Switched At Birth

I've Read It's A Curse To Be Related To A Writer

A public apology is called for when a couple of sentences, too clever by half, hurts a dear person who held me in her ten year old arms when I was still womb warm, red and wrinkled.

I implied once, in a useless scrap of printed words, that she was perhaps a few fries short of a Happy Meal and thought our mother wasn't suffering from an organic brain disease that caused her to halucinate and suffer other delusions, but rather was possessed by demons.

Fact is, I had my hopes pinned on the demon idea -- seemed more optimistic than the alternative.

For the record: my brothers and sisters have always said I was a prissy kid who didn't like to sweat, who sucked up to our mother so I could stay indoors and "practice" piano while they raked leaves for her in the sweltering central Florida sun.

I publicly invite them to add their own comments about any remembered shortcomings, embarrassing stunts or general lowness of mine that they would enjoy seeing about me in print.

I'll start:  I'm insular, sometimes think more highly of myself than I ought, am sometimes emotionally lazy or just plain unavailable, am a show-off, if not actually prissy, and I still hate to sweat.

But I love you, my sister, Flo, and beg your forgiveness.

Summer of '68

  

I cannot speak with the voice of myself as a young girl. I cannot hear her voice. I can barely see her.

 

I feel her anxiety, though. She is sitting on the piano bench, back to me, hunched over the keys.

 

“You never play for me,” Mother says, her voice a weapon, finding its mark. “You play for everybody else, but you never play for me.”

 

I want to please her. I always want that. “I would love to play for you. Do you have time now? Please, what would you like to hear?”

 

Mother sits on the couch nearby, back straight, palms flat on the tops of her bird-like thighs. “Oh, anything. You know I like it all.”

 

I pick out a Clementi sonatina, bright and sunny in the key of G. I’ve finished the first short movement and barely begun the second, when I notice a small movement at the edge of my peripheral vision. Mother’s hands, lifting both up together, palms rising and falling back to her thighs in a brisk motion. Impatient.

 

We have been through this song and dance before. She will exhort me to play only for her. “You know how I love your playing. I take you to your lesson every Saturday morning, but you never play for me, just everybody else.”

 

I eventually cave in this ritual. We assume our positions: me at the piano; she on the couch.

 

She has sat, pretending to listen, for as long as four minutes. This day, it was almost three.

 

I finished the Clementi, and then moved on to Chopin and Brahms, finishing with one of Shostakowitch’s dark Fantastic Dances. Two hours passed. I disappeared into my head and the room shrank until it was only a cutout of the piano, the lamp, the bench, the music and one dark-eyed young girl.

 

I don’t know how I got to Peru that summer, that summer of firsts, that summer of almost everything, that summer when my lips were always chapped and my mouth bruised from kissing.

 

But I do know this: I will always regret returning home still a virgin.

 

If only I had stayed in Lima one more week, so overheated, it would have slipped naturally away in that city apartment near the plaza. Each time we went there and lay on the sofa, clothes on, touching, kissing, my resistance was like fat in the fire, burning, dripping, and sizzling into the Peruvian afternoon, so far from home, Mother, and the piano.

 

 

 

{excerpt from Ruination, a piece of the puzzle I'm currently working on}