Tuba Notes

A goddamn tuba. Of all the insufferable instruments MaryAnn’s tone-deaf children had picked, her youngest and least talented had chosen the loudest, most reverberating. Even worse, he showed no sign of losing interest.

By now her former drummer and clarinetist would have given up, broken their respective sticks or reeds, and sworn off all music forever. But Henry—sweet, cherubic Henry, the child that had shown the most promise of never gravitating toward an instrument and sticking to an art the Mathis’s excelled in: accounting—came home from school one day announcing his intentions of not only studying the giant brass wonder, but becoming the greatest the world had ever known. And with only three valves to make notes, he even had MaryAnn convinced it was possible.

But then he brought the monstrosity home.

The bus driver had watched with a pitying smile as Henry dragged the case across the street, its plastic scraping loose stones over the pavement. MaryAnn rushed to help him, but he stopped her. His teacher told him he needed to treat the tuba as if it were an extension of his arm. Not wanting to ruin the boy’s joy, MaryAnn let him continue making his way, hoping the teacher’s advice would hold up in the future Mathis vs School battle when the road eventually got the best of the expensive instrument. Having survived its first street crossing, the tuba was then subjected to an afternoon, evening, and night of playing the alleged E note. That night as they sat in bed, MaryAnn and her husband looked at each other: three days, they mouthed.

With her other children, the initial excitement of rushing home from school and spending hours practicing lasted all of three days. This was followed by two weeks of parental coaxing and bribing for them to practice their instruments in an effort to ease the sting that came with needlessly shelling out hundreds of dollars. Eventually came the surrender on both sides, with MaryAnn promising to make sure all future grandchildren found instruments of their own.

By their third child, they had wisened up and borrowed from the school’s supply. But alas, the three days came and went, as did the two weeks, and two more. Instead of forcing Henry to at least practice during commercial breaks, he refused to ever stop. The E note had yet to improve but it was marginally better than the other notes he came home daily to attempt. MaryAnn was beginning to think that perhaps it was the tuba’s fault for sounding so poorly—no person on Earth who put in the amount of hours as Henry did could still sound so terrible. If it took 10,000 hours to become an expert in a skill, surely he must be at least halfway there?

Henry’s doing just fine, Mr. Scott assured her.

“But when does it start to sound like music? I could tolerate Mary had a Little Lamb, but it sounds like a naval brigade testing their foghorns every day.”

“He just needs more practice under his belt. If he keeps practicing through the summer, I bet you won’t even remember the days he struggled.”

Summer. The word turned her stomach. SUMMER!? Would he truly keep this up through the summer? No. Most assuredly he would not. He would be drawn to the warm weather, of wanting to spend time with his friends, of his mother’s agony. But the boy who used to bike to the park everyday now sat firmly planted in his kid’s chair practicing. 

MaryAnn tried to feign he was turning blue, that it was dangerous for him to blow another note for at least the next two hours; doubled his list of chores which he completed all before she had finished her first cup of coffee; and when she instilled new rules that during nice days all children must play outside from breakfast until dinner, it rained for two weeks. Henry wanted to play, and the universe wanted to hear it.

“Why do you like the tuba so much?” MaryAnn asked him one morning as she laid on the couch with an ice pack over her eyes. He was demonstrating the double-dare F Sharp note. Not an actual note, no, it came to Henry in a dream. But to MaryAnn, it could have been the G note from yesterday. Or the E.

“It’s the biggest instrument. If you’re walking in a parade, everyone knows who you are.”

“And that’s a good thing?” She thought of Henry playing in their local Founder’s Day Parade. Everyone would know which one he was, that was certain.

“It’s better than playing a flute. You can only hear them if no one else is playing,” he stated much too matter-of-factly for a fourth grader.

The flute, she groaned. If only he had chosen the flute. Who knew three valves on one instrument had the capacity to induce so much torture.

On occasion, when going to the mailbox, MaryAnn would see a neighbor look toward her. She had considered apologizing, even sending out notes to each house explaining the situation and assuring them that her’s was far worse. But with her own head bogged down by tuba notes, the written ones never went out.

“Screw ‘em,” she said, headed straight for a wine cooler at ten in the morning. If her neighbors didn’t like the tuba, then they--unlike her--could just move away.

Before MaryAnn knew it, the kids were already complaining about going back to school and suddenly she saw the light. She promised the universe she would never take for granted tuba practice being subjected only to the evening hours if she was given the strength to survive the final ten days.

Less than two weeks later, the familiar scraping of the hard plastic across the pavement could be heard entering the bus. 

Victory.

MaryAnn had done it and all without purposely jamming cotton swabs through her eardrums. Emphatically she waved as Henry’s bus transported him to his first day of fifth grade. She would soon enter a quiet house where she was free to think and exist without brass jostling her bones. 

“You’re quite happy this morning,” an elderly neighbor retrieving the newspaper called across the lawn.

“It’s been a long summer,” she winked, hoping her drift was understood.

“I myself am a little sad.”

“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

“I was enjoying your boy’s practising.”

“Were you really?”

“He’s certainly not very good,” the neighbor said with a shrug. “But after so many years alone, I found his consistency comforting.”

“I’ll send you a recording then,” MaryAnn said with a laugh before returning inside. 

For the first time in months, she heard the door close behind her, the clock marking each second, and her coffee pot percolating. For the first time in months, she saw Henry’s little chair empty. No tuba notes would come from it today. In fact, after his growth spurt over the summer he would need a larger chair. MaryAnn realized what she had lost by gaining silence. With a tear, she begged the universe to allow her one more summer of his playing all day long.