Winter
Winter knocks on my door.
Not snow, not ice, not the explosive train carrying its cyclone bomb,
Not bitter wind, not gaping lakes spilling over freeways,
Not old oaks with roots reaching the sky
not frozen fingers gripping roof gutters, but winter.
Winter of my life knocks on my door,
I wonder if it’s more than a visit,
More than a borrowed cup of flour,
More than a handshake
but instead, here to stay, lodge in my bones
take over my eyesight, my joints, my haste, my worry, my ability to
warm to each day, to wake to a new dusting of snow
another portent of old age, as winter of my life seeps in
stiffens my body as it takes residence each day
in woolens and fleece, immovable steel inside soft outerware,
resisting the feeling, not ready for it,
waiting for the warming red of a spring sunrise,
a warmth for loosening, unbuttoning, thinning the layers,
shaking the weight for a little while,
before spring opens to summer,
the cycle presses on, but with each season,
even the warm ones,
winter encroaches,
a reminder
in my fingers
that time is passing.
Piano (excerpted from a larger project)
“Je cherche un piano.” I said, dusting off my French. I hadn’t touched a piano in over a year.
The Bangui central park campground was empty except for the seven blue tents circling our Bedford truck and a single khaki pup tent on its own. We were stuck here indefinitely, waiting for our Sudanese visas to process. It had already been a week. Spending this much time in Central African Republic was not part of the original plan, but who knew Zaire would close its border just as we approached? The stationary days threw us off; we rarely had spent more than a couple of days any place before getting on the road.
I read from the Ray Bradbury paperback I pulled from the Bedford’s locker of well-worn books. Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed was loose at the spine but I turned the pages gently, enchanted. I wrote letters home, letters that would take over a month to reach their destination. I scanned our shared Frommer’s guide to learn more about this secretive country. Its nefarious dictator, President Jean-Bédel Bokassa, was legendary for the wealth he corrupted from his country’s coffers while his countrymen lived in poverty. Rumors around our night fires whispered about the brutality of his dictatorship. That he punished thieves by severing fingers, hands, arms. That he had offenders dragged through the streets from the fenders of official jeeps. We didn’t need our driver to caution us about our behavior here.
I was restless one late morning. I joined the pup tent resident in a walk to the river. His name was Trevor. British, heading east as we were, also waiting for his visa. Once we got to the closest shallow stretch of beach, we sat. Across from us, probably a twenty-minute canoe paddle on the Ubangui River, was Zaire. Forbidden country. So close and yet so far. We gazed at the opposite shore like illicit voyeurs.
Trevor stunk a high acrid stench. Since there was no wind, it made no difference which side I took next to him, so I just inhaled away from him. After his months traveling solo, he was interesting company. That morning he described the music he’d followed in a village the week before, all drumming. The sound pulled him from the spot he’d found his breakfast.
“Steamed perch,” he said, “wrapped in a banana leaf. With cloves.”
His story continued. A slow and steady beat came from the edge of the cluster of homes. As he approached the sound, it not only grew louder, joined by other beats at higher and lower pitches, but its pace escalated. By the time he reached the church, Trevor said, the beats were at a near frenzy.
“A church?” I asked.
He nodded. “A Christian church. I mean, granted, it didn’t look like a western church; it was thatched and constructed of hardwoods, but there was an alter at one end, and a White minister standing at the side of the drummers.”
“A missionary?”
Another nod. “He saw me and beckoned me in, so I sat and got caught under the spell of the talking drums.” Trevor fell deep into his memory. “It was mesmerizing.”
We sat watching the brown, slow-moving river.
I felt a sudden urge to broaden my fingers over a keyboard, to hear the sounds they would bring into my body. I told Trevor about craving a piano.
“Let’s find one,” he said.
We walked to the decaying high-rise on the river shore, a once grand hotel. Who stayed here now, I wondered. Pushing open the glass door, we anticipated a rush of cool air-conditioning but were hit with suffocating heat. Our footsteps echoed over ceramic tile the color of tea stains. A lonely bar stood adjacent to the cavernous lobby, with a view of the river through sealed tinted glass. No cross ventilation. A staff member approached from the front desk, transitioning from concierge to bartender.
“Voudriez-vous prendre un verre, mademoiselle?”
After splurging on a bottle of tonic water, I brought up my question.
“Je cherche un piano.”
Lines furrowed between his eyebrows. “Un piano?” He paused, then pointed away from the river, toward the city. “Try the church on the Boulevard,” he said, in French-accented English.
Another church. Trevor and I pulled our warm bottles from the bar and headed outside.
• • •
The years of cultivating my piano playing began so sparingly it felt impossible to imagine that someday I’d be able to pull lush colors from the keyboard, that I’d move from one-fingered staccato to ten-fingers-full fullness, multiple-chord Aegean seas of blue laments, glacial sharps, vertical flats on a slant.
Recitals at age six gave way to two-handed standards, musical selections chosen by Mr. Van Ornam who arrived every Thursday afternoon, parking his black Cadillac by our mailbox. When I asked him for more upbeat, newer sounds, he brought me “Strangers in the Night,” an arrangement by Nelson Riddle for Frank Sinatra. I hunted for my own music after that, easing into the practice rooms at the music store, finding single sheets of Beatles’ songs and Crosby Stills and Nash.
When I presented my teacher with my choices he pulled my parents aside, his contempt barely concealed. “She’s ready for another teacher,” he said icily, and we never saw him again.
My next teacher, my last teacher, wasn’t plucked from the blue. Mrs. Johnson taught my cultural studies class in junior high; she was the first African American in my day-to-day experience and I was in love with her. She taught choir, too. When my parents approached her about private piano lessons, she agreed to take me on. Each week I entered her rarified Eichler. She taught me to improvise, elevating pedestrian songs to rich layered heights, pieces I absorbed in my muscle memory, so embedded there that when I played I wasn’t tethered to the page but instead relaxed and moved into the sound. Mrs. Johnson reminded me to listen for my own heartbeat during my hunts for artists and composers. She stretched me so I grew past predictable beats and easily resolved chords; she played records with wildly dissonant flavors that brought me a beautiful ache. Thelonius Monk. Coltraine. Leonard Cohen.
Mrs. Johnson gave me a way to understand pleasure in the unresolved, and the appreciation in giving in to lush surrender.
• • •
Meanwhile, the Bangui church harbored no piano, but a man sweeping the concrete floor invited us to follow him. His hands excitedly framed his French messaging.
Trevor was fluent so he translated. “It will take an hour each way. You willing?”
“Let’s go!”
The fellow from the church asked us to call him “Laban.”
“My Christian name,” he told us, smiling. As he reached for a machete, his beautiful hands animated.
“To clear brush,” he assured us. “Protect from snakes.”
Laban led us through tarmac passages in town until we came to a dirt track heavy with the rich red earth we’d come to identify with the Central African Republic. As we followed Laban, we traveled deeper into thick rainforest towering both sides of the road. Oil palms steepled the sky while rusty termite mounds shaped mud into conical layers of sculpture. Regal mud castles. Occasionally we’d see someone approaching our direction. A solitary woman with a heavy gourd solidly resting on her head. Two men leading a bull. Two girls carrying scythes. Laban acknowledged them in Sangho as they passed us, everyone friendly.
At last we came to a small footpath, barely discernible at the side of the road.
“Par ici!” Laban quickened his pace, and we followed him another ten minutes, unable to avoid the scratch of encroaching branches of okoume trees. The sounds of insects heightened around us, and the fecund smell of rich, moist life filled our nostrils.
A slight clearing met us, in the middle of which leaned a disabled topple of unmilled boles, sagging from the weight of the overhead thatch. Had there been no clearing, we’d have passed by without noticing this once-standing shelter.
“It was the home of a French family,” Laban explained to Trevor, who translated for me. “They had a piano. It is still here!”
He leaned against one of the rooted mahoganies, one of the few solid weight-bearing features holding up one corner of the thatched structure. Lifting some of the palm fronds, he peered inside.
Facing us, his voice got very loud
“FAITES BEAUCOUP DE BRUIT!”
Trevor translated. “Make a lot of noise!”
I understood. All of the months of sleeping in tents had instilled a reflex to step heavily to scare away snakes.
“You will find your piano, but I’ll lead the way.”
Laban’s eyes sparkled for the gift he was giving me. His machete at the ready, he stepped inside but kept the fronds up for Trevor to duck his 6-foot frame into the small passage. I was right behind him. The exuberant rain forest crowded the interior, tangling any forward motion. Several minutes passed as we made our way from one end of the structure to the other. Mosses and lichens carpeted our feet. We both heard a sharp slicing sound a foot away.
“Snakes?” I whispered, terrified. Laban was ahead.
“DE BRUIT!” he yelled, and we yelled too.
“WE’RE HERE, WE’RE HERE!”
We stomped through the vines and upturned roots, studded with shoot growth. All at once, my focus went milky, because there it was: the piano.
Once an upright spinet, the instrument had fallen back, supported from complete collapse by a muscular African Cherry. The exposed harp was recognizable, though most of the strings were interwoven with thick cords of plant life. A dozen yellowed keys remained like a few rotted teeth hanging in the mouth of a corpse. I couldn’t help myself. I hit one of the keys. A hollow dead sound.
I couldn’t look at Trevor.
Laban’s smile widened. “Oui?” He bowed, dramatically, his lovely hands and fingers miming an airy arpeggio.
The ache of missing music would persist but I knew there would be pianos in my future. For now, my muscle memory would have to wait. Besides, another sort of chord change was just around the corner. A prelude conducted by unexpected heat.
Theresa Weitsenhoffer
When Theresa Weitsenhoffer invited me to usher at San Francisco’s Opera House, I was fifteen years old. The draw for me, she thought, was The Nutcracker, but ushering seemed like such an adult thing to do that I would have said yes, no matter what. She told my mother I would need a black dress. I didn’t have one so my mother took me to her go-to shopping destination, the Echo Shop on Saratoga’s main street. This was where affluent women donated their gently-worn clothing, and this was where I was outfitted each year when it was time to go back to school. For the ushering event, my mother slipped her hands through the metal hangers and pulled out a black A-line shift. “Here,” she said. “Try this on.” It looked like it had been worn past the gentle stage, but I complied. My reflection in the dressing room mirror showed a teenager in a middle-aged dress. I knew I had no choice. It was always this way. So we left with the dress loosely folded between once-used tissue paper at the bottom of a recycled Saks 5th Avenue shopping bag. I wasn’t overly bothered by this purchase. It satisfied my mother, and I had another plan in mind, anyway. Let her think this was the dress I’d be wearing in the aisles of the Opera House. I knew a sure-fire way to find something dramatically more suitable to my sophisticated tastes: I’d steal it.
The weekend before the ballet, Julie and I walked down Quito Road to Westgate Shopping Center. My mission was clear: scout a few stores, find the dress, put it on hold with several other random items, get lunch at the food court, return to the shop to “try everything on one more time, just to be sure,” and leave the dressing room with the dress wadded into my big bag. “I changed my mind,” I told the clerk, who was ringing up a paying customer. Her eyes followed the suede fringe of my bag as I casually exited the store to meet Julie at Kinney’s Shoes.
The dress fit me so I looked eighteen. First impression held it as black, but the saturated color served as a backdrop for a milky way of white pin-prick stars. While my mother was at work, I disengaged it from my bag to iron out the wrinkles. Its fabric swung luxuriantly as I walked. The neckline scooped but with a chastened line of good taste. This was not the dress of a slut, Julie assured me.
The Friday night before the matinee, Theresa Weitsenhoffer made arrangements with my parents for me to spend the night at her apartment in San Francisco. Before we left our house I concealed the Echo Shop purchase deep in the shadows of my bedroom closet, while my starry black dress got zipped out of sight in a garment bag. When I got dropped off outside of Theresa’s lobby with my small suitcase in one hand and the garment bag in another, my mother was none the wiser.
Theresa lived in Fontana West, one of two mirror-imaged iconically-curvy buildings planted just below Ghirardelli Square. Every time my family drove up Lombard Street on the way to visit Great Aunt Rose the sleek architecture made me think of the United Nations building in New York. Expecting me, the doorman guided me through the stately entrance to the massive elevators, ushering me inside. Before he leaned in to push the button, he touched his cap. “Mrs. Weitsenhoffer will be waiting for you when the doors open on the 18th floor.”
And there she was, even tinier than I remembered. I’d last seen her during a visit with my grandparents, and I’d marveled then about her sparrow-small body. Even against my petite great aunts, all with the same Russian-born olive skin and green eyes, all of them under 5 feet, Theresa was diminutive. Her hair was tied back in a patrician gray knot, and she wore linen slacks and a loosely tailored blouse with its sleeves folded, not rolled, up to her elbows. I gathered this was her idea of casual weekend wear. What a woman would wear who lived eighteen floors above sea level. A woman who ushered at the Opera House.
“Dear,” she said, as the elevator door opened. I towered over her. I didn’t know what to do, I only knew how to hug, and that seemed too big. Theresa saved me with a restrained kiss on the cheek. I followed her little frame down the quiet hall lined with Danish modern side tables beneath canvasses of modern art. I wanted to trail my fingers over the thick strokes and patterns of paint. I held back.
I held back all evening. I tried not to noticeably breathe. The buttermilk carpet absorbed our footsteps as well as the creamy upholstered furniture. But when I uncrossed my legs to rise for dinner, the texture rasped against my behind. And then, when I squeezed into the chrome dining chair, the scrape over the marble tile made us both wince. Theresa had prepared a small dinner for us. “I eat light meals,” she noted as she presented me my plate. A small fillet of sole rested next to a serving of peas. I counted them. There were twelve. I should’ve packed snacks. I wondered if I’d survive.
After sleeping fitfully, I woke up to nervous dread. We didn’t need to leave for the ballet until 10:30; it was going to be a long, vacant morning. Theresa was gracious, to be sure, but breakfast was as spartan as dinner had been the night before: a bit of scrambled egg and a piece of unbuttered toast. She drank hot tea while watching me pour blue-tinged milk from a wax carton. We avoided eye contact. I chewed as slowly as possible to extend the meal, fill the time and avoid talking. Midway through my toast, a rush of words cascaded from her.
“You need to know the rules of ushering.”
The rules turned out to apply to her more complicated responsibilities, seating patrons. All I had to do was hand out programs and point out directions to the powder rooms.
After helping to clear the table, I showered and zipped myself into the secret dress. I packed my suitcase with the rolled up garment bag so I had just one item to check at the Opera House. The dress felt cool and lovely and a little dangerous. I imagined what Theresa would say if I told her it was stolen. When I met her in the hall, her eyes traveled from the swing of the hem to my flushed collarbone.
“Well.” She paused, and I heard my stomach gurgle. She must have heard it too. “It will have to do.”
I was stunned. “What’s wrong with it?”
She said, “Ushers are meant to fade into the background, and when the lights go down, we should be invisible. That dress,” she shook her head, “is not invisible.”
The doorman relieved me of my suitcase and stepped outside to flag a cab. Within minutes we were picked up and deposited in front of the regal War Memorial Opera House on Van Ness, which faced the equally elegant Beaux-Arts City Hall across the street. Climbing the sweeping steps, my heart beat faster, and once inside I was so mesmerized by the Grand Entrance Hall’s coffered ceiling that I tripped. “Please, dear,” Theresa admonished as she led me to the coat check.
Already on orchestra level, the floor was empty except for a cluster of elderly sprights gathered near the wide staircase. All dressed in black, of course, they looked like sumptuously-dressed Sicilian widows. As a body, they turned in Theresa’s direction to greet her. She introduced me as a family friend and explained my ushering role. No one was moved to comment, and all at once the women turned purposeful, like a murder of crows, heading to their designated doors. Ticket holders would be entering in ten minutes. This was serious business.
My job handing out programs was perfectly suited for me since it didn’t call for any thought. I was too nervous to think and it was a relief that I wasn’t expected to show people to their seats. When the lights went down, Theresa generously led me to an unoccupied seat twelve rows from the stage. Whispering in my ear, she reminded me she’d summon me before intermission so I could take my place to direct patrons to the restrooms.
When the orchestra transitioned from tuning to the overture, the weighty curtain rose. I felt something swell inside me. I was sitting so close to the pit that the music filled me with overwhelming physicality. This sensation distracted me from following the spectacle on the stage, and it wasn’t until the second scene ended (and Theresa tapped me on the shoulder) that I recognized that Clara’s dreaming had miniaturized her world. She was the size of the Nutcracker under a giant-scaled Christmas tree. I had the uncanny sense that I was observing someone else’s imagination, which made it hard to distinguish dark characters from good ones (were the big mice supposed to be scary?) and follow the story. I was too preoccupied by the sheer athleticism of the dancers to discern the reasons for the occasional waves of laughter from the audience.
During intermission I dutifully pointed patrons in the direction of the powder rooms until the bell sounded, the chandelier lights dimmed, and Theresa motioned for me to take my seat. When the curtain rose to The Land of Snow, violins surged from the orchestra pit as the Nutcracker transformed into a handsome prince. When the music thinned, the prince’s landings jarred me out of my mesmerized state. The stage floor vibrated loudly each time he completed a Grand Jeté. What must have appeared etherial and graceful from the balcony shook me in the 12th row, dispelling any idea of ballet’s fragile delicacy.
After the performance ended and the opera house emptied, the ushers knotted back together to exchange a few anecdotes and listen to the head usher’s reminders about the next performance. I received a few polite nods and good-byes before Theresa led me back to the coatcheck and out the grand exit into the bright sun and sounds of Van Ness traffic. I saw the blue Falcon station wagon parked in the loading zone. My parents and my brother were waiting, the back passenger door was already open for me. My mother unlocked her door and stepped out to give Theresa a hug. “Thank you,” she said. Theresa carefully extricated herself from the embrace while commenting that “it had been a learning experience.”
My mother peered into the back seat. She was eyeing my dress.
Karen Andrus 