Refrain

by NTSTS

Chapter 4

When I graduated to high school, I took to leaving my metronome at home. There wasn’t enough time to spend with it during the few breaks between classes, and at that point most of my time was occupied with studying on theory, or for the subjects that seemed only to make themselves an obligation in the front of more practice, which is what I knew my mother wanted. When I did manage to find time to relax, in a sudden abatement of internal obligation or anxiousness, my mind went back to the same song it always did. I would mime the hoof movements on tables, or in an open textbook if I hit a passage that utterly failed to engage my interest. Not that the song was more interesting—by that point, it was simply rote memorization. I’d played my mother’s song so often I could do it in my sleep, which I think sometimes I did, waking up with my hooves raised above me in a mimicry of the chords I was so used to.

I was at lunch one day, pressing on invisible piano keys as I followed that familiar melody, when a scenario from my past saw fit to revisit itself. My lunch was gone from the table, with the leftovers nestled safely in my lunchbox which itself was tucked in my bag. Unlike the other ponies, whose parents could afford to buy them hot lunches, consisting of pizza and pasta and fancy desserts and other fabulous things I had never had, whatever money my mother was making seemed to go either to my music lessons, or to the unappealing sandwiches she insisted on packing for me every day, no matter how many times I told her I could make my own lunch. I think it might have been her way to try showing that she cared.

As I sat at my table in the corner by myself, as I often did, a familiar sense of dread washed over me with the approach of an unfamiliar pony. Just like the one in elementary school, her hair was some shade of blue—but so was the rest of her, with white highlights in her mane, and a cutie mark on her side in the shape of an hourglass. She gave me a huge smile as she walked closer, staring right at me. Her teeth glimmered underneath the cafeteria lighting.

“Hi-ya,” she said. She stopped a foot away, on my side of the table, still smiling. The ponies in the background eating their lunch and doing whatever else it was ponies do at that age, likely gossipping and discussing the finer points of the opposite sex.

“Hello,” I said. While growing up had pushed me face-first into a world where complete silence was simply not kosher, it didn’t make me any more comfortable about speaking to complete strangers, which, for all intents and purposes, everypony in my school was to me. I don’t even think the teachers remembered my name.

“Whatcha’ doin’ over here all by yourself? You look kinda bummed out.” Her voice had more enthusiasm than I think I’d ever be capable of exuding. I could feel the glimmer on her teeth as she spoke, and more than a bit of me wanted to jump up and run away just to escape her sudden onset cheerfulness.

“Just... eating lunch.”

“Well, it looks like you finished. Would you like some company?”

She sat down at the table without waiting for me to answer—not even the opposite end. She smiled at me from further down the bench on the side I was. I looked at her for a few seconds, then turned my eyes back to the table.

A few awful, awkward seconds went by.

“So,” she said. “You over here by yourself most of the time?”

Where did she get off asking those kind of questions in the first place? It was one thing, when youthful innocence meant somepony’s attempt to be friendly was simply them playing nicely with others. The de facto rule of high school, insofar as I could interpret it, was to be content to let other ponies wallow in their own lives. Even the few around the school who gave me odd looks and laughs when I walked by, always with my music books in hoof, didn’t ever approach me directly. There were horror stories about bullying... but that was all for other ponies. This was me. My world. My table, by myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t really feel like talking at the moment.

“Sorry,” I added again after a few seconds.

That didn’t seem to shake her at all. Her smile didn’t even waver.

“It’s okay,” she said. “My name’s Minuette. What’s yours?”

It was just like that day in elementary school. Being a teenager, the look I gave her was more ire than anxiousness, though that was mostly just to hide what I was really feeling at the time.

“Octavia,” I said. I let it hang in the air like a dead weight, hoping that if I gave in to her badgering she might relent and leave me to be contemplative and miserable in peace.

“Octavia, huh? Guess we both got stuck with the music names. That’s a treble clef cutie mark you have, right?”

I looked down to my side just as she did. I’ve always thought there was something untoward about openly staring at other pony’s cutie marks, so close to areas that should be devoid of attention. But, as I’d already noticed hers when she walked in, I suppose I wasn’t one to talk.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Cool. So that means you play an instrument, right?”

Like a rehearsal.

“I play the piano,” I said.

“Awesome! I’ve taken a few lessons too. Of course, when I got my cutie mark, my parents weren’t sure if I’d picked the right hobby or not—now even I’m not sure!”

Why was she talking to me? I’d said as plainly as I could that I didn’t feel like talking to her. Maybe subtlety wasn’t her strong suit.

“Please,” I said, adding the first weight of emotion to my voice. “I'm really not interested in conversation. I appreciate the thought if you’re trying to... do something nice by coming over here and talking to me, but really, I’d like it if you just left me alone.”

Minuette jumped up from the bench in an instant, her huge smile never leaving her face.

“No problem! You just looked like you could use someone to talk to.” She stepped away from the lunch table. “Lemme know if you change your mind, okay?”

And with that, she trotted away, sporting that stupid grin on her face, far more cheerful than she had any right to be.

I almost got up and asked for her to come back, but thought better of it in the end.

---

My birthday that year was another occasion for remembrance. Instead of fading away in the night, as all the ones I could most bear did, my mother took it upon herself to get me a present that year. It was waiting for me on the kitchen table when I got home, the living room table having long since been taken over by the various ornaments my mother had adorned the place in.

I looked around for her before opening the present, but oddly enough found myself alone in the house. It was such an unusual occurrence; I felt almost anxious as I tore the flowery wrapping paper off.

It was a songbook. A collection of famous operas and their accompanying refrains. Some of the titles I knew. Most I didn’t.

The front door opened behind me as I was leafing through the book, mumbling the notes under my breath, piecing out what some of the arias and other songs might sound like.

“Oh, you’re home early,” my mother said. She had a bag of something under her foreleg, groceries, and took a moment at the door to set it down and remove her coat. Her fine, fur-lined coat that she wore even when the weather must surely turn it into a sauna.

“I’m home at the same time I am every day, Mother.” It’s hard to put much feeling into a word like ‘Mother,’ which means that as a result, I didn’t often manage to do so.

“I see you opened your present without waiting for me,” she said, a familiar drip of ichor in her voice. I breathed out softly in response, too quiet to be a real sigh.

“I’m sorry, Mother.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine. I just would have enjoyed seeing your reaction myself. But, since you went ahead and got right into it, tell me what you think.”

“It’s a very nice songbook,” I said. I’m not sure if by that point in my life I had trained all the emotion out of my voice, or if it simply left because I was a teenager, and therefore possessed of the nature of all teenagers to be disdainful for life in general.

“Isn’t it though? I found it when I was thrift-shopping last week. I used to perform some of those, you know, back in my day.”

I didn’t say anything. Just nodded and went to help her with the groceries.

I was surprised to find pasta, sauce, and a bottle of wine amongst the other usuals.

“Mother, why did you buy—”

“Surprised? I thought we could have a special dinner, it being your birthday. A real artisan, foreign cuisine. And then perhaps you could play me a piece from your new book.”

I nodded. Pasta and piano. I suppose it was as much as I could have hoped for.

“Let me just have a glass of wine or two and I’ll get to making dinner,” my mother said, uncorking the bottle with a practiced expertise. Even though it was common knowledge than any store in town that sold alcohol would surely sell wine in a less expensive, less cumbersome boxed form, my mother always bought bottles. The wine cabinet was well-stocked, in that there was always one bottle, but never more. She would always drink it within days, then immediately go out to fetch a replacement.

“Bring me my cigarettes, would you dear?” she asked as she poured the bubbly red liquid into one of her tarnished wine glasses. I did as directed, tossing the packet of her smokes over. They landed on the table with a soft noise, and she smiled at me.

“I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

I nodded and went into my bedroom to look over my birthday gift. I was in no hurry to practice its contents.

Eventually, my mother called me down for dinner by belting my name up the stairs. When I was very young, she would yell it sometimes in moments of jest like it was a flourish in an operetta, embellishing it between notes and registers. It made me laugh, but she stopped doing it long before I reached high school. Now it was simply a shout: “Octavia!” Downstairs I went.

The table was set haphazardly. As she sometimes did when she felt the occasion called for it, my mother had taken out the ‘good’ table cloth, which meant too that the ‘fine china’ was out, only sporting nicks on every other dish, sparsely pockmarked amongst the white-blue swans and flowers painted over it. In the center of the table, a long magenta candle stood burning, flickering as its wick dwindled and it dropped great gobs of wax onto the china plate my mother had set it on.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

“Thank you.” I took my seat and eyed the meal my mother had prepared. It looked more edible than usual. I picked up the glass of wine next to my plate and took a drink. Manners, after all. Polite, proper. One does not refuse a drink. Swish in your mouth before swallowing.

“This really is lovely, isn’t it?” she asked, picking up a tiny noodle from her plate. She was always quicker to describe things in such vibrant terms. For me, it was certainly nicer than normal. But, alongside the questionably imported wine and mediocre pasta dish in front of me, I could hear the slur emerging in my mother’s voice. I wished I could see the bottle, but it was invisible, wherever it was, in the dim candlelight.

The meal passed in relative silence aside my mother’s occasional sigh.

“So,” she finally said, tucking her napkin under her plate and pushing it forward. “How are things? In general I mean. Or in school.” Ssschool. I could smell grapes over the table.

“Fine,” I said.

“Are you doing well in... in your studies?”

“Yes.”

“Have you made any friends?”

“No,” I said and then added, “not yet.”

My mother leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette.

“Ah, well. That will come with time. I never had any trouble making friends, of course. Things were different, then, but still. I was the mare-to-be at my school. Girls fighting each other to be my friends, stallions throttling each other just to ask for one date.”

“Mhm.” I sawed at one of the remaining noodles on my plate, breaking it into pieces as my mother went on.

“You’ll get there eventually, Octavia, dear. Everypony comes into their own eventually.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

The two of us sat there for a while, my mother’s head encircled by the wreath of smoke spreading from the end of her cigarette. Eventually, I pushed my chair back, though I didn’t stand.

“May I be excused?”

My mother took a final puff of her cigarette and put it out on the tablecloth, completely irreverent of the gilded edges already marred by several of her burns. Perhaps, in her inebriated haze, she thought the table was bare.

“Of course, of course. Does that mean you’ll play a song or two for me, from your new book?”

The night must come then. Practice, sight-reading.

“Yes.”

“Well, lovely then.” My mother stood from her seat and grabbed her glass from the table. She pulled the wine bottle, or perhaps a second one, from a spot I hadn’t noticed behind her chair, and poured herself a fresh glass, spilling a little over the edges in the process before setting the bottle back down.

I picked up the songbook and made my way to the music room. Mother followed on uneven footing.

“To the conservatory!” she said in a half-empty sort of way, and laughed to herself, coughing at the end.

I took up my seat at the bench and placed the book on top of the piano.

“Is there any one in particular you’d like me to play?” I asked, knowing that I may as well make the selection as painless as possible.

“There isss, actually,” my mother said, leaning over as she spoke and sloshing a bit of wine onto the carpet. She pawed at the book, flipping through the pages until she seemed to find the one she was looking for.

“Ah, this one. I performed when I wass young, you know. Lovely piece. Can you play that one?”

I looked over the sheet music. Relatively simple.

“Yes.”

My mother nodded. And so I began to play.

The piece opened with a somewhat uninteresting melody, single bass notes meant to lead in the main singer. As the proper vocalization approached, my right hoof moved upwards—and, at the same time, my mother opened her mouth and began to sing.

The words may have been right, according to what I could read on the page, though they were in a foreign language I didn’t recognize. What was nowhere near correct, however, was her delivery; while my hoof plucked out the notes at a relatively steady tempo, sure and secure in their tuning, my mother’s voice warbled in every direction, sloshing back and forth like the wine in her glass as her body moved. I tried to push her out of my mind, simply following along with what was on the page, knowing there was no reason in saying anything about her singing, nor would there ever be.

But it was her who stopped me. She held a hoof up to the book in front of the sheet I was reading, at which point I held my hooves still.

“No no no,” she burbled, tipping forward noticeably, her glass now almost completely empty. “You’re not playing that right. It doesn’t go like that in this part. It’s, it’s ma il mio...”

“I’m playing it as it’s written on the page, Mother.” Normally I would have found it easier simply to let her go on, but there would be no end to the torture if I let her find something to belittle me over. Lucklessly, wine is the sole champion over reason, and her hoof pressing on the page became more insistent, tapping at it over and over to seal her point.

“No,” she said again. “I knowthissong very well, young lady, and you were not playing that right. It’s... ma il mio, mist—”

I snapped the book away from her and held it towards her, pointing the notes right under her nose.

“Here,” I said. “Read that. Does that look like what you’re singing?”

Her eyes scanned the page for a few seconds. Even beneath the sheen of alcohol, I could see the sudden panic of ignorance in her face. After half a minute, her expression dulled again, and she pushed the book away.

“Looks fine to me,” she said, her ‘s’s blurring into incomprehensible garble. “Now, play it again, and play it right this time.”

I sighed and set the book on the piano again. Once more, I began the aria. Once more, as the vocal melody came in, my mother began to sing. This time her expression soured even earlier. Instead of tapping the book, she shoved me.

“Damn it,” she said, cursing in a voice that only brewed up when pickled in sour grapes. “Can’t jus’ play one thing for me? You’d thinkall those lessons I paid for would mean you can read a song book at leas’...”

I stood up and walked past her in the span of a few seconds. I knew she was in no state to follow me, which led me to my room and a forceful slam of the door.

I didn’t hear any sound from downstairs for a while, though burying my face in my pillow may have had something to do with that. After perhaps ten minutes, a knock came at the door.

“Octavia?” My mother’s voice outside my bedroom. Thank Celestia for the lock.

“Go away.” If I’d kept silent, it would have been a coin toss between victory and a four hours screaming defeat, and I was hoping to come out better in the middle ground.

“Octavia,” she said again. “I’m sorry. Won’t you come back downstairsss and... you don’t have to play anything. I just want to talk to you.”

“Go away.” I said the words and turned back to my pillow, muffling my urge to scream.

“Please,” she said. “I’m sorry. Come out and let’s enjoy the rest of your birthday.”

It was then that I held my tongue. After a few minutes, I heard the hoofsteps on the upstairs hallway, then the stairs as my mother left. A few minutes after that, faintly, I could hear the meandering touch of drunken hooves on keys, pressing the ones she’d taught me, warbling out a verse of the song she always sang. I shut my eyes and tried to think the song away.

It stopped after a few minutes. After a few more, I got up from my bed and opened my door. I walked down the stairs making as little noise as possible and found her there, passed out on the floor, a glass of wine spilled on the carpet. A cigarette smoldering on her other side.

Quietly, I picked up the cigarette and put it out, then went back upstairs to my room.

Comments

[Skeeter The Lurker]

How is one to come into their own if they aren't allowed to do so themselves?

What a hypocrite Octy's mother is...

~Skeeter The Lurker

[Sylentmana]

I feel like I can't say it enough. This story is great! The writing is so good, and if the author isn't a professional writer then I'd be surprised. I'm sorry I keep gushing over this story, but it honestly it the best one I've read so far.

[corona320]

smoky the bear says only you can stop wildfires.