Clarinet Lessons

by Stephanie Early Green

Mr. Blank says I need to work on my embouchure, that proper embouchure is everything, that if I don’t tighten up my mouth, my sound will lack clarity and strength, and what is the point of my parents spending all this money on clarinet lessons if I can’t master the most basic thing? I might as well be blowing a kazoo, the way my mouth is pursed.

“Tight corners,” Mr. Blank yells. “None of this loosey-goosey business.”

Mr. Blank rubs his bald head and sighs and throws his hands up while I play. He says things like, “What’s even the point,” and “Are you a hopeless case, or what?” I shake my head no and he says, “Well then, straighten up and fly right.”

Since starting private lessons with Mr. Blank last year, I’ve begun to hate clarinet. It was fun when I first learned in fourth grade, when I excelled at playing “Hot Cross Buns,” but now I’m in seventh grade and it’s obvious that I’m not that good and might even be kind of bad. I get lost in the complicated fingerings, I can’t stretch my pinkie to make a C sharp. I can’t sight read or hold long notes without losing my breath. I’m never going to be good like Kelly Beaumont, who’s first chair in concert band and also plays the oboe and flute and has gotten gold medals at regionals and sectionals. I’m just not cut out to be a great clarinetist, and I’m fine with that, but Mom won’t let me quit and neither will Dad. This is pretty much the last thing they agree on.

When Mom picks me up after my lesson, she always asks, “Well, how’s it going? Are you learning anything?” And I nod, and then she doesn’t ask me anything else. She turns the radio up high in the minivan and nods along with the people talking. We don’t listen to music in her car anymore, only talk radio. Today’s lesson with Mr. Blank was bad, worse than usual, and as I get into the minivan, I’m debating whether or not to cry. I was working on my solo piece, the adagio portion of a Mozart concerto for clarinet that’s way too hard for me, and I kept messing up the tempo and missing the high E, and finally Mr. Blank slapped his forehead and said, “I don’t even know why I do this. I’m wasting my life, you know that? I might as well walk out into traffic.” I sat with my reed on my bottom lip and waited, not sure if I should keep playing or what. Then Mr. Blank said, “Go on, then. Don’t just sit there like a mental midget.”

I slam the minivan door shut and Mom doesn’t say hi, just holds up a finger like, Wait. A man on the radio is talking about how Big Brother is coming into our homes, telling us how to live, stomping on our necks. Last year, in Texas, the government murdered a bunch of people for no good reason. Smoked them out like rats. And if we think that won’t happen to us, well, we’re just lambs being led to the slaughter. When the man stops talking and a commercial for Telegraph Ford starts, Mom looks at me.

“Did you hear that?” she asks. “I hope you’re absorbing the urgency of the situation.”

We’re driving north on Woodward, away from the sad strip mall where Mr. Blank teaches lessons in a small, hot room at the back of Royal Music.

“I want you to keep your eyes open,” says Mom. “I don’t want you to be a pushover.”

I decide then not to cry.

A commercial for the Novi Gun and Knife Show comes on, and Mom smiles. “We should go,” she says. “Wouldn’t that be fun? We can get you a little knife. That’ll have to do until we can get you a firearm.”

Since she and Dad split up, Mom has gotten really into guns. She goes to a shooting range and fires rifles and handguns and submachine guns. She subscribes to a magazine called Firearms Monthly. On the cover, there are men and women in camo and goggles and bulletproof vests kneeling, holding up big weapons, black and shiny as cockroach shells. Mom has a handgun and a rifle and wants to buy more, but that’ll have to wait until her finances pick up a little. She keeps the guns in a safe but doesn’t lock the safe, because it’s not like she’s going to have time to be fiddling with a lock and key when push comes to shove and she needs to act in her own self-defense. The government is coming for us, it’s only a matter of time, and she’s not going to be caught flat-footed. She thinks what those people Up North are doing with the Michigan Militia is a damn good thing. She wants us to move up there, live off the land, but Dad thinks that’s a ridiculous idea. He says Mom wouldn’t know the first thing about living off the land; she can’t even grow herbs. Our whole back yard is dandelions.

“Yet another one of your mother’s flights of fancy,” he said to me, the last time we talked about moving Up North. “Nothing will come of it. Don’t let it upset you. You know she used to be an anti-war protester?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, exactly,” he said, like this explained everything.

Dad and Mom got divorced two years ago. Mom says they split up because Dad is selfish and wants to sow his wild oats, two decades too late, and doesn’t want to be burdened by the demands of a family. Dad says they split up because of Sarah. Dad says that the death of a child strips the skin off a marriage, and if the bones underneath aren’t strong, everything falls apart. I picture the human skeleton model our science teacher, Mrs. Carter, has hanging in her room. I imagine pulling the pin from its neck, watching the plastic bones clatter to the floor. After Sarah died, Mom and Dad realized they didn’t have anything common except us. So why, Dad says, try to force something that was never there in the first place?

The radio program comes back on: a man talking in a high, fast voice about how women are turning into monsters, unrecognizable from how women used to be. “They want all men gone,” he says. “They won’t rest until we’re dead in our graves.” We’re studying Greek mythology in school, and there are a lot of female monsters: Gorgons, Medusa, Scylla, Charybdis. But there are male monsters too: Cyclops and Manticore and Argus. They were horrible too. Cyclops ate people alive, let’s not forget.

“Mr. Blank is mean to me,” I say to Mom as we drive past the exotic pet shop and the bulk health food store and the Redcoat Tavern and Duggan’s Irish Pub.

Mom frowns. “You know his wife died. Just this past year.”

“No, you didn’t tell me that.”

“Well, she did.” Mom looks back at the road. She’s gripping the steering wheel hard, tendons jumping on the tops of her hands. “Grief makes people mean. Mr. Blank is doing the best he can.”

Whenever Mom says the word grief, I hold my breath, not knowing if she’ll talk about Sarah, or if I want her to. She doesn’t, and I’m relieved. It’s mostly easier not to talk about Sarah.

To change the subject, I ask Mom what we’re having for dinner.

“Catch as catch can,” she says, her face strobed by the taillights of the cars ahead of us.

This means I will make myself a bologna sandwich or have a bowl of Chex for dinner. This means Mom will be in the basement the whole night. This means I will put myself to bed, and if I’m not in my room with my door shut and my light off by nine o’clock, there will be consequences. I don’t know what the consequences are, because I’ve never broken the rule.

When we get home, Mom disappears into the basement. She has a radio down there, and weights, and a computer. She keeps the radio loud while she writes notes to people on the computer. She has a friend in Idaho named Maureen. They met on the computer, in a chat room, and Maureen is planning on visiting us, or else Mom will visit Maureen. They haven’t worked out the details yet. Mom doesn’t know what Maureen looks like, but she knows she’ll recognize her when she sees her. She’ll be the gal with the big gun in a holster, says Mom. She’ll be the gal who no one will be messing with. Maureen lives on a farm, or a ranch, or something. She hunts her own meat, makes her own clothes. She drives a big truck and loves country music. She’s going to teach Mom how to pickle food and bury gold. I don’t know what Mom’s going to teach Maureen. Mom is an office manager at a storage facility. Maybe she can teach Maureen how to survive something awful. How to keep living.

I’m not allowed to go on the computer in the basement because Mom says the Net is full of derelicts and perverts, but she doesn’t know that I go on the computer at Dad’s apartment, that I go in chat rooms too, that I pretend to be a seventeen-year-old model with long, blonde hair who lives in Malibu. Her name is Kiki. Sometimes men say weird things to Kiki, like how they want to cup her breasts in their hands, or put their tongues in her ear. Kiki just giggles and says, “I don’t think so!” If they don’t leave her alone, she tells them to take a hike. The thing about Kiki is, she can say things like that. She can say no. She can say, “Buzz off, dirtbag.” She doesn’t care what kind of names they call her. She knows they can’t reach her.

Kiki had a boyfriend for a while, this guy Brian. He was seventeen (he said), from Wisconsin. He was into a game called Dungeons and Dragons and tried to get Kiki interested too, but she was indifferent. Kiki’s not the kind of girl who goes in for wizards and orcs. Kiki didn’t tell Brian much about herself, just that she loved the beach, and modeling, and her friends. She has lots of friends, with names like Crystal and Ashley and Kimber. Kiki and Brian traded messages back and forth for months. Brian said he was in love with her. He said he’d never met anyone like her in Wisconsin. He said he was gonna hitch-hike out to Malibu to meet her. That’s when Kiki broke things off.

***

I’m dreading my clarinet lesson this week. I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop myself from crying. If I go for too long without crying, the tears build up, and then when they come out, it’s like a tsunami, and Mr. Blank will hate me even more if I tsunami-cry in front of him. Dad and Mom certainly hate when I get hysterical. This, I guess, is another thing they agree on. When I walk into the little room in the back of Royal Music, Mr. Blank is sitting in his metal chair with his head in his hands. The radiator is hissing and clanking. The room is too warm and I can see beads of sweat on Mr. Blank’s head. He looks up when I walk in and for a moment his mouth hangs open like a crying child’s. But then his face hardens like candle wax; his mouth snaps shut.

“I hope you remembered to soak those reeds,” he says.

I sit and start assembling my clarinet, wrinkling my nose at the acrid smell of its insides. I clean the instrument with a cloth and blow the spit out after every practice, but my clarinet still stinks. I wish I played a non-smelly and cool instrument, like the guitar. We do warm-ups, scales and finger drills, and then we start in on the Mozart, the metronome clicking like a doom clock. Halfway into the piece, Mr. Blank leans back and closes his eyes. He’s never done this before, and the sight of his crepe-paper lids covering his eyeballs makes me nervous. I keep playing, my breath short. I take gasping breaths, a thing Mr. Blank despises. But he keeps his eyes shut. I stumble through the rest of the piece then set my clarinet across my knees and wait.

Mr. Blank opens his eyes. “Sorry,” he says, “I haven’t been sleeping.”

“That’s okay,” I say, and wait for him to tell me that I butchered the cadenza, and my fingering is terrible, and I need to do the breath exercises he assigned me if I ever want to get anywhere. But he just stares at me, his eyes glazed like how mine get if I watch too much TV in a dark room.

Then he says, “I think I might off myself.”

“What?” I say, even though I heard him.

He tilts his head to the side, like a cockatoo. “I think I might go home and take too many pills and never wake up. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to go? Peaceful.”

I can’t tell if he’s joking, or if this is a set-up so that he can tell me how awful my playing was.

“Some people,” Mr. Blank continues, “would shoot themselves in the head or hang themselves. But not me. Know why?”

I shake my head.

“Too much room for error. Then again, sleeping pills, you could mess up the dosage. I have a pharmacology textbook, but I’m no chemist. Hm. Maybe I’ll sit in my garage with the engine running. Carbon-monoxide poisoning, that’s supposed to be a real nice way to go.”

I shift my clarinet on my lap, push the keys, let them go.

We are silent for what feels like a long time. The radiator clanks, so loud that I flinch. Mr. Blank sighs. “You’re done,” he says. “See you next week.”

I take my clarinet apart so fast that spit flies everywhere, and I have to wipe the linoleum with my spit rag. Last time this happened Mr. Blank yelled at me, but this time he doesn’t seem to notice. I stuff my clarinet parts back into their velveteen compartments, snap the case shut, and hurry down the narrow hallway to the lobby and out the front door of the music shop. Mom is sitting hunched in the minivan, her forehead nearly touching the wheel. As I open the door, I decide I’m going to tell Mom what Mr. Blank said about offing himself. Maybe she can call the police, or the hospital, or whoever you’re supposed to call when someone wants to off themselves. And maybe she won’t make me go back to Royal Music anymore.

But in the dimness of the minivan, I see that Mom’s eyes are bright with tears. I panic, running through the calendar in my mind. It’s March, almost spring break. Sarah’s birthday was in October. She died in January. Nothing bad ever happened in March. So why is Mom crying? Did I forget to do something? Or did she find out about Kiki? Did she read the message from the businessman in Kansas who said he wanted to bend Kiki over his desk and pop her cherry? My mouth begins filling with spit.

Mom starts driving. For once she keeps the radio off. The traffic is worse than usual. We’re stopped behind a long line of cars when she starts weeping.

“Mom,” I say, “what’s wrong?”

She shakes her head. “I had a disappointment, that’s all.”

“What kind of a disappointment?”

She sighs. “Someone let me down, Caitlyn. You’ll find, as you get older, that people let you down all the time.” She wipes her face with the heel of her hand. “How was your lesson?” she asks, her voice shaky.

I swallow the spit that has collected in my mouth and think of the spit on the linoleum floor and Mr. Blank not even noticing. “It was fine,” I say.

“Good,” says Mom, and turns the radio on.

***

I spend weekends at Dad’s place in Southfield. His apartment is all white and beige. White nubby couch, white carpet, white tiled kitchen, white counters. Beige slatted blinds, beige fridge, beige easy chair. My room is beige, too, except for the bedspread, which is hot pink, my least favorite color. Dad keeps saying he’s going to fix the room up for me, paint and redecorate and get some fun posters on the wall, but he doesn’t know if he’ll stay in this place or move somewhere more exciting, like Ferndale, so maybe we should just hold off on painting for now. Dad’s been in this apartment for a year and a half, but the living room is still crowded with unopened boxes with labels like Taxes and Winter Stuff. He jokes that maybe he should just throw the boxes away, since they’ve sat there unopened for eighteen months and he hasn’t missed whatever’s inside them.

There are no pictures on the walls, nothing to suggest Dad lives there, except on his bedside table there’s one of those double picture frames. On one side, me as a baby. On the other side, Sarah as a baby. We look almost identical: fat, white faces, buggy eyes, wispy brown hair. I think I was slightly cuter, but I would never say this to Dad. We don’t ever say anything bad about Sarah, even as a joke. One time, a year or so after she died, my parents were in a big fight, one of those fights that sprawled over days and days and poisoned the air in the house. They weren’t speaking except for necessities: groceries, meals, school. Neither of them talked to me. One night, it was getting close to seven o’clock and no one had made dinner and I didn’t want to have cereal for the millionth time and I was desperate for them to stop hating each other and for the air in the house to be breathable again. I said, “Hey, hello, did you guys forget I’m not dead and need to eat?” There was a long pause, then Mom’s face crumpled and she started crying, and Dad told me to get out of his sight, that what I’d said was in poor taste, and cruel, frankly. From my room, where I lay curled on my bed, crying, I could hear their voices floating up from the kitchen, plates clinking. They did not invite me to come down and eat. The next morning, everything was back to normal.

On Saturday, like always, Dad picks me up from Mom’s house at eight o’clock on the dot in his Ford Taurus. He listens to classic rock on the radio and hums along to the guitar solos.

“What do you want to do today?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your mother up to this weekend?”

“Going to a gun show.”

Dad sighs. “Is she still talking to those lunatics on the computer?”

“Yes.”

“That woman?”

I know he’s talking about Maureen. I nod.

“So, she’s a card-carrying lesbian now, or what?”

I stare at him. “I don’t know,” I say. “Is she?”

Dad shakes his head and turns the radio up. “Forget I said that.”

Dad’s bought a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of the New York skyline at night and suggests we work on it. I say okay, since there’s nothing else to do in his apartment complex. He dumps all the pieces out onto the beige coffee table, and we start flipping them over. I can’t keep my mind on the puzzle. The pieces are all black, indistinguishable; my eyes go blurry looking at them. I feel Dad watching the side of my face.

“Sorry I said that about your mother,” he says. “Is that what’s bothering you? Because don’t let some stupid comment like that get to you. I just put my foot in my mouth, is all.”

Dad looks apologetic. This is rare. Normally, when he says something mean about Mom, he sticks by it.

“C’mon,” he says, elbowing me. “Cheer up, Charlie. What’s eating you?”

Dad’s looking at me hard, like he cares, like he really wants to know. A long time ago, before Sarah died, whenever either of us girls was upset, he’d kneel down and wait for us to calm down and tell him what was wrong. Mom would leave the room, or yell, or throw her hands up. But Dad was patient. He’d sit for so long on the floor that his butt would fall asleep, and then when he’d stand up, his legs would be pins and needles and he’d make funny faces and howl and limp until we’d stop crying and start laughing. He used to pick us up and carry us around, groaning about how heavy we were. He used to let us put plastic barrettes in his hair, ones shaped like stars and hearts and rainbows. He used to be different. I wonder, now, if maybe he could go back to the way he used to be, if we all could if we tried harder.

I say, “I hate clarinet. I want to quit.”

Dad frowns and shakes his head. “What have I told you about sticking with things? Once you sign up, you stay the course.”

Tears start to press behind my eyes. “Then why’d you and Mom get divorced? You didn’t stay the course. Why are you allowed to quit, but I’m not?”

Dad looks shocked, then mad, his cheeks pinkening. “That’s adult business.”

“I hate my clarinet teacher. He calls me names and he thinks I’m bad at clarinet and I am bad at clarinet and I don’t want to do it anymore. Why do I have to keep doing something I hate?”

Dad stands up, letting the puzzle piece he was holding fall to the white-carpeted floor.

“That’s what life is!” he yells. “The sooner you figure that out, the better.”

He walks out of the room. We don’t finish the puzzle that day, or the next. I spend most of the weekend in my bedroom, sitting on the bed with the hot-pink comforter, practicing clarinet. I do scales and finger drills and play the Mozart piece a hundred times. On Sunday evening, Dad drives me back to Mom’s house in silence, the radio off.

“Have a good week,” he says as I get out of the car. Like we’re carpooling. Like we barely know each other.

“You too,” I say, and slam the door.

***

Sarah died of a fever. The doctors never figured out what went wrong. Just one of those things. She got a fever and then her whole body shut down: her heart, her lungs, her brain. I was in third grade. She was in preschool. I don’t remember much from when she died because my brain blocked it out. The school made me see a therapist, and she said the brain protects itself by blocking out the worst memories so that people can continue to go through their daily lives. I don’t remember Sarah being in the hospital, or her funeral, even though I did a reading from the Bible and I have the program folded up in my underwear drawer. I can only remember Sarah before she died, how she used to scribble all over my schoolwork and mess up my Barbies’ hair and whine for popsicles after dinner, and how I used to tell her she was the most annoying person in the world and then she’d cry and say I was mean. I remember her ratty Little Mermaid nightgown that she never took off. Her cheeks stained red with popsicle juice. The way she’d cling to my shirt and I’d peel her fingers off and complain that she’d gotten me all sticky. Mom and Dad were always telling me to be nicer to her, that someday we’d be great friends, that someday, five years wouldn’t seem like much of an age gap at all.

If I’d known she was going to die, I would have been nicer to her. I told Mom that once and she said, “Life is full of regrets, isn’t it?”

***

I show up at Royal Music with my stomach in a knot. I’m dreading seeing Mr. Blank but also dreading him not being there. What if he offed himself? And I knew and did nothing to stop it? His death will be my fault. But when I pull open the door to the room in the back, there he is, still alive, looking at his wristwatch. Thank God, I think. Thank God he didn’t do it.

“You’re late,” he says.

I begin assembling my clarinet, thinking about how I have to keep coming to lessons to make sure Mr. Blank doesn’t off himself, at least through high school. Six more years. An eternity.

Mr. Blank starts the metronome, and I begin to play. And for once, I have enough breath. For once, I’m hitting the tempo. For once, I listen to the piece, enjoying the slide of the notes. The music reminds me of an empty meadow: soft, gentle. Lonely. When I’m done, I set my clarinet on my lap, breathless.

“Alright,” says Mr. Blank, eyebrows raised. “That was actually okay.”

I blink at him, like he might be a mirage.

“That’s the first time you’ve played that piece where I’ve heard the beauty in it,” he says. “Could you hear the difference?”

I nod. “I practiced a lot this weekend.” I don’t add, Because my dad was ignoring me and there was nothing else to do.

“Well, good. That’s what you have to do. You have to do the piece justice. This concerto is a masterpiece. Mozart wrote it two months before he died. He was only thirty-five. We still don’t know what killed him. One day he was here, creating masterpieces, and the next day—gone.”

“That’s sad,” I say. I’ve never thought about Mozart being an actual person before.

“He accomplished so much by thirty-five. Incredible, isn’t it? Meanwhile, I’m fifty-five, and what do I have to show for it?” Mr. Blank shakes his head. “I always thought that by this age, I’d be getting ready to retire. My wife and I have a cabin up in Harbor Springs. We were gonna retire there, live on the lake. And now—well, she’s dead, and here I am.”

“You teach kids,” I say. “That’s something to show for your life.”

Mr. Blank sighs. “Sometimes I think so. Other times I think I might as well pack it in.”

We’re quiet, the metronome ticking, the radiator jangling. Mr. Blank is starting to get that glazed look in his eyes again. My stomach knot tightens, so hard I can barely breathe. When I start talking, my voice sounds strangled.

“My little sister died,” I say. “Four years ago.”

Mr. Blank raises his eyebrows, opens his mouth. But I keep talking before he can say any of the usual stuff: Sorry for your loss. What a tragedy. Your poor parents.

“And so,” I continue, “there’s a lot of stuff she’ll never get to do. I mean—she didn’t even get to go to kindergarten. So I feel like I need to do stuff for her. Even stuff I don’t like.” Like clarinet lessons, I think but don’t say. “So maybe you don’t have to show anything for being alive. You just have to live, because not everyone gets to.”

Mr. Blank stares at me. My face burns hot as the radiator. I’m worried he’ll say that I don’t know the first thing about losing someone I love; I wasn’t even nice to my sister, I covered my ears when she cried, I pushed her down onto the sidewalk and she scraped her hands and then I lied about it, I was the worst big sister, and how dare I tell him how to live.

But instead, he nods. “Thank you,” he says, in a voice I’ve never heard before, a quiet voice.

The metronome keeps ticking. The radiator sighs.

“Should I play the piece again?” I ask.

Mr. Blank clears his throat. “This time, watch the fingering at the end. You have to nail the ending or the whole thing falls apart.”

After my lesson, Mom is waiting in the parking lot. My stomach knot loosens when I see her dry cheeks, her calm face. She smiles when I open the door. The radio is loud. A woman this time, saying that if she has to die by the sword of a Muslim crusader, she’ll go down fighting. Mom pulls into the traffic on Woodward. The radio is so loud my bones vibrate. When we’re stopped at a red light, I turn the radio off. Mom snaps her head around to look at me. She opens her mouth and I know she’s about to tell me that as long as she pays for the gas and car insurance, she’s in charge of the radio. But then she sighs and crumples down into her seat a little, like a few of the strings holding her up just broke, like she’s the plastic skeleton with its pin pulled out.

Stephanie Early Green‘s short fiction is published or forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, New Ohio Review, Juked, and elsewhere. She lives in Alexandria, VA, with her husband and three children. She is at work on a novel. Her website is https://stephanieearlygreen.com/.

Judge: Charlotte Watson Sherman was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. A former librarian, she is the author of Killing Color (CALYX Books), One Dark Body and touch (HarperCollins), Eli and the Swamp Man (HarperCollins), and Brown Sugar Babe and Mermaid Kenzie: Protector of the Deeps (Boyds Mills & Kane Books). She edited the anthology Sisterfire: Black Womanist Fiction and Poetry (HarperCollins), listed in Electric Literature’s “7 Revolutionary Anthologies by Black Women Writers,” June 19, 2020.