Music, art, and drama programs at all three district middle schools would be discontinued. Teaching positions associated with these programs would be eliminated. Margaret’s last day would be September 28th. He said it in the tone of a man reading a document that has already been finalized, which it had. He said he was sorry. He handed her the form.
He said she would receive the standard separation package and that HR would be in touch. Margaret held the form. She looked at the 37 stands she had set out. She looked at the four she had not yet placed. She looked at Gerald Sims. “My students have a concert in November,” she said. Gerald looked at the form.
“The program discontinuation is effective October 1st,” he said. “The November concert would be outside the program’s operational period.” Margaret set the form down on the nearest music stand. She picked up the 38th stand and carried it to its position. She placed it. She went back for the 39th. Gerald Sims watched her for a moment, then he said goodbye and walked back through the gymnasium door.
In the parking lot, Eddie Van Halen had heard most of this through the gymnasium window, which was propped open with a wooden block to let the September heat out. He had been crouched beside the rear passenger tire of his van, the same white 1968 Ford Econoline that had been carrying the band’s equipment since 1973.
Now with 94,000 mi on it and a passenger tire that had been slowly losing pressure since Pomona when the county sedan had pulled in beside him. He had heard the door open, heard the footsteps on the gymnasium floor, heard the folder open and the form being read and the word October. He stood up. He had grown up 7 miles from this school in Pasadena on the same streets and in the same kind of neighborhoods that produced children who came to Roosevelt Middle School and sat in Margaret Reese’s gymnasium on Tuesday afternoons
and learned to read music from stands she had set out herself before they arrived. His own music education had been his father Jan’s doing. Jan Van Halen, who had played clarinet and saxophone and piano in a dance band in the Netherlands before bringing his family to California in 1962, who had sat with his two sons every evening and shown them what music was made of.
Eddie had not needed a school music program, but he’d played enough clubs and enough San Gabriel Valley venues over enough years to know the children who had, the ones who had carried instruments home on the bus and practiced in apartments where there was not much room and who arrived in those clubs 20 years later as the working musicians who made everything else possible.
He opened the gymnasium door. Margaret was placing the 40th stand. She looked up. He was wearing a plain jacket and jeans and a baseball cap. He had a smear of tire grease on his right hand. He looked like a man who had been fixing a tire in a parking lot, which was what he was. “I heard,” he said, “through the window.” Margaret looked at him.
She was not alarmed. A man who had been fixing a tire in a school parking lot and had come inside after overhearing something was a specific category of situation and her 21 years of teaching had given her a precise instinct for the intentions of the people who walked through her gymnasium door. She went back for the 41st stand.
“How many students?” he said. “41,” she said. “Concert band and jazz ensemble.” Eddie looked at the stands, all 41 of them, placed in their positions, waiting. He said, “What does it cost to keep the program running for a year? Margaret stopped. She set the 41st stand down where it was. She looked at him. She had not been asked this question before.
She had been told what the program cost. She had submitted budget requests. She had argued for line items at school board meetings. She had never been asked by a stranger who had come in from a parking lot what it would cost to keep it. She thought about it. Instruments, maintenance, sheet music, the festival registration fees, the concert programs printed at the copy shop on Myrtle Avenue. $3,200, she said. For a year.
He reached into his jacket pocket. He took out a checkbook. He looked for a pen and found one in the breast pocket of his jacket, the same pocket where he kept picks when he was playing. He wrote the check on the 41st music stand. He wrote the date, September 11th, 1979. He wrote the amount, $3,200.
He wrote the pay, Roosevelt Middle School Music Program. He signed his name. He handed the check to Margaret. She looked at it. She looked at the signature. She looked at him. The recognition arrived slowly, the way recognition arrives when the context is wrong, when the face belongs in arenas and record stores and not in a gymnasium in Monrovia with a smear of tire grease on its right hand.
The name on the check, she said. He put the checkbook back in his pocket. This is for the program, he said, not a donation. I want a receipt that says the program is funded for the year. Take it to the district. He looked at the 41 stands in their positions. Drop your city or state in the comments.
I want to know how far this goes. Your students have a concert in November, he said. He walked back out through the gymnasium door. Margaret Reyes stood in the gymnasium with the check in her hand and the 41 stands in their positions and the afternoon light coming through the high windows for a long time after the door closed.
She took the check to the district office the following morning. Gerald Sims received her. He looked at the check. He looked at the name on it. He looked at Margaret. He made three phone calls. The program discontinuation notice was withdrawn. Margaret’s position was retained. The district accepted the private funding with the specific efficiency of an institution that has discovered an unexpected solution to a problem it had considered resolved.
The November concert took place as scheduled on the 14th, a Thursday evening, in the same gymnasium where the stands had been set out and where the form had been placed on the 38th stand and where a man with tire grease on his right hand had written a check on the 41st. 41 students performed. The gymnasium held 230 people.
Parents pressed three to a row in the folding chairs, siblings sitting on the floor at the sides, neighbors who had seen the flyer on the bulletin board at the Monrovia library. The district superintendent attended, having received a call from the board chair who had received a call from Gerald Sims who had processed the check and made his three phone calls and had been thinking about the whole thing since September.
Margaret conducted from the front in the dark blue dress she wore for every concert, the same dress for 14 years because it was the right dress for standing in front of students and it had never given her a reason to change it. The jazz ensemble played three pieces. The concert band played four. The choir, which had won the San Gabriel Valley competition two years in a row, performed last.
They performed a piece Margaret had arranged herself, a three-part harmony setting of a song that most of the parents in the gymnasium knew from the radio. The gymnasium was completely quiet when they sang it. Not politely quiet, the other quiet, the one that arrives when something is happening that the room has decided deserves its full attention.
