Los Angeles and would explode that August in the riots in Watts.

There was never a day on the El Ranchito Elementary schoolyard when I felt I could breathe easily. Long-legged, skinny, I never walked when I could run.

"Puta!" a male voice shouted, arresting my attention as I made my way toward the stage door of the auditorium. Leering laughter followed. I squinted near-sightedly in his direction, and made out a broad-shouldered, heavy-set youth with a swarthy complexion standing amidst a group of four or five other males. Then he uttered another phrase. I heard only one word of it. "Madre." In 1965, going to school in this tough East Los Angeles neighborhood, I had learned vulgar colloquialisms in both English and Spanish.

Feeling all alone in open space, I rushed by the group. They did not know my name. I did not know theirs. I had seen them before loitering by the wall outside the auditorium, smoking. None were in any of my classes. This was not the only time I'd heard their taunts as I passed them. I wished with all my might I might escape their notice and rush invisibly by them. Without tarrying, I made a rapid descent down a staircase to the basement of the school auditorium to join my fellow orchestra members in the pit.

I wondered if this was the gang who had raped one of my classmates. In the middle of the school year, a girl in my math class was assaulted under the baseball bleachers. She didn't attend school afterward. I saw her once outside on the steps of the apartment house where she lived with her family. She had large, somber eyes, and wore her dark brown hair in thick braids. She held a baby in the crook of her arms. I said, "Hi, Giovanna," and waved to her, but she didn't wave back.

That evening, I greeted my dad with a pair of scissors in my hand when he returned from work. I thought I'd look less conspicuous if my hair was short.

"What do I want with these?" he said.

"Cut them off," I said of my braids. "Straight across."

"Sure? What will your mother think?"

I don't care. Do it," I told him. I knew my mother would be late returning from work. She was a door-to-door salesman for Avon cosmetics and often made late afternoon deliveries on a bicycle she called Angel.

He hesitated. "You're willful."

"Go on," I repeated, heedless of the consequences.

Afterward, I wore my hair rough-cut and boyish until it grew out again.

As I tried to slip into my chair in the violin section, Bob Honshell barred the way with his tuba.

"I could snap that neck in two," he threatened, looking at the violin in my hand.

I tightened my grip on the bow.

"Hey you, Crosseyes," he said to Marie, my seatmate. "Watch yourself !You could be next." Honshell maneuvered the metal mouth of the tuba like a bayonet and jabbed it into my ribs.

I winced and involuntarily doubled over from the stab. Then I recovered a stiff composure.

Honshell smirked, relishing the power-thrill of giving pain. "Jew!" he spat. "Your mother's a Jew!"

Then he swaggered off, joining the horn players.

Honshell was a self-styled nazi bully. He wore a black leather jacket over a Storm Trooper's brown shirt, a war souvenir. He bragged that it was from a relative. He yearned to revive Hitler's Youth. Thirty years later, I would glimpse my old enemy, who'd become grown nazier and nazier, on television marching in Washington D.C. with fellow white supremacists of the American Nazi Party.

In the seventh grade, Honshell broke the arm of my only friend, a boy named Gerry, who was slight for his age and often called a sissy because of how he spelled his name. At recess time, Gerry and I used to hide out behind some chicken coops at the far end of the school yard to sing and act out songs from Broadway musicals. We imagined someday that he and I could run away together and make our way as song and dance hoofers in New York. After the "accident", Gerry never returned to El Ranchito. His parents enrolled him in a private school.

"I lost my best friend," I told Mother.

"I'll be your best friend," she said.

I reported Honshell's bullying. My English and social studies teachers said, "Stay away from him." Intimidated themselves, they tuned out and joined the principal and the janitor in the maintenance and repair workshop during recess, drinking coffee and playing gin rummy.

Mr. Mendelssohn said, "He is evil. God will punish him. God sees the truth, but waits."

No consolation. I was in a hurry. I wanted Honshell dead.

Mr. Mendelssohn rapped on his podium for us to begin practice. His raps were answered by a brass cacophony of falsetto squeaks and bass squawks. Once more he rapped for our attention, raising his hands and nodding his head in time with the music.

"All right. Count with me. One. Two, Uh-three, and four."

A spitball was let fly across the pit. False start.

Mr. Mendelssohn's glasses slipped down over the bridge of his nose, making his delicate-boned face appear idiotic and incompetent.

Exasperated with the tedious struggle to move us all together through four measures, he brought us up short, then removed his round, horned-rimmed spectacles, which gave him an owlish appearance. He wiped them on his shirt sleeve.

"Hoot, man, Hoot!" heckled Honshell behind his tuba.

I felt sorry for Mr. Mendelssohn. A bachelor, he'd come to dry Southern California for his asthma. For fifty minutes every school day, he stood in rumpled trousers before a ragtag ensemble, his white shirt sleeves rolled up, trying to conduct four violin players, one flutist, four horns, and a clarinetist borrowed from the fourth grade class, through Elgar's lugubrious march for the eighth grade graduation procession.

The week before, after orchestra class disbanded, Mr. Mendelssohn asked me to stay behind.

"Ariel, you're the only one in the orchestra's who's had any private music lessons to speak of. You have to play solo at commencement. You make your mama proud."

Mr. Mendelssohn came after school once a week to our rented duplex and gave me an hour's violin lesson. Weeks before, Mr. Mendelssohn had brought me the sheet music for "Meditation", a self-conscious, precious crowd-pleaser considered de rigueur for a young violinist's debut. I had only peeked at the score.

"Oh, no. I can't. I'm not ready," I said. Even now I can hear my mother's voice imploring.

"Please," she coaxes, cocking her head to one side smiling like an appealing child. "Do it for me."

"But I'm too nervous." I whined.

"Nervous? You're too young to have nerves!"

When Mr. Mendelssohn asked me to be soloist, all the years of fudging, pretending I could read music caught up with me, the fibs I'd told until I couldn't recall the straight story. I hadn't practiced for more than ten minutes in over a year. "Be sure and practice when you get home, " my mother exhorted. I'd take the violin out of the case, put it back, and skip out. No one, especially my mother, was the wiser. I couldn't tell Mr. Mendellsohn I dreaded coming to the staccato double stops stacked up in vertical columns, squinting at vague harmonic chords, pin-pricked on the musical score. I could read up close, but once I set the composition on the music stand, the sheets were too far away for me to dicipher the little, busy, slurring notes that swam together in a blur. I had learned to fake, playing by ear like a gypsy beggar what I couldn't see in my myopic blur.

After an eye test in the fifth grade, I had been prescribed glasses.

"Glasses?" My mother said. "You're just a child. I don't need glasses. Daddy doesn't wear them. I don't know why you."

She gave me a paperback, popular at the time, Sight Without Glasses. If I'd just do the exercises in the book, she maintained, I'd strengthen my vision. Next, she bought a juicer and gave me glasses of fresh carrot juice.

"No more reading in the evening," she said. "You read too much. That's the problem."

To her mind, eye glasses and hearing aids were crutches.

She was blind to my neglect in other ways: the short, outgrown skirts creeping up above the knees, the faded blouses fitting too tight against my budding breasts, the scuffed shoes that pinched my big toes, the bullies, like Honshell, and the marauding East Los Angeles gangs lurking at my school.

I could find no way to wiggle out of performing. Mr. Mendelssohn was in earnest for me to play at graduation.

He marked the score for me measure by measure, refingering a passage for my small hands.

"Like that? That's better, I think."

He hummed a few bars, then played them on his fiddle.

I imitated him, playing by ear, note by note, memorizing.

As I drew my bow across the e-string, my fingers stretching for sixth position, Mr. Mendelssohn halted me.

"I hear wolf whistles," he said of the squeaky sound I'd produced. He frowned, and took my violin from me, examining it closely, turning it over. "This is a Japanese toy you have outgrown," Mr. Mendelssohn said of my tinny-sounding, three-quarter-size violin. "Will you look at this? A crack in the wood. Here, take mine. I'll lend you. Play it in good health. Someday your mama can buy you a full-size. Your stick's so-so. Needs rehairing. I'll have it done."

I played a measure. His violin felt bulky and enormous in my hands. Its wooden neck was smooth, well-worn.

"Go on. Keep going," he directed. "But keep your pinky on the bow, not in the air. You think you're at a tea party?"

I repeated the phrase.

"What's with the smaltz? So now you're Jack Benny? Legato, yes? Even. No tremolo."

After school, the day before the commencement exercise, I met Mr. Mendelssohn in the school auditorium. "I'll just be gone for fifteen, twenty minutes, all right?" Mr. Mendelssohn said, leaving me alone in the orchestra pit. "Practice on stage. Get used to the full-size fiddle. You'll grow into it. Don't worry about an audience."

As soon as I heard the heavy stage door close, I set his violin down in its satin-lined case on an orchestra chair. Then I rosined the horsehair on the bow, forwards and backwards. It had been rehaired and was pure white and clean. In the vastness of an auditorium, I listened to the sweeping sound of rosining. The rosin dust fell between the cracks of my fingers, sappy and sticky. A thick coating of amber rosin lay on the stiff, white horsehair. I'd overdone it. Once on the strings, the bow would skip off course rather than glide smoothly.

I heard a scuffling sound behind me and I startled. I was not alone in the hall. "Mr. Mendelssohn? That you? " I breathed.

No answer.

"Honshell?" I heard myself call out, and my legs scrambled for flight. Then somebody was upon me, ambushing me from behind. I could not see my attacker's face, but I knew he wasn't Honshell. The hands that held me around were brown and all over my breasts.

I bit down hard on his thumb, enraged.

"Puta! Chinga!" the attacker cursed in anger, loosening his clutch on me.

I had wrested free of his hold. The bow stick had never left my hand.

I turned now and faced my attacker head-on-a husky Latino male with a pubescent mustache. He might have been the one who'd called me an obscenity in the schoolyard.

I lashed at him with the bow, stronger for not knowing my enemy's name. "You touch me again. I'll kill you! I'm gonna kill you," I screamed, laying it on him as hard as I could. I flailed him across the face again and again with the bow, sending the white horsehair swishing in the air.

He put his hands in front of his face. "Hey, don't mess with me," he said. "Chinga tu madre."

The stick broke in two and the hair whistled free and still I lashed out at him in my frenzy, unable to stop.

"Crazy girl. Loco." he said, backing away in fast retreat.

There was a sound of scuffling, and the fleeing youth breezed past Mr. Mendelssohn just as he came in from the front of the auditorium. The hall door clanked shut, leaving behind an echoing rumble.

Mr. Mendelssohn looked at me with a dismayed expression on his face. I stood, unable to move, holding the broken bow collapsed in my hand.

"Your violin's okay," I said apologetically.

"Yes? I'm not worried. Bubeleh, dear child. But what of you?" he said, taking the stick away from me. Then, he raised his hand to my face and reassuringly patted my cheek. "Don't worry about the bow. What's to worry about a bow, eh? You've been a brave girl. You fought off an attacker."

That Friday, at my eighth grade graduation, I played "The Meditation" by heart with Mr. Mendelssohn's fiddle and his bow.

Ariel Smart teaches English part-time at De Anza College, Cupertino. She has taught at San Jose State University and Santa Clara University. She was born at the Green Lantern Motel in Southern California's Imperial Valley, the setting for many of her stories in her collection, The Green Lantern and Other Stories.

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