Every Time I Play the Piano a Bird Dies

Mother sharpens her heels. She is going out. Father has his hammer and is hanging a painting. He takes the hammer to the wall, swinging its heavy head against the thin framing nail, as she stands up with her purse over her shoulder.

They do not like it when I linger, watching them. They send me into the other room. Go and practice your piano, they say. We are busy, they say. Mother across the hardwood. Her steps: Click-a-clack, click clack — this is her sound. Father grinds his teeth. He wants to bring the hammer down in one mighty swing like he’s building the railroad, but instead he grinds his teeth and taps taps the nail into place — this is his sound.

Everyone and everything has a sound. I’m sure of this as I sit at the piano in the other room, not knowing mine. But I should play, my parents will yell soon if they do not hear me playing.

I put on my headphones and turn on the tape deck. It clicks. The spools start to turn. It whines as it spins and the first heavy note, low note, of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata lands followed quickly by the walking right — fingers up and back, over and over, light over the low notes, like water on stained glass. I put my fingers to the piano’s keys and push down. I can not hear their sound — but I trust that it is there.

My fingers mime the movement of Beethoven’s notes when the sonata cuts out on the cassette. The tape reels and succumbs to a heavy splash of radio static, that is quickly broken by the reed of a ballpark organ tapping its shoes.

Light up a Lucky, it’s baseball time…Settle back in your chair, there’s baseball in the air right now, it’s Dodger time!

Again, a splash of radio static, swirling and curling, cut again by the velvet voice of Vin Scully in the microphone of my ear. Him and Gil Hodges agree: there is no better tasting cigarette than a Lucky. They’re all cigarette, all tobacco, all the way through, and in the textured hollow of the white noise is the ghost of Beethoven’s sound. My fingers try to play along with the sonata’s echo, but jump and skirt now with the distraction of the commercial’s jingle.

Light up a Lucky, it’s baseball time!

I keep my right wrist supple. I bed my finger ends down on the flats of the keys. I am firm with my left, but not inarticulate, as the game on the recording gets underway. September 8th, 1957 stuffed into a tin can and Jerry Doggett’s muffled voice takes over for the final meeting of the Giants and Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in New York City. The first pitch to Gilliam from Barclay is a ball and I watch the bones of my hand slide and stretch under my skin. The pinky reaches and the thumb taps and I dig through the low notes as Gilliam grounds out to the shortstop and that is how this game gets started.

The sizzle of static, the swirl of the loitering ghost. I sit with my back straight and my elbows at ninety degrees. Mother is in the other room: click-a-clack click clack. Father is in the other room: tap tap. Everyone has a sound. Every sound hides another. Nothing is being said.

Barclay struggles, giving up a single to Pee Wee Reese. The crowd roars like steak dropped on a skillet as Duke Snider singles Reese to third. Doggett’s voice comes through pan-seared as the rally in the first swells with potential. Gil Hodges at the plate and I look out of the large window to the back yard. The trees at the edge of the woods ripple from a muted breeze. The branches bend like they are carrying weight and their fingered leaves glitter and fret — my fingers copy their panic, their lantern-light joy waving to a slow-leaving cruise-liner. A nuthatch hunches its shoulder surveying the grain of a trunk. A chickadee chickadees and drops to a lower branch. It spurns one for another and then back again. My fingers go from one note to another; they change their minds, return and hold. This is my note, they think, no, this is! — I am making a beautiful sound — and Carl Furillo strikes out with the bases loaded and Gino Cimoli grounds out to second and Barclay escapes the jam. The crowd reels, roars, as the play develops, the side-arm toss from O’Connell to Lockman ending the inning and it’s the Giants turn in the bottom of the first: O’Connell, Mueller, Mays.

Yessir, Lucky Strike is a genuine cigarette, all fine tobacco, naturally mild, that is toasted to taste even better. Have you tried a Lucky lately?

I sit up on the piano bench. It has been awhile since the windows have been washed — the glass is streaked from dried rain, a whorl of oil at my eye-line. My fingers march on, laying boots down to an Anglo-Saxon voice: You better get some Shafer today — it’s real beer. And now it’s Don Drysdale with a 14 and 8 record on the season, having pitched a shutout the last time he faced these Giants at Ebbets Field, he’s been throwing the ball just fine. Don Drysdale firing it in, winds and delivers the oh one pitch…lined off Reese’s glove into left field. The roar of the crowd, then a pop! and the tape gives out. There is a brief singe of Beethoven through the silence, before the game finds itself again and my fingers round first without hesitation. O’Connell has a stand-up double. Now it’s Don Mueller turn at the plate. I hear a door close in the other room and feel its sound come up from the floor through the piano bench legs and into my stomach. Mueller sends a fly out to center field and I play heavy on the keys as the crowd again roars, finding themselves on their feet and I find myself on my feet, putting my back into the keys, laying loose rag into the piano, pounding into it, punching its teeth. Something is coming out of me. The sound of the door closing, the crowd thinking maybe, it’s gotta a chance — I’m playing like fire, like lingual tongues. These notes don’t just sound, they feel. This B feels like hope, this F drops like a fly ball. This chord is disappointment, love, contact on a hung breaking ball, losing your hat rounding second, the clap of Mays’s hand in his glove before he catches a ball — where triples go to die. This A flat is a triple dying. This run is a match lighting, a sit-back, an ahhh, a discouraging word, a punch against a wall.

My fingers are away from me at the end of my arms and I am in my head. Nothing but sounds and feelings in my ears, piped straight in, and I find out that I am almost out of breath. The ball putters and the crowd mutters as Snider settles under it and it falls into his glove for out number one.

No one is listening. I sit myself down. The door has closed — mother has gone out. Father grinds his teeth in the other room, the hammer loose at his hip, hand on his hip, looking at the wall and the haze of small holes that have failed.

Willie Mays flies out to center field. O’Connell advances to third on the tag but it does not matter — Jablonski grounds out to third to end the inning.

I know how this game goes. This is my song, but no one is here to say: this is your sound. But my fingers roll on across the keys, playing hard. Sounds like late summer, like New York baseball, like Beethoven, like a Lucky Strike ad, like condensed waves shaken out of a can, like something that’s never been heard before — that’s your sound, someone will say.

It is the top of the second and I am light on the right, certain with the left. I hang onto a note with my thumb, down and down, pushing on the key. Charlie Neal swings at the first pitch and reaches on an error. Rube Walker swings at the first pitch and grounds into a 4–6–3 double-play.

Outside something ripples across the leaves and shakes the birds from their branches. They churn air, hovering, waiting for it all to settle. One bird dips and my fingers fall with it. It pumps its wings and bursts across the yard towards me. I hang in there, poised, watching it lace towards me, hearing my song. This dark ball come my way and I’m thinking it will break, it will break, don’t bail, it will break. I keep playing hard. Stay in the box. I blink. I hear a note of flexing glass sounds through the static. The bird is gone. There’s a new smudge on the glass where it hit.

I pause. The tree across the yard is still. No birds flit. I look down and my fingers are still going.

Don Drysdale works a walk on a full count.