Very Far Away from Anywhere Else Read Online Free Page A

backed up and parked in front of the Fields' and went up to the front door and knocked and said to Mrs. Field, "Is Natalie here?"

    "She's practicing."
    "Can I see her for a minute?"
    "I'll ask her."
    Mrs. Field was a good-looking woman, older than my parents. She had the same severe expression Natalie had, but she was handsomer. Maybe Natalie would be that handsome at fifty. Kind of worn and polished like a piece of granite in a creek. Mrs. Field wasn't friendly or unfriendly, welcoming or off-putting. She was calm. She just stated the facts. She stood aside—it was still raining—and let me into the hall; didn't ask me in any farther; went upstairs. As she went, I heard Natalie practicing. It must be a violin, I thought. A tremendous noise, even though the Fields' house was bigger than ours and older, with thicker walls. A big, sweet, hard, rushing noise, rushing down the scales like a creek over rocks, bright and fierce—and then it stopped. I'd stopped it.

    I heard Mrs. Field upstairs say, "It's the Griffiths boy." She knew us mainly because mother had hooked her last spring for the March of Dimes, and she'd been at our house for the planning meeting.
    Natalie came downstairs. She was frowning, and her hair was all messed up. "Oh hi, Owen," she said from a distance roughly equivalent to the orbit of Neptune.
    "I'm sorry I stopped you practicing," I said.
    "That's all right. What's on your mind?"
    I had been going to ask her if she'd like to drive around some in my new car, but I couldn't. I said, "I don't know."

    And the ghost of the piece of pot roast came back and filled my entire mouth.
    She looked at me, and after this long, horrible silence she said, "Is something wrong?"
    I nodded.
    "Are you sick?"
    I shook my head. Shaking it seemed to clear it a bit. I said, "I'm upset. It's something to do with my parents. And stuff. It's not terminal. But I. But I wanted to talk. But I. But I can't."
    She was kind of floored. She said, "Would you like a glass of milk?"
    "I just ate dinner."
    "Camomile tea," she said.
    "Peter Rabbit," I said.
    "Come on in."
    "I don't want to interrupt you. Listen. Can I sit and listen to you practice? Would it bother you a lot?"

    She hesitated, and then she said, "No. You want to? It's dull."
    We went to the kitchen, and she poured me a cup of extremely weird tea, and then we went upstairs to this room. What a room. All the walls in the Fields' house were dark, and it all looked kind of bare, kind of calm and severe like Mrs. Field, but this room was the barest. It had in it one Oriental rug worn down to the warp or whatever you call it so you could hardly see what colors it had been, and one grand piano, three music stands, and a chair. There were some stacks of music under the windows. I sat down on the rug. "You can sit in the chair," she said "I stand up to practice."
    "I'm fine here."
    "OK," she said. "This is some Bach. I have to cut an audition tape next week." And she picked up her fiddle off the piano and injected it under her jaw in that peculiar way violinists do—only I figured out from the size that this one was a viola not a violin—and rubbed her bow with rosin and stared at the music on the music stand and started playing.

    It wasn't your standard concert performance. For one thing the room was so high and bare that it made the noise loud, hard, so that it sort of rang in your bones (she said afterwards it was a perfect room for practicing because she could hear all her mistakes). And she made faces and muttered a lot. And she would play the same bit over and over and over. That crashing run she'd been doing when I came in, she must have done it ten or fifteen times, sometimes going on from it, but coming back to it again, starting over. And every time it was slightly different. Until finally it came out the same twice in a row. She'd got it right. Then she went on. Then when she played the whole movement over, that part sounded the same the third time in a