by Alix Ohlin
Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student
He did not have friends. He was silent much of the time. He picked his nose, and when told to stop he would remove his finger slowly and stare at the snot, seemingly hypnotized, then put his hand in his pocket without wiping it. He had bad dreams: for one whole year he woke, white and crying, from nightmares about snakes. The next year it was clouds. He couldn't explain why the clouds frightened him and just shook his head, trembling and sweaty under the covers. Although his mother, Rachel, made an effort to find the nicest clothes she could within the budget, the same clothes that other kids were wearing, as soon as he put them on they drooped and sagged, changing from their store-rack normalcy into something disheveled, misshapen, patchlike.
Sometimes his eyes looked blurry and unfocused, but when Rachel took him to the eye doctor, his vision tested fine.
For his eighth birthday, he asked for piano lessons. Rachel and Brian, the father, looked at each other, then back at him. The three of them lived in a two-bedroom apartment. They had one bedroom, and he had the other. In the kitchen there was only enough room to stand up, and so in the living room, cramped together, were the dining table and chairs, the couch and the TV. Rachel and Brian both worked but, between credit-card debt and car payments, were barely making the rent. And there was something else. Rachel was pregnant; she was the only one who knew. She'd been pregnant once before, since Kevin, but didn't keep it. This time would be different. At night, with her eyes closed, she breathed in deeply, and at the innermost point of her breath she felt the baby, tight and insistent and coiled. It wanted to be born. “Kevin,” she said, “since when do you want to play the piano?”
“Since now.”
“Listen, buddy,” Brian said. He motioned Kevin over the couch, and he stood between his father's legs. “I don't know if you've noticed, but we don't have a piano.”
“The teacher does.”
“But you have to practice,” Brian said. “That's part of taking lessons—you spend like an hour a week at the teacher's or whatever, then you go home, and you have to practice. Like homework.”
Kevin looked up at him, his eyes both wary and blank. Rachel saw that he hadn't thought of this. Where did he get the idea for piano lessons in the first place, if he didn't even know that practicing was part of it? It was a mystery. Her son came to her and, wordlessly, placed his hand on her knee.
“It's okay,” she said. “We just have to think about this.” She felt Brian staring at her. She knew what he wanted: for Kevin to play hockey, stickball in the street, be more of a boy, be more like other boys. But somehow, she knew, it was already too late.
On the day of the first lesson Kevin wore a blue sweater and brown cords and smoothed his hair across his forehead with his fingers. He was excited. Bright images flickered through his mind, just out of visible reach: a grand piano, a stone castle, people dancing.
Rachel called, “Are you ready?”
“Coming.” He walked out of his room, hearing the beats of his own tread, his socks hitting the carpet, dum dum dum dum. His mother stood in the hallway with her boots on, holding his coat. When he put it on, she handed him his hat, then picked up her coat.
“I want to go alone,” he said.
She put her hands on her hips. “Well, you can't.”
“Why?”
She ticked off the reasons on her hand. “Because it's the first day. Because you don't know where it is. Because I need to meet the teacher.” The teacher was a friend of a friend of a friend. She'd just moved into the neighborhood and was charging low rates.
“Tell me where it is,” Kevin said, “and I'll find it. You told Dad I could walk there.”
“I meant later.”
“Now,” he said.
“Kevin, come on.”
“I'll only go if I can go alone,” he said.
“You have to go. I made the appointment.”
“I know,” he said, and held up his hands for his mitts.
Rachel gave them to him and they stared at each other for a long moment. Their eyes were the same color, very pale blue, although what was watery in Kevin's face looked tired and opaque in Rachel's. Then Rachel sighed and he knew that he'd won. She bent down, told him carefully how to go, and watched him walk down the street, his arms sticking stiffly out from the coat, his mitts drooping down from the wrists.
They lived in an apartment building next to a small park with brown grass splotched with snow. He was supposed to go halfway around the park to the exact other side from home. Then left, then right on Oakhill. The house where he was going was 1330 Oakhill. He had to look for the left part of it, which would say A, for Anita. The teacher's name was Anita Tanizaki. In his mind's eye his mother's handwriting rose up from a piece of paper: Mrs. Anita Tanizaki. A-ni-ta. I-need-a Tanizaki, he said to himself. Get me a Tanizaki this instant! I will now perform the famous Tanizaki maneuver. It has never been done in this country before.
He skirted the park, kicking the iced crusts of snow with his boots. From the big street a few blocks away he could hear a siren, maybe a fire engine's, bubbling and boiling. It came closer. He closed his eyes and listened: a note falling through the air like skiing downhill. With his eyelids shut, the sound was the color red splashed over the sky. Next it faded to pink, and then was gone.
He opened his eyes and started walking again. A car passed by, but nobody else was walking around. It was Saturday morning. He went left, then right. Inside his mitts his fingers closed against his palms, making warm sweat. He found the house without any problem. There was ice on the steps, and he slipped a little and almost lost his balance. He stamped his feet on the ice to steady himself, then pressed his finger against the doorbell, dingdong. No sound came from the house, no music, no movement, and for a moment the world wavered and threatened to collapse. Nothing was the way he planned it. Then he heard a rustle behind the door, and it opened.
“Come in,” said Mrs. Anita Tanizaki.
He stepped inside and took his boots off on the mat and hung up his coat. She waited for him at the end of the hallway, not smiling. Her short dark hair had waves all over her head, like frosting on a cake. The house seemed very dark and its smell reminded him of a restaurant, with all the food cooked and eaten hours before.
“So, come in,” she said again.
He followed her into the living room, where she gestured to the piano. He had never seen one up close before. It was smaller than he had thought it would be, and blacker. All of a sudden he was frightened: it just stood there, its wood body staunch and foreign, looking back at him like an animal. Mrs. Tanizaki sat down on the bench and patted the spot next to her and he joined her. They both looked down at the piano's keys as if the thing might start playing itself. Then Mrs. Tanizaki reached down and stroked a white key with her finger, from the top to the bottom, holding it down. The note resounded, pure and direct, resembling nothing except itself. She hit another key, then a black one, then another white.
“I'm going to be honest with you, Kevin,” Mrs. Tanizaki said. “This is my first lesson. Your first lesson, and mine too. We're going to be learning together. Here's what I can tell you right away. I love the piano. I love the touch of it”—here she made more strokes with the one finger, from the top to the bottom, the pad of her fingertip sliding—“and the sound”—adding another note, with the left hand, and Kevin flinched when her elbow touched him, but she either didn't notice or pretended not to— “and the way it looks. I can't teach you to love the piano, but I can teach you some basic things about it. So, now we'll start.”
She took his finger and pressed it down on a key. “C,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Not like, Do you see. I mean middle C. This note is the middle of everything. It's the center of the piano. Look down, don't look at me, it doesn't matter what I look like. Press it again.”
“C,” he said.
When Kevin got home he was in a daze. He waited at the table without speaki
ng while Rachel heated up some vegetable soup and cheese toast. His eyes were misted as if he were staring into the distance, even though he wasn't. Actually, he looked stoned. That's what my son looks like when he's happy, she thought, with a glow like pride.
To pay for the lessons, they gave up cable TV. But then Brian started watching hockey and basketball games in bars, drinking with his friend Steve, so it wasn't clear how well this worked out, budget-wise.
Mrs. Tanizaki had a son named Lawrence. He was fifteen. The next time Kevin had a piano lesson, Lawrence crept into the room behind them. Kevin could feel him there.
Mrs. Tanizaki, who was guiding the fingers of Kevin's right hand up a scale from middle C, stopped at the top. “This is Lawrence,” she said. “Lawrence, this is Kevin.”
Lawrence didn't nod or anything. His black hair flopped over his glasses. He was gangly in the arms and legs and fat in the middle. “I'm hungry, Mom,” he said.
She sighed. “Excuse me, Kevin. Lawrence, make yourself a sandwich.”
“Don't want a sandwich.”
“Then you can wait until we're done here, and I'll make lunch. There will be no lunch until I'm done teaching. Do you understand?”
Lawrence left the room. Kevin and Mrs. Tanizaki returned intently to the scale, and the song they were singing with it: do re mi fa sol la ti do. C D E F G A B C. After E you tucked your thumb under the rest of your hand and started over. Kevin didn't understand why the notes of the song had different names from the notes, but maybe one was for singing and one was for playing. When Mrs. Tanizaki sang, her voice was hollow and slightly rough. It was not at all clear like the piano. She made him sing too, and his voice was so ugly and unrecognizable that he tried to sing as softly as possible, hearing one set of notes but not the other, while his fingers moved thickly up the keys.
“Now you do it by yourself,” she told him.
Kevin swallowed. “Do re mi fa,” he sang, trailing off. Behind him he could hear a wet, chewing sound. Lawrence was back in the room, eating a sandwich.
“Excuse me, Kevin,” Mrs. Tanizaki said. “Lawrence, either close your mouth when you chew or leave the room. Or maybe you could do both.”
Kevin looked down at the keyboard while Lawrence shuffled out of the room. He was learning to memorize the shape of the keys, their color and configuration, the scuffmarks on some of them, the way they added up to a whole entity like a person's face. In his bedroom now, or at school, his fingers skimmed along surfaces, over the blanket or the desk, as if divining for sound. Inseparable from the keys was the smell of Mrs. Tanizaki's house, a spicy, sour smell of leftover dinner, and her smell too, different from his mother's but distantly related to it, an older-woman smell, and the darkness of the room, and the one lamp that pooled light over the piano. He was drawn inside all of this. Still, at times, he woke up at night and remembered the visions he'd had about the dancing and the castle, a piece of color at the edge of his sight like a scarf fluttering in the wind, and he knew that as piercing as the notes were, as clearly as they answered to his fingers on the white and black keys, still they were only notes, they weren't the music.
Rachel told Brian about the baby.
“I think it's a girl,” she said. “I just have a feeling.”
They lay side by side in bed.
“I want to keep it, Bri,” she said, then waited a moment. “I know it's going to be hard, but we won't regret it. I promise. It'll be worth it.”
He said, “If that's what you want.”
He put his arm around her and went to sleep, and Rachel stayed awake for hours, watching shadows and streetlights weave through the window. She waited for something else to happen, but nothing did.
She went to the doctor. Everything looked fine. She heard the baby's heart beating along with the pulse of her own blood. Brian acted kind yet impartial; when she talked about the baby, he listened. He said nothing against the baby, about the money or the apartment or how or whether they could live on just his paycheck. Rachel also avoided these subjects, knowing they were knotty, inviting danger. She kept her worries to herself. She tried to maintain the certainty she'd held in the pit of her stomach, the push of the extra life inside her, but somehow the energy of these feelings seeped away from her, more and more quickly, each day. In the mornings she felt nauseous, in the afternoons she felt great, and at night she was exhausted and went to sleep right after dinner.
One Saturday, at lunch, she asked Kevin if he understood what the word pregnant meant, and he said yes. She told him that he was going to have a little brother or sister.
He put down his forkful of macaroni and cheese and appraised her. “You don't look pregnant,” he said, and gestured a bulge over his stomach.
“It doesn't show yet. But it will soon.”
“Okay,” he said.
He started eating again, and Rachel felt herself plummet down into empty space. But then he said, with his mouth full, “Mrs. Tanizaki has a son.”
“She does?”
“He's fifteen,” Kevin said, and swallowed.
“Is he your friend?” Rachel said, not understanding.
He shook his head. “No. He sits in the room and eats sandwiches during my lessons.”
“Oh.”
“Lawrence is fifteen and I'm eight,” Kevin said. “When the baby's eight, I'll be sixteen.”
“Yes, that's right.”
“Sixteen,” he repeated. “I'll really play piano by then. I'll play for the baby.”
Rachel smiled. “That's right,” she said.
Mrs. Tanizaki loaned Kevin a book called Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student. When she presented it to him, the moment took on the aspect of a ceremony. Lawrence was not in the room, and it was very quiet.
Mrs. Tanizaki stood up, took the book off the top of the piano, and put it in Kevin's hands. “I'm going to lend this book to you, Kevin,” she said. “It's my book, and I want it back eventually. But you can use it for now. I'm going to assign you exercises from it each week, and you'll practice them. Every day.”
Kevin nodded and held the book loosely, afraid of damaging or marking the short, wide book with yellow pages, its cover already dog-eared and bent. He opened the cover and saw penciled handwriting on the inside: Anita Osaka. I-need-a, I-need-a, he said to himself, then looked at her.
“That was my name before I married Mr. Tanizaki,” she said. “I've had this book for a long time. That's why you have to be careful with it, and give it back.”
“Okay.”
“I trust you, Kevin. I know you'll take good care of the book, and practice every day.”
“Okay.”
“Do you understand? Say yes, Kevin, not this ‘okay’ all the time.”
“Yes,” he whispered. He was close to desperation. He had not told Mrs. Tanizaki that he had no piano to practice on, and was scared to tell her because she might say he couldn't take lessons anymore. Every two weeks his mother gave him an envelope with a check in it for Mrs. Tanizaki, and he brought it and laid it on the piano. It stayed there, undiscussed, until he left. They never talked about his family, or where he lived, or anything. The piano was their only shared element. Now he didn't know what to do. The book was ancient and valuable; he shouldn't have it. In his hands, as if by themselves, the pages flipped open, and he saw the long black lines stretching across the pages, notes rising and falling in small streams. As he looked, the notes wrapped themselves around him like ribbons of seaweed. He could not tell her.
He took the book home and laid it on his bed. Then he took his school notebook and ripped out three pages and fastened them side-to-side with Scotch tape. He took a pencil and drew middle C in the center of one page. It looked lopsided and thick and the bottom right side spread downward like something that had been left out in the sun and was starting to melt. He thought of Mrs. Tanizaki's face and Lawrence's chewing and the smell of food that laid itself over all his lessons, and he was angry then and ripped up the pages and threw them in the garbage
can.
But the next day he started over and drew eight white notes and five black ones, enough for a scale and the simple exercises for the right hand, and in the bedroom he practiced from the book, his fingers rustling and tapping against the paper. Before figuring out that he needed to put the paper over a book from school, he broke through it twice and ruined it. Eventually he drew the best, longest-lasting one.
Rachel, cleaning out the garbage can a week later, found all his failed attempts. By this time she was showing, and although she wasn't too ungainly just yet, the consciousness of weight invaded all her actions, including the way she bent to pick up the garbage can or sat down on the couch to examine the piano pages. When Brian came home from work and turned on the news, she brought him a beer.
“Brian,” she said, “we need to get Kevin a piano, so he can practice. Maybe we can find him one of those—what are they, like a synthesizer? Those little flat things that shouldn't be too expensive?”
He looked at her, but not in the face. Lately she'd noticed he wouldn't meet her eyes; instead, he looked at her stomach or his gaze seemed to fasten on her neck, not quite making it any higher, as if seized by that weight she carried, her additional gravity.
“You want to buy a goddamn piano?” he said.
“Not a real piano,” she said. “Just something for him to practice on. He loves it, Brian. It's really amazing. He could turn out to be a genius, I mean who knows?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Or maybe if we gave Mrs. Tanizaki a little extra money, she'd let him go over there and practice on her piano. She can't use it all the time, can she? I bet she'd do that. I think she would.”
Brian put down his beer and held her hand and looked at her lap. When he spoke, his voice was tender and soft. “Rachel, I don't know how to tell you this, but I want you to listen to me. I think you're losing it. I think you really are.”