Lying Read Free Page A

a sweet man with many sweet things in you, but with no thunder. A man should have thunder,” she said, glancing at my father.
    “Do you play, ma’am?” the pianist said again. He was still glaring. “Would you like to play some thunder for the crowd?”
    All the waiters had stopped, and all the people had stopped eating, and the patio looked like a frozen place, a garish game of freeze tag.
    “I have my own Steinway at home,” she said.
    “How nice,” the pianist said.
    “And I’ve played,” she said, and paused. “I’ve played in … many situations.”
    “Do take a seat,” he said, standing up from the bench and gesturing to his place.
    And then she went forward. I stopped being mortified and started being proud. Or, I was proud and mortified both, and my own dizziness was getting worse. She had balls, and she had vodka. She never stumbled or slurred, though: You could only tell if you knew her, from the metal smell of her breath.
    She pushed out the seat and sat down to take it. She made a big show of positioning her hands and straightening her shoulders, just like she had practiced all those hours at home. The party waited, waited for a symphony. Waited for the maestro she’d claimed herself to be. I know I could not have seen her face—her back was to me—but I have such a clear memory, a clear dream of my mother’s face as she sat at the peak of a promise she’d made, stuck in a lie, three blind mice all she knew.
Just play it, Mom
, I thought.
Three blind mice, see how they run, just play it and get it over with
. I think she stared down at the ivory keys, the bared teeth, and all thingssober passed across her face, because she did not know. She must have known she did not know. Somewhere in the world, if you pressed the right keys, or the right combination of keys, there would be thunder and Mozart, and more; there would be all you’d craved but been too clenched to take, soft songs you could sleep to, chords like a hammock, maybe, and a hand to hold, the way time slows in a tub. If you knew the right notes. Which she didn’t.
    You could’ve heard a pin drop. You could’ve heard the petals fall from a flower while we waited, and waited. Her hands poised over the keys. Sobering up. “I suppose not,” she finally said, and stood, and carefully, carefully walked away.
    That night, I had my first seizure.
    •  •  •
    At the school where I later went to learn about my illness, I saw movies, so I know what it is; it is not careful. You grit your teeth, you clench, a spastic look crawls across your face, your legs thrash like a funky machine, you hit hard and spew, you grind your teeth with such a force you might wake up with a mouth full of molar dust, tooth ash, the residue of words you’ve never spoken, but should have. You bite your mouth—I do at least—chew it to pieces from the inside out, a mythical hunger, my whole self jammed into my jaw.
    When I woke up my father was bending over me and then a doctor came, a guest of the hotel. He did not seem impressed. “Seizure,” he pronounced. “Rather common in young ones,” and then he left.
    I can dimly recall seeing my father’s face in the background of the hotel room, pale and shocked. My mother, as it turns out, missed that first seizure. She had fallen into one of her restless sleeps, a sleep so fractured and tentative she always had a veil of exhaustion in her glittery eyes. Sometime during the night my father must have told her; he must have woken her and said, “She’s had a seizure,” and so I waited, but she never appeared to nurse me that night, and this is a grudge I still hold.
    We flew back to Boston the next day. How did I feel? Shrinks have been asking me that question for decades now, as though the origin of whatever mental miseries I might have are linked to that first fall down. How did I feel, the shrinks ask, and offer me some Dilantin; you must be depressed, the shrinks say, and proffer me some Prozac.