Apologies to those of you who watch me on live journal and Facebook–this will probably be a repost. :)
She made the piano weep. Pretty melodramatic of me, I know. Ever since the day I heard her play Pathetique, second movement in A flat minor, certain things inside me began to move, to change. All because of her crooked little, freckle spotted, chewed nailed hands that coaxed my mother’s piano to make noises I’d never heard of in my life.
I’d been chasing a ball tossed by Jack, my inseparable best friend back then. We were your typical, pain-in-the ass ten year old boys populating every cookie cutter neighborhood at that time. Smashed windows due to baseballs, ridiculous pranks, toads in our pencil cases at school and tugging the pony tails of little girl’s everywhere just to make ‘em cry. That was us, and we were pretty proud of being the typical snots. That was my life then, dirt, bugs, toads, making my mother wish she’d had a girl and maybe a lot of trucks with a side of guns and destruction. Music or the arts didn’t interest me in the slightest despite my mother, the neighborhood piano teacher, trying her damnedest to sit me down and god, Robert, would you at least try chopsticks without pulling the cat’s tail?
And then there was Lisa.
Lisa had the unfortunate fate of being born with prominent front teeth and parents too poor to do anything about it yet. Lisa kept her mouth shut firmly, creating the sour impression that she never broke the thin, nervous line of her lips to smile at all. To make matters worse, she was freckled in painter’s fine-smatter, enthusiastically might I add, from head to toe and pale as paper. Her hair wasn’t even very red, a smidgen of strawberry gold her mother strictly wove into a severe braid right down her back and the tip of it was generally stained blue.
Because I always grabbed it in class and dipped it into the teachers ink pots. Lisa always cried.
Here she was, bent over my mother’s piano in our living room, strewn with family photos, drawings from when I was four and couldn’t tell the difference between one end of a crayon and the next playing that damn thing like it was built for her fingertips alone. It wept for Lisa, that ancient piano. It wept and then it rejoiced to be played by someone who finally understood it and wouldn’t try to chase the cat across its keys just to hear the awful cacophony such a thing caused. I thought she had sixteen fingers, the way she hit notes and crawled along ivory? I couldn’t do it.
I forgot entirely about my ball. I’d been standing for I don’t-know-how long staring gap jawed at this scraggly little buck-toothed, stick shaped, freckle spattered girl move heaven and earth for my ears. And she became the most beautiful thing in the entire world. I was going to ma—
Someone elbowed me in the ribs and I turned around to immediately cuff Jack, whom I knew had done it, upside the head.
“Ow!” He was grinning when he said it and he shoved me. His mock cry of pain startled Lisa into silence and I refused to look her in the eye ever since then.
I didn’t dip her braid in ink pots anymore.
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I graduated top honors that year in high school. Damn, but the world wasn’t ready for me—so I thought—but I was sure ready for it. Football, track, cheerleaders, beer and glory; that’s what it was all about then, and Jesus wasn’t I foolish to think that’s all there was…but isn’t that the way of being a kid?
Engaged to a ridiculously gorgeous cheerleader named Melinda, I was celebrating after graduation down at old Milton’s, a dive of a bar if there ever was one but the drinks were cheap and Milton didn’t care much for what you did so long as you paid at the end of the night. So here we were, Jack, Melinda, the entire class it seemed, hooting and spilling draft everywhere when I hear it…
Milton’s old beat up piano in the far corner past the pool tables. It was out of tune and it was always out of tune. Notes struck on Milton’s old piano were akin to the dinky notes of jewelry box’s being opened or wind up jack-in-the-boxes. And yet I heard it over all of the noise we were making and it sounded like magic.
Pathetique, second movement in A flat minor.
By the time I had rushed across the room, through the pool tables and toward the piano there was no one there.
For eight years I’d forgotten about her. I’d forgotten about the girl with sixteen fingers and how she made me feel that day in my living room.
She wasn’t there when I finally made it. Melinda curled a hand around my elbow and gave me a curious smile.
“Everything alright?”
“Yeah,” I lied to her. Because you just don’t tell your wife to be about little freckled piano girls bathed in sunlight you thought might be magic.
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It’s alright here. I get food, they keep me clean when they can, the kids come once every two weeks with the grand kids. They’re scared though. I can see it in their eyes. The youngest, Marissa, has Melinda’s jet-black hair and big gray eyes. Every time she looks at me I keep seeing Melinda and I’m not sure how to explain to her that it isn’t her that makes Grandpa look so sad…
They keep wheeling me out in this baby-blue, plastic chair and sticking me in the shade outdoors. Like I need some sunlight and every yellow pill they give me is a little sprinkle of water.
And this is what I am thinking when I hear it.
The first strains of it coming from across the field. You know something? I seriously thought I had finally succumbed to dementia, because as I looked out over green grass drenched in summer afternoon sun, I saw nothing. The tall blue spruces donated in memory of the other poor schmucks like me living here are still all in the same place. White housing buildings dot the horizon but that doesn’t change the fact that I hear it.
Pathetique, second movement in A flat minor. Clear as the day is bright…I tell myself that I’m not going to miss this, this time. So I’m pushing myself up out of this gods forsaken chair and fumbling with my walker across the lawn to follow it. Every step I take wobbles as I imagine a newborns might (here I HA! To myself at this, take a break, take a deep breath, then continue on) and it grows louder with every step.
There. There she is under the bowing, dancing strings of a weeping willow, playing my mother’s piano as she did years ago when I was a little boy.
She’s beautiful.
Her hair is a riot of copper sunshine down her back, she’s in a printed sundress that leaves her shoulders bare. That’s my girl with sixteen fingers! Just the very thought of it makes my eyes fill with tears…I’ve gotten emotional in my years on I guess but all of that doesn’t matter! There she is!
She’s stopping to twist about to look over her shoulder and Jesus if she isn’t the most enchanting woman I have ever seen. I’m literally struck silent.
“Robert,” she smiles. Her whole face does this lighting up business when she smiles that I think is a woman’s secret—a weapon devised to bring men fumbling idiotically to their knees and bobbing their heads along dumbly to anything they say just to see them do that. Smile like that, at them.
So I nod.
“Come, Robert. I’ve been waiting.”
I nod some more but don’t wait for a second invitation as she pats the piano bench beside her and begins to play again.
Now?
Now I have lived my life without regret. Now is when everything falls into place and I am content, truly content. I turn aside to give her a tremulous smile and exhale one long, deep breath that I feel like I have been holding in since the moment I saw her. With it, I whisper her name and the willow, the spruce, the grass and the sky whisper it back to me.
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