Read Online The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff - Free Book Online Page B

right?”
    â€œYep. I do.”
    â€œDo you know why?”
    â€œNo. I don’t think I know. It feels good.”
    â€œCan you imagine not playing it?”
    â€œNo!” It came out surprisingly loud.
    Deirdre nodded her head. “Then you’re stuck with it, aren’t you?”
    â€œI guess so. I guess I am.”
    She looked at me for quite a while with her intense eyes. “Allegra, here’s something about doing music—or painting a picture or anything. When you’re doing it, you have to remember everything you’ve ever learned, and simultaneously forget all of it and do something totally new.” She was silent for a while more. “Because if you do the first part and not the second, you’re making music or art just like everybody else’s. It’s not your own.”
    I was asking myself silently if I could ever do that, remember and forget at the same time.
    â€œWhen I lived in Boston, I used to watch the Celtics a lot. They do the same exact thing—when they’re at their best. It’s the same with your Trail Blazers in Portland. You watch one of those beautiful shots go exploding down through the basket and that’s what’s going on. That guy has in his memory every basket he’s ever shot—and at the same instant he’s making up a new one. The divine inspiration of the NBA.”
    â€œDeirdre, I never heard anybody say that before.”
    â€œWell, that’s the way it is.”
    â€œIs that what you do?”
    â€œYes, that’s part of it. When I’m at my best.”
    I imagined her bent over throwing up. “And you still throw up?”
    â€œSure. That’s why, in fact. Or that’s part of it. I’m afraid I won’t be able to get that simultaneity.” She clenched and unclenched both her hands on the lap of her white nightgown. “There are all kinds of static just waiting up there,” she pointed to her head, “to sabotage things.”
    I reached for the clipboard. “How do you spell those?”
    â€œWhat? ‘Sabotage’?” She spelled it for me. “It means ‘to ruin completely.’ You have to learn new words for school, or for yourself?”
    â€œWell, both, I guess. A list for school, but I’ll need them anyway. And simultan—”
    She spelled “simultaneity.” I wrote them down.
    â€œYou could wear a raincoat,” I said. “For throwing up.”
    She was stretching her arms again. “That’s exactly what I do.”
    â€œGood,” I said. “What’s this violinist like, this boy?”
    â€œOh, Steve? I don’t know. When he was a little kid, he was darling. He had a sixteenth-size violin. Curly hair and huge eyes. Long eyelashes. And Lego blocks. He built the most amazing things, he must’ve been three years old. Big towers. He had phenomenal concentration.” I was watching Deirdre take her long, dangly earrings out of her ears. They tinkled when she had them both out and was holding them in her hand. “He’ll probably end up being your boyfriend, Allegra.”
    â€œI don’t think so. You said he’s old.”
    â€œOh, not so old. Probably about Bro David’s age, I should think. That’s not old. I can tell you lots about old.” She got up and went over to a photograph of Ernest Bloch. It’s kind of low on the wall, and you have to bend over to look at it. I kept not telling her about the Bloch Competition.
    I heard a clinking of metal on wood. Two clinkings. She knelt down, her balloony nightgown spreading kind of like a white swan around her.
    â€œI dropped an earring.” She was bending over Daddy’s cello, which he’d left out of the case, lying on its side. “I can’t find it. Turn on the light, will you?” she said.
    I got up and turned it on. It was too bright; my eyes hurt. She was feeling around. Then she took hold of