'Oh, come on!” She held up her hands in exasperation. “You have something to say. It's written all over your face. What is it?'
'Well, Ma. Your birthday is coming up and all-” He stopped and held out an envelope to her. “Happy birthday.'
She opened the envelope and slipped on her reading glasses. They were tickets to Opera Southwest. Two of them. To see Don Giovanni.
'You always have music around,” Lenny said shyly. “I thought you might like to go.'
Norma didn't say anything for a moment. “Nearly forty years I've known you,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “And you can still surprise me.'
All the next week, she sang along with everything that came over the radio, tuneless or not. Belted it out with Patsy Cline. Harmonized with a Hunk of Burnin’ Love. She was a Werewolf in London Born in America seeing Paradise by the Dashboard Lights for the very first time.
Norma was so excited waiting for Lenny to pick her up she made herself pee three times. Just to be sure she wouldn't have to get up in the middle and go to the bathroom.
Lenny wore a tie for the occasion and looked so handsome that Norma decided she'd forgo cigarettes for the night. Just so he'd be happy. She left her pack of Reginalds in the dresser drawer just to make sure.
The drive downtown, the walk into the Hiland Theater, finding their seats in the middle just in front of the orchestra, passed in a happy, warm blur. She settled back in her chair when the lights dimmed and put one hand on Lenny's. The music came up.
I must have heard this a hundred times, she thought. But now, in front of her, sung by people no less flesh and blood than she, it came to life.
In the middle of the second act, where Elvira began her angry solo, Norma leaned forward. For a moment, she had an uncontrollable urge to cough. It subsided before she could do anything to stop it. Then, it came again. Stronger, this time. She was going have one of those hacking fits like when she coughed up the fleshy bit. She could feel it coming on. Norma had to get out of there.
She put one hand over her mouth, stood and walked quickly up the aisle. Lenny stared after her but she was outside in the lobby before he could react.
A bathroom. She couldn't find one. Instead, she walked outside onto Central Street, thinking to cough or throw up in the gutter.
When she filled her lungs, the pain eased and in her mind, she could still hear Elvira's rage, haunted by the Don and her own weakness. She opened her mouth, and it welled up and out of her like clear running water. The vibrating power of it shook her, made her heart pound and her lungs rejoice. Every day she had listened to the radio, the music had been captured and woven into her cells. Now, they were free.
She stopped when Elvira stopped. Lenny was standing in front of her.
'Ma?” he asked. “You okay?'
Norma nodded. She didn't want to speak.
'That was good,” he said softly. “Unnatural, of course. But good.'
'You think so?'
'Yeah.” He nodded. “I do.” Lenny didn't say anything for a minute. “Tomorrow we go see Dr. Peabody.'
'Hush.” She was smiling. Norma felt like a girl again and the world was bright with possibility. She was sixteen, sitting in an old Chevy, smoking and grinning and driving down a road straight as a runway and smooth as a glass table.
In 1711, for his first opera in London, George Handel advertised he would bring to the stage a chariot pulled across the stage by live horses, fireworks, a raft of tenors sailing through the storm in midair and not one, but two fire-breathing dragons. Consequently, opera, even opera in Albuquerque, was no stranger to novelty.
Ben told Norma she had two advantages going into the audition. One, she was old. It was hard to take a pretty, thirty-year-old diva and make her look seventy-five. Not only was it easier to do the same thing to Norma, she didn't mind and the diva usually did. The second was she had the pipes. Once the director was persuaded to hear her, she had a spot.
Not to say she got the front line roles. She was the old dowager, the mother-in-law, the comic innkeeper's wife, the ancient fortuneteller-in short, any role that suited her age and wasn't big enough to make the younger singers want it. This was fine with Norma. She was having a ball.
Hey, she thought to herself as she sprayed the inhaler down her throat. Look at me. I'm the Great Caruso.
The next two years passed quickly. Norma expected her voice to have a metal, inhuman quality, given its origin. Instead, it was an intensely human voice. “A dark warm revelry,” said one critic in Keystone. “Lustrous,” said another in Scottsdale. That was as far as she traveled. Opera Southwest had funding problems those years and their concert tours went only as far east as Amarillo and as far west as Needles.
She didn't care. The music never palled. The singing never lost its luster. But one day, she was listening to a recording of Rigoletto as she prepared for the role of Maddalena-being able to read music didn't come with the deal-when she looked up in the mirror. She looked the same. But what was going on inside of her? The quality of her singing seemed to get better over the last two years. She never coughed anymore. The only reminders she had were the daily dose of the inhaler and the two radiographs she had framed and mounted on her wall.
Norma stared at her image in the mirror. She was pushing eighty and could see it in her face. “What's going on in there?'
I should have died two years ago. I'm living on borrowed time.
Norma had a feeling deep inside that the mites were only waiting for her.
'Waiting for me to do what?” she asked Ben as she sipped her coffee. It was a warm March and they had come to an outdoor coffee shop near the theater. It was her birthday.
'What do you mean?” Ben leaned back in his chair, bemused. He was still thin by normal standards but in the last few years, he had filled out. Now, his eyes seemed properly proportioned and his mouth fit in his face. “Aren't you happy?'
'Of course I am.'
'Then don't question it.'
Norma snorted and stirred her coffee. “This was the miracle you wanted to be present at?'
Ben smiled back at her serenely. “I'm present enough.'
'These mites went through a lot of effort to do this to me. Why? What do they have in mind? Why did they stop?'
'The FTV stopped them.'
'I don't believe it. I don't think the FTV was much more than a suggestion. I think they chose to stop. For some reason.'
'You're making them more intelligent than they are.” Ben closed his eyes in the spring sun.
'I'm not sure intelligence has anything to do with it.” Norma drummed her fingers on the table. “You don't need intelligence to have a purpose. They had a purpose. What was the word you used? My singing was an… emergent property of their purpose.'
'What do you think it is?'
'How should I know? Send messages to the moon? A voyage to Arcturus? A better subway?” Norma mulled it over in her mind. “I owe them for this.'
'You don't owe them a thing. Think of it as a reward for a life well spent.'
Norma chuckled. She had a clockwork sense of time passing. It was her choice. They had made sure of it. Well, she was eighty now. When should she choose? Once the mind and gums went, there wouldn't be much left. Why not now, when she still had it?
'Heck,” she muttered out loud. “I was ready to let lung cancer kill me. Why not these guys?'
Ben leaned forward, suddenly alert. “What are you talking about?'
Norma watched the way a bicyclist worked his way down the crowded street. “I quit using the inhaler.'
'When?'
'Just now.'
It didn't take long. The mites were ready. A month after she stopped using the inhaler she woke up in her bed, too weak to reach the phone. Lenny came by on his way to work to say hi and found her. The paramedics came into her room in slow motion. Their hands left trails in the air as they drifted over her; the instruments resting on her
