Gender Readings. Top Ten. Ренц Т.Г - 49 стр.

       In a few weeks, I got a note from Mr Parker enclosed in a thank-
you note to my parents. It said that piano lessons would begin the
following Wednesday.
       I went to the Parkers’ after school. Everything was the same.
I warmed up for fifteen minutes. Mr Parker played, and I repeated it.
In the solarium were the usual cookies and lemonade.
       “Are they good, these cookies?” Mr Parker asked.
       I said they were.
       “I made them yesterday,” he said. “I’ve got to be my own
baker now”.
       Mr Parker’s hair had once been blond, but was greying into
the colour of straw, Both he and Mrs Parker seemed to have faded
out of some bright time they once had lived in. He was very thin, as if
the friction of living had burned every unnecessary particle off him,
but he was calm and cheery in the way you expect plump people to
be. On teaching days, he always wore a blue cardigan, buttoned, and a
stri ped tie.Both smelled faintly of tobacco.At the end of the lesson,
he gave me a robin’s egg he had found. The light was flickering through
the bunch of roses in the window as I left.
       When I got home, I found my mother in the kitchen, waiting
and angry.
       “Where were you?” she said.
       “At my piano lesson.”
       “What piano lesson?”
       “You know what piano lesson. At Mr Parker’s.”
       “You didn’t tell me you were going to a piano lesson,” she said.
       “I always have a lesson on Wednesday.”
       “I don’t want you having lessons there now that Mrs Parker’s
gone,” She slung a roast into a pan.
       I stomped off to my room and wrapped the robin’s egg in a sweat
sock. My throat felt shrivelled and hot.
       At dinner, my mother said to my father, “I don’t want Jane
taking piano lessons from Mr Parker now that Mrs Parker’s gone.”
       “Why don’t you want me to have lessons?” I said, close to
shouting. “There’s no reason.”
       “She can study with Mrs Murchison”. Mrs Murchison had been
my first teacher. She was a fat, myopic woman who smelled of bacon
grease and whose repertoire was confined to “Little Classics for Chil-


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