You Have to Be in Love
More than just a piano lesson
I suddenly knew Mrs. Geesey was going to ask me to play, and I wasn’t sure if I dreaded it or was thrilled by it.
“Mrs. Geesey, I haven’t played those duets in years,” I said. But she was used to my excuses.
“Neither have I,” she said. “Sit down.” She stooped to clear the piles of books and music from the piano bench. “Did you ever play the top part of this piece?”
My eyes scanned the music in a panic, trying to remember the tricky passages about which Mrs. Geesey scolded or tutted during my lessons.
“Yes, I played the top part.”
Yes, I sighed, relieved to see that the top part was just the melody in octaves. I could play that, I was pretty sure.
“Well, you’re going to play the bottom part today. I need to practice the top part for this weekend.”
The old woman seated herself firmly on the right side of the bench.
Despite the fact that this piece of sheet music had been in my own piano bench for nearly ten years, I felt like I was stepping into a foreign country, unable to speak the language or find my way to anything familiar. It was like a fuzzy dream where you are dialing the wrong telephone number over and over because your fingers are too big and clumsy to find the right ones, whatever they are.
Mrs. Geesey and the director of her church choir had been asked to play a duet for a parish festival. I was surprised when my mother had called me a few days earlier to relay a message from my old piano teacher asking if I still had any of the pieces we had played together years before. “Invitation to the Dance” by Weber, Koelling’s flashy “Hungarian Rhapsody Mignon,” and “Anitra’s Dance,” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt.
It never occurred to me that I should have played them through once or twice before bringing them here in person. Why hadn’t it occurred to me? Of course she was going to ask me to play with her.
Old hands, young hands
My eyes groped at the left side of the duet booklet. I checked the key signature. D major. Two sharps. I could manage two sharps. I gingerly placed my already sweating fingertips on the old keyboard. Mrs. Geesey’s were already in place.
From the corner of my eye, I watched for the teacher’s wrist to rise just slightly, as a conductor raises a baton for the orchestra to begin.
We had spent part of each lesson practicing this synchronization in case Mrs. Geesey ever decided to have a student recital. Using my peripheral vision, I was to watch for the lifting of her wrists, which no one else would see during a performance.
There were brown spots on her skin even back then, freckles, I thought, like dozens of grace notes scattered across the backs of her hands. There were also bright red sores on her arms and wrists, which, she explained, had something to do with her diabetes.
Today the brown spots were no longer grace notes but smears of pigment, and her left wrist was bandaged in gauze. The sores were probably bleeding.
I watched for the signal, my eyes flitting between the music I desperately tried to remember and the cue I didn’t want to miss. Here it was at last, the overdue recital. Her wrists rose, and together our four hands worked out the opening measures of “The Zampa Overture.”
Anything to keep from playing the piano
I was twelve again, feeling the rush of those Saturday mornings sitting next to this solid, imposing woman on a tiny piano bench. Lessons began when I was seven, two dollars for thirty minutes. Then, as Mrs. Geesey got older, she decided to retire but kept me on as her only pupil.
Our lessons often stretched into forty-five minutes, then an hour or longer, but she never asked for more than two dollars and the cost of any sheet music, like the piece on the music stand now.
The two things that delighted me most about my hours at Mrs. Geesey’s house were the chiming clock on the dusty console TV, marking quarter hours until my lesson was over, and the chance that Karen might come into the room.
Karen was Mrs. Geesey’s teenage granddaughter. She was deaf. It fascinated me that a woman whose whole life had been about music would have a granddaughter who could not hear.
When Karen came down the stairs, she would stand in the doorway and wait for me to finish whatever I was crashing through. I wondered what it must look like to her, me leaning forward squinting at the page, her grandmother wincing at my mangled melody.
Mrs. Geesey would turn around and notice her, and the two would sign a brief conversation, and Karen would wave shyly at me and go on her way.
“What did she say?” I asked, not realizing how rude I was being.
“Oh, she wanted to know if we could go to the mall later,” or some such thing. How was I to know if it was true or not?
I found a book about Helen Keller and practiced the manual alphabet on the back cover. One Saturday, when Karen came into the room, I boldly signed my name to her. She smiled then signed something to Mrs. Geesey, and they both laughed.
But from that day, Mrs. Geesey began teaching me a few signs at the end of each music lesson.
She was like that. As soon as I expressed an interest, no matter how trivial, she would nurture it. And I was often expressing interest in things. Anything to keep from playing the piano.
So when I bragged about winning a poetry contest at school, she gave me a musty book of poems, a yard sale find, which she pulled from a tottering stack of books, and showed me how to stand properly when reciting.
I told her my grandmother was teaching me how to crochet, and she pointed out the afghans draped over her sofas and chairs and told me the names of the motifs and patterns. I laughed when she called them “granny squares,” and that made her laugh as well.
When she heard that I was going to be starring in a local production of Cinderella, she made me stand beside the piano while she coached me on the proper way to breathe and annunciate as I sang. And opening night, she was sitting in the third row, beaming as if I were her own daughter.
Some weeks I practiced hard, beginning with scales, etudes, and arpeggios to limber my fingers, then measure by measure, working through whatever piece Mrs. Geesey had chosen for me. Once or twice in the decade I studied with her, I managed to bring a tear to her eye with my playing.
But most weeks, I hardly practiced at all, and I would start my lesson by telling her how hectic my week had been. But she could always tell when I hadn’t practiced, and she slowly shook her head, disappointed.
“Maybe you’re still too young for this piece. You have to be in love to play it the way it deserves to be played.”
I was in love. I loved Johnny Gage and Robin Gibb. But that wasn’t what she meant. She wanted me to be in love with the desperation of Chopin, the passion of Debussy, the genius of Bach.
In my senior year of high school when I told her I was quitting lessons, her eyes filled, but she hugged me awkwardly.
“You won’t stop practicing, will you? There’s that ‘Impromptu’ you haven’t finished yet.”
When I drove away from her house, I felt too many emotions to define. I was free from the obligation, but I had lost my one constant friend.
In college, I took lessons for one semester at Dr. Ragogini’s baby grand. He didn’t sit on the bench next to me but on a chair slightly behind me. He didn’t talk about poetry or crochet but only about dynamics and timing.
He was teaching me to play the piano, but Mrs. Geesey was teaching me to fall in love.
The old sting of disappointment
So there we sat in front of the old duet, its brittle pages crumbling at the edges, in the tiny villa in the retirement home where she now lived alone. Her arthritic, knotted hands moved stiffly through the same glissandos I had once stumbled over.
She touched my wrist as a signal for me to wait for her to catch up. I slowed my bass tempo so she could find the notes, and when she counted aloud, I did too. I was careful to observe the technique markings, and my stomach fluttered when I saw my teacher nod, yes, that was good.
My favorite part was coming. Years ago, I had practiced until I could play the graceful triplets effortlessly, impressing her at one of my last lessons. I was in love.
But this time, Mrs. Geesey played the top part and the triplets were hers. Keeping the beat and following the notes on my own side of the page, I listened to the melody she played in octaves, the chords leading to those delicate triplets.
She would play them as I once had, only better because she was the teacher. But the triplets came, and again her fingers touched my wrist — wait, wait for old hands to catch up with young ambition.
My favorite part passed, barely recognizable.
After several attempts at the finale, the closing chord resounded, and we lifted our hands in unison and rested them on our laps. I sighed heavily at the workout and grinned at Mrs. Geesey. But she didn’t look at me. I felt the old sting of disappointment, but I smiled hard next to the reality on the bench.
Love
She closed the music. “I don’t think Mr. Johannsen and I will play this one at the festival.”
I helped her to the couch, and she began fondly to recount some of the very memories I had been reliving during the “Zampa Overture.”
It was nearing 5:30, according to the relentless chiming clock on the TV. I had been sitting with Mrs. Geesey for nearly three hours and was sure my husband was wondering where I had gotten to.
I put on my coat, taking my time, not wanting to leave. But she continued to talk even as I pulled the keys from my pocket. Several times I sat down and got up again. We both knew it would be a long time before I returned, if ever, even to collect the sheet music I left on her piano bench.
Abruptly she stood. “Well, so long, Caroline. Bring that baby to see me.” She patted my tummy, then put her arms around me. “I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you, too, Mrs. Geesey,” I choked.
I touched the old piano as I passed it on my way out the door. A cold rain started falling as I walked to the car, and I began to hum “Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude,” trying to remember where I had stored the sheet music to that piece.
