~This story was first published in Southern Humanities Review (2013).
~Selected by Assistant Editor Kenneth A. Fleming
Courtney parks her Prius at the top
of Matt’s driveway because Brandon’s blue Mongoose bicycle is sprawled across
it. The blazing yellow forsythia at the edge of the drive runs down and is starting
to swallow the corner of his house. It’s pretty, just out of control, needs a
little tending. A lot of tending. The smell of cut grass wafts from the
neighbor’s yard, where a fat man without a shirt on is riding a slow roaring
mower.
She grabs her plastic tub of bruschetta—she
made it with organic onions and heirloom tomatoes from the co-op, and her own
fresh basil—and her grocery bag with baguette and knife and garlic from beside
her on the seat and gets out. She closes the door with her hip and picks her
way through scattered toys and sidewalk chalk in the carport. The kids’ bodies
are traced on the drive in chalk, like victims’ outlines in crime shows. And
there is Matt’s outline. Some child has filled him in, drawn him with big round
green eyes and jagged blue monster teeth. Matt’s a gentle man, a gentle father.
Almost passive. It makes things easy between him and Courtney. The ex-wife, not
so much.
The wooden rail at the door is half
stripped of its peeling white paint. One whole side is draped in beach towels,
turquoise and blue with fish on one, one black with bright pink butterflies,
another with blue and yellow flowers. At the back of the carport a blue tarp is
balled up like a giant sheet of discarded paper. Beside it are three nylon
camping chairs, and a faded bottle of OFF! Clean Feel bug spray. Beside the
kitchen door leans a gray snow shovel. The sticker is still on the wooden handle.
It says Ames: Our Tools Built America.
Matt gave Courtney a key to his place only
yesterday, before leaving for his conference. So she could meet the kids after
school. Also yesterday he asked her to consider marrying him. When she didn’t
respond with immediate glee—things between the two of them are great, it’s not
that; everything is just easy—he backed
off a little. “Don’t answer now,” he said. “We’ll discuss it when I get home.”
The little black cylinder thing that should
pull the screen door hissing back is broken and jabs out at her leg as the white
aluminum door drifts and hangs open like a broken wing. It’s ridiculous to be
nervous. Courtney has been a Shreveport Wideman semifinalist. She’s
concertized, performed Stravinsky Petrushka, Shoenberg. Berg Sonata. She was
with management, soloed with the Honolulu Orchestra right before it
folded. This is just three little kids.
She’s spent time with the kids, not alone
without Matt, but still they know her, like
her. Brandon is nine, Bryce is seven, and Alissa is five. Entering the dark
kitchen Courtney bangs her knee on the handlebar of Alissa’s Dora the Explorer
bicycle, which she sees now, standing up between its training wheels in the
middle of the kitchen floor, its front wheel turned sideways like a caught
child’s guilty, diverted gaze.
The boys will be easy, Courtney is
counting on that. They’re boys of course, but they’re good. Alissa is good too,
she’s not bad. She’s a little hyperactive—her school wants to have her tested
for sensory integration disorder, but Matt is refusing. “When I was a kid,” he
said, “we called girls like her tomboys and that was that.” He lets her ride
her bicycle helter skelter around the house. He lets her climb the door frames;
he laughs and thinks it’s cute.
Courtney’s meeting the mother for the
first time too, to make the hand off. Courtney’s not staying the night with
them while Matt’s gone—she’s never spent the night here, in their old marriage
bed; when the kids go to their mother’s Matt stays over at Courtney’s.
Otherwise they say goodnight at bedtime. The kids are spending their nights
with the ex. Matt calls her, “The woman who gave them birth,” but her name is
Ann and today Courtney plans to politely call her that.
Courtney flips on the lights to see that dinner
dishes are scattered across the counter by the sink, not even scraped of their
chicken bones—fried chicken, KFC or grocery store. She turns the oven on to
three fifty. She flips open the trashcan lid to drop in her chewing gum and the
reek of rancid meat fills her nostrils, makes her salivate around her molars as
her throat contracts. She pushes back the jug of milk with her Tupperware of
bruschetta and takes the baguette to the counter.
She slides the baguette out of the bag,
then the garlic and her eight inch Henckels bread knife—which will be going
back home with her, which will not be used to saw a branch in the back yard.
She cuts the bread into crostini-sized slices and lines them on Matt’s
half-rusty cookie sheet. She whacks out three cloves of garlic with the side of
her knife and rubs down each slice of bread. While the bread slices toast up,
Courtney scrapes the dishes, rinses them, loads them into the dishwasher, gets
it started. She takes out the rancid garbage and drops it in the can that is
also being swallowed by the forsythia. Two fat bumblebees hover around her arm
and head at the can, but they leave her alone.
Back inside the oven is beeping and the
whole kitchen smells of fresh garlic bread. She sets the cookie sheet on the
range. The range is splattered with grease and oily bits of onion. A crusty
clump of scrambled egg the size of Courtney’s thumbnail. Poorly scrambled,
splattered white and slimy on the edge like a glob of robin shit. Beside the
range is a pile of mail. A DVD collection: Dr.
Who the complete first season. Under that a magazine, which she pulls out
to look at: Family Fun, addressed to
the mother, to Ann who still has Matt’s last name. It announces, “Soak Up
Summer,” and has a picture of a boy in a blue swim shirt aiming a garden hose
playfully at Courtney.
She checks her watch. It is 3:20. Four
minutes till the kids are due. She makes sure she’s turned off the oven and
heads out to the bus stop to greet them.
Last Mother’s Day, their mom was out
of town, traveling for a NASCAR race, or some kind of car race, with the guy
Matt sometimes calls “the adultery partner,” but usually just shortens to “the
partner.” The kids were staying with him. “Since their biological mother is a flake,”
he asked Courtney, “you want to fill in?” She said, “I don’t want to be out at
some chain restaurant watching all the mothers with their children.” He said,
“We can do a picnic at the Peaks of Otter. Tomorrow’s supposed to be
beautiful.”
Saturday Courtney told Matt she couldn’t
come over, said she would see him Sunday for the picnic. She started in the
mid-afternoon. She beat and scraped and beat and scraped a glob of hand-churned
butter from the co-op. She refrigerated it while she made the dough, adding
half-n-half to the milk for extra creaminess.
She rolled and folded the butter and dough in thirds letter-style, rolled and
folded, rolled and folded, refrigerated, rolled and folded. After she gave the
dough eight turns, she refrigerated it again while she baked her special
pumpkin bars, with cinnamon and cloves and allspice and nutmeg, adding
chocolate chips to the recipe and frosting them with cinnamon cream cheese
icing. Courtney knew how to work for a goal, and how to make sacrifices; she
had earned both her Certificate in College and Community Music Teaching and her
Artist’s Certificate from Eastman, hadn’t had a serious boyfriend since grad
school, had moved all over—one place, didn’t get tenure, Honolulu, which
folded, New World Orchestra in Miami, played Carnival Cruises for a while, then
the Syracuse Orchestra, which also folded—never settled down. Then her dad got
sick and here she is back home, him in Runk & Pratt and her living here so
she can go to see him twice a week. She’s started working, getting students,
and weddings. Not a lot of return artistically, but the earning potential looks
promising.
While she prepped the picnic Courtney
listened all day to old favorites of hers, melodies she had always loved, but
music that had been overplayed and become hackneyed, passé. Rachmaninoff Sonata
2, and his piano concerti one through four, his variations on a theme by
Paganini, Liszt’s Symphonic Poems. Beethoven. She even listened to Appalachian Spring. And enjoyed it. So
what? she thought. Who does she have to impress now? Through the door she could see her shitty old Yamaha
grand, filling up the whole den so she had to step around it to get anywhere in
the house.
In 08 Courtney was up in NYC, with a
friend who was buying a piano for her school’s concert stage. They were meeting
a guy who worked at the Fazioli store and they were there early. The store next
door was open so she went in. They specialized in rebuilt Steinways, but they had
a Bluthner. The store was empty because it was morning, and the guy let her
just sit there and play. She played Bach B Flat Major Partita. This was the
high performance car of pianos, so responsive, no place to hide. Courtney’s
hand size sometimes presents her with challenges, but she has color in her
playing, refinement in her touch.
That day she whipped up the atmosphere in
that old store, created a rarified air that lifted them all and got them high. When she was finished with
the partita, both her friend and the guy at the store—jaded professionals—broke
into spontaneous exclamations and applause.
The man said, “You are a fine soloist.”
“It’s the piano,” she said.
“It doesn’t play itself.”
Courtney is an okay soloist. She’s a
better collaborator. She pays attention, knows when a singer needs to breathe
for instance. Once Courtney was in a colloquium with James Galway’s wife, who
is a flutist like her husband. Not like her husband—she is a bad flutist, and
on top of that a royal bitch. Courtney knows playing chamber music is a
delicate balance, working together, accommodating each other, losing the self
in this larger performance. She can do that, is actually good at it.
“Wow but what an instrument,” she said. “I
have to have one.” She was gigging at the time, and even though she was with
management, she was living paycheck to paycheck, with another friend who
sometimes covered her rent. Saving money before she moved out to Utah for a
one-year appointment at Brigham Young.
While the pumpkin bars baked and cooled
she took out the dough and cut and rolled her croissants. She baked the
croissants and set them on the cooling rack. The house was warm and smelled
like a bakery. She dragged one of her
free range chickens out of the freezer, thawed it in the microwave—which took
almost an hour, all told—baked it, pulled the meat off the bones as it cooled,
chopped the meat, mixed it with onion, celery—which she peeled the strings out
of and chopped into tiny pieces—mayonnaise—Hellmann’s because no other mayo
compares, and also because she’s heard they are going sustainable—salt, pepper,
just a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, and her special addition of white grapes
and chopped pecans. She boiled eight free-range eggs and cooled them under
running tap water, peeled them carefully under the water, sliced them with her
ten inch Henkels chef’s knife. She mashed the yolks with mayo, Dijon, a
teaspoon of cider vinegar—which always makes her jaws clench back by her molars
when the tang hits her nostrils—salt, pepper, paprika, and a quarter cup of
Clausen dill pickle relish. She put a bag of mixed seedless table grapes into
the freezer for the hike up, because what kid doesn’t like frozen grapes? She
cut up a cantaloupe and a honeydew melon into kid-friendly chunks. She ran out
and grabbed a bag of Lays wavy hickory barbecue potato chips. She sat down for
a minute and sipped wine, then hopped back up and cut the leftover celery into
four-inch sticks which she filled with peanut butter and lined on a tray and
covered with Saran wrap. She made lavender lemonade, then had second thoughts.
She would take it, but just in case the kids didn’t like it, she ran back out
and got three fat bottles of blue Gatorade. She mixed up some sangria in her
plastic pitcher. She washed and patted dry ten big leafs of organic bib
lettuce, and put them with paper towels between them in a gallon Ziploc bag. It
was two in the morning when she finally got everything put away and dropped her
heavy body into bed.
At ten the next morning, she had pretty
much finished the Times and come to a
standstill on the crossword puzzle, so she gave Matt a call.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “Their mother
came back early. She stopped by this morning and picked them up for the day.”
She cast about for something to say, was
silent an instant too long.
“Oh,” he said. “The picnic.” He said, “You
didn’t go to any trouble did you?”
“No,” she said. “Not really. I ran out and
got some chips and bottled drinks, but it’s no big deal.”
“You sure?”
“No,” she said. “Really it’s fine.”
He said. “I mean, she is their mother.”
“No, I agree entirely. They should be with
their mother on Mother’s Day.”
Matt drove the two of them out to the
Peaks of Otter. They ate soggy food off the lodge’s buffet, along with the
after-church crowd, all these old women with their kids and grandkids and great
grandkids even, some of them, it looked like.
Courtney would be thirty nine in fourteen
days. She had had a lot of professional success. But that doesn’t translate to
much in classical music, and things are getting hard. She applied for a
teaching position at Eastern Carolina in Greenville and she was eminently
qualified, thought she had a good shot. Benjamin Hochmann got the job—fucking Benjamin Hochmann. If the Benjamin
Hochmanns are taking jobs at places like Eastern Carolina, who else has a
chance for fucks sake? The women at the buffet who were Courtney’s age had
teenagers—tall lanky boys with floppy long hair, wearing khaki shorts and
loose-tailed Oxford shirts, who towered over their mothers as they stepped
together sideways at the buffet.
When the kids’ mother arrives it is
seven in the evening—the woman is almost an hour late—and the kids are getting
hungry again. They dove into the bruschetta earlier, slopped it all over the
table, worked the crostini in their maws like dogs with crunchy bones. Courtney
pulled the plate away laughing, and said, “Don’t want to ruin your dinner. Your
mom would get mad at me.”
Brandon wanted to play on the computer.
Courtney told him he had a thirty-minute limit and he decided just to go
outside and ride his bike. Bryce wanted to walk around on his toes and relate in
painful detail the plot to Children of
the Corn which Matt had inexplicably let him watch. Eventually she got him
outside too. He didn’t like the mosquitos, went straight for the bottle of OFF
in the carport and hosed himself down. Alissa took one lap through the house on
her bike, and then Courtney put her out the door, saying, “That is an outside
toy.” “Can I ride on the street?” Alissa asked. “I don’t know, can you?” “May I? Dad lets me.” “I’d be more comfortable if you stayed on the
driveway.” The girl accepted it without complaint. Courtney followed her out
and shouted into the yard, “Who wants to learn how to make clover necklaces?”
“I’m so sorry,” the mother says
before she even introduces herself. “Work was hell today.” She is heavy, bulges
in her blouse and jeans; she has on fuck-me boots with four-inch heels. She has
small brown eyes and a headache scowl that makes the parallel lines between her
eyebrows rise up to almost meet two lines across her forehead. If Courtney
filled in the lines with nail polish, it would be a fat letter T. Courtney knows it is petty, but still
it makes her happy.
“I’m Courtney.” She hands the woman the
pile of mail addressed to her, folded into the Family Fun magazine like a big paper taco.
The woman takes it. “I had this
client call right before I left the office,” she says, looking around for the
kids. She smells like cigarette smoke. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken the
call.”
“What is it you do?”
“I had to park over at Mrs. Stavers
because the driveway is blocked.”
“The kids are out back playing.”
“In the yard?” the mother says. “Together?”
“They’ve been out there since
snack.”
“You have better luck than I do
getting them outside.”
“It was easy,” she says. “I set a
thirty-minute limit on technology, but none of them used any.”
“You got Brandon off Runescape?
That’s impressive.” The woman sets her mail down on the kitchen table.
“I taught them how to make necklaces out
of clover. I can’t believe I still remember how.”
The woman steps to the kitchen door and
yells out into the yard, “Come on, kids. Time to go home.”
“I gave them bruschetta for snack,”
Courtney says.
“They ate bruschetta?”
“I had to make them stop so they wouldn’t
ruin their dinner.”
“I love bruschetta,” the woman says. “Isabella’s
Trattoria has hands down the best bruschetta ever made. You ever eat there?”
“Heirloom tomatoes and my own fresh basil.
Even the garlic is local and organic. Would you like some?”
The woman says, “You teach piano I hear.”
“I could some in a container for you all
to have later. It’s just me and I won’t eat it all.”
“Do you do anything else? I mean… do you
compose?”
“I’m not a composer.” Courtney’s been
making more money gigging lately than teaching, and weddings pay a whole lot
better than recital gigs, and they’re a hell of a lot easier to prepare for.
Don’t have to practice at all. It’s not steady and dependable work though.
The woman yells out the door, “Brandon
Bryce Alissa. This minute.” She turns to Courtney and has some money in her
hand, the outer bill is a five. She says, “To help with the food.”
“Nonsense,” Courtney says. “I had fun.”
“That organic stuff’s too expensive the
way these three eat.”
“Not in the long run, if it keeps them out
of the medical system.”
“True that,” the woman says. She asks, “Do
you have kids of your own?”
The three kids rumble into the kitchen,
sweaty ears, smelling like grass and worms.
Bryce says, “Can we go to Micky-D’s for
dinner?”
Alissa says, “I want Subway.”
“We did Subway yesterday.”
“So,” Alissa says. “Courtney, tell them
Subway is healthier.”
The woman says, “Miss Courtney, Alissa.
Use your manners.”
Courtney says, “Oh it’s okay. Just
Courtney is fine.”
The woman says, “They get excited and forget
their manners with people they don’t know.”
Courtney’s gaze is drawn to the wrinkled T on the woman’s forehead, to the gray
skunk streak. There is a kinked white hair in the part right at the hairline,
snapped back from a tweezer tug, looks like. Courtney can’t help herself and
she smiles.
“Mom,” Bryce says, “tell Alissa we’re not
going to Subway again.”
Brandon says, “I need my trumpet for band
tomorrow.”
“Where is it?” the mother asks.
Brandon shrugs.
“Have you even practiced at all this
week?” The mother walks to the door that leads into the dining room, which has
been for all the nine months Courtney has known Matt a storage room for things
of questionable ownership after his split with this woman. Sure enough the
trumpet is there among the boxes and chairs and lamps in its black plastic
case.
And an upright piano.
They all somehow end up in the
dining room with the piano. The wood is painted blond. Courtney opens the plank
of wood and looked inside at the plate: Lester
Piano Company, Lester, PA, est. 1888. Endorsed by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The hammers are red and yellow, old, soft, and the odor of mildew and dust rises
out of it, the smell of abandoned old church basements.
Behind it the window blinds hang
tattered—evidence of a dog they once had that ran away for days at a time, then
weeks, then just never came back. The windowsill is chewed and clawed, the
white paint gone, the wood beneath gouged and scratched. The blinds are
destroyed, and hang splayed like an ax murderer entered through them. In their hanging
gaps Courtney can see through the carport into the fat, shirtless neighbor’s
garage that stands perpetually open, filled with so much junk no car could fit
inside.
“That’s the piano your mom took lessons
on,” the woman says to the kids.
“Courtney can play the piano,” Bryce
says.
Alissa says, “Play the piano,
Courtney.”
“Miss
Courtney.”
“Maybe some other time. Your mom is
tired. She wants to get you guys on home and fed.”
The woman runs her fingers along the
keyboard. “I took lessons on this thing for seven years.”
“You still play?” Courtney asks.
“Play it,” Bryce yells, and Brandon
joins him in begging—please mommy, play us something, play it for us,
please—while Alissa bangs away on the keys, as if the thing hadn’t been in this
house her whole life, as if she’s just discovered it. It’s badly out of key.
It’s against an outside wall, under a drafty window.
“Let me in, Alissa,” the woman says.
Alissa scoots to the edge of the bench and the woman sits down to play. Her
flesh bulges inside her work clothes. She starts playing that Vanessa Carlton
song “1000 Miles,” and her kids all perk up and watch her—but the song is
written in B flat major and the woman is playing it in B Dorian. She can only
play the right hand. Kind of.
“Wow,” Brandon says.
Bryce says, “Mom’s a good piano player.”
He looks at Courtney, proud of his mother.
Alissa cranes her head back and says to
Courtney, “She’s a good piano player, isn’t she, Courtney.”
“Miss,”
Brandon says.
Courtney lies and says yes, she’s
not bad.
“I haven’t played in so long,” the
mother says, obviously pleased with herself. “I used to be even better.” She says to Brandon, “Get your trumpet.” She
says to Courtney, “In school I played a Steinway.”
“Those are the best pianos, aren’t
they mom?” Brandon says.”
“They are, honey.”
Courtney says, “I like the Steinway
growl, how deep and resonant it is. But it can sometimes be muddy.”
“True,” the woman says. Like she
knows.
Courtney has to step out of the way
as the woman scoots the bench back to stand, saying, “Get your book bag too.
You two go get your book bags. It’s time to go home.”
“Can we go to Micky D’s?” Bryce asks.
“Subway,” Alissa says.
“Micky D’s,” Bryce says. Brandon says,
“Micky D’s.”
The woman says, “We had Subway yesterday.”
The boys cheer. To Courtney’s surprise
Alissa accepts without argument, goes for her book bag.
To Courtney the woman says, “I work a
regular job. Sometimes I work pretty late, and I’m just too tired for some big
production at dinner.”
“I get it,” Courtney says.
The woman meets the kids in the kitchen,
says to them, “Say thank you to Miss Courtney for babysitting you.” They all
say thank you Miss Courtney. Courtney says no problem, she had fun.
Courtney sits at the piano and stares
through the broken blinds at the messy world of the neighbor’s garage. She sees
Alissa flash past the window, hears the kids and the woman all out in the
carport talking. She puts her hands on the keys and starts playing the Bach B
Flat Major Partita. She chips a note, then chips another, but then finds her
groove. The old piano is a piece of shit, but she makes it ring out.
Does she compose—what kind of question was
that? Courtney bears down and plays harder. She thinks of all the people known
for interpreting the work of others: Glenn Gould playing Bach; Mitsuko Uchida
with Mozart, Hayden; Richard Goode playing Beethoven. So what if she doesn’t
compose? She can play. And she is
young. She is Yuja Wong stepping out to play with the Oregon Symphony in a
little orange mini dress.
The boys pass by the window. Then the
woman. Courtney plays even harder. Forget color, nuance; she’s banging the hell
out of it now. The woman pauses and almost looks through the destroyed blinds
at Courtney, but then doesn’t. She walks
on, disappears from the window.
Courtney plays her heart out, so that they
have to be able to hear her from in front of the fat man’s house. She cannot
hear the kids talking, or the mother. She cannot hear their laughter. She
cannot hear the car doors close with a clop,
and a clop, clop. She cannot hear that
woman start the car engine start, or her drive away with the kids. All she
hears is music, music that fills this empty house to bursting, and she is the
one playing it. And damn, can she play.
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE
STORY
The skeleton of “Chamber Music” is an
actual experience. I was traveling a number of years ago, and my girlfriend—now
my wife—graciously offered to take the kids, whom she did not yet know well,
and do a trade-off with their mother. This was the first time the two had met,
and it was, as these things usually are, awkward and tense. The flesh and blood
of the story is pure invention.
I researched the life of a professional
classical musician by grilling two friends over lunch one day. They are
partners; one is a pianist and the other a percussionist. I conflated their
experiences which resulted in some skewing in my depiction of a professional
musician’s life—a classical pianist’s life is nothing like a classical percussionist’s.
Non-musicians will not notice the places where I go wrong, and I’m certainly not
pointing them out.
*****
ABOUT VIC SIZEMORE
Vic
Sizemore’s short fiction and nonfiction are published or forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Southern Humanities Review,
storySouth, Connecticut Review, Blue Mesa Review, Sou’wester, PANK Magazine,
Silk Road Review, Atticus Review, Reed Magazine, Superstition Review, Entropy,
Eclectica, Ghost Town, and elsewhere. Excerpts from his novel Eternity Rowboat are published or
forthcoming in Connecticut Review,
Portland Review, Drunken Boat, Prick of the Spindle, Burrow Press Review,
Pithead Chapel, Letters and elsewhere. His fiction has won the New
Millennium Writings Award, and been nominated for Best American Nonrequired
Reading and two Pushcart Prizes. You can find Vic at https://vicsizemore.wordpress.com/.
Nice, nice job on the unfairness and outsider-ness of being the good parent who is not the 'real' parent, of cleaning up other people's messes.
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