by Cynthia Aarons
To the backdrop of Regan’s
echoing words Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall—I took piano lessons. When
no one was looking, my favorite thing to play instead of practicing was Animal
from Sesame Street (if he played piano) and Don Music, the frustrated
composer. I dramatized Don Music’s cries when he couldn’t remember the
next note and the screeches of elation when he played like a concert
pianist. Or I played “Thunderstorm,” every novice’s best number. I
started with a gentle rain tickling the upper register of the highest octaves,
then as “Animal,” cascading down into a violent, formidable nightmare of the
booming keys, a roar that would be the perfect soundtrack to any mansion
murder. It was in these moments that I was a messenger of a distant music
that I alone was privileged to hear and transmit. Eighty-eight keys
produce a million variations of seven notes. I could feel the power of the
keys stretched out before me, realizing that any melody could be played by any
ambidextrous child. The piano teaches children that anything in the world is possible.
Miss V was my piano
teacher. She was also the vocal music director of three different grade
schools and one junior high. Miss V had no eyebrows. She drew them on
with an oily brown make-up pencil, the thick kind that leaves a permanent clown
upside down smile over each eye. Her olive tanned forehead was always
smeared in a glossy sheen. Her big glasses, the plastic kind the 80s were
known for, a direct revolt against the librarian half-glasses of the 1950s and
60s, magnified her eyes and reflected her face in the Coke bottle corners. Miss
V had a block tummy, like a book hidden under her shirt, that fell over the
waistline with an even roll all the way around. It looked like the door to
a dumbwaiter that if open would reveal afternoon treats: Battenberg cakes and
cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off and a pot of steaming tea, the tall
slender silver kind, spouting upward with the elegance of a giraffe’s
head. It was not a good look. I noted her odd shape at seven am every
other day of the week as I arrived for choir practice. I sat sleepily in
the front row of the sopranos, my stomach full of scrambled eggs and toast, and
I silently noted, without fully acknowledging the significance to myself, all
the beauty atrocities I would never commit as an adult. I would never become
her.
My piano lessons took place
at Miss V’s house, a 70s yellow brick ranch with a picture window looking out
on a yard that didn’t get enough sun. The too soft ground seemed always to be
covered by wet leaves and hollowed out branches from the one tree in the center
of her yard. It, along with the other trees in the neighborhood, created a
tunnel over the shady one-lane street. Her tree had a tire swing tied to
its sturdiest branch, something I never understood because she had no
children. Every time I walked up the path to her front door I wondered
about it—an unspoken question in the back of my mind—did the former owners put
it there, or did she? And who was it for? Did Miss V look at it from
her picture window and dream of children who might one day play on it? Did
the neighbors’ children use it? Nieces and nephews? Or did it twist in the
gentle wind every summer, unoccupied by children or laughter, still full of
autumn leaves and April rainwater?
In the summer, Miss V kept
the front door open with the screen door closed to let in the cool breezes that
the shady trees of her neighborhood created. In the Midwest, the humidity
could be eighty percent or higher, which meant 85 felt like 105, and none of us
had air conditioning. So the only things that made getting through the
summer bearable were screen doors and screen windows at opposite ends of the
house that created a cross breeze along with Oster fans—rotating models angled
to blow on your face, and large square ones that sat inside windows to suck out
the hot air. As I walked up Miss V’s path, feeling sweat underneath my
clothes and the oppressive heat on my neck, I encountered the most wonderful
thing in the world: piano music coming through an open window. At first, I
couldn’t tell if it was Joe or Miss V. Joe was two years older (and my
neighbor) and a lot better at the piano than I was (his Catholic parents made
him practice). But soon I could tell the difference. Miss V was
extraordinary—the technical precision was unparalleled. Her man-like,
calloused fingers, one or more usually wrapped in a Band-aid from playing so
much, and her square powerful hands hit every note without a mistake, ever.
Over time, I heard something
else during my weekly visits that I couldn’t explain at first. By the next
summer, I walked up to her screen door with a new sense of dread, a gnawing,
tugging pain in my stomach, and each step closer to her was an involuntary act
that I recognized as self-sabotage. Although Miss V’s playing was
technically accurate, including the crescendos and sudden shifts to piano
legato—there was absolutely no feeling in her playing. I can’t call it
music now. Even at that age, my pre-pubescent, still innocent, naive
wondering self knew that Miss V’s playing was cold, devoid of emotion and
color. I vowed never to let my music become like hers. I vowed I would
never become like her.
As a family friend, Miss V
shared personal information with my mother. I remember the day my mother
got off the phone with someone talking about Miss V and “her
condition.” She hung up the receiver attached to the wall next to the
kitchen door, its curly cord that could uncurl and stretch through the dining
room to the entrance of the living room or all the way to the stove if necessary,
recoiling against the wall as she returned the handset to its home. With a
cluck in her throat—the one that meant, “Isn’t it a shame?”—Mom said she hoped
Miss V would recuperate soon, and she declared she would make a casserole for
Miss V.
The casserole: an invention that probably originated in the
1930s but really gained traction in the 1980s: egg noodles from a plastic bag,
a glob of Cream of Chicken soup, a glob of Cream of Celery soup, a quarter of a
bell pepper, a small onion, and bam you have a meal that can feed 500
people.
Etiquette in small
Midwestern towns was rigidly and happily adhered to. Death? A
casserole. Bridal shower? A casserole. Baby
shower? Potluck? Any party, including major
holidays? Casserole! You switched it up with a different canned meat
or something festive on top like dried onion rings. You just had to label
your pan with a piece of masking tape and a permanent marker. Except for
Vera K’s casseroles and my mom’s, which actually tasted good, the rule for the
casserole beneficiary was to store the casseroles in a deep freeze, the one in
the cellar shaped like a coffin, packed with ice cream, deer meat, and twenty-five
cent plastic Corelle containers of frozen corn waiting for a tornado to take
off the roof. After a polite month, the beneficiary was allowed to thaw a
casserole, feed it to the dog (or put it on the burn pile for the neighborhood
strays), and give back the pan. If you gave back the pan too soon, everyone
would know what you did. If you waited longer than six months, it meant
you stole their pan. Either way, you would no longer receive casseroles,
which you might appreciate but only at the cost of not being liked, which in a
small town could be unrecoverable. These and other rules I learned as a
child without anyone explaining them to me. I learned that the gift of a
casserole accompanied the most serious events of life, especially those we did
not talk about in detail in the Midwest, if at all.
Mom seemed particularly
troubled as she stood next to the phone. Because Miss V was my piano
teacher, I pressed my mother that day, but she wouldn’t tell me, a child, what
was wrong. I worried Miss V had cancer. I worried someone I knew
would die. My mother assured me she wouldn’t die, but it was clear the
condition was as big as death, perhaps bigger, and I was not allowed to go to
the hospital. Days later, I pressed my mother again. In a moment of
weakness my mother revealed that Miss V had a “female
condition.” Amazingly, the tone of voice let me know she was referring to
the part of the body that we truly never, ever talked about, something not even
vaguely alluded to on TV except in tampon commercials. Many years later, I
brought it up again. Mom shared that Miss V had had a hysterectomy, and
visiting her at the hospital on the day of the “casserole phone call” was an
ex-boyfriend, a well-respected music director from the next town who had jilted
Miss V at the altar years before!
This was high drama
indeed. And it was death. A death to possibilities, to something I
could not put into words until now because it was so horrible and frightening
to say out loud. Some people didn’t get to have children. Or partners. Or
happiness. My mother let me know without saying anything that this was one
of the worst things that could happen to a woman. And I took Miss V’s
hysterectomy to be a stain connected to her singleness, to her not being
chosen. It seemed to explain her music, too, the dead, rigid, robotic approach
to the keys. Again, I decided I would never become like her.
During piano lessons and
choir practice, even though I didn’t know exactly what was wrong, I looked for
signs of Miss V’s “change.” But I couldn’t see anything wrong with
her. She was always upbeat and projected her voice as though performing a
solo in Carnegie Hall. Her energy frightened me. She seemed to lunge
into life a bit too enthusiastically, a bit too hyper. I took piano
lessons from her for three years. But when I was eleven, she told me I had to trim
my fingernails. I wanted to have sexy fingernails, as sexy as an eleven-year-old
can have. I knew feminine nails were long and had learned from a teen
magazine how to push back the cuticles with a stick and apply a base coat, two
color coats, and the final clear coat without getting polish outside the nail. But
Miss V said my nails were too long and were “impairing” my ability to play
properly. She and I fought over how I held my hands over the keys, and she
wanted me to study the 3 B’s (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms). At a younger
age I loved the Classics, but in my pre-teen years, I wanted to play Billy
Joel. I wanted to jump on the keyboard and then onto the couch singing, This
is My Life! (Go ahead with your own life—leave me alone!)
Miss V had dreams of making
me her protégé. She wanted to “expand my repertoire” and increase “my
range.” When I learned of her plan to live vicariously through my life as
a professional pianist, or at least as a fourth place winner at
State recitals, I panicked. And for one of the few times in my life, I
stood up for myself. I told my mother I was quitting piano. I stopped
pretending to practice and really started to sound horrible. Miss V and I
both knew it was a sham. My mother told me, You will regret this for
the rest of your life. She urged me to think it over for a couple of
months. But after a while she let me quit. I quit the choir also to
avoid eye contact, to avoid the fact that Miss V embarrassed me and frightened
me, and to avoid admitting to myself that I missed the piano.
I could not take piano
lessons from a different teacher because in a small-town Miss V would find out.
It would be an insult I would never commit. So I practiced on my own and even
improved quite a lot in the next years, but without technical guidance, I
peaked early and stayed there. I secretly longed for music. I would play
Eric Satie and Debussy with passion, as long as no one else was in the
house. I could be the faint heart of someone who had loved and lost or the
fiery self-made woman who led a Bohemian life that caused men to fall at her
feet. I mourned over Apartheid, humanitarian crises in Somalia, and
homelessness. I played with a deep conviction that I could be anything, do
anything, and that I could save the world.
Now I have lived in San
Francisco for more than ten years. Passionate types are a dime a dozen
here, and some actually save the world. I never went to South Africa to
end Apartheid, didn’t stick with the homeless ministry I joined when I first
moved, and now work two jobs, nearly to my own death, and I am, just like Miss
V, single and childless. I am probably five years older than Miss V was when
she had her hysterectomy, but unlike Miss V, I never had a man value me
enough—if even in a moment of reckless abandon—to offer to meet me at the
altar. I’ve contemplated adopting through Foster Care and becoming a
single parent, but I have come to accept that at least for now I cannot do it
alone, not financially, not logistically, not emotionally.
The world I inherited from
Women’s Liberation (though I am thankful for it overall) and Steve Jobs is one
in which I have more education than my parents and older siblings, with fewer
job opportunities—yet, I’m supposed to be successful in a profession and have
kids (through IVF) and postpone marriage indefinitely if not forever because if
necessary I can do it alone. We’re supposed to work all the time wherever we
are with all our documents in a cloud, readable on a tablet as thin as a fifty-cent
piece … on a date, in transit, even at the top of small mountains looking out
at the vast world below … the Me Generation turned iPhone turned a thousand
points of light all converging in my kitchen from all my devices, the lines
between work and the personal erased as quickly as a Venmo Smartphone kiss.
When I go home, an empty
hallway table greets me where plants once sat until they wilted in shadows,
leaving a blank gray wall. I binge watch Netflix and eat slices of cheese pizza
for dinner. Is there someone out there with the same ache I have watching
the entire oeuvre of Friends? Are there others reaching out to the rest
of our X generation/Ancient-Millennials, especially those still single,
unwilling to use online dating because it’s too much like ordering toilet paper
on Amazon? Perhaps Netflix will connect us, given that it knows more about our
daily lives than eharmony ever could—the unvarnished, raw pain of loneliness
recorded on our Watch List cue, the muted shades of TV light dancing on our
faces as it changes from scene to scene to blackout.
And what about the dream of
saving the world? As a community college instructor, I honestly don’t think
anything could shock me—I’ve taught a Lost Boy who witnessed his father being
macheted while his village burned down, a twenty-year old mother I took to a
women’s shelter, a boy whose stomach was eviscerated by an IED in Iraq, a woman
who witnessed her uncle executed in the street during the Cultural Revolution,
a woman who escaped her violent husband by jumping off the ledge of a building,
and countless students with precarious financial and immigration
statuses.
I taught all of them how to
use a comma, and I tried to give them hope. But I have not corrected the wrongs
done to them and cannot undo the trajectory of trauma and misfortune. In
the endless cycle of trying to make enough money to pay the always increasing
rent in San Francisco, meet the needs of overcrowded classrooms, and complete
ridiculous amounts of committee work, I can’t fit saving the world into my
Google calendar.
Is there a man out there who
is tired of this treadmill, too, whose B12 shots are no longer working?—Stop
the Madness! Is he unavailable because he is living in a biodome
saving icebergs in Antarctica or trekking solo on foot in Nepal, knowing that I
am so special he will have to look in the most remote place on earth? Or
is all the evidence pointing to the end of a fantasy that kept me alive through
the darkest times? Or perhaps the darkest times are yet to come. What is the
next delusional hope to pull me through?
In reality, I never could
have been a concert pianist. My hands are too small. I can barely
reach an octave, and so a lot of the more complex works are just physically too
hard. And frankly, I never wanted to be the kind of person who plays other
people’s music. But my mother’s voice is right there, You will regret this
for the rest of your life. She was right. My heart cries out
every day for music. For the past two years, I haven’t been able to listen
to music of any kind because the melodies make my cold life seem so pathetic in
comparison. Today I can listen to the radio occasionally, but I find myself
listening to the news and traffic reports more and more often.
Now I see Miss V’s empty
swing. I can see her at the window, and I feel sure a woman who devoted her
life to bringing music to children probably wanted some of her own. Yes, I’m certain
she imagined her own children playing on the swing and a husband to watch
through the window with her. I’m sure she felt trapped in our little
community—where would she have possibly met eligible men there at her
age? (I can’t even find one suitable man in this great world-famous city
of romance!)
I see myself walking up the path, the
inevitable steps to my own tragedy, as she played inside her front living room,
pounding the notes, getting them right, doing them justice, that cold, lifeless
shell. And now, I finally understand her.
No comments:
Post a Comment