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5 Catechism Where Mom and Dad purchased the only piano we could afford I don’t know for sure, but by the time of my second lesson, the piano—a dark, somber wood with still-white keys—was delivered. Mom didn’t play the piano, but when I saw her spread her hands over the keys, I knew she was giving me what she would like to have had herself. An upright—the word Amma used for wellbehaved —it just fit the wall in the dining room, making a narrow walkway between it and the chair at my place at the table. If I pushed my chair back too hard when I got up after dinner, I’d hit the piano bench. I was to practice every afternoon for an hour. Mom called it “the music hour,” and while I found middle “C” or ran a scale or perfected the position of my right hand and my fingering, Betsy wore her tap shoes or took her baton out to the yard to make throws and catches and twirls. Wasn’t I sorry I had to stay inside and practice? I wasn’t sorry. For my first piano lesson, Mom had walked with me out the back gate, through a neighbor’s backyard, down a driveway , and onto the sidewalk on Clark Road. Count six houses, and we arrived at Mrs. Bishop’s house. Mrs. Bishop’s voice was soft, and she sat close to me and said, “Pretend you have an apple just under the palm of your right hand.” She wanted me to hold my wrist at a certain angle, make a curved spaced under my hand, and be able to wiggle my fingers freely. “Relax them, wiggle them, Now!” When she said “Now!” I was to strike a note clearly. She was very gentle and let me try again and again, pleased even when the note blurred. She gave me a three-note tune to play, and she said I had mastered it. When she took the bench alone to play the piano, a Steinway, I was unprepared for the music she brought out of the keys, the speed and precision and power of her hands. The music was stirring, and 54 I felt tears in my eyes to think that I might, as she said I would, learn to play the piano, to make music like that. When I left Mrs. Bishop’s house, I was so excited that I ran all the way home without a thought of my not knowing the way. My body knew the way home, the way Mom said a horse did if you dropped the reins and let it go on its own. Not even a glimpse of Molly Taylor ’s freaky white sister Elsa, white as an albino rabbit and with pink eyelids, could stop me, out of breath when I reached the backyard gate, where Mom met me. “Did you like it?” she asked, delighted. She could see for herself. Nor did I have to answer when she asked, “Did you lose the way?” Here I was, back home from my piano lesson, a child of music to come. I gave a little jump of happiness when she asked if I liked it enough to take more lessons. “You’re such a big girl,” she said, saying big in a way that meant good. It was the music in her voice that made the word change. ) One afternoon when the backyard seemed to float on its own scent, lilac and peony and plum, I paused at the backyard gate, unwilling to leave the yard even though I wanted to play for Mrs. Bishop the complicated little piece I had practiced all week. Pausing at the gate was a ritual. Making that pause, I cleared my mind, so that all the way to my piano lesson I thought of nothing at all. Then the music I’d learned filled me completely, like water poured to the lip of a drinking glass, about to overflow. After three years of lessons there was so much more to flow over that rim. Today a sonata, but once, I remembered, I simply wanted to show Mrs. Bishop that my left hand could strike its few notes and move down the keyboard into deeper tones and at the same time my right hand could go confidently up keys into higher and higher notes. When the different notes fit together, though some were high and some...

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