The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [43]
Tell Bonnie not to come until 3:30!
Did you get the keys? I left them in the office!
She showed that even when she was little, and was so determined to learn to play the piano, even though they didn’t have one, in the apartment over the hardware store where she lived with her mother and brother (her mother a widow, poorly paid, who worked downstairs). Somehow the thirty-five cents a week had been found, but the only piano she saw was the teacher’s. At home, she practiced on a keyboard penciled on the windowsill. There was some composer— Handel, was it?—who used to practice on the harpsichord in the attic with the door closed, so his father would not know what a grip music had got on him. (How he managed to sneak a harpsichord in there was an interesting question.) If Frances had become a famous pianist, the windowsill keyboard—overlooking the alley, the roof of the curling rink—would have become another such legend.
“Don’t think you’re any genius,” was another thing Paul had said to her, “because you’re not.” Had she thought that? She thought the future had something remarkable in store for her. She didn’t even think it very clearly, just behaved as if she thought it. She came home, started teaching music. Mondays at the high school, Wednesdays at the public school, Tuesdays and Thursdays at little schools out in the country. Saturdays for organ practice and private pupils; Sundays she played in the United Church.
“Still bumbIing around this great cultural metropolis,” she would scrawl on her Christmas cards to old friends from the conservatory, the idea being that once her mother died, once she was free, she would embark on the separate, dimly imagined, immeasurably more satisfying life that was still waiting for her. The messages she got back had often the same distracted and disbelieving tone. Another baby and my hands are in the diaper pail more often than on the keyboard as you can well imagine. They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
Wind is bending the trees outside and snow is blurring them. A minor blizzard is going on, nothing to take much notice of in this part of the country. On the windowsill is an ink pitcher of battered brass with a long spout, a familiar object that makes Frances think of the Arabian nights, or something like that; something whose promise, or suggestion, is foreign, reticent, delightful.
“HELLO, HOW ARE YOU?” said Ted when she met him in the hall after four. Then he said in a lower voice, “Supply room. I’ll be right there.”
“Fine,” said Frances. “Fine.” She went to lock up some music books and close the piano. She fussed and dawdled around until all the students were gone, then ran upstairs, into the science room, into a large, windowless closet opening off it, which was Ted’s supply room. He was not there yet.
The room was a sort of pantry, lined with shelves on which sat bottles of various chemicals—copper sulfate was the only one she would have known without the label, she remembered the beautiful color—Bunsen burners, flasks, test tubes, a human skeleton and a cat’s, some bottled organs, or maybe organisms; she didn’t look too closely and anyway the room was dark.
She was afraid that the janitor might come in, or even some students working under Ted’s direction on some project involving mold or frog spawn (though it would surely