Immortal Days

My mother used to make me clean the piano keys with milk. I rubbed them so clean, the white keys radiated the effervescence of the sun shining through the window. I liked to polish those keys. I felt a sense of accomplishment about transforming dull ivory into gleaming pearlescent jewels which, if touched, would form melodies to my liking. That was before I learned to read music. I would make up my own tunes, or play by ear songs I’d heard on my sister’s 33 1/3 albums: something from “Oklahoma” or “South Pacific”.

My grandparents lived below us. Every morning, my grandfather would stick his head out the window which was beneath my bedroom, and sing “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” and I would hum along. He was something, my grandfather. When I knew him, he was old and balding and spent his time watching baseball when he wasn’t working at the clothing store he owned. He always dressed in a jacket and tie at our Sunday dinners, and he had this big diamond ring he wore that we used to call “the headlight”.

Every Sunday my grandmother would cook for us. She had a mahogany dining room table that always shined. My grandmother would put the embroidered white tablecloth on it and my sister and I would set out the glasses, plates, napkins, and silverware. There was a huge crystal chandelier that hung from the ceiling over the middle of the table, and sometimes my grandmother would let me help her polish it. She would let me lick the banana cake batter, too.

Those were immortal days for me. Shiny, like the piano keys and my grandmother’s table and the chandelier and my grandfather’s ring.

But then, my grandfather was robbed. The man hit him on the head with a gun and took his ring. My grandfather stopped working and stopped putting his head out the window to sing.

I had a dream about the chandelier the other night. I dreamed I went back to that duplex. I knocked on the door and told the woman who answered it that I had lived there when I was a little girl. The place no longer had my grandmother’s furniture or mahogany table. The people had added rooms and painted the walls white. But there, in the middle of the dining room, was my grandmother’s chandelier, shiny and glistening, and reflecting the rays of sunlight that found their way through the window.