(being Children of the Television, they only consciously responded to boys who dressed in the fashions prescribed to their demographic), but their bodies knew something was afoot with the pheromone-blizzard surrounding Lalo, and they acted squirmy around him as they sat in folding chairs around the rinky-dink upright piano.
Lalo led the girls through warm-up scales, which they mumbled through tunelessly (“Scales are so gay”). Once those were completed, Lalo boinked out remedial accompaniments of his favorite songs, all of which were invariably about sex or God (Lalo’s two big topics), e.g., “Day by Day” from Godspell, Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” and “My Sweet Lord” by George Harrison; songs that sounded weird and unwholesome when sung by a chorus of nasal little girls.
The last section of the class was arranged so that a few girls, if they wanted to, could sing a solo. For the first week there were no volunteers. In lieu of any takers, Lalo would sing them one of his own compositions: swirling, watery songs of tormented passion, in Portuguese, that involved a lot of mushy pedal work. The girls would watch Lalo pour out his carnal grief with confused doll-eyes, fidgeting and discomfited by any form of emotional exuberance. Ned liked it. He could tell that Lalo was a hypersensitive person (like him) transformed into a Real Man—he was cool, and he was kind to Ned. Whenever Lalo smiled at him, Ned’s bashful blood rushed hotly into his cheeks.
“Why do none of you want to seeng?” Lalo grumbled, the second week. “You, Liza, you do this. I know you like to seeng, I hear you seeng in the battroom sometime.”
Unbeknownst to Lalo, Liza had been lying in wait for this moment—she was dying to sing, but her tenuous social position made it impossible for her to volunteer. Liza sprang to her feet and thumbed through Lalo’s Easy Rock Hits of the 70's music book and found Melissa Manchester’s “Don’t Cry Out Loud,” splayed it open on the piano, then turned to face her rude and lumpen audience.
Lalo plunked away at the opening bars, and Liza, with no hesitation, opened her throat and hollered the song at top Melissa Manchester concert-volume, wailing into the first vibratos…
“Baby cried the da-a-ay the circus came to towwwn ‘cause she dii-dn’t want thah parade to go pahs-ssing By Her…”
The girls were shocked. None of them could believe Liza’s cringe-inducing brazenness, being too repressed, swinish, and conservative themselves to ever do anything that five or more of them couldn’t do simultaneously, to avoid individual embarrassment. At first the girls flashed each other grimaces of mock horror at Liza’s voluminous performance, the power of which was blowing their bangs straight up.
But as Liza roared great, artless lungfuls of lite pop balladry at them, a curious change came over the girls; their opinions shifted, as only the opinions of teenaged girls can, in sudden, collective whiplash U-turns like a school of guppies.
“DON’T CAH-RYEEE OUT LAH-OOOOOUUUD Just keep it in-sah-eeed And Learn how to hide your Feelings FAH-LYYYYE H-I-I-I-GH and PAH-ROOOOUD And if you should fa-a-a-all Remember You almost Had it A-A-A-A-A-A-L-L-L-LLLLL…”
The girls, who began that day collectively opposed to Liza because they were all vaguely disgusted by her, whipped around in an eyeblink, and were now collectively opposed to Liza because they were all grudgingly jealous of her.
When Liza stopped and all of the girls, their lower jaws agape and dangling from their upper jaws by orthodontic rubber bands, actually dapped for her, it was the biggest Ice Castles-swirling-Olympic-moment of her life. Her eyes went watery from the bright shards of happiness shooting from her heart.
Her glory lasted about six seconds.
The heroic display cracked the code for the other girls, and they all instantly figured out how to sing, or rather, they figured why they should stop not singing, and they became ruthlessly competitive. A riot of plastic-braceleted hands went up to sing next when Liza took her seat. From that point on, Lalo’s class was all-out, pop-chanteuse-wannabe warfare.
The next day, it was apparent that mothers had been marched to the music store, checkbooks fluttering. Glitter fingernails crammed glossy sheets of new music in front of Lalo’s dog-eared fake books. Lalo had to put a sign-up list on the wall; the girls elbowed, cheated, and snaked one another in efforts to get there first. Liza was kicked away from the list like a dog from groceries. The girls fatally attempted “Memory” from Cats and “Tomorrow” from Annie; they hatcheted songs from A Chorus Line and Evita into bite-size teen emoto-chunks. As painful as many of the girls were to listen to, Lalo was overjoyed that they had all snapped awake from their dismal comas of peer pressure.
Lalo was accompanying fifteen-year-old Chantal Baumgarten and singing the Barbra Streisand/Barry Gibb duet “Guilty” when Peppy walked by the music room on her way to buy cigarettes. Witnessing Lalo and the underage woman-child trying to harmonize with each other on the wonky, pseudo-operatic lovemaking duet and nearly succeeding, Peppy was stopped cold by a uterine pull of savage yearning. Her black, French-looking “Lulu” wig became warmer as her mind began to ferment with a bacteria of plots.
While the girls respected but disliked Barbette and were perplexed by Lalo, they loved Neville; he was their favorite. They gravitated around him, gushing compliments on him. Many of the girls had crushes on him, knowing little of homosexual lifestyles (only using the words gay and fag as a means of lite derision). Neville drilled the class through drama exercises of dubious worth and improvisation games, where all the girls crusaded to impress him with their individual wit by making off-color jokes, at which he would smirk and make a “naughty, naughty” gesture with a long finger. He did nothing to discourage their carrying on in this blue vein unless one of the mothers or Peppy was around, because it made him less bored, and, he reasoned, it “loosened them up.”
Nobody could say that Neville didn’t know where his bread was buttered. He favored Liza shamelessly in class, much to the writhing envy of her classmates, and made it a point to befriend Peppy, watching old movies with her on nights when he was too broke or hungover to go out “whoring in the city.” Mike and Ike would often join them, bringing over buckets of chicken.
If Liza could no longer get any solo song action in Lalo’s class, Neville was glad to give it to her after hours. He made her watch old Streisand films and listen to Julie London, Shirley “Goldfinger” Bassey, Cher, Nancy Sinatra, and Eartha Kitt records, teaching her all the grotesque showmanship affectations he so loved.
“Raise your hand when you draw out a long note with your fingers splayed out, like you’re pulling a baseball-sized wad of gum out of the audience’s hair,” he’d crow, and Liza would do it, to Mike’s and Ike’s laughing approval.
“… and when you sing the word ‘love’ flip your hair around like you can barely stand it.”
“… and when the audience claps, pretend like you’re surprised and like they’re teasing you, then shoo them away, then throw your head back and stretch your arms out straight like you’re trying to hug them all, because you just can’t believe how much they love you.”
Mike, Ike, and Neville would pick up strange, flashy dresses for Liza that they’d find in thrift stores; she was their Barbie doll. It was funny to them to have a girl her age imitate the unintentionally self-satirizing mannerisms of aging show-women on the brink of career death.
Peppy, being a very literal-minded person, had no gift for irony and was just delighted that the boys had taken such a special interest in Liza’s burgeoning talent. It was Neville who taught Liza to say strange, showbiz things, during nights in Peppy’s living room, drunk on jugs of Gallo table wine. Noreen
