notes ricocheted like pinballs, without room to open up and spread out. But outside, the sound had space to flex. A C might waver and become a D as it hit a patch of wind and lifted into the sky. A high note, instead of sounding slightly bossy, was clear: it cut like a knife through the traffic and barking dogs.
In a different house I might have been encouraged to take on a wide range of activities. Maybe, seeing my interest in the urbanwildlife in our yard, the kind caretaker in my alternate universe would have bought me books on anatomy and helped me articulate the skeleton of a vole from an owl pellet cleaned in ammonia. I could have attended ballet lessons and enrolled in the Girl Scouts, extending my toes into a perfect pointe and earning merit badges for insect identification and a facility for starting fires.
Idly speaking, it sounds nice. But it would have been the wrong approach with me. I’m not the sort of person who benefits from having her excess enthusiasm drained, and I was never the sort of child who got bored easily. It’s true that I had a lot of energy. But it wanted focus, not dispersion. If I’d been taught wilderness survival skills, I might be a feral arsonist by now.
Ada knew just what to do with me because she anticipated my love of music before I was ever born. When my mother, Sara, was pregnant and woozy with size, Ada sat her down next to a record player and let Chopin’s nocturnes rumble through her. She played Polish composers first—Paderewski minuets, Lutosławski concertos—but soon realized that I moved around more to vocals.
“It gives me heartburn,” Sara complained. Apparently I had a special fondness for Mozart and Dvořák and expressed this affinity through acrobatics. I know now what it feels like to be stretched to capacity—a drum skin, a bulging bag—and have your passenger decide to start kicking, so I can imagine my mother’s troubled expression as she readjusted to move her ribs out of the line of fire. She would’ve been reclining on pillows, sipping tea. At some point, when Ada wasn’t looking, I’m sure she reached down and gave me a few sharp flicks.
With or without my mother’s explicit approval, my cells were coaxed together in arpeggios and crescendos. I was born, much to Sara’s dismay, with a large head and a strong jaw, giving my very first scream a breadth and tonality that stopped my doctor in his tracks.
So I’m told. My baba Ada was always big on stories. And her chronicles leaked into my life before I was even conceived, even considered, by way of the people who lived them.
A da recounted her stories with the unwavering faith of a missionary, and so as a child I never questioned how she came to know so much about what her mother thought and said and did in her absence. The stories about Greta and Ada just existed, they just were , like Baba Yaga and the Dragon of Krakow and Peter Rabbit. I cried at night for more Greta, just one more Greta , in the small purple bedroom where I discovered my voice, where poster versions of Lucia Popp smiled her pristine soprano smile down at me under a bouffant hairdo.
Greta’s story followed a path that wound and split like a road on a map. It diverted into variations, forded streams, ducked through trees. You could step off it and run any number of directions, but eventually, no matter how far you wandered, it ended up in the same place.
A woodland clearing marked with a dark cross.
A blue girl, unbreathing, wrapped up in a shawl.
A nd here’s where the story always started.
“T here was a party.” Ada perched on the edge of my bed, one knee balanced neatly on the other. I settled beneath the covers and could see the threads of the narrative occurring to her: inspiration weaving together with myth, the certainty of the tale mingling with surprise. “The fabryka Łozina, thefactory of pianos, invited all the young people by to hear the voice of their instruments and to dance.”
She repeated