Meditation on Middle G Lucy Ferriss (bio) My musical friends tell me there's no such thing. There's middle C, they say. Anything else is just G. G above middle C, G below middle C, high G. I think of the note as middle G, though, and I cannot sing it. It's in what they called my "break," the place where chest voice shifts into head voice. Singing like a soprano, I emit a breathy sound, as if the only muscles I can summon to push out the note are bunched around my throat and clavicle. Slipping into a tenorish chest voice, I force the sound up from my belly through my adenoids until a headache shoots from the top of my palate through my scalp. Most songs, at least for women, include middle G. It's the tonic of the C scale, the dominant of the G, the minor seventh of the A. It's the note you're supposed to belt out, if you're belting. It's where you're meant to feel happiest, as a singer. If I were to draw middle G the way I've always understood it, it would look something like this: Click for larger view View full resolution I've been singing all my life. My voice has no character, but most days I don't care. I can read music, I can hit the notes, I remember most of the words, and I cheer up when I sing. Only middle G lurks inside me like a secret wound, the normal place that feels abnormal, the simple moment that grows vexed whenever I try to locate it. ________ Make Bs, my mother said. This was when Bs were good grades. Decent grades, you called them. Parents weren't ashamed of daughters who made Bs. More to the point, they had a shot at popularity. Girls were meant to be well liked. How hard was it, to be liked, if you wore more or less the right clothes, told more or less the right jokes, smiled a lot? Bs were middle G. Being well liked was middle G. I couldn't manage it. [End Page 172] I had skipped fifth grade. This is sheer numerical coincidence, but middle G is the fifth note of the C scale. In fifth grade, most girls turn eleven and enter the first stages of puberty. Fifth grade is the break. Skipping it at a girls-only private school, I acquired the reputation of the Smart Girl, or the Girl Who Thought She Was Smart. While other girls popped breasts like bread rising overnight, my chest remained stubbornly flat, my pudenda embarrassingly smooth. If I failed to make As, I would be exposed as a fraud. If I made them, my label would stick to me like reptile scales. My sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Woolcott, fiercely resented the problem I posed. In the first few weeks of school, I kept forgetting we had homework. There hadn't been homework, to speak of, in fourth grade, and neither of my parents seemed to realize that I was supposed to be filling out worksheets and completing math problems in the evenings. First thing in the mornings, the school held Chapel, and it was while the girls bowed their heads to say the school prayer—Watch over our school, O Lord, as its years increase, and bless and guide its daughters, wherever they may be, keeping them ever unspotted from the world—that I generally remembered what homework I had been meant to do the night before. I filed back to the classroom sick at heart. Sometime in that first month I told Mrs. Woolcott that I felt ill and needed to see the nurse. Spelling was the first period of the day. While I was hiding in the small, dark room behind the nurse's office, where three cots lined up with their thin waffle blankets, Mrs. Woolcott told one of the other sixth graders to open my desk. She pulled out my spelling exercise book, its pages for that day splendidly unmarked, and passed it around the class, demonstrating to my new, breast-budding classmates what...