Very Far Away from Anywhere Else Read Online Free PDF Page A

on November 25th, like I said. Between then and New Year's I got to know Natalie Field a good deal better. We got along well. Whenever we got together we started talking, and we talked like crazy for as long as we had. We didn't often have very long, because she was really busy. She gave lessons after school five days a week, and on Saturdays she worked from nine to two at a music school, teaching something called Orff Method to little kids. Nights she practiced, and Sundays she played in a chamber group, and practiced, and went to church. Mr. Field was a very religious man. No, I withdraw that. Mr. Field was a very churchgoing man. I don't know if he was a religious man or not. Natalie was a religious person, and she probably got it from him, but she didn't like church at all. She went, though. She had thought a lot about it and decided it was more important to her father than it was to her, so she'd give in on that point, as long as she lived at home. She thought things like that out. Sometimes going to church made her resentful, but she didn't get all bogged down and tied up in her resentment, the way I did over the car. She just swore some about the dumb minister and went on with what she had to do next. She had her priorities straight.

    She was almost eighteen, older than me. That can make a big difference at our age, especially since girls are supposed to mature faster psychologically than boys, but it didn't matter to us. We just got along well. She was the first person I ever met I could really talk to, and talk with. The more we talked, the more there was to talk about. We both had last period free, and we could hang around and talk then till she had to go to her lessons; and sometimes in the evening I went over, and then there was Christmas vacation.
    I think it wasn't till vacation that I found out she wasn't studying to be a professional violist. She played viola and violin and piano, but what she wanted to be was a composer. She worked on the instruments so she could earn money teaching, and get into music schools, and later on teach or play in an orchestra for a living, but that was all just means to an end. It took me quite a while to find that out, because she was shy of talking about it. I'm not sure she'd ever told anybody about it except maybe her mother. She was so self-confident and realistic about her playing, I didn't realize at first that that covered up a whole area where she wasn't self-confident, and was ambitious and idealistic and ignorant and unsure, so that it was hard for her to talk about. But it was the real center of her whole life.

    "There aren't any women composers," she said once. It was Christmas vacation, and we'd been able to see each other several times. We were walking up in the park that day. Its the best thing in our city, a huge park, a forest, with long hiking trails. We were walking the fat off Mrs. Fields dog, a poop a keep named Orville. It was raining.

    I know it is supposed to be Peke-A-Poo, but that dog was a poop a keep.
    "No women composers? There's got to be some," I said. She said there were, but they didn't amount to very much, or if they did you couldn't find out, because if they wrote operas they didn't get staged, and if they wrote symphonies they didn't get performed. "But if they were good,
really
good," she said, "they would get played, I think. There just haven't been any absolutely first-class ones."
    "Why not?" It seemed peculiar when you thought about it. Popular music has a lot of women composers now, and most kinds of singing have always been half women; anyhow music doesn't seem male, it seems human.
    "I don't know why not. Maybe I'll find out why not," she said rather grimly. "But I
think
it's prejudice and stuff. Like the self-whatsit-thingo you told me."

    "Self-fulfilling prophecy?"
    "Yeah. Everybody says you can't, and so you believe it. It was that way in literature, till enough women stopped listening and just wrote enough great novels that the