My mother cooked with lard she kept in coffee cans beneath the kitchen sink. Bean-colored linoleum ticked under her flats as she wore a path from stove to countertop. Eggs cracked against the lips of smooth ceramic bowls she beat muffins in, boxed cakes and cookie dough. It was the afternoons she worked toward, the smell of onions scrubbed from her hands, when she would fold her flowered apron and feed it through the sticky refrigerator handle, adjust the spongy curlers on her head and wrap a loud Hawaiian scarf into a tired knot around them as she walked toward her piano, the one thing my father had given her that she loved. I can still see each gold letter engraved on the polished lid she lifted and slid into the piano's dark body, the hidden hammers trembling like a muffled word, the scribbled sheets, her rough hands poised above the keys as she began her daily practice. Words like arpeggio sparkled through my childhood, her fingers sliding from the black bar of a sharp to the white of a common note. "This is Bach," she would instruct us, the tale of his name hissing like a cat. "And Chopin," she said, "was French, like us," pointing to the sheet music. "Listen. Don't let the letters fool you. It's best to always trust your ear." She played parts of fugues and lost concertos, played hard as we kicked each other on the couch, while the meat burned and the wet wash wrinkled in the basket, played Beethoven as if she understood the caged world of the deaf, his terrible music pounding its way through the fence slats and the screened doors of the cul-de-sac, the yards where other mothers hung clothes on a wire, bent to weeds, swept the driveways clean. Those were the years she taught us how to make quick easy meals, accept the embarrassment of a messy house, safety pins and rick-rack hanging from the hem of her dress. But I knew the other kids didn't own words like fortissimo and mordant, treble clef and trill, or have a mother quite as elegant as mine when she sat at her piano, playing like she was famous, so that when the Sparklets man arrived to fill our water cooler every week he would lean against the doorjamb and wait for her to finish, glossy-eyed as he listened, secretly touching the tips of his fingers to the tips of her fingers as he bowed, and she slipped him the check.© Dorianne Laux
What We Carry, BOA Editions, Ltd.