“A
piana
lesson,” Ben repeated. The way he said that word, I could see legions of simpering pansies behind legions of upright pianos while their adoring mothers smiled and patted their beanies. “Miss Blue Glass has started teachin’ piana. Mom’s signed me up, and my first lesson’s at six o’clock.”
We were horrified. “Why, Ben?” I asked. “Why’d she do it?”
“She wants me to learn Christmas songs. Can you believe it? Christmas songs!”
“Man!” Davy Ray shook his head in commiseration. “Too bad Miss Blue Glass can’t teach you guitar!”
Git-tar
, he pronounced it. “Now, that’d be cool! But piana… yech!”
“Don’t I know it,” Ben muttered.
“Well, there’s a way around this,” Johnny said as we neared the school. “Why don’t we just meet Ben at the Glasses’ house? We can ride on to the carnival at seven instead of six-thirty.”
“Yeah!” Ben perked up. “That way it won’t be so awful!”
It was settled, then, pending parental okay. But every year we all got together and went to the carnival on Friday night from six-thirty until ten, and our parents had always said yes. It was really the only night kids our age could go. Saturday morning and afternoon was when the black people went, and Saturday night belonged to the older kids. Then by ten o’clock on Sunday morning the park area was clear again except for a few scatters of sawdust, crushed Dixie cups, and ticket stubs the cleanup crew had left like a dog marking its territory.
The day passed in a slow crawl of anticipation. Leatherlungs called me a blockhead twice and made Georgie Sanders stand with his nose pressed against a circle on the blackboard for smarting off. Ladd Devine went to the office for drawing a lewd picture on the inside cover of his notebook, and the Demon swore she’d fix Leatherlungs’ wagon. I sure would’ve hated to be in Leatherlungs’ clunky brown shoes.
From my house, as the blue twilight gathered and the sickle moon appeared, I could see the lights of the Brandywine Carnival. The Ferris wheel was turning, outlined in red. The midway sparkled with white bulbs. The sound of calliope music, laughter, and joyous screams drifted to me over the roofs of Zephyr. I had five dollars in my pocket, a gift from my father. I was wrapped up in my fleece-lined denim jacket against the cold. I was ready to roar.
The Glass sisters lived about a half mile away, on Shantuck Street. By the time I got there on Rocket, near quarter before seven, Davy Ray’s bike was parked next to Ben’s in front of the house, which looked like a gingerbread cottage Hansel and Gretel might’ve envied. I left Rocket and went up on the porch. I could hear piano notes being banged behind the door. Then the high, fluty voice of Miss Blue Glass: “Softly, Ben.
Softly!
”
I pressed the doorbell. Chimes rang, and Miss Blue Glass said, “Will you please answer that, Davy Ray?”
He opened the door as the banging continued. I could tell by his sick expression that listening to Ben try to hammer out the same five notes over and over again wasn’t good for your health. “Is that Winifred Osborne?” Miss Blue Glass called over the racket.
“No ma’am, it’s Cory Mackenson,” Davy Ray told her. “He’s waitin’ for Ben, too.”
“Bring him in, then. Too cold to wait outside.”
I crossed the threshold into a living room that was a boy’s nightmare. All the furniture looked like spindly antiques that wouldn’t bear the weight of a starved mosquito. Little tables held porcelain figures of dancing clowns, children holding puppies, and the like. A gray carpet on the floor appeared to indelibly remember footprints. A glass curio cabinet as tall as my dad held a forest of colored crystal goblets, coffee mugs with the faces of all the presidents on them, twenty-odd ceramic dolls clothed in lace costumes, and maybe another twenty rhinestone-decorated eggs each with its own brass four-footed stand. What a crash that thing would make if it went over, I thought. A green-and-blue-streaked marble pedestal held an open Bible as big as my gargantuan dictionary, the type in it large enough to be read from across the room. Everything looked too frail to touch and too precious to enjoy, and I wondered how anybody could live in such a state of frozen pretty. Of course, there was the gleaming brown upright piano, with Ben trapped at its keys and Miss Blue Glass standing beside the bench holding a conductor’s baton.
“Hello, Cory. Please have a seat,” she said. She was wearing all blue, as usual, except for a wide white belt around her bony waist. Her whitish-blond hair was piled up like a foamy fountain, her black glasses so thick they made her eyes bug.
“Where?” I asked her.
“Right there. On the sofa.”
The sofa, covered in velvety cloth that showed shepherds playing their harps to prancing sheep, had legs that looked about as sturdy as rain-soaked twigs. Davy Ray and I eased down into the sofa’s cushiony grip. The sofa creaked ever so slightly, but my heart jumped in my throat.
“Now! Thinkin’ cap on! Fingers flow like the waves! One, two, three, one, two, three.” Miss Blue Glass started motioning up and down with her baton as the pudgy fingers of Ben’s right hand tried to play the same five notes with some resemblance to rhythm. Soon enough, though, he was pounding those notes as if trying to crush fire ants. “Flow like the waves!” Miss Blue Glass said. “Softly, softly! One, two, three, one, two, three!”
Ben’s playing was less wavy and more sludgy. “I can’t do it!” he wailed, and he pulled his hand away from those frightful keys. “My fingers are gettin’ all crossed up!”
“Sonia, give that boy a rest!” Miss Green Glass called from the rear of the house. “You’re gonna wear his fingers to the bone!” Her voice was more trombone than flute.
“You just mind your own beeswax now, Katharina!” Miss Blue Glass retorted. “Ben’s got to learn the proper technique!”
“Well, it’s his first lesson, for pity’s sake!” Miss Green Glass walked out of a hallway into the living room. She put her hands on her skinny hips and glowered at her sister from behind her own black-framed glasses. She was wearing all green, the shades varying from pale to forest. She made you feel a little seasick just looking at her. Her blondish-white hair was piled higher than Sonia’s, and had a vague pyramidal shape about it. “Not everybody’s a musical genius like you, you know!”
“Yes I do know, thank you very much!” Swirls of red had crept into Miss Blue Glass’s ivory cheeks. “I’ll thank you not to interrupt Ben’s lesson!”
“His time’s about over, anyway. Who’s your next victim?”
“Winifred Osborne is my next
student
,” Miss Blue Glass said pointedly. “And if it wasn’t for your magazine subscriptions, I wouldn’t have to go back to teachin’ piano to begin with!”
“Don’t you blame my magazine subscriptions! It’s your own self at fault! I swear, if you buy another set of dinner plates, I’m gonna go straight out of my head! What’re you buyin’ all those dinner plates for when we don’t ever have anybody to dinner?”
“Because they’re pretty, that’s why! I like pretty things! And I could ask you why you went out and bought a collection of First Lady thimbles when you can’t even sew a stitch!”
“Because they’re gonna grow in value, that’s why! You wouldn’t know an investment if it crawled up on one of those dumb dinner plates and begged you to eat it with a biscuit!”
I feared the Glass sisters were going to come to blows. The timbres of their voices sounded like a duel of slightly off-key musical instruments. Caught between them, Ben appeared about to leap from his skin. Then something went
crooaaakk
from the rear of the house. It was the kind of noise I would’ve imagined the tentacled Martian in the bowl could make. Miss Blue Glass jabbed the baton at her sister and snapped, “See there? You’ve upset him! Are you satisfied now?”
The door chimes rang. “It’s probably the neighbors fussin’ about your hollerin’!” Miss Green Glass predicted. “They can hear you all the way to Union Town!”
Johnny stood there when Miss Blue Glass opened the door. He was bundled up in a dark brown jacket over a black turtleneck. “I’m here to wait for Ben,” he said.
“Lord have mercy! Is the whole world waitin’ for Ben?” She made a face as if she’d bitten into a lemon, but she said, “He’s still got five minutes! Come on in, then!” Johnny entered the house, and he saw our edgy faces and realized he had stepped into something that was not a pile of roses.
Crooaaakk! Crooaaakk!
the thing in the back room squawked.
“Would you see to him if you aren’t too busy?” Miss Blue Glass told her sister. “Since you’ve stirred him up, at least see to him!”
“I swear I’d move out of here if I could find a cardboard box worth livin’ in!” Miss Green Glass groused, but she stalked into the hallway again and the ruckus was over at least for the moment.
“Lord, I’m worn out!” Miss Blue Glass picked up an old church bulletin and fanned herself with it. “Ben, get up and I’ll show you what you can be playin’ if you’ll do your exercises like I’ve told you.”
“Yes ma’am!” He jumped up.
Miss Blue Glass settled herself on the piano bench. Her hands with their long elegant fingers poised over the keyboard. She closed her eyes, getting in the mood I guess. “I used to teach this song to all my students when I was teachin’ piano full-time,” she said. “Ever heard of ‘Beautiful Dreamer’?”
“No ma’am,” Ben said. Davy Ray elbowed me in the ribs and rolled his eyes.
“This is it,” Miss Blue Glass explained, and she began to play.
It wasn’t the Beach Boys, but it was nice. The music swarmed out of that piano and filled up the room, and Miss Blue Glass swayed slightly from side to side on the bench as her fingers rippled across the keyboard. I have to say, it did sound pretty.
Then a terrible screech intruded. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and strained at their roots. The noise felt like jagged glass hammered into your earhole.
“
Skulls and bones! Hannah Furd! Skulls and bones! Cricket in Rinsin!
”
Miss Blue Glass stopped playing. “Katharina! Feed him a cracker!”
“He’s goin’ crazy in here! He’s beatin’ at his cage!”
“
Skulls and bones! Draggin me packin! Skulls and bones!
”
I didn’t know if those words were what the thing was screaming, but that’s what it sounded like to me. Ben, Davy Ray, Johnny, and I looked at each other as if we’d walked into a nuthouse. “
Hannah Furd! Crooaaakk! Cricket in Rinsin!
”
“A cracker!” Miss Blue Glass yelled. “Do you know what a
cracker
is?”
“I’ll crack your head in a minute!”
The screaming and screeching went on. Over this tumult, the door chimes rang again.
“It’s that song, I’m tellin’ you!” Miss Green Glass hollered. “He goes insane every time you play it!”
“
Crooaaakk! Draggin me packin! Hannah Furd! Hannah Furd!
”
I got up and opened the front door in prelude to running out. A middle-aged man and a little girl eight or nine years old stood on the porch. I recognized the man. Mr. Eugene Osborne was the cook at the Bright Star Cafe. “We’re here for Winifred’s piano less—” he began, before the caterwauling started up again. “
Skulls and bones! Crooaaakk! Cricket in Rinsin!
”
“What in the
world
is that racket?” Mr. Osborne asked, his hand on the little girl’s shoulder. Her blue eyes were wide and puzzled. On Mr. Osborne’s knuckles, I saw, were faded tattooed letters. A
U.S.
on the thumb, and on the following fingers
A, R, M,
and
Y
.
“That’s my parrot, Mr. Osborne.” Miss Blue Glass came up and shoved me aside. She was mighty strong to be so thin. “He’s havin’ a little trouble lately.”
Miss Green Glass emerged from the hallway, carrying a bird cage that contained the source of all that noise. It was a fairly large parrot, and it was fluttering at the bars and shaking like a tornado-spun leaf. “
Skulls and bones!
” it shrieked, showing a black tongue. “
Draggin me packin!
”
“You give him a cracker!” Miss Green Glass put the bird cage down on the piano bench, none too gently. “I’m not gettin’ my fingers snapped off!”
“I fed
yours
all the time, and I sure risked my fingers!”
“I’m not feedin’ that thing!”
“
Hannah Furd! Draggin me packin! Skulls and bones!
” The parrot was a bright turquoise blue, not a speck of any other color on him except for the yellow of his beak. He attacked the bars, blue feathers flying.
“Well, then get him to the bedroom!” Miss Blue Glass said. “Put the night cloth over him and settle him down!”
“I’m a slave! I’m just a slave in my own home!” Miss Green Glass wailed, but she picked up the bird cage by its handle again and left the living room.