Starry-Eyed Excerpt
The Accompanist
When I was nine years old I smashed my pinky with a meat mallet so I wouldn’t have to go onstage.
It was the night of Mrs. Komar’s annual Christmas recital. She’d rented out Westview’s Town Hall for her piano students, and it felt like half the town was there.
I stood in a corner of the green room (a file storage room by day) fingering the straps of my tote bag and listening to the older kids talk about how nervous they were, even though they really weren’t. All that hugging and deep breathing and “oh-my-God-ing”? That was excitement. They couldn’t wait to get out there and show the whole world how great they were. Nervous is when you beg your mother again and again not to make you do it, when you look up “phobia” in the dictionary before the scariest conversation you’ve ever had with your Eastern Bloc piano teacher, when your brother has a cold and you sneak dirty tissues out of his trash can and rub them on your face—and after all that fails, when you stuff a meat mallet into your tote bag, wedging it right between Chopin’s waltzes and Beethoven’s sonatas.
My black patent leather flats had rubbed blisters on my heels even though I was wearing tights like my mother told me to. She’d pulled my braids so tight I thought my eyeballs would pop out of my head. That way, she said, there was no chance my hair would fall in my eyes and distract me.
The problem with being able to play Mozart when you’re nine years old? Everybody wants to see you do it. But all that wanting felt like taking, like everybody who listened to me play pinched off little Andie souvenirs, leaving me with Swiss cheese for a soul. And then there’s the whole prodigy thing. People said exceptional and I heard exception. They said outstanding and I heard oddity.
“Andie, you okay?” Mrs. Komar’s husband bent down to peer into my face. It was his job to keep order backstage. Histrionic teenagers were bad enough. The last thing he needed was an epic third grader meltdown.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“You’re gonna be great,” he said.
“I have to go the bathroom.”
Alone in the ladies’ room with the door locked, I pulled the meat mallet out of my bag. It had a long wood handle and a big square metal block on one end for flattening chicken into cutlets. Two sides of the block were smooth, a third had spikes and the fourth had ridges. I picked a smooth side. I wanted pounding, not tenderizing.
I straightened my pinky on the Formica vanity. No hesitation. Just a good sharp thwack.
Freedom.