The Weight of a Piano

by Chris Cander

  Katya dropped her head and a heaving sob escaped her, a grief that could not fill the space where the Blüthner had been. There was no reason to hope that she would ever see it again, no matter what Mikhail had done with it. She had never known that he could be so cruel. His anger, which had simmered steadily the longer they’d waited, she could forgive. But not his cruelty. And Boris, could that story possibly be true? She had no idea who to ask—if not her own husband, who was there to trust anymore?

  The child, temporarily abandoned to his own fate, had stopped crying for a moment, just long enough to catch his breath before starting again.

  THE SATURDAY MORNING Greg’s movers were to arrive, Clara drove to Kappas Xpress Lube for the first time since her accident a week before. Peter’s mother was at the computer, completing an order, and when Anna saw her she pushed her chair back and walked over to Clara with her arms open.

  “Yassou, koukla,” Anna said, taking Clara’s cast in both her hands. “You poor thing, look at you. And so thin already. You’re eating the food I send you, yes? I tell Peter to take it to you.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Clara hugged her, breathing in her familiar scent of baby powder and motor oil. Peter, she thought, was lucky to have a mother like Anna.

  “But he made that avgolemono by himself,” she said, and winked.

  Clara laughed and then realized she hadn’t done so in a while. “He told me. It was really good, but he learned from the best.”

  “When are you going to come to dinner, huh? When are you coming back to work?”

  “I’m ready to come back now,” Clara said, “but I can’t do anything.” She held up her swollen hand.

  “You come back. You can stay up front, do the register. Or be service writer until you’re better. It’s not good for you to be home alone.”

  Clara shook her head. “It takes me forever to type. And Teddy’s the service writer. You don’t need two.” She shrugged and gave a half-smile. “It’s okay. I’ll be back as soon as the cast’s off.”

  Anna leaned forward and whispered, “You need money? You need anything, you just say.”

  “Thank you.”

  Peter came up from the pit, his work boots heavy on the steep metal steps, wiping his hands on a grease-covered shop towel stuffed partway into his front pocket. “Hey,” he said, smiling when he saw her. Then he turned to his mother and said something in Greek.

  She nodded and winked at Clara. “Always somebody need something,” she said, and slid open the glass door to shout to her husband, “I’m coming!”

  “You doing okay?” Peter asked, bending toward her.

  “Yeah, fine. Ready for this thing to be off.” She tipped her chin toward the pit. “Why are you changing oil?”

  “Alex always leaves a mess down there. I know how much you hate it when he does that, so…” He tossed the towel into a bucket. “You want to get some lunch or something?”

  Clara smiled at how his eyes, turned down slightly at the corners, always revealed his emotions. “Can’t, sorry. I just came by to borrow some of those moving blankets we’ve got somewhere.”

  “Shit, you’re not moving again already?” He winked at her.

  “Well, I did get five grand from that photographer, so maybe I should. Find a place on the ground floor to keep from moving the piano up another flight of stairs.”

  “Or you could let him keep the piano and live anywhere you wanted to, happily ever after.”

  She set her mouth in a hard line and gave him a go-to-hell look. “Will you please just give me a hand with the blankets? Greg’s movers are coming to pick it up today, and I want to make sure they wrap it up right.”

  Peter looked like he was about to say something, then thought better of it. He just shook his head and went to find the blankets.

  * * *

  —

  The surge of protectiveness she felt for the Blüthner took her by surprise. She imagined Greg scrutinizing it upon delivery, examining its yellowing keys, its scratches and scuff marks. Like a mother sending her child to school on picture day, she wanted to make sure it looked its best. So she put tiny dabs of toothpaste on a soft cloth and wiped each of the eighty-eight keys from back to front. “Now smile,” she said, then closed the fallboard.

  Examining the case, she paused at the treble end, where she noticed what had to be one of Peter’s thumbprints. There was a smaller one overlapping it, and she wondered if it was hers. She sprayed on the special high-gloss piano polish she’d bought at Kern Keyboards and wiped them away.

  She ran the cloth over every inch of the ebony lacquer, pausing at each of the major blemishes. Gone were the occasional water spots and fingerprints and smudges, but she couldn’t quite buff out the accumulated scratches or the two dents on the top of the case that had been there when she got it. They were faint enough that they hadn’t shown up in the photos she’d posted on her ad. She touched these as though noticing them for the first time. Would Greg be upset that she hadn’t mentioned them? Would they show up in his photographs and ruin the effect?

  Suddenly the idea of a stranger taking even temporary possession of her piano flooded her with panic—should she really let him take it away?—and she was still in the throes of doubt when someone knocked at her door.

  Two men, stocky and serious-looking, nodded at her. “Estamos aquí para el piano,” one of them said. He was bald and had a scar that ran from behind his right ear down his neck and into the thistle of hair poking out of the neck of his T-shirt. He carried an armload of quilted moving pads. The other one was taller, with mocha-colored skin and wavy hair that hung halfway down his back. He rested his arm on the top portion of a padded and upholstered board that was clearly a piece of moving equipment.

  She stood there looking at them. The bald guy stared flatly back at her, waiting. The other one checked the brass number screwed into the door just above the peephole, glanced at the paper in his hand, and said, “For pickup?”

  “Yeah, sorry.” She opened the door to let them pass. “Come in.”

  They wiped their feet before entering, although there was no doormat, then went straight to the piano, pulled it away from the wall, and began wrapping it in the heavy pads they’d brought.

  “I have more blankets,” she said, and the bald one looked at her and shook his head as if admonishing her.

  She watched as they secured the pads with packing tape and gave each other directions in Spanish. This was just another job for them, just another day. It seemed they knew what they were doing, but they didn’t seem particularly concerned about the piano; it was simply an object that needed to be moved from one place to another. Clara stepped forward and adjusted the pad where it drooped off the corner of the case.

  “You have to be careful with it,” she said. “It’s very…old.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  With the blankets in place, they maneuvered the piano onto the padded board, adjusting it until the bass end was snuggled up against the brace that came out at a right angle. The taller guy held the piano atop this platform while his partner ran thick nylon straps into slots in the board and fed them through to the other side. Each strap went over the piano and was buckled tightly to itself. When that was done, they squatted down slightly and buckled the second set of straps around their hips.

  “Listo,” the tall one said. On the count of tres they stood up, lifting the piano off the ground. The bald one looked at Clara with an unreadable expression, as if he had all the time in the world, despite the fact that he was holding up half of a five-hundred-and-sixty-pound load.

  “Oh,” Clara said, realizing that they were waiting for her. She moved quickly to hold the door open. The guys took careful, synchronized steps until the piano was over the threshold and then on the deck. They paused at the top step, then again counted and lifted and the bald man went first, descending the top t
wo steps. The tall one held the piano steady and then slowly let it tip forward until it rested almost entirely on his partner’s backside. The bald man looked strong but wasn’t very large, certainly not big enough to bear the weight of the piano himself.

  “Wait,” Clara said, panic rising again. “Are you sure you can do this?”

  They seemed not to hear her, because they continued their slow plod down the fourteen steps, a span that looked—that had been—treacherous to Clara. Surely the straps would come undone or their legs would give out and the piano would go crashing down. She held her breath, anticipating disaster, but they made it. Without speaking, they eased the piano down off the stairs. The bald guy used his foot to kick a four-wheeled dolly into position, and they moved forward and set the piano on top of it, then began rolling it along the sidewalk, toward the parking lot.

  Clara let out her breath and jogged down the stairs. In spite of their apparent competence, she wondered how careful they would be when she wasn’t looking. “Excuse me,” she said to the bald one, shielding her eyes from the late afternoon sun. “What’s your name?”

  “Juan.”

  “Juan,” she said, “can you tell me where you’re taking the piano?” He narrowed his eyes as if he didn’t understand. “I mean, are you allowed? To tell me, I mean.” He released the ramp from the truck and climbed up into the bed. “Of course you should be allowed to,” she continued. “I’m only renting it to the guy, not selling it. It’s not unreasonable for me to know where you’re going.”

  They pushed the Blüthner up the shallow incline. “Cuídate, Beto,” Juan said to his partner. She knew enough Spanish to understand that this meant be careful.

  She sucked in her breath, and Juan looked at her. “It’s okay, miss. No problem.” Inside the bed there were two duffel bags, a toolbox, and another stack of moving pads. The movers secured the piano to the rails along the length of the truck, then flipped the dolly over on its flat side so it wouldn’t roll around. After getting out, they pulled the door shut and locked it. Juan walked to the cab of the truck, rifled around, and withdrew a map.

  “Here,” he said, pointing to a tiny town just west of Las Vegas that had been circled in blue ink. “Then here.” He pointed to a large green area labeled Death Valley National Park, then swirled his finger over it. “And around here.”

  Clara leaned in and searched the map. “What? Why there? What’s he going to do with it there?”

  Juan lifted an eyebrow and shrugged. “Taking pictures. Then…” He made a flicking motion with his hands before dusting them together. Clara didn’t know what he meant by that, but it did nothing to ease her concerns.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  Without changing his expression, Juan lifted his hands to his face and pretended he was holding a camera, clicking the shutter.

  “No, sorry.” Clara shook her head. “I know he’s a photographer. I mean I don’t understand what he’s going to do with my piano in Death Valley.”

  Juan shrugged again. “Whatever he say.” Then he tipped his chin at Beto and they climbed into the cab, Beto on the driver’s side, Juan on the other.

  Clara stood there, hands hanging limply at her sides, trying to reconcile this odd itinerary with Greg’s explanation of his photo essay.

  Resting his arm on the open window frame, Juan turned to look at her and nodded with a vague smile that suggested she’d been tricked into this arrangement, that something ominous was going to happen. Had Juan’s flicking motion been a symbol of finishing something? Or finishing something off?

  As the truck started to pull away, Clara turned and sprinted up the sidewalk to her apartment, taking the stairs two at a time. She grabbed her backpack and cell phone and keys, locked the door—fumbling because of the sudden release of adrenaline—ran back down, slipping once and catching herself with her broken hand, which hurt but not enough to slow her until she was in her car and turning on the ignition and thinking, thinking, thinking: Which route would they take? East and then down Oswell, probably, instead of west to Mount Vernon—there was a construction project on the southbound side—and then they’d pick up Highway 58.

  She caught up with them at the Virginia Avenue stoplight. Juan’s elbow was still poking out from the passenger window, and the left blinker was on even though they were already in the turn-only lane. They probably couldn’t hear the rhythmic blinking over the cumbia that blared from the truck’s radio. The light went green and the truck pulled ahead.

  “Come on, come on,” Clara said to the car in between them. “Move over.” She honked, and the driver glanced at her in his rearview mirror. She swished her hand at him and then pointed toward the truck. “I’m following them,” she yelled, exaggerating the words as though he might actually hear her through the glass and metal. He flipped her off, then moved into the other lane.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She was right behind the truck. Now what? Make them pull over? Insist they return the piano to the apartment? Driving behind them, with the hairs on Juan’s arm fluttering in the wind, the heavy beat percussing out of the truck, she realized this was a stupid idea. She eased off the gas and drifted back a little. I should just go home. But her broken hand refused to turn the wheel.

  KATYA STEPPED OUT of the car and squinted at the fierce sunlight. Even in Italy the sun hadn’t been as bright as it was in California. Here, it glinted off of everything: the shop windows, the parking meters, even the sidewalks. She put on the sunglasses the woman from the Southern California Council for Soviet Jews had given her when she’d picked them up at LAX, just four weeks before. The same woman, Ella, was with them now, ushering her and Mikhail from place to place, helping them get settled.

  “There,” Ella said with a smile. “You look like a real American with those on.” Katya didn’t like them; they had heavy frames that covered her eyebrows and rested uncomfortably on her cheekbones. She wanted to throw them into the street, but didn’t because she needed them. She resented this, and the resentment made her feel guilty, and the guilt made her feel even more depressed than she already was.

  Mikhail beamed, happy as a child on his birthday, and led them into the United Desert Bank of California, where Ella would guide them through the necessary steps to open their first checking account. The money they would deposit—$400—seemed a huge sum compared with the amounts they’d subsisted on in Russia and Italy; it had been given to them by a local synagogue. “We didn’t earn this money,” she’d whispered to Mikhail when the rabbi’s secretary had offered him the envelope filled with cash. “We can’t accept it.” But her husband wasn’t embarrassed by charity. When, after they’d moved into a rental house paid for with an interest-free loan and she’d refused to go to the FEMA warehouse to pick up damaged canned food that supermarkets had donated, he’d gone instead. He said he planned to repay everyone as soon as he earned his first paycheck as an engineer for a top American firm. But first he had to learn enough English to get an interview; after a month in Los Angeles, he still knew only a few words.

  The bank manager invited them to sit down at a large desk. “Здравствуйте,” he said. “Добро пожаловать в Америку.” He knew enough of the language to welcome them to America, because so many Russian immigrants had ended up there in West Hollywood. His bank was friendly to new residents in spite of their small initial deposits; he knew that Russians were viable. The doctors, translators, and engineers, even the blue-collar workers, often labored harder than their American counterparts because they were so grateful for their newfound freedom and their second chances. At weddings and other gatherings, their first toast was always to the United States. The manager knew they would be loyal customers, eventually taking out loans to buy houses and cars or open businesses. Hospitality toward them was a good investment.

  Katya and Mikhail produced their passports and the INS-issued white cards that
proved their refugee status. Ella helped them fill out the application: their new address on North Genesee Avenue, their proposed employment, their sponsor’s information. They wrote their names awkwardly in English and signed the form.

  Along the wall behind the desk were framed bank-sponsored posters of California landmarks: the Golden Gate Bridge, Lake Tahoe, Disneyland, Venice Beach, and more. As Mikhail completed some other paperwork, Katya stared at one image over the bank manager’s shoulder.

  After a moment he glanced back to see what had captured her attention. “You like that one?” he asked.

  It was a strange image compared with the rest, all of which seemed determined to establish the state as one of perpetual Technicolor sunshine and happiness. It was the only one in black and white, a stunning photograph of what looked like a frozen lake with ice cracking into polygons in the foreground, pale mountain peaks beyond, and a wintry sky above. More representative of her homeland, she thought, it seemed out of place next to the others. Just like she felt herself to be. She gave a half-smile and nodded.

  “That’s Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America. Eerie, isn’t it?”

  Katya nodded again. She would have to look up the word eerie in her dictionary at home.

  “Like it says there, it’s in Death Valley National Park. It’s about a four-and-a-half-, five-hour drive northeast of here, right on the Nevada border. Kind of desolate, but worth a visit if you get a chance. We’ve got a lot to see here in California. You should take your son to Disneyland. It’s a real American institution.”