Duets by D. Dina Friedman

Image via Unsplash, Claude Gabriel

When my grandmother’s hands hurt too much to play the piano, she lost her will to live. She began to forget. In the middle of duets, her hands dropped off the keyboard. Notes transformed themselves to dots, melodies to monotone. We kept turning the pages to try something else. We never made it to the end.

She forgot the way downstairs to the pool, and whether she’d washed the strawberries. She forgot where the cabinets were, and the refrigerator, the names of the cards when we tried to play gin rummy. The air in her apartment grew dank. She wouldn’t open the door to the balcony. The ocean humidity might hurt the Steinway. 

My daughter now sits at the piano, yelling at fingers that will not hit the right notes—her eyes, my eyes, daggers as we struggle through duets. She will not wait for the right time to come in, and sometimes, neither will I. She yells at the piano, at me, at her hands, strawberry red and raw from winter. My daughter complains that the keys on our piano buzz, stick, reverberate. I tell her to tune it out, the way I tuned out my grandmother’s hands, her pained fingers falling into the wrong places. When my daughter was little, she used to sit on my grandmother’s lap, her chubby hands slapping at the Steinway. My grandmother would follow her as she toddled around the edge of the pool in a dark green dress that barely covered the edge of her diaper, the two of them sporting the same opened-mouth smile. “I always wanted a girl,” she said.

It took my grandmother over a year to die, several months to forget her words—one note, one phrase at a time until all was silent. No notes. No words. Only once after weeks of empty measures did she utter a lilt of syllables, my daughter’s name. Clear and in tune, I could see them again, the day they disappeared into the bedroom like sisters and came back in silver party hats. My grandmother yelled, “March,” and somewhere on the Steinway, I found some chords, a march rhythm, 1-2-3-4 all the way to the balcony, where beyond the pool, the ocean was so perfectly blue, she even agreed to open the door. Just a crack. Just for a moment. 

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D. Dina Friedman’s recent work includes a short-story collection, Immigrants, (Creators Press) and a poetry chapbook Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press).  She is also the author of the chapbook Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon & Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux). Dina has published widely in literary journals and received six Pushcart Prize and two Best of the Net nominations. Visit her website or her blog on living a creative life in a creatively challenged universe at: https://ddinafriedman.substack.com