Two-Part Inventions by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Read Free Book Online

But this, she realized, was a different kind of gift. Something you already possessed without knowing it, something inside that you’d taken for granted as part of who you were. And there was no giver. It was just there, mixed in with the rest of you, the parts that were like everyone else’s, but not everyone else had this. It made you special.
    And so, after she played for people who recognized her gift, she could accept that she was real. It must be true. This was who she was: the girl with a gift. Then her native diffidence would peel away, she could smile and accept their praise and happily, even giddily, high on her own success, join them around the table to eat the platters of food her mother set out. And as she grew older she suspected that the food, which disappeared so quickly, to praise that almost equaled the praise for her music, was her mother’s way of confirming her own existence. The notion that grown-ups, even her parents, perhaps everyone, needed some display to assure themselves that they were real and not mere pretenses, was consoling. She was not alone in her doubts. She played, she ate, she chattered. She would do
her part in the great game, everyone tacitly agreeing to grant one another their reality.
    They had begun, these command performances, a few years after the notable day her mother often referred to, talking to friends about Suzanne. Gerda was in the kitchen, singing as she often did as she went about her work, sliding a roasting pan holding a chicken into the oven. Gerda Stellman had a rich, husky voice, dense with emotion; the women she played bridge with urged her to try to get on one of the TV amateur shows, but she had no interest in performing in public. She was singing “Santa Lucia.” Near the end of the verse she reached the high note, then the melody took a series of steps down, then back to the high note again. That was how it sounded to Suzanne, playing with dolls on the floor in the adjacent living room. She could see in her mind the melody tripping down and then up a staircase. Lately she had experimented at the piano, trying to pick out tunes, nursery rhymes , “Three Blind Mice,” figuring out how the staircase of notes worked, how the white keys and the black corresponded to the notes of a sung melody, but she did it mostly when Gerda was out on errands, leaving her with her older twin brothers. They were willing enough to look after her but had an intense private fantasy life, replete with monsters, pirates, mercenaries, and the accompanying plastic paraphernalia, and so were glad when she could amuse herself.
    As she listened to Gerda sing, Suzanne went to the piano and found the note that was the top step and then moved the index finger of her right hand down the keyboard, making the notes imitate the song’s journey along the flight of stairs.
    Her mother stopped singing and came into the living room,
wiping her hands on a dish towel. Gerda was a plump, fair-haired woman—colorful, Suzanne thought, with her pink cheeks and green eyes and not quite orange-gold hair. There was something doll-like about her—the creamy porcelain skin, the rounded cheeks, the wide-open eyes always looking surprised, or anticipating surprise, something like the dolls Suzanne dressed with care. Suzanne was nothing like her. She could see in the mirror—it might not be trusted for reality, but about appearances it did not lie—that she resembled her father, tall and olive-skinned, with black hair, the bangs reaching down to her eyes like a curtain. Sometimes her father’s rough hand brushed the bangs away. “How can you see with all that hair in your face?” Joseph Stellman’s body was heavy and coarse, though, and Suzanne was slender and would remain so.
    â€œWhat are you doing, sweetheart?” Gerda asked.
    â€œPlaying the song.”
    â€œLet me hear it again.”
    â€œI don’t remember it exactly. Sing