“And what’s this?”
“It’s an S!” “It’s a cliff.” “It’s the high voice sign.”
“Good. It’s a treble clef.” Coral sounded out the two words carefully. “Let’s say it together.”
“Treble clef.”
“And again?”
“Treble clef!”
“Three times, like bells ringing.”
“Treble clef, treble clef, treble clef!” the children sang out, pitching their voices even higher than they were naturally.
“Perfect. Does anyone remember the name of the other clef?”
“Basic clef!” yelled Faraz. “It’s the basic clef.”
“Good! Bass clef. Let’s try that one together.”
“Bass clef.”
“Three times, like a choo-choo train.”
“Bass clef, bass clef, bass clef!” the children chanted, puffing out their chests in the effort to deepen their voices.
On Tuesdays, Mrs. Barrosa’s kindergarten had music right before their day ended at 11:40, so Coral would stop five minutes early to line them up; she was the one to give each child a high-five good-bye and to watch until everybody had left the playground with an adult. The children who spoke Spanish had someone waiting to walk them home, but most of the rest walked or skipped to a designated pick-up area, where a driver with a van marked Happy Daze Care or Kids Korner waited. Last week, one child had been left after all the others were gone. Coral wasn’t sure why, but she had already decided whose turn it would be for the love song today.
“We have five minutes left,” she said to the class.
“The love song!” “It’s love song time!”
“Yes, it is. And today the love song is for Melody. Do you all know that melody is a music word too? It means a series of tones that we like. Melody, did you know that?”
Melody shook her head shyly.
“Do you want to have the love song today?”
The little girl nodded.
“Do you want to tell us someone who loves you?”
She shook her head.
“Well, then, we’ll start with me.” Coral sang, “You’re the one that I love, I love, I love, you’re the one that I love, sweetest one of all.”
The children joined in. “You’re the one that we love, we love, we love. You’re the one that we love, sweetest one of all.”
Melody was wearing a faded purple T-shirt, with a peeling green Baby Bop on the front. “You’re the one that Baby Bop loves, Baby Bop loves, Baby Bop loves, you’re the one that Baby Bop loves, sweetest one of all.”
Melody smiled and touched the hem of her shirt.
“Butterflies,” she said so quietly that Coral almost didn’t hear her. “You’re the one the butterflies love, butterflies love, butterflies love, you’re the one the butterflies love, sweetest one of all.”
The children sang brightly, beaming at Melody as they picked up their cues from Coral, and when she motioned for them to stand, they kept singing, more quietly, as they found their backpacks and unhooked their sweaters, and the ones who were going to day care retrieved their lunches from the shelf near the door. Melody stood on the mat the longest, listening to them sing about her, and saying softly to Coral, “Minnie Mouse.” “Puppies. “Mrs. Barrosa.”
Coral watched the children line up and thought about how her life might be if she had not come home last year; if Augusta hadn’t casually mentioned how many teachers the district was hiring; if the thought, initially so ridiculous, hadn’t grown on her—after an argument with Gerald, after she had washed her favorite sweater three times and it still smelled like smoke from the club, after her check for the PG&E bill bounced, after Tonya mentioned that she had seen Gerald at a bar in Bernal Heights, on a night that Coral thought he had driven home to help his aunt replace her water heater.
Little by little, the option her mother was suggesting took hold. Coral had her teaching certificate, she’d never intended to become a singer. Singing had started as a dare. They were all at a club in San Francisco for someone’s twenty-first birthday, and there was an open mike call. Some of the guys started chanting “Sing! Sing! Sing!” until, laughing, she and Tonya went onstage. After that, it happened fast: someone in the club offered them a gig, for tips, and soon after that, there was another offer. Tonya dropped out to manage their bookings—that surprised Coral—but Coral kept going to school, showing up first to class and then to her student teaching bleary-eyed and hoarse. Whether she had done so because she wanted to finish college or because she would never have dared tell Augusta that she’d quit, she wasn’t sure.
And was that whole life a detour? For most of the six years that Coral had sung with Tonya and then with the band, she felt like she was doing exactly what she should be doing—that the music, her voice, the way people responded, the songs she wrote in her head, over and over, all the time, this was who she was and who she was born to be. And what did it mean that she could simply drop out of who she was born to be? That one day she would wake up and realize she was so tired; so tired that not being tired didn’t even seem like a real state. That she would wake up and know she had fallen in love with the wrong man, and that she wasn’t strong enough to fix this. She would wake up longing for a morning, missing daytime; she was so damn sick of living at night, of a pink-fingered dawn meaning it was time to go to bed. If she didn’t get out of there, if she didn’t get away, she’d go under. Music or no.
She wasn’t Tonya. She wasn’t Gerald. She was weaker than they were. And she needed her mother. She needed to go home. Coral laughed when she told her friends that she was back home living with her mother—she was careful to make it sound like a drag—but, really, she had been so grateful for the sound of her mama in the next room, for the blue sofa with the lumpy pillows, for the wooden swordfish Ray Junior had made in shop class hanging on the wall, for the mesquite tree dropping spinners on her window sill, for the suffocating, sweltering, clean, dry heat of a July noon. It was all beautiful, it was all home, it was all the way the world felt right.
So when the principal at Lewis E. Rowe offered her a job teaching music, she didn’t hesitate, she didn’t waste any time worrying about what anyone else might think of her decision. She said yes. And from the first week—when she couldn’t find the fourth-grade classroom, when the air-conditioning hadn’t worked, when the fire alarm had gone off just after she’d sent one small child to the bathroom—from the very beginning, it seemed to Coral it was a pretty good choice.