I feel a stab of guilt. “I’m home safe.” I wiggle my fingers. “See, all ten fingers and toes. Virginity still intact.” Her eyes widen, and immediately I regret the joke. Another stab of guilt. “It’s a nice neighborhood,” I say feebly.
“How did you get there? That’s an hour and a half away.”
“I took the BART.”
“The BART?” She’s repeating this as if she’s having trouble understanding the words.
I chew, growing impatient. “It was easy.”
“You can’t just run off like that by yourself. You don’t know what will happen.”
“Well, I have to go if I’m going to go to a good college.”
“But you’re four-point-oh.” A gleam of pride wiggles out beneath her knitted brows.
“That’s not enough.” We both knew that. Grades aren’t enough. Math Bowl seems pretty average. But a thing like winning piano competitions, actual competitions, that will make you special.
We eat without speaking for a while, the slippery noodles laced with ginger and onion slowly filling my belly with comfort. She’s probably thinking about all the things that could have happened, running through every scenario — bombs at the BART station, masturbators in alleyways, Armageddon. I wish she’d stop watching Fox News.
She delicately, methodically, tears her meat apart with a spoon and fork. I give up and just eat my drumstick with my hand.
“I was careful. It was fine. It’s during the day,” I say, reminding her with my voice that I’m still here. Nothing bad has happened to me.
“How much does it cost?” she asks.
“A hundred ten.”
“An hour?”
“He’s one of the best teachers in the area. Of course he costs that.”
She shakes her head. Her face mirrors my own shock when I was first told his rates. Only, I adjusted. She makes no effort to. “Ay yi yi, Claire.”
“Well, it’s not like we’re paying for Vassar,” I say, standing up with my bowl. I dump the chicken bones and the noodles in the trash and get the water running.
Last fall, the inside of our mailbox shone with glossy college brochures. Sarah Lawrence. Wesleyan. Vassar. The University of Chicago. Reed. Oberlin. Each one looked like a different world of soft-cheeked, serious, pure-faced kids in hoodies and sneakers, perched on the stairwells of brick buildings. The Vassar brochure had particularly cute boys, but Oberlin seemed more like my place. It had a real conservatory, and snow. For weeks, I fell asleep looking at them, until one night my mother woke me up as she turned out my bedroom light. None of these, she said, were affordable, or possible. I cried, but I didn’t throw away the brochures. I shoved them under the bed, and every once in a while I’d sift through them again. Maybe, at one of these schools, I’d be happy. I wouldn’t be so out of place for liking books more than video games, and classical music more than hip-hop, and J. D. Salinger more than J. K. Rowling.
With piano lessons, and time, and work, maybe I could win a competition or two, or even a scholarship. A school like Oberlin wouldn’t have to be a fantasy.
I feed the dog. The food’s barely in the bowl before he digs in, his sun-faded pink plastic dish grating rhythmically against the concrete every time he licks it. He smells so real and funky, you can’t pretend he isn’t there, but his fur is nice and soft. My father’s dog.
If Dad were still alive, these lessons wouldn’t be a problem. He’s the one who loved music, who insisted I take lessons.
When I was really little, the piano was just a toy, but I felt the notes in my body, rippling down my arms, pulling a twitch out of the skin between my first and second toe. The waves of sound shimmered through my flesh into my bones.
Then it filled the quiet when my mother, who used to have more time for me, who took me to dance lessons and the park, who read me stories at bedtime, was consumed with caring for my dad. But the piano was there, alert, and it always responded to me. At that time in our house, it was nice to have a response, even if it only reflected what I was doing, no more. It was neutral. Made me know who I was, like a fish that needs the motion of water to know what the world is.
I was barely aware of what was happening to my dad at first, and then, around the time I was seven, the world finally became clear. He started staying in the guest bedroom on the first floor because it had gotten too hard to climb the stairs. Around this time I started to really play, and my dad took notice.
It was summer, before he was too sick to stand and was still himself, before he had to quit his job but would often stay home and sleep.
I was picking out the tune to the song from Sleeping Beauty — “Both hands!” he used to say when he told the story — and singing to myself.
“Do you know who wrote that? Tchaikovsky,” he said. And he moved me over on the bench and played it from memory, and I sang the tune from the Disney cartoon. He showed me the left hand, and I picked it up. And that very evening, when Mom got home, he told her I should take lessons, and Mom, by then, couldn’t say no to him.
We talked about music a lot — more and more as he got sicker. He made my mother take me to lessons. He played Bach, Schubert, Liszt, Scarlatti, Haydn on the stereo, looking at me meaningfully. Like he was filling me up with them.
By the time he died, I was twelve. I could play the Sleeping Beauty waltz — with pedal, both hands. I played Mozart fantasies, Bach cantatas, and the “Aria” from the Goldberg Variations, which he asked me to play more often the sicker he got. It had been so hard to learn. The timing, the way it sometimes seemed only just barely to hang together, and threatened at times to fall apart.
After he died, playing started to feel like an entire world. A gentler world. It soothed me.
I don’t have a lot of clear memories of him from before he was sick — not as many as I wish I had. He would let me swing from his arm. He used to rest his hand on the top of my head, which he did, I think, more to calm himself than me. He had moody eyes that scared me if they stayed on me too long. He was quiet, but both my parents were, and now my mother and I are. Comfortably quiet together. Like we know each other so well, we don’t always have to talk.
I never took myself seriously enough to think I could be an artist. Be the thing I deep down want to be. And now that there is that possibility, I really want to see if I can do it.
I launch the second wave of attack on my mom in front of the television. “If you weren’t so afraid, you’d see how good for me this could be.”
We’re watching television, sitting right next to each other, so close that half of me has sunk between the cushions like a tire in mud. Old issues of Vanity Fair gleam on the coffee table. Her robe is velvety and smells of powder, and it’s almost too warm, the way it was when I was a kid, burrowed under her blankets in the morning.
“And how much is the train?”
I cringe. “Around nine dollars a trip.”
She clicks her tongue.
“If you meet him, you’ll see that it’s worth it.”
Her thumb is on the remote, skipping over the news, commercials for vacuum cleaners, pauses on a legal drama we sometimes watch. “Next week,” she says, nodding.
I punch the air in silent triumph. She smiles, makes the sign of the cross, whispers a word.