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eyes that understood nothing.
    So, like my paternal grandmother, I was a Snow White in coloring, and my mother was already showing a slight tendency toward the stepmother side. Who could blame her? It wasn’t some magic mirror saying that I was the fairest of them all—it was my father, her own husband, her man.

Piano and Potatoes
     
    M y MOTHER’S EYES were spring-green, cat-green, her round cheeks pink as a Dresden doll’s, her nose dotted with small freckles. While my father had an ageless old man’s demeanor (not only Yul Brynner, but Zorba, or the later Picasso), Gita remained dewy, fragrant, and unlined throughout her life. Her favorite color scheme, and it suited her, was “flowers”—any color, all colors. They blossomed on her sheets, in her dresses, in vases all over the house, on the towels and paper napkins. Her hands were soft, but there was ready power and capability in them from her years of practicing the piano. She had lived in the pretty Lithuanian town of Kovno, practicing her Bach inventions and Hanon exercises and arpeggios in a stately redbrick home overlooking the river. Her duplex had large French windows opening out onto the treetops, and on the ground floor of this building, which he owned, was her father’s little department store, right across from the university.
    Chopin was my mother’s most beloved composer, and although she was seemingly not fiery herself, his notes flew out of her body and transformed her, and everything around her, into a magic tapestry of passions, tears, dashed hopes, and soaring emotional resurrection. In Europe, my mother had practiced and given recitals on concert grand pianos; in Washington Heights, she played on a carved mahogany upright with creamy ivory keys. At four, I began pressing down on those keys, my mother’s fingers on top of mine. Later, my mother found me a teacher from Juilliard who had been trained by the legendary Madame Rosina Lhévinne (of the Moscow Conservatory). After a short audition, Mrs. Ruskin said I was promising, but I shied away from the piano and rarely practiced, and thus never arrived beyond the “Für Elise” and sonatina stage. I preferred a subsidiary role, taking solace from the world my mother could create out of sound.
    Each week, my mother would drag me to this teacher, who lived beside the Hudson River in a poorer neighborhood about twenty blocks south of our own. Mrs. Ruskin’s life was music. She had raised her son to become a concert pianist, and her small apartment was filled with grand pianos. One, with silent keys, fascinated me especially.
    “That’s so that her boy could even practice during the night,” my mother whispered to me. “Even I never had such a thing back in Europe.”
    During my lessons, my poor, devoted teacher made brilliant notations all over my music sheets or demonstrated concepts like the diminuendo with her capable hands. I focused mostly on the fact that she shaved her arms, leaving a rough stubble that I could feel when she slid her arms under mine to give me the sense of an arpeggio sweep. While Mrs. Ruskin would scribble endless tips in my spiraled workbook, I took the opportunity to daydream, my mouth watering from the hamburgers that Mr. Ruskin always seemed to be frying.
    My mother, meanwhile, sat just to my left, on a wooden adjustable stool like mine, enraptured by the lesson. After my hour was over, she would stay with Mrs. Ruskin as I escaped to the living room to better inhale hamburger smells or play a muted chord on her son’s silent practice piano. From there, I would hear my mother’s music emerge from the lesson room, rich and strong. Sometimes her notes were followed by a pause, a conversation, Mrs. Ruskin’s suggested phrasing, and then the improvement, coming from my mother’s own powerful hands—and making all the difference. Her melodies could soar without the use of crescendo; they could get right into you and make you forget this world. It never occurred