“Now, this could go badly. There’s a lot of room for interpretation, which basically means there’s a lot of room to interpret it badly. I think it has something to do with one’s emotional personality. Some people are just more trite. Though I don’t think that’s you.” He leans back into his chair and twiddles his fingers on the armrests. “Let’s do the first few measures.”
“Just start?”
“Half time?”
“Okay.”
I trace the path of the notes, my hands knowing where to go as I hop onto them like stones on a river. Four notes in, he stops me with a fingertip on my forearm and a sigh of exasperation. “No. Is that half time? Even slower, then.”
My shoulders rise at the comment, but I do what he says. His hand curls slightly over mine, obscuring my view, to stop my hands yet again with a comment about the shape of the ascending line, and again because of the time I put between each note, the weight of each one beneath my hands. Nothing is right. I play the same introductory measures over and over for the rest of the hour. Wondering how do-or-die this is has become a gut reaction, and as I play, I imagine him saying, “No, no, I’ve changed my mind. I can’t work with you.” Even though I passed his test, I know I’ve done well, these thoughts appear.
“Allow yourself to be a little more dramatic. Take some risks. Don’t worry. If it’s too outré” — his hand, just off to the side, waves the time, makes outlandish gestures, odd movements, as if adjusting minor currents in the air — “we can check that later.”
There’s one off-kilter chord that we play over and over. “More strength in the pinkie finger,” he says in a raised voice. “Hmm, maybe you should use the fourth.”
I try the fourth.
“Again,” he orders, like a drill sergeant.
I play it one more time.
“Again.”
I try the phrase once more, wondering what he’s looking for.
“Fine,” he says, gesturing for me to continue, then stopping me yet again just two measures later.
By the time we’re through, I feel like I’ve been slowly crumpled into a ball of paper, first by folding tiny corners, then folding those corners in. A systematic crushing. We’ve barely gotten past the first page. My cheeks ignite in shame. All the aunties are exchanging looks in my head.
He touches my arm and asks if I’m okay, and I shrug, pretending I am.
“Don’t be so uptight. Think of it like praying. Like something that you lose yourself in.”
“I don’t pray.”
He cocks his head at me. “But you wear a cross.”
I make a face. “My mother makes me.” I touch it. I know the way it feels — the warm metal, the dull points — more than the way it looks. I’ve worn it since my father got sick. For protection, my mother said. The few occasions when I’ve removed it, she told me to put it back on as if something bad would happen if I didn’t. Crosses are magical to her. For me it’s just a thing I have to do, like watering the roses. It’s just easier to have it on than to ruffle her.
He nods. “Turned off by Catholicism, then?”
“Like a lightbulb.”
He laughs. “I’m an ex-Catholic, too. Though so much of the music we’re playing, even if it isn’t religious, feels religious somehow. Nowadays our daily lives are so mundane. I can’t imagine anyone writing, or having the sort of gargantuan all-or-nothing feelings people must have had back then. Not with YouTube. And pop-up ads. And all that Insta-whatever and I-things. You know. Maybe if we cloistered ourselves from the Internet, people might be a little deeper, a little quieter.”
“Why did you quit being Catholic?”
“Well, it’s a beautiful religion,” he says. “But I didn’t like some of the ways it tries to get you to be good.”
“Exactly! Can’t we just keep the beautiful parts, and get rid of all the purgatory stuff?” There’s something about Paul that makes me talk about things I never talk about. Tash is a great friend, but religion is something we’d never discuss.
When my dad died, Tita Alta said he was burning in purgatory for his sins. At night I would think of my dad somewhere, perhaps in the hot core of the earth, unable to see light. Finally, I had to reject the whole thing: God, crosses, sins. I was too afraid all the time.
My mother, on the other hand, prayed even more after my dad died. She lives life like it’s a plank you walk until you either fall or jump off — a thing you do with caution. Like we’re supposed to still our very breathing, as if we’d lose our ability to if we actually enjoyed it.
“I wish they’d do away with all of that,” he says with a sharp look. “Purgatory, homophobia. It’s very cruel.” He rips a sheet of paper out of his notebook. “I also want you to listen to these.”
“All of them?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Are they on the Internet?”
“Some are, but there are a lot of recordings that have never been digitized. They’re still on CD, or on records. The school has a library if you can’t find them otherwise.” The school. He means the conservatory.
“Don’t you have to be a student there to use the library?”
“You just need permission, and then you have to call and they’ll mail you a card.”
He writes an email, and I call on my way home.
Chopin. The ballade. I finally get to play something I am completely in love with. I barely notice anything on the way home, barely notice I’ve made it to the door. Women’s voices singing through the front door pull me out of my thoughts. Mom’s novena prayer group meets every Friday, rotating from house to house. It must be our turn.
The room is stuffier than usual, and the voices meld softly together as I weave through the bodies. Prayer books rustle. Fans waft.
Mom touches my cheek in greeting. Rosary beads click as they sway. It smells of old lady perfume and hot wax. The thick flames of red votive candles, lit in glass cups, undulate to a rhythm that’s not in the song, the last song for the night. I know because I was brought to these things every Friday when I was a kid, and bored, and then dragged to them when I was older, still bored. They’ve been singing the same songs in the same order every Friday, and the last song, in Tagalog, is the saddest one. I don’t know what it means word for word, but I know what it means by its feeling.
Some of the women sound a little like they’re speaking, their voices deep from singing from their chests. Some sing like birds. Some bleat. The lady beside me warbles, her singing gravelly and thin.
There’s my dad’s picture beside the altar, off to the side, the one of him with me on his lap, looking fat and dumb. A strange feeling comes over me when I see it, one hard to pin down. My mother’s friends have crowded their small statues on the altar, close as chess pieces, porcelain and wooden dolls standing on pedestals with shiny fake hair, round cheeks, and red or green velvet capes embroidered and trimmed in metallic thread in doily-like patterns.
The song ends and it’s like a gate’s been opened. The women start to talk over each other. I weave past them and go straight into the kitchen, where foil-covered trays are laid out on the table. Score. I snatch up a paper plate and take a few spoonfuls of the sweet, custardy flan floating like a raft in a pool of syrup, noodles dotted with tightly curled little shrimp, some pork lumpia — this must have come from a caterer, because Mom never cuts the egg rolls so small — and some rice.