Mariah took a breath as the door opened. She nodded softly as he asked if she as Mariah. He seemed calm, cool, and collected as she walked inside his house quickly gripping the sheet music in her hand a little tighter. The house seemed nice enough. Some things were dated, but Mariah wasn’t much of an interior designer herself. Her mother had bought a lot of the furnishings and placed them strategically around her house. Mariah often wondered if there were secret cameras so her mother could spy on her. She looked in the direction he waved his hand and saw the piano. Her feet took her to the instrument and she sat down. She put her half crumbled sheet music on the stand and stretched her fingers a couple of times. She had practiced for a few weeks feeling like she should impress the teacher who was more than likely expecting a child and not the adult sitting at his piano right now. She looked at the metronomes and her nerves had her tense softly. Her anxiety was already pretty high now she had to keep up with the beat of that old instrument. Mariah moved a bit further down the bench as Beck pulled up a chair to sit closely. She reminded herself that her old piano teacher had to sit there to see what she was doing. Beck was the same. “Umm…yes…I…I started when I was about three and…I stopped at ten. I haven’t sat at a piano since that time. I…do still have some skills. I…I started practicing again once my mom told me she set all this up. I’ve been practicing this piece for the last few weeks. It’s Lacrimosa by Mozart.” she said softly before biting her lip as she set her fingers in the correct spots and started playing keeping her eyes on the sheet music and only there.
Beck’s home was an eclectic mix of things that his father had left behind after he died, some of his mother’s things, taken out of storage a couple of years back, and his own trinkets and photos from traveling around, his collection having steadily grown. On the wall directly in front of the front door, there were some photos from his childhood but mostly photos from his travels, cheesy pictures in front of the world’s biggest thermometer, holding beers on the beach with fireworks exploding behind him and his friend, kissing one of several flings he’d had while he was on the road. While they were often associated with painful memories, they were also times when he’d been happy, and Beck was learning how to take the bad with the good. They were a reminder that everything in life was a balancing act, and it was rarely as easy as categorizing things into wonderful or terrible. However, the most prominent feature of his home was stacks and stacks of records, piled up wherever there was room, along with an entire bookshelf of cassette tapes, scattered around the record player with a gaping mouth, a Dizzy Gillespie record still balanced on the turntable. In essence, his home reflected him: a mix of contradictions, all drowned out by a constant stream of music. “Okay, yeah, let’s hear it,” he said with an encouraging smile. She seemed shy, which certainly wasn’t a problem for Beck—he’d worked with students who barely said a word, and most of the time, they ended up being better than the ones who would talk his ear off. He tilted his head, watching her hands carefully before taking his pencil out from behind his ear so he could make some marks on her music. “Here and here, I think it might be easier if you try this fingering,” he said, labeling the notes with numbers that corresponded to her fingers. “And make sure not to forget the accelerando here,” he added, circling the notation in the music.” He bit the inside of his cheek before remembering to offer some encouragement as well. “It looks like you aren’t too rusty, though—that was pretty good,” he said with a reassuring smile.
