Tell me about your tomato plants, when I can’t sleep (excerpt)

The best thing in the world is the sound of piano. And the best way to hear piano is as it wafts through the floors and ceilings of a house to parts that never see the instrument, at work or otherwise. The house would wonder at those smooth vibrations if it was unwise. But houses with hidden instruments are always wise. You can really breathe piano in when you are ease-dropping it. When it doesn’t know you are listening. When it thinks no one hears the errors, the slips in tuning, the shifts in tempo with the rise and falling of crescendo.


When it happens, when the piano wafts up here like fresh frosted apple pie, you might slip out of that armchair and lay down on the linoleum. Listen, and hear mostly the dump truck in the lane, but still listen. A little more of the old instrument’s nuance.


Sometimes the woman downstairs plays the piano when she thinks she is home alone. She plays it well. She’s a stripper. Beautiful, huh? She makes terrible cake, but plays, so I forgive her, want to know more. Want to be her friend. Fall in love with the piano playing of a stripper and forget why I love up here and she lives down there. And ease-drop on a thunderstorm is blissful. Pressing a cheek to a glass pane like you would to this linoleum. Then the song is done, water’s gone. But I can slip back into the armchair and chuckle, that I just stole the best thing in the world.


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The woman who plays piano can’t make her tomatoes grow. I watch her sometimes, standing over them, trowel in hand, with a look of utter consternation. She adds water, more soil, more sand, nitrates and no end of other fertilizers, but the puny pale green stalks just sprout leaves and no flowers. Flowers that do happen are plucked off by birds. Flowers that manage to bud are et by greedy rodents and slugs. Three years and this afternoon I have watched her, trowel in hand, lording over her tomatoes that won’t tomato when the piano begins to play.