Erin Robertson
THE DENTIST, GALENA, ALASKA
She stands beside her truck outside the library/school
worried, intense -
Can I still get in there?
I heard there’s a piano.
No, it’s locked.
Is there a piano? she demands.
Yes. It will be there tomorrow.
Come for yoga. It will be open then.
I know (shoulders sagging)
I tried to come today
but couldn’t get away
until just now.
This is a Piano Emergency.
Karin recognizes the symptoms,
applies pressure to the wound:
I have a piano.
You can come to my house and play it.
She is incredulous.
You have a piano?
This holds so many other queries:
about its provenance,
Karin’s worthiness to possess such treasure in interior Alaska,
the instrument’s upkeep,
how it survived the flood,
who may play it -
but Karin only says
Yes.
The thread the woman follows next surprises:
Who tunes it for you, and how often?
It seems a challenge,
a test of Karin’s fitness as an owner,
and whether she warrants continued custody.
A guy tuned it, maybe five years ago,
she answers weakly.
The woman seizes upon this -
Why so long ago? What guy? Where was he from?
I don’t know, Karin offers noncommittally.
Do you wanna play it?
The woman shakes her head,
indicating no and that’s too bad at the same time.
We get into our cars and head home.
Next day, on the river,
Karin consults Boomer.
She’s the new dentist! Boomer explains.
I was at her office yesterday,
and she wanted to know
who had pianos.
She put herself through dental school
as a tuner.
I sent her to the school,
said, ‘There’s a piano there!’
Aha.
That evening, at yoga at the school/library,
Indra interrupts the usual flow of cues:
Excuse me. Does anyone know
Where there’s a piano here?
There’s a woman who’s asking.
Karin leaps from her mat.
I’ll show her!
I stay limp in the restorative pose,
a jellyfish with no bones left,
just the mere jiggle of breath.
I picture the dentist filling the gym
with thunderous Tchaikovsky
booming Beethoven
delicate Debussy -
waves of sound that gym has never felt before -
the climax of a desperate longing for piano fulfilled.
But at the end of class Karin is back at her mat.
Is she still playing? I ask.
No. She didn’t play very much.
She just wanted to see if it was in tune.
Now I picture her differently:
someone who simply can’t abide an off-key note.
Maybe someday she’ll slip back into the gym
(or into Karin’s house)
and with a slim sewn flannel case of dental implements
she’ll coax those strings into
pure tones again,
leave the town more harmonious
in her own peculiar way.
—Erin Robertson