A few essays

Of the piano players on our street, I was probably the most obnoxious since I was the most impressed with my own ability to play. Before I learned to play music by "real" composers, I regaled my friends with dramatic interpretations of student exercises like "Swans on the Lake," swaying back and forth excessively while the music crescenDOED and DEcrescendoed. My friends simply ignored me. But I perservered, learning to enjoy playing no matter how badly I managed it. I hated practicing arpeggios but I liked playing anything sad (Chopin), or loud (Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor), or bouncy (Joplin).

Our piano was a squat spinet standing about four feet tall, with no lower range to speak of. Luckily for my love of volume, the piano sat in the family room on top of linoleum tile, so I could get some thumping bass notes in my ragtime. But even I knew it was a lesser creature compared to the grand piano shared by the boy and girl across the street, or the baby grand two doors down at the Johnsons’.

Mr. Johnson was in the military. I think he was employed at the Moffett Naval Air Force base, though I never knew for sure. He was notable to our family mostly because he drove a red Porsche, which my two younger brothers would sometimes go over to admire. I do remember seeing him walk down the street in his tan uniform one afternoon, young and slim and good-looking.

The three Johnson children were all girls: Joan, Lisa, and Susie. Susie was the baby, a couple of years younger than Lisa, and had her father’s brown hair and her mother’s deep-set eyes and full, pouting lips. When Susie was about six or seven she sat in my parents’ backyard shed and explained to me and my siblings, and several other neighbor children, the meanings of all the swear words we could think of, even the F word. I had made correct guesses about several but was surprised at the last, since it sounded much more violent on the occasions my dad shouted it when he broke something. Susie also stole her mother’s cigarettes and was sometimes found smoking them in the crawlspace above the Johnson house. Her extravagant acts earned her notoriety, but only a grudging respect.

My sister Julie, however, was always Susie’s champion, and Julie, Lisa, and Susie often played together at our house. Our house was a favored spot since it had so many toys. In fact, it was accepted knowledge in our neighborhood that the children in my family were the most spoiled and had more stuff than anyone else. Kids often congregated at our place, spilling KoolAid on the rugs, losing the GI Joes and Barbies behind the furniture, and spinning the revolving rocking chair in circles until our feet flew up and left scuff marks on the wall. But even when we went over to other houses, the Johnsons’ house didn’t often come into the rotation. Children just didn’t hang around there.

When I occasionally joined Julie at the Johnsons’, I found it a place both lived-in and neglected. The girls’ rooms were typical kid squalor, with clothes strewn over all surfaces. The kitchen was narrow and didn’t seem to have much food in it, the front drapes were usually pulled closed, and the house lacked both decoration and the profusion of kids’ pictures and craft projects that spilled through the other houses in the neighborhood. Even the backyard was scraggly, and worrisome to me as it contained Chug Chug, the fierce dachshund who barked in circles while Susie teased him, and who was eventually sent away for biting one child too many. But it was the living room that I remember most, because it was empty except for Mrs. Johnson’s piano.

Her piano was a black baby grand with a matte satin finish. The room was dim, save for the window that looked into the overgrown backyard, and the piano stood near the window and glowed with the greeny light. The top was usually closed, though the keyboard lid often stood open.

I looked at the piano but, though I was always showing off some piece on other peoples’ pianos – The Spinning Song, The Maple Leaf Rag, the inevitable Für Elise – I didn’t feel right about touching the Johnsons’ piano. None of the Johnson children played the piano, nor did they have any interest in lessons. In all the other households, the piano was something purchased to improve the children – to teach us something, to expand our miniature horizons with Music. In the Johnson household, the piano was something else. It belonged to an adult.

For all my conceit about my playing, I was shy about crossing borders and didn’t like to cross Mrs. Johnson’s. But I did try playing her piano one day, while the other girls harrassed the dog just outside. Muffled in part by shouts and yips, I made my way through Für Elise and was charmed to hear the piano’s larger tones sound out with Beethoven’s ditty. I played no doubt as theatrically and romantically as was usual for me at that time, and most likely played too fast as well. But I was pleased with myself and with the instrument. I looked up to see Mrs. Johnson, who had appeared from somewhere else in the house, watching me.

Mrs. Johnson was blonde and a very good-looking woman in a full-blown, matinee movie way. She had a Marilyn Monroe mouth and sometimes wore the jerseys and tight capri pants that were de rigeur for her type of look in the 60’s. Her hair was swept up in a bouffant – not too high, since she was after all a housewife. She had painted fingernails, wore eye makeup, and smoked cigarettes, all of which were strange and intimidating to me. But her eyes, the few times I saw her, were always tired: heavy-lidded and sometimes puffy.

I now realize that the Johnson house seemed vaguely ominous to me because we never did see Mr. or Mrs. Johnson much. Mr. Johnson was usually out, even on weekends – perhaps off on military assignment, perhaps just gone. The kids fetched their own snacks, decided what they would watch on television, and took us around the house on their own. And it wasn’t as if Mrs. Johnson were in another room, ironing or cooking dinner. She was there somewhere, but wherever that was, it wasn’t with us.

I didn’t understand exactly how Mrs. Johnson’s absent presence was different. But I did know that her relationship with her girls was in some way extreme, and quite different from those any of us shared with our parents. We all knew Joan had been a bed-wetter; she was silent and stoic, leading her life without notable influence from her mother. Susie, of course, got in extravagant scrapes and held screaming matches with her mom. And Lisa and her mother faced each other as equals, arguing in ways I wasn’t used to children arguing with their parents. Lisa often chided her mother as our parents might have chided us.

Indeed, Mrs. Johnson let her children take the lead in most parental situations. I remember when another neighbor child accused Susie of stealing food from my parents’ kitchen. The other girl’s parents, Susie, and Mrs. Johnson all met in my parents’ living room to Discuss the Situation. My room, which shared a wall with the living room, was the perfect place to listen in. Always oversensitive to the plight of the underdog, I heard with growing indignation the adults discuss the claims and counterclaims of the two girls. "Why do you believe her and not me?" Susie cried self-righteously, as my parents questioned her whereabouts when the box of crackers disappeared. I wanted to jump out and cry foul – though most likely it was Susie who nabbed the goodies – and I wondered why Mrs. Johnson didn’t speak up for her daughter. But I never heard her voice until the very end, when Mrs. Johnson said softly and wearily to her tearful child, "All right, Susie. Can we go home now?"

It didn’t feel right to me and it made me uncomfortable. My sister, closer to the Johnson girls, understood that they often cared for their mother, rather than the other way around. I was simply wary of Mrs. Johnson’s mysterious figure. Perhaps at times she betrayed the slurred speech or broken gestures of the closet drinker. Perhaps she and Mr. Johnson shouted at each other during the quiet suburban nights. Or perhaps she suffered the alternating desperation and listlessness of the chronic depressive. I never noted any of these signals clearly, and do not know now what was behind her absence. But there was a sadness, a hopelessness about her that we all could feel without recognizing.

Her large eyes were looking at me as I finished playing the Beethoven, and I was surprised to see her. She half smiled and said something like "You like to play, don’t you?"

"Yes," I told her shyly.

"I can see that you do," she said. "Would you like me to play something?"

"Okay," I answered, though I would have liked to have gone on playing myself. But I yielded the bench to her, and she sat and played. I remember the empty room, the off-white rug and the black piano in contrast, and Mrs. Johnson framed against the window, playing. The music was broad and yearning and complete in a way the pieces I played were not, and sounded to my naive ears as rich and complex as any recording my parents owned. I don’t know what she played, or if it was difficult, or if she played it well. I remember only that I watched her, and saw that she loved to play.

When she finished I must have said something like "That was really good," and she told me I must keep up my practicing if I enjoyed the piano. And then she went back into her rooms, and I went outside to join my sister and the Johnson girls. And I don’t believe I ever heard Mrs. Johnson play the piano again.

I must have been twelve or thirteen then. I’m forty-one now, and recently purchased my own piano. The small spinet my parents bought had stayed with me, following me through marriage and divorce, offering a place to plonk out all the same tunes I had learned during high school and college, familiar and comfortingly clunky. When my daughter was born seven years ago, piano playing halted. There was no time at first, and later, when she was a toddler and I sat myself at the spinet, my child threw herself across my lap, grabbed my hands, and demanded I stop. Three years ago, however, I found a big black baby grand, high gloss, with a deep sound in the bass and a bell-like upper register. I can open the lid up all the way and feel the music against my face when I whack at some ragtime, or hear the cool soft tones of Debussy trail away as elegantly as I can manage to play them. At first my daughter was jealous of this piano as well, but she now brings her stuffed animals to dance when I play, tolerating my lack of attention as long as she can imagine I am playing for her.

I am not.