Still Life Las Vegas Read online

  I twist away from him and head back to the kitchenette, mumbling something about getting dinner started. This time he doesn’t follow. “You’ve got to be more careful,” he murmurs, and this time I wonder if he’s talking to me.

  Beans. There’s always a can of beans. Self-pity and beans, that’s what’s cooking tonight. I make a big show of being busy, slamming cabinet doors, banging the fry pan down onto the stove, but when I turn around my audience is gone.

  He’s left. The empty living room has—whooosh—expanded three times in size.

  Damn.

  Well, he can’t get any worse than he is now, I think, which is a lie. He can get a lot worse. But it’s not my responsibility. Isn’t that what that counselor lady told me, the social worker at LV Med, in one of the two appointments I actually went to? “You’re not in control of your father’s state of mind,” she said, tapping her long fingernail on my father’s file to make the point. “You’re not responsible, and you’re not to blame.” I thought she was crazy at the time. Who else was going to be responsible? But maybe she had a point. Let him sleep the rest of his life, if that’s where he’s heading. It’s not my problem.

  “Your turn, Georgia,” I say. I had a little sister once, victim of the Curse. An accident, never explained, never to be talked about. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if she were around today, helping me take care of him. Would we be rolling our eyes at each other about now? Would I be washing up dishes while she’d have to be the one going in, giving me the finger but smiling all the same? Of course, if she hadn’t been in that accident, well, well, there’d be no missing mother. No Las Vegas. No story. We wouldn’t even be here.

  I turn off the burners and head in.

  He’s already back under the sheet, one arm thrown over his eyes. I stay by the doorway.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Really.”

  No answer.

  “I’m sorry. You okay?”

  Without uncovering his eyes, he pats the bed with his other hand.

  I walk slowly over. As soon as my father feels my weight on the mattress he gropes for my hand and squeezes it.

  “Don’t scare me like that,” he whispers.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “You’ve got to be careful.”

  “I know.”

  He gives my hand one more squeeze, then releases it.

  “I gotta make dinner,” I say. There’s no answer. I think he must have gone away, but when I reach the door he speaks again.

  “I love you so much, Walt,” he says. “You’re the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  I wait for a minute, but there’s nothing more. I switch off the light and quietly close the door. Back to the beans.

  I’m the best thing he’s ever done. Yeah, that’s probably true. At least, I’m the only thing he’s managed to keep.

  EMILY & ROSSETTI

  WISCONSIN

  MUCH EARLIER

  On the same day she unearthed Liberace’s framed photo from the cardboard box at the back of the closet, eight-year-old Emily, in her search of Vee’s personal belongings, discovered another artifact hidden there, this one in a dark brown case deeply submerged in the box, beneath stacks of paperwork. The case’s surface was pebbled and striated; crocodilian. The material invited tactile investigation, as did the two brass latches, which were not locked. Emily flipped them up quickly and flung open the lid.

  It was an accordion. Emily had seen such an instrument before—there was a black-and-white photo up on the wall of Vee’s father playing one—but this accordion, nestled in the blue velvet lining of the case, in such vivid color, was scintillating. The keyboard was mother-of-pearl; the minor keys and the body of the accordion were of a shiny, pearlescent red resin, the deep, alluring red of apples offered to fairy-tale princesses, and of bowling balls. To the left of the bellows, the word “Rossetti” was painted on in white, flowing script not unlike the looping signature adorning Mr. Liberace’s photo.

  Emily pulled at the dark leather straps. The accordion was heavier than she had anticipated and fell back into the case, her almost following. Emily took a wider stance, grabbed onto the straps again, and hoisted upward and back, pulling it toward her body. Once the accordion cleared the cardboard box she knelt down, resting it on her lap.

  She slipped her arms in the shoulder straps; they hung loosely down her back. The body of the accordion covered her entire torso; she could rest her head on it. It felt solid, like armor. Emily hugged the accordion close. It was begging to be released.

  She slid her left hand under the leather bass strap. With her head still placed sideways on top, she looked across at the metal clip holding the bellows together and traced its outline with her right hand. With one flick she unsnapped it. The top of the bellows stirred, pushing against her. Quickly, the bottom clip was felt and found and unsnapped as well, and with that the bellows loosened and the accordion became pliant, a breathing creature. She slowly let it expand with her left hand, feeling it engorge with air, her chest expanding along with it.

  There was power gathering between her hands—sound and energy waiting to be released, and all she had to do was squeeze. She knew she would have to put all of her strength into her left arm to push back the bellows. Her left shoulder tensed, ready for the plunge—and that’s when she saw the shadow of Vee in the bedroom doorway.

  Emily froze, felt her fingers grow numb. Vee’s eyes were narrowed, her brow clamped down over her eyebrows and her lower jaw jutted out. She, too, was frozen, but Emily knew it wouldn’t be for long. She recognized that look; two strides and Vee would be upon her.

  But, miraculously, the heavy hand of Vee did not come down, administering justice. Instead, the woman turned abruptly and left the room. Emily was alone in the bedroom amid all of Vee’s plundered belongings and an accordion filled with air. Eyes liquid, chest heaving silently, Emily tried sneaking the bellows back into place little by little. It let out a disconsolate moan. Emily almost swooned. Suddenly, from the living room, she heard Vee’s voice, low and measured: “Bring that in here.”

  The accordion moaned again. Emily managed to tether it shut and pushed it off her lap. She stood up and felt a trickle of cold sweat travel from her knees to her calves. The photo of Liberace stared up at her, his smile still beaming. Help me, Mr. Vee, she thought desperately, but she knew there’d be no salvation there. Emily picked the accordion up by its shoulder straps and slowly trudged to the door, the instrument weighing down her every step. She thought briefly of Sunday School Jesus, marching toward Calvary, wooden beams heavy on his shoulders. Could that Cross be any heavier than this accordion? Emily doubted it.

  She finally made it to the living room. Vee was standing by the glass sliding doors. The curtains were closed. Her arms were folded. Emily stood before her, head bowed, her pearlescent red badge of shame resting at her feet.

  “Look at me.”

  Emily raised her eyes toward Vee’s face, from which nothing could be read.

  “That was mine. My father gave it to me.” Vee spoke without any emotion at all. “He played very well.”

  Emily nodded.

  “He wanted me to learn.” Vee’s lips pressed together, puckered, and came to a rest. “I was never much interested. It’s a good accordion, though.”

  She looked down at Emily. “You interested in playing?”

  Emily nodded, eyes wide.

  Vee frowned, exhaled, and patted her arms twice, quickly.

  “All right, then.”

  * * *

  The accordion needed work, though not as much as one might expect, given that it had sat in a box in Vee’s closet for close to two decades. The reeds had to be retuned, the wax holding them in replaced. The bellows were in excellent condition. For Emily, Vee had the shoulder straps tightened and a back strap added. Even so, it was a ladies’ full-size and Emily was small for her age. Her fingers had to strain to reach the farthest buttons. It would have been preferable to start out with a child-size ac
cordion, but Vee would never have agreed to the extra expense, not when there was a perfectly good accordion that Emily just needed to grow into.

  Finding an instructor was not difficult, not in Milwaukee, polka capital of the Midwest. Vee selected an old friend of her father’s, a semiretired professional polka player, to be Emily’s mentor. Joe Wojcik, “the Accordion King,” was stout, emphysemic, and barely limber enough to waddle across the room, but strap an accordion on the man and he would become as energetic and elastic as a fully inflated playground ball. He taught lessons in the mildewing basement of his ranch house in West Milwaukee. In the cool, damp space with a stained orange shag carpet, he’d set up a folding chair on one side of the room and place his seat on the opposite side, amid his collection of taxidermied birds and small mammals, which served as a mute but attentive audience.

  Joe didn’t know quite what to make of Emily, his first Asian student (“A little chinska, playing the accordion?” he would mutter in varying shades of disbelief several times a lesson) but in nine months’ time she was his star pupil.

  Emily practiced constantly, with great determination. Reading music made intuitive sense to her; after a month she could hear in her head the song emanating from the rapid rise and fall of notes on a page, and could translate that knowledge into choreography for her fingers dancing gracefully along the keyboard. What she had to work on was the timing: the pressing of keys, the pushing of buttons, and the flipping of switches, all coordinated with the breath of the bellows.

  Physically, this was daunting for petite Emily. Managing the bellows alone took all her strength. Her size, though, became something of an advantage over time: Emily had to put so much of herself into making the bellows breathe that it became an extension of her own breath. This gave her playing muscularity, and passion. It also gave her the shoulders of a junior linebacker.

  Once the mechanics of playing the accordion were mastered, the music seemed to stream effortlessly out of Emily through her instrument. After memorizing a piece she would enter into an almost trancelike state, her fingers flying along the keys of their own accord, the bellows pushing in and out like the tide.

  “Did you hear that, my wiewiorka?” Mr. Wojcik would confide to a dusty squirrel perched alarmingly askew by his side, after Emily had finished a particularly daunting passage. “Perfect! That is how you play the ‘Hoop-Dee-Doo’!” Emily faced the unblinking eyes of pigeons, jays, crows, and squirrels, as well as the blank, sightless stare of one unfortunate, patchy mole she was particularly fond of. That creature, no bigger than her hand, was one of Wojcik’s first attempts at taxidermy, and proved to be too small and delicate for his sausage-like fingers. As a result, the inexpert stitching, the odd bulges in its back, and the loss of its two front paws made it look more like a rolled-up sock than a creature. Emily liked performing for the mole above all the other woodland fauna; it loved her no matter how she played.

  Wojcik introduced Emily to the mysteries of the European ballad, the passion of the tango, and the complexities of the world’s jolliest music, the polka. “There Is a Tavern in the Town,” “Little Brown Jug,” the polkas of Karolinka, Julida, and Jenny Lind, her fingers conquered them all. Her hunger for music seemed to have no satiation; each time she successfully completed a piece she would look up at Mr. Wojcik and his fat green binder, hungry for more.

  The only thing Mr. Wojcik couldn’t teach his student to do was smile. Emily took her playing dead seriously. The look on her face was one of pure concentration. Whatever song she played, “La Vie En Rose,” “Sentimental Journey,” or “Choo Choo Polka,” she attacked with the same intense focus. “Listen to this music, my ptaszku, my little bird,” he would implore after wincing at her severe expression, “it is dancing! You are making the bubbles in your heart! Light! Happy! Smile, ptaszku, smile! This is the ‘Champagne Polka’!”

  Emily tried to oblige, but the effect was even worse: her brow continued to pull down while her mouth muscles strained upward, creating an expression that looked like she was ready to chew off her own leg. Worse yet, it interfered with her timing. Wojcik soon realized it was best to leave well enough alone. What her face lacked in buoyancy her nimble fingers more than made up for.

  Just after her tenth birthday Emily played her first public performance. Seated on the back of a flatbed truck serving as a float, Emily, wearing a white milkmaid’s dress, her hair in two black braids, solemnly knocked out a flawless, continuous loop of “Beer Barrel Polka” for the town’s Oktoberfest parade. Five pimply boys in leiderhosen sat behind her, trying in vain to keep up. At first she was something of a curiosity to the crowd, with lots of pointing and smiles hidden behind hands, but soon they were all clapping along. Emily noticed none of it, until the end of the parade, when she played her final flourish. She gave a relieved, gap-toothed grin, and the crowd burst into applause. Cheering loudest was Mr. Wojcik, who bounced forward to help her down from the truck. Farther back was Vee, who smiled and gave Emily a gentle swat on the head. The three of them headed for the bratwurst tent, and later went out for ice cream.

  After that success, Mr. Wojcik encouraged Emily to hone her skills in public, finding her opportunities over the next few years at various nursing homes, hospitals, and VA events. These older audiences were particularly appreciative. Even those not afflicted with eye disorders got weepy at her World War II–era repertoire. Their arthritic hands clapped gingerly but enthusiastically, and they liked to reach out from their wheelchairs or aluminum walkers and make contact with Emily, patting her head or stroking her arm as if she were a touchstone to bygone, better times.

  As the performances grew more numerous and farther away, Mr. Wojcik volunteered to drive Emily in his banged-up boat of an Oldsmobile. It reeked of smoke, and Mr. Wojcik was an erratic driver at best, but he was far more enthusiastic than Vee about Emily’s playing. He would shout his evaluation of the day’s event over his shoulder at Emily, strapped in the backseat next to her accordion. He’d veer widely across the highway as he recalled a particularly fine moment in Emily’s playing, losing the steering wheel for seconds at a time.

  After they arrived home, more or less in one piece, Mr. Wojcik often stayed for coffee while Emily got ready for bed. She’d enter the kitchen in her nightgown to say good night, and they’d be at the table, Mr. Wojcik with his Sanka and Vee with a mug of darker brew warming her hands. He would have just finished recounting the night’s triumph, and Vee would look over at Emily and nod her approval. “Off to bed,” she’d say.

  At the Junior High Talent night, Emily played “Stairway to Heaven” on the accordion, all eight minutes and two seconds of it, flawlessly. She won first prize and the ridicule of her entire school, except for her three friends from biology and a cadre of second clarinetists, who thought she was a god. Mr. Wojcik stood up and cheered loudly from the back row, and Emily blushed, not entirely from embarrassment.

  The following year, Wojcik entered Emily into the American Accordion Players Association’s (AAPA) Wisconsin Youth Competition. Though participation had been steadily eroding over the years, competition was still fierce in a state known for its champions. Emily was competing against fifty other accordion players, all under the age of eighteen, 80 percent of them male. The judges initially dismissed this serious-looking chinska as an oddity, much like Joe Wojcik had, but they could not deny her virtuosity. Her musical selection was a polka version of “Hey, Look Me Over” followed by a stirring version of “Come Back to Sorrento” that was melancholy beyond her years. Two of the most hardened judges teared up. They awarded her first prize.

  Vee was in the audience for that victory. “That was my father’s favorite song,” she told Emily, and for a long moment Emily didn’t know whether it was a compliment or an accusation. It was a compliment.

  Emily’s photo was printed on page eleven of the Milwaukee Herald. Mr. Wojcik snapped up ten copies of the paper from the newsstand; Vee picked up her newspaper from the front porch.

  Mr. Wojcik
was overjoyed. Before the regional competition, which was to be held three months later in Chicago, he insisted on additional lessons for Emily—on his own dime, of course. He set up a little stage in his basement, just for her, stopped wearing his stained white shirts, and combed his hair. He even dusted the animals. “Listen to me, ptaszku, this will be no problem for you. To win Wisconsin, very hard. The rest, pah!”

  Emily did listen. They disagreed only once. Three weeks before the competition, she wanted to change her musical program. Instead of “Hey, Look Me Over” Emily wanted to play the notoriously complex “Clarinet Polka.” Mr. Wojcik could not think of anyone in the junior competition that had ever opened with “Clarinet Polka.”

  “Wiewiorka, why would she do this?” Wojcik demanded of the perpetually shy squirrel hiding its head beneath its paws. “That polka, it is no good for the nerves! No one expects a fourteen-year-old to perform ‘Clarinet Polka’!” He addressed a group of crows clustered by the water heater. “Why not the ‘Pennsylvania’? The ‘Friendly Tavern’? Why not ‘It’s a Small World’! They love to hear the young ones play this!” Finally, he thrust his shaggy brows in her direction. “The ‘Chihuahua,’ for God’s sake, play the ‘Chihuahua’!”

  But Emily was adamant. She knew that if she could put over the “Clarinet Polka” it would give her the edge. She also knew that she could play it, and play it well. Finally, she knew that Mr. Wojcik knew this, too, and would relent. He did.

  A week before the event, Vee bought Emily a formal black velvet dress, as per the regulations. Emily had hoped Vee would pull out the green dress from the cardboard box in her closet and have it shortened, but Vee never offered, and Emily didn’t dare ask. In the fitting room, Vee was surprised by how much Emily had grown. “You’ve got legs!” she said, almost reproachfully. Emily blushed and smiled.