down the trail to the village. When she read us all the way to Narnia, to Aslan tied down on the stone table and his mane shorn away, I bit the inside of my cheek until I lay in the dark alone, then sobbed into my pillow, not yet knowing how the story would end. When she read from Uncle Arthur of the mother who ran back into her burning house to save her sleeping baby, and of how in the morning the firemen found the two in each other’s arms, burned to death, I imagined myself curled in my fiery bedroom, lying on the beige shag rug lit with sparks, and could see her crawling through the hallway dripping with flames, calling my name through the smoke.
I believed she was strong enough to save me from any danger. When she hoisted the axe above her head and cracked it down on a block of wood, those rounds of pine and fir split easily, over and over, in halves, then quarters, then cleaved to eighths. Show us your muscles, my brother and I would say. She shooed us away, told us to haul what she’d split, but we kept begging, please, just show us, until finally, she lifted one sleeve and flexed, her bicep a white bulge threaded with turquoise. And when we called her Popeye, she tugged the shirtsleeve down, shook her head and rolled her eyes, then picked up the axe and swung it down again.
Every time I called her name—Mom, Mom—the soft solo syllable, part hum, part cry, she appeared like magic. Every time I called—Mom—a miracle, a backlit shadow. When, in my bedroom, the mosquitoes whined and wheedled around my face, needling my sleep with blood-threat and itch, and from beneath the blankets I called Mom, she stood in her nightgown in the doorway, holding out the can of Raid. Cover your head, she said, and I ducked beneath the covers, burrowed down deep and sealed myself off from the aerosol hiss she sprayed above me, around me, across the whole room. She pulled the covers up to my chin. Goodnight, she said. Sleep tight, I said. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. In call and response, we back-and-forthed the rhyme, and then she bent to recite with me our bedtime prayer—Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep—our voices moving quickly through the liturgy, its cadence as familiar as my mother’s night-time smell of talcum and soap.
First god, woman above all other women, mother of all mothers, she was the one I reached for first inside the Wednesday-morning huddle of praying ladies. Against my mother’s warning, I’d gone roaming outside the sanctuary, had tried to pick a scruffy bouquet from the weeds in the ditch between the parking lot and road, but instead had come back with mud-crusted knees and white socks hooked with burrs. My quest for brighter fireweed and fatter rosehips had drawn me down toward the boggy culvert, and I’d fallen, twice, struggling up the slope of the ditch and back into the church. I tried not to cry, but as soon as the women looked at me, filthy and on the verge of tears, and their eyes went kind and their tongues clucked with compassion, I broke. I reached for my mother, and she reached for me, enfolding me into a perfume of Avon lotion and spearmint gum. The other women bent down around us and with a flurry of hands began to wipe away the mud from my knees, dabbing at the dirt and scrapes with tissues, plucking off the burrs stuck to my socks. While I cried into my mother’s shoulder, they tended to me, murmuring a gentleness without words until my shuddered sobs calmed to breathing and they had removed the evidence of my fall. How far I’d strayed outside the boundaries, how shameful the filth, how worthless my now-wilted clutch of autumn weeds lying at my feet—these humiliations faded as I stood inside the circle of their low and soothing voices.
“Look,” said Old Mrs. Wiens, pointing to my white socks. “All clean.” She held open her handkerchief. Each Nettie, Sarah, Tina, and Ann poured in a handful of burrs. Old Mrs. Wiens tucked it in the pocket of her black cardigan and touched my cheek with her cool, blue-veined hand.
“Now,” said my mother, licking her thumb to wipe dirt from my mouth, “let’s go have something to eat.”
The Bear’s Dance
EVERY MONDAY AFTER supper for three long years, I sat beside Mr. Everson, my hands resting in my lap, waiting for his first instruction.
“C-major scale. One octave, hands together.”
I found my starting notes—right thumb on middle C, left pinkie eight notes below. Mr. Everson slid the weight of the metronome to an easy pace, unhooked the pendulum, and let it tock, tock, tock me into the scale’s climb.
In the tiny one-level bungalow, his baby grand nearly filled the living room. The only other piece of furniture that fit was a small sofa tucked behind the piano bench, a place for other students to sit and wait their lesson turn. The piano, polished to a black sheen, looked like it belonged in the spiral-staircased, chandeliered home of a famous composer, not in these drafty, cramped quarters that smelled of burnt onion and dirty diaper.
On the other side of the pony wall, Mr. Everson’s wife, dark-eyed, pale, and thin, except for her low, pouchy stomach, sat at the kitchen table in her bathrobe and slippers, her hair up in a towel. She spooned Pablum into their daughter’s mouth and said nothing, not even to the baby, who, between bites, kicked her feet, slapped the high-chair tray, and squealed.
When I reached the octave’s turn—left thumb, right pinkie—and started the descent, I felt it—my heart speeding up, bucking against the metronome’s beat, anxious but trying to steady the notes, to keep my playing clean. So far, so good, so far, so good. The closer I came to ending in perfection, the more slippery my fingers on the keys. To make a mistake now would mean another week of practicing the same notes, the same song, because practice, said Mr. Everson, makes perfect.
Playing the week’s pieces for him at my lesson stirred in me the same minor dread as when I stood in front of my teacher’s desk to recite the monthly scripture memory passage. One stumble over a phrase—“Yea, though I speak with tongues of men and angels”—and Mr. Schmidt would correct, THE tongues, and OF angels, then tell me to practice the verses a few more times and try again tomorrow. One stumble over a run of dotted eighth notes, and Mr. Everson would lean forward over the page and with his sharpened pencil circle the shaky bars. In my music dictation book, he wrote directives for the coming week. Count aloud. Staccato! Phrases—SMOOTH! Slow down. Speed up. Keep a steady, even rhythm as you play.
Praise from Mr. Everson came rarely, which made me crave it even more. For every half hour I spent plunking at the keys at home, my mother let me choose a marble from a jar in the cupboard above the stove, to add to my collection. But even without the incentive, I wanted to practice, to earn my teacher’s nod of approval, his quietly spoken Good work or Fine job at the end of every song. I worked harder for him than I ever did for Miss Cindy, my first piano teacher, who during lessons wore fuzzy slippers and her hair in pigtails and said things like Aren’t eighth notes fun? and Wow, now that’s fortissimo! For every song I learned, Miss Cindy let me pick a sticker from a box. Scratch-and-sniffs, puffies, shinies—she had them all and gave them out as liberally as her praise. Even if I stumbled over notes in a simple one-line melody, she clapped her hands together, smiled, and said with a voice as bright as one of her glittery happy-face stickers, I can hear you getting better every time you play!
With Miss Cindy, I plodded through “Pony Ride,” “Crack the Whip,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and all the other pieces in the primer level, adding stickers to my repertoire with every page we turned. Nothing needed to be perfect for Miss Cindy. Good enough was good enough for her. Do your best, and let’s move on, was her philosophy. New songs are waiting to be played!
At the year-end recital, in the living room of her mobile home across from the hockey rink, after each student performed a final song to culminate the year of lessons, Miss Cindy stood at the piano, faced us, and broke the news. She and her husband, Larry, were moving. She sniffled into a tissue, dabbed her eyes. He had a new job. She told us we were the best students she could have asked for. She wanted us to carry on with our music, to play for the sheer joy of it, and she’d help us all find a new teacher before she left.
“HE’S MORMON,” MY mother said on the drive to our first lesson with Mr. Everson. “But don’t say a word about it.”
Her