Further, aside from
the voice, in instrumental music, the “grain” or its lack
persists; for if there is no longer a language here to afford
signifying in its extreme form and scope, there is at least
the artist’s body which once again compels me to an evaluation:
I will not judge a performance according to the rules of
interpretation, the constraints of style (which are quite illusory,
moreover), almost all of which belong to the pheno-song (I shall not
go into ecstasy over the ‘rigor,’ the “brilliance,”
the “warmth,” the “respect for the score,”
etc.), but according to the image of the body (the figure) which is
given me.
—Roland
Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”
I
started taking piano lessons from Mrs. W when I was four years old, a
pale little girl with rice-cake cheeks. For the first few months, my
mom would sit next to me and “help” me practice. As
happens when learning something new, I made mistakes.
No—it’s
an A.
I
know, Mommy!!!
Okay,
okay…can you talk to Mommy nicely please? I’m just
trying to help you—
I
would then banish Mom to a different part of the house. No matter
where she went, though, the sound of my body’s infantile
indignation bounced off of the walls. There was a particularly vexing
accidental in Kabalevsky’s “The Clown,” and every
time I missed it my sweaty little hands frantically slapped
themselves across the keyboard. Sometimes I got so upset that I put
myself in time-out: pouting, weeping, furiously pressing my scalp
into the piano’s wooden underbelly. I would hide underneath the
piano until Mom found me, coaxed me to the couch, and held me for a
while.
I
saw Mrs. W nearly every week of my childhood. She is a second mom to
me. I was just a seedling when she planted me in front of the piano,
a trellis for my body. After years of lessons, practicing, recitals,
and competitions, she heard my hands grow nimble, my wrists loosen,
my shoulders slacken, my back straighten, my breathing deepen. She
heard my body transform. Pretty soon the marshmallow-fingers of that
frustrated toddler stretched into the spindly, agile digits of a
sixth grader who played Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3.
The
following year, when I was in seventh grade, my body clung to a new
trellis: the scale. Each morning at 6:00 AM, while my parents were
still asleep, I tip-toed into their bathroom to weigh myself. The
number must be lower than it was yesterday. My right hand
mastered the silent turn of the doorknob; my feet learned to creep
across the cold tile, toe-to-heel. I pressed the ball of my right
foot into the center of the scale. The screen awoke with a flash of
blue light. The second it finished calibrating, as indicated by those
hollow, rectangular zeroes, I stepped on. I felt the scale’s
plastic exoskeleton groan underneath my feet. That groan traveled
through my body like lightning; I can still feel its reverberations.
I
started developing an eating disorder when I was thirteen years old,
no longer a pale little girl with rice-cake cheeks. I was a stocky
girl with freckled cheeks, tan from playing field hockey. In the
beginning, my sole aim was to weigh 113 pounds. This is the “healthy”
weight for women who are 5’3”, according to the
suspicious app I downloaded from a targeted weight-loss
advertisement. It takes an immense amount of discipline and
self-hatred to enjoy starving oneself. As happens when learning
something new, I made mistakes.
You
promised you wouldn’t eat any carbs from now on. Why did you
eat the rice 할머니
[Grandma]
put on your plate? Why is she feeding you rice when she wants you to
lose weight?
I
didn’t want to be disrespectful. But I know better. I should
have thrown it away when she wasn’t looking.
I
closed the bedroom door and entered my closet. Standing in front of a
full-length mirror, my eyes traced the reflection of my naked body.
Pressing a fist into my bloated belly, I hissed, fat, fat,
fat,
fat, fat, fat, fat! I turned sideways and pretended to pose
for a
maternity photoshoot. I proceeded to do sit-ups until I observed a
sufficient deflation in my profile.
It
only took a few months to lose my period. At the time, I was learning
Brahms’ Rhapsody in B Minor. I was taking lessons from Mr. R,
one of three piano teachers working under Mrs. W, because the music
was still in his body. Mr. R is a short, bearded millennial whose
mannerisms reminded me of a mouse. But as soon as he started
playing—from memory—his torso grew a couple of inches,
and his body lurched towards the fallboard like waves lapping against
a sandbank. His breath was like that of a hibernating bear.
Learning
the Brahms Rhapsody with Mr. R made me realize that playing the piano
was a full-body affair. Mr. R told me to dig into the bottom
of
the keys. I would play the opening F-sharp octave again and
again, envisioning a burst of electricity from my toes, surging
through my knees, my shoulders, out of my right hand. I pushed my
left foot into the ground, thrusting myself off of the bench and onto
the keys. For a split second I was floating in midair, my pinky and
thumb on the keys, my right foot on the pedal. No matter how many
times I catapulted myself onto the keyboard, there
was a layer
I couldn’t quite penetrate, couldn’t quite dig into.
Better…he
would say, with an unconvincingly lilt. Again.
One
day Mr. R resorted to anecdote. He told me about one of his pianist
friends, a young Korean American woman who loves Korean
barbeque
and kimchi. She’s so petite, but when she plays, you can
tell—her sound, it’s just, so…beefy! You like
Korean barbeque and kimchi, right? I nodded, half-smiling,
half-wincing. Okay, so just, I don’t know, channel all the
barbeque you’ve ever eaten!
I
never admitted to Mr. R that I refused to eat Korean food, let alone
barbeque and kimchi. My eating disorder had marked Korean food as
unclean and unhealthy. My eating disorder taught me to subsist on my
body’s own meat and bones, and the wilted iceberg lettuce from
the school cafeteria.
After
losing thirty-five pounds over the span of a couple months, my
chances of making a beefy Brahms sound were getting slimmer and
slimmer. One week, I had my lesson with Mrs. W because Mr. R wasn’t
available. As I was packing up to leave, she blurted out, You
know, I know how it feels. To go to the dressing room and look good
in everything you try on. I’ve gone on diets. But I’m
getting a little worried. You’ve lost a lot of weight—I
mean, you’re beautiful, but you young people need to eat
because you’re still growing. I smiled weakly at a stain in
the carpet, pinching the flesh between my thumb and pointer finger. I
responded, Okay, followed by an uneasy chuckle.
Everyone in my
life could see that my body was shrinking, but Mrs. W is the only one
who heard it in a song.
After
the Brahms Rhapsody, Mrs. W wanted me to play Ravel’s Piano
Concerto in G Major. That year, however, my weekly lessons with Mrs.
W were gradually replaced by weekly appointments with several other
middle-aged, blonde female professionals. Namely, the adolescent
medicine eating disorder specialist, the dietitian, the therapist,
the psychologist, and the pastor’s wife.
My
parents got rid of the scale in their bathroom—or, rather, hid
it somewhere I could not find. Instead, the scale at the adolescent
medicine office became the trellis for my body. This scale I mounted
backward, wearing nothing but my underwear and a papery hospital
gown. I was now determined to reach a mysterious “weight
restoration goal range”—only insofar as I did not want
the eating disorder specialist to pull me out of school and send me
to the children’s hospital, which she threatened to do several
times.
I
was a terrible student of eating disorder recovery. I constantly lied
to my treatment team about following my meal plan, about staying away
from the gym, about the bottles of water I chugged right before my
weight checks. Even after graduating from my partial hospitalization
program, where I realized that I actually wanted to recover, it only
took a few months of COVID-19 lockdown for me to start restricting
again. Having accumulated many tactics of deception over the years,
it wasn’t long before I dove back into the depths of my
disorder, headfirst.
Two
years passed before I confessed to my mom. I had sustained my relapse
through junior and senior year of high school, completely undetected
by my family, my friends, and my treatment team. Well, perhaps not
completely undetected. I’m sure other people had their
suspicions, Mrs. W in particular. But the music—the music knew.
At
the beginning of my relapse, in the summer of 2020, I had just begun
teaching myself the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano
Concerto No. 2. I normally played cello in my high school orchestra,
but when I asked the director if I could play the concerto for our
spring concert, he agreed. After the lockdown ended, I started seeing
Mrs. W again for weekly lessons.
I
practiced so much that I could play the music with my eyes closed,
hands separate, hands together. For once, I practiced because I felt
like this is the most beautiful music in the world—not
out of frustration or shame. I practiced because I was in love with
the music. And the music loved me, too.
Better
than all of the echocardiograms, electrocardiograms, x-rays, blood
tests, and bone density tests I have been given, the music of
Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 knew me—knew my body.
My cold fingers melted into the interstices of every chord; the music
melted into the interstices of my rib cage. Each note rippled across
the pool of ivory, lapping against my wounded soul. I winced and
smiled. We were one. The music left a mark on my atrophying muscles,
my brittle bones. The music knew that I was dying a slow death, and
yet, it didn’t withhold itself from me. The music gave itself
up for me.
How
could such sweet music dwell in such a broken body?
Today,
four years into stable recovery, most of Rachmaninoff’s Piano
Concerto No. 2 escapes me. Those parts of my body wherein the
recapitulation dwelled, with those rapturous chords, are deep
within—too deep. While my body may not remember, the music
does. The music helps me remember, helps me revisit my memories and
see things that I hadn’t before.
I
see the pale little girl with rice-cake cheeks, pouting underneath
the piano. But I also see someone sitting next to her, placing a hand
on her trembling head. I see the tan, freckled teenager hissing at
her own reflection. But someone is standing right in front of her,
cupping her face with gentle hands. Look into my eyes, see
your
reflection here.
The
music was never so alive as when I was slowly dying.
