The Salad Maker Listens to the Piano

Part Four

Edith tracked the pianist to the meeting room near the top of the hotel after her shift on Sunday. This time she settled onto a chair in the last row instead of standing in the doorway. She crossed her ankles and folded her hands, feeling as unfitting as a black tooth in a rich man’s mouth, though she had worn her best outfit, a navy blue shirtwaist dress that boasted a matching blazer with cloth-covered buttons. She had taken the blazer off while she worked in the kitchen, of course, but now wore it again. Every few seconds, she realized she was fidgeting with a loose thread on one of the buttons, and each time, she made her hand rest.

The pianist played on, seeming heedless of her presence. Gradually, Edith's uneasiness dwindled. Her shoulders, aching after an afternoon of finagling the skins down off chicken legs and pulling the meat and bones out, then re-stuffing the emptied limbs with chopped chicken mixed with cream and breadcrumbs, relaxed. 

The music drilled and dripped and eddied into her, depending on its tempo, answering questions she hadn’t asked. It raised a hurt she hadn’t known of, soothed it, then raised it again. Sorrow spilled inside her like water from a faucet. Also, gladness and wonder. She leaned forward without being aware of it. If Helly had come, or the red-headed floor manager, she might not have been able to hear them speaking to her.

Eventually, the pianist’s hands fell to his lap. “You like it?” he asked without turning. His accent that made the plain question fancy.

“What was it?”

He laughed.  “Music.  Moo-si-ca.”

“But that last tune, what’s it called?”

“It was all one song, though it sounds like many. It is the Scherzo in B Flat Minor,  composed by my countryman, Pan Frederic Chopin. A pianist and composer. Like myself. Alas, he died young.”

The man began playing again. The notes fell quickly and cheerfully now. They reminded Edith of the mittens and hats she had knit for the children, though knitting had never been a thing she enjoyed, but just another chore that needed to be done.  The tune changed, becoming slower and gloomy, or maybe not so much gloomy as dignified. She was taken back to the mornings on the farms they rented when she would rise before anyone, light the cook stove, and start the water for oatmeal boiling. 

Those tasks had not been anything she thought of kindly or unkindly. They were as automatic and needful as breathing or stoking the fire. But now she caught sight of something else in them, something pleasant, or anyway worthwhile. Then the music changed again, became insistent and hurrying, and Edith was running across the field to Ivan. She caught her breath, but made herself listen. Then it changed again, and her thoughts stilled.

She stayed quiet when the pianist quit playing. Finally, she said, “Bravo,” hoping it was right. It was the most unusual word she had ever spoken.

The pianist turned then, and Edith saw that he was not young or as well off as he’d seemed on stage that first night. His hair was thin and graying,h and his jacket was faded and too large.  His eyes were bright, however. “Ah!  A music lover, a real one.”  He extended his hand, palm in the air, the first finger lower than the others. 

Edith had seen a movie on Dwight’s television where a man in bright blue velveteen breeches held his hand out like this to a bosomy lady in a long gown, inviting her to dance. Edith gave her sore shoulder a brief massage.  “I don’t know anything about music.”

“But you have to come to listen, yes?”

Edith nodded.

“And you have liked what you heard?” 

She nodded again.

The pianist turned and produced a sprightly run of notes, then a long solemn chord, and then began, softly, with less of the notes, the tune he had been playing when she first sat down.  Edith leaned back and closed her eyes.

The sound trailed off, but she didn’t lift her lids.

“What does it say to you?” the pianist asked, his tone curious.

“It sounds like the things you can’t get said.” 

“Hurrah!” the man cried, and Edith’s eyes flew open. He beamed at her. “You are a worker here, yes?”

“I work in the kitchen. Five years now.”

“A good job?”

“I’ve bought my own house with my earnings. It’s my name on the deed, just me.” Edith nodded firmly.

The man studied her. Then he said quietly, “Bravo.”

***

Dwight took Edith to his and Miriam’s house that afternoon, as he did every Sunday.  (Fridays she ate with Arthur and Vivian, Tuesdays with Patricia and Earl, and the other days of the week at home, as the rest of the children was further off, too far to go for dinner except now and then.) Miriam had fixed chicken and potatoes with green beans and cornbread. Edith ate everything on her plate and took seconds.  “Everything’s real good, Miriam,” she said, sopping up gravy with a chunk of cornbread.

Miriam smiled.  “You don’t get to where you want those fancy dishes like at the hotel, then?”

“Any kind of food agrees with me,” Edith said, and Miriam’s smile dimmed. But it was true that even the fussy foods at the hotel, the stuffed carrots, the aspics in their fancy molds, the Lobster Thermidor that was the feature of tonight’s menu, pleased her. Food of any kind did, especially if it wasn’t oatmeal, black bread, or lard.

After dinner, Edith sat on Dwight’s plaid couch, sipping a Budweiser from a can. The news was on, but she didn’t follow it. In her head, she heard the song the pianist had played, but she was already forgetting the outlines of it. When the beer was gone, she crushed the can in one hand for the amusement of Dwight’s children, and then Dwight took her home. 

She dozed in the car while Dwight talked about the boys in his science class.  “Well, I can see you’re tired, Mother,” he said stiffly when she didn’t answer some question he’d asked her. 

“Worn straight out.” She looked forward to getting into her housecoat, out of the girdle and brassiere, the nylons and tight-laced shoes. She dozed off again and woke with a snort, and then they were turning onto her street. 

“Thank you for dinner, Dwight.”  Edith patted his arm, two pats like shaping a biscuit one last time. 

“You’re welcome, Mother.” He stared through the front windshield, his hands on the steering wheel. 

Edith’s throat tightened. Dwight had missed all of his second-grade year of schooling and wasn’t out of bed for more than an hour or two each day in that time. There hadn’t been any money for doctors or medicine or the foods the county nurse had told Edith to feed him. She had said they should give him fresh fruit and vegetables even in the winter months and the same with milk and eggs. But that was impossible. Dwight had grown thin and hollow-eyed. He coughed through the nights and often flared into fevers. Edith believed he would die and she would have two boys in graves she couldn’t get back to visit. Harold tenant-farmed, and something always happened that meant they had to move on. His temper flared at the man who owned the land, or the crop failed, or he heard the hunting was better ten miles over on another section. They had picked up stakes eleven times in their sixteen years of marriage, and there was never any way to get back to where they had come from for a visit.

Dwight had turned dreamy, a reader, in the year he was ill. He talked of hearing voices and seeing spirits, talk Edith spanked him for, hard. She herself heard voices and saw spirits now and then, plus the shimmering, and experience told her it was nothing to encourage.  

The car slowed, and she thought of telling him about the piano player. But then they were at her house, and he was coming around to open her door.

“I’ll pick you up from work at four tomorrow, then?”

“Not tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll get a taxi.”

“What on earth for, Mother?”

“I have something to do after work.”

His expression turned incredulous. “Something to do? What?”

Edith glowered in answer, and Dwight sighed. “I can take you, whatever it is.”

 “You don’t have to.”  Edith plodded up her sidewalk, having neglected that final pat she usually gave Dwight’s arm. Behind her, the car door slammed.