How do you discipline yourself? people asked, but discipline had nothing to do with it. The music I played was like an itch in my throat, a question to be answered, a story to be told. Discipline: a word that never entered my thoughts until somebody tossed it into my lap, set me up to walk beneath it as if it were a bucket of cold water. Though sometimes I could hear the word foreshadowed in the tone: My goodness, Ann, why you are so disciplined? Why do you work so hard? I’d stare straight ahead, embarrassed, in the same way my friend Dee was embarrassed by her boyfriend, a sweet, strange boy who didn’t comb his hair and spoke in a language he’d invented himself.
Even now, it’s hard to explain what drew me to the piano with such single-mindedness.
Let’s say it is late on a Thursday night, in the fall of my senior year. Let’s say I’ve just finished practicing for the day, so I turn on NPR. Perhaps, tonight, there’s a Brahms intermezzo I’ve never heard before, shimmering in the air like an ornament, an apple, something that was placed there just for me. I’ve already wiped down the keys and closed the piano lid. I’ve filled the kitchen sink with cold water, dumped in a tray of ice, and lowered my arms into the soothing chill. Now my arms lay across my lap: humming, satisfied. And yet, I cannot help myself. I move to the piano, finger the keys. Soon, I’ve managed to rekindle a good portion of the A melody, but the next thing I know, there’s my dad in his droopy underwear, blinking at the light, reminding me that there are other people in this house, people who need to get some sleep.
During the night, the scattering of notes I’ve skimmed arrange themselves into a single idea, a line I can hold in my head like a prayer. In the morning, I comb through this line as I lie in bed, listening to the familiar waking sounds of the house: the thud of the bass from my brother’s bedroom, the morning show laughter from the living room, the scrape of a plow going past on the street. The line—I understand this now—is not complex. There’s another just beneath it, lumbering and full, bumping up against the surface like a turtle trapped under ice. I am certain I can free it. I only need a few minutes, half an hour, maybe an hour at the most, but school starts at 7:10, early enough so the older kids can work the three to eleven shift, and my father has put his foot down—no piano before seven in the morning or after nine-thirty at night. A rule I understand, even though I resent it. A rule I agreed to a few days after the new piano was delivered.
How people shake their heads at that piano, which cost as much as a good used car. They say that my parents have spoiled me. They say it is no wonder if that Ann is too big for her britches, no wonder if that Ann always has her nose held up in the air.
That Ann, That Ann, like a first and last name.
I rise, shivering in the icy room, and kneel on the carpet to say my morning prayers. I am seventeen, and so I do crazy things like sleep with my window open. I deny myself: the best seat, the first choice, the biggest piece. I turn the other cheek. At school, it’s a sport to tease me, trip me, knock my books out of my hands, because everybody knows I won’t tell, and I don’t have a boyfriend to protect me. Am I too big for my britches? Do I have my nose in the air? These are the complaints my teachers have made: to me, to my parents, to the other kids who agree. It’s a terrible thing, to believe you’re good at something. To believe that you could be, for heaven’s sake, a concert pianist. Who ever heard of such a thing? Where does that Ann get these fine ideas?
Here comes the queen, one of my teachers likes to say. Make way for the queen.
I take my seat, arrange my books, pretend I do not hear.
My piano teacher, Mr. Celeste, has told me all about the Greeks, how they believed that music had the power to transform the human soul. I desperately hope this is true. I probably am too big for my britches. I probably am arrogant, vain. And then there is my mind, which is often unruly. Thoughts fly into my head that are so frightening it is easier to pretend they are not mine. One day, I passed the antique crucifix in the hall between my bedroom and my parents’—the one my mother took down to show me when I was very young, explaining how to unlatch the back, take out the blessed candles, the scroll with instructions for Last Rites—and, for some reason, it caught my eye as if I’d never seen it before. As I studied the agonized line of Christ’s mouth, it occurred to me that I was looking at, well, a dead guy, and that he was hanging in the middle of my house, and that this was as weird as the weirdest thing I’d ever read about in National Geographic. In fact, we had the most remote populations beaten, hands down. I saw that everything was simply a matter of perspective, meaningful or meaningless according to custom alone. I took the crucifix off the wall and buried it under the towels in the linen closet. The next day, it was back on the wall.
My mother looked at me funny for days.
Without music, without the line that now plays in my head, I am certain such thoughts would overwhelm me. The tidy truths that have formed my life, like the neatly shaped hedges around my house, would be mowed down, torn away. And then there would be no point to anything—would there? There would be no reason to pray, to get out of bed, to move through the day. There would be only the chlorine smell of the shower, the yellow quiver of eggs on my plate, the chill puddle of dread in my stomach at the thought of another school day. The green tile lining the corridors, voices cut by the razor-slash of locker doors, the tin-whistle shriek of the school bell, the crackle of daily announcements read by giggling seniors over the intercom. Even these sounds can be transposed, rearranged into an indifferent song that shields me as I slip out of homeroom to the drinking fountain, which I call a bubbler, to linger as long as I can. As I rush down the steps that lead to the locker rooms while the boy who insists even teachers call him Boner steps on my heels, shouting, “Flat tire!” as I enter the sprawl of the cafeteria with its pounding jukebox, its stale odor of American cheese.
Lunch is at 11:10. Too early for anybody to be hungry, but we all shovel it in. I slide my tray in at the edge of the table where my friends sit dipping tater tots into a substance Ronald Reagan has declared a vegetable. These friends are good people: I know this. These friends are much better people than I am. They are firmly grounded in the world. The girls talk about their diets; the boys tease the girls, speak in shrill, falsetto voices. The popular kids call them “art-fags.” I am an art-fag, too. It is a relief to be something, even an art-fag. It’s a relief to rest at the edge of this group of friends who sign their notes “love always” and who, for the most part, after graduation, I’ll never see again.
I try to pay attention, try to laugh when a boy throws a perfectly aimed tater tot down the front of a girl’s shirt. It is funny. It is also not there. I am not there, distracted as I am, working the line like a needlepoint, in and out, up and down, revealing it piece by piece. My first teacher taught me to play music by ear. My next teacher, Miss Williams, taught me to memorize music by reading it and hearing it in my head. My new teacher, Mr. Celeste, gives me articles by sports psychologists showing that athletes who think through their actions—not as observers, watching themselves, but as if they are actually experiencing their movements—excel over those who do not. I am teaching myself to practice this way. I re-create the sounds I have heard, transcribe them onto the page. I see the notes before my eyes, feel the keyboard under my hand.
Lunch is over by 11:35, and as I separate my paper products, my silverware, I realize that I can’t bear to face the afternoon. I tell a friend that I feel sick, that I’m going to head home—would he tell my biology teacher? My friend rolls his eyes.
“What should I tell him this time?” he says. “The intentional flu?”
“Rabies,” I say, and I bite him on the neck.
“Bitch,” he tells me pleasantly. The other kids think we are sleeping together, a deception that benefits us both. He is a homosexual. (We pronounce the word seriously, diligently, emphasizing all the syllables.) And I—well, I’m not sure what I am. Maybe some kind of eunuch. After all, I could have dates, but I turn them down. Turn up my nose, the other kids say. It will serve me right if I never get married. It will serve me right if I spend the rest of my life alone. Only music can save me. Only music has the power to transform my soul. Dimly, I am aware that it is prayer—devotion to Christ—that I should be endowing with these magical properties. But prayer leaves me feeling anxious, leaves me feeling that no matter how hard I try, God will find me wanting. I am neither bad nor good but something in between. I am what the Bible calls lukewarm. I am what God will spit from His mouth.
I collect my coat from my locker, where somebody has scrawled WET DREAM in thick black permanent marker. Perhaps it is the same person who has been shoving notes through the vents, saying that he is going to give me the bloody fuck I need, stuck up cow, you better watch your step. In the pocket of my coat, I’ve tucked a paring knife I have pilfered from the kitchen; in my purse, I keep a slender bottle of pepper spray I ordered in secret from a catalogue. Who is writing these notes? It could be anybody. The wrestlers who made my sophomore year hell have all graduated, gone off to who knows where. Perhaps it’s the boy who sits behind me in art class, bragging about how he and some friends broke into an elderly woman’s apartment one night. “I don’t know why she was crying,” he says, laughing. “All we wanted was for her to cook us some eggs. But she was fuckin’ crying so hard she kept dropping them on the floor.” It could be the boy who, at a bluff party in September, teased and twisted and dragged a girl who liked him into the bushes, forced his way into her one hundred feet from the open trunk of the car where the rest of us had gathered to drink beer. Later, I found her sitting in my mother’s car. Please, she begged, don’t say anything. Please just take me home. It could be a member of the basketball team, which has pledged to beat up the school’s single black male student—a transfer who has just started school that fall—if he thinks about looking at a white girl. It could be the anonymous figure who jumped my friend Dee’s boyfriend in the park one night, calling him queer, leaving him with cracked ribs and a broken jaw.
Weekends I work at my parents’ real estate office, where potential buyers from Milwaukee talk about how they want to move to a small town for their kids, for the safety, for the good schools, and I wonder what on earth they are talking about. But then, I often feel this way. There is the surface of things—the shining lake, the church on the hill, the sweet-faced women in the downtown shops—and then there is the way things are. There is the little town with its clean, well-lit streets—and then there is the knife in my pocket. The God who is Love—and the God who condemns homosexuals, people of other faiths, people who have abortions or use birth control, people who have sex outside of marriage, people who get divorced and remarry. The single, sanguine story everybody agrees to tell—and the stories like my own, trapped beneath that stifling weight.
Who frightens me more—the boy who writes me these terrible notes, bearing down so angrily that I can trace the impression of his letters, understand their meaning, with my fingers? Or the God who, like the boy, is bent on controlling me, keeping me in my place, keeping my mind on Him? Better watch your step. If only I can make it until Christmas break. If only I can make it through the six weeks after that, when my first round of college auditions begins. If only I can do well enough to get into a good conservatory. If only I can survive until August, without something terrible happening.
If only. Da-DEE-dum.
That Ann. DA-DA.
It is familiar, it is Brahms. The line is back in my head.
I slip out of the school by a side door, cross the athletic field. The chill licks away the fog of the classrooms, the over-heated hallways and dull, fluorescent lights. Heading north on Holden Street, I pass the neatly kept houses, the snow-covered, geometric lawns. Christmas trees twinkle in every front window; lights hang in crisp, bright strings from the porches and mailboxes. A plastic Santa glows on a rooftop, holding up an arrow that points to the chimney. I am starting to feel better. I will make hot chocolate and work on the intermezzo, sounding it out until three o’clock, the hour I usually start to practice. Then I will switch over to what I should be working on, my audition pieces: the Bach suites, the Chopin ballade, the Beethoven sonata, the Bartók variations. At my lesson tomorrow, I’ll tell Mr. Celeste about the intermezzo, play what I’ve been able to come up with. He will grumble a bit before rising, combing his bookshelves for the music. This is dessert, he will say, tucking it into my satchel. After the Beethoven. After the broccoli and carrots.
I will make it till Christmas. I will make it to the end of the school year. Tonight, I will tell my mother, I took another sanity day, and she will write my excuse on a piece of the thick, creamy stationery she receives from her own students every year, along with the bottles of perfume, the fruitcakes, the knickknacks, and homemade ashtrays.
Of course, there is another side to all this. There is the part of my life that is neither school nor church, the part that I love, the part that I sense I will lose for good if I ever step out of its rhythms. There is my maternal grandmother’s kitchen, and her hundred-acre farm, and the gentle swell of fields, fringed with woodlands. There is the color of the landscape, the tans and browns and winter-whites, the spectacular greenness of springtime. There is my mother and father. There are my uncles and aunts, cousins and second cousins, the hearty clamor of reunions and holiday suppers, Grace that swells like a symphony: Bless us O Lord and these Thy Gifts. There is the shared language of absolute faith, the shared reason of people who have lived out their lives within twenty miles of the place where they were born, the land beneath them like the heart of a single organism, a vast and powerful drum. There is the comfort of such numbers, the ease of being swept along with the tide, of giving yourself over to the seasons of marriage and birth, and birth, and birth, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, land and a house and a garden behind it, a kitchen like my grandmother’s, humming like a hive.
Where does the piano fit into all this? The hours I spend practicing, or listening to music, or talking with Mr. Celeste about composition, theory, the Greeks? I imagine Orpheus attempting to transform my grandmother’s soul with his lyre. She stares at him hard, neither friendly nor unfriendly. She says, Are you supposed to be a boy or a girl? She says, When you finish up your racket there, run down the road and tell Uncle Joe to bring his gun, there’s another opossum trapped in the silo.
Discipline means nothing to my grandmother either. Discipline is simply the way you live your life. You don’t sit down until your work is finished, whatever that work might be, and your work will not be finished till God calls you to the grave and, if you’re lucky, lets you rest a while before He dreams up something else for you to do. My grandmother isn’t sure what to think about my music. She believes it is a gift from God. She also believes that it’s something that could lead me away from home and into trouble. I am her godchild, her particular responsibility. I am also the oldest child of her youngest child, her baby’s baby. Her love for me is as concentrated, as rough and raw as a cat’s tongue. I squirm beneath it, half in pleasure, half in pain.
“Music is the language of angels,” she says in the same tone she’d use if she saw me about to squirt lighter fluid directly into the burning barrel. The tone she’d use if something I’d said came close to disrespect of the Church.
It is the day of Christmas Eve. I am sitting at my grandmother’s table while she stands frying doughnuts at the stove. As I peel withered apples from the bucket I’ve hauled up from the root cellar, two little girl cousins sit across from me, licking their fingers. Each time my grandmother lifts another doughnut from the crackling grease, it’s their job to fetch it, shake it in a bag of sugar, then arrange it, still warm, on a plate. The air simmers with the burnt, sweet smell of frying dough. More cousins are playing on the floor with a cigar box full of dominoes. They stand them on end, arrange them in precarious lines, argue over who gets to knock the first one down. “Jeez!” they say, and “Youse guys!” and “Cut it out, once!” In the rocking chair, a cousin just two years older than I am is nursing her second child. Her first crawls around on the floor, menacing the dominoes, but the older children push him patiently aside, as if he is a windup toy instead of a beautiful, tow-headed boy. My second cousins all seem to be beautiful tow-headed children. All I would have to do is graduate, and get married, and produce a beautiful tow-headed boy like this one, and it would mean more to my family than any scholarship I might win, any concert career I might achieve, more than any other single thing I might ever do with my life.
There are shouts from the living room, where my uncles and older male cousins are watching sports on TV. The house cat rockets in, wild-eyed; the crawling baby abandons the dominoes and motors after him, chiming, Kee! Kee! One of my aunts is making another batch of dough; another aunt washes lunch dishes; another aunt is making a pot of Maxwell House Coffee, vaulting the children, the cat, the dominoes on her way to the sink. My mother has taken the trash outside to the burning barrel. From the window, I can see her at the edge of the bean field, the black plume of smoke rising—so it seems—from the top of her head like a feather. She feeds the fire slowly, adding to it piece by piece. To her right is the outhouse attached to the chicken coop; to her left is the double shed. Beside that stands the old corncrib where my brother and cousins and I played jail. There’s the milk house and the barn with its double silos. There’s the cow pen, empty now, the barbed-wire fence coming loose, and the steeple of Saint Nicholas Church, poking through the dark line where the fields meet the sky.
My mother and I have been here since early this morning, helping with Christmas preparations. Tomorrow, the house will fill with over a hundred people, families arriving to eat the noon dinner in shifts, others arriving for the evening meal, everyone bringing a dish to pass. In addition to the kitchen table, where twenty-odd people can sit, there will be card tables in the living room for the young people, an oilcloth spread on the kitchen floor for the children, everybody eating on paper plates and drinking from plastic cups. There will be dollar bills for the grandchildren, fifty-cent pieces for the great-grands; there will be Secret Santa exchanges, fruitcakes and pfefferneusse, homemade Christmas tree ornaments, wreaths, candles, pinecones rolled in glitter. There will be a pile of coats on my grandmother’s bed that reaches halfway to the ceiling. All day, children will sneak into the bedroom to tunnel into the middle of those coats, just the way I once did. All day, there will be the slamming of doors, the rasp of coats coming off and going on, the crying of babies and the fussing of children, the hearty laughter of the men, the peals of out-rage and delight from the women, the clatter of plates, and the sound of the television.
I have finished the bucket of apples, and now I set down the paring knife, rest. Any kitchen task like this—chopping onions, slicing bread, peeling apples—bothers my wrists and arms, but I don’t want to say anything. It would look like I’m just being lazy. It would look like I’m trying to get out of work. And isn’t it true that even when I hurt, I still manage to play the piano at least three hours a day? The house cat slinks down from the windowsill, wriggles in beside me on the long wooden bench my grandfather made. He rubs his broad flat face against my sleeve as if he is a kitten instead of the big, bad broken-eared tom he is. I scratch his chin. My wrist aches.
“Have the barn cats been fed?” I ask.
My grandmother looks up from the stove, a quick, fond glance I understand. She leaves these little tasks for me—feeding the barn cats, gathering eggs—because she knows how much I enjoy them. Knows that, like my mother, I enjoy working outdoors.
In the refrigerator, there’s a Tupperware container full of multicolored scraps: Jell-O, the dried-out heel of a roast, stale potato chips, leftover breakfast cereal, sour milk. I carry it out to the entryway, stepping over my cousins, the dominoes, the baby. In the chilly bathroom by the stairs to the basement, I add a few scoops of cat chow from the fifty-pound bag my grandmother gets at the mill. My coat hangs on a peg by the door; I put it on, step outside into the sudden silence of a vast cathedral. The cold is stunning. Radiant. My eyes smart and tear. Snow has erased the roof of the barn, the shed, the milk house. The winter sky presses down, the color of smoke, and I smell the burning barrel as I follow the partially shoveled path toward the barn, follow the harsh rasp of my sneakers. Somewhere, a crow coughs. A loose shingle flaps. Around me, the fields hold the absolute weight of sleep, fringed by yellow stubble, a few dark clots of earth.
A word shapes itself in my mind: holy. It splits the crude shell of the word I’ve been taught and emerges, shimmering and whole. God is here, in these dormant fields, in the bald-headed woods beyond. God is in the crow’s call, and the watery shadows cast by the barn. God is in my restlessness. God is in my love of this place and my fear that I will never find the courage to leave it, that it will smother me gently and sweetly and indifferently, like a sleeping parent rolling over upon a child. God is in the thrum and hush and spin of the world beyond. God is a moment like this one: reverent, transcendent, when the very air seems to shine.
The barn door is frozen shut. I bump it hard with my hip, jump back. Icicles fall from the eaves like diamonds shattering at my feet. Now the heavy door slides just enough for me to slip inside. “Kitty-kitty-kitt-eee,” I say, imitating my grandmother’s call. The barn is silent, empty except for the pigs grunting softly in the adjoining lean-to, the rattle of mice in the grain bins. I remember how an aunt once led me out to the barn on Christmas Eve, back when I was small enough to need to hold her hand. There were dairy cows then, and their sweet grassy smell; there was a bull with a ring in his nose. My aunt had promised me that at midnight, the animals would speak, and when I said I didn’t hear anything, she said, well, it wasn’t midnight yet, so they were probably still thinking about all the things they wanted to say.
“Kitty-kitty-kitteee!”
Now I feel them watching from the rafters, from the top of the steps leading to the second floor where the machinery is stored. I dump the Tupperware’s contents into an old pie tin, fill the other with snow from the drift beneath the broken windows. The cats appear like ghosts, eyes aglow in the dusky light. They dance forward and back until I step away from the food. Then they surge forward, a dozen or so. I recognize an orange tabby, a dirty white tom with a missing eye. There’s a new one with a tail shaped like a crank, broken in at least two places. A tiger-stripe rubs against my legs, but flinches when I stoop to pet her. She darts out of reach, then rolls and rolls in a pile of loose straw.
It’s a far cry from a storybook manger with its clean, yellow straw, its fluffy white sheep. Cobwebs hang in dirty clots from the crossbeams. Breadlike clumps of old manure fill the troughs. The barn cats growl and purr, tails lashing; the ceiling groans with every gust of wind. Still, it is Christmas Eve. I am a child again, clinging tight to my aunt’s mittened hand. I am waiting for the animals to speak, believing, for this moment, that they can.
We spend Christmas Eve with Grandpa and Grandma Ansay, the way we do every year. My mother invites them over for a six o’clock supper, something simple, for my grandmother doesn’t care for rich foods. After ward, as the broiler pan soaks in the sink and the odor of chicken settles everywhere, we all sit around the Christmas tree and begin, one at a time, to open Christmas presents. It’s an awkward time because my father never gives anybody anything—though my mother always hopes it will be otherwise. My grandparents give everybody the same thing: one-hundred-dollar U.S. savings bonds. As my brother and I open my mother’s gifts, my grandmother laments the cost, the waste, the excess. “Oh, say!” she says at my new pair of boots. “Too much, too much!” The stroke has robbed her of all but a few phrases. She pokes my grandfather until he opens the single gift my mother has addressed to them both, then peers into the box of chocolates as if it contains tarantulas. “Oh, say!” she says, laughing unhappily. But—as my mother well knows—my grandfather loves chocolate, and he is a man who does not love much. Love has been worked out of him, toiled out of him. Even in retirement, his hands are splayed with monstrous yellow calluses. When he takes the first piece of chocolate, tucks it under his mustache, my grandmother slaps at his hands. He ignores her, takes another. She slaps harder. She hits him as hard as she can, limp-wristed, flailing. He makes a swift, rough gesture and their knuckles click.
“G’wan,” he says.
She says something nobody understands, but my grandfather says, “That’s enough.”
It’s time to distribute my presents: an antique teacup for my mother’s collection, a sweater for my brother, matching pillow shams I’ve sewn for my grandparents’ beds. Because the pillows shams are homemade, my grandmother lets them pass. My grandfather, bright-eyed with sugar, pats them with a massive hand. I don’t give my father a gift because, if I do, he’ll simply return it. He does this even if somebody gives him something he really needs, something he’d buy for himself. Or else he’ll refuse to open it. He’ll joke about it, urge us to open it ourselves, then set it on a shelf to open “later.” It will stay there for several days, several weeks. One day, we’ll glance at the shelf and discover it is gone.
This year, my brother has gifts for everyone, too, and this is unexpected because lately, like my father, he has shied away from gift-giving, from family events, from emotion. At fifteen, a loose-boned shrug has become his sword; selective deafness his shield. Now, he seems like his younger self again, eager and sweet-natured. For my grandparents, he has made a towel holder in the shape of a frog. My grandmother is delighted with this. For my mother, there’s is a floral coffee mug with her name on the side, and a bag of coffee mug with her name on the side, and a bag of coffee beans to go with it. My mother flushes, proud and pleased. For me, there’s an adjustable ring, mounted with a circular frame in which a little round-eyed girl holds a little round-eyed kitten. I love this ring. It is exactly what I’d have chosen for myself. I put it on my finger, squeeze to make it fit. “Thanks,” I say—everybody says—impressed, but my brother isn’t finished. It seems he has a gift for Dad, who is already laughing, waving it away, asking, “Did you keep the receipt?”
“You have to open it,” Mike says. “Once you open it, you can have the receipt?”
Mike wears his hair long so that it covers his eyes. He pushes the gift at our father’s chest, then steps away, so that Dad has to grab it to keep it from falling. “If you break it, Dad,” Mike warns, “you won’t be able to take it back.”
The gift makes an oddly musical sound when our father turns it over in his hands. Now everybody is curious. Dad stands up and sits down and stands up again, and then he tells my brother he should open it. “You open it,” my mother tells my father, giving him a no-nonsense look, which inspires my grandmother to cry, “Too much, too much!” which means she is taking my father’s side, which means that now my father has to open it to save face. He sits. We all watch as he loosens the tape, peels away the wrapping paper carefully, so that it can be reused.
There in a tall, thin glass jar, rolling around in the murky water, are a dozen flesh-colored balls.
Testicles?
For a moment, nobody says anything. Mike waits, his long hair curtaining his eyes.
“What’s this?” our father quavers, holding out the jar for my mother to read. “What does this say?”
My mother sounds out the words on the bright orange label: Gefilte fish. None of us have ever heard of such a thing. None of us can imagine where he might have gotten it.
“Fish balls,” Dad says, too heartily. “Well. How very nice.”
My brother says, “Do you want the receipt?”
For a moment, we all imagine Dad carrying the fish balls back into the store where they were purchased. We have seen him return just about everything: half-eaten foods that weren’t quite right, umbrellas, towels, clothing, even a two-year-old pair of shoes that had been “guaranteed to last a lifetime.” But can he go through with this?
“Uh,” he finally says. “No. I think this is something I better keep.”
A shadow of a smile plays around the corners of my brother’s mouth.
In fact, everybody is smiling now, even Dad, and I finally release my breath, thinking, Well, that wasn’t so bad. But thoughts like this only tempt the gods. After the wrapping paper has been folded and saved for next year, my father suggests a little piano music, a recital, how about it, Pumpkin? My grandfather has been dozing in a sweet sugar coma, but now his eyes fly open with alarm. “Play! Play!” chimes my grandmother, knowing how my grandfather will hate it. “I’ll be right there,” Mom sings from the kitchen, where she’s doing something wonderfully aggressive to the broiler pan. Mike is halfway out of the room, but the old man is quicker. “Hold up there, Tiger,” Dad says, jiggling the jar of gefilte fish. “Let’s listen to the Pumpkin play.”
The Pumpkin doesn’t want to play any more than the Tiger wants to listen, but I sit down at the piano anyway and begin, cruelly, the first of the Bartók Opus 20 improvisations. It will be another hour before my grandparents finally go home, another three hours before my mother and brother and I will put on our coats and head to Midnight Mass, where we’ll take turns nodding off between shrill bursts from the aging choir. Bartók is perfect for a moment like this. It is every word I’ve been holding back since my grandparents stepped through the door. It’s my father’s jolly refusals to open his gifts, the mysterious hurt this masks. It’s my mother’s hand-to-hand combat with the broiler pan. It’s my brother’s brief sphinx of a smile. It’s the round-eyed girl holding the kitten, and the round-eyed girl who wears that image on her finger, trying to live up to all that it suggests even as she knows she cannot. Eight variations. Eight states of mind. I relish the dissonance, the irregular meter; I flatten my fingers to achieve an even brassier, percussive tone. I am into this now, it’s no longer a recital, I have disappeared and something wild and wordless is shining in my place like fire. When I finish the final improvisation and rise, lending the weight of my body to the final chord, I can’t quite remember how I came to be in this room.
Then I see the faces of my family, the glazed-over eyes, the open mouths. They look like people who have been tied down and beaten. I meant to play only the first few improvisations. Somehow, I have performed them all.
Nobody applauds.
“Maybe,” my mother says faintly from the doorway. “A Christmas carol…would be nice?”
A Christmas carol. I melt down onto the bench. Humbly, I begin to play “Silent Night” in slow, block chords. I can feel the mood in the room begin to change. My father uncrosses his arms and legs. My mother actually takes a seat. When my grandfather slips the last of the chocolates from the box, I wait—watching from the corner of my eye—for my grandmother to slap him, but she doesn’t. She has pulled herself forward on the couch, and when I begin the second stanza, breaking into a few light arpeggios, she astonishes us all by beginning to sing.
Stille nacht, heilige nacht
Alles schläft, einsam wacht
I remember, vaguely, my grandmother’s voice before the stroke, before she became the person she is now, locked into the straitjacket of her body, locked into a faith that offers her no comfort, locked into a marriage that should have ended long ago. My grandmother’s voice is not beautiful, but it is true, and the words she cannot speak roll like a miracle off her tongue. Now my mother is singing, too, in her thin soprano, and there’s my father’s wavering baritone. My brother doesn’t sing, but he does shake the hair out of his eyes while my grandfather rolls the last morsel of dissolving sweetness around on his tongue.
I play on and on, verse after verse. I am overwhelmed with love for my life, for everyone in this room. It is exactly as the Greeks foretold. The artificial Christmas tree shines.