The Piano

Or, I don't know much about much

Back when I started teaching in a writing program at a local college, I’d ride my bike a different way to work each day in an effort to find the best route—one that kept me off busy streets and gave me something interesting to look at every now and then. Like a field of sunflowers. I did this for about a month—tweaking the route each day, trying new streets, new bike paths. Usually I gave myself enough time to experiment with the route but sometimes I got lost. On a good day, it was about a nine kilometre ride; on a bad day, it could be as many as fifteen kilometres. Some days I’d end up being a little late. I really hated being late; it made tsk-tsk-tsk’ing the students who arrived late to class a little tricky, though I still did it—I’d just smile ironically at the students in class who’d seen me arrive minutes before.

One day, while sussing out a new route, I wound up on a bike path that ended in a small residential neighbourhood. It felt promising until it didn’t. I had no idea where I was. The streets all looked the same and appeared to kind of circle one another in that way that sidewalk-less suburban streets sometimes do. While circling this neighbourhood, stressed about being late, I saw something amazing: a grand piano on someone’s front lawn.

I was in too much of a rush to stop for very long, so I clocked it, made a note of the street name, and kept going. After a day of teaching—fun, but exhausting for an introvert—I biked back the same way I’d come. The piano was still there. A big black grand piano, all four legs planted firmly in the grass. The fallboard covered the keys. There were a few fallen leaves on top of it, and on the rest of the piano. There was even a bench. I stopped at the curb outside the house, lingered, loitered, waited for someone to come out and… start playing? Or maybe explain why they had a piano on their front lawn? But no one came out. The piano looked fine: it wasn’t rain-logged or eaten by insects or porcupines. I once spent a night in a cabin in a provincial park—that shall remain unnamed here because technically the cabin wasn’t for overnight use—and was woken in the middle of the night by a sound I simply could not identify: the sound involved wood, somehow, and there was an almost but not quite hammering or thudding sound that just went on and on… for a very long time. I wasn’t scared or made nervous by the sound, but I was incredibly curious. After a while, I slipped out of my sleeping bag, got my flashlight, and went outside to investigate. What I found was a porcupine chewing on a nearby woodshed, just gnawing away at some lumber. The porcupine glanced at me, and then went right back to work. Anyway, all of that to say the piano had not been gnawed on by a porcupine or any other beast.

While it wasn’t the quickest route to the college, nor my favourite route—too many streets circling back on one another—I detoured past the piano every few days. It remained unchanged, with the exception of the fallen leaves that continued to gather on top of it. It rained several days in a row, and someone threw a tarp over the piano and weighed it down with some rocks. Rocks! Okay, so: they cared enough to protect it from the rain—but they insisted on keeping it out on their front lawn. I started imagining what kind of person would do that and why.

The piano was there for quite some time. Weeks, a couple months. The first snowfall of the season came, and still it remained there, covered with that blue tarp. What a sight!

And then one day I biked by, and it was gone. I never did stop to ask what the deal was. I kind of didn’t want to know.

I thought about that Raymond Carver story—the one where the guy brings all his furniture out onto the front lawn after his wife leaves him. The genesis of that story is that Carver and some writer friends met up for a drink and one of them had spotted the furniture out on the lawn on the way to the bar. Upon hearing this, all the writers around the table stopped and looked at one another because they knew it would be a race to see which one of them would be the first to use that image in a story. Carver went home and wrote “Why Don’t You Dance?”.

Joyce Carol Oates once came across a story in Life magazine about a murderer in Arizona who was targeting young people. He was not only a despicable person, he looked like a despicable person—just absolutely creepy. After reading only a few lines of the article, and seeing the photos of this man, Oates closed the magazine and wrote a story called “Where Are You Going, Where Have you Been?” She said later that she didn’t want to finish reading the piece because she didn’t want it to affect the story that was already forming in her mind. She used what little she read as a spark and created something new from that—related to the original story, but entirely different, entirely imagined. She has also said that Bob Dylan’s “It's All Over Now, Baby Blue” inspired the story as well. (Oates dedicated the story to Dylan.) After reading that, I could never listen to that song in the same way.

It’s not a coincidence that I was teaching this Joyce Carol Oates story to my students around the same time that I saw the piano on the front lawn of that house. I decided that I didn’t want to know how that piano ended up on the front lawn and why it stayed there for so long because I had an idea that I might someday use it in a story and I didn’t want the actual reason it was there to inform what I might someday write. In his wonderful book, A Swim In A Pond In The Rain, George Saunders refers to this as taking the story out of its plane of original conception. One way he says that he does this is to follow the voice of the character and to let that lead the way into and through the story.

I keep an inventory of images in a notebook. Sometimes they pop up in stories, sometimes they don’t. This image of the piano on the front lawn is one that I’d try to insert into a story every now and then, but it never felt quite right. And then one day, I started imagining this woman who had a complicated relationship with the piano. And I started wondering why she had a complicated relationship with the piano. And I thought about friends who were forced to practice as kids, and I thought about the strained relationships that some people have with their parents—and how that can bleed into other parts of their life. I ended up writing a very long story about a woman named Clara who was not only an erstwhile pianist, but also a dedicated entomologist (who some of you might remember from a story I posted on here called “Field Notes”). The longer the story became, the more disjointed it began to feel. I was trying to capture this woman’s entire life in a short story—and I wasn’t doing a great job of it. Fed up one day, I deleted everything except for the first two lines of the story and decided that those two lines encapsulated everything I was trying to say about this character:

Clara found it less embarrassing to tell the movers that the piano was haunted than it was to tell them the real reason she didn’t want it in her house was because it was the last thing her father touched before he died. It was only after the movers left and the piano was sitting under the maple tree on her front lawn that it occurred to Clara that those two things were not mutually exclusive.

I take a perverse pleasure in deleting hundreds of words from a story. Sometimes it’s the only way to get to its essence. This felt pretty extreme—but it amused me. Those two lines give us some interesting information about Clara. She is someone who can feel embarrassment. She may or may not believe in ghosts. That’s not clear, but the story does suggest a strained relationship with her father. And that she perhaps feels haunted by her father—haunted in that way that the memory of people can haunt us (even the living can haunt us!). She’s also someone who has a piano on her front lawn. Under her maple tree. She is someone who has a maple tree! (Owning a house is, you know, whatever, but owning the trees on your property kind of blows my mind: like, how can you own a tree? That’s crazy. Anyway.) What is this woman going to do about this piano under her tree? How long will the piano stay there? Will she play it? Will she let nature take its course? I answered all these questions and more in the long version—but it remained unsatisfactory to me. Boring, even. It wasn’t what the story was about to me: what it was about was what was encapsulated in those first two lines.

There was something else going on when I deleted all but those two lines of the story. I had in mind some of the (very) short stories of Lydia Davis and Diane Williams, maybe even Gunnhild Øyehaug. All of those women are much smarter than me, and much better writers—which is why I think of their work as touchstones for what I’m sometimes trying to do. Their very short stories (some as short as a single sentence) carry a lot of weight because those writers are somehow able to infuse just a few words with so much depth and meaning. They do this subtly, sometimes mystifyingly so. There are writers I read in such a way that I am not exactly reading for pleasure—but rather, to figure out how they do what they do. Those three writers are good examples of that kind of reading that I sometimes do. Some of their stories remain mysteries to me, but that’s all the more reason why I love to read them: to figure out just what is going on in their work and to figure out how they do what they do.

And so, in deleting all but two sentences, I was aiming for a little mystery, a hint at a larger story, and a big blank space for the reader to fill in the rest. I love how this implies the story can and will be different for everyone because we all bring to a story that which we bring, right? (True of all stories, I know, but perhaps more so with a very short story.) Call it baggage or history or experience. But it is all going to feed into our interpretation—and when the writer is asking you to deepen that, to engage even more with a story because there is so little there—but, hopefully, just enough, well, you’ve got to conjure more information, fill in the blanks, do some work. Connect the dots.

After deciding that the piano story might stand on its own in my forthcoming book of stories, I wrote a few more stories about the same character: these stories act almost as character studies. The idea—and hope—is that together and apart they give a sense of a life, and of the pieces that fit together to tell Clara’s larger story. Clara has a real-life counterpart, someone who was neither a pianist nor an entomologist, but was a real, live human who is with us no more. This real life counterpart wouldn’t be recognized in any of the Clara stories, not at all, but she’s there hovering just beyond the plane of original conception. And so in this way, I also think of these stories as a way to quietly pay tribute to her life.