Fiction by Eve Marx
I was seven years old when I began taking piano lessons from Tilda Zeller whose home was a short walk distance from our apartment and who was my mother’s friend. I had a little crush on her son, Micky, who was a year and a half older and who would, in a few years time, commute daily with his father from Atlantic City to New York City to attend Juilliard because he was a piano prodigy. At the time I began my lessons Micky was an introverted boy who wore glasses and whose primary interest was reproducing and staging the most terrible military battles of World War II. He had hundreds if not thousands of hard plastic toy soldiers; American infantrymen; German artillery bunker defense soldiers; Russian infantry; German and British paratroopers and the complete D-Day Allied assault. In addition to soldiers, he had toy-sized battleships and aircraft. In three unoccupied bedrooms on the third floor of their dark, sprawling, sparsely furnished Victorian manse, Micky staged and fought over and over the Siege of Leningrad, Dunkirk and The Battle of the Bulge. Once a week, just after the final bell of the day rang at the Richmond Avenue School, I met Micky who patiently waited for me outside the school building and together we walked to his house where his mother was already busy giving someone else a piano lesson. Until it was time for my lesson to begin, we sat at a battered, newspaper covered table in the enormous but messy kitchen eating the after school snack Tilda left for us, healthy snacks otherwise unfamiliar to me, like slices of apple to dip in saucers of honey or buttered slices of thickly cut sprouted wheat bread she baked herself when everyone else’s mother bought Pepperidge Farm or Wonder Bread.
I dreaded my lesson and hardly ever practiced, which drove my mother wild. My father, who was already in his 50s and an accomplished musician, was indifferent. He treated me more like a grandchild than a daughter and called me “Pussycat” and was happy to have me just sit on his lap and do tricks lighting his cigarettes for him. If he had any feelings about the lessons at all, it was probably resentment towards the $15 my mother paid Tilda every week in compensation for my torturous half-hour. The only reason I carried on with it at all was because I was completely smitten with Tilda’s cat, Miu Miu Chi Chi Meow Meow Meow.
Miu Miu Chi Chi Meow Meow Meow — and he was always called by his full name — was the star attraction of the lesson because I desperately wanted a pet, an animal companion, even if it was just for half an hour. At home for a week we’d had a miniature poodle; Wyatt Earp was his name and he belonged to a girl who used him in her cabaret act at a nightclub. How my father even knew her was something of a mystery. I was allowed to have two very small turtles — Tootsie Roll and Lolly Pop were their names — but they contracted a disease where their shells became soft and died, probably miserably. I brought home a goldfish I won at a school fair but my mother flushed it down the toilet when it lost its gold flecks and grew big. I convinced my father to purchase a turquoise blue parakeet I named Petey but his life with us was brief. My mother claimed he committed suicide but I’m pretty sure she just let him fly out an open window one day when I wasn’t home. I would have loved to have a cat but my mother said they shed and were wanton destroyers of upholstery. So, having Miu Miu Chi Chi Meow Meow Meow in my life at all was a treat to be savored.
I was smaller than average and the piano Tilda gave lessons on was rather large.It was a concert upright; to reach the keys, she perched me precariously on the hard wooden bench on top of two old phone books. Tilda sat inches away in a straight backed wooden chair. Miu Miu Chi Chi Meow Meow Meow languorously reclined across the top of the piano while I indelicately banged out “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” a song I hated, thumping his tail like a metronome. I have no idea if the cat participated in other people’s lessons or only mine. What was obvious was his pleasure in being the center of my attention, which annoyed Tilda, who certainly must have been exasperated at having to give piano lessons to the untalented and unmotivated offspring of her friends. Eventually she gave up attempting to teach me anything and every week after enduring ten minutes or so of my awful playing, allowed me to return to the kitchen where I spent the remainder of my reserved time studying her wild birds. At any given time she had two or three injured robins or sparrows or jays recuperating from broken wings and puncture wounds, secured in old wire cages suspended by strips of fabric attached to hooks in her kitchen ceiling. Once there was a crow. The birds, of course, were victims of Miu Miu Chi Chi Meow Meow Meow.
My mother told me Tilda was born in Italy. Unlike my father who was self taught, as a musician she was the real deal having studied in Trieste at a famous conservatory. She shared with my mother a vague shared connection to Budapest. I don’t know when or where Tilda met her husband, a taciturn man called Vasco; only that in 1945 they established a music school in their ramshackle Victorian home. The downstairs rooms were at once shabby and ornate; I remember a great deal of dark wood paneling and fifty year old wallpaper peeling in strips. There was very little furniture save for an old brocade sofa and three or four concert upright and grand pianos.
In the 1960s, very few people in Atlantic City had air conditioning. Most people didn’t even have screens. In warm weather the Zeller’s windows were flung open and birds sometimes flew in. This was particularly true of the third floor rooms where avian and perhaps rodent droppings frequently appeared on the unfinished wood flooring. Perhaps Micky felt they lent a realistic touch to his battlefields. It’s likely in those days anyone but Micky ever ventured to the third floor.
Tilda had a penchant for broken things and also for what broke them. She loved the assassin cat who went after the birds as much as she loved the birds and tried to heal them. To nourish them while they were in her care, she tried tempting them with chunks of watermelon and spoonfuls of mashed ripe bananas; she offered them applesauce, infant rice cereal, oatmeal soaked in fruit juice. She made her own yogurt for her family’s consumption and the aroma of fermenting milk turned my stomach. I was a little afraid of Tilda and her kitchen and the birds who were wild and angry and not at all like docile Petey who enjoyed riding around on my shoulder while I fed him bits of carrot.
Tilda encouraged me to communicate with the captive birds. She said they responded well to music and the sound of the human voice. She spoke to them in Italian and they seemed to understand. Not all of them survived whatever torture the Siamese cat inflicted and every week when I arrived for my lesson, it was a surprise to see what birds were in the kitchen. I asked Micky what his mother did with the ones that didn’t make it and he said she always cried when that happened, honoring their birdy lives by giving each dead one its own funeral. He described her gently removing each body from its cage and wrapping it carefully in a dishcloth which she then placed in a shoe box and which she carried to the beach to bury in the sand. What amazed me was that she never once expressed anger towards the cat whose only thought was to murder birds and eat them.
This is what cats do, she said. Not very long after, I quit the piano lessons to take up ballet, which I was much better at.
A year and a half later on a brilliantly sunny day, I was walking home alone and saw just outside the Zeller house a bird lying in a bramble of bushes. It was on its side and I could see one eye was open but it was unclear if it was dead or alive.I gingerly touched it with one finger and it quivered and tried to rally to fly away, which relieved me.
By then my father had died and I was anxious about dead things. I picked up the bird and carried it up the steep flight of stone steps to reach the front door. I knocked but no one answered. I placed my hand on the knob and turned and the door opened and I entered the dim, dusty, familiar vestibule, passing through it to the front parlor, which was empty. Through an arched doorway I could see and hear Vasco tuning a piano in another room. I passed through the room, once a formal dining room, where I’d had my lessons. The piano was still there and the bench and the wooden chair and the stack of old phone books. Miu Miu Chi Chi Meow Meow Meow lay sunning himself on top of the piano.
Is this your handiwork I said, having familiarized myself with the word after reading “Little Women” a story I didn’t much like although I admired the vocabulary. By then I had abandoned all pretense of ever having played the piano and ballet as well, having immersed myself in reading anything and everything I could get my hands on, including the Encyclopedia Britannica’s my mother purchased from a young salesman she fancied who sold books door to door. The cat barely blinked in response.
I found Tilda in the kitchen reading a newspaper at her kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee. Her hair, usually tidy in a tight matronly bun, was loose and flowed down her back like a river. It was the middle of the day but she wore a faded floral wrapper over a nightgown. Her long feet with their thick thorny toenails were bare except for rubber flip flops. Not for the first time I noticed her prominent beaky nose.
She lifted her eyes from the newspaper and looked at me over the top of her half frame spectacles. If she was surprised to see me in her kitchen, she didn’t show it. I held out my hand and uncurled my fingers to show her the injured bird. Tilda silently took it from me and placed it on the kitchen table on top of the newspaper she was reading.
Let’s have a look.
I turned my head away as she examined the bird which lay completely still as she gently poked and prodded.
Hmm, she said. That puncture is very deep.
She told me to cover the bird loosely with my hand while she fetched her supplies to attend to it. I put my hand over the bird. I wished I knew a song to sing to it. I remembered Tilda having said birds enjoy the sound of the human voice and began singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the only song I remembered from nearly two years of piano lessons.
Tilda returned with a few bottles and two droppers and some gauze. She indicated with her eyes I was to move my hand away. We both saw immediately there was nothing to fix or heal. The bright eye I’d seen when it was still in the bushes was now dull, a light film already beginning to form over it.
Disgusted and defeated, I ran from the kitchen into the old dining room to confront the cat who’d leapt from the piano at the sound of my pounding feet. He ran as fast as he could to another room and straight to Vasco who caught him in his arms.
I hate that cat, I screamed at Vasco who softly stroked his pet.
No, you love this cat, he said. You love this cat.
I didn’t look at him or Tilda and left the house. By then Micky was commuting alone to New York City on the Trailways bus and I rarely saw him. When he was home, he never came outside to interact with the neighborhood kids. Sometimes, passing by, I could hear someone playing the piano.
After my father died, my mother’s relationship with Tilda changed. It seemed they were no longer friends although I don’t think they were enemies either. Most of the couples who once were my parents’ friends dropped her when she became a widow. For a long time she was sore about that.
Not long ago, killing time on my laptop, I stumbled on Tilda’s obituary which said she’d taught piano for nearly 60 years. I fear in all that time, I may have been her worst student. Micky, it turns out, never moved from his parents’ house and still lives there, renting out rooms to boarders. I heard he became a psychotherapist, not a concert pianist. I wonder if he still has his toy soldiers.