93: flute
When I am thirteen, I take up the flute. Inspired by my younger brother, who watched the children bicycling past from his second-floor window for a good week before pronouncing himself "ready" -- and taking to his wheels the first second in practice, like a fish in water -- I have decided that knowing music is possible, and having genetic proof that I am not unusually or unnaturally denied this gift, I have no good reason to keep from at least making the attempt.
A girl next door owns a flute, so I don't immediately have to save up the money to buy my own. Within a week I have mastered the keys and a few scales, at least to the point at which she no longer winces and holds out her hand, demanding it back, after a few sour attempts. Within two weeks, I have moved past simple mechanics and into practice, at which point the girl, her sister and her mother confront me as a group and suggest that I make a purchase of my own.
I've been saving my money -- as difficult at thirteen as it is when I am twenty, or thirty, or older -- and, once I explain my aim to my mother, am easily able to hitch a ride to the music store. The street nearing it and the stores surrounding it have changed, but it's the same store: Smaller, more typical, less interesting, less special than when it held denial. I'm by now old enough to be mortified by my mother's existence, and ask her to leave me there: I'll take a bus home, and would have taken a bus there if I weren't so excited.
I fork over the money for a silver beauty, with only two previous owners, and as it's being wrapped up I notice a boy in the corner, lingering near the flute cases. He is chubby, but happy. His hair is growing out, like a fuzzy dandelion, from some mistake or inspiration. He runs his finger along the counter like a budding cat burglar, but I know he is only biding his time. I can hear his mother attempting to haggle the owner, somewhere else in the store.
On the counter near me, there is a grimy brass key. I know its every angle, although mine is cleaner and shines more brightly: HOME, it says across the top, and the grooves down it are long and straight. The geometry of its angles has comforted me through many nights of uncertainty; its twin burns beneath my shirt.
The boy is wearing an unflattering sweatshirt, and shorts that are painfully out of style. He looks uncomfortable even in the idea of his body. I approach him, offering to demonstrate the flutes even though I'm only weeks into my own training, and he gladly stares back at me, amazed at being treated like a human being.
"Just wait," I say. "It gets better." He nods, barely listening.
Staring at the rows and rows of instruments we both know will be denied him, when it's time to open his mother's wallet and see where his dreams measure up. His name is James; he is delighted that mine is Jimmy. He is beautiful, and doesn’t even know it. I play a few scales, quickly as my fingers will allow, and his eyes widen. I teach him this word, embrasure, and after some ceremony allow him to try it for himself. "Not too hard and not too soft," I say, and he nods. His eyes are somewhere far away, looking at a packed crowd in the future. Looking at the tourists on a hillside square, the day it hailed and rained and the sun shone, all at once.
They will leave, and get into their station wagon, and go back to a house smelling of cold peanuts and rage. She'll climb into bed for two days, exhausted by the outlay, and he'll stare at the English horn across the short expanse of his bedroom, hatefully, and these two will be in their separate bedrooms, hating it for different reasons entirely, never knowing the other's echo. The little brother, I imagine, will dance madly from one room to the next, doing his little dances, trying to make pancakes and sending up acrid black smoke into the air. He won't care, because he loves the chaos. It brings us together.
And he'll wake up on Monday and head off to school with a heaviness and an English horn in hand, and the passion for music won't last. He'll come back to his house in the evenings and stare it down, as disgusted by the flabby honking sounds it makes as the rest of them. They'll send him down to the courtyard, or across the alley to the abandoned lot, when it's time for him to practice, and he'll set there at a rubber-coated picnic bench or on a weathered termite stump in a field, and play until the rain comes.
"It gets better," I say again, worrying over the bumps in his future, and he nods proudly.
"It gets easier," I promise him. He closes his eyes, trying to play a single note.
The boy's hands shiver at the keys, trying not to disappoint me. When his mother approaches I get out of there -- she is too old, and too young; I can't get a fix on her face -- and I can hear the adult resign in his voice when she produces the English horn, begging him not to throw a fit. I've left the key I found on a closer counter; I know that he'll know I left it for him.