Thank You for the Music

by Jane McCafferty

  Anne cut the pound cake, facing the window. Her dark hair was pulled back with a red rubber band. She poured tea into thick cups, the sort you’d find in an old luncheonette. Nobody spoke; she poured, we watched.

  “So, are you originally from Pittsburgh?” my mother finally said—always her first question.

  “Oh no. I grew up in the west until I was fourteen, then moved to New Jersey.” Anne looked at my mother, and then at me. We stared at each other quite openly, until I grew shy and looked away.

  “I can’t imagine,” my mother said, as if Anne had explained she’d come from the moon.

  “So you’ve been here all your life?” Anne said.

  “All my life.”

  “That must be something. That connection you must feel to this place.”

  My mother said, “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t think I can even imagine what it would be to have that sense of home,” Anne said. She made it sound like a compliment and my mother took it that way.

  “Well thanks. I just can’t imagine not living here where I grew up,” she said. “My sisters, my cousins, we all stayed.”

  “It’s beautiful, I think,” Anne said.

  My mother smiled. “So you’re a painter and a piano player.”

  Anne was looking at my hands now. She wasn’t answering. My mother finally said again, “A painter and a piano player.”

  “Yes, yes. Look at those hands! Those hands should play the piano.”

  We all looked at my hands on the solid wooden table. For a moment they seemed to glow from within.

  My mother held up her own hands. “And look at mine! Dishpan hands! These hands should go wash the dishes!” She began to gulp down the rest of her tea.

  Anne watched her, a bit puzzled, and I blushed, embarrassed for my mother, wishing for a moment that she was not connected to me, fearing that Anne would judge me for it. My mother was not an educated woman. She had graduated early from high school at sixteen to marry my father. She read fat romance novels. She had never been to a museum, and the art she hung was made of yarn, or those paintings of girls with the big heads and enormous black eyes set low in their faces. At twelve I was beginning to develop a snobbery I didn’t understand.

  “I just love music,” my mother was saying as she rose from the table. “Do you play any Burt Bacharach?”

  “Oh, sure, I could,” Anne said, and when her eyes flashed over to me, for a moment I was fearful that she was mocking my mother.

  “I just love his stuff,” my mother said and sighed, and took her teacup to the sink. “So, welcome!” she said, and then we were leaving.

  Back in our own kitchen my mother said, “Another odd duck for the building, huh?”

  I shrugged.

  “She’s nice, though, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  Later I heard my mother tell her friend Lorine on the phone, “We got a new neighbor. A mixture of a nun and an artsy-fartsy.”

  Nun because she wore no blue eye shadow, no lipstick, no bleach in her hair, no nail polish, I supposed, like my mother and Lorine. And she had that quiet about her whose source was surely the luxury of her own reflections. Not that the nuns who taught me had any of that.

  “So do you want to take piano lessons?” Anne said. It was fall, I was in my school uniform bouncing a ball on the sidewalk. Though it was warm, Anne was in a coat that looked like an Olive Sibley coat, and for a moment I took my affection back. I didn’t want her to be too strange. I wanted her to walk that thin line between strange and ordinary, or to be ordinary and secretly wonderful. Why was she in that winter coat? And why did her eyes look so urgent?

  “I don’t think my mom would let me,” I said. “Too much money.”

  “I’d give them for free, if you’d let me paint you.”

  “Paint me? You want to paint me?”

  “You’d make a great subject, I think.”

  “I’ll have to ask my mom.”

  “Of course. Just let me know.” She smiled, and I felt again my rush of curious affection for her. I watched her walk away, her dark silver-streaked braid hanging down her back, swinging with her sturdy stride.

  Later I jumped up and down in our kitchen with my hands folded into prayer. “Please oh please can I ma can I ma?”

  My mother just looked at me. Maybe she was envying my energy.

  “She said I’d make a great subject!” I whined.

  Lorine was at the table watching this display; my mother had set Lorine’s hair, as she did every Thursday, and now a net covered her pink foam curlers. Her husband, a man I’d grown up calling Uncle Lou, had moved the year before to Chicago with a twenty-two-year-old girl, leaving Lorine with Lou Junior and Mary Pat, thin, pale, long-fingered children whose claim to fame was that neither of them had ever sneezed. Lorine would sit with them when they had colds and coach them. “A-chhooo!” she’d say, and the confused children would repeat the word.

  “I don’t know. What do you think, Lorine? Should I let her take piano from the woman across the hall?”

  “I’d beware,” Lorine said, eyebrows raised so the whole head of curlers lifted a bit. I could always count on not being able to count on Lorine.

  “She is a little different,” my mother said.

  “Isn’t everyone a little different?” I argued. They ignored me. Mary Pat and Lou Junior were pushing matchboxes on the floor with my little brothers, using my feet as hills.

  “You kids go get lost, get out of here, scram,” Lorine told them, and they ignored her, as usual.

  “Please, I really want to play piano! I’ll learn how to play ‘This Guy’s in Love’ and ‘Knock Three Times’ and ‘I Beg Your Pardon.’”

  My mother looked down at me with those pale green eyes weighted with what I can recognize now as the deep fatigue that ruled her young life. “I guess you can give it a try,” she said.

  Lorine sighed. “You spoil her, Shirley. The kid gets whatever she wants.”

  Lorine was one of those women with so many regrets she couldn’t stand looking at any version of the girl she had once been, a girl who still had choices. I didn’t understand that then; I thought she hated me for mysterious reasons, or because I refused to pull my shoulders back when she reminded me I had crummy posture and would end up with scoliosis. But Lorine was staying for dinner; sloppy joes, her favorite, my mother tossing the meat with a wooden spoon, radio playing. My father would sit in a bar down on the South Side until eight or so; Lorine and my mother would sit in the kitchen and drink cheap wine called Night Train, and I’d be expected to come to the aid of the little kids, should a crisis arise. That night I accepted my role gladly, spinning the kids around in circles in the playground across the street, daydreaming about my new life with Anne the artist, my eyes on the moon and the big black sky.

  After my first few lessons with that elegant woman (she wore delicate wire-frame glasses when she taught and afterward fed me expensive chocolates and good coffee—my first cup), I began practicing piano at my school in a large empty gym, with the lights off. Down the hall was the brightly lit pool where girls my age swam; I could hear the echo of their laughter and shrieks, imagine their long legs kicking underwater or shivering purple by the poolside while Sister Thomas Aquinas, in full habit, paced with her whistle by the pool’s edge. The thick smell of chlorine wafted down the hall; I remembered it stinging my eyes and turning my hair green the year before. This year I couldn’t take all that locker-room nakedness, the peeling off of wet suits, the goose bumps and gawkiness, the dread that my own body was horribly abnormal in some way. I’d grown four inches in a year. My best friend had moved. I was determined not to replace her with some new sidekick. Her absence served as a presence. I played the piano picturing her buried under the leaves of Ohio. Her new school, she had written, was a hell-hole full of morons. She had included unflattering cartoon versions of everyone she’d met, all of them drooling, or cross-eyed and saying, “Duh, what’s my name?”

  I’d fool aroun
d on the keys for hours, until the streetlights poured in through the high barred windows and told me it was dark outside. The wet-haired girls from the pool would parade by the open doors of the gym, laughing and talking, having no idea I was there behind the piano in the dark.

  Still, Anne was not impressed with my musical ability. I didn’t have a very fine sense of rhythm, and I was really only interested in learning pop songs, sad songs like “Fire and Rain,” and finally Anne gave up on teaching me scales. But she was excited with me as someone to paint.

  The first time she painted me I had to wear an old red dress that smelled faintly of vinegar. It had a lace collar that had yellowed. I thought it was a terrible dress, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. I sat there on a simple blue chair and watched her eyes peer and squint at me, watched her face take me in with concentration I’d never seen before. I felt such acute self-consciousness of my own body as an object in that red vinegar dress I almost got up and ran around the room in an attempt to shake myself back into myself. But something always shifted; I relaxed under her mysterious gaze. I was freed, perhaps because the world of conventional judgments felt far away in that place. I was made of shapes, and color.

  In that first small painting I was a cross between myself and an Edvard Munch girl with all kinds of furniture sliding toward me, a window behind my head where a tiny brass lamp floated in the pink, surrealist sky. “Now don’t look at this painting as if it’s a mirror,” Anne assured me. “I’m not a realist.” My knees were bony as an old woman’s, I thought, terrible looking, and my shoulders were full of tension, and my neck too long and pale. She had rendered the buds I had for breasts accurately, I thought, embarrassed. But she had given me such beautiful eyes. Much better than my real eyes. So luminous, with such depth, the more I looked at them the more I was able to see how insignificant the bony knees were.

  It took at least a month of sitting for this one painting, and near the end my mother knocked on Anne’s door, then stormed in before Anne could answer, my youngest brother asleep on her shoulder.

  “At least show me the painting!” she said. I hadn’t noticed anything brewing in her; in fact, I hadn’t noticed her at all lately. I watched her now with shame; she was in a housecoat, her hair full of silver clips, her white calves fat, I suddenly saw with a pang. My brother’s undershirt looked gray.

  My mother stood and looked at the painting, while Anne, her concentration broken, went to the kitchen in her black smock, saying, “I’ll make us some tea,” her voice soft with defeat.

  “That doesn’t look a thing like you!” my mother whispered, smiling, relieved, it seemed to me.

  “She’s not even a realist!” I whispered back.

  “But you look like a mental patient!” she said, her voice rising, lips compressed to hold in laughter.

  “You don’t understand! Just be quiet!”

  Anne called us for tea; the orderly kitchen was like another painting we could step into. A smooth black rock sat on the sill over the sink. The sky pressing its blueness up against the screen like it wanted in. The grains of the wood in the table, swirling.

  “So Gracie tells me you’re not a realist,” my mother said, smiling.

  “Right,” Anne said. She seemed a bit baffled, as if she’d just come away from a long, solitary swim.

  “Why do you need Grace to sit for you then?” my mother said. Anne looked down into her tea and said she was using me as a starting place. That she worked with planes and angles and ideas. Combinations of things.

  We sat and drank our tea in uncomfortable silence that was broken by my brother waking up in tears. “What’s wrong, little boy? You got a fever? We’ll leave these two alone now,” my mother said, getting up.

  “Don’t forget where you live,” she added.

  She rushed out.

  “Maybe you’re spending too much time here,” Anne said.

  “No, no, no,” I said. “I don’t think so. Really.”

  So we went back to work.

  Back to the shifting perceptions of my own body in the chair, back to Anne’s blue eyes behind her glasses, her bare feet or worn moccasins, the sunlight or gray light in the room. I remember her serving ginger snaps on a red plate one afternoon, and being startled because they were so mundane, unlike her usual offerings. I remember she played the song “Standing in the Shadows of Love” on her record player once, and that I imagined the song made her remember an old love, a man who had died young in Paris. She asked me all sorts of questions about school, and my lost Ohio friend, and I answered them happily in great detail, amazed at how interesting I could sound in the presence of her genuine curiosity.

  It was a little more than a year, this kinship, and my mother hated it, and I didn’t care. I felt that year like my mother was a box I was clawing my way out of. When my mother and Lorine watched Guiding Light on summer afternoons, too alert on percolated coffee, they’d wait for commercials to tease me as I walked through the living room.

  “So what are you doing with the rest of your day? Let me guess. You’re gonna go sit on your ass across the hall for another painting they can hang up in Western Psych!”

  “Whatever you say, ladies.”

  “At least get some fresh air once in a while.”

  “Maybe I’ll avoid fresh air and normal things for the rest of my life.”

  “She’s gonna turn out like Francie Bartusiak!” Lorine yelped, and the two of them laughed, and I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t ask who Francie Bartusiak was.

  “You two can be so revolting,” I mumbled, but the power of the real disgust I felt alarmed me.

  I had sudden moments when I missed my mother, whoever she had been.

  “Hon, we’re just jaggin’ you,” my mother assured me.

  But I knew she was angry and hurt that I’d pulled away. I’d always been her girl. My father wasn’t around much—a man of his time, he worked and he went to the bar and he slept, and if he didn’t sleep he read the paper, and you better not disturb. He wasn’t a bad man, just tired, so tired all the time. He had a way of squinting at the mess in our apartment as if he’d never seen it before, as if it were completely baffling to him. “I need to get out of here,” he’d say to the air, and then he would, he’d get out of there.

  So I had been my mother’s confidante, the one who watched late-night movies with her in her bed with bowls of rice pudding, the one who she took shopping downtown with her when she bought a new dress, valuing my opinion over anyone’s, even Lorine’s. I was the one who gave her back rubs at the end of the day, her deepest pleasure, no doubt. And now I wanted nothing to do with her. I would not get near her; I was afraid she was contagious. Sometimes she would come into my bedroom late at night, sit on the edge of my bed, and watch me sleep, though I was only pretending to sleep, and my whole body was clenched in anger, feeling her presence as a terrible invasion of my privacy, my body, while I prayed for her to disappear.

  One day I had taken a bus to the South Side with Albie Rooch, the middle of the blond Rooch brothers. I had admired Albie from afar for years, had entertained all kinds of fantasies about him, and now, here he was, an eighth-grader, walking beside me on train tracks, his usually bare feet in faded black high-top sneakers. Trees made sparkling green walls on either side of us. Albie wore a muscle shirt and cutoff jeans and was talking in his long-winded way about the war mongrels who ran the world, and I was agreeing with everything he said, nodding encouragingly, like a girl.

  That’s when I saw Anne and another woman walking toward us. They seemed so out of place I thought I must be imagining it. The other woman I’d seen twice before, in Anne’s apartment, but I’d forgotten her name.

  “Hey,” Albie Rooch said. “There’s the lezzy.”

  “That’s Anne,” I argued. “Don’t say that.”

  “You don’t know she’s a lez?”

  Now Anne and her friend were approaching us.

  “Hi, Anne!” I said, my heart pounding.

  “Hi,” Anne
said, smiling. “Remember Margie? Margie, this is Grace and this is . . .”

  “Albie,” I said, and he was looking off into the sky, arrogant, disdainful, and bored.

  Anne said something benign about the beauty of the day, and I looked at her with new, suspicious eyes, and saw that Albie was right, and it hit me all at once, in the stomach. No man in her life, no makeup, this friend with the haircut like a man’s. How had I not seen it all before?

  “Not much to say today, Gracie?” Anne said, because I looked down at my feet, hating that I hadn’t known, hating that I’d associated myself with her, that she’d meant so much to me, that she’d done all those paintings of me.

  “No, not much to say,” I said, too loudly, and off I ran with Albie, down the tracks. We wandered up into the trees, where he got a hungry kiss, as if kissing him that way could somehow obliterate whatever I felt for Anne.

  “So you finally got tired of Anne, I see,” my mother said one August night. The little kids were in bed, Lorine was in Sea Isle City with her kids visiting her sister, and my mother and I were up late watching Marcus Welby, M.D.

  “Yep,” I said.

  It was dark in that living room, the windows were all open, the heat of day had given way to cool breezes. My mother was in an armchair and I was sprawled on the gray couch. It had been a long time since we’d watched anything together. We lived with a huge distance between us, and most of our talk consisted of her yelling for me to help with my brothers, or me yelling to her that I was going out.

  “I don’t think you’re being fair to her,” my mother said.

  “To who?”

  “Fair to your friend Anne. You can’t keep lying and saying you’re busy. You two were good friends. I don’t like to see you drop a friend like that, even if she wasn’t my favorite person.”

  I kept my eyes on handsome Steve Kiley, the motorcycle-riding doctor that shared Marcus Welby’s office.

  “You never struck me as mean, Gracie, and this is mean.”

  “Why do you care now? You and Lorine talked about her like she was a weirdo, and you were right!”