October 17 - When I opened my mouth to sing

“Erica can sing,” Pete piped up. “Why doesn’t she do it?”

Four heads turned to look at me. Dad’s eyes were stern and calculating, Mom’s, only recently down-cast and teary, became wide and hopeful. My aunt’s eyes crinkled to slits beneath the thick frames of her tortoiseshell glasses, and Pete’s were practically shining from the dim lighting in the back room of the club, speckles of gold among the blue.

“I…” My voice caught, and I tried again. “I guess I could do it.” Aunt Lydia’s eyes narrowed further; some of the hope was dashed from Mom’s. “I know I can,” I said as forcefully as I could.

It had all begun with a phone call ten minute earlier. My family owned a popular venue for cabaret, and Friday nights always featured a headlining singer, tickets often selling out weeks in advance. Tonight, at the last minute, Madame Ladybug, as she was known, had called in.

“Mr. Mangini,” she rasped into the phone. “Bad case of laryngitis. There’s no way I’m gonna sing for yous tonight.”

Madame Ladybug was an even bigger deal than most of the singers that my family was able to book; she was popular in cabaret circles, and we had talked of nothing else for the days leading up to tonight. We were expecting full capacity of two-hundred head. Now, half an hour before doors were to open, Mom and Dad had made frantic phone calls to everyone in their little black book, but what singer could dash over on such short notice? Half our acts lived in far away cities; the other half worked other jobs. Twenty minutes now until the doors opened wide, and we were at a loss. That was when Pete said:

“Erica can sing. Why doesn’t she do it?”

I could sing, yes, this was true. I loved to sing! I was a shower diva, a sing-along-to-the-radio aficionado, a closet Broadway showtune belter. I had always longed to get up on stage, imagined it at night, pictured an audience in the place where my mirror was as I sang into a hairbrush ‘microphone’. But I had never actually performed in front of an audience more attentive than my bedroom mirror. Each time Dad had offered, that same pain had grabbed my belly, and I laughed the offer aside. Now, I looked nervously from Dad’s waiting eyes to Mom’s pleading ones, to Aunt Lydia’s squinting dare.

“I can do it,” I peeped, hardly a note to be struck in public.

Pete nodded, already assuming his role as the new patriarch of the family, since Dad frequently retreated into the background and gnawed on an eggplant sandwich in the back room while playing computer mahjong instead of attending to the account books. “That’s settled then,” said my younger brother. “Erica will sing.” He clapped his hands sharply, and Dad’s bulk, an extra forty pounds in the past two years alone, gave a startled shake. “Everyone to their places!”

The nightclub had been in my family’s purview for three generations, founded by my great-grandfather in the days when these things were known as speak-easies and were hush-hush, under the radar. Now, two generations later, it was known within a three hour radius as the venue for a Friday night out. Madame Ladybug was hard to book, normally frequenting joints in New York City, London, Paris, but tonight she was supposed to be here, and tonight she had coughed into the phone and scratched out to Dad, “Bad case of laryngitis, doll.”

Fifteen minutes later, the audience had filled their seats. The low hum of their voices, like a distant hive of bumblebees, drifted backstage. I kept trying to swallow and kept tasting the chicken piccata that Mom had made for dinner.

“You all right?” Mom asked me, placing a hand on my shoulder, I gave a start.

“Fine, fine…” Chicken. There had been capers in there. I swirled my tongue around. Garlic.

Mom nodded as though it was the truth. Pete walked by and clapped me so hard on the shoulder that I pitched forward. Instinctively, I grabbed at my stomach. “You’ll do great!” he said enthusiastically. “You look great.” This last with an appraising eye, like I was a new purchase for his home.

Expecting to see a green reflection, I turned to look at myself in the mirror. Except it wasn’t myself anymore. This woman was rouged and primped, mascara-ed and glossed. Fat, blue, faux gemstone earrings the size of goose eggs dangled at either side of my neck, and my body had been squished into a blue sequined gown that looked like a bad mixture of the Blue Fairy and Cleopatra.

This is it, I told my reflection fervently. You’ve been waiting for this for years.

“It’s now!” Aunt Lydia hissed from her position by the curtain. Dad was out on stage, still the titular head of the family, making his announcement.

“...special surprise, ladies and gentlemen,” he crooned in his Sinatra purr. “My very own daughter, my flesh and blood, will be the special guest entertainer.” There was a startled clamor, couples turning to whisper to one another, friends to twitter. The chicken piccata climbed further up my esophagus.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Dad said with a verbal ta da, “I present, Erica Mangini!”

Aunt Lydia hauled on the rope and the curtain parted wide.

The room was in front of me, swimming in the dim lights, the spotlight a giant sun on my face, melting my makeup. I took two steps to the microphone, which waited for me at the edge of the stage. I gripped it with both hands, pulled my mouth to it. I could hear the audience’s silent hush of expectation. People leaned forward inadvertently. I could hear their chairs creaking, the absent cracking of knuckles, the hair on their heads growing softly. All these sounds, but not my voice.

When I opened my mouth to sing, nothing came out. I heard my breath rattle at the back of my throat, then stop there, like a vacuum had suctioned out the sound.

“Aw, go on!” someone heckled. A low round of boo and hiss reached my ears. I squeezed my eyes shut.

You’re standing in front of a mirror, you’re standing in front of a mirror, I instructed myself. I tried to picture them as hazy glass, but still only saw the men’s smoking jackets, the women’s shining cocktail dresses, the tables and the bottles of wine, the cigar smoke drifting into the air. They were too real and they looked too little like me. I remembered another anecdote a professor had taught me once.

“My first lecture,” he said crisply in a British accent as clean as a white handkerchief, “I was so nervous that the only way I could get through it was to picture the audience in their underwear! And quite suddenly, seeing them all in their skivvies and tighty-whities, I thought, ‘What do I have to be embarrassed about’?”

I opened my eyes and this time didn’t try to see my reflection, or my shower curtain, or my stereo player. I imagined I really did see ladies in thongs and men in boxers, eagerly leaning forward, some shifting awkwardly, all of them saggy and exposed in nothing but their underwear.

“What’s she smiling at?” I heard Aunt Lydia ask Mom in the wings.

I opened my mouth to sing.