Fanfare for the Common Man

“Tub” by Molly McNeely

I do not have my father’s hands. He is dead, and I have not inherited them. My fingers are not long and graceful, their skin so tight to bone that when I stroke the keys, sinews pop through flesh. My hands do not coax crystalline utterances from father’s piano. I must plod and sweat through each note.

“Enough. She is no good.”

My hands freeze. I am only halfway through a “Little White Donkey.”

Von Ingersleben stalks across our cramped apartment, past the couch hauled back from Goodwill and the lamp dragged in from the alley. He is tall. His dark ruff of unwashed hair leaves streaks of grease on our coved ceiling. He stoops over the piano. He taps my pudgy fingers. I whip my hands away and tuck the ten offenses beneath my skirt.

Mother follows in Von Ingersleben’s wake. She pinches the plastic buttons on her baggy cardigan with nervous, flicking fingers.

“But she has played since three, sitting on Karl’s lap while he composed. You know this.” She begs.

I cringe. Von Ingersleben was Father’s friend. He comes here only as a favor. Nothing more.

“Then she has learned nothing in ten years.” Von Ingersleben huffs. Mother wavers beneath his breath, then lifts a hand. She lays it above Von Ingersleben’s elbow. How great this effort—how touching this man’s arm must bring back the dead: the Composer Extraordinaire. The Mozart of North Minneapolis. The Lunatic of Park Place Apartments. Father.

“How much?” Mother says.

In this room there is the couch, the boxy TV, and the piano. In the next room is a mattress on the floor she and Father shared. In the room opposite, I have the bed frame, on top of that a mattress, on top of that a comforter constellated with hand-sewn stars. There is not much we can afford. Surely Von Ingersleben sees that.

“She’d need lessons. Before school. After school. You could not afford me.” Von Ingersleben scowls. His nostrils grow cavernous. I grip the bench beneath my skirt. “Even then, there is Leta. Already beyond her years. You must understand. Mary is a lost cause.”

Leta. The girl with saddle shoes in my seventh grade class. When I might be great, she makes me mediocre. Our money will be lost. Mother must let Von Ingersleben go now, but to my horror, she tightens her hold. She does not understand that my hands have already failed us.

“I will pay. You get her into St. Joseph’s Conservatory. I will pay. He left a little. Enough.”

Von Ingersleben whips his arm away, but Mother flies with it, her fingers trapped in the fine, purled holes of his sweater. His eyebrows lift. He looks at her like it’s the first time he sees her. But it’s not. Tucked in the pages of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Father kept a picture. A younger Father sits at a piano. All smiles. A younger Mother stands and holds a flute. In the photo, a happy Von Ingersleben is too near Mother. His hand rests on her waist. He contemplates her, not the camera. His young nose is in profile, already huge and vulgar.

Now that Von Ingersleben pays attention, Mother wets her lips. The tip of her tongue softens them to pink. She was beautiful before, but her dark, sharp beauty has greyed and grown gaunt.

“I can cook. Clean. For you. She is not bad, right?”

Von Ingersleben blinks. “His unfinished work. The Sunlight Serenade…you will pay me. Two weeks. If she is good, we see from there.” His glare slips down my arm, but ends at my wrists because I still sit on my hands.

“Tomorrow,” he says. His hair whispers, hush, hush, against the ceiling.

When he is gone, Mother smiles. 

“It will be alright,” she lies.

***

Von Ingersleben comes every morning an hour before the bus. Mother fries bread over the stove using tongs. We do not have a toaster or hair dryer or anything else that comes with tags warning of electric shock—not since she caught me reading them a week after Father’s burial. Gone also are the knives and razors rusted in the medicine cabinet.

Mother soaks the toast with tastes-like-butter spray and sprinkles sugared cinnamon on its blackened sides. The apartment reeks of this burnt, woodsy-sweet scent. She sets the toast on our best platter, edged with pink and yellow buds. Von Ingersleben ignores it every morning, but still, Mother insists.

After she sets out the platter, she hovers in the kitchen doorway and watches me play. My back towards her, I am still, since Father’s death, aware of where she is. It has become second nature, this seeing without looking—if you do not know where your loved ones are at all moments, you might walk into the bathroom one day and find them dead in the tub, wrists split and oozing.

Von Ingersleben flicks my fingers. He pinches the flesh on the back of my hand.

“You silly girl. You aren’t counting. You are an elephant pounding. You make noise, not music.”

I lose concentration. Often. Von Ingersleben does not forgive me my fingers.

And I do not forgive Father.

I haven’t showered in months. I stand at the sink and wash by sponge. Mother has filled the tub with plants: English ivy and pothos and rubber trees. The plastic pots are brightly colored and cracked. She runs the shower over this garden until the soil leaks from the pots. When the water drains, it leaves a dark strip of earth on the tub’s bottom.

She has not scrubbed the faint, rust-colored lines that ring the tub. Two. Blood lines. Timelines. The higher one: his body in the tub; the lower one: his body removed. Because of—what does Mrs. Blixt, the physics teacher call it?—Displacement.

“Hopeless.” Von Ingersleben says. “Again.”

White donkeys braying to music lose all grace beneath my fat and tangled fingers. I think Mother, in the kitchen lighting the oven and pulling down pots, will show the mercy Von Ingersleben does not. Once, I hazard a look at her, quick, over my shoulder. Her gaze flits around the room. She does not focus on anything anymore. There is no reason to when eventually everything you see becomes the image you can’t forget.

                             ***                              

At last it comes out perfectly. I play “The Little White Donkey.” The notes don’t sing, but neither do they thud. Von Ingersleben does not smile, but he grabs the toast Mother has made. She gives him her seat across from me. Her hand quivers when she slides him a mug of tea. Cinnamon dust whorls in the air and dizzies me. Von Ingersleben watches Mother’s hands. She reaches for the buttons on her sweater, but instead of tightening it against his gaze, she loosens the collar.

I replay that gesture at school. Mrs. Blixt strings out ones and zeros on the board, but all I see are knuckles and buttons. 

When I arrive home that afternoon, Von Ingersleben is already there. His hair is matted so it does not brush the ceiling, and he has lost the smell of smoke and chai from his own apartment. Perhaps he had never left ours.

“You will play a recital.”

“At the community center?” That’s where I’ve always played my recitals.

“At Ted Mann. The University. You will play with children who want what you want. A place in St. Joseph’s. You will see how good you have to be.” Bach’s Sofleggietto already lines the piano.

But I want to play Father’s lullaby. The piece he sold for a month’s worth of groceries. The one he played with my hands riding above his.

“Play it now,” Von Ingersleben says.

I can’t. Not without Father’s fingers lifting and sinking beneath mine.

Von Ingersleben points to Bach’s Sofleggietto.

My hands twist through the arpeggios. The web of skin between my thumb and finger is so tight, I can’t span the octave chords. I cannot breathe, either. The sweetness of cinnamon cloisters around me, as if Mother has been making toast all day. Von Ingersleben reeks of it.

When he is gone, and I have washed the runny yolks from our dinner plates, and I have curled up beside Mother in hopes we’ll get more than TV static tonight, she feels foreign. Mrs. Blixt says there is the tiniest, immeasurable space between people, that you can’t truly touch someone. It’s simply nerves, and perhaps hope, that convinces us we do. Though her sweater is coarse against my cheek, Mother feels very far away.

Her free hand rests at the top of her sweater, where the button hung this morning. Two bare threads dangle there. She twists them between finger and thumb. What have you done, I want to say.

                             ***                              

Von Ingersleben stays for toast now. I know he stays longer. His stench—the sweaty, underarm smell of a man too important to wash tempered with chai—hugs my mother’s cheap sweaters.

He raps my hands in the afternoon. Mother does not come save me. But I learn. Or rather, the muscles in my fingers finally memorize each move. The tremolos roll.  The scales soar. I come in second at the recital. Leta is not there, so I finish behind a boy the size of a toddler who picks his nose and wipes boogers beneath the bench.

The day after the recital, I come home from school, but Von Ingersleben is not there. Instead, Mother has two large cartons. She squats on the floor and her jeans stretch thin over her knees. In one box, she sets the toast platter on top of my folded comforter. The hand sewn stars collapse beneath the platter’s weight.

“Your clothes.” She nudges the other carton towards me. The staples on the cardboard bottom scrapes across the floor.

“Where are we going?” I speak carefully. Words have been spoken steadily and quietly since Father died. You do what you can to avoid another shock.

“Von Ingersleben’s. He says you have a chance at that scholarship to St. Joseph’s. But it will take constant practice. He thinks it best if you move in with him for a bit. I’ll come too.” She unravels twine and shuffles it beneath the box, brings it up and around and ties it. I do not move. “It’s not unusual.” She speaks lightly, though her hands jerk and snap at the string.

“Are you bringing your buckets and mops, too? Or your magical flute?”

Mother’s hands pause. I have never found her flute, the one from the picture. She must have played once, but never while I was alive. I dug through the closets after Father’s death and found only the Ajax and buckets and brooms she used to clean sky-scraper offices.

Her hands resume their tying.

“What about the plants?” I say.

“He’s picking us up. Hurry. Make sure you’ve got what you want to take.”

“I want to take the plants.”

“Mary…” Purpled skin sags in moon-shaped crescents beneath Mother’s eyes.

“I want to take the plants.” I kick the carton from her hands. I flee to the bathroom. I pound on its black and white tiles. I want her to hear me, to remember Father and feel the guilt of leaving him here. I have lain beside her every night since his death, and she has not cried.

The ivy shoots up around the faucet toward the frosted window and tangles around the curtain rod. But the streaks of dirt in the tub are dry. I push my finger into the pots. The soil, there, too, is dry. Father’s already been left behind.

                          ***                       

Von Ingersleben tucks the cartons into the trunk of his old Mercedes. The seatbelt buckles in back are frayed, so I don’t bother fastening up. I grip the door handle, ready to jump. We drive away from the concrete housing compounds, painted in bright colors to make one forget, past the factories on Hiawatha that reek of hot metal, towards the steely, sun-sleeked Minneapolis skyline. Mother peeks over her shoulder the whole ride, as if her glance will pin me down the way the belt can’t.

Von Ingersleben lives near the farmer’s market on the greenest edge of downtown. The smells here are fresh, sweet, simple. His apartment is magazine perfect: white and glass and metal. Floor-to-ceiling windows meet in the corner— and in that corner of glass….a grand piano. It’s a beast; strung metal ribs fill its belly and shine in the afternoon sun. I can’t resist. I strike a chord. It sings so beautifully. Something inside me breaks.

Mother watches. She holds her breath; her chest lifts high beneath her sweater. When her darting eyes meet mine, they’re bright with wishing.

I jam my hands in my pocket. I turn away from the piano and its view of the world.

***

Leta sits beside me in the dressing room. Up close, each zit across her nose resembles a pimento. Her sleek hair is so ebony, it shines blue beneath the fluorescent lights. She cracks her knuckles and breathes in, then out out out in short puffs. Benches line the room where we wait for our turn. Strains of some song I vaguely recognize leak from the auditorium. Maybe Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” We hear it as if we’re underwater—and the way the boy opposite me holds his breath, we might be.

Leta stands in the corner and glares out. Her teacher, Ling Ling, who wrote “Fantasy for Four Hands,” kneels and whispers in Leta’s ear. I do not know how they afford Ling Ling. Her father runs the dollar store where her mother rearranges rubber spatulas and whisks that never sell. The leather on Leta’s saddle shoes is cracked. Marker fills in the black; shoe polish brightens the white. This meticulous effort doesn’t matter, though, when she plays. She pumps the pedals so fast that the black and white blur to gray.

Another thing: Leta has my father’s hands.

“But she does not have your fierceness,” Von Ingersleben says. He is not being nice to me, only honest. He taps my stunted fingers. “She is too tame. You, too wild.”  Mother stands behind him. She smiles. Her gaze flits from my nose to eyes to hands. Then they leave me to face the postered walls and Leta, who perhaps has heard Von Ingersleben’s slight, because her eyes narrow and her legs stiffen above her saddle shoes.

“He will dump you,” Leta says. She waits, face blank, for a response. Then: “He does this. He moves in students. When they do not please him, they find their things outside his door. You’ll not stay. You’re not good enough to stay.” Leta lowers her voice.  “No matter what your mother does for him.”

My cheeks burn.

When it is my turn to play, I find Mother and Von Ingersleben in the audience. Von Ingersleben crosses his arms. The program pages feather against his elbow. Mother, hair brushed to sleekness, still wears gray, only the new sweater owns the silkiness of a rabbit. I used to fall asleep to Mother and Father, their playful cries like Chopin’s Minuet in G. Now at night, Mother squeaks like a broken-reeded clarinet attempting Brahm’s clarinet sonata.

I arrange my skirts on the piano bench. I lift my hand. The audience quiets.

I glance out again. Mother’s fingers pluck the strings on Von Ingersleben’s sleeve.

I turn my gaze.

The first note thunders.

*** 

I played wildly that afternoon. It was not enough to beat Leta, but it was enough to make Von Ingersleben wake me earlier and work me later.

“Do you want these nice things?” Mother hisses when I complain. She shakes a pan at me. The kitchen tiles are true terracotta, and she’ll drop the pan and ruin both. We are cooking dinner for the maestro. We fry eggs and boil pasta for dinner like we did for Father. Only the eggs are brown and organic, the pasta whole grain from the co-op two streets over. Von Ingersleben takes his turn at the piano. He is not as good as my father. His compositions lack Father’s darkness.

“You get into that school, you might have all nice things.” Mother runs the tap. She doesn’t want to chance that Von Ingersleben will pause and hear us.

Von Ingersleben has floor-to-ceiling windows which capture the view of his success: silver skyscrapers and rooftop office parks. But he does not have a lullaby named for him, or a blanket with hand-sewn stars, or a tub full of English ivy and pothos and rubber trees.

“Well?” Mother says. She turns off the tap just as the maestro stops playing.

It is very quiet.

“You whore.”

Even before Mother slaps me, I feel its sting.

                            ***                              

I take the city bus home from Kennedy Junior High. We ride down Nicollet Avenue, a wide street bordered by skyscrapers and brick sidewalks. Vendors brave the autumn cold and push sleek, silver carts shaded by tin awnings. The street narrows, the sidewalks crumble into concrete slabs, and the vendors sell tacos from the back of windowless white vans.

Leta rides, too. She wears galoshes instead of her concert saddle shoes. She drums her fingers on the back of the seat. The ting of her nails on the metal bar begins to make sense. I hear music. Debussy’s “Tarantelle”.

I creep up the bus aisle and sidle in beside her.

She glares. “Are you trying to take my place?” I don’t know if she’s talking about the bus seat or the scholarship to St. Joseph’s Conservatory.

“Neither,” I say. She stops drumming and cracks her knuckles. Her hands remind me of the dead bird I found on our stoop. Some animal had picked the bird clean of flesh; only the bones and small feathers remained. I nudged its skeleton with my fingertip and pushed down on its fragile wing. Leta’s hands are sharply boned. When she moves them, I hear the snap of that bird wing.

“Stop staring,” Leta says. I look towards the front, out the greasy windshield that dulls the November sun from yellow to pale gray. Leta smells savory. Each time her hands move, her sleeves flap and send off a meaty scent. Weeks ago, I would be starving at her aroma. But now my belly bursts on Von Ingersleben’s schlackwurst. When we’re right at the northern edge of the city, just where the skyscapers turn to pitted brownstone, she stands up.

“You’re in my way.”

I nod. I swing my legs around. She doesn’t look at me the whole way off the bus. Outside the greasy glass, her red coat shrinks into the distance.

2.

My fingers…they are too clumsy. My fingers, they are too fat. My fingers, they have no daintiness.

Von Ingersleben insults me. We have picked through all the sheet music that hides in his piano bench. The floor rustles with paper. Von Ingersleben picks up one sheet after another, lining their edges perfectly before stacking another sheet.

I snatch Chopin’s Butterfly etude before Von Ingersleben adds it to his pile of what I can’t play.

“This one. I’ll play this one for the next recital.”

“No—”

Before I protest, Mother creeps in. The skin along my spine prickles. Since the slap, we have both stopped facing each other.

“It’s dinner,” she says.

“No it’s not.” Von Ingersleben does not look up.  He studies the Butterfly etude that flutters between my fingers.  Father said once that Von Ingersleben saw with his ears, that this peculiar sight made him the most successful teacher. But I know Von Ingersleben sees now only the chair left open at St. Joseph’s Conservatory and weighs his chance to fill it. 

“She will practice first. The arpeggios.”

“Mary? Dinner?” Mother says. I keep my back on her. I strike middle C.                                      

*** 

The gymnasium is full. Families sit on orange plastic chairs. I sit on my hands. The netting on my dress pushes hard into them. On one side of me sits Von Ingersleben. His greasy hair, slicked back this morning, now falls oily down his temples. He puffs through his nose and stares ahead. On the other side of me sits Mother. Her head, like her eyes, jerks from piano to window to me to the girl ahead of us who taps her feet on the chair.

“Stop,” I hiss. The whole gymnasium rocks every time she swings her head. It must be a tiring vigilance, this keeping away visions you don’t want to see.

Mother settles when Leta takes the stage. I’ve sat behind Leta on the bus every day now. I’ve watched her fingers drum on the hard seat before her. Though I kept my eyes on her jagged nails, I couldn’t make out what she played. I ran through all the classics in my head. There was no melody I could match to her fingers’ rhythm.

But I’m going to hear it now. I hold my breath. Von Ingersleben stiffens beside me. Leta lowers her eyes, lifts a hand…We hang there with her finger. She fools us all into the first note, which doesn’t come. She looks out at the gym, over the heads of parents who pin scrabbling children to the chairs, over the other pianists, dazed as they wait their own turns. She finds me. She smiles.

It takes a few bars before I believe what she plays. I rise. I fumble towards the aisle, over my mother’s knees. Mother’s eyes jerk to me, away from me. Her fingers flicker at mine but I pull away. I trip down the row, crushing toes not fast enough to hide.

Father’s lullaby sings in that gymnasium as I’ve never heard it played before.

I rush down dark hallways. I duck into the bathroom, but the song follows.  I push into the faculty room. Father’s song still finds me. It has always been this way, since the plants in the tub, since the dirt-packed grave, too cold to grow grass. This is why mother keeps moving. To not be caught.

Von Ingersleben finds me wedged between a tiled wall and metal drinking fountains.

“It’s not fair,” I sob. “She shouldn’t have done it.”

“She plays it well. And if this mattered, she would win. Listen to how she drops her notes, the gravity in each push.”  I cover my ears. Father’s hands beautifully and spidery pluck at the keys, his pencil in his mouth, his teeth puncturing the pencil’s yellow skin. The staff paper came by mail every month, wrapped in brown paper. He filled its lines with the poetry inside him.

Von Ingersleben shakes his head.

“She has precision. But you have something more I think. You have intuition. You pound, but with alacrity. She picks mechanically. It could be better. If you listen, you will hear.”

I bow my head. I cannot listen. I focus instead on the gurgle of the fountain’s backed-up drain. Von Ingersleben gives no comfort. He simply waits. Down the hallway a shadow shifts against the lockers. Mother. She hovers. Father’s lullaby both collapses and expands time. It has been years, but only a day since we all became this.

I raise my head. “I’m going to play it.”

“No. You picked Chopin. You worked on Chopin. You play Chopin.”

“I know this piece. I’m going to play it.” He’s right. Leta plays well—but not perfectly. There is no rubato in her song.

“Do not embarrass yourself.” But Von Ingerslebren’s coat buttons give him away. His buttons quiver. He breathes in short gasps. He fears. Our destinies have collided. When I fail, so does he. When I am foolish, he is the fool.

“I’m going to play it. Better than her.” Here is what I know now: Every day on the bus, I’ve watched Leta’s fingers, over and over and over, tapping it out.

He has no choice but to let me go when my name is called. I march to the stage. My fingers hover over the keys. They are wiped down between contestants, but still, I smell Leta. I close my eyes. I visualize the bus’s blue plastic seat beneath her tanned fingers—the distance between each one. The order of each stroke. The timing. I just need the first note.

The sinews of my father’s neck press on my head as he leans forward. His pencil touches the paper, a dot when he pulls away. High G.

“Put your hands on mine,” Father says. But it’s Leta’s hands I will follow now.

***

No one speaks during the car ride home. Not my home. His. The apartment in a neighborhood where we can buy from street stalls brilliant fruit unmarred by bruising or mold.

Von Ingersleben catches my eye from time to time in the rearview mirror, and once, when I lean outside the rolled down window, Mother smiles at me in the side mirror.

My hands rest over my knees. I feel their strangeness, as if they’ve just now become a part of me. They have not failed. Von Ingersleben knew they wouldn’t. He used them to push me.

It is true: I do not have my father’s hands.

But I have his genius.

At night, after the knocking and sighs, Mother slips into my bedroom. Her excitement makes her bold. She ignores me ignoring her, and slides beneath the coverlet. She holds my hands and rubs them with her own.

“First place today! He says you’ll make it. He says, if you play like you did today, you will get the scholarship. You will never have to go back.”

The blanket with the hand-sewn stars has been packed away, just like the memory of fried eggs with crisp, burned edges, the TV static instead of the news, the sunny way my mother touched Father’s hair while he played.

The plants in the bathtub will have died by now. Or perhaps, with our rent not paid, a new tenant will have tossed them out, scrubbed away what is left of my father, then lain in the tub to clean themselves.

“Imagine, Mary. Everything your father and I hoped for.” Mother’s hands are cold in mine. They are rough with cleaning. Her fingers squeeze mine painfully. In that tightness, I discover where Mother’s flute has gone. Into Father’s music. And now, into mine.

“Imagine,” she says.

And I do.

***

Leta on the bus does not look at me. She must have guessed how I could have played so well. She hides her fingers in her lap and taps on the folder. Still, she cannot fool me. She practices the “Revolutionary Etude.” It is a large piece that marches up and down the entire keyboard. I hear the knock of her elbow against the back of her seat as she finishes each run. Then she stares at me. Her eyes are black.

We ride like this for weeks: Her fingers tapping furtively on her Trapper Keeper. But me, I don’t care. I spend two hours every morning and three every evening with Von Ingersleben. He claps the top of the piano when I rush or slow down the rubato. He pinches the spare skin on the back of my hand or screams at how I maim Debussy’s one perfection.

I say nothing. I am only waiting—for the future I imagine.

Von Ingersleben chooses etudes as my work horses. Sometimes, I do not move a finger. I play the piece backwards and forwards in my mind while Von Ingersleben watches, arms crossed but his face slack with satisfaction.

Von Ingersleben says a good piano player has the core of a sumo wrestler. My back aches from the rigid pose he makes me keep, but my inner core winds tight. The muscles in my hands grow so that my veins bump out against my skin and writhe up my forearms. I grow stronger, wider, taller—but Mother grows thinner. Her constant flittering shows the sharpness that sweaters can’t hide. She comes to my bed at night before she goes to his. She has planned out the years ahead. We will eat steak at Christie’s once a week, Saturdays, when I come home from school on the light rail. She will bake chicken in Marsala wine. We will get drunk on giddiness.

“You will win,” Von Ingersleben says. Because he says it, I know I will.

***

The auditions are held in a church basement with a stage at one end. Mother and Von Ingersleben drop me off at the church nursery, where four other boys and girls already sit on chairs at tables meant for toddlers. Leta’s knees poke above her ruffled blue skirt and tower above the table. There is no moderator, just a woman, thin as an oboe, who stands in the doorway and calls us out, one by one.

Despite the closed door, music strains through the cracks. We listen to others play. Where have they failed? What can we do that they can’t? The boy with a blue-and-yellow striped tie lays his cheek against the table to feel the music. Its vibrations sink into the laminate beneath our palms. When he is called, it is only Leta and I left.

She will not look at me. I stand. I pace the perimeter of the tiny room. Piled in the corner of the nursery are boxes of toys. Stuffed animals line window ledges. A child’s kitchen with a plastic phone and plastic food in its toy sink sits against a wall.

Liszt’s sonata creeps through the door. I only have four minutes, maybe five, before the skinny woman comes and sings out another name.

I stop at a closet tied shut with twine to keep away curious toddlers. Leta watches me now. My back is turned, but two pricks of heat burn between my shoulder blades. I work the twine. The knot comes undone in my hands. I drop the twine on the concrete floor. Inside the closet are brooms and vacuums and a tool box. No razors or knives or anything sharp, just a hammer. The hammer’s handle is smooth in my hands. The head of it is heavier than I expect, and for a moment, I almost lose it to the floor.

By now Leta stands. Her eyes widen. The ruffles on her skirt don’t pass her knees, and the darts in the bodice of her dress are too high for her breasts. She rides several blocks past my old stop—where even vendors are too frightened to go.

I hope Leta thinks of all this, too. I advance upon her. She scrambles over wooden strawberries and plastic eggs. She trembles. Strands of her black hair quiver like strings inside a grand piano. Guts of horses. That’s what Father said the first piano strings were made of. If horses knew the beauty they would be a part of, he said, they would willingly die. Is that what Father did? Sacrifice himself for a larger beauty?

Leta reaches the door. There is nowhere to go but out, out into the dark hallway, then the basement auditorium, where there is a stage, a piano, and five judges from St. Joseph’s Conservatory who will determine our futures. Leta moves her hand behind her, grasps the door handle, but dares not turn her back on me to leave.

The hammer grows lighter as I advance.

“Leta,” I whisper. “Help me.”

***

When the moderator calls my name, I do not come. She moves a step in and peers around. I sit at the table and shake my head. She shifts her hips, waiting for me to change my mind. The pain is too much for me to speak. My eyes are wet, but I cannot wipe them.

She leaves at last. I know what will come next. Who will come next. Using my good left hand, I lift my right onto the little table and arrange my fractured fingers. Each touch brings searing pain. When I am done, the table’s laminate flashes white between my fingers like piano keys. This is my final composition.

“Mary.” Mother stands in the doorway, breathless. “Mary, we’re waiting for you.” I shake my head. Dark creeps into the sides of my vision.

“Mary.” Von Ingersleben says. He ducks beneath the door frame and enters the room. What an embarrassment to him if I do not go out.

“Mary,” Mother says. “Think of your father.”

“I am.” My voice is hard. Hard enough to catch their attention.

They see my fingers, splayed on the table.

Mother gropes for the door frame. She catches the corner shelf and knocks a basket of toy cars. They clatter to the floor. Her nails scratch at the grout between the cement blocks, but nothing can hold her up. She slides across the wall and drops to the ground.

“What have you done?” Von Ingersleben pales briefly, then burns a brilliant red. He reaches to touch Mother’s hair, then pulls back. Branches of blue throb against his pale wrist—there are a hundred ways to die in our hands alone. Father found one. I found another. But there are other ways to die, too: in the encroaching darkness comes the picture of Von Ingersleben with a wishful hand on my younger mother, who will one day pull aside a shower curtain and never be the same. There comes sweaters soft as rabbits that hang limp on tired shoulders, and a floor-to-ceiling window with nothing but a different view of things once held dear.

“She will never play again,” Von Ingersleben says.

Then he is gone.

With a rolling moan, Mother breaks open. The noise that comes and does not stop works into my bones. Her fingers dig at the concrete floor as if it were ground softened by rain. But her grief is not for me.

I nudge the hammer beneath the table with my toe. I gave Leta a choice. Either she would play my father’s lullaby again, or I would win it all.

She had never played so well.

In that great crescendo, when Father’s hands would split beneath mine, one hand fleeing toward treble, the other tumbling to bass, I lifted the hammer. It fell, cracking knuckles and bone until there was nothing left to imagine but a tiny apartment in a concrete high rise and a tub full of plants.

 “Let’s go home,” I finally say when Mother grows quiet.

The nursery spins: bright primaries and cotton-candy pastels swirl around me. I puke. The vomit spreads between my broken fingers. Mother rises and comes, a solid dark against the whirling colors. I watch her until the grey creeps up and makes shadows of everything.

about the author

M.E. Kopp is winner of the Jonis Agee fiction award, Northwoods Scholarship, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She is currently revising her first novel, a finalist for the Shirley Holden Helberg grant. Her work can be found in magazines including The Berkeley Review, The Florida Review, the Sonora Review, and the South Carolina Review. 

About the Artist

Molly McNeely (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based poet, photographer, and visual artist. Currently, she is working with a Polaroid 600 camera, as she is interested in the limitations of the Polaroid as well as its immediacy. The limited control of light and focus creates images that are dictated by the surrounding environment, a product of its place and time.  www.mollylauramcneely.com