How She Thinks About Music - Anne Wright

Suzanne didn’t come from a musical family, although before her grandmother Mimi died, she used to sit at the ebony grand in Mimi’s apartment when Dad took her to visit, and press with her fingers on the smooth ivory keys. The tonggg of the low note would go on forever, and a chinggg of the high note, especially if she could manage to reach a foot down to the pedal. Like the colored glass perfume bottles on Mimi’s bureau, and like the empty Marlboro cigarette boxes that Mimi saved for her to use as doll beds, and like the black and white television set tuned in to As the World Turns in Mimi’s darkened apartment, the piano was mysterious. Nobody played it; Mimi had bulging arthritic knuckles, Daddy never offered, and Suzanne had never thought of it as a musical instrument. She had never heard piano music.

Suzanne’s family moved into a furnished house one year. She was eleven years old, and in the living room sat an upright piano. After seeing that Suzie was enchanted with the sounds she made on the old piano, Mother agreed with Dad that she could take lessons, and sent her each week to Mrs. Murphy’s house. For half an hour she played nursery rhymes set to music, and she just didn’t get it, this baby music, note by note. She never practiced; it was boring, and no amount of nagging could get her to sit an hour a day at the stupid piano. It was more fun to tease her sister and read library books. So when she went for her lessons she never progressed, and was embarrassed so she quit.

The next year she heard of a little radio that ran on batteries and she had to have one. When she heard the sounds coming from its little speaker she was excited and became so attached to the radio that she slept with it on her ear, only to wake up in the mornings with no sound coming from it, its batteries dead. After school she turned on the television and watched Dance Party, and practiced dancing using the doorknob as her partner, stepping back and forth to the beat of the music until she fell down, joyous and out of breath. The music just got better, every year, and when she closed herself into her bedroom with the record player on, loud as it could go, she couldn’t even hear her mother screaming, turn that noise down. It helped her bear living with a couple of idiots who just happened to be her parents, and whose job it was to torture her by making her clean up her room.