Adagio - Writing Sample

Opening Scene - Introduces protagonist, antagonists, setting, tone, and conflict

1977 - SUMMER
Church bells toll outside my open window, asserting God’s ownership of the day. He must have caught me humming. Better Him than my mother.
I squeeze in two more scribbled lines at the bottom of the page, rhyming ‘begin’ with ‘sin.’ Catholic, if you couldn’t tell. Hearing my mother’s nasal twang down the hall, I grab my pitch pipe from the nightstand and crane my head out the window between my bed and Elena’s. It’s dicey, making music at all, but I’d be wasting my last day of confinement if I didn’t write about it. With a gentle blow into the pipe’s metal spokes, I turn my hum into notes, into a song.
“Hello!” My mother is yelling, so I assume she’s talking to me. 
“Coming!” I call. My head bangs against the window frame on its way back inside.
“Florence Segreto, don’t you dare yell in this house.” The irony is lost on her. 
I jot the notes above their lyrics and shove the notebook between my floral sheets, futilely trying to mirror how Elena tucked her duvet under her pillow. 
Without changing out of my nightgown, I meet my mother in the living room. She’s wearing her pink mock-neck dress with an ankle-length pleated skirt, balancing her handbag on her knee to sift through it. She exposes a sliver of her calf, and the sheer, flat color confirms she has stockings on despite the heat pushing sweat out of my uninhibited armpits. Elena clears her plate from the wobbling wooden dining table, and I hear my father opening and closing drawers in my parents’ bedroom. 
My mother twists to look at me, her thin eyebrows raised. 
“It’s 8:30 and you aren’t dressed?”
I’ve made a risky bet, but one that usually pays off. Behind the half-wall separating the wood-paneled living room from the kitchen, where my mother can’t see her, Elena winks to offer good luck. A thought creeps in, suggesting Elena enjoys my defiance for the juxtaposition it provides, rather than the entertainment. I shoo it away. 
I lean against the wall and feign shock. My mother isn’t buying what I’m selling, so I add a self-deprecating head tap. 
“I slept through my alarm! Again! That’s it, I’m putting new batteries in it tonight.” I twiddle my thumbs and try to look selfless. “Don’t wait for me. You and Elena should go, and Dad and I will catch you there.”
My goal, of course, is to never catch anyone at church ever again. This skit has worked out a single-digit number of times, and those Sundays were the best ones of my life. My father shares my aversion to the stiff-backed pews and stiff-upper-lipped people at St. Gertrude’s of Bensonhurst. After my mother leaves, all it will take is a despondent gaze at the wall-to-wall shag carpet, lamenting that this is my last Sunday before I’m a college girl, how little time we have left before I meet my husband and get married—and with the first mention of me replacing him as the most important man in my life, my father will search for change, shouting that we will go to breakfast and then the record store.
But not today.
My mother purses her lips, and I know she’s onto me. She doesn’t like the influence I have over my father, because she has never had it. At least not during my lifetime. She and I never discuss where I’m going to college, or that school starts tomorrow. If mail from the New York School of Theatrical Arts makes it to my room at all, I find it in the garbage can. The only evidence that I will be a freshman at NYSOTA tomorrow is my mother holding on with white knuckles to every remaining aspect of my life under her control.
“Your father isn’t coming. He’s working.” She says the word ‘working’ like her husband is a toddler making pretend phone calls in a playpen rather than rolling under the bellies of cars, trying to make them roar. “We’ll be waiting, Florence.”
I change into a black sleeveless dress. It’s wool, far too insulating and morbid for August, but my only other black dress is saved for the first day of school. Besides, I’m setting up Elena. I’ll make a joke that I’m attending the funeral of my favorite excuse, and then I will ask her to craft me a new one. She will, and she will never use it. She demonstrates altruism I can only emulate.
My parents are second generation Italian Americans. My grandparents’ parents came over from Italy long before Ellis Island and were too busy working to teach their kids two languages. My parents—obviously, yes, their names are Maria and Franco—not only speak zero Italian, but also have no family back in the motherland providing an excuse for a vacation. Despite this, my mother is very, very Catholic. So essentially, there are no benefits. 
My mother and I look about as alike as the numbers one and eight. I look up at her as we walk, her Roman nose over which I’ve been peered down at my entire life. I feel my dark curls bounce along my back while her bob and bangs don’t leave her angular face, every strand precisely in line like obedient children. Like Elena. My mother is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and I look nothing like her.
“What’s that look for?” she asks.
“What look?” But I already know. While Elena can drain emotion from her face like she has a vacuum in her long neck, I wear whatever I’m feeling like water weight after eating baccalà. I can usually twist what I feel to tell the story I want to tell. I’ve especially mastered disguising hurt as anger. 
“Don’t make me ask you what you wanna say, just say it.” 
“I picked my song.” My mother stares straight ahead, so I keep talking. “For my audition. For the musical next week.” Of course, I also don’t know how to be quiet and when.
“Florence! God has given you everything you could ask for, and on the one day out of seven that’s reserved for him, you haven’t been awake an hour and have already managed to make it about yourself.”
My mother’s pace quickens, Elena and I dragging behind. Elena leans over to whisper in my ear. “I thought you would tell her about Patrizia’s—”
“Shh!” I hush her. If my mother heard anything, she doesn’t let on. No one speaks the rest of the way. 
We walk past open windows and convertibles belonging to people with less religious fervor than my mother. Fragments of Elton John and Johnnie Taylor drift from their radios to our ears, serenading us. My hips start swaying. Elena rolls her eyes, but she can’t resist chuckling. She mimics me, shimmying her arms and abdomen. I can’t listen to music without moving. No matter the rhythm, it absorbs into my skin and makes my shoulders rock back and forth, my arms pop out and back, rolls my chest forward and winds it up again. 
When we arrive at the church, when Elena scurries up the narrow spiral staircase to join the old ladies in their choral robes, my legs carry me to my mother’s favorite pew, but my torso doesn’t budge. The organ moans and groans, beckoning the priest and the gifts down the aisle toward the altar, but this may be the only music that doesn’t move me. It’s not that I don’t know the tunes. The problem is that the whole songbook is too knowable. The chords are expected, mindless and easy and obvious. 
My mother nods as the priest tells us the Holy Spirit will wake us up in the morning if we maintain our devotion, like she isn’t fueled by coffee and judgement of others. Boys tilt their back-to-school crew cuts away from the altar to watch Elena, perched like a bird in the first row of the first sopranos. My mother catches me staring at her among the stained-glass windows and red robes, and I know she wishes I was wearing one. We’ve fought about it more times than I can count. Besides the fact that the choir loft is hot as hell (ironic), my high school plays and musicals practiced on Sundays, and most importantly, choir songs give the only parts worth singing to the sopranos. Jesus may have died for our sins, but whoever is writing songs on His behalf is not giving an inch for the altos. All the lower register melodies sound like the dying wish of a heifer. Whenever I explain these reasons to my mother, she says one of two things:
“Think about all the people you know who don’t have time for God. Are they doing so good?”
“No one should even be able to hear you anyways. You’re all supposed to blend in.”
She only further proves my point.
I wouldn’t admit it to her, but after the Body of Christ melts to mush on my tongue and we’re all on our knees, I pray. Religion isn’t a pillar upon which I’ve built my life. It’s more like a shoulder to cry on, a security blanket. I reach for something to believe in when I’ve exhausted all other options. I feel this must be common for unlucky people like me. 
God, please help me belt a C5 without reaching. 
When you talk to my mother later, could you tell her to stop wincing when I bring up NYSOTA? Maybe suggest she ask questions, like she does with Elena about SUNY New Paltz? Don’t tell her I asked. If I let on that I care that much, she’ll never do it. You understand. 
Last, I know it’s a long shot, but please keep my mother from finding out Patrizia fired me. If you’re open to advice, I would find a way to revitalize my mother and Patrizia’s fight from the DiNicolo baptism, when my mother said there’s no way in hell—sorry—that Patrizia actually—I search for a church-appropriate phrase—made love with Frank Sinatra. I promise, if you do this for me, I’ll never question your existence again. 
Amen. 
Elena stays the rest of the morning to sing in three more masses, so my mother and I walk home in silence. When we get to our house, I avoid the rusted railing and push the rusted button to open the rusted screen door. The house I grew up in now grows mildew up to my waist. Time used to be measured in height markings on the door frame next to the white fridge, and now it is measured in how high the mildew is compared to me. My mother says the house is ‘falling apart at the hinges,’ and my father says it’s ‘just fine.’ 
I peel the wool dress off my body to change into jeans and a white t-shirt. My mother washes down the Eucharist with a meditative glass of water, and I let the screeching screen door slam on my way back out.