Music Teachers

Music Teachers

A Chapter by A Shared Narrative
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A woman is asked about a picture, and memories of her mother who played piano.

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The reporter had asked me if the photo was one of the happier memories I had of my mother. The reporter also asked me what was so funny. Memorials and retrospectives aren’t usually supposed to provoke laughter, after all.

 

I have absolutely no happy memories of my mother. That doesn’t mean I have bad ones, though. My mother was a good woman, but a driven woman, and that drive came directly from the damage inflicted on her by my grandparents. As a result, my mother was a positive monster when it came to that piano and me for the first sixteen years of my life. In her own way, it was how she showed me love that she couldn’t communicate any other way.

 

Despite being the virtuoso pianist that she was, my mother absolutely refused to bring any other piano into the house than that mahogany upright. It belonged to her parents and was virtually the only possession they brought when they came to the United States from Canada. They bought it and swore that their child wouldn’t have to do manual labor or factory work, like so many of that generation hoped for their children. It wasn’t just a college education and a good job they would give to their daughter, though, and that’s where my mother’s story takes a bit of a darker turn.

 

The American Dream quickly became a young girl’s nightmare. Music, we’re taught in schools, is an expression of emotion and ideas given sound. My mother was taught that it was a mathematical formula that must be flawlessly executed. If you didn’t know that they had come to New York from Canada, you would have thought my mother and her parents came from some Eastern European “Old Country”, they fit the stereotypes so well. And those stereotypes can turn out to be terrifyingly draconian realities.

 

My mother had a gift, and my grandparents turned it into a product. Ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day my mother would have to practice on that upright. They never physically abused her when she failed to perform to expectations, but there was plenty of meals, love, and just plain childhood that was withheld from her.

 

Like every parent, I suppose, they thought they were doing the right thing. If my mother didn’t work hard, after all, she’d never have the ability to escape her humble, lower-class beginnings. That’s part of why she became so famous, above and beyond her talent, and part of why I’m being interviewed lately. Her story is quintessentially “American.” A little talent, and a lot of hard work, and she became one of the most amazing success stories that classical music has known in modern times.

 

The abuse continued through her college years, until she started seeing professional instructors and tutors, as my grandparents could afford them. The one thing you’ll hear in the interviews and profiles, time after time, is that she was flawless in every performance she ever had, or participated in. Her detractors, though, and sometimes her closest supporters, had to admit that her music didn’t have much soul to it, and it’s why she became famous, but never a household name. At least, not until she died last week.

 

Her work “ethic” continued well after her parents had passed away, through her pregnancy with me, and even through childhood. There was never a time the house wasn’t filled with music. I was literally raised from the womb with chords vibrating through the amniotic fluid, you could say.

 

So, music was in my blood from the start, and I think that’s part of what my mother was so afraid of. If she could have kept the music room (really, it was just a repurposed office and sun room separated from the living room by a set of French doors) locked, and me out, I’m sure she would have. But she had to settle for keeping an eye on me and yelling at me, at every age, to stay away from her piano.

 

You can see how well I listened. Even at that age, I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to anything but that magic box that kept my mother so occupied, and my ears so delighted. I can’t tell you how many times I had my hands slapped for touching those keys like that, trying to make noise and joy like she did. One time, when I was eight and in a really defiant mood, I disassembled the hood that goes over the keys so she couldn’t lock it on me. That was the one time she ever struck me in real anger, and laid a conductor’s baton she’d been awarded across the back of my hands while I tried to play. It only took twice for her to draw blood, and, you know, I can’t say I ever remember seeing that baton again. I think that’s as close to an apology for protecting me from music as she ever got.

 

Back to the picture, though, because that was the root of the question, and the root of my mischief with music. Mom hated the thought of me playing the piano, or any music, especially from such a young age. She didn’t want me to turn into her, or risk herself succumbing to the temptation of teaching me to become like her. Dad, though. Dad loved seeing me at the piano, and he would encourage it at every chance. He saw her in me, but not like she saw herself in me.

 

This was probably one of the earliest times of Dad encouraging me, egging me on to pound the keys and make the noise and the joy. Truth be told, I don’t even remember this incident, but I remember plenty like it. For every time that Mom would slap my hands or yell at me, Dad would later take me to the bench and poke away to my heart’s content. They weren’t secret lessons, per se, as much as it was a tacit agreement that she, the piano, and I never existed in the same space at the same time.

 

So, from the time I could reach the keys on my tip toes, Dad was either taking pictures of me doing it, or putting me up to it by just plain putting me on the bench. He never had mom’s gift of talent, but he could play his fair share, and that’s my happy memory of learning to play the piano in this picture. It wasn’t my mother at all.

 

It was eight years after the baton incident that she caught me and Dad playing together. We were poking our way through a two-person rendition of “Heart and Soul” and had totally lost track of the time. It was something we’d been playing around with for a few months, because Dad mostly liked to watch me play since I had fun, and Mom’s performances were on a different plane of existence. He’d never seen someone have fun playing before, and he was having fun finally getting to join in with the talented family members.

 

It was awful, and cheesy, and he kept telling awful jokes, and we’d lose our place and laugh and start over. Or just keep going, because that riff can just go on forever until it gets stuck in your head. And we did keep going, until the tacit agreement was broken, and we turned around, caught red-handed, when Mom cleared her throat. I thought we were both going to get it for certain, since it wasn’t just me playing, it was him, too. She didn’t lose it, though.

 

She did the one thing I had never seen her do in the sixteen years of life I had lived up to that point, when she’d caught be on the bench in front of the piano: she smiled. And then she started crying. Not crying-crying, but just tears running down her face. She embraced my father and kissed him in a way that would make any sixteen-year-old blush, let alone one that was eighteen inches from their faces. She just whispered, “Thank you,” to him and then she wrapped me up in the most uncharacteristic and tightest hug she’d ever given me, and whispered, “Thank you,” in my ear, too.

 

She walked out of the music room, and left the French doors to swing wide open. She stopped just for a moment in the living room, didn’t turn to look at us at all, and just said, “Don’t stop.”

 

That. That right there. That’s the happiest memory of my mother, the virtuoso concert pianist you know, that I have. And that’s the story that you really wanted to know, even if you thought it would be about the picture. That picture of me is cute, don’t get me wrong, and was certainly the start of my musical education, but my best and happiest memory of Mom is the day when her daughter played the piano better than she ever could, and it made her happier than she’d ever been.


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© 2016 A Shared Narrative


Author's Note

A Shared Narrative
PHOTO CREDIT: Kayla Rene-Ann Richardson
PHOTO CONTENT: Kayla's daughter, reaching for the piano keys

1,511 words.

ABOUT THE PROJECT:
Every piece was written before I knew who or what the image was about. Credit and attribution was revealed only after completing the story for each picture.

Each of these stories is in the same form as it immediately came out onto the page. The exercise is to produce words, and a habit. Please feel free to critique on content and rate accordingly. Leave notes about egregious technical errors, but please don't let it stand against your rating of the content.

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Added on May 9, 2016
Last Updated on May 9, 2016
Tags: flash fiction, flash, short stories, short story, family, music, piano


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A Shared Narrative
A Shared Narrative

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I am mostly an on-demand writer. I respond to prompts and contests as an exercise to compel creativity in different ways. more..

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