For Adrienne

I love to play the violin but have never liked performing, especially for people I know. It’s tough to tell how long you can continue before boring them. Afterward, if you played badly, they say, “Wow . . . that sounds . . . so hard!”

I don’t really remember playing violin for my grandmother, because every time she visited, my parents had me play for her, and those occasions were so similar to other times when I had to perform for family. Once I played her a Bach partita, I think.

Bach’s Partita No. 3 in E major starts on a high-note phrase that’s critical to get right if you’re going to fall smoothly into its flowing lines. At the time, my violin teacher was showing me, during my weekly lessons, how hard Bach is to read and perform, since the violinist’s responsibility is to draw emotions from the density of notes. “Make up a sentence describing the feeling of a section,” she said. “Write down the sentence, and then play it.”

If I really did play the Bach for my grandmother, it would have been in the same dining room where, when I was six, I slipped on the hard-wood floor in my socks while showing her a pirouette. The skin below my chin burst open when it slammed against the wood. I picture the moment as being somewhat exciting for her, because she lived across the country and only saw me twice a year, receiving updates by phone or e-mail. The accident was a searing memory we really shared.

I remember more clearly the things I joked to my friends about, because they seemed like comically abnormal grandma behavior: “My grandma only lets me call her by her first name.” “Oh my god, guess what Adrienne sent me for my birthday? A purple, lacy thong.” “We had vodka gimlets at the Warwick Hotel. No one cards you if you’re with an eighty-year-old.”

My grandmother sat in on one of my violin lessons when I was eight, in my violin teacher Carmit’s living room. My parents came to my lessons until I was ten, but Carmit and I always pretended there was no one else in the room. I played scales, études, and my recital piece, with Carmit interjecting every few seconds that my notes were sharp, or that my bow-hand pinky wasn’t curled enough. During the lesson Adrienne sat on the couch, listening quietly.

Her father had played the violin as a hobby. Her mother had been a trained concert pianist—won competitions, studied with top teachers in America and Europe—until she married and had children. During her husband’s lifetime she only played accompaniment, and also tried to teach Adrienne piano when she was a child. The lessons were so frustrating for both that they stopped. I imagine my choice to study violin was fraught with symbolic meaning that no one mentioned out loud—a feminist’s first female offspring after three sons, carrying on her mother’s art.

At a sleepover in high school, my friends stayed up late talking about whether there could be symbolism in real life, or if it was just reading into coincidence. I didn’t say anything.

I visited my great-grandmother, the former pianist, in Cambridge twice. On her grand piano were framed portraits of her late husband and of Brahms. She had a delicate nineteenth-century canopy bed, smooth, light-brown wood. When she died two years later I inherited the bed, and felt close to her, even though we never had a real relationship.

On her visits, Adrienne was terrifyingly short with me if I was too rowdy or silly. My mother said that, since Adrienne had had three sons, she didn’t feel as comfortable with a girl. I didn’t totally buy it, because she had been a girl herself and that seemed like it should have been enough.

I didn’t understand her. But she was a famous poet, though in middle school I had also made a silent pact with myself...