Has a forbidding cluster of faceless and anonymous concrete buildings. She loves them. Down she goes into the basement entrance and the distinctive scent of the building's hard skin enfolds her. It's not a real smell, though there are hints of chlorine in it. It's more the lack of the organic. The lack of anything alive.
Flattened and beaten down by the last thirty years, there are gold carpets. That sounds garish but it's not. It's perfect.
She spent a lot of her childhood riding and waiting. Riding in cars, then waiting in places like these.
The barrenness here is so beautiful. She can *see* into the walls.
Someone once said of her, "She sees the madness in me." Someone else told her, "You hide behind your eyes."
Last year Mama told her she was sorry for the waiting. Or more precisely for what it cost her. “You never got to have the fun of being young.” Mama doesn't understand her or she wouldn't have said that. Or maybe Mama understands her too well. Was she made by these walls, then? As her mama fears? Or did she make them? Is she what's left after the ambitions and duties of those she waited for, or was she here all along? Way before them, waiting in a different way?
Why not both.
#
It's another rehearsal. Her dad this time. He's doing some kind of voice-over. Undergraduates with instruments file in. They don't even know how new they look. None of them want to be here. It's late and they're tired and have other things to do. "Your own damn fault," she wants to tell them. "Nobody asked you to play the violin." She's seen so many people run around trying to get at everything. When in the end there's only one thing.
But of course people *did* ask these kids to play the violin. Told them to. Do this, do that, develop this, enrich that. *They* had parents who drove and waited for *them*.
She pans that insight across their faces. She should study them more. She should look until she finds something she can understand. But she feels better with the walls. She eyes away.
#
Now it's a presentation. Some friend of Dad's from a class they audited together. The friend looks at her with chagrin: "You're being dragged around to this!" He's one of the few who's ever noticed.
"I've got a book" she says.
And the walls. Faces without eyes.
But they see too. They wait with her.
