The Lilac Cube

Chapter 19 VitaThe pizza came at 7:00, the biggest pie they had, and the two of us ate more than half of it in total silence.It was a strange meal, made stranger by the fact that Dad forgot to turn the kitchen light on.Dad had quit drinking about three years ago, but that first night alone, he stayed in the living room, drinking glass after glass of whiskey and strumming his guitar.He wasn t very good at it, and he mostly played trucking songs by Red Sovine, Porter Waggoner, and Hank Williams, but I stayed up with him to sing along until after midnight.We sat together in the darkness of the living room, me wailing along on top of his slurred baritone, until he finally closed his eyes, went silent, and let the guitar slide down from his lap to the floor.I picked it up, tried to strum it, but my fingers weren t strong enough.I ventured a tiny sip from his unfinished glass, sputtered at the hot bitterness of the whiskey, then decided to haul myself off to bed, leaving Dad alone in his favorite armchair.Dad never once stopped paying for my piano lessons, or gave up his dream of one day seeing me perform a solo at Carnegie Hall, probably sitting at my custom Steinway between a full orchestra and a packed house.I had been taking lessons since I was eight, going over to Dr. McCaskill s music store every day after school.Dr. McCaskill (Dr.M to me) ran the biggest music store in Truro and he gave cheap lessons to kids from all over town, most of them high schoolers in the CEC band.Dr. M was a small man, an ex-professor from the music department of Dalhousie University.He wore bifocals and had a tidy little wrinkle-lined smile when he talked with my parents, anyway.With me, he could be an unmovable, meanspirited villain, forcing me to recite my scales over and over for an entire session, or getting me to play the same piece at different tempos until I went home with the eight-year-old pianist s version of carpal tunnel syndrome.But whenever he dropped by the bungalow to make sure my parents planned to continue my lessons, he was the picture of easy dignity and literate charm, sipping black coffee from my mother s best china as if he were a visiting diplomat.Although both of my parents considered it their duty to keep me at my lessons, Dad was the one to actually make sacrifices in his own recreation budget to accommodate them.Summer after summer, he was forced to give up his precious membership at the Truro Golf Club so I could practice six days a week instead of four.I hated him for it.But, by the time I was eleven, I was starting to see the results, and actually began to think that being a concert pianist might not be a lifetime of torture.I started to enjoy wearing my cute little frocks to Dr. M s store, showing off a bit to the other parents who were dropping their own kids off or picking them up.It helped that for those two years I was the youngest kid studying with Dr. M, and I became almost his prized student during that time.Not really because I was more talented than any of the others, but because I was so young, Dr. M preferred to spend a lot more time working with me one-on-one.By the time my parents got divorced, prices had gone up, and my lessons were costing the family $10 an hour, a lot more than we could really afford at the time.Dad s golf club

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