Member-only story
Thy Dross to Consume
On being sturdy filler-material, and keeping things together
Frigid and loose. Harlot and mother. In the a capella Mennonite Church where I was raised, we had a third important dichotomy for the classification of women: soprano and alto.
Unlike the suspiciously feminine sopranos, humble altos never got the flashy melody line or soaring descants. They were sturdy filler-material, stolidly rounding out chords and keeping everyone together. And yet they sang at the edge of their gender role, well off the beaten track of the melody, sometimes even crossing over to tenor when the tenors were too busy dreaming of solos on Broadway. Transgressive without demanding attention, altos were the drably confident badasses who didn’t need the limelight of the melody to lift their voices. Song leaders brightened when they walked in: here came the heavy lifters.
My mother was an alto. She kept a thousand quarts of garden produce canned in her root cellar. My mother’s mother was an alto, too: skipped four grades then dropped out during the Depression to support her family at the meat packer’s. Lawyer mothers were altos, except for the soprano lawyers, because of course this is a false dichotomy. My best friend who stood six feet tall in eighth grade, my aunt who became a pastor in spite of her father’s lifelong war on women’s leadership, all my mothers’ sisters — alto, alto, alto.
Naturally I thought I was an alto, too. I was an alto when I caught frogs in calico, when my socks poked out from the holes in my shoes while I descended Massanutten Mountain on a little red Radio Flyer wagon. I was an alto when I hid my combat boots beneath long skirts, when I spent my high school summers laboring in the orchard to pay for math courses. How alto was I, out in the cow pasture, getting into trouble? Wrong dichotomy — which meant I needed more than ever to be alto.
I was an alto when I hid my combat boots beneath long skirts, when I spent my high school summers laboring in the orchard to pay for math courses.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t alto at all when I sang. I could barely carry a tune. My singing had been the family joke since I was five, which…
