You can tell a lot about a family by the very first thing you see when you walk in their front door. Maybe it’s a photo of their dog. Maybe it’s an overflowing coat closet with muddy boots poking through the doors.
When you walk into my house, the first thing you see is my mother’s Steinway concert grand piano. My mom once had a full-ride scholarship to Juilliard. She even played in Carnegie Hall. Then she got nerve damage in her left hand.
It took her a long time, she told me, to find a new dream, but she realized that, like in music, you can say silent, special things to people with cakes and cookies. I’m not exactly sure what she means, because how can you say things to people without actually, you know, saying them? Anyway, she discovered that an only half-useful left hand doesn’t hold you back as much in a kitchen as it does on a piano keyboard. She’s even figured out how to manage most of the cake decorating with only her right hand, and she has an assistant at her bakery who helps, too.
She still likes to play piano sometimes, but she gets frustrated when her left hand won’t do what she wants it to. She especially loves to play when my big sister, Nonny, is here. Mom can play the right hand if Nonny can do the left.
Both Mom and Nonny won a piano contest called the Colorado State Young Musicians contest when they were twelve. When they were my age.
I always wanted to win the Colorado State Young Musicians contest when I was twelve.
I wanted to be Mom’s left hand, too.
But here’s the thing about music and me.
There’s something that happens to my muscles when I look at piano music. It starts in my shoulders, then spreads down my arms and to my gut. My shoulders become stiff and hard to move, and my hands get cold, and I suddenly have to pee really bad.
Sometimes people talk about deer in headlights like it’s a cliché, but I read about it once in a magazine, and it’s very scientific. Adrenaline floods their body and literally makes their muscles freeze even though a big old truck’s about to blam right into them. I think maybe when my brain looks at piano music, it turns into a stupid, frightened baby deer that only sees an oncoming big-rig.
I really tried. For three years I took piano lessons, complete with frozen-brain practicing sessions and one especially jaw-clenching recital that totally flopped. So when I was ten I finally quit.
Afterward, when I wasn’t turned to stone on the piano bench anymore, I sometimes talked to Beethoven and Bach in my head, asking them why they had to make it so hard for people like me. Sometimes it felt like they looked down at me in their white wigs, pointed their fingers, and laughed.
Nonny is really good at music.
I don’t think Beethoven and Bach laugh at her.
You might think this means that I’m jealous of Nonny because she can do all these things I can’t do. Not just piano. She can also help Mom in the kitchen without breaking bowls or messing things up. And she can do the monkey bars. I’ve never been able to do the monkey bars.
Let me tell you the truth about Nonny.
Nonny is my safe person.
She’s the person I can talk to who never makes me feel like I’ve said the wrong thing. She’s even better and more helpful to talk to than the people in my head. Of course, my parents are also good to talk to. They never make me feel dumb when I say things, but they still sometimes get that look like I’m so precious or growing up so fast. I’m still their little girl, you know?
Then there’s my sister, Nonny.
Her real name is Naomi, but I couldn’t say it when I was little, and so now everyone calls her Nonny. She’s twenty, almost nine years older than me, but she doesn’t talk to me like I’m her baby sister. She has long, long dark hair and a clear complexion pale as starlight, and she’s married to a man named Thomas who has the best laugh and the broadest shoulders and can still lift me over his head with one arm. He’s got deep, night-sky skin, what Nonny calls a wrinkly-eyed Idris Elba smile, and he once beat my dad at Boggle, which is super hard to do. They met last fall, at Nonny’s first semester away at college. They fell in love fast, like gravity pulling two moons into orbit around each other, and then got married in May, right before the end of the school year. And right before Nonny’s twentieth birthday. I think my parents were really nervous about her getting married so young, except then we met Thomas. Then they weren’t nervous.
Let me tell you a story about my sister.
A couple of years ago, during Nonny’s senior year of high school, I got hearing aids. I didn’t know that kids at school would think they were weird until after I got them. Nobody made fun of me or anything. Then at the beginning of last year when I was on the playground at lunch I started talking to these two girls with bangle bracelets up both their arms, and they were nice but after a few minutes one of them said, “Sorry, I’m not really used to playing with people who wear hearing aids.” They went over to the swings and I went and ate my lunch in the library.
Want to know the weird part? I didn’t even feel bad about it. At least not at first. I just thought, Okay, and I went and read a book about the discovery of penicillin. (Penicillin was an accident, by the way.)
When I got home, though, I had more time to think about what had happened. That wasn’t so good. I didn’t cry or anything, but when I was done with my homework I couldn’t think of anything to do except sit on my bed and feel very, very small. Sometimes you feel like you could shout and scream so loud your lungs would burst, and to the rest of the world it would only be about as loud as a mosquito fart.
Then Nonny came home from school. She came in and said hello to me, and she could tell that I wasn’t having the greatest day ever, and then I told her what had happened and she paused for a moment, but not for too long, and said, “Wow, they must not know very many interesting people at all.”
Then she brought me into her room and we blasted Celtic Woman (her favorite) and danced around with hairbrush microphones.
You may not think that Celtic Woman is good blasting-dancing music.
If you think that, let me tell you something.
You’re wrong.
Especially if you’re singing with Nonny.