“A scale with five pitches. It’s different from a heptatonic scale, which is seven notes, like the major scale—do re mi fa so la ti.You find them all over the world—in jazz, blues, Celtic folk music, Japanese folk music. The thing about it is that you just can’t play a wrong note—whatever key you hit, it’s going to sound good.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You know the song ‘My Girl’? By the Temptations?”
“Yeah.”
Zoe lifts the lap harp she’s holding and plays the instrumental intro, those six familiar rising notes that repeat. “That’s a pentatonic scale. So is the melody that the aliens understood inClose Encounters of the Third Kind.And a blues scale is based on a minor pentatonic scale.” She puts down the harp and hands me a mallet. “Try it.”
“Thanks but no thanks. My last experience with an instrument was violin, when I was eight. The neighbors called the fire department because they thought an animal was dying inside my house.”
“Justtryit.”
I take a mallet and tentatively strike a bar. And another. And a third. Then I hit the same pattern. Before I know it I’m striking different bars, making up a song as I go. “That,” I say, “is pretty cool.”
“I know, right? It takes all the stress out of music.”
Imagine if there was a pentatonic scale for life: if no matter what step you took, you could not strike a wrong note.
I hand her back the mallet just as Lucy sulks through the door. That’s really the only way to describe it—she takes a look at Zoe and then glances at me and realizes she is not going to escape as easily this time around. She throws herself into a chair and starts gnawing on her thumbnail.
“Hi, Lucy,” Zoe says. “It’s good to see you again.”
Lucy snaps her gum. I stand up, grab the trash can, and hold it under her jaw until she spits it out. Then I close the door of the special needs room, so that the noise in the hall doesn’t interrupt Zoe’s session.
“So, you can see that Ms. Shaw is with us today. That’s because we want to make sure you haven’t got a pressing appointment somewhere else again,” Zoe tells her.
“You mean you don’t want me to ditch,” Lucy says.
“That too,” I agree.
“I was thinking, Lucy, that maybe you could tell me one thing you liked about our last session, so that I could make sure we get to do it again . . .”
“That I cut it short,” Lucy replies.
If I were Zoe, I’d probably want to throttle the kid. But Zoe just smiles at her. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll make sure we keep things moving along then.” She takes the lap harp and puts it on the desk in front of Lucy. “Have you ever seen one of these?” When Lucy shakes her head, Zoe plucks a few strings. The notes are sporadic at first, and then rearrange themselves into a lullaby.
“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,”Zoe sings softly,“Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”She puts down the harp. “I never really understood those lyrics. I mean, wouldn’t you rather have a mockingbird that could say everything you taught it to say? That’s so much cooler than a piece of jewelry.” She strums the harp a few more times. “Maybe you’d like to try this?”
Lucy makes no move to touch it. “I’d rather have the diamond ring,” she says finally. “I’d pawn it and use the money for a bus ticket and get the hell out of here.”
In the year I’ve known Lucy, I have never heard her string so many words together in a response. Stunned—maybe music does work wonders—I lean forward to see what Zoe will do next.
“Really?” she says. “Where would you go?”
“Wherewouldn’tI go?”
Zoe pulls the marimba closer. She begins to tap out a rhythm that feels vaguely African, or Caribbean. “I used to think of traveling around the world. I was going to do that after graduating from college. Work in one place, you know, waiting tables or something, until I got enough cash to travel somewhere else. I told myself I never wanted to be the kind of person who had more stuff than she could carry in a knapsack.”
For the first time, I see Lucy actively look at Zoe. “Why didn’t you do it?”
She shrugs. “Life got in the way.”
Where, I wonder, did she dream about going? A pristine beach? A blue glacier rising from the center of an ice field? The crowded bookstalls on the banks of the Seine?
Zoe begins to play another melody with the mallet. This one sounds like a polka. “One of the really cool things about these two instruments is that they’re tuned on a pentatonic scale. Lots of world folk music is based off that. I love the way you can hear a piece of music, and it brings a snapshot from another part of the world into your mind. Next best thing to being there, if you can’t hop a plane because you’ve got math next period, for example.” She taps the mallet, and the tune sounds Asian, the notes jumping up and down the scale. I close my eyes and see cherry blossoms, paper houses. “Here,” Zoe says, handing the mallet to Lucy. “How about if you play me a song that sounds like where you wish you were?”
Lucy takes the mallet in her fist and stares at it. She strikes the highest bar, just once. It sounds like a high-pitched cry. Lucy strikes it one more time, and then lets the mallet roll from her fingers. “This is so unbelievably gay,” she says.
