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SENA ]ETER NASLUND The daughter ofa music teacher mother and a physician father, Sena Jeter Naslund was born in 1942 in Birmingham, Alabama. In high school she was a cellist with the Alabama Pops Orchestra. She is a graduate of Birmingham-Southern and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University oflowa, where she earned both her M.A. and her Ph.D. in creative writing. Following her graduate work she taught for a year at the University of Montana, and since 1973 has taught at the University of Louisville . She is co-editor of the Louisville Review and the Fleur-de-Lis Press, housed at Spalding University. Her work includes three novels, TheAnimalWily to Love (1993), Sherlock in Love (1993), and Ahab's Wife or, The Star-Gazer (1999), which was a Book of the Month Club selection; and two short story collections, Ice Skating at the North Pole (1989) and The Disobedience ofwtlter (1997). Her short stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, The Indiana Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Louisville with her husband, physicistJohn Morrison, and her daughter, Flora. "The Perfecting of the Chopin Valse No. 14in E Minor" first appeared in The Georgia Review in 1985 and was collected in Ice Skating at the North Pole. Naslund has said the story "suggests that art (music) and the beauty of the home flower garden provide a kind ofconsolation in the face ofdeath." A magical realism tale set in Louisville, it portrays a woman and her pianist mother coming to terms with the prospect of the mother's aging and dying, journeying beyond. • One day last summer when I was taking a shower, I heard my mother playing the Chopin Valse No. 14 in E Minor better than she ever had played it before. Thirty years ago in Birmingham, I had listened to her while I sat on dusty terra cotta tiles on the front porch. I was trying to pluck a thorn from my heel as I listened, and I remember looking up from my dirty foot to see the needle ofa hummingbird entering one midget blossom after another, the blossoms hanging like froth on our butterfly bush. Probably she had first practiced the Valse thirty years or so before that, 252 SENA ]ETER NASLUND in Missouri, in a living room close enough to a dirt road to hear wagons passing, close enough for dust to sift over the piano keys. How was it that after knowing the piece for sixty years, my mother suddenly was playing it better than she ever had in her life? I turned offthe shower to make sure. It was true. There was a bounce and yet a delicacy in the repeated notes at the beginning of the phrase that she had never achieved before. And then the flight ofthe right hand up the keyboard was like the gesture ofa dancer lifting her arm, unified and lilting. I waited for the double forte, which she never played loudly enough, and heard it roar out ofthe piano and up the furnace pipe to the bathroom. Perhaps that was it: the furnace pipe was acting like a natural amplifier, like a speaking tube. Dripping wet, I stepped over the tub and walked through the bathroom door to the landing at the top ofthe stairs. She was at the section with the alberti-like bass. Usually her left hand hung back, couldn't keep the established tempo here {and it had been getting worse in the last seven or so years), but the left hand cut loose with the most perfectly rolled over arpeggio I had ever heard. Rubinstein didn't do it any better. I hurried down the steps; she was doing the repeated notes again as one ofthe recapitulations of the opening phrase came up. I tried to see if she had finally decided to use Joseffy's suggested fingering-2, 4, 3, !-instead ofher own 4, 3, 2, 1 on which she had always insisted. But I was just too late to see. She finished with a flourish. "Bravo!" I shouted and clapped. The water flew out of my hands like a wet dog shaking his fur. She leaned over the piano protectively. "You're getting the keys wet," she said, smiling. "You played that so well!" "Suppose the mailman comes while you're naked?" "Didn't you think you played it well?" "I'm improving. You always do...

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