While the City Slept by Eli Sanders Read Free Book Online

relationship between herself and Vance is difficult, and Marcia’s recovery is gradual. One day, a small argument between Jennifer and Vance explodes into a loud standoff, things get said that are hard to back away from, and Jennifer leaves home to go live with her grandmother. Around the same time, Marcia and Vance move out of the rented yellow house and call off a wedding they’ve been planning. Where they go, Jennifer doesn’t know. She doesn’t speak to her mother for about two years. “When she left, I felt horrible,” Marcia says. But she also felt grateful. Jennifer’s grandmother would be able to give her opportunities Marcia couldn’t.
    —
    High school is a slippery place, so while Jennifer makes plenty of friends, she doesn’t tell any of them what’s been going on at home. She has her first boyfriend, tall, handsome, too cute for her in her mind, though she is aware of a certain amount of attention she receives from young men, sees heads turn to take in her olive skin, deep brown eyes, shiny jet-black hair. She just doesn’t put it all together. There’s a lot going on.
    She does share a few things with the woman who teaches the school’s vocal jazz class, Susan Bardsley, who notices that outwardly none of it seems to be dragging Jennifer down. “She always had this innate goodness and strength in her,” Susan says. And then there was the voice. “It would be hard to miss what Jen had,” Susan says. “She possesses one of the most naturally beautiful voices I have ever experienced in my life, and I’m a professional musician now. I do nothing but musical theater. Avoice like hers is very rare.” It’s not just the voice, Susan says, but her ear—her control of pitch, her innate sense of musicality and rhythm, her ability to inhabit a song. “It’s as if her cup is very full of the music gift,” Susan says.
    The public school Jennifer is attending, Roosevelt High School, is known for its musical theater program, and the director of that program, Ruben Van Kempen, notices Jennifer’s voice, too. Is stunned by it, actually. “A very clear, legitimate soprano voice,” he says. “It was pure. A really great vocal instrument.” In a setting that brings him mostly belters and character voices, Jennifer’s voice remains one of the top voices he’s ever heard.
    —
    She is in the ensemble for
Oklahoma!
as a freshman, then in the ensemble for
42nd Street
as a sophomore. In her junior year, she plays Fiona in
Brigadoon,
a leading role and one her soprano seems perfect for, the role of an ingenue. The performance is exceptional, but Ruben and Susan see something that concerns them. While Jennifer’s voice is Broadway caliber, her body is not what Broadway will want. “Her voice is an ingenue voice,” Susan says, “and her body is not an ingenue voice. Her body is a character voice. She does not fit—and unfortunately this is the case—in terms of visually, looking at her, her body does not fit the sound of her voice.” In the cookie-cutter world of professional musical theater, her body will likely get cast as an older matron, and Susan worries that on Broadway Jennifer will be “chewed up and spit out,” if it doesn’t happen on the way there. “I always worry for girls, because girls are judged so harshly,” Susan says. “Just like the quirk of the genetic gift of the voice, you’re given a body, and there’s only so much arguing you can do with the body you’ve been given.”
    —
    Jennifer is aware she’s larger than other girls at school, but this is not the difference on which she’s most focused. What strikes her is how, eventhough she’s seen as talented, she feels invisible, alone, older than other students because of what she’s been through at home and, at the same time, younger than them because of what she’s lacked. Food soothes and also contributes to her being “a little chubbier than the average girl,” she says. “But I wasn’t huge by any means.”
    In