The Beat Goes On
Her best friend’s mother suggested piano lessons. She’d give it a go even though there wasn’t a piano in sight. Never give up. She beat her fingers on the three paneled fold-out keyboard, provided free of charge. Knock, knock, knock and the pads of her thick fingers soon turned red as ripe cherries. Leaving Twinkle Twinkle and Happy Birthday behind, she played Gershwin. Swaying blue velvet and low lights. Her friend had an organ that sat on the kitchen table where her mother, imperious and raven haired, scanned newspapers with an oversized magnifying glass looking for god-knows-what, contemplating world events, smoking drugstore Tiparillos while occasionally offering unwanted advice, similar to the one about the lessons.
Reluctantly, they let her borrow the small instrument made of chocolate colored plastic, after she pleaded her case: the music is in me. The mother sat straight-backed, at attention and eyed her like something in a curiosity shop, squinting through her bluish smoke, sometimes not exhaling until she hit a final note. Already an audience. She pumps the keys in a trance, one note overlapping the next. The organ wheezing pumped air under the keys, causing, a delayed reaction, making rhythm in its own time not hers. Beads of sweat pooled on her upper lip. She held her breath.
“Enough,” the friend’s mother said with clear precision one night, standing up, shaking her head, slowly, side to side. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and then from the keys of the organ. Forgot, for a moment, where she was. Tiparillo ash still glowing in the ashtray, the newspapers piled like fortress. Her friend stood, arms folded, eyes down, the toes of her right foot drawing x’s and o’s on the cracked linoleum. Complicit. Still aware of a semblance of her own worth until the mother deadpans to her proud back “Don’t make it a habit.”
She heads home, three doors down to her own mother who will be lost in some mysterious reverie of her own, ever-present dark glasses affixed to her impassive face. Always without words. She’ll a grab a couple of pencils, number two’s, without points. She’ll beat a soft tattoo on her mother’s bony, bruised knuckles, then work her way up to her jutting, exposed collarbones, her straggly brow. Her mother will smile with one side of her mouth, soundless. She’ll press her ear to the bony scaffolding of her mother’s chest and inhale and exhale to the beat of her the woman’s breathing.
The music will remain somewhere amongst the battered three panel keyboard, the breaths quick, short and shallow, a music all their own. She decides if she is good enough and doesn’t try too hard, she will occasionally have the air organ, wreathed in smoke, on the table of her friend’s sloe-eyed mother. She, more than anyone, always seemed to know the limits of a good thing when she heard it.
Michelle Reale is an academic librarian at a university in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her fiction has been published in Verbsap, Apt, elimae, Dogzplot, JMWW, Laura Hird, Freight Train, Pequin, Diddledog, Blood Orange Review and others.