Practicing in the Dark
It’s March and
too cold for Delia, who pulls her black wool scarf
tighter around her neck and tugs her coat—missing three
buttons—tighter around her body. Under the coat, her
winter blue-plaid school uniform offers no protection
against the chill. She holds a stack of textbooks
against her body for added warmth and wishes she hadn’t
lost her gloves. She longs for warmer temperatures, for
spring’s kiss on the now-naked winter trees lining the
streets. Her father, who has sayings for everything,
once told her March comes like a lion, but leaves like a
lamb. Today, the lion roars her to numbness. She reminds
herself to remember to sew the buttons back on her coat
and to possibly snag her mother’s gloves.
On Riverside Avenue she forces
herself step by step toward the Inner Harbor, away from
Mary Star of the Sea High School, knowing she must
endure the cold for another twenty minutes before she
reaches her neighborhood. First a piano lesson, then
home to change, and then her cashier job at the grocery
store where her mother knows the owner and finagled the
under-the-table job. The stack of textbooks provides
some protection against the cold air, but her arms ache
from the weight. She sets the stack down on a nearby
stoop and shivers in her thin coat until she picks them
up again. The books hold her coat shut. A few days ago,
she asked her mother for a warmer coat, but winter is
nearly over, her mother said, adding that she’d get a
new one next year. She also asked her mother to sew the
missing buttons, which sat in a small, clear cup in her
room, back onto her coat.
“You could do it yourself,” Ivy
said.
Delia felt guilty for asking. She
could do it herself, if she knew how to sew. She
promises herself that she’ll figure it out, sew the
buttons on as soon as she arrives home. She wishes she
could skip work today, go home after her piano lesson
and do her homework. She wishes she could skip work
forever, but Bird and her mother arranged the whole
thing, and the money pays for the piano lesson,
something her mother didn’t want to pay for anymore. To
her mother, going to work was like going to church,
except you get paid, and you didn’t skip it unless you
were dead, never mind that Bird gives Delia the creeps.
She increases her pace, reaches
Montgomery Street, and foregoes her usual stroll through
Fedhill Park, proceeding instead down the steep hill
straight to Key Highway, a six-lane avenue. She plans to
duck into one of the one of the Harbor Pavilions to warm
up, even if it is overrun by tourists. She could walk
through both of them to stay warm for the duration all
the way to Pratt Street. Usually the afternoon sunlight
dances over the harbor water causing the surface to
glitter, but today’s weak sun hides its yellow face
behind gray clouds, and the harbor waters appear a dull
green. The city’s skyline, jagged against the colorless
sky, casts shadows that look like dinosaur teeth on the
pavilion’s faded green rooftop.
In her head, Delia focuses on
practicing her Shubert to distract her from feeling
cold. She imagines the notes and the rhythms. Everything
is music, Lucy told her, and advised her to train her
ears. To train her ear, she follows Lucy’s instructions
of listening to the rhythms of all the sounds around
her. She listens hard to the sound of her feet hitting
the pavement, but her rubber-soled saddle shoes keep her
footsteps quiet. At Key Highway, the orange pedestrian
light blinks “Don’t Walk,” and at the curb near the
control box, she listens intently for tones and rhythms
around her: traffic horns, tugboat blasts, train
whistles, seagulls’ cries, children’s shouts, car and
truck engines whizzing east and west along Key Highway.
She shuts her eyes and tries to experience the sounds of
the world the way Lucy might, and with her eyes shut
tight and with intense concentration, she can hear the
whirs and clicks of the traffic light controls. She
wonders what different things Lucy might hear and “see”
with her blindness. Compared to Lucy’s trained ear,
Delia knows she misses hearing a lot of stuff and
wonders what Lucy misses seeing. A few minutes later,
when the whirs and clicks of the control sound again and
the sounds of moving traffic stop, Delia knows the light
has changed and she can cross the avenue. When she opens
her eyes, she sees that the cars are stopped at the
light. She also sees Bird’s red delivery car across the
street. Inside, Bird waves to her, and a knot forms in
her stomach. What’s he doing on Key Highway? What’s he
doing here? Why’s he parked in a no-parking zone, his
hazard lights blinking in a steady, unbreaking rhythm?
“Delia, do you want a ride home?”
he calls across the street, cupping his hand around the
side of his mouth like a yodeler.
She hopes none of her school
friends will see Bird waving at her. She’s tempted. A
ride home would be warmer and faster, but she doesn’t
want to be with Bird. “No,” she shouts, shaking her
head, as she crosses the avenue to the other side, where
Bird is parked. She walks past his car. “Thanks anyway.”
Bird opens the car door and stands,
half in, half out of the vehicle. “Come on Delia, I’ll
give you a ride. It’s too cold for you to walk,” he
yells.
Passersby probably think he’s her
father. Delia imagines breaking into a run, but the
stack of textbooks in her arms prohibit that. She
continues away from Bird’s car. “Later, Bird,” she says.
“It’ll be nice and warm in the
car,” he says, now walking beside her.
“I know,” she says. “Thanks
anyway.”
“I have a little prezzie for you,”
Bird says, his voice sotto voce, almost conspiratorial.
She stops. She doesn’t look at him,
though she wonders what could possibly top the diamond
earrings that have been dangling from her ears since he
gave them to her in the store’s office. Tempted, she
fights the desire to look and keeps her eyes straight in
front of her.
“You can give it to me later,
Bird,” she says. She begins walking. “I like the walk.”
“Come on, Delia. Look.”
Bird holds a department store
package in his outstretched hand.
“There’s another, but you have to
come with me to get it,” he says.
Delia wonders what’s in the box.
Her arms are full of textbooks, which are holding her
coat shut. She stares at the shiny bag.
“It’s yours. Take it,” he says,
smiling. Then he must realize that she can’t.
He grabs her stack of textbooks and
trades them for the bag. His eyes shine; he’s pleased
with himself. Delia imagines him jumping up and down
like a small child, but he is standing there holding her
stack of books, looking earnest. Behind his lips, his
white teeth gleam. He carries the stack of textbooks to
the car and dumps them onto the back seat. “Shit Delia,
you’re going to break your back with these books,” he
says, standing by the car. “Come on, now. Get in and
open the bag.”
In the car, the hem of her school
uniform skirt peeks from beneath her coat. Delia adjusts
that coat before fastening her seat belt.
“What the fuck is going on with
your coat?”
Delia’s face burns with
embarrassment when she sees Bird staring at her thin
coat with its missing buttons. He says nothing, and
frowning, he cranks up the heater, blasting it in her
direction. She’s grateful to be warm. Eyes watering,
tears streaming down her face from the change in
temperature, she looks as if she’s crying as she pulls a
rectangular box covered with black and white paper and a
turquoise ribbon from the shiny department store bag.
Bird jerks the car out of the no-parking zone, clicks
off the steady sound of the blinkers, and merges onto
Key Highway in the direction of the neighborhood.
Delia unwraps the rectangle and
holds a plastic-wrapped, pale yellow box with gold
French lettering, “Aromatic Elixir.”
“Smell it. You’ll love it.
She does. The fragrance enchants
her. It smells like a musky combination of flowers and
spice.
“Thank you!” she says, meaning it,
returning the box and the wrapping paper to the bag.
“Wear it now. Go on, spray some on
now. You’ll smell grown-up,” Bird says.
When he stops at the red light on
Calvert Street, Delia notices he’s in the wrong lane and
fails to turn in the direction of their neighborhood.
The knot in Delia’s stomach returns.
“You missed the turn,” she says,
pointing to where the car should be going.
“Don’t worry Delia. I told you
there’s another prezzie. Part Two. We’re going to get
it. It’s waiting for you. Just up the street.”
“Part two?”
“You’ll see. It’s a surprise,
though I realize now I should have gotten you something
else.”
“Here,” he says, handing her a
brown bag from the store, filled with fruit. “That’s not
your second prezzie. That’s in case you’re hungry.”
Delia grabs a large apple from the
bag and bites into it, sweetness of the fruit flooding
her mouth, the crispiness of the fruit just the way she
likes it.
“Let me have a bite,” Bird says.
Delia winces. She doesn’t like
sharing food that’s not properly cut. She takes another
bite and hands it to him. “You can have it,” she says.
Her mother has warned her so many times not to share
food or drinks with others because of germs, but Bird
apparently missed this lesson, because he bites the
apple without hesitation. Still chewing, he hands it
back to her.
“No thanks. You can have it,” she
says, pushing his arm away.
Bird finishes the apple, tossing
the core out the window and wiping his fingers on his
pants. She turns and sees through the car’s rear window
the apple core bouncing and splattering on the street,
the car behind them running it over, obliterating it,
and is amazed that Bird didn’t wait for a trash can to
throw it away.
“You’re not supposed to litter,”
she says.
Bird laughs uproariously as if
she’s just told a fabulous joke. Delia scrunches her
face, wondering if it would’ve been faster to walk back.
Then Bird turns onto Light Street again, except now they
are further north but traveling south, homeward bound,
and Delia begins to relax until he pulls into the
parking garage for the Treehouse Apartments, sliding
into a spot near the elevators.
“Part Two. Come with me,” he says.
“Piano lesson in an hour, so is
this going to take long?” she asks.
“Just get out and come with me,” he
says, slamming his car door.
She wonders what Part Two is doing
in this building. In the elevator, which looks fancier
than her whole house, Bird stands too close to her. He
tries to kiss her on the elevator, but she averts her
face. When the doors open, he squeezes her hand and
leads her down a long, blue carpeted hallway with drab,
forgettable posters on the walls and silk floral wreaths
on many of the doors. Bird unlocks the door to 1329, and
they step inside. With its bare walls, curtain-free
windows, unstocked kitchen cabinets, and empty
refrigerator, the place looks sad and neglected. A cheap
glass-top kitchen table and four plastic chairs occupy
the dining room. A scale, boxes of plastic bags,
mirrors, and razor blades sit on the table. An unmade
full-sized bed fills the bedroom, the sheets stained in
areas.
“My secret apartment,” he says,
showing her around.
* * *
Later at home, Delia’s mother Ivy
arranges three cups of raw walnuts atop a white linen
cloth on the kitchen table before covering them with an
identical cloth. She leans into the table and with a
thick rolling pin begins crushing the walnuts, pressing
the pin into the cloth as she rolls it back and forth
over the linen. Periodically, Ivy checks on the texture
of the nuts, moves them around with her fingers,
replaces the top linen, and resumes the rolling. Delia’s
mother’s black, lacquered hair stands tall in a black
bouffant, wrapped with an orange kerchief. She’s wearing
makeup, mostly rouge in two perfect circles on her
cheeks and dark red lipstick, her signature look. A
faded, flour-dusted apron covers a pair of navy blue
sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt, and Delia wishes
her mother would pay more attention to how she looks.
Measuring cups, a bowl of shelled eggs, containers of
already sifted and premeasured flour, sugar, milk, a
glass of orange juice, a bowl with two oranges, and a
bottle of dark rum sit on the counter next to the mixer.
Ivy is baking her usual church bake-sale cake, her
famous orange, walnut, and rum cake. Delia dislikes the
smell of that cake and wonders why her mother never
bakes them something simple and plain, something less
fancy than orange walnut rum cake, which Delia dislikes
anyway.
On the stairs, Delia holds her coat
in one hand and the three missing buttons in the other.
A towel wrapped like a turban around her head covers her
wet hair, which she will need to dry before leaving for
work. She’s taken an extra-long, extra-hot shower to
clean Bird’s smell off her skin, but it lingers.
“Ma, can you sew the buttons on my
coat while I get dressed for work?”
“Dammit. You see I’m busy,” Ivy
says. “You can do it,” she says, reminding Delia that
she said the same thing yesterday.
“But it’s just three—”
“You’re not a baby. You can sew
three buttons,” Ivy says. She doesn’t look at Delia.
Instead, she focuses on the white linen cloth, on
pushing the rolling pin to and fro, on baking her stupid
cake. Her mother doesn’t have to hide the rum bottle
when she makes the orange walnut rum cake. Delia wonders
how many swigs Ivy has taken, and she doesn’t need Ivy
to remind her that she’s not a baby anymore, especially
after being with Bird in his secret apartment.
“You were late from your piano
lesson,” Ivy says. “You must tell him you’re going to be
late.”
“I already did,” Delia says, lying.
“Bird already knows I’m going to be late today.” Her
mouth doesn’t seem to want to work properly, and she
forces the words out. Another black mark spreads across
her soul, joining all the ones that appeared on it while
she was in the secret apartment, and she imagines how
they all cover her once stain-free, white soul like an
oil slick. She wonders if her mother sees something
different about her, a shadow following her wherever she
goes.
“Get moving then,” Ivy says, eyeing
the rum bottle.
Delia remembers when she smoked a
cigarette with Francie for the first time. They were
sitting on the lower steps of the funeral home, a place
they thought was safe from prying eyes, but both their
mothers knew what they were up to before they returned
home. After that, they weren’t allowed to be friends
anymore, and Ivy beat Delia with both hands. Delia
wonders—if someone saw her and Bird at the Treehouse, or
walking to the car in the garage, or Bird driving her
back and dropping her off a few blocks away from Lucy’s
house for her piano lesson—would Ivy beat her again?
“You were probably wasting time
with that big oaf Fred. Bird told me that Fred hangs
around you. Don’t let me find out you were with him
after your piano lesson, or you’re going to be in
trouble.” Ivy’s voice sounded matter-of-fact.
“Why are you talking about Fred
like that? You’ve known him forever,” Delia says,
knowing that she met up with Fred before the lesson and
not after.
“It’s different now. You’re in high
school, and things happen,” Ivy says. “Boys that age
want different things, things you don’t know anything
about yet.”
Delia bugs out her eyes and smirks.
She wants to tell Ivy she knows plenty. “I wasn’t with
him after lesson, Ma. OK? My lesson ran over.”
Delia wonders if she’s become
invisible to her mother. The diamond and gold earrings
that Bird gave her shimmer in her ears like giant
billboards, and Ivy has not noticed them. She hid the
perfume bottle in the back of her underwear drawer along
with prezzie number two, a bracelet matching the
earrings. “Bird barred him from coming into the store,”
Delia says.
“You’d better not be lying, Delia,
or there will be hell to pay,” her mother says without
even a glance at her. Fred walked her to Lucy’s house
after Bird dropped her off. He carried her books for
her. Delia squeezes the three buttons in her hand but
imagines throwing them at her mother, whom she fiercely
hates at this moment. Ivy empties the now-crushed
walnuts into a small glass bowl by shaking them loose
from the linen cloths.
“Do we have any needles and
thread?” Delia asks.
“In the flatware drawer. Do you
have time to sew them on now?”
“Bird said to get there when I get
there,” Delia says.
He said exactly that when he let
her out of the car. Maybe she wouldn’t get there at all
today. Through her lesson, Delia contemplated not going
to work. In the flatware drawer she finds a spool of
burnt-orange thread with a rusty needle poking out of
it. The orange thread will clash with her grayish black
coat, but she doesn’t care. She wants to be warm.
Sitting at the kitchen table with the coat, buttons,
needle, and thread, she accidently pricks her index
finger with the needle more than once. She struggles to
sew a button onto her coat, yelping softly whenever the
dull point stabs her finger and wiping the blood
droplets on the towel wrapped around her head.
She imagines the statue at school,
the beautiful girl with the long, golden hair who
plucked out her eyes rather than marry an older man.
Delia can’t imagine plucking her eyes out to avoid the
sensations Bird made her body feel after school, even if
she knows it’s wrong. Delia’s soul gained a new black
mark every time Bird thrust himself in and out, because
she couldn’t stop it from feeling good. Her body
transformed itself into a wicked, out-of-control thing,
humming, groaning, moaning, betraying her with its urge
to meet Bird’s thrusts and to wrap her legs around his
hairy thighs, wanting him to go deeper, faster as if she
didn’t recognize herself anymore. A part of her likes
the way Bird moved inside her as if he were late for a
train. Unable to look at him or keep her eyes shut, she
studied the cracks on the ceiling above the bed in the
secret apartment, hating her body for the pleasure it
felt from Bird’s fingers, worrying about the state of
her soul, imagining it looking as black as Benny
Pokino’s eyes, Benny, the boy she loved since third
grade until she saw him shoplifting from the store.
In the secret apartment Bird’s face
scrunched up as if someone stabbed him in the back. He
squeezed her tight and groaned; his weight crushed her
as she struggled to breathe, and he kept himself inside
her until the last possible minute. Later, all through
piano lesson, something leaked out of her into her
underpants. When she showered, the crotch of her
underwear looked stained with pale yellow. She washed
them with shampoo and blow dried them before dropping
them into the hamper so Ivy wouldn’t see it.
At the kitchen table, Delia
completes sewing the first button, the orange thread
shouting from the black button. She picks up the second
button and begins the process again. Delia notices that
her mother has retreated into her own world, perhaps
forgetting that Delia is still sitting at the table. Ivy
dumps softened butter from its small container into a
large mixing bowl and turns on the mixer. She pours
sugar into the mixing bowl, a slow stream of white
granules, moving it around with a rubber spatula. Delia
returns to the button and then smells rum as her mother
pours it into a liquid measuring cup. When she looks up
at her mom, she catches Ivy taking two quick swigs
straight from the bottle. Delia completes the second
button and moves on to the third; she glances up and
sees Ivy swigging more rum from the bottle. Delia stabs
the needle in and out of the cloth, the orange thread
growing more taut.
“It’s time to put the rum away,”
Delia says, unable to keep the anger out of her voice.
Ivy, who’s startled by the sound of
Delia’s voice, faces Delia with a murderous expression.
“You don’t tell me. I tell you.
It’s time to get your late-to-work ass out of here
before I slap you two weeks into next month.”
Delia completes the third button
before getting up. “I quit,” she yells, just to annoy
Ivy, who must have been swigging rum for most of the day
because she’s drunk. For a moment, Delia misses the
mother Ivy once was, the one there for her always, and
despises this odd replacement, an obese look-alike with
perfectly round circles of rouge on her cheeks and not a
clue about anything else.
“Like hell you did,” Ivy shouts,
lobbing a rubber batter-coated spatula at her.
Delia avoids the spatula winging
its way toward her and splattering cake batter
everywhere along its trajectory. She doesn’t want to be
home with a drunk Ivy without her father, who’s working.
She doesn’t want to go to work because she doesn’t want
to see Bird again. When she leaves the house, she walks
across the street to the church rectory and rings the
doorbell. The church secretary knows exactly why she’s
there and lets her in. She calls the store and leaves a
message that she won’t be in. She then enters the church
from the rectory and heads straight for the piano where
she’s spent many years practicing in the dark, the area
illuminated only by dim lights of flickering candles.
Rosalia Scalia
earned a master’s degree in writing from Johns Hopkins
University in May 2003 Her work has appeared or is
forthcoming in Amarillo Bay, The Baltimore Review,
Blue Lake Review; Crack The Spine; Epiphany, Hawaii
Pacific Review, The Oklahoma Review, North Atlantic
Review, Notre Dame Review, Pebble Lake, Pennsylvania
English, The Portland Review, Quercus Review, and
many others. She has been Pushcart-nominated along with
numerous other recognitions and awards. Her short story
collection, Sister Rafaele Heals the Sick & Other
Stories, was shortlisted in the 2013 Santa Fe
Writers Project Fiction Awards.
Scalia is working on a novel,
Delia’s Concerto. The first chapter was one of
seven finalists in a competition held by the National
League of American Pen Women and a more recent version
was published as a story titled “Soul Music,” in Crack
the Spine #109.