It was the night of Mrs. Komar’s annual Christmas recital. She’d rented out Westview’s Town Hall for her piano students, and it felt like half the town was there. I stood in a corner of the green room (a file storage room by day) fingering the straps of my tote bag and listening to the older kids talk about how nervous they were, even though they really weren’t. All that hugging and deep breathing and “oh-my-God-ing”? That was excitement. They couldn’t wait to get out there and show the whole world how great they were. Nervous is when you beg your mother again and again not to make you do it, when you look up phobia in the dictionary before the scariest conversation you’ve ever had with your Eastern Bloc piano teacher, when your brother has a cold and you sneak dirty tissues out of his trash can and rub them on your face—and after all that fails, when you stuff a meat mallet into your tote bag, wedging it right between Chopin’s waltzes and Beethoven’s sonatas. My black patent leather flats had rubbed blisters on my heels even though I was wearing tights like my mother told me to.
