ISEE Practice Test 12

The Tuner's Apprentice

¹  The summer I turned fifteen, my uncle Teodor hired me to carry his

²tool case. He tuned pianos for a living, driving from town to town in a

³van that smelled of felt and coffee, and he claimed he needed someone to

⁴hold the flashlight. I suspected my mother had arranged the job to keep

⁵me out of trouble, but I took it anyway, mostly because he paid in cash

⁶at the end of each week.

⁷  The first house we visited belonged to a retired music teacher whose

⁸piano had not been played in years. Uncle Teodor lifted the lid, struck

⁹a single key, and winced as if someone had stepped on his foot. Then he

¹⁰struck it again and listened, his head tilted, for a long time. I heard

¹¹nothing wrong at all. To me, the note sounded like every other note I

¹²had ever heard: loud, then quieter, then gone.

¹³  "Listen for the wobble," he said. He played two keys together, and

¹⁴this time I caught it: a faint throbbing inside the sound, like a moth

¹⁵fluttering behind a curtain. As he turned the tuning pin with his

¹⁶wrench, a fraction of a turn at a time, the throbbing slowed, and

¹⁷slowed, and then simply stopped. The two notes melted into one clean

¹⁸tone. I must have looked astonished, because he laughed. "It was always

¹⁹there," he said. "You just never had a reason to hear it."

²⁰  By August I could hear the wobble in nearly every piano we opened, and

²¹in other places, too: in the hum of the refrigerator, in two car horns

²²sounding at once. It was not always a pleasant gift. Some evenings the

²³whole world seemed slightly out of tune.

²⁴  On our last day, the teacher played a hymn on her repaired piano and

²⁵cried a little at the end. Uncle Teodor packed his tools without a word,

²⁶but in the van he handed me the wrench to hold, not the flashlight, and

²⁷I understood that something between us had changed.