Exercisin' 3

I want to play her like a piano, that’s it. I want to make her sing. She stalks the house at night while I lie in bed and I hear the cat meow as she jumps into the house through the open window. The medicine cabinet behind the mirror is a mountain of snake-oil cures. Imaginary illnesses compound and the variegated pills go down the throat. The clock ticks circadian when dark finally falls, tired itself.

She plays the piano sometimes. She nods her head to keep time, doesn’t tap her foot. The keys are so well weighted. The piano, so beautiful, and the day it arrived only to find it couldn’t fit through the front door. Through the balcony instead.

Her son is not my son. His friends come after school on Wednesdays and play Dungeons and Dragons and her son sets the fireplace grate on end on the desk in the extra bedroom and he speaks to his friends through the grate like a confessional. He demands checks to their luck. They die in grisly accidents of chance more than in valorous battles.

I want to demand a check to her luck.

She hovers across the floor all throughout the day as I imagine it. When I come home she has some new plan. A garden she says, most days, a garden for tomatoes and carrots would keep her busy. A baby would keep her busy. I agree. It never comes.

I try, sometimes, to cast romance on her solitude. She is mysterious and withdrawn, I think. The cornucopia of thoughts that plague her mind ring sonorous and thick and immobilizing. She is the reclusive genius, I think sometimes. I pour through her journals while she sits on the porch drinking the sun. Nothing.

But I just want to play her like that piano. I removed the front panel behind the sheet music and exposed the strings. She plays softly but never touches the black keys. She isn’t great. She plays at the pedals unaware of their effects and on occasion an off note will sustain until she realizes her gaffe and pulls her foot back in recoil like a rifle or snake.

Her son plays Legos with me. He builds spaceships. I build houses. She sits on the porch drinking the sun. Late at night the radio squawks and crackles and speaks in a treble and she turns on the lamp beside the bed to jot down the name of some pill, some method. She sits in the sun.

But I know. I will play her like that piano - I will make her sing. Frustrated at night I think she is so reckless and so helpless and that she needs to be walled. In her garden I will build a maze of hedges she will travel each day.

She needs a God and, being blasphemous, I will be that God. I will write a symphony without a name and I will play it on her like that piano, and the movements and motions and the crescendo will be like the swell of the sea in a storm.