by Kendra Currie
When I was seven, my mother signed me up for piano lessons with a local woman who advertised at our neighborhood grocery store. Shirley Cochran, who had faded umber red hair and plastic gnomes all over her front yard, lived several blocks over. For the first lesson, my mother walked me through the neighborhood, while I chatted nonstop beside her, my white slip-on Keds dragging on the sidewalk cracks when I would forget to pick up my feet, excited to learn how to play. When we got there, Shirley had me sit at her old oak piano, weathered by many small fingers, and stretch my hands across the dull ivory keys. My fingers, petite like the rest of me, couldn’t reach beyond six keys. She tsked and shook her head, told my mother that piano would be hard for me, stretched her large hands to reach 9/10 keys easily, talked about octaves and chords, while I sat, feet dangling and swinging on the old oak piano bench and stared at my small hands.
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Horses, like my piano skills, are measured by hand size. When my mother was younger, she used to ride competitively, with her black patent boots and round hat. Being a petite woman, she was ideal for this—light, compact, quick on her feet. My grandmother whispered about how good my mother was, but how she never seemed to have the competitive fire.
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My grandmother’s hands were always pillowy soft. She was doughy from a life lived with my traveling businessman grandfather, content with red wine and bougie steaks. Her counter in her pastel floral pink and metallic bathroom was crowded with circular pewter jars, all filled with different types of cream. Every evening, she’d put on a muted nightgown and a robe, and slather her skin with the lotions. She smelled like a florist shop, and as a child, I’d snuggle deep into her warmth on the leather couches of her home, wondering at how a human can seem so pliable.
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My father’s hands were muscular and scarred. He was a blue-collar man who worked in construction, but before that, he was an angry young man who picked a lot of fights. He balled his fist up once when I was a teenager, pointed at his first two knuckles, and how they were even with the others around them. He made me ball my fist and showed me how my first two knuckles stood out, sharp angular bone jutting from the skin.
I broke them so many times in fights, he guffawed. You can tell how tough a man is by the placement of his knuckles.
When I first met my husband, I grabbed his hand, and without him knowing, I assessed his knuckles. I rubbed my fingers along the jutting bones in their proper place.
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On one hand, my husband has lived a very sheltered life. On the other hand, I still expect him to understand that mine wasn’t.
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My brother’s hands look like my father’s hands. My brother, also blue-collar, works on diesel engines and drives semi-trucks.
His hands are strong. Once, when driving in the car, he went to go kill a mosquito on the glass, and the windshield cracked. A visual rippling of his strength.
But my brother’s hands are softer than my father’s hands. When he palms a beer, he sips it daintily, coiling fingers around the neck of the bottle and dragging it towards him across the table.
He’d be the last person to throw a punch, even if he is angry.
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Twenty years later, I sometimes sit at the long forgotten dusty piano and play, my fingers stretching and moving methodically across the keys. Musicality is a gift, and the notes blend into each other. I’m buoyed, lost in the anarchy of music.
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When the piano wasn’t an option, I discovered ballet. In ballet, young ballerinas are prone to claw hands—the fingers curling inwards as the focus of the ballerina tends to go towards the feet or the leg placement. An unfortunate angle, elbows dropping—the antithesis of beauty.
My ballet teacher made me shake my hands vigorously, and then relax them, fingers spread, thumb slightly tucked in. See—she’d murmur as her fingers glided and adjusted parts of my body as my fingers relaxed—The hand wants to relax like this. It’s naturally beautiful.
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My father played piano as well, and his hands, gnarled and heavy, danced across the keys of our piano.
He never seemed to have issues with reaching, although his hands were small too. He hammered the keys, causing some to stick because of his callous use. He filled the house to the brim with maudlin music.
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As a child, I was placed into the hands of my father. 6.5 lbs newly human, swaddled in hospital white. This was before he worked construction, before his hands were hard and cracked with the callouses of tools and leather. I imagine his hands were soft. I imagine he could have held me in one hand, but two felt safer.
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A hand injury from a car accident still plagues me when it rains, a scarring deep below the surface.
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Sometimes I dream of the piano. Fingers stretching, dancing across keys. But when I dream, it’s not the sonata or “Jingle Bells” or “Greensleeves” that I still play on imaginary keys now. It’s “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It will always be “Puff the Magic Dragon,” banged away in increasing volume, a deluge of notes coming to engulf me.
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We had a grandfather clock in my home, something handed down when my grandparents moved into a senior facility. It required daily winding, a task my father loved to do. He’d sink the key into the base of the clock, and wind, meticulous and keen to hear the gears grinding. Then he’d carefully push the minute hand of the grandfather clock to its proper placement, double-checked by the pocket watches he preferred to carry, and carefully shut the glass door until the next day.
I was fascinated by the movement of his hands, the clicking of the gears, the definitive shutting of the pocket watch, swallowed in his hands.
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The world of ballet offered an escape to something else, a quest for beauty. But the pain was crippling.
Toes broken and taped together, toenails black and blue from working on pointe. Hamstrings pulled and babied for six months. Knees scraped from floor work. Back sore from beautiful arch after beautiful arch. The hands were the only thing untouched, a flourish always present.
But there was beauty even in the pain.
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A friend is losing her hearing, and now when I video chat with her in my home in Texas, she needs to meet on certain platforms so she can lip read and there are subtitles. She is teaching her children how to sign now, and when she talks, her hands move, half-echoes of the conversation we are having, a sympathy of movement that has no audience.
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My husband, a lifelong drummer, stretches his hands constantly. When we are driving, he alternates his hands, stretching his fingers down so he can push them against the steering wheel, elongating the muscles in the wrist joints.
He taps on my skin as well, light finger beats as if I am the drum, his fingers the sticks. He is staccato and consistent, fingers tapping on my back, on my neck, on my breasts. We move in rhythm with one another, a different kind of skin beneath his hands.
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My father only played two songs on the piano: “Puff the Magic Dragon” was his preferred tune. The other was “The Marine Hymn.”
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In the seventh grade, I got into my first and only fight at school. Shannon, who was always mad about something, pushed me against the wall, choking me one afternoon. Her hands tightened around my neck, cold shower tile pressing on my backside. I swung, instinct taking over, and connected directly with her nose, snapping it, a hollow wet sound that filled the junior high bathroom. She screamed and fell to her knees sobbing, blood running down her white JNCO jeans and striped shirt. She didn’t expect me to fight back.
My mother yelled at my father, who in turn yelled at me. He beat me black and blue, his thick hands walloping my backside.
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There was catharsis in the connection between flesh and hand, the way I’d throw my hip into it to get the most impact. The way there would be some pride when guys would wince. That I’d feel capable and strong until they all started to distance themselves from my tiny viscous fists.
There is still a ghost of that longing in my fingers when I ball my fist up. The catharsis of contact is something I will always dream of.
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My father used to rest in his old brown recliner after work and crack his knuckles. Each finger pushed down, each pop a loud echo, each family member flinching as he exhausted the air in the spaces between bones.
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The piano still sits in my childhood home, its dark cherry wood getting dusty under a lazy blanket my mother threw over it years ago. It’s out of tune, and she keeps talking about donating it to the neighborhood children, who all keep moving away before she can get around to it. My father passed a few years ago, and no one plays it now.
When I’m visiting home, I still push at the sticking keys, finding calm in the off-key chords. I sit on the bench, kicking my feet.
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When I’m thirteen, I press my ear to the hollow wooden banister of my childhood home, where the piano sits on the other side. The day is rainy, grey, and my father has been playing the same song on the piano for over an hour.
The repetition doesn’t bother me. I close my eyes and sway, unseen, with my father who rocks and stomps on the pedals as he plays “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Sometimes he sings, his deep baritone vibrating all the baseboards of our home. I never wanted it to stop.
Until it finally did. My father sighed heavily and went to cover the piano keys, but I wasn’t ready. My head popped over the banister and begged him to keep playing.
The switch was instantaneous. Perhaps it was because I had surprised him. Perhaps it was because he forgot he had children in the house. But he slammed the piano key cover shut and bellowed, I only play when I’m sad. Is that what you want me to be?
About the Author:
Kendra Currie (they/she) is a queer writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan. They received their PhD from the University of North Texas and their MFA from the University of Memphis, where they currently teach Creative Writing and Literature. They have work in Whiskey Island, Southern Quill, Hobart, Nimrod International Journal, and other places. When they are not teaching, Kendra can be found at home watching terrible reality television and plotting world domination with their corgi, Rodeo. Their favorite apple is an Opal.