Mrs. Alexander’s hands and forearms were tangled in a net of veins like the mould on blue cheese.  She rested them almost imperceptibly on my shoulder as I played my scales. 

            “Tempo, tempo, tempo,” she reminded me.  “It must always stay the same.”  Her dog – a stunted Shiatsu – licked my bare ankles, its moustache stringy and spongy as the wet husks of corncobs.  Vinegar-smelling books were stacked like ruined Roman columns beside stuck-up antique chairs with snobbishly curved backs.  Mrs. Alexander played the rustic Steinway as if she was shooting Gamma rays from her eyes and her fingers.  All this, I was sure, was presided from some room upstairs over her manic, ghoulish daughter – driven to insanity by the tragedy of her husband’s death.  At least that’s pretty much how the story went.

            Mrs. Alexander was short – with her hunch she barely reached my armpits – although I did have to duck under the Tiffany hanging lampshade whenever I came in.  People always said I should try out for the freshman basketball team but I was a lot more awkward than I was tall.  I never related much to the locker room politics either.  I like to think I found a more respectable way to become a man.  Sometimes I think the women in my life had a lot more to do with that. 

            I saw Mrs. Alexander once a week – every Sunday after church.  I guess my mom felt sorry for her – understood the pain of losing a husband.  I’m reminded often of this because I get the feeling I’ve never met all of either woman.  But then again, Mrs. Alexander is like a well – old, crumbly, and mysterious, but I sure wouldn’t want to go looking down there. 

            Mrs. Alexander always closed her eyes for the hymns and held the Bible in her claw-like hands, but she never needed to open it.  She sat in the last pew where she could watch the anxious organist with frightening scrutiny.  Mom always herded us in late – she could never quite get things ready in time – so we always ended up sitting next to Mrs. Alexander.

            It was mom who started talking to her one morning and mom who offered to pay her to teach me when she discovered that Mrs. Alexander had been a Viennese concert pianist for most of her life.  Mom was always pushing new experiences at us – the music lessons were recurring episodes – piano lessons here, violin lessons there – I’d picked the piano finally, mostly because I was too lazy to keep learning new things. 

It was mom that reprimanded me for saying Mrs. Alexander must be crazy.  I couldn’t quite describe to mom just how she lived – how cramped and depressing it was in there – how I indulged those schoolboy horror stories about her daughter to the point of giving myself goosebumps – how I’m sure the atmosphere of that house hadn’t changed since their husbands died – without calling her crazy.

            Mrs. Alexander had no eyebrows, hair, or lips.  Two copper curves spanned over her eyes – gooey and shiny like something wet hidden in Kleenex – her skin was crumpled and blanched.  She wore a charcoal wig and had drawn full lips where there were none.  As she drank her tea with shaking hands, her rose-dust lipstick melted, bleeding up the cracks and wrinkles under her nose, and fading into her mouth.  It looked like she had devoured something bloody.  I could never understand how her hands could shake to the point of creating a tempest in her teacup but when she sat at that piano it was as if a calm came over her.  Each key commanded her fingers to be steady.

            One afternoon I had been playing Rachmaninoff.  I had gotten so immersed in it I hadn’t even realised Mrs. Alexander had dozed off.  I looked cautiously but steadily at her face. 

            “Mrs. Alexander?”  She didn’t even open her eyes; she just took a breath as if coming back to life – a deep, quick intake through the nose.  Her eyelids fluttered slightly and then she opened them.  The pearly spheres beneath her grey lashes were almost frightening.  The sharp radial patterns on her irises were out of focus and the sparkle had melted into the corners of her eyes.  She cleared her throat, swallowed back the ever-constant phlegm, and blinked herself fully into the present.

            “Yes, Thomas?” she replied roughly.

            “Erm … how was that?” I asked.  She nodded as she always did.

            “Play it again,” she said.  “And this time, play it how Mozart is supposed to be played.”

            Mrs. Alexander invariably went into the kitchen to make some tea about halfway through my lesson. 

            “Practice your scales, boy,” she would say in her syrupy accent.  I tried to fantasise that her sensual accent belonged to a sensual body but all I could see was old Mrs. Alexander.  I started my scales, up and down and up and down robotically but as soon as she left the room I knew she couldn’t hear me so I stopped.  I nearly had to shout if I wanted to communicate in any other way than by nodding my head subserviently.  I knew she couldn’t hear her daughter shuffling about upstairs either.  But I could.  And an itchy curiosity was burning inside me – that unsolved schoolboy mystery.

            One afternoon I stopped playing while listening to her fumbling with the kettle.  I though about the scary little stories we wove about her daughter, Mrs. Brown.  She had been our elementary school teacher – but she quit after her husband died.  Of course no one ever asked how he died – it was destined to become fodder for horrific lore.  Something about her long, shiny nails was always figured in too.  But being a little older I knew it was all just gross exaggeration, just as how the principal used the PA system to contact his family on Mars, the way Michael’s aunt put cockroaches in her stew – Mrs. Brown probably just needed a break – maybe she even retired.  All the same, we’d made her life into such a mystery that I still felt the need to know the truth however mundane it was.  I listened for Mrs. Alexander opening the cupboards.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do – pretend to be looking for a washroom (I realised Mrs. Alexander had never shown me outside of her music room) while actually trying to catch a glimpse of her or something?  I stood up from the piano bench and walked to the other side of the room.

By one grand bookcase was a side table covered in vellum-y papers.  I tilted a few of them to face me, glancing over the writing and noticed that they were covering a picture frame.  Gently displacing the papers, I pulled out the frame and held it up in front of me.  It was a photo of Mrs. Brown and her husband painting a fence outside.  I looked at the smiling face of the poor, gentle woman we’d victimised with our imaginations and I looked at her husband.  It made me feel the same way I do when I look at photos of my father – kind of like I really want to ask him what his favourite colour is or what kind of toothpaste he uses.  My dad’s favourite colour was mint green – he painted our kitchen like that but it’s white now.  Mom says white is modern.

            I leaned forward, holding the frame in my hands, peering over the papers.  My movements disturbed a slowly swirling column of dust and sunlight.  And then Mrs. Brown walked into the room.  I dropped the frame on the table and took a step back.

“I’m sorry, I – ” My lips seemed to stick together.  Anxious embarrassment rattled like suppressed laughter inside me and I let the suddenly audible rhythm of my heart back it down.  She frowned.

“Where’s my mother?” she asked.  I stood uncomfortably between her and the piano.

“She’s in the kitchen.  I was just stretching my legs and I – I just thought the frame had fallen over.”  Mrs. Brown picked the frame off the table, holding it to her side. 

“Are you Thomas Dempsey?” she asked, smiling suddenly.  I nodded.

“You always did have you hands in everybody else’s stuff.”  She gave me a wink.  She was exactly the same – kind and elementary-school-teacher-ish, hardly a banshee.  Mrs. Alexander tottered into the room I moved quickly over to the piano.  Mrs. Brown took the teacup from her mother and placed it by the piano for her.

“I’m going out for a little – I’ll pick up your preserves on the way back.”  Mrs. Alexander nodded and then turned back on me.

            “Taking liberty with the caesura are we?” she nearly barked.  I brought my hands to the keys as if I’d been whipped into action.  I’m sure Mrs. Alexander could tell I was distracted because my fingers tripped over themselves.  She finished her tea painfully slowly while I worked my way through my exercises and then she let me go.  As I walked out of the room I noticed the fence from the photo winding along the sidewalk – it was rotting and a few slats were missing – it should have been replaced years ago.

*                      *                      *

            Friday afternoons were blissful in Spring.  It was like the heat loosened people up.  Hard knots of boys and girls dissolved into only vaguely associated bodies running this way and that in the sun.  You felt more ... more like you belonged.  At least if you didn’t otherwise; it was easier to melt in amongst all those people.  Come to think of it, it was kind of like baking a cake.  Things mixed together a little easier when they started to warm up.  This particular afternoon I was walking through the park between the school and the village.  My mind was out in the open, airy and caught up in Spring.  And then I saw Mrs. Alexander’s shiatsu poking around like a pig searching for truffles.  I followed her, somewhat surprised to see her anywhere other than under the Steinway.  I could barely imagine even Mrs. Alexander anywhere except in her house and that dusty old church!

            “Hello.”  She waved.  Her voice was soft and lilted.  She bent over to pat Daisy.  “She’s got you playing Chopin now, right?  Funny old thing.  You know she’ll never change how she teaches that stuff – I’m sure she just bores her students into practicing, if that’s even conceivable.”  Mrs. Brown chuckled.  I felt an immediate rush of embarrassment and forgot to think.

            “I’m sorry for looking at your picture like I did.  It’s just that …”  Horrified for stupidly launching into an uncalled-for apology, I clammed my mouth shot.

            “That’s fine – it’s a messy room – I’m sure it’s perfectly called for to want to clean things up a little.”  Grateful she didn’t know what my bedroom looked like, I relaxed a little.  The tension broke like an elastic and I let out a laugh.

            “You okay?” she asked curiously.

            “Yeah.  Ha!  You know, when me and my friends were young we made up stories about you going crazy – disappearing because you’d become incurably insane.  Funny, eh?”  I took it back the second I finished speaking and Mrs. Brown gave me the coldest glare I’ve ever experienced.

            “Six years ago my husband died overseas.  You’d think an innocent widow would be granted a little space to grieve, but all you kids did was terrorize me – red eyes and I’m suddenly a monster – grief that your parents didn’t want to explain to you misunderstood as some terrible neurosis!  You’re nervous because you thought my head was going to spin in circles?”  She grabbed Daisy up in her woolly arms.  “Ha, funny story I know, eh?” she said spitefully.  Rendered unable to speak I watched her whip around and storm off.  I couldn’t help myself from picturing snakes bursting out of her fuming head.

            When I go home I found my mom sitting in the living room.  She was reading and she had a glass of wine.  She looked tired.

            “Suzie’s out at dance.  She’s getting dropped off by Karen’s mom tonight,” she told me absent-mindedly.  I nodded and put my music down by the couch.  I sat beside her.  “Don’t forget to bring your music upstairs when you leave,” she said.  Almost impulsively I voiced a question as it blurred about in my brain.

            “Mom …” I stared.  “Do you miss Dad?”  She closed the book.

            “Of course I miss your Dad,” she answered wearily. 

            “But you don’t … get all upset about it.”  Upset was an understatement.  I was really marvelling how I’d never seen her blow up like that – never seen her transform like Mrs. Brown – never seen her crippled by it like Mrs. Alexander either.  She smiled sadly.

            “Sometimes it’s … hard.  But what would be the point of getting upset?  I have two wonderful children and beautiful memories.”  It sounded like she had summarised things like this before.  It almost sounded like she wasn’t speaking directly to me.  She looked off into space for a moment.  “Why this all of a sudden?” she asked.  I mumbled something about just wanting to know.  She reached over and gave me a hug.  “Life’s about moving on,” she said proverbially and smiled.

            For the rest of the summer I went faithfully to Mrs. Alexander’s house for piano lessons until I convinced my mom that I didn’t want to become a concert pianist and school rolled around and I would have been too busy anyway.  I felt sorry for Mrs. Brown sitting upstairs, making the old house creak as if she was a part of it – an old support beam warping and creaking with time.  I couldn’t see how her husband’s death had stitched part of her into the wallpaper of that house – how she’d turn bitter in his remembrance – when my dad’s death only motivated mom to make life better for us – to treasure things.

            I thought maybe Mrs. Brown’s husband’s death had been exceedingly tragic, but then all death is tragic.  I thought about it every once in a while but I really couldn’t figure it out.  And then the last day I practiced my scales on that rustic Steinway I noticed something different in the room.  Mrs. Alexander’s tea table had broken and she had paid the neighbour’s boys to take it away.  Mrs. Alexander was looking absolutely depressed about not being able to put her tea down where she always did.  And I figured it out.  Nothing had changed for them – not for Mrs. Alexander or for Mrs. Brown.  That house was the same as it had been the day Mr. Alexander died.  And Mrs. Brown was sitting upstairs only allowing herself to feel the same way she did the day her husband died.  I thought about the photo albums Mom kept in our garage and how she told me she wasn’t letting Suzie sleep with her baby blanket anymore because it was time to let go.  Mrs. Alexander lived the cramped and horrible way she did and her daughter cried away her life upstairs only because they couldn’t let go.