Beginners Welcome

by Cindy Baldwin

  “Thank y’all very much,” he said. “I’ve got to go now, but I sure do appreciate your time.”

  He hadn’t once looked at me yet, but I knew he could feel me there just as surely as I could feel Queenie down the hall, cutting hair in her big-windowed shop and calling people honey and sugar. She’d waved at me as I’d walked by this morning, and I’d been split down the middle between anxiety that she’d find a way to unwind all my lies like a cat with a ball of yarn, and happiness that she knew who I was.

  Letting people see past my invisibility cloak meant they could hurt me. But I guessed it meant they could love me, too. I still wasn’t quite sure which was most worth it.

  “That was amazing,” I said when Ray came over, leaning on a wooden cane.

  Ray’s grin stretched wider. “Thank you, Miss Annie Lee. That means a lot to me. Now, you ready to start learning?”

  I looked around at the atrium, feeling the airless anxiety you get right before a test. Most people hadn’t lingered after Ray finished—they’d disappeared into shops or restaurants, or left through the glass doors into the heat of outside, where I could hear laughter and chatter and the sound of a guitar being strummed in the brick-lined courtyard between the two buildings. But still, it felt like anyone could walk by at any time. What if I sounded awful? I hadn’t touched a piano in more than a year.

  Maybe I hadn’t quite thought this lesson idea all the way through.

  Ray looked at me steadily, the birch-bark skin under his eyes sagging sympathetically. “I promise, child, nobody pays much attention to this old piano most of the time—I should know.”

  “You’re sure?” I squeaked.

  “Sure as sure.”

  I rubbed at the quarter in my pocket, my fingers brushing up against the paper I’d stashed in there, too.

  Cash prizes. Beginners welcome.

  I thought of the way the washer had dumped water all over the hallway on the first day of school, the way my clothes had smelled a little funny ever since, like Mama’s sink-washing wasn’t ever quite as good as the real thing. Yesterday in gym class, a girl had looked sideways at me and wrinkled up her nose. I’d never been so aware before of the way I smelled, of how even though Mama had washed it the night before, my T-shirt smelled of sweat and the laundry detergent Mama hadn’t been able to quite rinse out.

  Maybe that prize money could even buy a new washer.

  “Okay.” I slid onto the piano bench. I’d have to pull my invisibility cloak extra tight, if I wanted to keep being overlooked while I was practicing out here.

  “Your mama already gone to work? I figured she’d bring you today.”

  “Oh, uh—no, she had to get in early today. Maybe another time, though.”

  “But she’d be okay with us having a lesson, even without her here?”

  The real answer would be definitely the heck not, but I nodded anyway.

  Ray shuffled back to the piano, walking with a funny sort of rolling high-step-low-step action, his cane clicking against the shining floor. He sat down on the opposite end of the bench and sighed heavily. “Got the arthur in my hips, too. I tell you what, Annie Lee, getting older is for the birds.”

  I thought about Daddy, how he’d never be an old man with skin sagging into papery wrinkles.

  Ray coughed. “I guess I should start by asking you if there’s anything you already know.”

  “I took lessons for a while. My daddy really, really loved music. I can read music okay, and I used to be able to play with two hands at once. But it’s been a long time. We don’t even have a piano anymore.” I paused, then rushed on before I could chicken out. “I’ve never seen anyone play the way you do. The way your music makes those lights appear.”

  Ray’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh? You can see those, huh?”

  “Yeah. They’re real, aren’t they? Why can’t everyone see them?”

  “Oh, they’re real, Miss Annie Lee. But I don’t know why some people can see them and others can’t. It isn’t something I control—people seem to see them when they need them most.”

  “Can you . . . can you teach me to play like that? With the lights?”

  Ray pursed his lips. “I can certainly try. But really, that’s up to you. The lights come from in here.” He tapped a curled hand to his chest. “That magic, it comes from honesty, Annie Lee, from letting people see who you really are inside.”

  I swallowed. “I don’t know if I can do that.” Invisible people can’t be hurt.

  “We’ll work up to it. For now, let’s start with this.” He pointed at the keyboard, with its bright ivory and gleaming ebony keys. “I’m guessing you know the names of the notes.”

  I nodded.

  “Then you know that the black keys are special. They’re how you find your way around the keyboard. There’s more to black keys than geography, though. They’ve got a secret. Any combination you play on those black keys, if you keep away from the white keys, it’s going to sound great.”

  He put his hands on the keyboard and played something short, a few seconds of music that sounded like it should have a sax breathing behind it and be played in an elevator.

  “Now it’s your turn,” he said, looking at me with an encouraging smile.

  I balled my hands up in my lap. “I can’t play that!” Nothing I’d ever done in two years of piano lessons with a gray-haired lady named Mrs. Kline had prepared me for anything like what Ray had just done. I couldn’t just make things up and expect them to sound okay. Before I’d quit, I hadn’t even been able to make things sound okay after practicing.

  A familiar tickle of anxiety spread itself over me, starting at the top of my head and working its way down. I was starting to remember exactly why I’d quit piano lessons. But I thought of the sadness on Daddy’s face when I’d told him I wasn’t going back to Mrs. Kline.

  Maybe even though Daddy was gone, this was my chance to reach out for him just the way the ghost in the apartment reached out to me. Maybe this was my chance to have that golden string of music connect us one more time.

  “Well, no, you can’t play that song,” Ray said. “That was my music. But go on, child, play me some of yours.”

  “I don’t remember any music! Shouldn’t we be starting with something like scales?” Mrs. Kline had loved scales and made me learn new ones each week. They were boring, but not as scary as the real music. It was harder to play the wrong note when you started with scales.

  “Sure, scales are good to know. But the most important music comes from inside you. And you don’t need scales to figure that out.”

  I reached a hand out, tentatively, and played one black note and then another. They were harder to press down than I remembered, like they were waiting for my fingers to get serious, and once I finally did get them all the way down, they were loud and ugly. I put my hands back in my lap, fast. There was no way I could stay invisible out here in the atrium if I was making sounds like that. I had to keep my playing small, quiet, the kind of thing that could fade into the background.

  “I’d rather start with scales,” I said, not looking up at Ray.

  Ray was quiet for a long minute, then nodded. “All right, Miss Annie Lee. Scales it is.”

  14.

  Mama’s hands on the steering wheel were tight. Ever since Daddy died, Mama was scared of everything—driving, leaving me home alone while she went to work, the big high school boys who thumped basketballs on the court outside our apartment complex. It was like Daddy’s heart stopping in the middle of a game of church ball had filled her up with fear that absolutely anything could be dangerous, maybe even deadly.

  Sometimes, the way she’d look at me with her mouth pulled together and her eyebrows down, I thought maybe she was even scared of me.

  We were on our way to Harris Teeter the day after my piano lesson. Before Daddy died, grocery shopping was a regular thing: Mama would go to the store every Monday morning after I’d caught the bus to school, buying exactly as much food as we needed for seven
days of breakfasts and lunches and dinners.

  These days, like everything else, it was different. We went grocery shopping whenever we ran out of food and had enough money, and whenever Mama had enough energy. Since Sundays were the only day Mama didn’t work for Mary’s Maids, that meant it was usually Sunday.

  It always gave me a little twist of discomfort behind my belly button, because I knew it would’ve made Daddy sad, us being at the grocery store and not at church. But Mama hadn’t been able to step foot in that building since the day she got the call from the paramedics. She’d never said so, but I knew it was because too much of Daddy lingered there. Like the walls and floors and ceilings of that church building had held on to wisps of the moment when Daddy’s heart had stopped working, and they couldn’t let go.

  At the beginning, right after it had happened, our doorbell had rung over and over with church ladies bringing casseroles and cookies and hugs and making Mama and me promise to call if we needed anything. Now, though, the stream had trickled off to a call or two a month, an anxious church person on the other end asking please, please, wasn’t there something they could do, and Mama always saying, No thank you, we’re fine.

  Mama turned the car into the store parking lot careful and slow, like any sudden movement could make us roll right over into the roadside ditch, and then pulled us into a parking space so far away from any other cars it might’ve been on the other side of the world.

  I slouched out of the car. Grocery shopping was boring, and I would rather have stayed at home (or even better, run off to Brightleaf and practiced some of the things I’d learned yesterday, the way my fingers were itching to do). But since it was the one place Mama went where I could come, too, she always made me.

  “So,” said Mama as we walked into the store. Without Daddy here to be the bridge between us, every conversation with Mama felt like a walk uphill. “What have you been doing while I’ve been gone this week, Annie Lee?”

  “Nothing,” I mumbled. “Just homework. And stuff.”

  Mama’s mouth pressed into a pale little line against her skin.

  We were heading toward the milk section when we saw them. I tried to slink back behind a display of canned beans, but I wasn’t quick enough.

  “Annie Lee?”

  Dr. Hsu was smiling the way he always did. Even though I’d spent plenty of time at his house and seen him wear all kinds of things, it always seemed strange to see him wear a regular T-shirt and blue jeans, like a normal dad—they looked like somebody else’s clothes, like he should only ever wear a button-up shirt and his white vet’s coat with Hsu Zoo Veterinary Clinic written in blue letters.

  Monica and Meredith were behind him, their arms linked together, Mer’s pale freckly skin blurring into Monica’s sandier gold. They were laughing at the tank of huge, gangly lobsters who were all fated to become somebody’s dinner. Monica and Meredith hadn’t seen me yet.

  “It’s been so long since you’ve been over to our place,” Dr. Hsu said. “We’ve missed you. Right, Monica?”

  The M&Ms looked up now, their faces frozen into identical expressions of guilt and awkwardness.

  “Yeah,” Monica said finally, the word skinny and quiet and easy to spot as a lie.

  I had met Monica on the first day of kindergarten. I’d cried so hard when Daddy dropped me off that morning that I could hardly see out of my puffy eyes. Even six years later, I could remember exactly how lonely and scared I’d been, and how excited I was when Monica came over to my desk and asked in a no-nonsense voice with the tiniest bit of a lisp, Will you be my best friend? Every time we went out to recess that day Monica held my hand, like she knew how much I needed somebody to hold on to in the swirl of strange kids and new rules I didn’t understand.

  Monica and I had been best friends for two years, and when Meredith moved to Durham when we were all in second grade, the three of us had snapped together like Legos. We were all different: Monica was funny and outgoing and kind, perfect at taking people under her wing, just like she’d done with me on that first day of school. Meredith was dramatic and emotional, the kind of person who was either entirely happy or devastatingly sad. She liked using words like “tragical” and had had her sights set on Broadway since the first time her mom took her to a community production of Beauty and the Beast. I was quieter, calmer, the one who listened to all of Monica’s and Meredith’s big plans and then suggested ways to actually make them work.

  You’re like the glue, Annie Lee, Monica had said once when we were all sitting on her porch swing. We’d been eating Creamsicles—Meredith had a line of orange ice cream stuck to her top lip, and Monica was breaking off bits of hers to feed to the cockatiel on her shoulder. You’re the one that keeps us all together.

  Until that day in June when Daddy’s heart had stopped, and it turned out the M&Ms didn’t need me to hold them together, after all.

  “How are things, Joan?” Dr. Hsu asked now, his smile disappearing into the kind of concerned look that Mama and I had brought out on everyone’s faces ever since Daddy died.

  “Oh, we’re doing fine. We’ve had some trouble with Fitz’s life insurance, but otherwise we’re not too bad.”

  Somehow I didn’t think that not too bad meant I cry all the time and our apartment is haunted.

  I reached over and tugged on Mama’s hand where it was holding the cart. “We need to go get our milk,” I said through my teeth, looking anywhere but at Monica and Meredith. Behind them, the lobsters scuttled along the bottom of their tank, their antennae waving. I wondered if it made them mad, being put in there with a bunch of other lobsters when their claws were tied up with rubber bands.

  “Well,” said Mama, her voice even brighter, “I guess we’ll see y’all sometime soon. Take care, and say hello to Jenny for me.”

  Dr. Hsu nodded, and Mama finally let me drag her off toward the milk.

  “That was rude, Annie Lee,” she scolded under her breath when we’d gotten a little ways away from the Hsus and Meredith. I didn’t say anything, just picked out a gallon of milk and plopped it into the bed of our cart.

  “I mean it,” said Mama. “I understand that you’ve been through a lot this summer, honey. You and me both. But that’s no cause to be unkind. You can’t let the way you’re feeling dictate the way you act.”

  She was one to talk, with all her tears and the way we hardly spoke at home and how scared she was of everything on God’s green earth.

  Mama sighed, and when she spoke again her voice was still quiet, but this time it was sad instead of mad. “You know what, Annie Lee, some days I worry that when your daddy died, he took with him whatever it is that you and I need to carry on an actual conversation.”

  I picked up a box of margarine and held it until my fingertips went numb from the refrigeration.

  Sometimes, I worried the exact same thing.

  15.

  Hey! Reader girl!”

  It was the Thursday after Mama and I had run into the Hsus at Harris Teeter, and Mitch was running toward me across the bus lane, her dark curls bouncing. “Save me a seat!”

  I hurried up and slid into a seat near the front of the bus, rubbing my two-headed quarter while I waited.

  “Hey.” Mitch slid in next to me.

  “Do you ever take that hat off?” I asked, looking at her beanie.

  Mitch shrugged. “Sometimes. If it gets too hot. But I dunno, I like wearing it. It’s my uniform, I guess. Or maybe my armor. So, hey. Your mom works, right?” I nodded. “Want to get off at my stop today?”

  I squeezed the quarter in my shorts pocket, till I could imagine the pattern of the ridges imprinted against my skin.

  “I mean,” Mitch looked down at her feet. “You don’t have to. But my mom could drive you home.”

  “Yeah,” I said before I could chicken out. “I mean, yeah, I would.”

  “Cool,” Mitch mumbled, still looking down at her Chuck Taylors, but I could see a little smile sneaking its way into the corner of her cheek.r />
  “Who is this again, Annie Lee?” Mama asked when I called to get her permission. “A boy? Mitch?”

  “Oh my gosh, Mama,” I said into the phone as quietly as I could, my face flaming so red it hurt. “No. Mitch is my friend from school here. She eats lunch with me every day. She’s really nice.”

  “I don’t know, honey.” I could practically see Mama chewing on her lip, squeezing her hands together till the knuckles turned white. “I don’t know if I feel okay letting you go off with somebody I’ve never met . . . how could I even know what her parents are like?”

  “We’d just be at her house the whole time. Her mama and daddy seem real nice. They’re professors and stuff.”

  Mama was quiet for a minute. “She there on the bus with you right now, honey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you put her on for a second?”

  I groaned and covered the microphone with my hand. “She wants to talk to you,” I said to Mitch, still blushing. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. She’s kind of a worrier.”

  Mitch took the phone from me and put it to her ear. “Hi there, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” she said, and her voice sounded like she was getting ready for some kind of fancy party, it was so polite and not at all gruff like normal. “Yes, ma’am. Of course. Yep. My daddy works at Duke. My mama’s a journalist, though. Yeah. My grandma lives with us, too. Mm-hmm. One little brother.”

  I listened to the one-sided conversation, chewing on my own lip, till Mitch finished and handed the phone back to me.

  “You text me if you want me to come get you, no matter what,” Mama said, and though her voice sounded worried still, there was a little bit of hope, too, like maybe I wasn’t the only one who was excited that I had found a friend.

  Mitch’s family lived in a green, tree-lined checkerboard neighborhood near Duke campus—the kind of place where the lawns were all mowed and the turn-of-the-century houses were fixed up and shining, not falling to pieces like they were on my street. Her house was tall and made of brick, the kind of place you’d see in a fairy-tale book, where a princess slept surrounded by roses.