Two girls and their big wooden boxes. Their machines. When Maze and Mary Elizabeth weren’t in their room or at class or a meal, or off on a long Saturday hike, that was where you’d find them that fall: Maze at a loom, Mary Elizabeth at a piano in the Music Building. The piano teacher at Berea, Mr. Roth, was stunned by Mary Elizabeth’s skill; the first time he heard her play, he told her he had nothing to teach her.
“Where’d you learn to play like that?” he asked. He didn’t mean it unkindly, Mary Elizabeth knew, yet she’d heard the extra emphasis, however slight, he’d placed on the you. It rankled, but she would not let that show.
She looked down at her hands on her lap. “First from my aunt. She lived for some years in Paris and learned there,” she said. “Then from Professor Hallis at the University of Kentucky.” She looked up, knowing Mr. Roth would be waiting for further explanation. “He was a friend of hers.”
“I see.” The young teacher, who was probably only a few years older than Mary Elizabeth, nodded slowly, watching her. “Well,” he said, “I may not have much to teach you, but I can work with you, and I can make some folks around here sit up and take notice of you.” A few days later, he arranged for her to play for the College president and the board of trustees at a special concert in December. They got started on a program right away.
“Only two pieces,” Mr. Roth said, a relief to Mary Elizabeth. His lanky blond hair was always falling in his eyes, and he whisked it back now with delicate fingers. “More than that and the old geezers’ll start nodding off. You like the Frenchmen, so let’s have you play one of the Debussy pieces. And then Chopin. You should work on the Études.”
She agreed. Secretly she was ecstatic at the thought. Aunt Paulie, who’d loved Chopin, had worked with her on some of the Waltzes. “Like the sound of a steady rain when there’s been a long, dusty drought” was how she’d described it after she’d played the “Waltz in E Minor” on her record player. Mr. Roth loved it when Mary Elizabeth recalled the things Aunt Paulie had said. Cortot was a nervous little collaborator. Ravel was a mama’s boy. Horowitz had hands like racehorses. Gottschalk stole his best ideas from black musicians. He’d make her take a break and have some tea and tell him stories about her aunt. He’d toss back his blond hair and laugh with abandon.
There was one thing she would eventually wish she hadn’t told him. Aunt Paulie always wished she’d been able to play Stravinsky. Petrushka, the version he’d adapted for piano. Three movements, and she’d never mastered any of them. That was one Mary Elizabeth should have kept to herself.
“We’ll work on that, then, after the concert in December” was Mr. Roth’s answer the day, after a lesson in late September, when she told him. “You’ll master it, and then you’ll play it at an even bigger concert at the end of the year. President, trustees, all the big-money people, all the faculty … it’ll be marvelous. They’ll see how good you are, what you can do; you’ll prove it to them.” He never mentioned her race. He didn’t have to. What she never understood was why it seemed to matter so much to him. It unnerved her, and it made her talk too much, made her tell him too many things.
Both of them, Maze and Mary Elizabeth, were happier that fall than either had expected to be at Berea. On bright autumn Saturdays, after practicing and weaving through the morning, they’d hike into the hills together, out along Scaffold Cane or up the rocky slope of the hill they called Devil’s Slide, sandwiches and water in a rucksack that they took turns carrying. Town boys in cars along Scaffold Cane—“scoads,” the students called them—would yell at them out their windows. But they barely noticed, Mary Elizabeth’s fingers still tingling and her ears filled with Chopin, Maze walking, unconsciously, to the rhythm of her feet on the loom that morning.
They talked on their hikes about many things. Mary Elizabeth’s progress on the Études, Maze’s battles with the know-it-all girl who’d replaced the former weaving crew chief.
Maze had hidden her skill at the loom to get the college work assignment she wanted: part of the crew of weavers working at the varied looms in the Weaving Cabin. There they created table runners and blankets and throws to sell at the stores in town. Technically, students assigned to the weaving crew were supposed to be novices, learning a new skill, but when her crew supervisor saw how quick and efficient a weaver Maze already was—and how quickly his crew would therefore be able to fill its quotas—he pretended not to notice that there would be little left for her to learn.
She’d learned from Sister Georgia, the woman her mother had cared for, on a big old loom that had belonged to the early Shakers. Georgia had learned at Berea, where she’d been a teacher sixty years before. Though she bickered endlessly with Maze’s mother, with Maze Georgia was endlessly patient and tender, a perfect teacher. Maze was competent at the big loom at twelve, accomplished by fourteen; Vista sold the table covers she and Georgia made to the owners of the Beau Rive Hotel, where she was a laundress.
Maze never tired of it, and knowing she could weave while at Berea was one of the things that had made her give in to Vista and agree to go. Even the monotony, the rhythmic sameness—in fact, especially this—soothed her. She was known to sneak into the Weaving Cabin after hours, even sometimes to skip a class or two, to finish work on a complicated overshot blanket or one of her favorites, the pretty indigo Bronson weave.
“You’d best keep your mouth shut, you know,” Mary Elizabeth warned her, “if you want to keep that job. And you’d best slow down a little and make a few mistakes.” She’d watched Maze at the loom many times; often, as their dormitory’s eleven o’clock curfew approached and Maze still wasn’t back at the room, she had hurried over to the Weaving Cabin to drag her there.
“Don’t you ever get bored with it?” Mary Elizabeth couldn’t help asking one night, watching Maze use her feet to manipulate the rows of yarn, then lift and slide the shuttle, over and over again, counting, Mary Elizabeth knew, the whole time—even while she talked. Mary Elizabeth’s own eyes glazed as she watched; try as she might, she could never remember which was warp and which was weft, could never understand how the whole contraption worked, how the pattern at Maze’s side was transferred to this massive rack of wood and wires, sticks and strings, and rows of yarn that somehow came together into a big expanse of patterned cloth, soft and lovely, this time in muted pink and gray.
“Bored?” Maze said, still counting somewhere in her head, somehow. “Well, no. Do you get bored when you play the piano? Don’t you go other places in your mind while you’re playin’? Don’t you forget about all the pads and wires inside the thing and just feel the music in your bones somehow? Isn’t that what you told me the other night after you played?”
She’d stopped now, and she was looking at Mary Elizabeth. It was hard to read her expression.
“I didn’t mean that to be insulting, Maze,” Mary Elizabeth said, worried.
“I’m not insulted. I’m just sayin’ that while I’m doin’ this, I can go anywhere I want to in my head.” She tied a thread and moved the shuttle and started up on the pedals again. “Back to Pleasant Hill.” She spoke in rhythm with her moving legs. “Back up Devil’s Slide. Places I have never even been.” Her feet did not stop moving, her fingers somehow tracking rows even as she spoke.
Mary Elizabeth was still baffled. “But how do you not lose track?”
“Well.” Beat, beat. “How can you”—beat—“pound those keys”—beat—“and talk to me the way I’ve seen you do?” Beat, beat.
Mary Elizabeth laughed and shook her head. “Only when I play the old hymns, girl, you know that. I can do those in my sleep.”
“Well, it’s like I’m doin’ this in my sleep sometimes, too,” Maze said, stopping again now, tying another thread. She smiled and started up again, looking at Mary Elizabeth. “Just dreamin’ along.” Beat. “A pilgrim and a stranger,” beat, “I journey here below,” she was singing now—the words to a hymn they’d sung at chapel services the week before, one that had made Maze roll her eyes and laugh.
“Far distant is my country,” Mary Elizabeth joined in, singing with the same stilted emphasis to the beat Maze set with her feet. “The home to which I go.”
Christian talk about heaven set Maze’s teeth on edge; at chapel services, she’d scowl and slump down in the pew at any talk of a better life beyond. “What’s any of that got to do with livin’ right here right now?” she’d lean over and ask Mary Elizabeth in a stage whisper.
They finished the verse just as Maze reached the end of a row on the loom. She stopped her pedaling then, and the college bells started to chime eleven o’clock. There was really no comparison, Mary Elizabeth thought as they walked back to their room, humming together. Though truthfully, she could go somewhere else, the way Maze described, when she played certain things. Maybe the Debussy “Reflections in the Water” from the Images, the piece she’d learned first. Certainly some of the hymns, the old ones that she still loved. “Precious Lord,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” “Amazing Grace”—Maze’s hymn.
But it was all changing now, her playing. It started when Mr. Roth had arranged for her to play for the college president and his wife and some of their guests at a reception at the beginning of October. She’d played pieces she knew well, really in the background, while they all drank their punch and talked, but eventually the front parlor of the president’s house, with its beautiful grand piano, had grown quiet and everyone had stopped to listen, looking over at her. She’d nearly forgotten where she was, but she’d closed her eyes and recovered and kept on playing.
When she’d first arrived at the house, she’d been told to go around back, to the kitchen, where the other servers were. Until the president’s wife had seen her and stepped over to invite her in. “You must be the pianist we’ve been hearing so much about!” she said. And Mary Elizabeth knew why they’d been hearing about her, why the president’s wife knew immediately who she was, but she smiled, then looked down at the ground and said, “Yes, ma’am, I’ve come to play.”
Now every week or so someone from the president’s office called Mr. Roth to schedule something else. An alumni dinner. The opening of a new building. They’d started trotting her out for every donor or newspaper reporter they could get on campus. Hers was “the new face of Berea College.” Over the Thanksgiving recess, Mr. Roth told her, he’d be heading up to Louisville to pick up the sheet music for Petrushka that he’d ordered.
But hers wasn’t the face of Berea College. Not even the “new” face. Not her real face, anyway, the face none of those white men in suits and women in pearls ever saw, the face no one ever saw. Except maybe Maze, sometimes.
Maze, who didn’t care at all about whom Mary Elizabeth played for the rest of the time, really only wanted her roommate to play private concerts for her, any night she could get her to, over at the lounge where she’d played that second night they were together. After dinner, after their work assignments, after studying, whenever she wasn’t weaving, whenever she could get Mary Elizabeth to go.
When Maze wasn’t weaving, she always seemed to have the time. Maze would cut class, miss curfew, spend all kinds of extra hours at the Weaving Cabin just because she liked it more than studying. Mary Elizabeth’s work assignment, on the other hand, was washing dishes after meals in the cafeteria, along with most of the other black students that year. That was the only other time she could let down her guard, show her true face. For twelve hours a week.
Her daddy told her, the night before she left, never to slip. He needn’t have said anything; by then she was already expert at it. Live where they live, eat where they eat, learn where they learn—but keep your eyes down. Do it all well, but not so well they think you’re uppity. Let them know you aren’t a threat.
Aunt Paulie would have laughed at that advice, then spat on the ground. But that was why her daddy did his best to limit her aunt’s influence. Mary Elizabeth had figured that much out early. Once a week for her lesson when she was younger, an occasional overnight for a concert in Lexington after that. But with explicit instructions then: no jazz. No exposure to the men and women who might normally play music at Aunt Paulie’s house on a Saturday night.
And one unforgettable time, for a trip to Cincinnati to hear a young pianist Aunt Paulie had heard about, playing with the symphony at Music Hall. Mary Elizabeth was twelve then. “I want to do that,” she said to Aunt Paulie when the lights came up at the end. It was the only time Aunt Paulie, whose eyes were wet with tears, couldn’t answer her. She only looked away.
By the time Mary Elizabeth was eighteen and ready for college, she knew the drill. Funny that now, at Berea, the only times she could show her real face, and rest, were when she was sleeping and when she was working. There in the bowels of the kitchen, with other students like her, who were every bit as tired as she was. You could see it in their faces while they scraped and scrubbed, rinsed and dried.
And sometimes, too, with Maze. She realized this on a bright, cold day early in November when they climbed Devil’s Slide. They’d stopped for water and to talk a bit. Usually on their walks, their talk eventually came around to some version of Maze’s main preoccupation: Who are our mamas, and will we become like them?
Maze generally did most of the talking. Vista distrusted most men, she said. Maze didn’t know enough to decide whether to trust them or not. Vista was ashamed to have come from the mountains of eastern Kentucky; Maze would move there, to her Mamaw Marthie’s crumbling old cabin, in a heartbeat if she could. And she’d take Sister Georgia and the big old loom in the Sisters’ Shop with her.
Vista was a Baptist, though not a very devout one. Maze didn’t necessarily believe in God, though she had some sense of a spirit, or spirits, and she had believed Sister Georgia and the other old Shakers when they’d said they saw them. In fact, Maze said, she sometimes thought of becoming a Shaker herself, even though the only other one left in the state of Kentucky, or west of the Appalachian Trail, for that matter, was Sister Georgia.
On this November Saturday, though, Maze was pensive. Mary Elizabeth was even quieter. Her practicing had not gone well that morning. The day before, she’d gotten a letter from her father; her mother was back in the hospital, he said.
Maze took a long drink of water and looked over at Mary Elizabeth. They were sitting on a wide rock. The trees had shed many of their leaves, and the air was crystal-clear. Below them they could see bits of the town and campus through the normally dense curtain of leaves, the spire of a church here and there, smoke from a handful of chimneys.
“You know, M. E.,” Maze said (she’d begun to call her that, finding that nothing else, like the shorter Mary or Mary Liz, seemed to suit her, she said), “I believe you’re right. Your eyes do look as sad as your mama’s sometimes. Maybe even sadder. Why is it you never tell me any news about her and your daddy?” And Mary Elizabeth began to cry.
She started talking then, inexplicably telling Maze things, too many things. Her mother was sick or something, she said, not quite right in the head.
“Not right in the head?” Maze said, and the words sounded horrible, echoing back to Mary Elizabeth like that. “What does that mean?”
Of course Maze would never do the delicate, tactful thing. Change the subject, look away. Not Maze. Maze would thunder onward, ask for more.
All right, then, Mary Elizabeth decided. All right, then.
Sometimes her mother had fits of a sort, and they’d have to steer her up to her room and put her to bed. Once they did, she might not emerge for days.
Fits? What kind of fits?
Talking to herself. Almost like she was singing. But in a language no one could understand. Ah bay. Rorororo. Thissss, tisss, sisss. Strange like that. Nonsense. Quiet-like usually, but still, of course people would stare.
What kind of singing? Like a hymn? Pretty like that? Or sad sometimes like when you play the piano? Maybe she wanted to sing along.
No, no—not like that. How to convey that terrifying sound? It could have been music almost, sometimes, like a kind of singing, maybe like blues singing. Low and kind of rumbling, scary almost. In a minor key if it was in any key at all. Just a few strange sounds, and she’d repeat them over and over.
“I went to a prayer service over in Torchlight once when I was little,” Maze said, “over in the mountains, and when the people there got the spirit, that’s what they sounded like. Kind of like animal sounds, growls and mumbles, but it also sounded like words some of the time, just words in a language I didn’t know. Then they’d fall on the ground and jerk around, and when it was all over they went right back to being normal, singin’ hymns and actin’ just like everyone else.”
“I suppose they handled snakes, too.”
“M. E., I’m just sayin’—”
“I know what you’re sayin’, Maze, but my daddy doesn’t believe in all that getting the spirit and speaking in tongues nonsense. That’s not part of his church, and it wasn’t part of my mama’s growing up, either, and that is not what she is doing when this happens to her.”
“Well, who said anything about your daddy’s church? I thought we were talkin’ about your mama, about her not being right in the head, in your words! Isn’t that what you just—”
“She has tried to kill herself. For all I know, she’s just tried again. My daddy says she’s in the hospital, and he didn’t say why. But I can guess. He says I can’t visit her till I come home for Christmas break and she’s out of the hospital again. He says it’s her ‘woman troubles.’ But that’s what he’s always told me.”
She was weeping now—big, fat tears, snot running from her nose. Maze tried to reach for her, but she pulled away and got up from the rock.
God, she thought. Not right in the head? Whose words were those? But how else could she say it?
Maze was talking again, she would never stop talking, but it came out a whisper now. “You reckon she was tryin’ to make those fits go away when she tried to kill herself?”
Mary Elizabeth felt exhausted suddenly, afraid she might not make it back down the trail. She looked over at the buildings she could see, the late-afternoon sun hitting the roofs and making them gleam. “I don’t know, Maze,” she said, wiping her wet eyes and face with the back of her hand. “I’m tired. Let’s go back.”
“All right, M. E.,” Maze said, but she didn’t move from the rock.
Mary Elizabeth started down the trail on her own, and before she’d gone far she heard Maze behind her. She felt a hand on her shoulder, and when she turned around, Maze was there with a handkerchief. She wiped Mary Elizabeth’s eyes and cheeks tenderly, then smoothed her hair away from her face and behind her ears.
“I imagine there’s more goin’ on with your mama than ‘woman troubles,’ whatever that is,” she said. “Probably more than you’ll ever know. I don’t know why they think they can’t tell us who they are, but it seems like that must be what they think.” She put the handkerchief in Mary Elizabeth’s hand.
Mary Elizabeth nodded, not really hearing. When they got back to campus, they went straight to the cafeteria for supper, and Mary Elizabeth was glad to stay on after to work, washing piles of dishes in a fog of exhaustion. She was glad to be away from Maze and all her questions, all her theories. Glad just not to think about it anymore.
Mary Elizabeth wouldn’t go with her because, she said, while she did like the old hymns, she didn’t have much use for hillbilly music—the term everyone seemed to use for the music Maze had learned to love as a child. Some of Maze’s earliest memories were of Vista playing songs like “Cripple Creek” and “Single Girl, Married Girl” on an old wind-up Victrola in her Mamaw Marthie’s cabin.
She certainly wasn’t going to ask any of the other girls on their hall, so Maze went to her first Berea Country Dancers square dance in the school gymnasium on her own, on the Saturday night before Thanksgiving. It wasn’t just the music, she knew. Mary Elizabeth had seemed far away from Maze since the day she’d talked about her mama. She claimed it was because she was so busy, because she needed to practice every minute she wasn’t studying or working, to get ready for her recital in a few weeks. But Maze felt like Mary Elizabeth was avoiding her, and she found it hurtful. And that made her restless.
Even weaving didn’t help. She felt fidgety, itching for something to happen, forced indoors by the cold and damp of late fall. She’d seen posters for the Saturday-night dances and longed to go, but she feared she’d be lost without a partner. At home you needed a partner for the barn dances she’d gone to outside Harrodsburg, and she always went with her sometimes boyfriend Darrell. Since coming to Berea, those were the only times she’d really missed Darrell: Saturday nights, when she felt like dancing.
Finally, on that unusually warm November night, Maze decided just to walk to the school gymnasium on her own. And that was how she met Harris Whitman.
She watched him dancing for a while at first. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen him. He was tall and thin, with curly dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard; he lived in town, and Fern and Dare and some of the other girls on Maze and Mary Elizabeth’s hall, who found him handsome and mysterious, had learned all they could about him. He wasn’t a student at Berea, though he had been a year or two before; he’d stayed on in town, working as a woodworker, selling the furniture he made through a couple of the local stores. He was also a rabble-rouser, the owner of one of the stores had told Fern. Involved with unions and the like, noisy about state politics. Because he was so handsome, that kind of activity only added to his allure. Had he been a different man, homely or even just regular-looking, interests like those would have made him a pariah in those girls’ eyes, Maze knew.
He wasn’t married, they reported, though he did go out from time to time with Miss Perrin, the new art teacher at Berea, who was from Pennsylvania and, the girls claimed, looked down her nose at everyone else in town. Except Harris Whitman, apparently.
Maze found their interest in him ridiculous, and she told them so. He was nice enough to look at, yes, but they didn’t know one meaningful thing about him, she said, only further confirming their sense of Maze’s peculiarity, with her funny name and her wild gold hair that she refused to straighten or tease. Not to mention the way she spent all her time at her work assignment or with her roommate, that colored girl.
“Well, like you said, M. E., I am one odd girl,” Maze would say when the two of them walked by a cluster of blond Berea girls and heard them snicker. Somewhere along the line, Maze had stopped caring about the fact that those girls felt that way. By now, she knew that Mary Elizabeth didn’t find her all that strange. Or maybe she still did, but she didn’t care. When Maze reminded her of the night she’d called her “odd,” Mary Elizabeth only laughed and rolled her eyes, nodding at the memory of her first response to Maze.
Maze hadn’t cared one way or another about Harris Whitman before that night, when she walked into the gym to the sound of the musicians playing “Sally Goodin” and saw him dancing. Even with a fast tune like that, there was a softness in the way he moved, and an effortlessness; he’d guide his partner with the gentlest touch at the small of her back as they promenaded down a row, then spin her and catch her up, his long fingers at her waist.
He danced with a number of different partners, and Maze saw no sign of Miss Perrin, who probably didn’t care for hillbilly music, either, Maze supposed. From the first dance she watched, Maze knew she had to dance with him, had to feel that hand on her back, her arm, her waist. When Dr. Wendt, her philosophy professor, saw her and walked over to ask her to dance with him when they called the next reel, she was happy enough to walk out with him. But the whole time she kept one eye on Harris Whitman, who was sitting that one out, standing and talking by a table near the back of the gym and drinking a Coke.
“Nice that you came, Miss Jansen,” Dr. Wendt was saying to her across the row as they waited their turn. “Not many students come out for the country dances.”
Maze looked around the gym and realized it was true; most of the other dancers were older or else much younger, kids, really, probably the children of some of the older dancers. Still another thing to make her odd, Maze thought, imagining Fern and Dare’s reaction to seeing her dance with Dr. Wendt. But so be it. She loved a good country dance. She hadn’t realized how much she had missed it.
Dr. Wendt was a pleasant if rather wooden dancer, which somehow didn’t surprise her. Before the reel quite ended, she curtsied in his direction and thanked him, claiming to need a bottle of pop. Before she got to the tables in the back, there was Harris Whitman, walking right toward her, back to the dance floor.
He smiled at her like he knew her, and she felt a funny kind of shiver from her stomach up to her chest. Before she had time to think about it, she said to him, “I was wondering if you’d mind dancin’ one with me.”
He smiled again, a different way somehow. Maybe a little sly, she thought, then sweet. How many different kinds of smiles could a man have? And then he said, “I don’t believe I’d mind at all,” and he reached for her hand and led her out to the middle of the floor.
But what in God’s name had she done? she suddenly thought as the music reached her ears and struck her heart cold. This was a waltz! Then “Oh, I’m sorry,” she mumbled, letting go of his hand. “I don’t know how to dance a waltz.”
He took her hand again and pulled her close, whispering as he placed his other hand on her back, just where she’d longed to have him put it, at that sweet, warm place below her waist where the heat rose up from below.
“Just relax and follow me,” he said. And she let her arms and legs go soft, almost limp, leaning into him, into his own heat and the way he smelled, like the woods after a spring rain. And she did relax and follow him. She let him lead. Through that song, and through all the rest of them that evening.
Until that night, her only partners had been country boys, barn-dance stompers. At other dances, at her high school, she’d backed away from slow dances, even with Darrell, who only saw a slow dance as a chance to sneak both hands onto her behind and try to kiss her neck.
It didn’t help that she was almost always taller than the boys in high school, Darrell included. Why, she often wondered, couldn’t she have been raven-haired and dimpled and small as a bird, like her mother? Apparently she favored her father, a man she’d never seen. “You got the Swedish half, I reckon,” Vista had told her once. “They grow them big and blond, like you.”
But Harris Whitman was a good three inches taller than Maze, who was five foot nine in the flats she wore that night. She’d never known what it felt like to fit together with a man like that.
She’d worn her best dress, even though it wasn’t the season for it—a lilac-colored organdy that had once belonged to another of Vista’s employers, Nora Taylor, who’d been tall and thin and broad-shouldered like Maze. It had a fitted bodice and a pretty scooped neck, and Maze had always loved the way the thin, silky layers of its skirt moved against her thighs as she danced. Lucky—maybe even a little strange, she thought—that it was such a warm night for November.
That night, dancing with Harris, the soft touch of those layers, and then his leg between hers as he turned her, pressing her back with his palm and cupped fingers, was almost too much; at times, when they waltzed, she nearly cried out from the pleasure of it all. He seemed to know when she was feeling this way, and to pull her closer then. She could feel his lips on her hair, which was loose and falling in wild curls down her back.
They made a striking pair, she knew, two willowy dancers, even during the fast reels. Maze could feel the appreciative eyes of the other dancers, watching as they moved together. Harris wore black trousers and a starched white shirt that was open at the neck, and he never took his eyes off Maze. No one dared to cut in and ask her to dance, and none of the women she’d watched him dance with earlier came looking for him. Apparently, Maze thought at some point, during the last slow waltz of the night, nearly bursting with happiness, it had been just fine for her to come to one of the Berea Country Dances alone.
Mary Elizabeth didn’t notice how late it was when Maze got back to the room that night. Her concert was scheduled for the following week, on Wednesday, the last day of the term. She had practiced until ten o’clock that night, then returned to their empty room. Probably Maze had gone from the dance to the Weaving Cabin, she thought as she collapsed on her bed, still in her clothes.
The next morning, Maze was sound asleep in her bed, snoring lightly, her organdy dress draped over a chair. She must have pulled the covers up over her and turned off her lamp, Mary Elizabeth realized when she was fully awake. She dressed for church in the dim morning light and tried to decide whether to wake her roommate. Maze had missed many church and midweek chapel services by now, and this didn’t go unnoticed at Berea. And her grades were none too stellar, either, with all the classes she’d missed and the little studying she’d managed to do.
But then, Mary Elizabeth thought, her own grades were slipping, too, what with all the time she was spending at the piano. Why she was doing it she couldn’t exactly say. Mr. Roth was pushing her, certainly, but there was something else, too, some ineffable thing. Some sort of longing, some sense of possibilities she hadn’t thought of before. These days when she finished playing the “Étude,” (polished now beyond her wildest imagining when she’d begun working on it last September) and closed her eyes, she saw the fingers of that pianist she’d seen as a child at Music Hall in Cincinnati. She imagined Vladimir Horowitz’s fingers—like the legs of a racehorse. That strong, that rapid. When she opened her eyes and looked at her own long, slim fingers, she saw something else, though. What, exactly? Who or what was she becoming? How could she imagine herself in this way?
These days her fingers alternately ached and tingled, all day long. Mr. Roth had long ago petitioned for a change in her work assignment when he’d seen what all that dishwashing was doing to her hands. Now she cataloged books in the back rooms of the library. She was still hidden but less able to relax, with all the librarians bustling around, watching her.
For the concert, she would play on the grand piano in the alumni lounge, the same piano she and Maze had stumbled on their second night on campus, in a room with portraits of past presidents and board chairmen hung on the walls. (How had they managed not to notice these? How had they felt free to settle in there that evening?) When she thought of the upcoming concert, now less than a week away, she felt a team of horses racing through her gut. But no racehorse fingers. Unless the legs of horses ached and tingled the way her fingers did now.
She decided to let Maze sleep. One more missed church service could hardly make a difference. Closing their door quietly and walking down the hall with the other girls, all of them dressed for church, all sleepy and quiet, she wondered idly, in the back of her mind, if those could have been actual grass stains she’d seen on the back of Maze’s discarded dress.
Maze longed to tell Mary Elizabeth. She imagined when, and how, to say it; she practiced. A knock on the door of the practice room in the Music Building, maybe, and then “I have fallen in love!” Or she might take her a sandwich. When, in God’s name, was the girl eating? It seemed that all Maze saw her roommate do was sleep. And Mary Elizabeth did precious little sleeping, too. When she did, she was restless, fitful, grinding her teeth.
So a knock on the door of the practice room, and then a sandwich. Then, casually, “Remember how I decided to go to that dance last Saturday on my own?” Or “You know that fellow Harris Whitman all the girls talk about? Well, guess who he kissed. And, well, did more than that with.”
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t tell Mary Elizabeth what she had done with him. Though she was nearly bursting with it, with the joy of it, the feel of him, his skin, his mouth. Him inside her! Lord! The mystery of that, the complete mystery, and the surprise of it. The way she couldn’t not find out what that would be like. “We should stop,” he’d said; “I’ll walk you back.” And “No!” she’d tried to shout, though her voice had come out like a sob, like she was almost choking, and she’d pulled him back to her and said, “No!” again. “Please, no.” She couldn’t stop, couldn’t let him stop, she wanted that night to go on forever, wanted his hands on her forever, would have swallowed him whole if she could have.
They were on a hill behind the gymnasium, above a little patch of woods. Far too late for a harvest moon like that night’s, for the strangely warm air. Like Indian summer, but it was nearly Thanksgiving. All of it seemed not quite real. Like she was dreaming, and she couldn’t let it end.
He kissed her again, and she pulled him toward her, on top of her, she pressed herself against him and felt him there, hard—so different from feeling Darrell hard against her, when she’d only wanted to pull away. Now she arched her back and pulled him tighter. He kissed her neck, he lifted up her skirt and pulled down her panties and touched her there, and it was agony while he did but more agony if he stopped, and she let herself moan and call out his name in a voice she didn’t recognize.
“Where have you come from?” he asked her, panting.
From a land of fairies, she might have said. I do not remember, she might have said, right now I cannot recall. What she did say, as she reached to unbutton his trousers, was “From deep in a mountain holler.”
Of course, she knew, there was no way to tell Mary Elizabeth any of this.
The concert was fine. Hadn’t it been fine? Everyone said so. Everyone was smiling afterward, drinking their punch and nibbling on cookies and smiling at her—the president and his wife, three members of the board and their wives. Her father stood in a corner and beamed, one eye always on her mother, held together somehow, maybe with glue. But not smiling. Maze was there, too, with someone she didn’t know—tall, bearded; who was he? Mr. Roth floating around the room, making introductions, also beaming, constantly pointing at her, smiling over at her, nodding. Saying something about her that she couldn’t understand, couldn’t hear, for some reason.
She couldn’t hear what any of them were saying. Were they speaking to her, or about her? There were sounds, muffled sounds, getting through somehow, but when she lifted her hands after the final chord she had somehow stopped being able to hear. She had played not with her ears or her mind but with her body, as Aunt Paulie had taught her; by that evening, the Chopin “Étude,” like the “Image,” was a physical memory for her. Girl and machine, together, one. She was exhausted now. That had to be it. She believed she had played well. Everyone was smiling, saying she had.
Then her father looked at her across the room, and she knew it was time to walk with him and her mother to their car. She said good-bye to Mr. Roth. “Practice, practice! And Merry Christmas!” She nodded; she had read his lips. Her bag was already packed and in the trunk of her father’s car.
Then, as they walked to the parking lot, a voice behind her, one she heard this time—Maze calling out to her.
“M. E.!”
She turned. Maze was hurrying toward them, her father getting her mother into the car quickly, closing her door, hurrying around to open his own. Maze had the tall man with her still; he walked fast to keep up with her.
“Mary Elizabeth, Reverend Cox,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling. She was out of breath. “This is Harris Whitman. I wanted you to meet him.”
He held out his hand. Mary Elizabeth could see her father at her side, slowly closing his own door, nodding nervously, smiling. “How d’you do,” he said, and shook the man’s hand, then looked at his daughter.
She shook Harris Whitman’s hand next. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. Who are you? she thought.
“That was beautiful,” he said. He still held on to her hand.
Her father cleared his throat. “We should get going, Mary Elizabeth,” he said. “Your mother’s tired.”
The air was growing thick again, everyone’s voice weirdly muted, the cotton back in Mary Elizabeth’s ears. She pulled her hand back and opened the car’s back door.
“I didn’t get to say hello to your mama,” Maze said as Mary Elizabeth climbed in. “M. E.?” She put her head in next to Mary Elizabeth’s. “Couldn’t I just—”
Then Mary Elizabeth pushed Maze, gently, back out of the car. Quickly, so no one else might have seen, she thought. Hoped. “Not now, Maze,” she said as she did it. She tried to smile, like it was a kind of joke. But it hurt to smile, she realized; she was so tired of smiling. “I’ll call you soon, Maze. We have to go now.”
The engine of their old Ford roared as her daddy started it, and Mary Elizabeth rolled down her window. Maze was frowning at her, the gleam in her eyes gone. Mary Elizabeth waved, trying to make it light and funny, trying to make it better. Gotta go! Maybe another concert! My public awaits me! But she didn’t say any of it.
“I’m sorry, Maze,” she said, waving, as her father put the car in gear.
Then Maze reached for her hand. “I was thinkin’ I might come visit you over the vacation,” she yelled through the window, over the engine’s noise. She looked toward the front seat. “Reverend Cox, Miz Cox, would that be all right with you?”
Mary Elizabeth watched her daddy look back at Maze and try to smile. He licked his lips and coughed, then waved as if he hadn’t heard her. His wife had sunk deep into her seat, had made herself impossibly small somehow. Was she even there? Mary Elizabeth wondered.
They had to go, she knew, so she began rolling up the window. “I’ll call you, Maze, okay?” she said again. “After Christmas. I promise I’ll give you a call.”
“But M. E., you know I don’t …” was all she heard before she closed the window completely and her father pulled away.
Have a telephone. She doesn’t have a telephone, Mary Elizabeth remembered then. But she couldn’t bring herself even to turn around and wave out the rear window one more time.
Because already it had started up in the front seat. Ah bay. Esss, sisss. Isss. Ah bay, oh.
Mary Elizabeth wished for a long, hard rain to drown out the sound. For that cotton in her head, her ears, again. She stared at her fingers as her daddy reached for her mama’s hand, trying to soothe her. She tried not to notice her mother pulling her hand away and turning to stare out her own window. Esss. Isss. Ah bay, oh.
Mary Elizabeth closed her eyes. She was asleep before they’d even left the campus. She didn’t remember walking into her house and getting into her bed when she woke up a day and a half later, on Christmas Eve.