In a suburban, Midwestern split-level, a piano teacher (just turned thirty),
leads an eleven-year old girl and her parents down eight shagged stairs
to the piano room illuminated by backyard sunlight from a sliding glass door.
**** has infested the entire room and a polka-dot-print couch with skirt ruffles
and a low brown coffee table create a makeshift waiting area.
This is where the parents sit writing out checks (the bank president’s daughter
was denied lessons last week for paying too late, too often). A faux-wood
sign slid into a gold-trimmed stand demands Please No Smoking but it’s only 1980
and too overbearing not to offend the parents. Smoke still ascends the ashtrays
atop their classy black uprights with chipped middle Cs.
Nobody in the neighborhood but the piano teacher has a metronome.  
She wears flowered blouses and is slightly overweight in a padded movie-like way;
she has fat, muscled fingers for playing all kinds of notes.
A stubby brown piano is piled with stacks of dog-eared songbooks.
The eleven-year old slouches over the keys attempting simplified Chopin, Bach,
and “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist, simulating her close-ups for Solid Gold.
Every year there are recital awards, a scale-shaped silver hanger or a coffee cup
with a handle fashioned like a quarter note. One year they all memorize the lives
of the composers. One year the piano teacher is pregnant by a tall, awkward,
bearded husband who practices fencing out in their backyard. Today she tells
the eleven year-old about last night’s dreams where “Christ is holding her baby.”
The parents overhear this and close their checkbooks.

For twenty minutes my father argued with her about the end of my music career.
She acquiesced in the end, saying a girl should always obey her father.
Within the year my teacher did find fame in the papers by obeying her father,
the day he commanded her to steam-clean the crimson stains on the **** carpet,
the day after he shot and stabbed and set afire that awkward, bearded, fencing man,
father of the baby that dreamed-up Jesus was so fond of. And now when she takes
the 5th, I never know if it’s that Amendment or Beethoven’s.
                                                                ­                                       Please No Murdering
the perfect melody with your bars and keys. The piano teacher went on teaching scales
and I imagine her piano is festering like a box of echo and madness, notes floating
through the sliding glass door stuck ajar. I imagine her frumpy, stomping on the stiff
damper pedal that sustains all our dreams.