Page 24 of Beautiful Ugly

I don’t know where my mother found him—the teacher we called the music man—but I remember the first time he came to the house. I was nine, and I thought he looked old, but everyone over thirty looked old when I was young. He was probably no older than that. The piano was in the dining room—we always ate in the kitchen, so it was a room we never used—and my mother left me in there with him. I’d been taught not to talk to strangers, but apparently if a stranger called themself a teacher it was okay. The music man closed the door “so as not to disturb her” and the first lesson did not go well.

I love music. I could listen to Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, or Ella Fitzgerald all day long, but I have never been gifted in that way. I can’t even play a triangle. The piano stool was too low to reach the keys,so the music man placed a red velvet cushion on the seat for me to sit on. It made me taller but didn’t help me play any better, and when he left that afternoon my mother was bitterly disappointed. She had been listening and didn’t like what she heard.

The next lesson was the same as the first: a disaster. The music man always brought two things with him: a metronome and a flask of coffee. He would slowly twist the lid off the flask at the beginning of each class, then take noisy sips from his plastic cup before placing it on a lace doily on the top of the piano. I have never liked coffee, and I’m sure it is because of him. Just the smell of it makes me feel sick. He started the metronome as soon as I began to play the basic scales he was trying, and failing, to teach me. He said it was to help with my rhythm.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

When, by the third lesson, it was obvious I wasn’t getting better, my mother expressed her disappointment in meandhim. So he came up with a plan and things were a little different for lesson number four.

The music man closed the door as usual.

He opened his coffee flask just like always.

Then he sat down on the piano stool instead of me and started to play the scales himself.

“You want to make your mother happy, don’t you?” he asked quietly. Nine-year-old me nodded. “Good girl,” he said, looking pleased with me for the first time. Then he switched on the metronome.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

My mother was delighted after the lesson, she thought I had finally got the hang of it.

I hadn’t.

I never did.

But there were other things the music man wanted to teach me.

The following week we did the same thing. I sat next to him and he played the piano pretending to be me. The metronome was already ticking away, producing a nice steady beat, when he unzipped his pants with his left hand then played a C-major scale with his right.

“Your mother would be so upset if I told her you lied and that you don’t really know how to play,” he whispered. “I won’t tell, but I need you to do something for me.”

I did what he told me to do. Afterward, I used to hear the sound of that damn metronome in my sleep. Months went by and my mother thought I’d progressed from scales to Mozart. She was so happy, I couldn’t tell her the truth, and the music man said everything he made me do in that room had to be a secret, because if my mother ever found out she would be very upset.

He was right about that.

One afternoon she walked into the room without knocking, carrying a plate of freshly baked cookies. The music man’s hands were on the piano keys, his trousers were around his ankles, I was on my knees. I didn’t hear her come in. He didn’t either. Neither of us knew she was there until she hit him over the head with Aunt Veronica’s blue vase. He fell to the floor unconscious and the room was completely silent, except for one sound.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

I didn’t know what happened after that because she sent me to my room and locked me inside until the following morning. I know I never saw the music man again and that the axe we used for chopping wood was missing. My mother locked the piano shut and said that I was never to talk about what happened. With anyone. And I haven’t, because why would I? I don’t want to be judged or defined by that. The thing that upset me the most was the way my mother treated me afterward. Things were never the same and she looked at me as though I were damaged. Broken. Unlovable. Which made me feel as though I was all of those things. I think that’s why she sent me away, so that she didn’t have to look at me anymore.

SILENT CONVERSATION

GRADY

“Me and you need to go back to the cabin right now,” Sandy says, staring at me with a strange expression on her face. She and Midge exchange a glance. They share a silent conversation the way only people who really know each other can. “I need to see these bones for myself.”

Before we can leave the room there is a loud bang on the ceiling, followed by several more in short succession. We all look up at the miniature crystal chandelier as it starts to creak and sway from side to side, casting an eerie pattern of moving shadows on the table.

“What was that?” I ask.

Once again they converse without words before answering me.

“It’s nothing to worry about. Just Mother,” Sandy says, glaring upward as the banging starts again. “She uses her walking stick to tell us when she needs something.”

It doesn’t sound like a walking stick.

“Is she all right?” I ask.