The Blondes by Emily Schultz Page A

slim metal bars gleamed inside. I wasn’t sure about the difference between a xylophone and a glockenspiel, and I admitted as much to Moira. I told her I’d thought that the glockenspiel had tubes hanging from it. Although I supposed it was wrong to engage in small talk after everything that had happened that day, I found myself doing it without guilt.
    “Now you’re thinking of a marimba,” Moira said. “Xylophones are wooden. Glockenspiels have metal bars. Marimbashave the resonating tubes. They’re more for orchestral performances.” She told me she had one at home, but not a good one, since a good one cost as much as a piano.
    I asked Moira where she was from.
    Buffalo and Richmond, she told me. Her parents had split and she lived with her “mum”—which is how she said it, with a soft
u
—but sometimes spent summers with her father in Virginia. Moira did a lot of travelling. Drifting, she called it. I remember that I felt a flicker of excitement—now I had met someone while travelling, and that meant I was a real traveller too. Moira had studied music in school, and she performed with various art groups and experimental ensembles, mostly in galleries. I could hardly believe she roamed across the country by herself. When she was in Buffalo she tended bar because it was flexible and she could easily get away for days at a time. She’d had just the one performance in New York, so far—“And it paid,” she said. I remember her raising her expressive caterpillar eyebrows in amazement at this. She said she would be back to play again in the city in a couple of weeks.
    I told her I wished I could’ve seen the performance and asked if she would play something for me.
    “The glockenspiel makes a pretty penetrating sound,” she said, and made a worried shape with her mouth. It was after one in the morning on a Thursday. But she’d been standing behind the instrument, as if about to play, since I had first asked her about it. “I’m sure there are other guests here, aren’t there?” she added, uncertainly.
    I didn’t say anything as Moira turned and closed the doorto my room. She picked up the mallets. Her face took on a look of concentration.
    When she struck the first bar, it was as if a bell had been shaken in the small room. The song progressed, flute-like and tinkling, almost a lullaby. She used hard, quick-moving mallets, and eased from the vibrating bars a timbre that reminded me of running water. Blue-green was the only way to describe the sound, and reclining on the bed, I closed my eyes. A few moments later, the song became more percussive. The floor shook with thumps from an irate neighbour. The instrument hiccupped a couple of final notes, as if Moira wanted to fit them in, then stopped suddenly.
    I opened my eyes.
    “
Glockenspiel
literally means ‘hitting of one body against another.’ Well, actually that’s not true,” Moira amended. Her voice was softer than before, perhaps from concentrating on the music. “It means ‘playing of bells,’ but the hitting definition is in there somewhere too. Germans!” Her eyes were downcast, fixed on the gleaming instrument.
    “That was … breathtaking.”
    The corners of Moira’s mouth curled into a wry, half-hearted smile. “That song’s called ‘Plastic.’ Usually the glockenspiel is amplified and I use a delay pedal.”
    It took me a second to realize that she was apologizing—that she felt the song hadn’t sounded quite the way it was supposed to, that I’d somehow been cheated.
    I laughed, the sound startling me. “Call it whatever you want,” I told her. “It was great.”
    Sometimes, Moira told me, she played with art-school bands. She listed a flurry of names—none of them recognizable to me. As she tucked the mallets away, a gold cord caught my eye. Attached to one end of it was a shape the size of a dollar coin, slightly thicker, flat and shiny. The apparatus lay in a crevice of the case. It reminded me of Eugenia’s