"Hoffman-KeySignatures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Abbie)

Sitting at her window in the bank, she wondered what the other tellers would say
if they knew of her secret life. Most of them went home to television and
children and exhaustion; to Zita it felt odd how her present life was
fragmenting within itself, her job in one fragment, her fiddle class in another,
and the grange dances in a third, different sets of people in each fragment,
though Bill and Angus and a few other fiddle students overlapped two.

The granges were miles out of town, and gathered dancers and musicians from
their local populations, she never saw people in town that she had met at the
granges, aside from fiddle class people. She felt like a superhero. She could
put on a whole different set of clothes and assume another identity, flirting
and dancing with the men, gossiping with the women, pretending she was a country
girl when she had spent most of her life in metropolitan areas. They knew
nothing about her, but they accepted her without question. At first she knew
nothing about them. She gathered bits and snippets of information and took them
home to warm her in the silence of her apartment.

On her first night she had listened to the musicians and realized none of them
would ever make a record. Some of the fiddlers were talented and some were very
untalented. After six three-hour classes she could play a tune as well as the
worst of them, better than a few. The guitar players just played chords and kept
time. An occasional bull fiddle, mandolin, harmonica, or banjo lent spice to
some of the meetings, but even without them the dances went fine. Some people
sang but their voices weren't the kind you heard on the radio; syllables got
swallowed, pitch varied from true, and sometimes they forgot the words.

When she shook off her competitive edge she started listening in a different
way. She heard the music saying something in a language she could almost
understand. It had warmth in it, an invitation. Come. Here is home. Her heart
wanted to open, but the scar tissue was too thick.

She got books of lyrics out of the library and studied the words to the tunes
she had learned on the fiddle, "Take These Chains," "You Are My Sunshine," "Have
I Told You Lately that I Love You," "The Wild Side of Life," "Wildwood Flower."
Most of the songs had been written thirty or forty years earlier. That made
sense. Most of the musicians and dancers were upwards of fifty; one of the
fiddlers was eighty-seven, another ninety-one.

Some of the other tunes had titles but no words, and those, she thought, were
older, brought to this new world from over the sea, passed down through
families, trailing history with them; some had probably originated in the
mountains to the East. Most of the people at the granges came from out of state,
Minnesota, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee.

Travelers, like she was, ending up in Oregon, as she had. Jetsam, washed up on
this particular beach.

The Thursday night after class had disbanded for the summer, Bill called Zita
and asked her if she'd like to go play music in Kelly's garage. Zita had picked