Book Excerpt

Okay, folks, I'd like some opinions/comments on this bit I wrote of a story that's been percolating in my mind for a while. It isn't the one I'm working on at the moment, but I wanted to make sure that it made sense and that I wasn't nuts. Tell me what you think, please? Many thanks.
--A Rather Bewildered Author That's Attempting To Be An Author

The Piano Teacher

Winter trudged up to the blue back door of her piano teacher’s minuscule house. She didn’t really want to be here right now, and she dreaded the long drive back home once her lesson was over. Winter hadn’t been excited like most girls were when they got their driver’s licenses—she loathed the whole business entirely. Her hands just never could seem to obey what her brain wanted them to do. She always made it home safely, true, but by what she was sure could only be the divine grace of God alone.
Her mother usually laughed when Winter complained about her intense dislike of driving. “That’s just silly, Winter. You know how to play the piano, after all. Driving’s no different from looking at the music and watching the keys. You just don’t pay enough attention. You never do.”
Winter smiled a humorless grin. Correction: her mother would only laugh when she was paying attention to what Winter was saying in the first place. Mrs. Lovington did her best, theoretically, but she was a very busy woman. She was president of the board of directors in her medical supplies company, and being a single mother was her second job. What time Mrs. Lovington did have at home (and the time at home in which she wasn’t attached to her umbilical chord, aka, her phone), she usually spent with Winter’s little brother, Stuart.
The silky sounds of Claire de Lune greeted Winter’s ears when she managed to pull out of her own thoughts long enough to remember the fact that there was indeed a world outside of her thoughts. She stood stock-still for a moment, entranced by the beauty of what her teacher was playing. Winter grudgingly admitted to herself that she could never get the music to sound so romantic and mysterious, yet strangely hesitant at the same time. For herself, Winter usually enjoyed playing bolder pieces that required lots of fervor, and classical music was much less fun to play than Broadway show tunes and the sheet music to movie soundtracks.
That was the problem with getting labeled as “talented” in Winter’s opinion. It generally meant that the skill that you had previously enjoyed for its own sake was suddenly turned into a money-maker, a desperate plea for release from the normalcy of the rest of the world. But there was the rub—Winter didn’t want to escape from what was considered normal. Her ability with music set her even further apart from the rest of the world than the personality she couldn’t control already did.
Resigned to the fact that she had wasted as much time as was humanly possible whilst standing on a doorstep, Winter turned the cold brass doorknob and stepped into the house’s living room.
Her teacher, Miss Smith, stopped playing the moment she heard Winter’s entrance. “Hey, Winter!” she said cheerfully as she vacated the piano bench so that her student could sit down. “Come on in. Did you have a good week?”
“Oh, it was all right,” Winter replied with a perfunctory grin. She may have hated the direction that her musical education was currently taking, but she couldn’t find fault with Miss Smith herself.
As Winter set her music up along the piano’s wooden stand, she realized with a jolt of something very like guilt that she’d never really thought much about Miss Smith as a person. The piano teacher was just always there, in the same way that an unused chair in a large house was always there. The chair sat quietly, never producing any drama—unless somebody tripped over it in the dark despite the fact that it had been in the exact same place for no less than five years. It was funny how apologetic a chair could appear while being cursed at for an accident not of its own causing or desire.
Miss Smith apparently had the ability of societal invisibility down to a fine art, whether she realized it consciously or not. Her clothes were always neat and fairly current in their styling, but that just made her look like every other woman of Winter’s acquaintance that was suddenly wearing wide belts or wedge shoes. She wasn’t tall or short, could claim to be neither thin nor fat, and wasn’t particularly beautiful or ugly. Miss Smith’s light brown hair fell in a smooth bob to her chin, neatly, but there was nothing distinctive. Silver rectangle glasses framed brilliant green eyes, her only truly notable feature. She had a small mole on one side of her chin, and her thin lips were usually lifted in a patient smile. Winter guessed Miss Smith to be in her mid-thirties, and she was undoubtedly what an older generation would have called a spinster. The teacher lived alone in this tiny house, teaching endless piano lessons and…doing who knows what else? Miss Smith’s apparent lot in life was to fill a necessary function of life. A spatula is a kitchen utensil. Miss Smith was the piano teacher. It was just one of those rules that no one had ever thought to question or wonder about.
Winter couldn’t even confess to knowing what Miss Smith’s first name was—for all that she knew, the piano teacher didn’t even have one.
“Glad to hear it,” Miss Smith replied now as she sat down in the rocking chair pulled up close to the upright piano. “Did Debussy give you much trouble when you practiced?” She picked up a baton in her slim fingers so that she could point to the music without leaning over at an odd angle. The stick also gave her the ability tap out a beat more effectively.
“Not much,” Winter mumbled. It truly hadn’t—she knew the notes perfectly well. Despite that, she still felt embarrassed, almost as if she hadn’t practiced at all and was waiting for the inevitable disappointment of her teacher. She knew that her performance couldn’t match the emotion with which Miss Smith had just played, emotion that she hadn’t known Miss Smith had possessed in the first place.
“Well, then, let’s hear it, if you don’t mind.” She gave Winter a starting beat with a tap, tap, tap of her baton and then sat back in her rocking chair. Her teacher’s relaxed posture didn’t fool Winter for a minute, though. She knew that Miss Smith’s keen eye was murderously accurate, and any mistakes or falters of Winter’s fingers would be worked through without mercy after she’d played the piece once.
The hour passed fairly quickly despite Winter’s new awareness of Miss Smith’s role as a fellow human being and not just as a very useful object. She managed to get all the way through Clair de Lune without stopping for the first time, and ran through her scales with a bored expression.
At the end of the lesson, Miss Smith gave Winter her assignment for the next week and said what she always said at the end of their time together: “Thank you for your hard work this week. Have a good weekend, Winter!”
Winter would usually reply “Thank you. You too,” vaguely, already worrying about the thirty minute drive ahead of her now that the lesson was over. Today, though, she stopped after the thank you and asked her teacher abruptly, “What’s your first name, Miss Smith?”
Miss Smith’s green eyes grew a little bit rounder, but that was her only outward sign of surprise. Her face was as smooth and as patient as always when she replied, “My name is Tallie.”
“Oh. That’s unusual,” was all that Winter ventured to say.
“Yes, it is, somewhat. As is Winter, if I may say so.”
A real smile broke across Winter’s face at that. “You’re right. Have a good weekend, Miss Smith.”
“You too, Winter.” With that, Miss Smith stepped back to the piano and started putting her metronome and notebooks back in their positions of readiness for the next student. As Winter opened the door to leave, a little boy in a red shirt barreled in, nearly knocking her over. He didn’t even stop to apologize for his near-miss as he headed over to the piano bench and started explaining to Miss Smith how he’d forgotten his music at home and how he hadn’t really practiced that much anyway and how he was really sorry but he had wanted to play baseball…
Winter had gotten into the driver’s seat of her used brown car and started the engine before she realized what had caused that uncomfortable prickling feeling at the back of her neck. It was the sight of Miss Smith’s patient smile as she greeted the boy, even while Winter saw that a deep weariness was suddenly visible in her young eyes.