Her Enviable Braids

K died the summer before sixth grade. She’d been walking on the side of the road when a car clipped her.

Months later, during the short dark days of basketball season, a grown-up would remark, “Pedestrians are supposed to walk opposite the direction of traffic. That way, you see ’em coming.”

At the funeral, some of them were already reckoning with this, as if it were a true or false question: You are flirting with death if you choose to walk on the right hand side of the road. True or false. A driver is absolved of wrong-doing if all they can see is the back of your giggling shoulder. True or false.

In these summers before they could drive, the classmates were separated by miles out of town in different directions. Fields turned from green to gold and then were shorn. That was the extent of time between late May and early September. They heard about K’s death one by one and wondered what it meant. What were they supposed to do? This was the first intrusion on a summer since they’d started school together six years ago.

The mothers rallied the classmates, driving them all to the small cemetery at the edge of town. They were agog at seeing each other outside of school, outside of three-minute multiplication quizzes and the spring bookfair and some girls starting to wear bras. They were agog at seeing K’s fifth-grade school picture propped on the coffin. Some of them realized they would not see her again.

The minister said prayers. A few others offered remembrances. For the classmates, the familiar school picture said enough. K had silken hair that she wore in two long enviable braids. Her smile was easy like an apple.

Two friends couldn’t help themselves. They whispered to each other during the service. “How’s your summer going?” “Ok, how’s yours?” “My little brother is a pain in the ass!” Eyes widened. So this was going-on sixth grade, saying “ass” with confidence. “I can’t believe we’re here.” “I know!” The whisperers trailed off, caught by the scowl of another classmate whose whole body shook with rage as she put her finger to her lips in admonishment.

One girl giggled. She covered her mouth with her hand and turned to look at her whisperer in arms, who giggled back. They couldn’t stop. They whisper giggled until someone’s mother said, in gentle reprimand, “Girls.”

They quieted themselves, one looking at the two roads leading out of the cemetery into the distant horizon of swaying wheat fields. The other observed the school picture propped on the coffin, aware that–all but one–they’d soon be sitting for new ones. Sixth grade.

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The Soul in Winter

People ask when my next concert will be. “I’d love to hear you play.” Or, “I just love the piano.” Always said, it seems, with eyes rolling heavenward or a clasp of hand to the heart. These prostrations unnerve me. I bear up. “I’m hibernating,” I say. “No performances on the horizon.”

I hear that hibernating bears emerge bony and skeletal from their dens. Weak and emaciated. I observe my fingers, which now sometimes have problems opening jars. I wriggle them and wonder how long they would last across the tundra.

In my hibernation, I listen to music, sometimes, like last night, discovering a pianist from Iceland, Vikingur Olafsson, who recorded Philip Glass in 2017, and then J.S. Bach less than two years later, as if no winters or summers had passed between the two composers’ lives. Time steps aside in deference to personal interpretation. I listen and devour the curvy turns of phrase in the Bach, the hesitant tripping grace of the Glass. I find a video of Olafsson playing a favorite Brahms Intermezzo of mine, Op. 117 No. 2., and recall something Clara Schumann said: “In these pieces I at last feel musical life stir once again in my soul.”

Wrapped in my headphones, I do not mind that I have no concert this spring, or fall, or next winter. The listening will be food enough. I’ll survive the journey to a future horizon of concert seasons. When I choose to wake.

 

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Buddha

“Your emotional reactivity will get the best of you,” he counseled.

This became a daily routine, the multi-vitamin of their relationship.

On Monday: “Do you want to let your thoughts and emotions control you?” Then Tuesday: “Your suffering is yet another one of your imaginary narratives. If you can accept it as imaginary, then suffering shall cease.” By Friday: “Unless you want to suffer.”

He said all these things with the same blank face he used to negotiate fees for his work, or to tell his mother he loved her at the end of a holiday visit.

“You could try meditation and send your thoughts down a river.” He lobbied for passivity and corrected himself, “I mean, observe them flowing by.”

He particularly liked correcting anything that was an exaggeration. Like the time she insisted he hadn’t touched her naked body, under the coverlet, in “more than two months.” “No.” He was always very matter of fact. “It’s only been two weeks.”

There was never any money, but he always wanted home and garden improvements. He pointed to the stone wall that wrapped around the pool, with its nooks and alcoves “perfect for a Buddha statue.”

“You could really make this a Shangri-La,” he’d say, as if she had no desire for Shangri-La, no desire for shrines to Buddha. As if implying the desire to be touched under the coverlet was an irrational attachment to a typical idea. Just her emotions getting the best of her.

“You could put those emotions in a jar in your mind and screw a lid on it,” he’d suggest oh so casually while making backups of backup drives that didn’t really need backing up. “You could try to sit with those emotions and do nothing. Nothing. And see if they don’t disappear in a day, maybe hours, maybe minutes.”

He liked pinning things like that down. He sought comfort in his diagnostic assessment of her psychological being. If she could dissipate all her turmoil, desire, angst, and strife in a matter of mere minutes, then he knew precisely what he was dealing with. He could lie there, feigning sleep under the coverlet, having never undressed from what he’d been wearing for days. He could—eyes closed, hands clasped, limbs folded one over the other—wait out the storm of her.

This became the routine, too. Waiting out the storm of her. Waiting out the blistering bikini weather of her. Waiting out the indecisive spring rain with fierce sun shining through of her. Waiting out the stark late-day Amsterdam shadows of her. Waiting out the fury of the dragon, her jaw unhinged, eyes wild, velvet tongue lolling about, screaming, “Fuck Buddhism! Fuck mindfulness! Fuck the thoughts in the river!”

He feigned sleep, silently preaching, eyes sewn shut, legs and arms securely knotted across his heart, while she raged on, joyously.

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