My White Piano

I got my white piano the summer after I was married, from a company having a liquidation sale who had set up temporary shop in an otherwise empty storefront in my home town of Sayre, Pennsylvania. I was in Sayre the summer after I got married because I was taking care of my grandmother while she recovered from twin knee replacements. She was in her 80's then, and needed considerable help. I spent quite a bit more time at her house than at my own newlywed house, and that was fine with just about everyone except my mother, who spent quite a bit of her time muttering about how I was spending mine. One day she sat drinking coffee with her best friend and shook her head dolefully at me when I came in. What is it, I said. Nothing, she answered, just that Carol and I were sitting here saying that we sure don't want to be burdens on our kids when we get old. True to her word, my mother died exactly three months to the day after her cancer diagnosis, and was only 63 at that, so she scarcely had time to be any sort of burden at all and no one had to worry much about her getting old, either. Be careful what you wish for, I still tell my own two kids, and that's exactly what I'm thinking of when I say it.

I think as she often did, my mother was comparing who-I-was to who-I-ought-to-be and as usual, I was losing. Or maybe she'd felt she'd been a bad example to me, which was often at the real root of the things that were hard between us. My mother's first foray into marriage had lasted around seven years, start to finish. The accident of my conception had been the start, and this was the finish: one day my father kidnapped my sister and me--I was in second grade and my sister a kindergartner, and he just walked into the school and walked back out with us in tow, which no one thought twice about in those days. That's the part of the story that gets me the least, when I think about it now. Next he took us across a state line which would eventually make it harder for my mother to get us back, and now I'm a little more irritated thinking about it all, but what gets me even angrier was how he hid us at his mother's house and her being in cahoots with the whole thing, saying, when my mother called her, that she hadn't seen us. And after that, it was his turn to call around to various members of my family and hint that he might have drowned the two of us in the river--he was pretty drunk by this time--but really, to my mind it wasn't even that so much as it was the story about how my mother and her same friend Carol, who had been her best friend at twelve and still was then, at twenty-eight or -nine, how she and Carol drove over the back roads and through the hills that night hoping like crazy that maybe my sister and I had somehow miraculously been deposited at my aunt's house, my mother's older sister's place, and they'd find us there and that would be the end of this particular nightmare...

...but it wasn't, and what they found there instead was my aunt meeting them at the door and drawing herself up and not letting them in and saying to my mother, her baby sister, her baby sister who had no real reason to doubt that her own babies were lying at the bottom of the river in the dark, saying this: you know, if you'd been at home like a good wife, none of this would ever have happened...

But, that was my family, and when they weren't busy self-medicating or trying to pitch each other out of windows or ambushing us kids, you could usually find them all occupied whacking whoever was handy over the head with the imperfections they couldn't forgive in themselves and using each other for their passive-aggressive target practice. You can see it in all the photographs, the way we all have our teeth bared in those Gorgon smiles, Christmas, Fourth of July. You know, the way everyone showed up for all the holidays, no matter what. The way they all kept in each other's business. You know, love.

So probably my mother was concerned lest I become a bad wife but since my marriage lasted all the way up until death us did part, I guess she didn't need to be. That summer morning I passed by the formerly-empty storefront I glanced in and saw that overnight, it had filled up with pianos. Pianos! My friend Linda was with me and that is exactly how I ended up with the piano I got--it was a 1919 Fischer upright, and in the fashion of the day, was painted white, an ivoried white with gold lines of trim. Linda and I had walked right to it because her little brother Ed had had a white piano when we were all in high school. I could still picture it in their family room, on the wall that ran perpendicular to the sliding glass doors. I don't know if their piano was still there by then, but Linda and I had the same thought--just like Eddie's!-- and at that moment, me and that white piano bonded and that's how I knew it was going to be mine. Eight years later Ed died, and after that when I would sit down to play, I would think of him and remember how happy he was when he got his piano, remember him dying while I was late in my pregnancy with my daughter, and him telling Linda that if I had a baby girl, I should name her Lily.

The piano cost $600 which was considerable money in 1983, or at least was a considerable amount to me in 1983. But my grandmother bought it for me. She had always maintained that a home was not a home without a piano in residence and I tend to agree although nowadays, you see them less often than you used to. She had gotten her first piano when she was sixteen, when her foster father traded their old work horse, Molly, for it. She lost the piano again when someone, I think my grandfather, gave it away to a boy at their church and I know it broke her heart when that happened. Later on, it was replaced by a spinet which was the piano I always remember them having, although when I knew my grandmother she didn't play at all anymore. I didn't care for it when I first started out, and could scarcely see how the torture of practicing scales was any different from the torture of learning times tables, or, for that matter, how trading a horse for a piano had been any improvement in the fortunes of the household in general. I always wished they'd kept the horse. Also that the horse had lived for the next fifty years until it would had been time to meet me. My grandmother still had Molly's old horse blanket, and whenever I stayed at her house I always slept under it, in spite of the fact that I'm allergic to wool and it made me miserable with the itching.

My white piano got delivered to my newlywed home a few days after I bought it. The van was driven by two sullen men who informed me their normal job was hauling all the equipment around for a race car team but this was something they did sometimes to earn a little extra money. They didn't do this particularly well, as it turned out--a 1919 Fisher upright piano weighs a lot and is really more of a 4-person or even a 6-person moving job, particularly when it's coming down an unpaved and uneven path such as the one that led to my front door. Still, they got it inside, and just as they were getting ready to leave again what was about the biggest thunderstorm I've ever seen blew up and suddenly, you couldn't see their truck from the door for the rain and to try stepping outside in that seemed like a supremely bad idea, so I gave them each a beer and they stood by the door and drank, morose and silent, until the rain finally let up enough that they could dash back out to the truck and head off to their purer vocations as race car roadies.

I sat and played my piano most of that afternoon, and some each day after that, or most days, and when it needed tuning a friend of mine who had been a music major at Ithaca College came over and tuned it. I have always regretted not learning to do that myself, even now, when I no longer have need of such a skill. A few years later we moved to Massachusetts, and hired people on both ends of that trip to first load and then unload the piano onto the truck for us. I worried the travel might be too much for it, but I didn't need to. When I got it, the salesman told me the piano had been living in Binghamton, NY, in the summer of 1972 when Hurricane Agnes blew through and flooded everything, and a week in water hadn't hurt it, or at least hadn't hurt it much, it had only needed a little refurbishing after that. We all lived together in the Massachusetts house for ten years, and the last time I saw my old neighbors they were saying how they still talked about it to the woman who owned the house now, pointing to the wall and telling her this is where Anne had her piano whenever she had them all over for a party.

In that house, though, the piano was hardly ever in danger of being played, ironically because it was a happy house for us: it's where my husband got sober, it's where we got our two kids. And once there are babies in the picture, let's just say that your priorities get rearranged, and piano practice turned out to be pretty low on my list, way lower than being able to get a shower, say. I spent a lot of my time when the kids were toddlers keeping them away from the piano, or trying to, because one after the other, once they were able to stand up on their own, they began crawling under the keyboard overhang and then suddenly standing UP and the sound of their heads smacking into the hard wood would ricochet around the room and I would worry that they'd grow up addled. But sometimes I could find a little time to play, and the dog I had in those years, a Rottweiler cross, who was generally on the grouchy side, always calmed down and flopped beside me while there was piano music in the air. She was made especially relaxed by listening to the third movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and the more expressively I tried to play, the better chance I had of lulling her right to sleep. When we finally left that house six men from our neighborhood came down and picked the piano up and put in on the truck, and then we all drove the five miles up the road to our new house and they brought it in and set it down on the stone floor there. My neighbor Tad pulled a muscle in his chest doing it, and he nearly dropped the piano on his foot from the severity of the pain. We all thought he'd had a heart attack, and I had the additional thought that quite possibly, my piano had just committed its first murder.

The day my youngest child started kindergarten I drove him over to his school and went in the classroom for a while and bolted back out again when I realized I was going to cry, and then I came home and decided I was going to celebrate this particular rite of passage by sitting down at my piano and starting to play my old favorite pieces and practicing every day until I was back in good piano shape. I played for a little while that morning and I think that was the last time I ever touched it. At least on my own: I taught both of my kids a little bit and when my daughter was in third grade, she and three of her best friends decided to form a girl group. Tuesdays after school they'd all come home on the bus together and all four would sit down at the keyboard at once and giggle awhile while I gave them a "lesson," which consisted of four giggling girls with their eight slender hands trying to play C, D, E in unison, or everyone stopping to hear one or the other pick out a tune, if she could. Then they'd troop off to my daughter's room to draw posters and eat and think of publicity ads for their band and decide what everyone was going to wear, and then it would be time for them all to go home.

If my white piano had been possessed of real legs I'm sure it would have walked out of the relationship a long time before I finally let it go, but the truth was, at some point along the way I had lost my interest and couldn't see my way to ever getting it back. I never was able to be the musician I wanted to be--I was at best middling, and at worst ambitious, because to have those aspirations without the talent to back them up only leads you around in circles for awhile until you figure out you're not making progress, you've ended up pretty much right where you started out. I don't know why I wasn't gifted when I so wished to be gifted, but there it was, I was not. I didn't have the drive, I suppose, and I only recently figured out that I also wasn't built for it. This occurred to me when I was looking at a picture of a musician friend, and noticing his impossibly long fingers--real musician's hands, I told him. You could look at those long fingers and know they'd have no difficulty conquering scales or speeding through the allegros of a song, and that mastery lends them an air of purpose and also a slight erotic charge. My own hands, by contrast, look better-suited to digging potatoes out of a field than hanging poised over the keyboard of a concert grand. I feel now as though I ought to apologize to my piano for having wasted so much of its time.

The piano did not care about any of this, of course, but I think it had long since started laying the groundwork for its next move.

It had been there in that happy house in Massachusetts, and when we lived there I had a friend across the road whose life was difficult, owing mostly to a right royal bastard of an abusive husband and the four kids he left so battered that the eldest son finally decided he was done. His suicide came a few weeks after my husband's death, and in those chilly months afterward his mother and I talked a lot and grew close again and when it was time for me to move, I gave her the white piano. I knew a piano was one thing she'd always wanted--well, other than her son back, which I couldn't do for her, but this was something I could. She lived in a little lake house, same as I had, and the last time I was there, she was planning to move her entire upstairs living room into the basement, and the upstairs was going to become The Piano Room. I know my white piano, and know it's going to like dominating a space like that. I've written to her a few times since we've moved though she never writes me back. I hope it's that she's occupied with the regular busy-ness of life, and that if she does have a few moments when her hands are empty, she's starting to find her way around that keyboard, and that when she sits down to play, at first she'll be remembering the years that we were friends and after that, she and that white piano music will head out together somewhere that's just a little ways off in the future and quite a bit happier than where she is now.