Beginners Welcome

by Cindy Baldwin

  “Now, I’ll tell you what,” she went on. “This project seems like the kind that might need a rest for tonight so your brain can think on it. What do you say after we hose off all those broken eggs, we pull out some ice cream and do something fun instead of finishing up homework? Just for tonight.” Mama paused, and I could tell she was thinking hard. “Maybe we’ll watch a movie, or—I don’t know, paint our nails, or something. Isn’t that what mothers and daughters do?”

  Before Daddy had died, he’d always been the one organizing fun family nights: movies, or trips to the mini-golf course, or ridiculously dramatic magic shows where he wore a tall silk hat and swirling purple cape and had Mama and me both in stitches the whole time. I could tell that Mama didn’t really know, any more than I did, what mother-daughter bonding was supposed to look like.

  But tonight, just the fact that she was trying was enough to send a little thread of warm light all through me.

  I leaned into her, smelling her soap-and-vinegar Mary’s Maids smell. “I’d like that a lot.”

  “Me too, Annie Lee. I’d like it, too.”

  25.

  Clara was waiting outside Brightleaf when I went for my next lesson, a Wednesday afternoon right after I’d gotten home from school. Her leash was looped around a pole, her paws folded under her chin as she watched the world with her warm-honey eyes.

  “Hey, girl,” I said, dropping to a crouch and scratching behind her ears. Clara closed her eyes in appreciation. “Such a pretty doggy. I bet Ray loves you a whole lot.”

  Clara opened her eyes again and looked soulfully at me, like she knew what I was thinking. Dr. Hsu had always said that dogs were experts at picking up cues from their humans, and that was why they made such excellent companions for people with blindness or epilepsy or anxiety. Could Clara sense Ray’s pain, the way his arthritis ate at him all the time? Did she worry, just like I did, when he stretched out his fingers or rubbed at his legs or stumbled and almost fell on the polished wood mall floor?

  “We gotta take care of him, don’t we, girl?” I murmured, and Clara looked right into my eyes and made a low rumble in her throat like a cat’s purr.

  I wandered into the mall, pausing to peer in Queenie’s window. She wasn’t with a customer today—she sat behind a desk, looking over some papers with a pair of little half-moon glasses like Dumbledore’s perched on the end of her nose. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her sitting down before, or quiet like this, except when she was watching Ray. She looked older, but softer, too.

  I knocked on the glass, and she looked up and saw me, waving her hand in big strokes to tell me to come on in. The salon was warm and perfumed, with jaunty pop music playing from a speaker somewhere. In the back, one of Queenie’s stylists—a bald white man with black studs in his ears—was chatting with a customer while he gave her highlights.

  “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Queenie said, getting up from her desk and hugging me. She smelled like shampoo and hair spray, and her silky shirt was soft against my cheek. “How you doing, Annie Lee?”

  “Good.” For once, it was actually true, too.

  “You off to another lesson with Mr. Owens?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He told me yesterday y’all were coming right along. Said he registered you to enter a competition in December. I wasn’t half proud!” Queenie beamed so big I could tell she was proud—like I was her own daughter, not some stranger she’d met less than half a dozen times.

  Was there anyone in the world Queenie didn’t love?

  “How’s your mama? It strikes me I don’t even know her name.”

  The nervous fluttering started up again in my chest. Talk about Mama was dangerous territory. “Joan Fitzgerald, Miss Queenie, ma’am,” I said, praying that Queenie had never met anybody named Fitzgerald in her life.

  As if she could hear the little shake in my voice, Queenie’s gaze sharpened, the brown skin around her eyes crinkling into a suspicious squint. “She usually walk over to pick you up after she’s done?”

  “Well—no. I go meet her there.”

  “I still hope I get to meet her one of these days. I’m not trying to judge her, Annie Lee, but doesn’t she worry ’bout you coming here to have lessons with somebody she doesn’t know?”

  “She trusts me,” I said. It was true, but I knew all that trust would be shattered if Mama had any inkling of where I was right now. “I’m very responsible. Anyway, I’d better go. Bye!”

  Queenie watched me for another minute, a thinking sort of expression on her face, before the glass door of the salon closed between us and I made my escape. I walked to the atrium still feeling like something was trailing me, some kind of shadow I could only catch out of the corner of my eye. Part of me wished I’d never said a word to Queenie, no matter how nice she was.

  How much longer could I go on like this before Queenie sniffed out all the lies I’d been telling? Before Ray did, too? It was only two weeks into October—there was a lot of time left until December and that competition.

  What if Mama found out what I was doing before then? What if I lost my chance to play for those judges because Queenie was so friendly, cared so much about me and about my mama, who she didn’t even know?

  By the time I got to where Ray was waiting at the piano, my hands were cold and clammy and I was having to work hard to take deep, slow breaths. Sitting on the shining black piano bench helped, though, and so did putting my hands on the keys and playing through both scales I was practicing for the competition, C major and G minor.

  After I’d finished, I pulled my sheet music out and put it on the piano music stand, and lifted my hands up to start it, but Ray put his hand on mine so I couldn’t. His skin, only a few shades darker than the ivory on the white keys, was rough and dry. Then he looked right into my eyes just the way Clara had, his eyelids drooping down at the corners.

  “I’ve got something special I want you to focus on today, Annie Lee. Today, I want you to let yourself forget a little bit about the things you’ve been practicing—the fingering, the rhythm, those things. You’ll still be working on those same pieces, but today, I want you to concentrate on the way you feel in here”—he tapped his chest—“and let that feeling come out through your shoulders, your arms, your fingers, and into the keys. Like this.”

  He leaned forward and played “Russian Folk Song in G,” the very same notes I’d been playing for all these weeks of practicing—but the way he played it was different. It was light and playful and sweet. Some notes tripped and some notes swayed; if I closed my eyes, I could almost see the crackle of candlelight, lords and ladies in fancy dress moving in time to the music.

  “I’m never gonna be able to play like that,” I said, panic rising back up like acid in my throat.

  “Of course not. That was from inside me. Now you show me what’s inside you.”

  I put my hands on the white keys and let them sit there a minute, their satin coolness flowing into my fingertips and up my arms. Joyful, I thought. Peaceful. Light.

  I closed my eyes. The music was sitting there in front of me, but I’d played it so many times in the last month that I didn’t need it anymore: the notes were inside of me, running through my veins alongside my blood.

  And for the first time since I’d asked Ray to teach me, I wasn’t thinking about the competition or even the bit about Cash prizes. I wasn’t thinking about anything but the music.

  I played.

  And even though I’d been coming to Brightleaf for weekly lessons and extra practices for more than a month, and even though I’d played that dumb old Russian folk song every single time, today was different. Today it was joyful, peaceful, light. Today my fingers didn’t slip or trip or clump like elephants. Today, they spoke all those words my heart could never figure out how to give voice to.

  Today, that music came from me.

  Ray was quiet when I’d finished, lifting my hands gracefully from the keyboard just the way he’d shown me to and then letting
them drift into my lap. He was silent so long I turned to look at him, a little of that burning panic back. Was he okay? Was I? Had I done something terrible?

  But he was breathing just fine, and the look on his face wasn’t shock or frustration. It was something golden and lovely, something that poured all through me like autumn rain. When he spoke, his voice was tight and scratchy.

  “Well now, Miss Annie Lee,” he said, and I could’ve sworn his eyes were brighter than normal. “Well now. I’d say that was just exactly as it should be.”

  I didn’t even need him to tell me to pull out the Bach minuet and try that one, too.

  26.

  By the time I got back from school that Friday, the message light on our house phone was blinking double time. I hit the button as I took off my backpack and rummaged through the kitchen looking for a snack. “You have three new messages,” the smooth recorded voice told me, before beeping its way into the first message.

  “Hello, Joan, this is Patricia with the school district office. I’m calling on behalf of the district superintendent. If you could give me a call back as soon as you get this, I’d appreciate it. Thanks.”

  The machine beeped a second time. “Hi, Joan, it’s Patricia. Just checking in again to let you know that the superintendent would still like to speak to you as soon as possible. Please call me back when you have a chance.”

  My hands stilled on the banana I was peeling. “Hi there, Joan, this is Patricia. I’m really hoping to get in touch with you before the workday is over, as Mr. Shepherd’s message is fairly urgent. Please give me a call back right away. Thanks.”

  Patricia with the school district office. Was this the secretary Mama had been calling and emailing ever since the life insurance people told her to?

  Mama’s contract with Mary’s Maids stated that she was never allowed to make or take personal phone calls when she was at jobs, or even between them, because the people who owned the company didn’t want to run the risk that their employees might try to talk on the phone and drive at the same time. And Mama never took off work early—anytime she did, she didn’t get her pay for those hours and had to pay a fine out of her other wages to cover the cost of sending another maid over. In the three months she’d been working full-time at Mary’s Maids, I hadn’t one single time asked her to do anything that might’ve resulted in that fine.

  But if this urgent message was about what I thought it was about, it might just be worth it.

  I pulled my phone out and texted Mama. Secretary had been a spelling word in fifth grade, but I was a little fuzzy on superintendent. I hoped she’d get the point.

  I scratched the skin near off my knuckle waiting for her to get home. By the time I heard Mama’s key in the lock, I’d come close to throwing the coffeemaker out the window when it wouldn’t stop burbling and smelling of Daddy’s Panama blend, and kicked the record player twice when it had started up with John Denver singing how he felt like a sad song without his girl. The record player hadn’t even been plugged in.

  It was like Daddy’s ghost could feel the tension in the air, the way our whole apartment was holding its breath.

  Sometimes, the ghost appeared in important or happy moments, like the first day of school, or the day me and Mama were throwing those eggs off the balcony—like Daddy wanted so badly to be there celebrating with us, and this was the only way he could think to do it. Other times, the ghost showed up when it was lonely and quiet, like in the afternoons while Mama was still at work.

  But nothing seemed to make the ghost more agitated than stress. Like the day Mama and I had come home from our hike at the Eno and she’d gotten that bad email and the TV had turned on two different times, like Daddy was trying to reach out from wherever he was now and reassure her.

  Except the only thing the ghost ever succeeded in doing was making everything worse.

  I squeezed the lucky quarter in my pocket.

  Mama came through the door and hugged me, still in her pink polo that was damp with sweat and cleaning spray, and then went right to the message machine without a word. She listened to the first message, then the second, then the third.

  Then she picked up the phone.

  “Hello?” she said after a minute. “Patricia? Yes, hi, it’s Joan Fitzgerald. Yes, of course I’ll wait . . .”

  Mama didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at her; the hope rising in that kitchen was like a soap bubble, bigger and bigger and bigger, and one breath could’ve made it pop.

  “Yes, hello,” Mama said again. “Yes, it’s nice to talk to you too, Mr. Shepherd. I know, it’s been awhile. Mm-hmm . . . yes . . .”

  Mama’s side of the conversation devolved into murmurings that didn’t make much sense without knowing the other half of it.

  But her face was getting tighter, her eyebrows pulling together and her mouth going thin. She wasn’t saying, Oh, I’m so relieved or That’s so good to know. Thanks so much, Mr. Shepherd.

  Mama finally finished the call with an “I appreciate you letting me know,” and put the phone back on its cradle. She had to try three times before she could get it where it needed to be, her hands were trembling so bad.

  “There isn’t any more life insurance.” She floated into the family room and sank onto the sofa. She looked puffy, like her skin wasn’t fitting her bones the way it should. “They looked all over. All through the computer system. They finally found his personnel file. It had a typo—two Ls in ‘Fitzgerald’ instead of one—which is why they couldn’t find it. Can you believe that? All this time, a little extra L was the only thing keeping us all in the dark. Once they found the file, though, there wasn’t any record of him paying extra for more life insurance. The way we’d talked about. The way we’d agreed.”

  Mama was breathing fast, her chest sucking in and out. “Nothing on his pay stubs. Nothing anywhere else. They even called the insurance company manager back just to quadruple-check. There’s no more, Annie Lee. No more coming. Ever.”

  No more life insurance. No more money. Nothing at all for us except Mama working all day every day but Sunday for Mary’s Maids and coming home smelling like sweat and vinegar and sadness. Never moving out of our haunted apartment. Probably no new clothes for me this winter, which meant I’d have to dig out my too-small clothes from fifth grade and wear them again and hope nobody laughed.

  No new washer.

  No new anything.

  “What are we going to do, Annie Lee?” I might’ve thought Mama would cry, but she didn’t. She just sat there on that sofa like she was the one who had died, shaking her head over and over again and talking to the empty air. “What are we going to do? How in the hell are we supposed to keep making ends meet? How am I supposed to afford the things you’ll need for school?”

  I thought of the DPTA competition. Cash prizes. Beginners welcome. A hundred dollars wasn’t much, but if I could win that prize money, maybe we could at least get a new washer, at least have one thing in our life that worked okay.

  Mama was still talking. “Who’s going to take care of you, honey? I feel bad every single day, letting you get off the bus and spend all afternoon in an empty apartment. Maybe I should let Mrs. Garcia watch you the way she offered, but I don’t have any money to pay her and it just seems like such an imposition to ask of a neighbor we hardly know. . . .”

  Guilt wriggled inside me as I thought of the secret life Mama didn’t know about—all the trips to Brightleaf, all those afternoons with Ray at the piano. Queenie in her salon, living out the life Mama might have had if she’d learned to be a hairstylist instead of getting pregnant with me.

  “What about going to beauty school?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, honey. It would take money. I just can’t see that far into the future yet.” The white skin around Mama’s lips was extra pale, her chest still going in and out like there wasn’t enough air in the world. Was this what hyperventilating looked like? Did I need to call an ambulance or get her to breathe into a paper bag or something l
ike that?

  “It’s just like Fitz to have been too busy living in the moment to make sure things would go on smoothly after he was gone. It’s the fuel pump all over again. That man never could keep the important things straight.” Mama rubbed her hands over her face hard, and I couldn’t tell if she was trying not to cry, or wishing she could.

  I thought of the day the fuel pump broke, how Daddy had built that fort and played records of all the things we’d have heard at the symphony if the car hadn’t broken down. About how we’d all ended the night feeling twice as happy as if we’d made it to the concert in the first place.

  This time, Daddy wasn’t here to make things up to us. He’d always been uncomfortable with things that took paperwork and filing, especially things that were about the future.

  Look at me, Al, he used to say sometimes, a grin on his face. I’m in the prime of my life right now. A beautiful wife, a beautiful little girl who’s gonna be a concert pianist someday. The job of my dreams. Why on earth would I want to spend any time worrying about stuff that’s far off on the horizon, when I could use up my energy being happy right now?

  It had never bothered me before when he’d said things like that, because life with Daddy was one big adventure, filled with laughter and surprises and spontaneous fun. Even Mama couldn’t ever stay mad at him too long, because Daddy’s happiness was infectious, the kind that crept into you and changed you from the inside out.

  I had a feeling if he’d been here right now, Daddy would have argued that he was great at keeping the important things straight. He’d have said that me and Mama were the important ones, not some old fuel pump. But he’d have been wrong. Because things like car repairs, like paperwork—those were the things you were supposed to do to take care of the people you loved. And right now I wished, harder than I’d ever wished anything in my life, that Daddy had used a little of his endless energy to make sure me and Mama would be okay when he was gone. How could he just leave us like this?