This holiday season we are featuring the 2017 winners of the Cedric Literary Awards, given to previously unpublished Canadian writers of prose and poetry aged 50 or more. Founded in 2014, the Cedric program is an annual juried competition that also celebrates First Nations writers, Francophone writers and those who represent a pan-Asian heritage. More than 500 writers from across British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Yukon have taken part in the competition.
Today, we feature the last of the winners, Susan Pieters, in the creative non-fiction category of the Cedric Literary Awards. The previous published winners were Guudiniia La Boucan in the First Nations category, Anneliese Schultz in the fiction category and KB Nelson in the poetry category.
---
Susan Pieters is the winner in the creative non-fiction category of the Cedric Literary Awards. Pieters is a short story and novel writer, and mother of three living in Burnaby. She is also part of the founding team, and contributing editor, at Pulp Literature magazine. Susan has an MA in English literature, but considers her experience as an editor for the magazine to have been worth far more than any diploma. To read more of her work, go to Pulp Literature at: http://pulpliterature.com
- - -
Singing Solo
Choir practice is my last class of the week and the band room smells like spit, stuffy as the locker room when it’s been shut up with the windows closed, but I’m used to it so I go to a metal folding chair by the kettle drums. I sit in the back row because I’m tall for a girl, taller than most of the boys in Grade 9, even though I’m a soprano.
Soprano? my mother said, Why don’t you try and be an alto? It’s so bourgeois to always sing the melody.
The popular girls come in next, the pretty ones who can sing better than I can because life’s not fair — another one of my mother’s lines, as if expecting life to be fair is also bourgeois. Then the boys drift in, like they don’t care if they’re here or not. The boys in choir have to act tough and wear jeans because this is a cowboy town and no one wants to get teased about being a sissy.
It’s Friday and hot outside and the choir director, Mr. Stanton — who is also the band director, because this is a small town — has a gig tonight with his own little jazz ensemble, so he half-heartedly runs us through a warm-up scale and says we’ll skip practice on the English madrigal with four-part harmony that we’re struggling with. We have some time yet before the Spring Concert to master it, so today we can do pop solos.
There’s only one microphone out, a heavy black probe in the mic stand up front. When you pick it up and slide the switch, it feels like God can suddenly see you. It’s a professional mic like the ones on television that get handled so casually by Donny and Marie Osmond, who hold it right up to their lips like they don’t know it’s there, while Donny closes his caring brown eyes and Marie parades her tiny waistline.
Shelley Thompson, a popular girl who sits near me, goes first.
Singing solos is not like singing together. It’s a subversive competition. You cheer each other on with smiles but secretly wish the other person will go flat.
At home, alone, I never go flat. In the shower, when heated water roars with applause and sympathy, or with the radio turned up in my bedroom, I sound good. Or at least okay.
But you’re not alone when you sing choir solos; you’re in the spotlight. Everyone sees you. And now Shelley must feel it as they pass her the mic, the weight of all of us looking at her, like police with flashlights going up to a car parked late at night, ready to catch her naked.
She chooses Snowbird and smiles brightly like she’s Anne Murray. From the choir director’s intro, I can tell he’s tired of this song.
Shelley is singing okay, but I can hardly pay attention because my palms are wet. I’m next in line, and I need to pick out a song.
Shelley ends after one verse. No repeats of the chorus, because others will want a turn, and there’s not enough time for everyone.
Everyone in the room is antsy, restless like a lineup of teenagers standing on a cliff, boasting and bouncing, ready to jump into the lake below. But when it’s your turn to dive in, the water looks very far away.
Shelley hands the mic to me across an empty chair and gives me some cord.
I could say ‘I pass’. Mr. Stanton doesn’t force you to take a turn. It’s like an AA meeting where you don’t have to share if you don’t want to. But this is my chance. If I’m honest, there’s nothing I want more than to show these people I can sing, really sing. I want to show them I’m as passionate on the inside as the stars on TV. I want them to know I’m smarter than Shelley Thompson (who only gets Bs and never gets acne and hasn’t even suffered), and because I’m smarter and more tragic it means I must sing better, because although life is not fair, life does have balance, and trade-offs, and there must be some sort of compensation for being me. After all the glances in the hallway that make me feel invisible, I’m going to show them, show them all who I really am, I’m putting all my chips on the table. They’re going to ask me how I did it, why I’ve been hiding my talent, and Shelley will want to be my friend and have sleepovers, although I might say no to her. This is the moment they’ll see the real me.
“Close to You,” I tell Mr. Stanton, my chest already tight, an artificial voice coming through the speaker that I don’t recognize as my own.
He nods. He’s a Burt Bacharach fan and he’s into diminished seventh chords and diminished ninths, and once he said there was such a thing as an eleventh chord but it fell on our ears like astrophysics. After that, none of us has dared go hear him play at his own gigs to see if his music makes any sense at all. We joke that no one shows up to hear him play jazz except college professors from the next town over.
The lead-in ends and, even though my throat feels like I have tonsillitis, I hit middle C dead on.
My alto mother would be pleased. It’s not that low a note, but I also didn’t have to smoke cigarettes for twenty years to do it.
I know this song well, and I ease into it. My mother buys all The Carpenters’ albums, though she rarely plays records any more. She comes home tired from teaching and pours herself a scotch and the house goes quiet in a certain way that I don’t disturb until she pours a second drink and goes to the master bedroom.
The third line is “Why do stars fall down from the sky,” but my voice grows quiet. I need more air so I sit up straight. Really, I should be standing, but no one does except for concerts so that would feel like showing off. I try to breathe through my diaphragm and I wish my mother had given me singing lessons when I asked instead of insisting on piano lessons, because singing lessons would be a waste of money on you, but when I do take a deep breath and look up I see a cute guy who might think I chose this song because I have a crush on him, so I look back down and hunch over a bit.
You shouldn’t slouch, do you need a new bra?
I hesitate and almost lose my place, when I hear the keyboard pulling an eleventh chord.
It’s magical, just like Mr. Stanton told us. The notes ring out like bells at odd angles, they settle from the sky like a flock of birds that don’t land all at once but touch down gently on a beach, uneven and perfect.
Before I know it, I reach the end of the song.
I pass the mic over to the next person like it’s the Holy Grail, or a black hole, or a venomous snake.
No one makes eye contact with me. All eyes slide away and follow the mic. The choir director doesn’t make any comment; he never does.
I sit and listen to eight more solos, replaying my own performance, wondering if I sang better or worse than each new person who sings.
The bell rings and the room empties of students, except for me. I always stay behind to help clean up. I don’t need to run the gauntlet at the lockers, nor am I in a rush to get a front seat on the bus.
I wind the cables like Mr. Stanton has taught me, reversing the circle on alternate loops so it lies flat and pulls smoothly without tangling, unlike the garden hose back home.
I’m waiting for him to say something. Maybe when we’re alone he’ll tell me I sounded great today, or that he’s proud of me for being brave and singing even though I was nervous. Or maybe he’s silent because I sounded like crap.
I’ve detached the microphone. I tuck it snug in its foam bed and latch the case shut. I pass it to Mr. Stanton so he can lock it up in the cabinets.
“Thank you,” he says. “Have a great weekend.”
I fiddle with the angle of a music stand. “I hear you’re playing somewhere tonight?”
“Just a night club,” he says, not telling me which one. Maybe he’s afraid I’d try to show up even though I’m underage.
“Do you get much of a crowd?”
“Not really.” He locks the cupboard with a key. “Last month, we had five people actually listening in the audience.”
“Five?”
“Don’t look so shocked,” he says. “That’s not why I perform.”
The diesel engine of the bus starts up with a rattle across the lawn outside. The driver is getting ready to go.
“Why do you do it, then?” I pick up my backpack. I suppose I look at him with pity. He’s not a music teacher at this moment, but an old guy in a band that no one listens to. He’s got to be fifty at least; he has grey in his hair and thick glasses and leans forward when he plays the keyboard like he can’t see very well.
There’s a warning honk from the bus; last call to get on board.
“There’s something about being onstage that I love. I call it focus.” He scratches his chin and I hear the scraping of his fingernails against a place he forgot to shave. “It’s like I’m finally alone.”
He looks at me through his glasses, and I wonder why no one ever thanks him for playing the keyboard for us. He must spend a lot of time practising the music we sing.
I run across the lawn to catch the school bus. The windows are lowered and every eye looks at me, the one holding them up. I walk down the centre aisle, holding on to the green vinyl backs of the padded bench seats until I reach a free spot.
The bus pulls onto the freeway, and I look out the window. I hear again the chords trickling through Mr. Stanton’s fingers like a waterfall. He’s right. In that moment, I no longer heard my mother’s voice. I was alone, and it was quiet, and I forgot that I was singing solo.
