Family Saga: A Changing Room (Brahms Cabin, with Laurie)
Laurie puts her violin down on the chair next to her.
“Here, just look at this and tell me if it’s a tick bite!!” She starts to pull her shirt up and I scream.
“No!!!”
“I don’t care if you see my breasts, I just can’t see it myself!!” I start laughing and put my head in my hands, the neck of the cello tucking into my elbow.
“What!!??” she cries.
I can barely breathe I’m laughing so hard. It is that point in the summer, where we’re a little too tired – wiped out from two concerts every week and trying to help the kids in every spare moment – so tired that something microscopic, unrelated, very thoroughly silly can set us off, leave us in a puddle of tears at our instruments, laughing because there’s not enough energy or brain matter left to talk. Today that thing is Laurie unceremoniously trying to pull her shirt over her head and make me inspect the underside of her left breast to see if a tick got her, if some late-night sleep-deprived dog walk in the tall grass of Maine will render this an emergency situation or just something we laugh about for the next twenty years.
As I look around, catching my breath finally, it is that span of twenty years that crosses my mind: twenty years ago, nearly, that I met Laurie for the first time, sitting almost exactly where I am sitting right now, in this tiny cabin in the woods. It has no air conditioner, didn’t then: just four chairs and four music stands, and when I sat here for the first time and Laurie’s eyes caught mine and held them, her head tilting slightly down, I knew that I would never again in my life be unseen.
Now it’s swelteringly hot here, nothing like those years of hoodies and late Beethoven quartets and suffocating under the weight of my dreams, when I could never have dared imagine that Laurie might run this place someday, hire me, sit here in this same cabin rehearsing with me.
But we are not rehearsing yet, we are laughing only, and now Laurie is red in the face, too, tears streaming down her cheeks, her hair a wild dark mane haloing her head. Finally I have enough air to speak.
“I don’t care about seeing your breasts, but you can’t take your clothes off here!!” I cry. “There are windows and as soon as I’m bending over looking at your bite one of our students will walk by!!!” We dissolve again, melting into each other’s laughter.
“Fine!!” she squawks. “We’ll rehearse and I’ll take a picture of my breast and send it to my doctor later!!!” I chortle, agree, and tune, looking over at her, our air humming with laughter and music and tick bites and almost getting caught naked by our students.
– Gwen Krosnick, April 2024