College Counseling
Reimagined.

The Cleveland Girl

The first time I heard a kid play better than me, I was fifteen, and I was sitting in a practice room at Tanglewood with the door cracked open because the air conditioning was broken.

The girl in the room across the hall was working through the Elgar concerto. I had been told I was gifted since I was seven. My mother kept a folder of every program I had ever played in: the church Christmas concert in Medellín before we moved, the regional youth orchestra in Newark, the recital where I won the Stanley Drucker Prize and a teacher I had never met before put her hand on my shoulder and said, "remember this." I remembered all of it. I had built a small private chapel out of those memories.

At Tanglewood, the chapel cracked open. The other students were not just better than me, which would have been fine. They were better in ways I had not considered. A boy from Seoul played a Bach prelude and made me understand for the first time that a single note could have weather inside it. A girl from Cleveland, where I had assumed nothing happened, played the Dvořák and I cried in a bathroom stall about it. I had been working on the Dvořák for two years. She played it like she had written it that morning.

I stopped practicing. This is the part of the story I do not like to tell. There is no honorable version of it. I did not stop because I was depressed, or because I was protesting, or because I was thinking deeply about my relationship to the instrument. I stopped because I was embarrassed, and because if I did not practice I could tell myself I had not really tried, and if I had not really tried then the Cleveland girl had not really beaten me. I went to the lake instead. I read three Murakami novels. I wrote my mother short, lying emails about how rich the program was.

In the second to last week, my coach, a Russian woman named Elena who had played second cello at the Bolshoi for eleven years, asked me to stay after class. She did not ask why I had stopped practicing. She asked me to play her something, anything, and to not try to be good at it. I played the opening of the Saint Saëns. Badly. My fingers were stiff and my bow shook on the long notes. When I finished, she nodded for a long time, like she was reading something written far away.

"You play like a boy who has been told he is special," she said. "It is a hard thing to play like a person."

I did not understand what she meant for a long time. I think I am still understanding it. What I have come to believe is this: for most of my life, I had played the cello as a way of confirming something about myself. Each phrase was a small piece of evidence I was building toward a verdict. The Cleveland girl had not been better than me because she practiced more, though she probably did. She was better because she was not building a case. She was just listening.

I came home from Tanglewood quieter than I left. I did not stop playing. I think I was afraid of who I would be without the cello, even after Tanglewood had made me suspect I did not know who I was with it. But I started practicing differently. I stopped recording myself. I started listening for weather. I did not win the Stanley Drucker again the next year. I did not place in the Sphinx, either. But last spring, in an empty practice room in the basement of my high school, I played a passage from the Brahms second sonata and had to stop in the middle because something inside the line had moved. There was no audience. There was no judge. There was a boy and a piece of music and a small, true thing that had passed between them. It was, I think, the first time I had ever played anything.

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