Or trade the memory of this night for food.

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

man is making friends with death

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I wander’d off by myself,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

"She just scared you," I said. "You're a chicken. You're a chicken, Wayne. You are. Scared of a little card," I singsonged.  Wayne fell at me, his two fists hammering down on my nose. I gave him a good one in the stomach and then I tried for his head. Aiming my fist, I saw that he was crying. I slugged him. 

"That one? That one means you will die soon, my dear." She gathered up the cards. We were all looking at Wayne. "But do not fear," she said. "It's not really death, so much as change." She put the cards on Mr. Hibler's desk. "And now, let's do some arithmetic."

Not  bad," she said. "I do not see much higher education. Probably an early marriage. Many children. There's something bleak and dreary here, but I can't tell what. Per­haps just the tasks of a housewife life. I think you'll do very well, for the most part."  She smiled at Carol, a smile with a certain lack of interest. "Who wants to be next?"

her hair hung straight down and seemed hardly to have been combed.

sumac

You're look­ing a little pale, Tommy." She touched the back of her hand to my forehead and I felt her diamond ring against my skin. "Do you feel all right?" 

"She was fine. Mom," I asked, "can I go to my room?"

Beethoven, she said, had not been deaf; it was a trick to make himself famous, and it worked.

She said that the biggest diamond in the world was cursed and had killed everyone who owned it,

"Did you hear me?" my mother asked, raising her arm to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand. "You have chores to do." 

My mother

ou ever see an animal that was half lion and half bird?

Without glancing down at the book, she began to talk about the movement of souls in Egyptian religion. She said that when people die, their souls return to Earth in the form of carpenter ants or walnut trees, depending on how they behaved­"well or ill"-in life. She said that the Egyptians believed that people act the way they do because of magnetism produced by tidal forces in the solar system, forces pro­duced by the sun and by its "planetary ally," Jupiter. Jupiter, she said, was a planet, as w}had been told, but had "certain properties of stars." She was speaking very fast. She said that the Egyptians were great explorers and conquerors. She said that the greatest of all the conquerors, Genghis Khan, had had forty horses and forty young women killed on the site of his grave. We listened. No one tried to stop her. "I my­self have been in Egypt," she said, "and have witnessed much dust and many brutal­ities." She said that an old man in Egypt who worked for a circus had personally shown her an animal in a cage, a monster, half bird and half lion. She said that this monster was called a gryphon and that she had heard about them but never seen them until she traveled to the outskirts of Cairo. She said that Egyptian astronomers had discovered the planet Saturn, but had not seen its rings. She said that the Egyp­tians were the first to discover that dogs, when they are ill, will not drink from rivers, but wait for rain, and hold their jaws open to catch it.  

"I hate a mess," Miss Ferenczi said. "I hate a mess in a desk or a mind. It's ... unsanitary. You wouldn't want your house at home to look like your desk at school, now, would you?" She didn't wait for an answer. "I should think not. A house at home  should be as neat as human hands can make it

fossicking

"that is what we will do: the Egyptians. A remark­able people. Almost as remarkable as the Americans. But not quite

"I talked with the other teachers before class this morning," Miss Ferenczi said, biting into her brown food. "There was a great rattling of the words for the fewness of ideas. I didn't care for their brand of hilarity. I don't like ditto machine jokes." 

"I don't like that word either," Miss Ferenczi whispered, bent over, her mouth near my ear. "It's ugly. My feeling is, if you don't like a word, you don't have to use it." She straightened up, leaving behind a slight odor of Clarets. 

what's the problem?" 

"In higher mathematics,

She sighed every few minutes and rubbed her glasses with a frilly perfumed handkerchief that she withdrew, magician style, from her left sleeve. 

A pledge does not suit my mood

Miss Ferenczi,

She clapped her hands at us

Five Oaks being a rural community

Carol Peterson's evil giggle

brown-noser

Carol Peterson

Mr. Hibler, developed a cough.

After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that I remembered. Really, it was a very good piano.

"You just not trying," my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad.

And even worse, I never asked her about what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope? For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped. The lid to the piano was closed, shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.

"Too late to change this," my mother said shrilly.

"I'm not going to play anymore," I said nonchalantly. "Why should I? I'm not a genius." She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way.  "No!" I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along. "No! I won't!" I screamed.  She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She

I didn't budge. And then I decided, I didn't have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one.

But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom.

my mother complained

So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn't stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes staying with me all the way.

I had on a white dress, layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people jumping to their feet and

My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle Tin were there.

So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance.

our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It's like you can't stop this natural talent." 

Auntie Lindo’s daughter, Waverly

I was so determined not to try

reverie

She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China:

He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios.

I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that sounded like a cat running up and down on top of garbage cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and say Very good! But now you must learn to keep time!"

Mr. Chong

“Why don't you like me the way I am?" I cried. "I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!"

my mother had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six.

"Ni kan," my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. "Look here."

So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored

I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not.

And after seeing, once again, my mother's disappointed face, something inside me began to die.

The tests got harder

My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned

My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.

But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. "If you don't hurry up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good," it warned. “And then you'll always be nothing."

clamor

sulk,