Craig Morgan Teicher

PRACTICING PIANO

I should practice piano. I want to, and when I imagine myself getting up and out of my easy chair, stepping up the one step out of my home office, crossing the TV room and then the living room to the Yamaha electric piano, pulling out the bench, sitting before the sprawling keys, reaching my left hand to the on/off switch, and pressing it to turn the keyboard on, a warm feeling, like an invitation, like reading an acceptance letter, balloons in the center of my chest. I am ever so slightly happier.

It is when I imagine—now the piano is already on, the little red light beside the switch illuminated—actually placing my fingers on the keys, squinting at the notes on the sprawled pages of my music book, and depressing the keys, that a bitter feeling overtakes the warm one, and that feeling is immediately replaced by fear. (I should have already mentioned that I began taking piano lessons from my seven-year-old daughter’s teacher about a year ago, after sitting through a lesson and realizing I had always wanted to learn to play the piano and that I could think of no reason not to begin learning now.) Then, I do not get up, do not walk to the piano, and another night passes and I am no better at playing my newly beloved instrument. Some small shard of my self-confidence has been broken off. I have broken a promise to myself, and I am somehow more than one day older when I awake the next morning.

In this same way, almost every day, I do not go to the gym. I do not deny myself dessert. I do not put more money into my savings account. I do not allow myself to believe that my son, who has severe cerebral palsy and can neither walk nor talk, can understand every word I say but cannot express his understanding, and is simply trapped inside his inarticulate and insubordinate body, aching to get out, like Melody, the main character in Out of My Mind, the book my daughter and I are reading, about a ten-year-old girl (my son is eleven) with cerebral palsy who is extremely intelligent but is aching with frustration over all she cannot express. Though I try not to let my daughter see, reading this book makes me extremely sad, like it is evidence of a promise I made not only to myself but also to my son, which I am failing to keep.

But I believe he does understand. I believe his cognition was unaffected by the catastrophic birth injury that severed the connections that link his brain and his body, allowing his muscles to ignore or poorly approximate the execution of the commands his brain issues. I believe that in exactly the same way I believe that I will enjoy practicing the piano if only I will get up, walk across the room, and put my fingers on the keys. Only I don’t get up, and nothing terrible happens. No crack in the walls or fabric of space-time opens when I break a promise to myself. I guess it’s the same when I break a promise to my son. Or maybe I’m not breaking a promise at all. Maybe I’m correct to doubt. Maybe I don’t need to go to the gym. Will I actually die any sooner if I eat just one more cookie? Or smoke for just a few more years? Am I supposed to know what my nonverbal son understands if he can’t tell me? Am I supposed to act anyway as if he understands, as if I believe? Do I owe that to him? Don’t I? Mightn’t he start to understand, if in fact he doesn’t already, or begin to show me he already does, if I treat him as if I have full faith in his ability to understand and be understood by him? Is that what his smile means when it breaks across his face like a sunrise after I ask him a yes or no question?

You see my problem, right? What if I go to the gym every day, but get hit by a bus or felled by cancer? What if I quit smoking today and then North Korea drops a bomb on the East Coast on Thursday? What if learning how to play the piano is just too difficult, just not fun enough, for me to keep at it for the years and years it will take.

CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection The Trembling Answers, which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and the essay collection We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress. He works as Digital Director at The Paris Review and teaches at NYU and for the Bennington Writing Seminars.