Piano Hands

Dear Mom,

This morning, I woke up early and through our shared wall, I listened as you put your makeup on at the sink in your bathroom. I heard you unzip your makeup bag, and I imagined the rest of the procedure: your eyebrows penciled in, your eyeliner done in one swipe with practiced pianist’s hands.

I thought about my own makeup routine and the fact that I lied to you yesterday. It was an obvious lie, and you have always been good at seeing through my lies, but I will confess to you anyway. You were right; I did fill in my eyebrows. I did it with a black ballpoint pen. Perhaps even odder is the fact that I thought the pen wasn’t noticeable until Tim said it looked dorky. I guess little brothers can always be counted on to tell the truth.

But I won’t gloss over the first odd thing: the fact that I did not use an eyebrow pencil. It isn’t as if ballpoint-pen eyebrows are a trend in the 10th grade (unless I discover next week that everyone has copied my look). It’s just that I was too embarrassed to ask you to buy me an eyebrow pencil, or to take me to the store so I could buy one. I didn’t even want to have one in the house because I didn’t want you (or anyone) to find it. I thought that if you found the pencil, you would so quickly deduce the reason I wanted it: that I have almost no more eyebrow hairs left. So that is my second confession.

I pulled out my eyebrow hairs for the first time three years ago. Grandma noticed and said that she knew thin eyebrows were in fashion, but I had beautiful hair and should leave mine alone. I was ashamed to think she thought I was vain. But I couldn’t tell her that it was not vanity so much as inevitability—that my fingers flexed, dissatisfied, whenever they were not ripping out a hair, the way a spider’s legs twitch when it nears a trapped fly. That I did not even know that thin eyebrow hairs were in fashion; in fact, I hated the gaps in my eyebrows so much that I sometimes wore gloves or put glue on my fingers to try to stop my hands from touching my face. Would you have been able to explain all this to Grandma, whose hands are only ever productive—sketching building blueprints, writing letters to friends, sewing dolls for the church drive?

Mom, I have always thought your hands were like Grandma’s: agile and perfectly controlled. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve watched you at the piano and marveled at how your fingers move exactly the way you want them to, partnering with your mind without hesitation. I thought your hands were inherently more capable of creating something more intricate and beautiful than my hands are.

But there is one more confession I want to make. Before I listened to your makeup routine this morning, I heard you washing your hands. I heard you turn the tap on and off and on and off, heard the water start and stop, start and stop, over and over for minutes. I didn’t hear you rubbing your hands together, but I know you picked up the soap because I heard it fall to the floor.

Mom, I almost never wake up that early. I have never heard you do this before. Is this why you wake up so early? Am I completely wrong when I tell my friends, laughing, “My mom does not need as much sleep as the rest of us”? And how many times have we been in our separate rooms, me trying to make the ballpoint pen in my eyebrows as subtle as possible, you washing your hands as quietly as possible?

I am not asking for you to confess anything to me. I just want to say three more things: first, that I think you are strong, and not because you need less sleep than most people. Second, that your music is beautiful, and that maybe I can make something beautiful with my hands too. And finally, that I am so proud to be like you.

Love,

J