This is an excerpt from an emerging books. I invite your comments.
The living room was a calmness of gray, creme and beige, the better to set off the oil paintings that hung there. She would lay on her stomach with legs up in the air or she'd sit cross legged in front of the speakers, listening intently to understand the words put to music. The plush gray carpet offered itself for frequent hand sweeps to bring up balls of fluffy gray fibers that grew as she rolled them. The piano was at one end and the sofa at the other. The drapes hung closed on the windows, never open to the sun. There was a hushed, almost sacred feel to this room. She felt special just to be there. The middle of the carpet in front of the speakers was her domain. She could look up at a large oil of foggy trees in the mist and wonder where they were, exactly?
Mom would change the records on the turntable in the hall cabinet. She was not supposed to touch that, though the way it spun slowly around and the little needle were very tantalizing. “The needle goes around these grooves on the record and makes a sound”, mommy told her. You have to be careful not to scratch it or you'll ruin the record. “ Of course she had to try it once or twice when mommy was upstairs or otherwise out of range. The sound it made when scratching was terrifying. What if mommy heard it too?
Every day she listened to the music that poured from the speakers. Show tunes were her favorite and she soon sang along to Mary Poppins , My Fair Lady and Peter Pan. Sometimes there would be a classical recording. The different movements of the piece always sounded like the weather to her. There was always a happy part and then a stormy part like a thunder storm that was just a little bit scary . Peter and the Wolf and Tubby the Tuba taught her about the instruments and she was fascinated. It's a Small World After All was another favorite.
When she was about six and already in school, piano lessons began from a book called Teaching Little Fingers to Play. gDid you practice?h, her mother would ask, already knowing the answer. So she would sit down dutifully and bang out Here we go/ Up the row /To the birthday Party. Little three fingered exercises that took the fun out of the music. But how else was one to learn? Having to do something was so much different from wanting to do it.
But reading was never a chore. It didn't take much practice and it never seemed like work. Rather, it was always a way to discover secrets. She would enter the cool dark room that was her father's study and head for the bookshelves that lined the far wall. A small finger would trace the titles on the bindings and eventually begin reading them. Tropic of Cancer. She knew that was a sickness people only mentioned in whispers, like the word divorce. The thought that someone would write a book about that illness gave her a little thrill of fear. In the sanctuary of daddy's study, nothing scary could really get to her. Her world was protected by the rich leather of his easy chair and the back set of the Cadillac.
The study was another fascinating adult room and it belonged to daddy. His pipe tobacco gave off a slightly sweet scent in there. She loved to put her fingers into the bowl of an empty pipe and sniff that wonderful deep smell. The pipe rack sat on the big wooden desk, front and center with many stacks of papers and a yellow legal pad or twobehind it. She and her brother knew not to touch the papers or disturb their order, but the pipes were a different matter. They could not resist trying those out, putting the pipe stem to their lips and sucking in the sharp and acrid after taste that sometimes burned their throats That was not nearly as good as the smell. Funny about smells. Coffee smelled rich and deep like chocolate but it sure didn't taste that way, especially when eaten! Curiosity lead her on all kinds of adventures in that house.
Daddy's closet was another great place to play. There was a big trunk in there. It was filled with all kinds of pictures of people she didn't know. Sometimes she and Andrew would drag daddy there by the hand and ask him who the people in the picture were. Most of the time there were stories to go with the people: that one was his own father, your grandpa, who was in the Russian army and escaped to come to New York. That is him in his uniform. The baby on the bear rug without any clothes was daddy himself How we squealed with delight to discover that! Mommy's childhood picture, by contrast, was of a fully clothed chubby little girl looking in fascination at a ball laying on the groudn in front of her.
After a time of poking around in that closet, oh so careful not to disturb anything or move it out of place, she would go back to the books, picking out one or two with lots of pictures to wonder at, curl up in the big maroon chair and slip into the world beneath the book covers.
