The Choir That Sang Under My Window

Wilma’s shoulders came down. That was all. I saw the back of her robe lower by an inch, the way a woman’s shoulders do when she has carried a basket a long way and finally gets to set it on the step.

She did not turn around, and she did not sing my part.

She left it.

I took another breath and sang the next phrase, and it was a little better and a little louder, and the rest of the choir came in beneath me on the third line like men laying a plank over a ditch. I stood on it. That is how it felt. They laid it down under my voice and I walked out on it, one step at a time, and I did not fall in.

I ran out of air at the end of the line. I always had to, that winter. And Marlene Hoppe, who in thirty-four years of teaching and thirty-one years of directing has never slowed a hymn for any living soul, saw me falter through the glass, and she slowed the second verse down.

She took it at the speed of my lungs.

I have never told her I noticed. I imagine she knows.

When the hymn was over nobody said anything, and nobody clapped, because it was church. Wilma blew a note for “Abide with Me,” and the second alto had her place again, and this time I took it from the first word.

“Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.”

My voice was a screen door. It still is.

In the kitchen the water kept running for a very long time.

The weeks after

I would like to tell you it was easy after that, but it was not. Some Sundays I sang a whole verse and some Sundays half of one, and once I coughed so hard Gordy Fosse had to carry the tune alone for two lines. Dale sat with me afterward every week and watched my color.

The choir did not alter. They came the same way each Sunday. Same cars, same ten minutes to eleven. They stood in the same two rows, with the same space left, and they sang three hymns, and they left. Nobody stayed to talk. No one brought a casserole, and no one called after. If I had not wanted to hear them they would have sung to a house with the curtain drawn, and gone home with the same expression.