Leaning, Leaning Over Water

by Frances Itani

  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, whi
pping 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.”

  “The Whiffenpoof” was so complicated I could only bang out the top notes of the right hand. Father stood behind, filling in with “Baas” when I couldn’t go on. “The Midnight Fire Alarm” had no words, so with this we had to take our chances. Father stomped his feet in marching order behind my back. “Keep up the beat!” He clapped his hands and drummed on the mahogany and it took two weekends to get past the first twelve bars. After one of our Saturday afternoon sessions, Eddie said, as if he were trying to spare me, “Your playing stinks, you know.” But he said it with pity because he and I knew that in our family we never gave up.

  We had been checking the progress of the new school all summer and twice Lyd and I had walked the mile and a half to watch its angles and contours take shape. It was in a kind of no man’s land between village and country, hunkered in the middle of a long field. We would still have to take the orange bus, but now every Protestant child for miles around—village and country—would be brought to this place. We would study here until grade eight. After that, we would be transferred to the high school, in Hull.

  Lyd and I were worried. Living beside the river as we did, we rarely saw our classmates during the summer. When it was time to go back to school we did not want anyone feeling sorry for us.

  Workmen at the site warned us to stay away from the earth pit of the gym and auditorium, so we peered in along the front of the school through taped windows, and guessed which rooms would be ours. We’d heard that the grade eights would not have to share space and Lyd was certain that she’d be in the first room down the hall from the office.

  Eventually, an announcement arrived in the mail to say that teachers had been hired and classrooms were finished. Inside work on the gym would not be complete until November. The date had been set in that month for an opening ceremony.

  I continued to practise at my piano. On Saturdays, Father was behind me, hands pressing down on my shoulders. I was skipping from one folder to another now, relying less and less on any ability to read notes and more and more on my own ear. At night, in my sleep, Mother looked on from the doorway by the mirror, while I pumped the pedals and pounded the keys.

  It had been weeks since Lyd and I had spoken of Mother, though words sometimes flew out of our mouths:

  You’re supposed to soak that for ten minutes to get the dirt out.

  How do you know?

  Mom said.

  You’re not supposed to drink tea before bed. It keeps you awake.

  Who said?

  Mom.

  Then we walked away to separate parts of the house, each avoiding the other’s face because it looked like one’s own—stricken.

  At the end of summer, everything speeded up. My birthday came and went and I invited Mimi for supper. After we’d eaten the cake, I went to the river and cried.

  “Don’t worry,” Mimi said. “It isn’t true that if you cry on your birthday, you cry all year.” She added, soberly, “It was like this when my father died, I remember. Come to my place and we’ll laugh,” she said. “You can practise French with Grand-mere. You can put your fingers around her little wrist.”

  But I went back to my own house and stood in the closet, the blouses brushing my face in the dark.

  In September we walked through the doors of our new school and I learned that I had not one but two new teachers, though the second was only temporary. My classroom teacher was Mr. Crawley—the first male teacher I’d ever met. He had a flabby face and a big behind and hair the colour of sand. He constantly took us by surprise because of his mood changes and I worried all the time I was in his class. He stalked us backwards between rows, his back to the blackboard, and tried to surprise us face to face. Very quickly, he earned the name Crawfish. What set me on edge was that no matter what I did to stay out of his way, he hovered around my desk. I would turn around and he’d be there; I’d step into the room and he’d be behind me, the hairs of a tiny moustache sprouting over his upper lip. I did not like looking at him because he had what Lyd and I called the sorrowful eye and he had picked me to fix it on.

  My second teacher, but only on Friday afternoons, was Miss Tina. I never learned her last name. Miss Tina was as kind as Crawfish was unpredictable. At the beginning of the year, fourteen girls, aged twelve and thirteen, were rounded up and led to the unfinished gym through an outside door. Although the gym itself had not been completed, the stage at the end was ready for use. We walked across a row of planks and up a side flight of steps to reach its blond hardwood floor.

  The reason the fourteen of us had been chosen was because, at the opening ceremony in November, we were to be part of the entertainment. We were told that we were going to learn a dance. To teach us, a real dance teacher had been found. The lessons were free. No one knew where Miss Tina had come from but she told us it was her job to convince us that we could coordinate our limbs.

  We could hear sawing noises above the ceiling at the far end of the gym. During that first lesson, fourteen of us leaned into the wall of bricks and stared. Miss Tina was the first adult woman we’d ever seen who had no breasts. Not only did she have no breasts, she wore no bra. What she did wear was a skimpy black leotard that accentuated the flat board of her chest.

  Tap tap tap, shuffle shuffle. Miss Tina darted, relaxed and let go. She called to us, “In out, in out, tap tap tap.” So busy were her lower limbs she did not seem to notice that she had no breasts.

  To my astonishment, my own feet, after an hour of awkward tries, began to shuffle in time with the feet of the other girls. Miss Tina opened a portable record player on stage and set and reset a record she’d brought with her while she coaxed us step by step. We would not be required to buy tap shoes, she explained, because that would mean unnecessary expense for our parents. “What we’re learning are shuffle-taps,” she said. “We just keep time to the music and point our toes.”

  The top-hat piece we were working on was “Pretty Baby.” I knew the song because Mother used to sing it, but it was one I’d never tried to play at home on my piano. By the end of the lesson, we’d begun to like Miss Tina. And she actually liked us, we could tell.

  We walked back across the planks as slowly as we could so we wouldn’t have to return to our home rooms before taking the bus. Most of us in the dance group were in Crawfish’s sixseven class. Lyd would be waiting for me outside the door of her room, the grade eights. We tried to stay together to ward off the pitying glances thrown our way by our classmates. We knew that tragedy had happened in our family but we wanted to
be treated the same as everyone else. Mrs. Perry, who had the grade twos now in the new school, stopped me in the hall and, in front of everyone, hugged me close and said how sorry she was about my mother. In the lunchroom the same day, a grade eight girl named Gladys carried over half a sardine sandwich and put it on my lap. I had my own sandwich and hated the crunch of spines in sardines but I didn’t know what else to do but eat it.

  The most surprising thing of all was that we were expected to carry on. Make our lunches at night, go to school the next morning. Come home, do our homework. Go to bed and back to school in the morning again. I could not, though I tried, remember the last time Mother had touched me—to put her hand to my cheek, or to stand me in front of her knees while she sat and brushed my hair.

  At the end of the third lesson, Miss Tina told our little dance troupe that we were beginning to perform like real dancers. We were able to swish along in an even line and seemed to be getting the hang of it. While she was packing up, three of us went over to the old piano that had been moved in from Brick and hoisted up to the new stage. We had ten minutes till bus time and began to take turns showing each other chords. When it was my turn, I played from memory “The Pride of Kildare.” It was the song I sang to my mother silently when I believed she was standing by the mirror, and I knew the whole thing by heart.

  Miss Tina, her body curved over the record player, straightened to listen. She asked me to play again and, on the spot, decided to reduce our dance line to thirteen so that I could play accompaniment. She went to her dance bag and pulled out the sheet music for “Pretty Baby.”

  “Take it home with you,” she said. “Just try it out and see what happens. “You have a lovely touch on the keyboard.”

  I did not want attention drawn to myself but I could see that Miss Tina thought this an honour. My mind flashed to Dallas, Texas, and I panicked. Since school had started, I’d paid little attention to Eighty Easy Lessons. I explained to Miss Tina that I didn’t know how to read sheet music—not properly. First, I would have to learn the piece by ear. Even then, it would be pretty skimpy.