Sometimes you have to say to yourself life starts now...
“And Then There Was Music”
a short story
by L. J. Lundblad
May 16th 2011
“All happy families are the same;
every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
One time she stood in front of the mirror and tried to say it. It was somewhere on the east coast; probably it was in the ladies room at Harvard – it might have been while she was at a conference at Princeton. She doesn’t remember. It doesn’t matter; the words never come out right anyway. This time she whispers them to herself: “My name is Ilona. I was raped when I was eleven years old. I had a baby when I was twelve. I gave her up for adoption.” She looks out the window; the plane is about to land. She can see the ground beneath her now.
Her name was Music. How come a twelve year old was allowed to name her daughter Music? There were no questions when she uttered the names she had chosen for her daughter: Mya Music Mercedez. An impressive name, perhaps; when she was twelve years old she did not think much about it. Now, she sometimes thinks she gave her daughter such a striking name to make up for everything else she could not provide. She closes her eyes and continues: “I held her for a week. For an entire week, I was a mother and I had a child.” For years now, she has been other things: she has been an undergraduate student at Yale, she has been a graduate student at Stanford, she has even been a postdoc for a year at Berkeley. Now, she will become assistant professor at Uppsala University...
Often she imagined what it would be like when she finally made it home. What she would do when the plane landed, how she would take her bags, get on that train and go to the center of Stockholm. Once there, she would take up her phone and make the call. She would try to make it sound as if nothing ever happened; as if everything is happening now and all those years in between never came and left. Now, she is sitting at that same café where for years she imagined herself sitting one day and the number is scribbled in the notebook lying on the table in front of her. What does one say? “Hello, my name is Ilona and I am your mother”?
It is September. In November, she’ll be eighteen. That is eighteen years of life she never saw. Eighteen years of experiences; eighteen years of first days at a new school, of learning to ride a bike and falling and bruising one’s knees, of falling in love and getting a first kiss, of making it to first place in the school’s swimming championship, of feeling unsure, hopeless, strange and crying when nobody’s looking. What does a mother who never was a mother say to that? I’m sorry?
“Hello?” a female voice asks and Ilona realizes she dialed the number and pressed ‘call.’
“Is this Music?”
“Yes?”
Now what does one say? Something smart, something kind, something to make up for lost time? To make all those years of absence disappear?
“My name is Ilona and I’m… I am…” she cannot say the words. What if also this time they do not come out right?
There is a long silence. She isn’t sure if she can hear breathing or not. The call might have been broken; the other person may have hung up.
“Ilona?” finally the silence is broken.
If she doesn’t say it now, she will never say it: “I… I named you Music.”
“Are you my mother Ilona?”
“Yes,” she says and pauses, but not for too long: “I am Ilona, your mother.”
“Why are you calling me?”
“I’m in Stockholm and… and I would like to see you.”
“Why?”
“I’ve never seen you.” She stops to think of how this must sound. “Would you like to meet me? I can buy you dinner, and we could talk, anywhere you’d like to go, just say the words…”
There is another long silence. Though not as long as the first: “Sure.”
*
Music never talked about Ilona; not because she didn’t want to but rather because there wasn’t anything to say. Growing up, she knew little about her real mother. She knew just as much about her as she knew about her father and her father died when she was five years old. When she became a teenager, she started to ask the questions: Who was or is she? Why couldn’t she take care of me? How old was she when she had me? There were never any pictures; not of her mother and not of her father. All she could find was their traces on her own skin. When she was fourteen, a close friend once said that her mother must have been beautiful. Ever since, she imagined her real mother to be something of a beauty. Sometimes she would pretend to have long conversations with her, that she somehow made her proud through the way she lived her life in her absence and that despite all the miles between them, they still had some kind of connection… The kind of connection only a mother and a daughter share. Now she stands in the subway car on her way to meet this woman. She looks at the darkness outside the window. Seeing her own reflection in the dark glass, she wonders if she will recognize her the second she sees her – and if she will know that Music is her daughter as immediately. She wonders if her hair is the same color as her mother’s, if she also has such blue eyes or if she got them from her father. She looks at herself and wonders if they will like each other.
Entering the restaurant, she notices a young woman sitting at a table by the window on her right side. The woman is slender, kind of small, with long blonde hair – slightly curled, or perhaps only slightly disheveled from a long day – and she is wearing a red cardigan over a white blouse. She has glasses and looks preppy, looks put together, looks neat and when Music approaches, her pale face lights up and she smiles to show her white teeth. Before she can put the thought into words, she understands that this is the woman who gave her the name of Music. She stops, almost at the table – but not quite there yet. How come she looks so young? She knows she must be thirty by now, and yet… she had not expected her mother to look not like a mother. She looks like a young businesswoman, carefully groomed and gracefully styled. And she is beautiful; not only in her healthy effortlessness but also in the sharp lines of her face. Music, however, was expecting a mother – not someone to play the part of an older sister she never had.
“Music?” the woman says and holds out her hand.
Music looks first at the woman, not knowing what do to, and only then she sees her outstretched hand over the table. She notices that it is shaking. She cannot but take it…
“Please, have a seat,” the woman continues.
Music sits down. She knows that the woman is contemplating her appearance in just the same way as she was contemplating hers a few seconds ago. She wonders if she is pleased with what meets her eyes, if she is the kind of daughter she imagined that she had once upon a time, if she is pretty enough for her, if she’s looking put together enough, if she will ever be good enough for her?
The woman does not say anything for a long time. She looks at Music. She closes her eyes and it takes a minute of silence until Music realizes that she is crying. Ilona takes a deep breath and tries to wipe away her tears. Music doesn’t know what to do. Ilona hides her face in her hands; her shaking shoulders reveal the sounds she suppresses. Instinctively, Music moves her chair closer to her side of the table and puts one arm around this woman.
“I’m sorry,” Ilona begins, “I didn’t know what it would be like to see you. I’ve had years and years at my disposal to prepare for this meeting, and for some reason I thought of everything save you… The last time I saw you, you were this small” – her gesture shows how she might have held a baby in her arms – “and I knew you for seven full days and now… Now you are a person I don’t know. I made that choice – the choice not to know you.”
“You were twelve.”
“And you even look like me!,” she exclaims suddenly, leaning closer to Music and touching her cheek softly. “Music, did you know you look like me?” suddenly she smiles and it seems as if she is about to laugh.
“No,” she shakes her head. “Because I didn’t know what you looked like.”
“Do you know what I chose when I didn’t choose you?” Ilona doesn’t wait for an answer. “I was a kid, as you know, and your father was in prison and anyway, I didn’t know him. I didn’t have anything to offer you. They all told me one and the same thing, my parents and the people at the hospital and the social welfare people: ‘Do this for her.’ They said you didn’t deserve to grow up with that kind of family, with a mother who was still a child herself and with a father in prison, but that you deserved a better chance in life, and that if there was a way for me to give you a real family, then I should do so. And I did what they told me to. I gave you up and there hasn’t been a single day in my life that has gone by without me thinking about you. Wondering where you are, how you are, who you are…” She puts her arm around her and looks her in the eyes. “And you even have my eyes… I want you to know that, Music, I need you to know that you were always with me. You were always in my thoughts. And when I chose you not for myself, I made the choice I thought was best for you.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I know how it must sound. Without you to take care of, I could go on with my life and pretend like nothing ever happened and get an education…”
“Did you?” Music interrupts.
Ilona nods as she continues to smile. “I did, I did. When I was your age, I got a scholarship to go to Yale in the US. After that I went on to get a doctorate in gender studies at Stanford. Now I’m here to be a professor – of sorts,” she adds with a slight laughter, “ – in Uppsala.”
Music also starts to laugh. “My mother is a doctor and a professor?”
“Yes, yes.”
“I always knew there was a reason why I was smarter than the other kids in school,” she says.
“But I can’t take all the credit; your father also had a part to play in your genes…”
“The man who raped you?”
Ilona sighs: “It all seems to have been too long ago now to even be true.”
“I wouldn’t be sitting here if it wasn’t true.”
“I don’t know why I wanted to see you. Perhaps I wanted to see that you were real, that you were okay, that you had a good life… that you were having a good life.”
“I am having a good life,” Music smiles.
Ilona bites her lip and looks away. “Maybe I shouldn’t have called you. This was as far as I ever thought of meeting you. I never thought of the next step, perhaps because I was never sure you would even agree to see me and that if you did, maybe you would be angry with me and turn away and tell me that you didn’t want to have anything to do with me. That you were happy without me.”
“I was happy without you.”
Ilona doesn’t say anything; she is softly crying again. Her lips appear to be forming the same phrase over and over again, inaudibly this time: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…
“But I would like to know you,” Music says. “After all, you did give me life.”
“I didn’t give you anything else, though.”
“I think that sometimes you have to be thankful for what you received instead of feeling sad for all the things you were deprived of,” Music smiles and hands her a napkin.
Ilona wipes her cheeks with the napkin and smiles yet again: “Music, how did you become this wise? At seventeen?”
“It seems to me that the life that didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to is what teaches us the most about what it means to be alive,” she begins, “and I’m certain you must feel the same way. Maybe not exactly, but just a little bit? Take my story as an example: I grew up with a father who committed suicide while in prison because he was sentenced for raping this little girl who was somehow my mother but whom I did not remember and whom I never knew. There have been times when this thought made me cry. Many times. But the older I become, the more I realize that your story gave me an opportunity that I would never have had if I had been the product of a happy family.”
“And what exactly is this opportunity?” Ilona asks.
“I don’t know…” Music shrugs her shoulders. “Maybe to live life more, to live it like it matters?” she looks away and doesn’t know if she should smile or not. “Now I think that there is a reason I exist. I might never get to have what most people have in their lives, but I wouldn’t trade my family for anyone else’s.” She smiles and leans over to give her mother a hug. “Most people grow up with their mother, but I get to wait until I’m old enough to be able to really know mine until I finally meet her.”
“Would you like to know me?”
Music nods.
“Even without all those years of your life that I missed? Even without all the things I failed to give you?”
“Sometimes you have to say to yourself life starts now and not think about the past,” she says.
Ilona glances to her side, at her daughter, and somehow the words come out right this time; this time as she’s holding her in her arms for the second time and says it out loud: “My name is Ilona and I had a baby when I was twelve and now I’m thirty and that baby is telling me what to do.”
“Your baby is her own person now,” Music laughs, “and I guess you will have to somehow get used to that.”
“I have so much to learn from you…”
“Are you coming home to stay this time?” Music interrupts again.
Ilona nods.
“Then I guess all we have is the future.”
