The Fragile World. Paula Treick DeBoard
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they lip-synced to pop songs, they executed strange karate routines that involved a lot of posturing and choppy air kicks. Daniel was the last one to take the stage, no doubt because the organizers knew he was the best. He announced that he was playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov and the entire gym went quiet with the opening notes. His fingers flew confidently over the keys; if he was intimidated in any way by hundreds of eyes on him, it didn’t show. Mom had tried to convince him earlier that day to bring the sheet music as a backup, but Daniel had only tapped his head with one finger, meaning It’s all up here. It was the first time I realized that Daniel was really great, something special.
What a disappointment I must have been, must still be. I took three years of piano lessons and barely advanced beyond the “early learner books.” I remember one song, played with my right thumb on middle C and my right index finger on D. See the bear, on two feet, begging for a bite to eat. All I had to do was toggle my fingers between the two keys, and yet somehow I couldn’t help but hit adjacent keys or lose the simple beat, giving up in a frustrated squash of all my fingers against the keys at once. Inside, a voice was saying, regular as a metronome: Don’t mess up. Get it right. Play the notes. It didn’t seem hard—but somehow I couldn’t do it.
On the day of what would be my last lesson, Mom arrived at my teacher’s house as I was fumbling my way through a simple scale I’d spent hours practicing. I’d been biting my lip in deep concentration, but when I saw her listening in the doorway, I burst into tears.
“It’s okay,” she said as we drove home, my tears finally drying against my cheeks. “You know, I’m not a musical person, and your father isn’t, either. We’re all talented in different ways. I don’t want you to feel bad about this, all right?”
But I did feel bad. Not because I had any illusions about my musical ability—even as a third grader, I understood that the awkward clunking sounds I made at the piano were never going to evolve into the effortless music Daniel made. It hurt me, though, to think that my mother had given up on me so early, that she had accepted my lack of talent so easily. I might have resented the hell out of her for it later on, but at that moment, I wanted her to fight for me—or at least give the slightest acknowledgment that I was worth fighting for, even if it was a lie. Something like: “Olivia, you have hidden potential....”
But no. I was an eight-year-old failure.
As he got older, Daniel seemed to float through our lives on his way from one practice or event to another—concert band, musical ensemble, pep band, a steel drum band that met before school, a band that jammed for hours in our garage after school. He was a member of the youth symphony orchestra; he played piano for the spring musical his junior and senior years. Colleges fell over themselves with scholarship offers—on top of everything else, Daniel had maintained a 4.3 grade point average throughout high school. Basically, he was that one-in-a-million kid, the one who participated in everything and volunteered for everything and did a fan-freaking-tastic job at everything. His face—pale beneath a shock of dark hair—appeared dozens of times in his high school yearbooks, the margins crammed with notes from friends and phone numbers from hopeful admirers.
Sometimes I thought his success would have been easier to take if Daniel had been an asshole, some mean-spirited genius who could only look down his nose at everyone else. But the thing was—he was so damn nice. He was the best big brother you could have. He never once told me to go away because I was bothering him. He never once told me that I sucked at the piano or worse, showered me with pity. He made up silly songs for me every year as a birthday present, and when he got his license, he once spent an entire Saturday afternoon driving me around Sacramento in search of the best sno-cone. When he went away to Oberlin, he sent emails that were just for me, separate from the ones he sent to Dad and Mom, filled with jokes and links to funny things he’d found online, like penguins bowling and dogs chasing their tails. He liked to set cat videos to his own music, little things he composed for a joke and that I thought were genius.
Basically, I worshipped him. And as bad as I felt for disappointing Dad and Mom, I never once felt that I had disappointed Daniel. You just couldn’t feel bad about yourself around him, because he didn’t have that effect on people.
In the beginning, there was Daniel.
Until one day, there wasn’t.
The obituary in The Sacramento Bee, written by Aunt Judy when neither of my parents was up to the task, left out everything interesting and reduced my brother to the barest of facts: Daniel Owen Kaufman was predeceased by both his paternal and maternal grandparents. He is survived by his immediate family, parents Curtis and Kathleen Kaufman and sister Olivia. He is also survived by an uncle and aunt, Jeff and Judy Eberle, cousin, Chelsey, and friends throughout the Sacramento and Oberlin, Ohio, areas.
Survived, when you think about it, is a funny term. Survived implies that we were there on the sinking ship, that somehow we got on the lifeboat, but Daniel didn’t. Survived suggests that we were pulled from the wreckage of the collapsed building, but Daniel wasn’t. Survived also means we kept on living—and I’m not sure that’s true.
Oh, we were still alive in the biological sense of hearts beating and lungs inflating. Dad kept on showing up at Rio Americano High, where he had taught physics for so long that he was almost an institution unto himself. Mom, who had been a buyer for an antiques dealer before branching into her own furniture restoration business, threw herself into her work with a passion that bordered on mania. And me—I guess you could say that I kept going, too. I was still living and breathing and getting decent scores on my homework. I still basically looked like a normal kid. But nothing ever felt right.
Somehow, as the years passed, Daniel was still there. Not in some weird, spiritual way, as if his ghost were haunting our upstairs hallway or his profile had appeared on a moldy tortilla, but in the hold that he had over me—every memory of my childhood had Daniel in it, hovering at the edges like an orb sneaking into the background of a photo. Moving forward—moving past the incident, as our family therapist had said in her nice-nice way, as if everything bad could be covered over with a euphemism—was like stepping into a vacuum, a World Without Daniel, a blank space, an empty room. Some people, I heard, kept phone messages from their dead loved ones, replaying them for a dose of comfort, a reassurance of immortality. Mom’s way of keeping Daniel alive was to say his name as much as possible, to bring him into conversations like that old saying I’d learned about Jesus, the silent guest at every meal. Seeing a notice in the paper about a soloist in a holiday concert, she’d say “That name sounds familiar. I wonder if that’s the younger sister of what’s-her-name, the one who used to play clarinet with Daniel?” Cleaning out our junk drawer: “This must be the missing piece to Daniel’s little gadget, that little thingamajig that he used to spin around on the patio....” For no reason at all: “Remember when we rode the cable cars to the wharf and Daniel...”
Yes, Mom. I remember. We know.
Dad and I, by tacit consent, mentioned his name less and less, until we stopped saying it at all. The space Daniel had occupied was now a silent void, a sort of musical black hole that we tried to fill with the television, with random chitchat about things that didn’t matter at all. It was as if Daniel had taken with him all the arias and sonatas and symphonies, all the pianissimos and fortes, all the beauty and improvisation.
Dad and I kept our silence because it was too hard—it was shitty, frankly—to acknowledge that Daniel had ever existed, because then we had to remind ourselves that he didn’t exist anymore, that he was, and would always be, dead.
October 29, 2008
When the phone rings after midnight, it’s never good news.
The sound was startling, echoing off our wood floors and banging around in the hallway, but in the strange way that sounds penetrate sleep, it seemed as if the ringing came from deep underwater. Or maybe I was the one underwater, swimming to the top of my dream, and suddenly bursting through. I jerked upward, head foggy, propping myself up on my elbows.
Dad