The Guitar Lesson
For my birthday this year my mother hands me a thin brown paper bag, the size notebook paper comes in. I open the bag and slide out copies of The Bob Dylan Songbook and Twenty Intermediate Classical Pieces for Guitar and say thank you, thanks very much. My mother still has her coat on; she’s wearing a dressy navy blue number with big buttons, Jackie Kennedy style, but her jet black hair is a wreck and her usually crimson lipstick faded. She’s says she’s sorry the books aren’t wrapped and I say it doesn’t matter, you didn’t even have to get me anything this year and she says of course, don’t be ridiculous, I wanted to, it’s just …
I am sixteen. I have recently been kissed by my guitar teacher, a man of nearly thirty years, but I have been numb to that and to everything else since my father’s brain embolism propelled him into the hospital a week and a half ago. I have not seen my father since before that catastrophe; I was at school when it happened and an ambulance took him to our local hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where he was immediately hustled off to the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City where they had experts. This greatly upset my eleven-year-old brother, Bobby, because we are Catholics, but I explain to him that God doesn’t mind about the Presbyterians taking care of Dad. I tell him there probably aren’t a lot Presbyterians in that hospital anyway; it’s just that Presbyterians originally owned the place and so they got to name it. He doesn’t stop gnawing on the raw cuticle around his middle finger when I say this; he doesn’t look relieved. I envy my brother the specificity of his worry; he is too young to understand the seriousness of what’s happening and he has successfully transformed his fears about our father’s death into a unique obsession.
My mother is on the phone a lot these days. She gets up very early and drives the trafficky forty minutes into the sun across the George Washington Bridge and drives back again into the enigma of northern New Jersey so she’s there when we get home from school. She makes a cup of Lipton tea and chats with us a little. She offers Oreos daily, but never remembers we don’t like them. She tells us the hospital is right on the other side of the George Washington Bridge, and I visualize a lofty, ivy-covered brick building right next to the emerald green Hudson River, with my father lying, miniaturized, in a spotless white doll’s bed overlooking a terrace. His black Vitalis hair is like slick fur against the white pillow and there is a scarlet geranium in a vase on the bedside table: green, black, white, red—the colors of some incomprehensible country’s flag.
These nights I take over so my mother can put her feet up. I throw our peculiar dinners together—odd combinations of whatever I can find or know how to cook. We talk and shovel food into our mouths distractedly. Mostly I’m the one to ask the questions. My mother tells us that Daddy has never really been awake since the “event,” but that he seems to be sleeping pleasantly, that he is not in pain. I think “event’ is an odd word for what happened to him. They do not allow children to visit on the intensive care ward and it never occurs to me to say “but I’m sixteen” because I cannot imagine standing next to my dying father: it is obscene. One day my mother cries a little as she tells us that, out of the depths of his coma, Daddy began to hum “La Vie en Rose,” a song the two of them loved before they were married. Bobby asks what the title means and my mother says, “looking at life through rose-colored glasses.” My father sang in his sleep, some sweet mantra deep inside his brain activated by my mother’s nearness, a probing electrode of comfortable affection.
My father’s empty place at our Formica-topped kitchen table has become a repository for unopened mail, shopping lists, expired coupons, church newsletters, catalogs, rubber bands, dried-up ball-point pens, a package of watermelon seeds, a crumpled dollar bill. My mother says, “He’s getting thin.” She won’t let me wash the dishes. I hear her whispering on the phone later with her sister Grace. When I walk into the room she tells Grace she has to go. She has been drawing endless overlapping intricate pyramid shapes on the cover of the phone book making it look like a heavily inked relief print and she has a blue ink smear on her cheek. I point this out to her and her eyes go small and angry.
They had whisked my father off to the great Presbyterian hospital in the hope that the embolism could be treated surgically, but that was not to be. It was inoperable, “in a bad place.” My mother described it to us as a little burst balloon in an artery; no one knew what caused it — it might have been there since my father was born and just suddenly decided to explode. This issue of cause was a touchy subject; my father had suffered two heart attacks already and continued to smoke heavily and to drink what I had begun to identify as far too much scotch. He was forty-six. My mother was a registered nurse. She could do nothing about any of these things.
My guitar teacher, Don, calls to see if I’ll be coming to my lesson that afternoon, the afternoon of my sixteenth birthday. He knows my father slightly, knows about his illness. When I’d quickly outgrown the cheap little red plywood, tinny-stringed guitar I started taking lessons on, my father traded Don’s boss, the owner of the music store, a rifle with a hand-tooled stock for an expensive, gleaming new Gibson classical. I think Don met my father then. Dad was a gunsmith and Don didn’t approve of guns, but he did say the maple leaves my father had carved into the dark walnut of his boss’s new Winchester were really beautiful. He was even more impressed when I told him I’d sketched out those leaves so my father could copy them into the wood.
I cradle the heavy black telephone receiver against my cheek and tell Don I can’t take my lesson today, but that I’m going to “practice extra” tonight. He has great hopes for me, for my music. He asks me if I’m okay. I don’t know if he means because of last Tuesday’s kiss or because of my father, but I say I am.
It’s January. Only last November my father’s mother died: Hodgkin’s Disease, which flattened her like a cruel and startlingly sudden tornado. I was in the bathroom one morning endlessly combing and rearranging and loathing my teenage hair in its fuzzing flip when my grandmother pounded on the door. “I need to get in,” she said, with deep-voiced desperation; it was not her style. I fled the room. In a minute I heard her retching. Five minutes later she came out, looking perfect, but pale. She was wearing a lavender wool suit and a pink nylon blouse and she smelled of gardenias. I loved the way she always dressed up when she came to visit. Two weeks later she was buried next to her first husband, my grandfather Robert, who had died long before I was born.
I came home from my friend’s house the day Grandma died and was surprised to find my father at home in the middle of a work day. He was in the driveway washing our old blue Plymouth sedan. The weather was flannel-crispy and his face was flushed purple. “Hi, Chickie,” he said. He paused with a big dripping sponge in his hand and fixed my eye with his own. “Grandma died today.” I had never seen his face with such outright need upon it; he must have recognized that I was growing up and might offer comfort. But I didn’t offer him any that day; I just walked on down the driveway swinging my stupid purse. I had loved my grandmother more than I understood, and now that she was gone, what family female would value me for my strange, disconnected self? My grandmother’s understanding had protected me from a world of scolding fingers, shaking heads.
I walked on into the house and found my mother ironing my father’s and brother’s white dress shirts. “I’m sorry.” I said. She nodded. She said, “It’s hard on your dad.” Two months later at my father’s funeral people would say he’d died so young, thank God his mother hadn’t lived to lose him. I could see no logic in anything.
I’ve come to think that bad things are worse before and after they happen than they are when they are happening. When they are happening they are happening and there is nothing you can do but keep on going. Before they happen the anticipation is excruciating and afterwards the memory is often confusing or painful, or, at best, poignant. At some point I admit to myself that my father is going to die. I remember when I was in eighth grade and Billy Green’s mother passed away one Wednesday morning and how that very afternoon we’d seen Billy calmly painting a Halloween scene in thick orange and green poster paints on the window of the local hardware store. It was the annual town competition. I was assigned a window two stores down from Billy and I remembered watching him and thinking as I filled in the hollow eyes of my beautiful blue-haired ghost with greenish-black paint, “How can he?” Now I know.
I go to my guitar lesson anyway and Don doesn’t seem surprised to see me. I roll on through my long–practiced exercises with robot-like precision, and Don doesn’t say, as he sometimes does, “Put your guts in it.” He plays for me a while, at my request, and I watch his fingers with their long, feminine nails pluck and strum and tease and then stop the strings from vibrating when they shouldn’t. Watching his fingers and hearing the Vivaldi weaving in and out on itself wrenches me out of my stupor and makes me feel as though I have longed for this one piece of music all my life and will never hear it again. And then I begin to cry and Don wipes off my face with his guitar polishing cloth and helps me put my coat on. There have been no more kisses since the first one, though there will be again. He says let me know what happens and I say I will. I’m supposed to call my mother to pick me up but instead I walk the long mile home, letting my heavy guitar case bump up against my leg like a big loving dog. There’s very little snow left but I’m not wearing boots and my feet are freezing and damp. I’m wearing a dark green-and-blue plaid corduroy dress and my slip is riding up underneath from the friction of my winter coat and heavy tights. I wonder how Don can like me, but do not question that he does.
I walk very slowly so that I will never get home.