Leaning, Leaning Over Water (9 page)

“It’s the perfume,” I said. “Where she puts it. Right on the pulse.”

“lci! lci!”
Lyd said, jabbing her finger, and we doubled over, loving Rebecque.

We crouched down to settle in. The men were going back and forth to the washtubs for beer, the women dancing with one another’s husbands—except for Duffy and Rebecque. A log was kicked into the fire from one side and burst out the other. The laughter was shrill, edged with foolishness.

“They’re worse than we are,” I told Lyd, but that was okay. We knew who they were; we’d been eavesdropping on them for years. We just wanted to be there to make sure we knew what they were up to and that what they were up to was the same old thing.

Now the radio was playing “Jambalaya.” Everyone stopped and pointed glasses and bottles up into the air. They planted their feet and became a chorus over the rapids. They could not be said to be in harmony.

“They’re half snapped already,” Lyd said.

“Not Mom,” I said. “Look.”

She did have a drink in her hand and we knew it was gin and tonic but she wasn’t holding it in the air and she wasn’t
singing, either. She knew every showtune, every line from every musical, every radio song. But she didn’t shout her songs into the sky. Our mother sang privately, to herself and to her children. She’d been doing it since we were born and probably before that, too. In the kitchen, a tea towel wrapped around her waist because she couldn’t be bothered tying an apron. Our mother, her dark hair floating over her shoulders, her bolero drenched with stars.

Now, she set her drink on boards that had been propped on two logs, and looked through the circle of fire. She was by herself, away from the others who were singing, and she reached down into the paper shopping bag and started dropping corn, one cob, another, and another, into the boiler. She did this methodically, as if she were thinking about something else. And then she straightened, and looked through the fire again. I thought I saw her lips move but I wasn’t close enough to figure out what she was saying.

The members of the chorus, shouting to the treetops, arms around one another’s waists, were finding themselves very funny.

“What the hell!” It was Roy. He had his fly open and a dark stream had already arced into the bushes beside us. He turned his back one direction and Lyd and I twisted in the other.

“You little buggers,” he said. “Get the hell home before I tell your father.” He was fumbling with his pants. We thought he’d shout for Father right there and then.

“How did you get up here?” He hissed at us, his fly finally done up.

“We came the long way,” I said. “From down below. Are you going to tell?”

“You bet I’ll tell. Now get the hell out of here. Go back the same way you came.”

We bolted along the line of bushes, into a night as black as the waves, heading for the wall so we could follow its curve to the path. Lyd was in front this time and I was shouting.

“Where the hell did he come from? I thought they were all singing. Goddam him sneaking up like that. He almost peed all over us.”

We reached the wall and leaned against it. “Mother was saying something,” I told Lyd. “I was trying to see what she was saying.” I started shoving against the wall as hard as I could.

“Are you crazy?” Lyd said. “The wall’s going to fall.”

“You’re the one who’s crazy,” I said. “The wall’s a foot and a half thick. It’ll never fall.”

I kicked at it again, and shoved some more. But I gave up and we walked slowly home along the path, hearing the party behind us, never considering the hands groping up out of the black water as we skirted the booms, down below.

“Did you see Roy’s penis?” I said.

“No, did you?”

We started laughing hysterically, and ran the rest of the way, climbing in through our bedroom window, even though there was no need to with our parents up in the Pines. We laughed and laughed and laughed and got into our big double bed and didn’t draw a line down the middle of the bottom sheet or fight or swear at each other or make threats that would have to be resolved or carried out the next day. We went to sleep thinking of Roy telling or not telling, of almost being peed on, of Rebecque dancing in her tight red pants, of music floating up through the pines. We slept right through the blackest hours of the night and didn’t wake until we heard new sounds and crying and shouts in the dark. The barn door
banging and the hooks thrown out of the attic to the earth below.

“What,” Lyd said. “What.” She got out of bed and I could see her long legs in the moonlight as she jumped from one foot to the other. We went through the summer kitchen and stood at the back screen. All the lights had been turned on in the house. Rebecque walked in and pulled us both tightly against her chest.

“What,” Lyd kept saying. “What. Tell us what. Please, Rebecque, please tell us.”

Because we still didn’t know. Because we’d been sound asleep when Mother walked to the edge of the cliff, slept while her left foot tripped and crossed over her right, slept while she lost her balance and slipped silent over the edge, disappearing in full firelight view of her husband and her closest friends. Looking into Rebecque’s face we still did not know. And it would be some time before we would be able to imagine the weightlessness, the air rushing past the two spots of rouge on her cheeks, her head bobbing in the white-tipped waves, the breeze resting, now, in her long dark hair.

1955

M
other was in every shadow of the house. In the furniture that had moved with us from Darley and in what was left of the furniture abandoned by Duffy. She was under the winecoloured carpet that Lyd beat with the broom and inside the smoker with spool legs, and on the wicker settee in the porch. I thought of her, too, when I picked away at the keys or pounded chords on our old Heintzman piano. At night I dreamed the weight of it pressing through the floor, going down like a mahogany ship through waves of hardwood, sinking to the crawl space below. I dreamed unthinkables—worms, moles, voles, weasels, proofs of which I hoped never to see. I dreamed Mother trapped below, trying to reach up to get to us, and I awoke, terrified, in the dark.

Sometimes she stood in the doorway beside the long mirror
that had belonged to Duffy’s runaway wife. From the piano bench I could see the front of her but in the mirror there was no image of her back. With two fingers I picked out a melody she used to sing: “Norah, the Pride of Kildare.” But when I played—softly, so the others wouldn’t hear—I substituted Mother’s name. “Maura, sweet Maura,” I sang. “What mortal could injure a blossom so rare.”

Mimi’s Tante Florence had taught me how to chord and move my hands over the length of the keyboard, switching octaves. At home, Father stood behind me, hands resting on my shoulders, and said to anyone who might be visiting—there were people in the house constantly now—“She’s a natural. Listen to my child-between. She’s an absolute natural.” I knew without turning around that his eyes were filling, and I tried to squirm away.

When no one was around, I wedged my way
behind
the piano. It was beached kitty-corner at the end of the living room and had been left like that all the years since its abandonment by Duffy. “Too heavy to move,” Father said. “The floor can’t take the weight of it, shifting around.”

The back of the piano, unlike the deep rich stain of the front, was uncamouflaged—raw pale wood. I stood there, silent, scarcely breathing. It was like being inside an afterimage; holding a negative to the light, seeing mouth and eye sockets white and exposed beyond skin.

“He’d steal the coppers off a deadman’s eyes,” Father snapped as he crossed the room, and I realized with a shock that he didn’t know I was there. He stood for a moment in the doorway of the porch and said, “That puts the kibosh on
that.”

There were other days when he recited mournful snippets of Tennyson that lined up inside his head.

…my whole soul grieves,

At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves

He wandered sorrowfully from room to room and I could hardly bear to look at him. I heard him, though, from behind the piano.

I heard Eddie, too, when he ran through the living room and yelled, mysteriously, “I hate you!” And Lyd went banging through the house, from room to room, looking for me. “I can’t find her!” she shouted back to Father. “I know she’s hiding so she won’t have to do the dishes!” Under her breath she said, “Damn her.” And then she added, “Jesus Poêle,” a curse we’d recently admitted to our vocabulary.

Implicitly, from my piano bench in front, and from the triangle of space behind, I knew that the piano had begun to belong to me. Father seemed to know this, too, because he announced one day that he’d sent for a home-study course all the way from Dallas, Texas. I checked the atlas when he held up the ad from the
Star Weekly. Play Piano,
said the ad.
Easy Home Lessons.

“Who wants to learn?” Father said. “Properly.”

Lyd was not interested. Nor was Eddie. I was elected. I even volunteered. Well, I thought. I’ll come out from behind and take my place on the long bench and I will learn what real pianists know. Lyd and I argued over what I would be called—“Pee-ANN-ist,” or “PEE-a-nist,” which sounded too much like penis, to me.

While waiting for Dallas, Texas, I began to explore the piano as if I’d never seen it before. The mahogany bench was stuffed with old sheet music and I kneeled on the floor, propped the lid and shuffled through stacks of classical works, and songs popular at the turn of the century. I asked Duffy about these but he was surprised that they were there. “Maybe it was the mother of my runaway wife. Or the grandmother,” he said, when I showed him a signature written on a cover.

What fascinated me were the ribbons of black beads rising and falling across the page. This was the code I had to break. I began in earnest to limber my fingers against any flat surface I passed, even layers of shale when I sat on the banks of the river in front of our home.

In my sleep, Mother smiled as I chorded. But it was in my sleep, too, that I saw her in the river, a place she’d never been until her death except to wade up to her ankles while Eddie splashed around, or while she’d helped Lyd and me wash our hair. The dreams always ended the same way. Mother in the waves. Me waking and sitting upright, chills running through my body. I said to myself each time:
When I went to bed, she was here. When I woke up, she was gone.
It had happened that quickly. It was the difference between
this
and
that.

The old Heintzman had columnar legs and a hinged top. Its front panel was the size of a small door, which I could raise and rest on top of my head. This was like lifting a stage curtain and in one fell swoop, as Father said, catching the actors and prompters off guard. I plucked at the hammers, all
maple in colour and padded with green felt, and they plinked in a muted way as if somehow their musical journey had been incomplete. Even with the weight bearing down on my head, I never tired of being a voyeur to the Gepetto-like workshop inside my piano. I ran fingernails over taut wires—short and thin for high notes, tight thick coils for low. I pressed the ivory keys and guessed at corresponding gaps as the hammers fell forward. When I reached for the foot pedals, the entire keyboard rose and fell like big-bosomed breathing. To clean the keys I used a cloth dipped in a cereal bowl of warm milk carried, with careful ceremony, from the kitchen. It was Father who’d heard about the milk—he’d put out the word in the hotel one Friday night. I rubbed its whiteness into the keys until stickiness and smudges disappeared, and when I was satisfied, I tugged the lid and closed its clever concealing curve over the keyboard of my piano.

Back I went to the river, trying to sing, trying to practise songs I’d been picking out with one hand. My fingers tapped accompaniment on shale:

En roulant ma boule roulant,
En roulant ma boule.

Mrs. Perry had taught this to us during the last days of June when we’d been impatient to get out of school. We’d been cooped up, all the grades in one room, moist waves of early summer heat wafting through the screenless windows. Mrs. Perry knew we were fed up. She had taught us “Riding on a Donkey,” too, and we’d raced about the school yard shouting:

Were you ever in Quebec,
Stowing timber on a deck
Where there’s a king with a golden crown
Riding on a donkey?

Our new school was supposed to be ready in the fall; it was even rumoured that for every two grades, there would be a new teacher. At one time this had mattered. Now, I didn’t care if I ever went back to school.

When the course materials arrived from Dallas, Texas, Father was right there to unpack the contents. Lyd was there, too, but she would not look me in the eye. I knew she didn’t want anything to do with the lessons, especially as it meant reporting to Father. A stutter of doubt blipped through me along with what I suddenly saw as an extra burden, an invisible lifeburden stuck to the contents of this box.

The name of company and course was
Play Piano, Eighty Easy Lessons,
and the lessons were divided into ten folders. Two sheets of paper had been inserted under the cover of Lesson One. The first was to say that a place would be held for Trude King—there was my name in print—in the Music Hall of Fame. I imagined some Dallas, Texas, musical space and thought of my triangle behind the piano, its dust rolls and its raw wood.

The second was a testimonial:

Dear Director:

For a long time our unfortunate daughter, Clara, has been a problem. My wife and I asked ourselves
many times if we had done something wrong. She had no interests; she had no friends; she received poor grades in school. I am not exaggerating when I say we were more than a little worried. We managed to locate and buy an old piano, and hired a blind man to tune it. Then, we sent for
Play Piano.
At first, Clara reacted the way she always did, without interest. But her attitude changed the moment she dug into the box. Now, she plays like a natural.

I suppose you’ve already guessed what I’m going to say next. Clara can sit at the keyboard and play “Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes” until it would break your heart. At school, her teachers are rubbing their eyes. Believe me, I’m going to tell everyone I know about
Play Piano.
Our daughter is on Lesson Seventeen and going strong.
Play Piano
has changed her life.

Faithfully yours,
Mr. X.

A part of me hunkered down. I would ignore Lyd. It was not so easy to ignore Father, his face releasing hope. Somewhere, I told myself, Clara is teaching herself
Eighty Easy Lessons
on an old piano tuned by a blind man. This very moment she might be running through “Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes,” for old time’s sake. As I thought about her, I knew one thing for certain. Just as surely as Clara had escaped her fate, I was being drawn into mine.

When the others left me alone, I began to inspect the folders. Alternating with the text were pictures of couples or partygoers grouped about a piano. Never an upright like ours, but a baby grand with a propped lid.
Baby grand,
I whispered, loving the sound.
Baby grand.

The women in the pictures looked sideways to the camera. They wore floral-patterned dresses and dark lipstick and had page-boy hair. Mother had worn her hair like that for a time, but mostly she’d pinned it in a vertical roll, for the Spanish look. Two weeks after Mother’s funeral, Rebecque had come to the house on a Sunday after we’d come home from Hull where we’d been to church. Father had asked her to help sort out Mother’s clothes. Duffy took Father and Eddie to the end of the backyard, where we had a horseshoe pit, and the clang of horseshoes against the iron peg paused and rang through the screens while Rebecque began to go through Mother’s closet and dresser drawers.

Lyd and I sat glumly on Mother’s side of the bed. We were supposed to tell Rebecque what we wanted to keep, what we wanted out of the way. The jewellery, we divided into two small heaps on the bedspread. There were a few sweaters we could wear, a cardigan, a short coat for Lyd. We did not look at the party dresses in the plastic wardrobes, and told Rebecque we’d decide on those another day. We did not want the rest. But at the last moment, through Rebecque’s tact and kindness, I made a leap for two of Mother’s long-sleeved blouses—a rayon and a silk—just as Rebecque was folding them and placing them in the bag.

“Those are too old,” Lyd said. “Way too old for you.”

She was right. One was a soft pale pink; the other, a sheer off-white. When Mother had worn them, her slip and bra
straps had shown through. But I didn’t want them for wearing. I gave no explanation, and neither Lyd nor Rebecque argued.

Later, I hung them at the end of our own long closet. I put them beside the stones of the chimney where they would always be warm. When I was alone, I walked into the closet and stood between the blouses, my face pressed against them. I believed that I could smell my mother. The scent of her, her bits of rouge, her perfume, even a hint of deodorant were in those blouses and I stood there, drawing her in, through the dark.

As I continued to look through the folders from
Play Piano,
I read other letters printed at the beginnings of lessons as if to spur me on. These were from both men
and
women. The men played as a hobby or to entertain friends after trying days at the office or when they relaxed after being on the road. One woman planned to become a concert pianist after she finished being a housewife. All of them swore that
Play Piano
had changed their lives.

At the bottom of the box I found a long black-and-white chart to slide in behind the keys. Each lettered key showed me how to tell one note from another. Lesson One promised that before I could say “Jack Robinson,” I would no longer have to rely on this chart, which was only a prop to get me started.

The chart had to be centred at middle C, and from the beginning I sensed this to be the most important key on my piano. It was my favourite; in C I recognized a core, a touchstone for all musicians, a lighthouse that beckoned, when we floundered offshore. All other keys existed only as they related to middle C.

I spent days and weeks filling in exercise sheets, shading notes, whipping through the first eight lessons so I could move
on to folder number two. I stowed the chart-prop in the bench and never looked at it again. I tackled “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and learned the words to all the verses. I began to skip whole pages that did not interest me.

What
did
interest me was reading about the people who’d studied before.
Last night, I attended a concert,
a woman wrote,
and I was careful to watch the posture of the pianist. He knew how to stay alert but relaxed at the keyboard.

I had never been to a concert except for the Christmas concerts at Stone, my one-room school. I sat at the piano and thought of the words
alert but relaxed.
I flung out my arms and tried to let go. I was to think clearly about my problems—this was the message I read in Lesson Nine.

I knew my problems. One of them was that I’d given up on counting. I’d made some attempt to learn whole notes, quarters, sixteenths (a sixteenth is no longer than a grunt, I read), but counting did not interest me and I made up my mind to play everything by ear. This meant I had to find other ways to learn melody. Knowing nothing of my decision, Father tried to boost my attempts to learn. On weekends, he stood behind me, his hands resting heavily on my shoulders. “Keep playing,” he said. “Don’t stop, even if you make a mistake. Keep up the beat! Keep up the beat!” One Saturday, he took the bus to Hull and crossed the river to Ottawa and went to Orme’s on Sparks Street. He came home with sheet music for “The Whiffenpoof Song,” and a march and two-step, “The Midnight Fire Alarm.”