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atom, inventing an elaborate story. It seemed like a paradox, yet it must be so. She knew other people were real because she thought about them. Her thinking of her parents and her brothers, her school friends, was proof that they were real. They were both outside and in her head. But how could she be sure she was in anyone’s head?
    When she played the piano, her doubts subsided. The music was undeniably real—it never occurred to her to question that. And if she was producing it, well, then, the music conferred its reality on her. Even more, her touching the notes in a certain way made something in the world happen—sound, music—and that in turn made something happen in people’s minds. They listened and heard, they nodded, they smiled with pleasure and appreciation. If they were more than simple clods, they even felt something. The sounds she produced changed them. The making of the music and the hearing of it, and what happened inside the listeners—that was all real beyond a doubt. That was the kind of reality she could trust and rest in. It was she who made it happen, and it was their knowledge of that fact that confirmed her existence.
    So when her father would summon her from downstairs, make her leave off reading on her bed or dressing her paper dolls, meticulously folding the little tabs at the shoulders and wrists and feet—the shoes were especially hard to do—and call her to entertain the visiting friends and relatives, even though
she hated being displayed like a rare piece of merchandise that had miraculously fallen into his possession, she was lured as well. She slumped down the stairs slowly, like someone anticipating an ordeal, yet she knew that at the end of the ordeal would come the irresistible reward. It was not so much the attention, the astonished faces, the praise. It was the hugely satisfying certainty of her own existence—the music being heard, received, responded to. And so she colluded with her father at the same time as she resented his pressure, his vulgarity, his overweening pride in what he had nothing to do with. He was a musical dullard; the music genes came from her mother’s side of the family, all of them good singers, a distant uncle even a cantor in a Queens synagogue.
    There was no use protesting, in any case, at least not when she was so young. She could be stubborn but was no match for her father, older, bigger, with that deep hoarse voice. He never actually threatened her with any punishment if she refused—his worst punishments were the glares, the muttered words of his displeasure—but in the face of his badgering, sometimes accompanied by the badgering of the guests, her child’s will deflated and collapsed.
    When she was older, ten or eleven, she bitterly resented the command performances. The allure was gone; she no longer needed them. She could do it for herself, confirm her own reality, anytime she chose. But still she obeyed; it was habit, the easier path. And she was old enough and cunning enough to grasp that possessing her and putting her on display was her father’s way of reassuring himself of his own reality. Still, when the brief performances were over—one piece was usually enough to prove his point—she was flushed with excitement.
Her eyes shone, her skin was lustrous. She was Suzanne, the prodigy, the child who had the special gift. Her gratification was utterly unlike her father’s, more inward, more simple, less selfish.
    Her mother had used that word, “gift,” when she first discovered it. “She has a gift. A natural gift,” she announced to the family. At the time, Suzanne was barely four. She thought a gift was something you were given on your birthday, wrapped in paper and tied with ribbons. A toy, a book, something to wear. You tore it open, shredding the noisy colorful paper, while people watched, and then you were supposed to say thank you whether you liked it or not.