Welcome to Labrys, your student-run art and literature collective of Smith College.

I always clipped my nails to the very grit before I went to piano lessons. If they were even a little too long, the piano teacher would cup my hand in her beefy palm, take a fingernail clipper, the biggest and shiniest I had ever seen, and cut them right down to raw skin. She would do this out on the porch while I looked down at my knees trying not to scream out. Sometimes they would bleed but she would just rub the blood off with her sleeve and give me a tissue for my nose. Then we would go inside for the lesson like nothing had happened.

Sometimes she would eat cheesy crackers during the lesson, or potato chips. If it was a really hot day she would eat strawberries but she always ate them with a face like they were too sour. While she told me all of the things my fingers were doing wrong, I would stare hungrily at her little plastic snack bowl. She never offered me any snacks. She would just munch away and watch my hands slide up and down the keyboard. Sometimes she would drop a cracker or a chip. When this happened, she would flatten it into the carpet with the heel of her shoe without taking her eyes off my hands.

I was eight years old, and she was the tallest woman I had ever seen. Her skin was flat white like milk and she had a prominent man’s chin. Her hair was cropped and dyed black and hung down as straight and floppy as string. When she laughed, it sounded like it was coming from under our feet. She said it was because she knew how to use her voice-box like an instrument, and tried to teach me how, but I could never get my voice to sound that deep and beautiful.

One year she came over to my house on Christmas. I don’t remember why she came over, but I do remember Mom seeming confused when she opened the door and there the piano teacher was, holding a wrapped present, her hair dotted with snow. My grandmother was over for the holidays and the piano teacher introduced herself. I remember my grandmother stared at the piano teacher like she was a particularly infuriating article in the newspaper. The present was for me. It was a doll, and it came with a handbag and three different sets of clothes. After the piano teacher left, I hid it at the bottom of a drawer with all my other dusty dolls. I remember hearing Mom and my grandmother having a whispered discussion that night, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying through the door.

Sometimes, if I played a piece just right, hitting all the chords at the right time with my fingers perfectly arched and my spine straight, she would call her friend and make me play the piece over the phone for him. She would hold the phone up to the piano and stare at my fingers with her mouth locked in a big grin. She said that her friend’s name was Giles Sneed and he was a composer. She said he was really famous. I pictured him with a powdered gray wig sitting at a grand piano, feather-pen in hand, staring into space.

She had a husband, but it was easy to forget. He lived in the basement and didn’t come out much. I only ever saw him on really unbearably cold days; on those days he would sit on the sofa with his legs pulled up to his chest like a child, rubbing his hands together and smiling at me. “Hey there,” he would say, and I would look shyly at him from behind my hair, not knowing what to say.

They had a daughter named Wendy who was two years older than me and who lived upstairs on the weekdays and downstairs on the weekends. She spied on me during my piano lessons, thinking I didn’t notice her peeking from behind the sofa. I began to stay after my piano lessons and play with Wendy in her room. Her room was actually a closet, but the walls were painted pink and covered with posters and I remember being jealous of her little windowless hideaway. We could hear other students’ piano lessons from inside the room, the songs reverberating through the floor, the piano teacher’s laughter penetrating the walls. Wendy had pet rats but she kept them downstairs with her dad. She said her Mom would kill her if she found out, and I laughed but it didn’t sound like she was joking. Their names were Diamond and Ruby and they were both the color of cardboard.

One day in her room, Wendy told me about erections. I told her she was lying but she said she was older and knew these things. She showed me her diary then. Her diary had a lock so her parents couldn’t read it, and she kept the tiny key under her pillow. I said I didn’t want to talk about boys anymore but she told me I had to get used to talking about boys if I ever wanted to have any friends. I started to cry so she taught me long division to distract me. As I carried my zeroes I tried to forgive her.

I only ever went downstairs once. There were boxes and half-finished paper mache sculptures piled up against the walls, and a rope swing hung next to a hammock by a board in the ceiling. Wendy explained that her dad was an artist but hadn’t sold anything yet. She assured me that someday he would be rich and famous. She said that he was going to move to a penthouse in Manhattan and that she was going to go with him. Her dad smiled self-consciously from the hammock and continued reading his magazine. “Hey there,” he said. Wendy showed me the rope swing and we swung back and forth for the rest of the afternoon. Eventually, Wendy said she needed to go upstairs and do her homework, and she left me down there with the rope swing and her dad.

As soon as Wendy left, I noticed how cold the concrete floor was under my bare feet. The basement was quiet except for the slight creaking of the rope swing. Wendy’s dad had finished flipping through his magazine and was looking at me with that same slight smile from the hammock, his disheveled hair the gray color of dead leaves. He motioned me towards him with one finger. I approached the hammock, listening to the slapping sound of my feet against the basement floor. “Wanna see my secret?” He stepped out of the hammock and led me to a big black trunk next to his cot. He produced a key from his vest pocket. When he opened it, I saw that the trunk was packed with rats, all dead and cardboard-colored. I held my breath as the smell hit me. “There are 112 rats in this trunk,” he said.

The piano teacher was always telling me that I didn’t put enough “sass” into my playing. She said that the ending is always the most important part of a piece and that nobody would know that the piece had ended if I didn’t flaunt it in their faces. I never really understood what she meant by this, but I could tell my failure to show off frustrated her. She would often give demonstrations, hoping that her sass would rub off on me. During these demonstrations she snapped her fingers hard against the keys, so hard that I could hear the slapping sound of her skin against ivory over the sound of the melody. She didn’t seem to be looking at her hands or at the sheet music. I had the feeling she was watching me from the corner of her eye.

One day, after playing through Ave Maria, I took her advice and snapped the last chord strong and fierce. I turned to look at her. She had put down her bowl of cheesy crackers and was smiling, her head back and her eyes half-closed, as if deep in some fantastical daydream. Her chin jiggled precariously. I wondered if she was going to pick up the phone and call her friend Giles Sneed and have me play for him. But she didn’t reach for the phone, or for the cheesy crackers, or for my hand. Instead she took my head between her two dinner-plate hands and kissed the top of my hair. The kiss was wet and I could feel it there even by the time the lesson had ended.

When I got home I avoided Mom and went straight for the shower, throwing off my clothes as I went. I turned the tap as hot as it could go and steamed myself pink. I filled my ears with water and shook the chords of Ave Maria from my mind. Even three different kinds of shampoo couldn’t get the slight, wet pressure of the kiss out of my hair.