MCAS Practice Test 1

from *The Listening Room* by Ilse Darrow

¹The piano had come down from the Fenwick house on a flatbed truck, wrapped in moving blankets like something injured, and for three days it had stood in the middle of the shop while Delia pretended not to look at it. It was a 1912 upright with a walnut case gone cloudy at the corners, and when her grandfather lifted the fallboard on the first morning, the keys looked like a row of old teeth.

²“Mrs. Fenwick's mother played this at her wedding,” Abel said. “She wants it ready by Saturday. Her granddaughter is getting married in the same parlor.”

³“Then you'd better start,” Delia said. She was sixteen and had been sentenced (her word) to a summer in Abel's shop because her mother believed that a girl who spent all of June on her phone needed “something real to put her hands on.” So far the something real had been sandpaper, felt strips, and a radio that received only one station, which played polkas.

⁴Abel did not start. He sat on the bench with his palms on his knees and studied the piano the way other people study a stranger at a bus stop, as if deciding whether to speak. Then he pressed middle C and held it, and Delia watched his head tilt toward the sound, then a little farther, then farther still, until his ear was nearly against the wood.

⁵“Hand me the lever,” he said.

⁶She handed him the tuning lever, and for the rest of the morning she sanded a drawer front and listened to him work. He would strike a note, turn the pin a hair, strike it again. Sometimes he struck the same note eleven or twelve times. Around noon he set the lever down on the music shelf with a click that sounded, to Delia, almost like an apology.

⁷“Come here,” he said.

⁸She came. He struck the A above middle C, and then the A below it. “Tell me what you hear.”

⁹“Two notes.”

¹⁰“Listen past the notes.”

¹¹She rolled her eyes, but she listened. Under the two tones something moved—a faint throbbing, a waver like heat above a road. “It's . . . wobbling?”

¹²“Beats,” Abel said. “When two strings are almost in agreement, they argue. That's the argument. You turn the pin until the argument stops.” He held the lever out to her, handle first.

¹³“You're the one who knows how.”

¹⁴“I know how,” he agreed. “I don't hear it anymore. Not the high ones.” He said it the way he might have said the shop needed a new lightbulb, and that was what made Delia's throat tighten. For weeks she had noticed things without letting herself add them up: the radio turned louder each afternoon, the customers he asked to repeat themselves.

¹⁵“Does Mom know?”

¹⁶“Your mother knows I'm seventy-eight.” He nudged the lever toward her again. “Saturday, Delia.”

¹⁷She took it. The handle was warm from his hand and heavier than it looked, and the first time she fitted it over a pin and pulled, nothing happened at all. The second time the pin jumped, and the note went sour in a way even she could hear. She expected him to take the lever back. Instead he reached past her and played the A again, patiently, as if she had not just made things worse.

¹⁸They worked like that all afternoon and all of the next day. She turned; he played; she listened for the argument and tried to make it stop. Her shoulders ached. Twice she wanted to quit, and once she said so out loud, and Abel only shrugged and said that the piano had waited a hundred years and could wait while she complained. By Friday evening the middle of the keyboard was clean—she could hear it, a stillness where the waver had been—and she moved into the treble, where the strings were short and stubborn and the beats came so fast they were almost a buzz.

¹⁹It was nearly dark when she struck the last octave. The two notes rang out and came together and simply stopped arguing. She held the key down until the sound thinned to nothing.

²⁰Abel had been watching her, not the piano. “Well?” he said.

²¹“It's quiet,” she said, and realized she meant something more than the strings. “In the middle of it, I mean. It's quiet.”

²²He nodded as though she had told him the weather. Then he stood, slowly, and switched off the radio, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.