I was eight years old when I discovered how deeply I could hate. Eight years old. It doesn’t seem quite possible. The number sounds too innocent, depicts a soul far too new to the world to know something so ugly, so austere. But my memory tells me different. My memory tells me age doesn’t matter where these sorts of things are concerned.
I’ve tried hard to forget about that day, tried and failed, for the taste of it endures, the scent of it too, and the color. Everything. In the past, I often tended to minimize the incident by reducing the tearing animosity I felt to nothing more than childish scorn, perhaps even a spoiled tantrum. Somehow it felt more natural when coated in those lighter terms, but I struggled to convince myself of their merit. Inevitably, images of that day – the day I learned to hate – would come crashing back to me with the boisterous ferocity of a speeding train, and the feeling that was incurred in my small body all those years ago would return with such a morbid intensity that I just couldn’t escape it – I knew it was real. I knew it was genuine contempt I had felt that day. Just as I know now that I continued to harbor that feeling for many years after, let it fester in the quiet depths of me as I lived from day to day with a potent ill-will for the man who was my father, this terrible hatred, so all-consuming, burning on inside me and searing away at the outer threads of my bruised mind.
It was a Saturday, the day I learned to hate. This much I’m certain of as I had just returned from my weekly piano lesson. My teacher, Mrs. Liebovitz, strolled alongside me as we walked the short distance between her house and mine, our arms linked loosely like an interlocking pair of horseshoes.
That summer in Vermont was as bright and sticky as ever; the hot oppressive air breathed down heavily upon the town of Fair Haven, transforming the stretches of grassland into lime colored crunch.
We ambled along at a leisurely pace, Mrs. Liebovitz and I, the luminous rays of sun piercing through the leaf bustling trees adorning the curled street of Cedar Hill on either side. I leapt across the pavement as we went, jumping from one shady patch to the next and forcing Mrs. Liebovitz to break her steady stroll with an occasional hop of her feet, the sudden jerk of movement causing her shawl to fall from her grasp. She insisted on wearing that flower netted garment everywhere she went, no matter how hot it might be, but each time that it fell she managed to skillfully readjust it about her slight shoulders without any interruption to her busy chattering.
My piano teacher for all of three weeks now, Mrs. Liebovitz was an incredibly determined creature. A decidedly short Jewish woman, she was both warmly eccentric and uncannily discerning, with more years behind her than there were in front of her, as she liked to put it. And although I was tall for my age her petite stature made me feel like something of a giant. Each week, I secretly measured my height against hers, eagerly anticipating the day when I would surely tower over her.
“Remember Jack,” Mrs. Liebovitz was saying, recapping the main points of the lesson, “when you practice you must sit with your back perfectly straight and your fingers must always be arched into the shape of a claw.”
Her voice, as always, was high in pitch, her words as elongated as poured honey. It was something I’d noticed about her during our very first lesson – Mrs. Liebovitz never spoke, she sang her words and hummed her tone like a true songbird.
“Next week we’ll move on to chords,” she continued. “Do you know what a chord is?”
I shook my head.
“No? Well, they’re much like people really,” she mused. “You see Jack, if you play a single note it sounds flat, one dimensional. But if you play a chord, three or more notes together, you can hear the texture of it, the richness and the depth.”
I didn’t always understand Mrs. Liebovitz’s unconventional attempts at wisdom, laced as they were with her quirky metaphors and odd reasoning’s. But I liked the way she said those things, as if I was the only person she ever told them to.
As we approached the Winter family home, tucked away at the end of this deathly quiet street, Mrs. Liebovitz said her goodbyes and headed off in the direction of Fair Haven’s small town center. I watched her disappear into the glaring sun before beginning my slow ascent of the curved driveway.
0 comments:
Post a Comment