You weren’t a stranger, though my mother said you were. You were the man who came to play the Steinway upright at our house, the piano collecting dust in our living room because no one in my family knew how and my mother thought someone should and had deemed me still too young for the lessons I desperately wanted, so twice a week you arrived dressed in polyester browns, both your suit and scent lingering reminders of the ‘70s. With no piano of your own (“down on his luck,” I’d heard my mother tell my father), you came to our house to practice, to tickle those ivories, in the late afternoon while my father was still at work, and I’d watch my mother’s face light up with every expert note, as she transformed into a stranger, a woman I’d never met, donning dresses I’d never seen her wear, her hair fixed like an actress, her lips too red, her cheeks too pink. You weren’t a stranger, so the afternoon that I was home sick from school and my mother left me alone (“I’ll be back in twenty minutes”), I let you in when you rang the doorbell, grateful for the company, grateful to have an adult there, even though you were supposed to call first, which you hadn’t done, but I didn’t know that, didn’t understand why my mother was so upset, so alarmed, when she returned home from the store, or why she asked you to leave so abruptly, saying this arrangement wasn’t working out. After you left, my mother, in her usual Chic jeans and plaid blouse, no make-up—familiar to me once again—wouldn’t stop squeezing me and scolding herself for leaving me alone when I was far too young to be left alone. I never saw you again after that, so you wouldn’t know, but that was the afternoon my mother finally signed me up for piano lessons.
Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and writing coach whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.
Photo Credit: Claude Gabriel on Unsplash
