A Face in the Band
BY DILARA ALMATA SÜMBÜL
“his life was a good one, simple, he could never / understand why anyone would want to write / it down.” —Ada Limón
My father was a carpenter and a jazz pianist. When he whittled at the table, he whistled low to match the wood’s dying wish. I’d watch him peel little figures like he was uncovering them rather than creating them, the same way he used to peel apples at the table to spite my mother, red falling in clean, curving strips. He was salt and peppered by the age of 35, a severe man with mild humor and a tendency to make jokes funnier by not laughing at them. The club where he worked still has his pictures up today. In all of them he’s blanching, staring straight into the camera with all the enthusiasm of a hostage, surrounded by delight.
When I was young, he told me that jazz was played without scales, that the best players smashed the keys just like me. You’re carving ivory, don’t stop. It was the nicest thing he’d ever said to me. I abandoned my scales, started pounding when my teacher came to play and my grandmother asked to hear my recital. All for the evenings he’d sit me down with him and put my hands on the keys. Again, he’d say, and those times I’d try to get it right. On good tries he’d move his hands off mine and let me play, feel for his pack in his shirt pocket and listen with a light. Every inhale of the cigarette illuminated the wood shavings in the air all around his garage domain, dancing in the light and strong smelling enough to pin me there in memory to this day. It was beautiful until Mary Jane’s father got lung cancer and I quit piano. Cigarettes were for special occasions like paternal approval, and I was terrified that they’d kill him. Still, I never said. Maybe I just wanted him to kill himself where I couldn’t see. Even so, he’d swing his arms down low to hold me close in the summer, when wood and smoke and sweat clung to him. I wondered who he approved of so much, for him to be smelling of smoke still.
He once told me that jazz is creation out of absence. That’s why it’s perfect for us, Abby. We have such a quiet house. With my mother there was never any music. I used to think that meant they didn’t love each other until I saw them once on the stoop as he left for work, ducking his head into hers and holding both their hands together as dusk turned her skirt pink in the light.
Many years ago, my father tended a peach tree for my mother. In early spring, she’d send him out for her despite the lack of fruit. She’d never reach the branches, all five feet two inches of her, so she’d send him out again to gather petals. At this, he’d always laugh. There’s no peaches yet. Still, the petals.
Later on he’d take his work boots off every night so as to shuffle rather than stomp, minutes and minutes un and re-placing the laces as quietly as he could bear. We put out carpets when I was 13, so even our sock footfalls would be softer. And he’d stand ramrod straight when my mother emerged to make supper. He’d fluster when she made to exert herself, always saying Jeanie, that’s too much. He was always more like a windless kite than any authority on the matter, hovering and putting his hands on his hips in Midwestern protest.
As little as I remember her, I know her to be casually displacing his concern. She’d hum under her breath and tell Laurence to sit, and he’d sit in the kitchen while she cooked and carve apples to prove he’d already eaten. Still, she persisted with her pies and trays and special suppers. My mother started leaving the apples outside on hot days to spoil, and my father would dutifully retrieve them. Carving the soft away, he’d take care to leave the peel where she’d see, always one long and careful strip.
When she died, he cried for the very first time. I watched his shoulders hitch from the kitchen steps and his hands reach up to cover his face. I didn’t move, and he didn’t see me. I was 17 at the time, and had learned how to go around quietly in hopes of easing something in my mother.
I’ve never seen a musician die so willingly in silence. I’d never see him like that again. Not stooped over his granddaughter’s crib, not at Niagara Falls, and not dying— a stone in his own deathbed. Niagara Falls had been a lifetime dream of his. He had stood there in his tourist hat and usual slacks, as earnest in his presence as he always was. I watched him squint at the waterfall as he looked over and said, That’s neat, huh? Makes you think. So I watched the water turn over and over near the bottom, rivulets that carried the tender of the bank up with them, and waited for him to speak again. But he just stood there, clasped his hands behind his back and instead hummed just once, soft enough to be lost in the stream.
What I remember best is the last dinner we had with her food, just leftovers. He’d put out her picture at the table with an unusual sentimentalism. He’d been so incredibly open, raw in a way I’d never seen before and never would again. I’d cried nights earlier about my mother’s petal collection rotting, and my father found me on his bedroom floor, holding browning spoils and choked into silence. He’d gathered them up, gently put them back in her box for her things.
I think about him a lot now because he’s the only father I’ve ever had. But also because we were the only two people in the house and in the world then. A small pinprick of honesty. I remember that year with a fondness it doesn’t deserve, glazed over despair turned gentle in its haziness.
That night, he lit the candles but didn’t bother to turn off the ugly fluorescent light. We sat at the peeling kitchen table and waited for whatever moment he wanted to appear. He’d regain his fortitude within a month, but he was smaller than I was used to, creased with worry and held downwards by the world around him. He held something in his lap wrapped in a white napkin. Outside, I could hear neighborhood kids play and cars go back and forth. He seemed the only person in pain with me, and that made him the only other real person in the world. When he said Abby, quietly, I looked. I wanted anything but this freezer burned lasagna, preserved this long despite ourselves.
My father pulled the napkin up from his lap and opened it for me to see. He’d carved out the petals she used to collect like jewelry when I was small, true forms coaxed out of the wood. When he reached out his hand they turned a gentle pink in the light, like her skirt in the dusk, fighting the fluorescent to be strikingly beautiful where we were pale and drawn still. He took my hands in his hands, pressed wooden petals to my palms. I looked him in his red-rimmed eyes and loved my father more than anything.
This will keep, he said, shaky. I’m almost certain of it.
