When my brother marries his piano, he says it’s because of its beautiful ivory smile. He’s 16 and too young to real-marry, but he digs in even more. Says he loves the toothy sureness of his piano wife. The wide welcome every time he comes near. My mother tells him that it’s just the keyboard and that he’s always mistaking one thing for another. That he’d been doing that ever since our father left and my brother turned the refrigerator into his male role model. How he’d sit for hours listening to the hum, taking it as wisdom words and nothing my mother or I could say could be heard over it.
After a month, we realize we have to accept it. He’s our only brother/son and therefore we have to love what he loves. When my brother is at his after-school ice cream job, I take special care to dust the blonde grain wood on the piano top and bench, I have to admit there is a certain voluptuousness to its surface, all polished and smooth as a soft thigh. My brother always talked about the piano’s smile, but I think he might have been lured in by the silk and swirl of the rest of it. How could he not?
One day, I sit down and start playing an etude I remember from those lessons I took years ago. I am caught up at once in a waft of notes and waterfalls. It’s as if the piano is playing it for me. Leading my fingers where it wants me to go. It makes me think about Billy Waxman, how he guided my hand so gently toward his penis that time in seventh grade. How I wanted to cry, knew I should cry, but didn’t.
Meanwhile, my mother is sitting in front of the refrigerator. I saw her pull a chair in front of it the other night after supper. After the dishes were put away and she just sat and sat. My brother busy now with his piano, me pretending not to be madly in love. And there was my mother. I could be very wrong but there was a moment where I thought she might be moving ever so slightly, as if to get up, offering the refrigerator her hand, as if accepting an invitation to dance.
