The Piano Song

Alone at a window a woman stood, her right arm raised holding back the curtain. Next to the window on a rickety end table an empty vase stood. Behind her was old furniture, and further behind against the back wall of the room, an old piano. Out the window the bare branches of a single tree bowed forward in the wind. The November afternoon was sinking into evening. The woman watched the cars and people on the street and the sparse, swirling flakes of snow.

Soon one man approached, his hat pulled down, collar turned up, hands in his pockets. The woman watched him. In moments he had gone out of sight to the left of the window. Then came the sound of the door opening and stomping feet.

She let go of the curtain and walked, back straight, hands folded, quiet steps invisible beneath her skirt, from the living room to the front entry. She stopped in the doorway between the two. “Hello, Tom,” she greeted him. The man wore a coat as grey as the sky and the color of his face was nearly the same.

“Cold walk home?” she asked gently.

He shrugged and gave a grunt, and went into the small kitchen. From a shelf he brought down a bottle and a glass. He poured some whiskey and took a drink.

“You know, I can’t find anyone to tune the piano,” she began, following him into the kitchen. “It seems there are so few and they’re so expensive…” The woman trailed off, seating herself on a hard wooden chair.

Tom took another drink, still standing at the counter. “We never should have let your mother give you her old piano. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, Marie.”

“Not most of the time…” she replied under her breath. She looked down at her hands in her lap.

Her husband poured more into his glass and left the room. On the way out he said, “By the way, that Dennis has finally retired and I’m sure to be promoted next month. I’m going to start looking for a new house.”

-

It was three months later, a wintery afternoon with snow falling. Marie, her back curved, head bent downward, sat at the piano, the last object remaining in the room. The curtain had been taken down from the window and the dull light came in, settling on her clothing and the black and white keys in soft greyish shades. Her purse sat at the foot of the bench. Wearing a hat and a coat that did not button anymore over her stomach, she was alone. Her fingers passed gently, smoothly, over the keys, her foot pumped the pedal in slow and rhythmic movement. The music was beautiful, flowing like a draining sigh, played with care.

After several minutes the front door burst open and a loud voice shouted into the room, startling her. She jumped and the music stopped abruptly. “Marie! Stop playing that old song. It’s time to go.”

Marie’s hands rested limp on the keys. She sighed. When Tom entered the room at her back she straightened sharply but did not turn.

“I’m coming, Tom,” she said.

“It’s time to go. Everything is packed,” he said with finality.

Marie looked down and whispered, “Not everything.”

He heard her. “Marie, this piano is old and worthless. It is not worth the struggle of moving it down the stairs and into the new house. Please, for once, be realistic.”

Marie stood, lovingly pushed in the bench, and bent laboriously to pick up her purse. “My mother taught me to play that song. This piano is the only thing I have of hers,” she said quietly. I guess I have the song too, she thought. She placed a hand on her stomach, with the coat splaying out on either side and the buttons undone below her breast. She laid her other hand one last time on the keys of the piano.

“We are not taking it, Marie. Anyway, with my promotion I can buy you another one, a better one, if you really want it. Let's go!”

Her hand slid from the keys with a dissonant plunk and she turned. She followed her husband out the door into the snow, and he locked the door behind them.

-

Many years later, in the yard of a large suburban house, a clothesline stands in the muddy spring ground. Laundry billows in the wind as a woman hangs it piece by piece from a basket. From inside the house comes the faint sound of a song played falteringly on a piano.

Presently the woman finishes her chore and returns inside, carrying the empty basket. In the living room a little girl sits at a piano, her feet dangling off the bench into mid air. Her brow furls in concentration. As the woman approaches the girl stops playing and looks up at her.

“Mama?” she says, a frustrated expression on her young face.

“What, darling?”

“I need help.”

The woman sets her basket down and seats herself next to her daughter, a creak coming from the old wooden bench.

“Which part?”

The girl points to a section that she has been trying to play on the simple sheet music resting on the piano shelf. “Here.”

Her mother puts a hand on the keys and plays the notes, slowly, for her daughter. The little girl watches.

“There. That’s how it should sound.” The woman smiles. “You try now. I have to go see if Grandpa needs anything.”

The woman rises and walks away and down a hall. The girl’s playing continues, quieted as the woman enters a bedroom and closes the door behind her.

“Dad?” she calls gently.

An old man leans back in a large bed, covered in rumpled sheets. His eyes are closed. On the nightstand is a bottle of whiskey and a glass half full.

“Dad, can I get you anything?” The woman asks softly.

Suddenly there is a knock on the door. The little girl. “Grandpa Tom,” she calls from the other side of the door.

“Just a minute, sweetie,” the woman says. Stepping to the door she opens it a crack, sticks her head out and looks down at her daughter.

“Grandpa Tom, I want to play a song for you,” the little girl calls, craning past her mother to address the man in the bed.

“I thought you were still practicing, darling,” her mother says.

“No, another song. The one Grandma Marie taught me when we moved here, to take care of her and Grandpa. Grandpa needs me to play it.”

Grandpa Tom speaks then, in a low and surly voice. “I don’t need anything.”

The little girl looks up at her mother. The woman pauses sadly. She looks at her daughter. She remembers her mother, teaching her that song on the new piano, the song she had learned from her own mother. She remembers just months ago her mother teaching it to her daughter, her granddaughter, just before she died. Then she looks back over her shoulder at her father in the bed.

“You’re right, darling,” the woman says. The girl brightens. The woman slowly swings the big door all the way open. “Grandpa needs to hear some music,” she says. “The whole world needs to hear music. Go play the song for us.”

That evening, the woman takes down the laundry from the clothesline. The cloudy sky has turned a soft greyish pink in the sunset. The dull glow is reflected in the wet mud of the ground, where the garden will be planted soon. The girl’s playing can still be heard faintly from the house. Too young to have learned it in its entirety, the girl plays the song’s melody line, slowly, simply, the single notes floating up alone. The woman smiles, her eyes shining with memory in the light of the sunset sky.