“The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, as if you were walking on the beach and found a diamond as big as a shoe; as if you had just built a wooden table and the smell of sawdust was in the air, your hands dry and woody; as if you had eluded the man in the dark hat who had been following you all week; the relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard, playing the chords of Beethoven, Bach, Chopin in an afternoon when I had no one to talk to, when the magazine advertisement forms of soft sweaters and clean shining Republican middle-class hair walked into carpeted houses and left me alone with bare floors and a few books I want to thank my mother for working every day in a drab office in garages and water companies cutting the cream out of her coffee at 40 to lose weight, her heavy body writing its delicate bookkeeper’s ledgers alone, with no man to look at her face, her body, her prematurely white hair in love I want to thank my mother for working and always paying for my piano lessons before she paid the Bank of America loan or bought the groceries or had our old rattling Ford repaired. I was a quiet child, afraid of walking into a store alone, afraid of the water, the sun, the dirty weeds in back yards, afraid of my mother’s bad breath, and afraid of my father’s occasional visits home, knowing he would leave again; afraid of not having any money, afraid of my clumsy body, that I knew no one would ever love But I played my way on the old upright piano obtained for $10, played my way through fear, through ugliness, through growing up in a world of dime-store purchases, and a desire to love a loveless world. I played my way through an ugly face and lonely afternoons, days, evenings, nights, mornings even, empty as a rusty coffee can, played my way through the rustles of spring and wanted everything around me to shimmer like the narrow tide on a flat beach at sunset in Southern California, I played my way through an empty father’s hat in my mother’s closet and a bed she slept on only one side of, never wrinkling an inch of the other side, 73waiting, waiting, I played my way through honors in school, the only place I could talk the classroom, or at my piano lessons, Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary always singing the most for my talents, as if I had thrown some part of my body away upon entering her house and was now searching every ivory case of the keyboard, slipping my fingers over black ridges and around smooth rocks, wondering where I had lost my bloody organs, or my mouth which sometimes opened like a California poppy, wide and with contrasts beautiful in sweeping fields, entirely closed morning and night, I played my way from age to age, but they all seemed ageless or perhaps always old and lonely, wanting only one thing, surrounded by the dusty bitter-smelling leaves of orange trees, wanting only to be touched by a man who loved me, who would be there every night to put his large strong hand over my shoulder, whose hips I would wake up against in the morning, whose mustaches might brush a face asleep, dreaming of pianos that made the sound of Mozart and Schubert without demanding that life suck everything out of you each day, without demanding the emptiness of a timid little life. I want to thank my mother for letting me wake her up sometimes at 6 in the morning when I practiced my lessons and for making sure I had a piano to lay my school books down on, every afternoon. I haven’t touched the piano in 10 years, perhaps in fear that what little love I’ve been able to pick, like lint, out of the corners of pockets, will get lost, slide away, into the terribly empty cavern of me if I ever open it all the way up again. Love is a man with a mustache gently holding me every night, always being there when I need to touch him; he could not know the painfully loud music from the past that his loving stops from pounding, banging, battering through my brain, which does its best to destroy the precarious gray matter when I am alone; he does not hear Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary singing for me, liking the sound of my lesson this week, telling me, confirming what my teacher says, that I have a gift for the piano few of her other pupils had. When I touch the man I love, I want to thank my mother for giving me piano lessons all those years, keeping the memory of Beethoven, a deaf tortured man, in mind; of the beauty that can come from even an ugly past.”