andante molto

Last night I put myself in considerable peril shifting around the ginormous cardboard boxes stacked in the garage, hunting for my old piano books. Lord knows why I took them with me when I left; I think I had wild hopes of finding someone with a piano in the Midwest. Thanks to my parents' generosity and my steadfast pleading, the piano on which I learned to play -- an old upright displaying no brand name, but whose keys stay stubbornly in tune and whose damper and pianoforte pedals work beautifully -- still presides over the activities of the dining room. Walking back into the house of my childhood the other week, I touched the piano lightly on my way past with my luggage, happy to see an old friend.

My parents enrolled my sister and me in piano lessons when I was nine and she was six. I loved the piano instantly; my sister didn't. But we both biked across town every week for the next five years or so to the dark house where our piano teacher, Mrs. K., lived and taught. I never liked the house; the lovely antique cupboards and buffets in her dining room, where my sister or I waited for our lesson, groaned under the weight of cheap creepy cookie jars painted garishly into barely recognizable animals, and the whole place smelled like old lady's breath. But Mrs. K. kept plenty of coloring books on the dining room table -- a pretty piece of craftsmanship rendered sticky and mildly vile by its coat of grayish paint.

One of my favorite sister-stories comes from this era. As our lessons progressed, it became clear that Mrs. K.'s personality had not softened into grandmotherly kindness like a plate of warming butter about to go into cookie dough; under all her stickers and squeaky chuckling lay a rather vicious temper. By the time Laura and I began under her tutelage, she had stopped punishing her students' mistakes by cracking their knuckles with a stick; an older boy in our church had been the one over whose knuckles the stick broke, and his parents raised hell when they found out; but she still used that stick -- you could see the worn place at the tip where it had broken -- to count out time, tapping on the page from which we read with a sort of wistful violence.

Mrs. K. taught music theory splendidly; every week we took home our music homework and returned more educated in musical mathematics, chords and chord families and transposition and tempo. Her greatest emphases lay on tempo, sight reading and memorization. The first two caused me to falter -- Laura had a fabulous internal metronome, but I was born without one; I liked expression, and hated playing the sonatas Mrs. K. picked out; Laura also possessed an almost faultless gift for sight reading, which meant she rarely practiced if she could get away with it, while I tended to clam up nervously, torn between my fear of hitting the wrong note and my fear of ruining the tempo under Mrs. K.'s gimlet eye.

But nothing could touch me in memorization. After the right amount of practice, I could play songs with my eyes closed: The music drew my fingers to the right keys like the meeting hands of lovers, and when I closed my eyes to feel what the song was trying to say, I felt the keyboard shiver, I felt my body electrified, and then I could play. When I let go and lived in the music, it came to life, and I lost myself for a wonderful little while.

Mrs. K.'s nitpicking criticism tended to subdue that rapture, but even she had complimentary things to say about my memorization. But oh, my sight reading. She hated my sight reading. And since she felt that a student's weak points should be emphasized more than his or her strengths, to work them out like bubbles in a batch of bread dough, I found myself sight reading a lot, and I hated going for lessons. Laura hated lessons because she hated being made to do anything, and she hated Mrs. K. But where I cowered under Mrs. K.'s disapproval, Laura closed in on herself and stared fixedly at nothing like someone trying to withstand the urge to do something evil.

The summer I was twelve and Laura nine, we biked over for our usual Tuesday lesson, and it was my week to go first. I left Laura in the dining room working on a coloring book that told the story of Thumbellina and walked through the doorway into the dark muted room with the piano.

It was a terrible lesson. I was tired that day, and she wanted to do almost nothing but work on my sight reading. I couldn't concentrate, but I tried, to please her, and all I managed to do was frustrate her. She bit her lip and savagely tapped out the tempo with her broken stick while I stumbled through the music like someone trying to dance ballet in shackles on a boulder field.

Finally she threw her stick down. "It's hopeless," she snarled, and when my face crumpled and the silent tears started tracking down my cheeks, she tried to soften her words with her insincere giggle, and decided we'd had enough for today. I picked up my books without looking at her and walked blindly to the door, trying to smother the sobs I wouldn't let out in the open by holding the books to my chest.

When I stepped into the dining room its chandelier fired the tears in my eyes to a painful brightness, and I stopped to blink them away. That was when Laura looked up.

She took one look at my face and her whole body snapped still; her eyes narrowed and her jaw tightened. Grimly she snatched up her books and stalked into the music room. Her eyes as she passed me were bloodthirsty.

While I sat at the dining room table and buried my head in my arms and puckered the pages of Thumbellina with tears, Laura proceeded, coolly and deliberately, to deliver to Mrs. K. the worst lesson of her life. She struck every note wrong. She repeated her mistakes with absolute precision when ordered to correct them. She played with one finger. And when Mrs. K. threw sarcasm to the winds and yelled, my sister cast her watch an exaggerated glance of boredom and yawned.

Her half hour, too, was cut short, and as Mrs. K. rushed past me to the bathroom wiping her eyes, Laura emerged from the dining room with a little smile of satisfaction sitting at the corner of her mouth.

"Come on, Sarah," she said loftily, "let's go home."

Mrs. K. never really bothered with my sight reading after that; but she really hated my sister, and a little while later, Mom, sensing something wrong, accompanied Laura to a lesson while I spent a week away on a youth missions trip; and when I returned hopeful and excited with the name of a piano teacher handed to me by one of the youth group boys, Mom told me curtly that she was glad, because we were never going back to Mrs. K. again.

Our new lessons required a forty-five minute drive into New York, so Mom began taking us to our lessons again, and I watched the swamps and sleepy pasture rivers flash by outside the window with a sort of hopeful despair.

Kerry was a mug of hot soup and a hand-knitted afghan and a fireside after walking home in subzero weather. I have never in my life met a man so gentle, so patient. He learned to keep a box of tissues handy for my lessons, because his kindness usually made me cry out of gratitude and disbelief. He never raised his voice. He never criticized. He never mocked. His judgments were always fair, and he praised the good before moving to needed improvements. His black cat, Gepetto, a grizzled and war-roughened old soul, liked to sit next to me on the bench while I played.

As the months went on, he started to unravel, bit by bit, the reasons why I was so tense and nervous, and my sister so belligerently indifferent, around the piano. He never said much, but sometimes the horror on his face didn't hide fast enough. He watched me play, and saw something of what I held in check, and encouraged me to be more expressive. He introduced me to Debussy, who required no metronome.

And I learned to loosen up, learned not to sit, as Kerry said, "like a person trained to the harpsicord" -- wooden and straightbacked as a Shaker chair. Practicing on the old upright at home became a daily joy, for its own sake, and to show off my improvements at lessons. My memories of the lessons, and of the time spent with my mom and Kerry's wife Marian and their children while Laura had her lesson, are soft-lensed and glowing; a Hallmark commercial couldn't compete. Lessons were a safe place, a quiet place, a peaceful place, a chance to escape from everything else and bask in the love of music. In that home, it always felt like Christmas.

Long after I stopped taking lessons and went to college, I would hunt all over campus for a vacant piano and keep playing. I would channel every stress, frustration, fury, hurt, joy, love, and hope into my favorite songs, which never quite left me.

But in my four years away from home, and away from pianos, I've grown quite rusty. I still harbor hopes of one day taking up lessons again somewhere; I was never a brilliant pianist, never a great technician, but I was expressive, and I'd like a little of my skill back. In the meantime, there's keeping up what I remember, and now I finally have my old friend, my childhood piano, all to myself again.

So last night, I slowly opened the cover over the keys and ran my fingers over their opaquely gleaming white, I sat down and tested out the pedals, I started to smile. It was dark, I had the house to myself, the air felt chilly and smelled of winter, and as I set down my glass of cabernet and reached for the soul of Grieg in the andante movement of his Opus No. 7, as the notes crystallized and sank away and surged back reborn for the first time in years in that dining room, with the light making the sheet music glow, it felt like Christmas.