House Arrest

The Devil Plays Uno February 8, 2011

In the cul-de-sac, I parked by a snow bunker the street plows had formed on someone’s lawn. The short daylight had faded an hour ago, and the street was lit up by an amber glow from nearby strip malls. I heard the faint thrum of traffic from the highway a mile away. The flat, midwestern landscape hid nothing. I took a deep breath of the chill air, and then got my violin from the trunk.

Playing fiddle is how I keep my sanity in the winter, and after a few years learning by the seat of my pants, I decided to take some classical violin lessons and see what I was capable of. But I was always a little out of sorts in my teacher’s neighborhood. It was a suburban development like so many others, and not unlike the ones I had grown up in, but I hadn’t lived in one for decades. A contractor leveled this patch of unimproved land outside the highway, and a weedy crop of two story houses, built of gypsum and pine and concrete, sprung up overnight with streets named after the few remaining trees left behind. At least, that’s how I imagined it happened, though it would have been ten or twenty years before I arrived to town. I didn’t blame the home owners. They needed a place to live, and there was a limited supply of drafty, expensive eighty year old homes on the market, so what alternative did they have? But the prefabness of the neighborhood, extended over acres and acres of what was once post-glacial woodlands depressed me along with the gun metal winter skies and the paranoid rhetoric of the local papers.

The studio was in a small room at the very front of her house. Through the picture window, I saw a young girl, maybe six, sitting in a small chair and holding a violin in her lap like a baby doll that she was not thinking about but instinctively knew not to let drop.

I was early. Outside on the stoop, I kicked the clinging snow off my shoes, and opened the front door. The house was typical of a young, new parents, the walls pressboard white, the floors a non-descript laminate, and the furniture serviceable, modern, and sparse. At the end of the short hall, Dad was in the kitchen in a suit and tie, washing dishes in the sink, with a toddler holding unsteadily to his leg. I was about to call hello, but the boy’s mouth opened and out came a scream that had been building up for a good ten seconds before I had walked in the door. Dad knelt down and said comforting, apologetic words; he must have dropped something on the boy’s head. I decided to not disturb them.

There was no coat rack, closet, or wall hooks in the hallway, but there was a carpet remnant to keep the slush from spreading. I put my shoes on it next to a pair of Sorrels and, folding my coat and hat, laid them neatly on top. To my left, through the closed door of the studio, I heard the slow, creaky notes of a scale being dragged unwillingly out of a student violin with a student bow. Inwardly I winced, remembering those days and wishing they were farther behind me. I slipped into the living room on the right, thinking to take out my fiddle and warm up, run through  some scales, wondering if that would be too disturbing, when I noticed two people in the living room.

A father and young daughter were sitting on the floor playing cards. The girl was quiet and watchful, waiting for her pink, clean-shaven father to take his turn. It must have been her older sister next door who was pulling out notes like bad teeth. I didn’t know the father, but I recognized the girl right away from my last lesson. I was unlikely to forget her.

Dad smiled and said hello to me, in the friendly, chattering way of young parents who have spent far too much too much time reading popup books and listening to repetitive, electronic, learning toys. He was quite ready to let the game hang for two, five, even ten minutes just to have an adult conversation, sweet manna in the desert of parenting preschoolers. He chatted. He told me about Uno, the game they were playing, about how the manufacturer redesigned the game and made it much worse, and how he had been looking for the original set to buy, and finally they re-introduced it, and Target was selling them for a dollar, and he bought three sets, one for them, one for grandpa, and an extra set, just in case. He spoke to me and to his daughter, but the girl said nothing. She just looked up at her father, patiently waiting, and since I was looking at the girl, he noticed her waiting and played his turn. When he paused, I introduced myself, and he did likewise for himself and his daughter.

“Yes, I know Sophia,” I said. “I met her a couple of weeks ago. She was sitting in that chair in the corner, and she caught my eye, because when I looked at her, despite her innocent, cherubic face, there was something odd and almost sinister about her, and then I realized there was smoke rising up over her head from behind the chair.”

Dad’s eyes opened a little wider, “Oh, I heard about you! You’re the one who stopped the fire.”

“Well, I don’t know about a fire,” I said, warming to my little tale. “There was a little plastic lamp on the floor in the corner, shaped like a bowl, with a halogen bulb inside. I think it was under-lighting for their Christmas tree. The tree was already gone by then, but the lamp was still there. Something plastic inside was burning, maybe something had fallen off the tree. It gave off a tendril of smoke, and it didn’t smell very good. Sophia didn’t seem to notice, so rather than alarm her, I said, ‘Excuse me,’ and reached behind the chair and unplugged the lamp. Then I got Ellen. ‘Sorry to interrupt your lesson,’ I said, ‘but I think your house is on fire.’ Of course it wasn’t really, and when we came back, Sophia was still sitting in the chair, perfectly unperturbed, although the room stunk of burning plastic.”

At the sound of her name, Sophia gave me an attentive look, but when I didn’t say anything more, she turned back and played a card. Then her Dad put a card down and significantly left his finger pointing at it, “You have to pick up four cards now, sweetie,” he said. He repeated “four” while holding up as many fingers. Sophia picked up the first card from the deck.

“What does the name ‘Sophia’ mean?” I asked, while watching her drop the card carelessly on the floor inside her crossed legs.

Dad, was examining his cards. Without looking up, he answered, “Um, I don’t know, actually.”

“I feel like I ought to. It’s familiar.” Sophia looked at her Dad, and then picked up a second card and placed it  in her hand. “Oh, wait,” I said, “Philosophy, or rather philo-Sophia, isn’t that ‘love of learning’ or ‘love of wisdom?’ I think it means ‘wisdom.’”

Dad pulled a one-sided grin. “She’s certainly smart. She’s a wiz at Uno, and I have to think very carefully when I play against her. Of course, well … do you know how she used to play? Tell him, Sophia.” He looked at Sophia, who was studying her cards for the first time since I entered the room. “No? Well, she used to cheat.”

He said it fondly, proud of her precociousness, watching for my reaction.

“Was she any good?”

“At Uno?”

“No, at cheating.”

“Oh, yes, she was very good. She used to arrange the deck ahead of time, and hide a couple of cards in her lap, and if you weren’t looking, she would slip you a card that you didn’t want.” He chuckled at the memory of it. “But she doesn’t cheat anymore. She doesn’t need to. She’s too good even without cheating.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Sophia quietly pick up the card she had dropped earlier in her lap. Her Dad turned back to her, “Did you take your four cards, sweetie?”

She nodded yes, and Dad picked up a card. I said nothing, but shared a meaningful glance with Sophia. Had I known her better, I would have winked. When her sister appeared and I went in for my lesson, I realized I was in better spirits than I had been when I first arrived.