I was on pins and needles waiting for my Thursday afternoon lesson. Although switching to a new piano teacher wasn’t voluntary, I secretly was grateful for the unfortunate circumstances that resulted in my being delivered to the venerable Mme K. By her reputation, I had pieced together an image of a starched and frowning matron dressed in period clothes who glared from under sharply arched eyebrows. She was Ukrainian; without much interest in geography I equated this with being Russian—the Soviet bloc’s being a large yet nondescript region covering much of the far side of my rotating student’s globe.
Mme K lived in an older Miami neighborhood lined with classic mid-century homes. Not as shiny as the newer northern subdivisions near my own home, there was a look here that I later learned was the patina of old money. The neighborhood announced itself with stately yet unnecessary signage, lest the visitor be unaware that he or she had crossed the line into an enviable, upscale community. I imagined from the back seat that I was being driven by a personal chauffeur to some banal activity: a play date, a dentist visit, or just home from an elite private girl’s school.
Finally, my mother made the right turn onto Mme K’s street and stopped at the third house from the corner. I blinked in astonishment. Surely this couldn’t be right. I scanned the neighbors and found lots of lovely homes with manicured lawns, well-tended flower gardens, and gently bowing palms. Slowly, I panned back to my right and surveyed the scene. There, behind nearly a foot-high patch of unmowed lawn, stood a modest bungalow-style home. Admittedly, it had good bones, but the stucco exterior was peeled and pocked to such an extent that it was almost impossible to determine the color that it pretended to be. The windows were shut and draped from the inside. The garage door was closed and severely warped so that as a result the horizontal panels did not line up. The dandelions, which had long ago overtaken the driveway area, were in fact growing into the gaps at the bottom of the garage door that had been allowed to rot away. This scene, with its obvious neglect and isolation, was the scariest thing I had seen in my nine short years.
“You’re coming in, right Mom?” I asked, somewhat rhetorically.
“No. I have to buy groceries to make dinner,” she said. “I’ll walk you to the door, and then I’ll be back in an hour to pick you up.”
I slipped out of the car, trying not to cringe when the dandelions tickled the bare skin above my socks. At the front door I listened to muffled strains of a familiar Beethoven Sonatina while debating whether to ring the bell or to pry open the torn screen door and knock.
Without warning, the inner door flew open. The threshold was filled by a caricature of a woman who seemed to be in a constant state of motion. She was singing the melody line of the Beethoven, clapping her hands to the rhythm, and at the same time grasped me by the arm and pulled me inside, exclaiming with a heavily accented yet melodic voice, “Ah! Little! Come in and sit quietly!” I turned to watch the door slam shut behind me and caught just the barest hint of my mother’s tail lights speeding away.
Almost immediately, the teacher declared the other girl’s lesson at an end. After a few pleasantries she was dispatched to a waiting car. Slamming the door, Mme K then pivoted and faced me to size me up for the first time.
“Stand, little, and let me look at you!” she commanded, hands on hips. Though her Ukranian accent was heavy, she spoke English well, albeit with a certain unique inflection. ‘Little’ was actually ‘leetle’ when it fell from her tongue, but she was always crystal clear in what she was trying to communicate. “Let me see your hands!”
In that moment, I had an opportunity to size up the woman for myself, trying to sort out the reality from the fantasy and folklore that preceded this first meeting, exchanging the image in my mind for this newer version. Mme K cut a striking and exaggerated silhouette. She was not tall by any means, but her ample bosom and hip made her appear larger than life. Her clothes were ill fitting and unstylish—matronly to an appropriate degree. The large bow on her white polyester blouse could not camouflage the strain against the garment’s contents. The double knit skirt conformed to her body line and offered no tailoring details to speak of, except for a rather necessary slit in the back. She draped a dull-colored cardigan sweater across her shoulders and held a pair of dark-rimmed glasses in her fist.
I presented my hands, which by this time were a bit shaky and definitely sweaty. “Small hands!” Mme K frowned. “Let’s see what they can do. Play!”
I brought with me a stack of sheet music and books about a foot high, but left those on the coffee table and took the only comfortable seat in the house—at the piano. “What do you want to hear?” I asked politely.
“Just play, play, play,” she demanded with the wave of a hand.
I began with my favorite, the Brahms Waltz in A-flat. I was incredibly proud to have mastered the rising sixths at the end with considerable smoothness, but before I could reach that passage the teacher broke in. “What else?”
I switched instantly to a Schubert Impromptu, doing my best to find a tempo that showed off my technique without tying my fingers knots.
For the next thirty minutes, I executed a series of shotgun performances, offering excerpts from a repertoire that included some tricky Bach Inventions, a movement of a Mozart Sonata, a short piece by Aaron Copland, and a few examples from several Chopin genres. If she was impressed by my memory, or my technique, or the range of the selections, she never let on. Finally, as if to punish me for an unknown transgression, she demanded scales and cadences. Sighing, I dutifully banged out a series of two-octave scales, working chromatically from C to C-sharp to D to E-flat on up the line, pairing each scale with its respective I-IV-I-V-I cadence.
I paused with my hands in my lap, avoiding the Mme’s stare, afraid to discover that I was not up to snuff. “Look at me, little,” she said. It was the first time I had scanned the face of this formidable woman. Surprisingly, her skin was like alabaster giving her a timeless, translucent look. She was certainly older than my own mother, yet it was impossible to tell whether I was staring at a woman of forty or fifty. Then I caught the eyes. Dark and penetrating though they were, Mme K’s eyes had the brightness of a young girl my own age. Through these portals I sensed a kindred spirit, filled with mischief and a range of possibilities. Our eyes held for a moment, then in a flash it was gone and I felt abruptly cut off. “Now, little, we go to work,” she said.
At the end of the hour the next student buzzed the door. I gathered up my music, both the stack I brought from home and a few new pieces to challenge me for next week’s lesson. “You will be a great pianist, little,” she said with such uncharacteristic quietness I wasn’t quite sure whether I heard it or imagined it. With that, she pushed me out the door to my mother’s waiting car.
“Tell me all about it,” my mother demanded, once we had turned onto the main road.
“It was good,” was all I felt like sharing. Something about those last few moments with her seemed conspiratorial, almost intimate, like two young girls sharing a secret. Although much was unsaid, I was certain we had made a rare connection. I didn’t want to spoil the moment by opening it up to my mother’s scrutiny. Instead, I sat quietly all the way home, imagining myself on an ornately gilded stage in a custom gown, dazzling a packed house in some remote European capital.
Tomorrow's blog: Teacher, Teacher, I Declare (Part Two)
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