Thank You for the Music by Jane Mccafferty Page A

leaving Lorine with Lou Junior and Mary Pat, thin, pale, long-fingered children whose claim to fame was that neither of them had ever sneezed. Lorine would sit with them when they had colds and coach them. “A-chhooo!” she’d say, and the confused children would repeat the word.
    â€œI don’t know. What do you think, Lorine? Should I let her take piano from the woman across the hall?”
    â€œI’d beware,” Lorine said, eyebrows raised so the whole head of curlers lifted a bit. I could always count on not being able to count on Lorine.
    â€œShe is a little different,” my mother said.
    â€œIsn’t everyone a little different?” I argued. They ignored me. Mary Pat and Lou Junior were pushing matchboxes on the floor with my little brothers, using my feet as hills.
    â€œYou kids go get lost, get out of here, scram,” Lorine told them, and they ignored her, as usual.
    â€œPlease, I really want to play piano! I’ll learn how to play ‘This Guy’s in Love’ and ‘Knock Three Times’ and ‘I Beg Your Pardon.’”
    My mother looked down at me with those pale green eyes weighted with what I can recognize now as the deep fatigue that ruled her young life. “I guess you can give it a try,” she said.
    Lorine sighed. “You spoil her, Shirley. The kid gets whatever she wants.”
    Lorine was one of those women with so many regrets she couldn’t stand looking at any version of the girl she had once been, a girl who still had choices. I didn’t understand that then; I thought she hated me for mysterious reasons, or because I refused to pull my shoulders back when she reminded me I had crummy posture and would end up with scoliosis. But Lorine was staying for dinner; sloppy joes, her favorite, my mother tossing the meat with a wooden spoon, radio playing. My father would sit in a bar down on the South Side until eight or so; Lorine and my mother would sit in the kitchen and drink cheap wine called Night Train, and I’d be expected to come to the aid of the little kids, should a crisis arise. That night I accepted my role gladly, spinning the kids around in circles in the playground across the street, daydreaming about my new life with Anne the artist, my eyes on the moon and the big black sky.
    After my first few lessons with that elegant woman (she wore delicate wire-frame glasses when she taught and afterward fed me expensive chocolates and good coffee—my first cup), I began practicing piano at my school in a large empty gym, with the lights off. Down the hall was the brightly lit pool where girls my age swam; I could hear the echo of their laughter and shrieks, imagine their long legs kicking underwater or shivering purple by the poolside while Sister Thomas Aquinas, in full habit, paced with her whistle by the pool’s edge. The thick smell of chlorine wafted down the hall; I remembered it stinging my eyes and turning my hair green the year before. This year I couldn’t take all that locker-room nakedness, the peeling off of wet suits, the goose bumps and gawkiness, the dread that my own body was horribly abnormal in some way. I’d grown four inches in a year. My best friend had moved. I was determined not to replace her with some new sidekick. Her absence served as a presence. I played the piano picturing her buried under the leaves of Ohio. Her new school, she had written, was a hell-hole full of morons. She had included unflattering cartoon versions of everyone she’d met, all of them drooling, or cross-eyed and saying, “Duh, what’s my name?”
    I’d fool around on the keys for hours, until the streetlights poured in through the high barred windows and told me it was dark outside. The wet-haired girls from the pool would parade by the open doors of the gym, laughing and talking, having no idea I was there behind the piano in the dark.
    Still, Anne was not impressed with my musical