Thank You for the Music (6 page)

I
WAS TWELVE WHEN A WOMAN NAMED
A
NNE
moved into the apartment across the hall from us. My mother and I let her settle in for a week before we walked to her door with a pound cake and welcomed her to the building, though I thought an extension of sympathy may have been more appropriate, considering what surrounded her. The building itself wasn't so bad—typical brick five-story apartment house across from a playground in Pittsburgh. But the tenants, ourselves included, were unpredictable. Our landlord was a hippie named Bert who had inherited millions from his father; Bert didn't mind problem tenants. He didn't even evict Olive Sibley, an old woman on the first floor who had birds, wild and domestic, careening around the empty rooms of her apartment, the windows open in case they cared to leave, which it seemed they didn't. Olive Sibley with her wild white hair in the lobby by the mailboxes grasping your hand and whispering her name in a confidential tone that implied a world of outsiders who'd never be privileged to hear it. Sometimes you would see Olive sitting sidesaddle on the ledge of her open window, waving like a woman on a ship moving away from land. Other times she looked furious, alone in her black coat by the fence at the playground, cursing under her breath. When kids made fun of her, my mother scolded them. “She's a human being!” she'd yell.

On the third floor lived another human being, the widower Irving Rooch, and his new wife, Natasha, and the four blond, feral Rooch boys, who went barefoot into November. Irving Rooch was friendly, and worked hard in a bar, but once he tried to saw the doors off his Chrysler in the middle of the night. My mother had yelled down, “Hey, what's going on down there?”

Irving Rooch had yelled back, “I'm tryin' to saw the doors off my car!”

Telling the story the next morning to my father, my mother ended with, “Poor Irv's had a hard life.” It was her highest compliment, I see now.

I didn't like the place when I was twelve, I wanted something else, something like Alicia Montgomery's duplex on Darlington Street with its enormous, spotless kitchen, and the father reading
National Geographic
and talking about the habitat of prairie dogs at the dinner table, and the mother brushing your hair at her marble vanity, then taking you to the Carnegie art museum on Saturdays. “So I have a daughter who likes going to
museums
?” my mother said, in strange wonder, when I told her about my time with the Montgomerys.

Now that I'm a grown woman living amid the busily employed, who duck in and out of apartments as if the air itself is to be avoided, I'd welcome back Olive and Irving.

Or Anne, I'd welcome Anne, though she was much quieter. The day we gave her the pound cake she smiled thought fully in her doorway, her dark blue eyes looking first at my mother, then at me. Then she spoke: “How nice. Come on in.”

I was already intrigued by this woman with the silver-streaked hair who seemed clothed in silence. Her place appealed to me because I was a container of chaos and the rooms were stark with definition, taming a few layers of that chaos as I drank them in. She had a white baby grand piano in one room. Nothing else but a corner table with a vase of wildflowers. We followed her into the kitchen that smelled of oil paints. Covered canvases lined up against one wall. A painting of a pair of old boots kicked into the sky hung on another wall.

Anne wasn't chattering. I was used to chattering women. Was she angry or just odd? She asked us to sit and have tea, so we did, though my mother was strictly a coffee person; she was twenty-eight and had four kids; coffee got her through.

The kitchen brimmed with sunshine that seemed not to belong to Pittsburgh. It was French sunshine, I felt. Or English. Sunshine I'd seen only on
Children's Film Festival
on rainy Sunday afternoons. I imagined a history for Anne that involved a village, herself a child walking down cobblestone streets with Skinny and Fatty, the kids from one of those imported films.

Anne cut the pound cake, facing the window. Her dark hair was pulled back with a red rubber band. She poured tea into thick cups, the sort you'd find in an old luncheonette. Nobody spoke; she poured, we watched.

“So, are you originally from Pittsburgh?” my mother finally said—always her first question.

“Oh no. I grew up in the west until I was fourteen, then moved to New Jersey.” Anne looked at my mother, and then at me. We stared at each other quite openly, until I grew shy and looked away.

“I can't imagine,” my mother said, as if Anne had explained she'd come from the moon.

“So you've been here all your life?” Anne said.

“All my life.”

“That must be something. That connection you must feel to this place.”

My mother said, “Uh-huh.”

“I don't think I can even imagine what it would be to have that sense of home,” Anne said. She made it sound like a compliment and my mother took it that way.

“Well thanks. I just can't imagine not living here where I grew up,” she said. “My sisters, my cousins, we all stayed.”

“It's beautiful, I think,” Anne said.

My mother smiled. “So you're a painter and a piano player.”

Anne was looking at my hands now. She wasn't answering. My mother finally said again, “A painter and a piano player.”

“Yes, yes. Look at those hands! Those hands should play the piano.”

We all looked at my hands on the solid wooden table. For a moment they seemed to glow from within.

My mother held up her own hands. “And look at mine! Dishpan hands! These hands should go wash the dishes!” She began to gulp down the rest of her tea.

Anne watched her, a bit puzzled, and I blushed, embarrassed for my mother, wishing for a moment that she was not connected to me, fearing that Anne would judge me for it. My mother was not an educated woman. She had graduated early from high school at sixteen to marry my father. She read fat romance novels. She had never been to a museum, and the art she hung was made of yarn, or those paintings of girls with the big heads and enormous black eyes set low in their faces. At twelve I was beginning to develop a snobbery I didn't understand.

“I just love music,” my mother was saying as she rose from the table. “Do you play any Burt Bacharach?”

“Oh, sure, I could,” Anne said, and when her eyes flashed over to me, for a moment I was fearful that she was mocking my mother.

“I just love his stuff,” my mother said and sighed, and took her teacup to the sink. “So, welcome!” she said, and then we were leaving.

Back in our own kitchen my mother said, “Another odd duck for the building, huh?”

I shrugged.

“She's nice, though, huh?”

“Yep.”

Later I heard my mother tell her friend Lorine on the phone, “We got a new neighbor. A mixture of a nun and an artsy-fartsy.”

Nun because she wore no blue eye shadow, no lipstick, no bleach in her hair, no nail polish, I supposed, like my mother and Lorine. And she had that quiet about her whose source was surely the luxury of her own reflections. Not that the nuns who taught me had any of that.

“So do you want to take piano lessons?” Anne said. It was fall, I was in my school uniform bouncing a ball on the sidewalk. Though it was warm, Anne was in a coat that looked like an Olive Sibley coat, and for a moment I took my affection back. I didn't want her to be too strange. I wanted her to walk that thin line between strange and ordinary, or to be ordinary and secretly wonderful. Why was she in that winter coat? And why did her eyes look so urgent?

“I don't think my mom would let me,” I said. “Too much money.”

“I'd give them for free, if you'd let me paint you.”

“Paint me? You want to paint me?”

“You'd make a great subject, I think.”

“I'll have to ask my mom.”

“Of course. Just let me know.” She smiled, and I felt again my rush of curious affection for her. I watched her walk away, her dark silver-streaked braid hanging down her back, swinging with her sturdy stride.

Later I jumped up and down in our kitchen with my hands folded into prayer. “Please oh please can I ma can I ma?”

My mother just looked at me. Maybe she was envying my energy.

“She said I'd make a great subject!” I whined.

Lorine was at the table watching this display; my mother had set Lorine's hair, as she did every Thursday, and now a net covered her pink foam curlers. Her husband, a man I'd grown up calling Uncle Lou, had moved the year before to Chicago with a twenty-two-year-old girl, leaving Lorine with Lou Junior and Mary Pat, thin, pale, long-fingered children whose claim to fame was that neither of them had ever sneezed. Lorine would sit with them when they had colds and coach them. “A-chhooo!” she'd say, and the confused children would repeat the word.

“I don't know. What do you think, Lorine? Should I let her take piano from the woman across the hall?”

“I'd beware,” Lorine said, eyebrows raised so the whole head of curlers lifted a bit. I could always count on not being able to count on Lorine.

“She is a little different,” my mother said.

“Isn't everyone a little different?” I argued. They ignored me. Mary Pat and Lou Junior were pushing matchboxes on the floor with my little brothers, using my feet as hills.

“You kids go get lost, get out of here, scram,” Lorine told them, and they ignored her, as usual.

“Please, I really want to play piano! I'll learn how to play ‘This Guy's in Love' and ‘Knock Three Times' and ‘I Beg Your Pardon.'”

My mother looked down at me with those pale green eyes weighted with what I can recognize now as the deep fatigue that ruled her young life. “I guess you can give it a try,” she said.

Lorine sighed. “You spoil her, Shirley. The kid gets whatever she wants.”

Lorine was one of those women with so many regrets she couldn't stand looking at any version of the girl she had once been, a girl who still had choices. I didn't understand that then; I thought she hated me for mysterious reasons, or because I refused to pull my shoulders back when she reminded me I had crummy posture and would end up with scoliosis. But Lorine was staying for dinner; sloppy joes, her favorite, my mother tossing the meat with a wooden spoon, radio playing. My father would sit in a bar down on the South Side until eight or so; Lorine and my mother would sit in the kitchen and drink cheap wine called Night Train, and I'd be expected to come to the aid of the little kids, should a crisis arise. That night I accepted my role gladly, spinning the kids around in circles in the playground across the street, daydreaming about my new life with Anne the artist, my eyes on the moon and the big black sky.

After my first few lessons with that elegant woman (she wore delicate wire-frame glasses when she taught and afterward fed me expensive chocolates and good coffee—my first cup), I began practicing piano at my school in a large empty gym, with the lights off. Down the hall was the brightly lit pool where girls my age swam; I could hear the echo of their laughter and shrieks, imagine their long legs kicking underwater or shivering purple by the poolside while Sister Thomas Aquinas, in full habit, paced with her whistle by the pool's edge. The thick smell of chlorine wafted down the hall; I remembered it stinging my eyes and turning my hair green the year before. This year I couldn't take all that locker-room nakedness, the peeling off of wet suits, the goose bumps and gawkiness, the dread that my own body was horribly abnormal in some way. I'd grown four inches in a year. My best friend had moved. I was determined not to replace her with some new sidekick. Her absence served as a presence. I played the piano picturing her buried under the leaves of Ohio. Her new school, she had written, was a
hell-hole full of morons.
She had included unflattering cartoon versions of everyone she'd met, all of them drooling, or cross-eyed and saying, “Duh, what's my name?”

I'd fool around on the keys for hours, until the streetlights poured in through the high barred windows and told me it was dark outside. The wet-haired girls from the pool would parade by the open doors of the gym, laughing and talking, having no idea I was there behind the piano in the dark.

Still, Anne was not impressed with my musical ability. I didn't have a very fine sense of rhythm, and I was really only interested in learning pop songs, sad songs like “Fire and Rain,” and finally Anne gave up on teaching me scales. But she was excited with me as someone to paint.

The first time she painted me I had to wear an old red dress that smelled faintly of vinegar. It had a lace collar that had yellowed. I thought it was a terrible dress, but it wasn't uncomfortable. I sat there on a simple blue chair and watched her eyes peer and squint at me, watched her face take me in with concentration I'd never seen before. I felt such acute self-consciousness of my own body as an object in that red vinegar dress I almost got up and ran around the room in an attempt to shake myself back into myself. But something always shifted; I relaxed under her mysterious gaze. I was freed, perhaps because the world of conventional judgments felt far away in that place. I was made of shapes, and color.

In that first small painting I was a cross between myself and an Edvard Munch girl with all kinds of furniture sliding toward me, a window behind my head where a tiny brass lamp floated in the pink, surrealist sky. “Now don't look at this painting as if it's a mirror,” Anne assured me. “I'm not a realist.” My knees were bony as an old woman's, I thought, terrible looking, and my shoulders were full of tension, and my neck too long and pale. She had rendered the buds I had for breasts accurately, I thought, embarrassed. But she had given me such beautiful eyes. Much better than my real eyes. So luminous, with such depth, the more I looked at them the more I was able to see how insignificant the bony knees were.