Duet

My mother spat something dark into her napkin and regarded it closely—I looked around for the server. The restaurant smelled of stale water crackers and the walls were draped with fishing nets full of sand dollars.

“Things seem to become muddier now,” she said, setting the napkin down, “and for many years the opposite seemed true.”

She had called me a day earlier, her voice urgent and crackling, to request my company at dinner. I arrived late from a performance I’d attended across town. An acquaintance had given a recital of her own compositions, and I was tasked to write a review. The music was like nothing I’d heard, and yet there was something sharp and personal pressed snugly between the layers of counterpoint. It was only a notion, one possessing the character of a spring displaced from some obsolete apparatus. I left with the desire to articulate this to my mother, though such convictions rarely moved her.

“Do you ever tell friends about your childhood stammer?” she asked. “How the hitches vanished when you sang?” My mother has at times been courageous, at times helpless.

The server came with a pitcher, and my mother placed a hand over her glass. Water splashed over her fingertips—she’d long ago stopped wearing her wedding band. The server apologized; she shielded her eyes.

Then she asked, “Remember my plum sedan?” Then she brandished her fork, exhibiting a scallop. I did remember the car. I remembered my father’s hatred for it, and the satisfaction his sentiment brought her. For years, she worked at a deli counter during the day and an IT helpdesk at night. All the while, he gambled away disability checks.

A dollop of tartar sauce dripped from my mother’s fork onto her blouse. She caught me staring.

“I hope I haven’t raised too much of a scrutinizer,” she said.

My mother’s presence often prompted me to consider that any interaction may be the last you have with a person. This thought can be painful, or gratifying.

Flicking moisture from her fingers, my mother said, “I am relieved I spent so little of my precious time fretting over things beyond my jurisdiction.”

The server returned to collect our plates, and things became more pressing. We stood to leave.

“Did you know he grew up with a piano in the house?” my mother asked. “Your father. It endowed him with expectations.”

My mother was eighty and attended to most daily tasks adequately. She moisturized and flossed often. Instant coffee was her only vice. When I was young, I’d wake in the wee hours and catch her slurping the stuff greedily. She left half-empty mugs all over the house. Undissolved particles floated in them like drowned larvae. Some nights, she would enter my room and sit beside my bed. I would feign sleep while she spoke. “You cannot hold me accountable for this or much else,” she whispered in the dark.

After dinner, we walked to her apartment. At an intersection, she paused and stared hard at the sign above our heads. I thought she was getting her bearings, but then she said, “People used to say there was a road map, and if you followed it closely, everything would work out.” The ground shook as a truck rumbled past. “Improvisation was frowned upon.”

We reached her door. Unblinking, she took my face in her hands.

“Your grandmother,” she intoned, “the mother of your father, she would pinch your cheeks.” The skin of my mother’s hands was like chilled felt. “Whenever she did it, I told her to never do it again. I didn’t want her painted fingertips discoloring your skin.” My mother released me, clawed a strand of hair from her face.

“Then one Sunday, you must have been three, I slid you into her arms, and I knew she would do it. There was gravy boiling on the stove in that tiny kitchen, and there was a cutting board on the counter with a knife beside half an onion.”

A lanky boy slid by on a skateboard smoking a cigarette. Then he was gone, and again, it was only the two of us.

“I knew she was going to do it, so I picked up the knife and pointed it at her. Do you know what I said?”

I pictured my mother waving a knife, and at this instant, two pickup trucks at the intersection set their horns blaring. The trembling dissonance was like music, and again I considered the recital, how I might render into words what I’d heard. One piece stood out: a duet for viola and bassoon. Every interval traced by the viola was replicated a bar later by the bassoon in its most unflattering register. It wasn’t designed to play so high, and according to the composer, that was the whole point. It couldn’t be done with finesse—you had to find a workaround. In this case, the bassoonist hummed the last pitch into her instrument, it being entirely out of range. The program instructed the audience not to applaud, and we didn’t.

My mother said, “I told her, if you lay a fingertip on my boy’s face, I’ll slice it off. I’ll slice off your goddamn finger.”

I had never heard this story before, and my mother would tell it again a few months later, in a slightly altered form. We were on the way home from the hospital then—she had an awful bout of pneumonia, and her recovery astonished us all. In this variation of the kitchen story, my father was there, and after she brandished the knife, he laughed. My grandmother hid my face in her apron, and though my mother felt her eyes water, she did not cry. She told me she never cried, at least not in front of my father, and this fact would provide comfort during her convalescence.

But that evening after dinner, my mother stood in the doorway of her apartment and held out her spotted hands to me. “These hands,” she said, “they did their best given the circumstances. I suppose you never told me otherwise. You might have, though.”

She held them there in midair, a fermata—a suspension.