“Another one?”
I nodded. He picked up my glass and went back behind the bar and mixed and shook and strained and poured. Bartenders were dancers, dancing three-square-foot, tightly choreographed bartending ballets. Then he returned with a bowl of buttered popcorn and the drink, two slices of lime this time. The limes could keep each other company in their gimlet swimming pool. They could sink or swim together. They would not be alone either in life or death. I didn’t try to smile or talk. I didn’t do anything other than be what I was, a tired gimlet-drinker who wanted to sit on a high stool and prevent a lime or two from drowning.
“Long day?” he said, and I nodded. The bartender gave off the same feeling as the bar itself had when it had appeared, twinkling-lit, around the curve of Route 28. Kind. Was that the word? Warm. The photo of my bright-eyed mother with that look I had never seen before on her face rose up in my head, my mother who was never coming back. Everything I had not said to her, everything she had not said to me. Yes, a long day. A pushing-back-the-lump-in-my-throat day. A willing-myself-through-it day.
The bartender put his hands on the tabletop, just the fingertips. As if the tabletop were a piano and he was getting ready to play a prelude. A soft, slow prelude. Maybe a Chopin prelude, the one I used to play to myself late, late at night in college to end practice, in one of the soundproof piano rooms in the basement of the music hall. Me and the piano and lamplight and the heavy door with the small, square-paned Triplex-glass panel. Sunshine and Brown knew where to find me late at night, if I wasn’t in my room and no one had seen me. Me and my piano and my piano hands, smoothing the keys up and down, one foot keeping the beat. The bartender’s hands reminded me of those days. They reminded me of my own hands.
“Drink slow,” he said, “and drive safe.”
I ate the popcorn and I drank slow and I drove safe, twelve miles from Inlet to Old Forge, the oldies station coming in and out in flashes on the radio. Static was all right sometimes, like the white noise you might hear from outside a closed door to a room where a small party was happening, a party of people who knew one another and loved one another. Comforting.
My hands on the steering wheel remembered the feel of the piano keys in that practice room and the one Chopin prelude that always ended my nights. The cool touch of the shining keys under my fingers. The sound of the giant stringed instrument filling the tiny room with its cinder-block walls and ceiling made of acoustic tile. Why music? was the question sometimes asked of me. Why music when you don’t ever play in front of anyone? When you don’t even want to play in front of anyone? That tiny room. That enormous instrument with its hidden strings, the enormous sound that poured forth from my fingers. You seriously never played any instrument until you got to college? That was another question, to which I used to shake my head and smile and shrug the way I had smiled and shrugged at the tattooed server tonight.
My hands on the steering wheel. The bartender’s hands on the bottles and glasses. Tamar’s hands stretching forth into the air when she searched for a word. Drink slow and drive safe. The car and I crested a steep hill in the darkness and the Tug Hill Plateau spread out below us with a sky filled with stars. For a minute it felt as if we might fly.
* * *
What went wrong between me and my mother had gone wrong a long time ago, and the beginning of the wrongness could be boiled down to Conversations Late at Night in the Kitchen Where Clara Is Finishing Her Mohawk Valley Community College Application for $400. It was January, and the application was due. Asa had broken up with me in September. MVCC was half an hour away. My broken heart and I could live at home and go to school part-time and work part-time.
Tamar, suddenly: “Clara, you’re not going to school in Utica.”
Clara, confused: “What are you talking about, Ma?”
Tamar, resolute: “No.”
Clara, bewildered: “Ma?”
Tamar, finale: “New Hampshire is where you’re going to college. Two states away.”
That was her. That was a Tamar remark. She was a say-it-once kind of person. I looked up at her in disbelief. She was standing next to the kitchen table with her hands jammed into her jeans pockets. The application’s pages were strewn around me, nearly complete. I had filled the boxes in, one by one, in my neatest allcaps printing. I had written and rewritten the essay.
“Ma? Is this a joke?”
She shook her head, a violent back-and-forth, her hands still balled up in her jeans pockets, big lumps halfway down her thighs. Then she pulled them out and swept the pages of the application together, and before I could rise up from my chair and stop her, she was ripping them. Tearing them up, in halves and quarters, torn paper drifting down from her ripping hands.
“Ma!”
“You’ve been accepted already,” she said. “It’s something called early decision.”
She showed me an envelope, from a college in New Hampshire, a Dear Clara Winter, We are delighted to inform you that letter, dated a month prior. Grants and work study and scholarships.
What? How? Who? I shook my head in bewilderment.
“I didn’t apply to this school,” I said. “There’s a mistake.”
“There’s no mistake,” she said. “I filled out the application for you. Annabelle and I did it together, last October.”
She turned and walked out of the kitchen. It was late. The table was strewn with torn paper. I remembered the sound of her footsteps going up the stairs, the littered table, my galloping heart. I sat there for a minute, fingers pressed on my neck, trying to slow the beats by pressure alone, which did not work now and did not work then. A feeling like lava rose from my gut and streaked down my arms and legs, filled my head with molten rage. Wild heart trembling, I tore out of that kitchen and through the dark living room, pounded up the dark stairs and shoved open the door of my mother’s dark room.
What I remembered after that was screaming, mine, words ripped out of my heart and flung at Tamar, who was invisible in the darkness between us but whose caught breath I could hear. When I thought about it now, which I tried never to do but couldn’t help, all I heard in my head were fragments. Who are you, what are you, Asa is good, Asa is kind, Asa loved me, what did you say to him to make him go away like that? What kind of mother doesn’t want her daughter to be happy, doesn’t want her daughter around, what kind of mother throws her daughter out. That kind of thing. That was what came back to me. I didn’t know if those fragments were real.