AB’s Some Kind of Relative
July 10, 2020
One weekend off from my job as counselor at a wilderness camp for troubled teenage girls out near Palestine, Texas, my buddy AB, who also worked there and had that weekend off, decided it would be fun to drive into Dallas and visit with a relative. I can’t remember exactly what kind of relative she was, maybe a cousin or a great aunt; she definitely was in the age category of a great-something. But it was a place to go that was somewhere other than the piney woods of East Texas, and we needed that.
My memory is we arrived at her house rather late in the evening. She greeted us at the door, holding a white miniature poodle and looking absolutely ancient. Her face was caked in pale powder with a smear of blush, like a bad makeup job on a corpse. She was a little bit of a thing; tiny in stature and so frail-looking, like you could break a bone if you hugged her too hard. In addition to the poodle she had in arms, there was a pack of them skittering around her feet, or perched on a nearby chair or sofa. It looked like there were at least five of them.
The first thing that hit us walking in was the cold. Like a meat locker. AB and I had been living and working outside in the heat of East Texas and hadn’t felt air conditioning in months. Her house could not have felt more alien. It. Was. Freezing. Of course, we were guests, and well-behaved ones at that, and we certainly weren’t going to comment on the temperature.
The second was that everything was white—the carpet, the furniture, the dogs. She waved an elderly hand (an exception to the white were her alarmingly long, chipped fingernails, painted bright red) rather nonchalantly in our direction, for us to put our stuff down. She then gave us a tour of her house, walking delicately from white room to white room, holding one white poodle and surrounded by her other white poodles.
The one thing that was not white was her Steinway concert grand. I of course asked her about it. AB said something about what an amazing musician she was, so I asked her would she please play something. She was happy to do so.
AB and I seated ourselves on the sofa, while she arranged her tiny self on the piano bench. She paused a moment at the keyboard, but just a moment, and then BAM! Out came not some little old lady ditty, not “You Are My Sunshine,” not a Methodist hymn, but Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, from memory.
She played with fury, and what a sight she was, this skeletal creature pouring out red-hot torrents of music into her white world. As I listened, I kept hearing these strange and annoying clicking sounds and wondered what in the world they were. She played for a bit, stopped, and turned around to apologize for all the wrong notes, in the way that people do, and of course we told her how fabulous she was.
I walked over to the Steinway, and noticed that the veneer on the piano above most of the keys had what looked like gashes in it. I had never seen that before. Weird. But then it came to me. The fingernails. She had been playing the piano with these obscenely long fingernails, and through the years had scraped off the veneer. And the clicking sound had come from her long, red, chipped fingernails scraping against the finish. Creepy.
Well. We had arrived late, gotten the tour, been treated to a concert, and it was time for bed. As it turned out, we had to sleep on the floor in the very cold living room. I seem to remember that we pulled the cushions off the sofas and lay on them and scrounged in every corner and cabinet for throws, quilts, old sweaters, anything to keep us warm.
As we lay eye-level to the white carpet, shivering, I noticed tumbleweeds of white poodle hair being blown across the carpet by the air conditioning. AB and I laughed.
Morning could not come soon enough. And when it did, we were out of there.
©2021 Joy Cunningham