BABY GRAND/PIANO GIRL

Baby Grand, you set me apart. I am no longer girl, but Piano Girl. Witness my making of magic. Clunk. My shoe kisses the pedal. Cough. A man wearing a fedora in the third row bites back a second bellow. His wife doesn’t know his cancer is back. Hush. A frazzled mother dampens her restless child’s cry. Giggle. A girl in my English class is amused by my ambition. Instead, she should be scared. I summon silence, steered by the song of Satie. I am, as the woman in the first row whispers, a god-damn prodigy.

Fingers sink into ivory dunes, a note in isolation echoes and eddies, ringing row to row. Then a chord or two, mellowed by the press of a pedal. The room, now a river, carries the chords and the cries of my grandmother in the second row, who is well into her second pack of Kleenex by the second note. See, a song is not a song but a moment in time laden with love and thought, and what are you thinking of when you are listening to this? Who?

The hard part is approaching. The best part. My piano teacher talks to me. Don’t rush, lift your fingers up higher, cut your nails. I forgot to cut my nails. It’s coming. My stomach swirls and the bones in my hands don’t feel they belong to me, though I trust them. Don’t forget to breathe. Breathe. Wheeze. I am not here but in the sitting room at my grandmother’s home, on the upright Bösendorfer with no other being but myself. Just me. Hands hover. Go. 

Baby Grand, I bleed my soul into you. Be gentle with me. The strings, like the cornfield rows opposite my home, caught in a gale. The eyes, like dust particles in the sun-soaked sitting room, watching me. I wonder what they are thinking of, for I doubt their mind is still. Mine never is. You’d think one would think more about the music when playing but there comes a point in a piece when you almost forget what you are doing. The breath of thought between the inhale and exhale of a song is one that is long and loaded, sometimes with love and life, having or losing, and what plays is not a mere melody, but a myriad of memories. I think of the women that sit at the stool before me (my mother, her mother, her sister, their mother) and if these frantic fingers are hereditary, then let this opus be an ode. 

Feel the buzz in your bones, the vibrato is a bee that hums and hums. Run after run, the black and white teeth chatter their song. And here, at this piano, I transform into something else entirely: a puppeteer and the crowd, my marionette. And now, for my final act. An apostle of arpeggios ascends into the auditorium with as much ability to move a crowd as a bullet, and sometimes music is just as powerful, is as powerful, though instead of taking lives, it gives them, and I am the mother of this melody. 

Baby Grand, you set me apart. Clap. Hear them roar for Piano Girl. Feel the blaze of a hundred eyes bathing in our divinity. Clap. Hear the whistle of a woman in the back row who came all this way from Ireland. Stand, bow. Have the chance to look into the faces of the crowd and soak in their adoration. We did it. I did it.