In Defense of the Major 7th Chord

At some point in the last few weeks, in an unsupervised moment, my five year old son saw an advertisement for Stranger Things with the Gorgon’s face in it, horrible and splayed out like a dead flower. Rows of fangs. Painted in shadow and blood. This afternoon, the image was resurrected in his mind, and it was somehow my fault.

I am in charge of piano practices in our house because 35 years ago, I took piano lessons.

I only mention the piano lessons because it matters to the story that I am capable of picking out a tune, and I understand a lot about music without understanding any of it at all. I learned what is called “Suzuki method”, a Japanese style of teaching that came with the rigor of a martial arts program, including bowing to my teacher before and after each lesson. It also included countless hours of listening to cassette tapes. I wore them thin, watched them get eaten by the small player in my room, rescued and re-spooled their stringy black guts, and then played them again. The idea was that even if you didn’t know the exact notes to “Clair de Lune”, you’d hear the song so clearly in your head that could match your playing to it.

The week my teacher finally tried to introduce me to notes on a staff, I begged my parents to quit. They caved after delivering several rounds of “you’ll regret this forever.”

I’d go on to teach myself saxophone and trombone and guitar without being able to read a lick of music. I played in a series of awful bands. I even played piano in one of them. Then, all these years later, I tried to resuscitate these atrophied skills when the youngest started piano lessons. What I mean by all of this is that it wasn’t my fault.

There is still some sort of Suzuki “residue” kicking around up there, so when he said he wanted to learn the Mario Brothers song, I said “OK,” with some reasonable amount of confidence that I’d have most of it down in a minute or two. We walked together to the piano bench and I reminded him “I only have like 15 minutes before I need to go to the doctor, so I–”

“Am I going with you?”

“What? No. I just have to go because of my shoulder.”

“Can I come with you?”

“No, just let me figure out this song, please.”

“Why does your shoulder hurt?” His voice grew smaller. He reached up toward me and cupped his hands around the muscles of my arm and squeezed. I don’t know if he meant it as an expression of kindness or curiosity. I didn’t answer his question.

I didn’t know the Mario Brothers theme, except that it had a common set of ascending intervals walking up a major chord (playing the root, the third, and the fifth consecutively) in the opening phrase. So I told the kid to sit tight for a second, and I played the ascending intervals, and then for some reason, jumped up to the 7th.

“Doesn’t that sound pretty?”

“That’s not how it goes.”

In my defense, the Major 7th is a very pretty chord — albeit not one you find often. Jeff Buckley used to throw it around a lot. It’s all over Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow”. I wouldn’t know what it was if you showed it to me on a music staff, but the major 7th has a recognizable feel to me. It feels like a question. More specifically, a major 7th chord feels like the sort of question you wrote on a small piece of paper, folded in half, and then slid onto your 5th grade crush’s desk while the teacher’s back was turned.

Do you like me?

Check one.

Yes No

But the problem is not in the beauty of a major 7th chord. The problem is that when you play quickly, with four notes in a row going up, touching the octave and heading back down (as I did in a moment of absent-minded exploration and curiosity while fumbling for the opening notes for the Mario Brothers theme), it is immediately recognizable as part of the theme to Stranger Things.

I didn’t know he had ever even heard of the show. I didn’t know he had seen a Gorgon in an ad for the show, or that he knew what it was, or thought it was real or that the ad featured the theme song. I didn’t know that I was conjuring up some sort of horror in his mind. I just watched him slouch forward and start to cry. But the major 7th is a pretty chord, and I didn’t know that it was me, so I just kept arpeggiating. I thought maybe he was just mad that it wasn’t Mario.

I am a litany of mistakes. I am a library.

He finally blurted out that he hated that song because “Are gorgons real?”

I stopped. We tried to talk about what a gorgon is and why his whole face is his mouth and how being afraid makes you hurt in your heart and isn’t it silly sometimes that adults like to feel afraid sometimes because that’s fun for them, and I’m so sorry, I didn’t know, I’m sorry. I was calm about it. He sat there next to me and we just talked.

As it was happening, I kept thinking to myself, Look at this! Fucking father of the year shit right here. And I meant it. I kept thinking, look at me, I’m doing the stuff from the books, and then his big brother came dancing into the room with impeccably terrible timing and shouted “Are you guys talking about the gorgon?!” He held his hands up to his face and covered it, then suddenly opened them and roared. As Gorgon impressions go, it wasn’t bad.

The youngest was in tears again. So overcome with the heavy sobs of a cry that nothing coming out of his mouth makes sense. He slumped all the way off the bench onto the ground.

I gave his brother a look and the impression ended.

I’d talked to my five-year-old piano player about chord shapes before. Practices used to be games we’d play. Swim like a fish into the kitchen, then come back and play an F note. Now jump like a Kangaroo into the kitchen, then come back and play a D note. I blindfolded him and had him guess whether I was playing notes going up or notes going down. Then I played major (“happy”) and minor (“sad”) chords and had him guess which was which. I made a whole mystery for him where he had to fill in the blanks with the notes I played in order to solve a crime.

I was in a C-A-F-E

when my B-A-G

was stolen by a D-A-D

with an angry F-A-C-E.

The evidence is under the B-E-D.

But even those were practices that he endured only for as long as he had to. The rule was that after practice, he can play video games, and while I am both author and enforcer of the rule, I didn’t understand it. His new favorite game was a pink ball-shaped character who somersaults and rolls forward over a racetrack made of desserts, gobbling up as many strawberries as possible. You get to the end, and whoever’s ball-shaped character is the fattest (from eating the most strawberries) is the winner.

That’s it.

That’s the whole game.

He checked it out of the library last week, because checking out video games from the library is a thing you can do now. While he and his brother were looking through the games, I pulled a book off the shelf of “New Arrivals” because I liked the title. The actual book doesn’t matter, but the epigraph was a quote from Emil Cioran, who said that a book should be the things “you would never dare confide to anyone.” I wonder what he would have thought about the somersaulting ball-man, sucking strawberries into his gaping mouth. I wonder what he would have thought about us carrying a game to the library check-out counter instead of a book with him in the epigraph.

I think Cioran is wrong, by the way. It doesn’t have to be brave. You don’t have to carve it out of yourself. What a stupid mandate. It just has to be true. It can be mundane and true. It can be losing your shit because you’ve tried and failed for the twelve-teen hundredth time to get the boy to just make it all the way through a piano lesson.

“I can’t do this right now! I have a doctor’s appointment anyway!” I shouted at the boy in tears underneath the piano, but it was too little too late. The small room was already descending into chaos. The five year old was screaming. His brother was doing some sort of crab dance, kicking at the edge of the rug. The dog, who is a herding breed, was sprinting in circles around both of them at breakneck speed like she does sometimes when the room is spinning with anger and arguments. I was still shouting about how neither of them had even seen the show, so how could you get traumatized from a commercial and you absolutely have got to shut up for a second, because I can’t even hear your brother crying and somebody get the fucking dog. I handed the oldest one both the television remote and begged them not to fight. “I don’t have time for a fight right now, OK?”

A small voice came from a boy-shaped lump near the piano’s pedals. “Is piano practice over?”

“Yes it’s over. Go watch TV with your brother.” I was out of breath.

The dog stopped for a moment, looked at me, then resumed her running but in the opposite direction.

The youngest sat up, pulled a sleeve across both eyes to dry them, and bounced toward the couch. He had been miraculously healed, it seemed, from the excruciating and devastating pain of a piano lesson. “Can I play switch?”

“Why can’t you just do songs that are in the book?” I asked.

He didn’t even turn to look at me. The switch controller was already in his hand. “I wanted to learn the Mario song.”

I walked out of the room and tried to find my breath.

The dog followed me into the front room, sort of trotting along next to me with a big dumb grin on her face. I didn’t know if dogs can smile, but she looked pretty happy about everything that had just happened. She looked happy about me finding my shoes and my keys and I rubbed her head a bit and she smiled about that too. I love her, but there’s absolutely nothing going on up there.

I turned to check on the boys before I opened the front door. “Tell mom I’m at the doctor,” I shouted.

I kept the radio off for the entire drive. No noise but the road. No complaining about who is on whose side of the back seat, or the temperature of the car and direction of the AC vents or the location of the sun and the quiet was unnerving.

I wanted to take my time and take surface streets, but pulled onto the freeway instead. I pressed on the accelerator and merged. I made it to the physical therapists office with just a few minutes to spare.

“Your copay today is twenty dollars,”

I reached for my wallet instinctively with my right hand and winced in pain, dropping it onto the floor. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. Sorry.”

He waited, tired of me already it seemed. His thin, wireframe glasses were sliding down his nose, but it seems it would have required some effort to lift them back up. I checked his name tag quickly. “Joshua” did not seem to be interested in making an effort.

I lifted myself back up to his window, braced myself against the reception desk and twisted my body to find my wallet with my non-dominant hand. “OK” I told him, and then, for reasons I don’t understand, I said “Sorry” again. “Can I tap?”

“Chip.”

Joshua was dying, it seemed, in that chair. Sentenced to death via copays and medical record numbers. “Please take a seat in waiting area #2 and the nurse will call your name.”

Physical Therapy shared a waiting room with Radiology. I played a word search game on my phone for awhile, but looked up when I heard some guy started to lose it back at the registration window, just out of view.

“The fuck do you need to know if I have a fever for? Give me the goddamn x-ray!” someone screamed.

“Sir, it’s a standard question.” A voice that I think belonged to Joshua was louder, but still exhausted.

“Sir, we’re gonna ask you to please exit the building at this time.” This voice was more direct.

“It ain’t got nothing to do with the x-ray, does it?”

Mumbling. Voices that were trying to keep things calm.

“No it doesn’t! No!”

Sometimes people just break.

The small group of them shuffled into the room together. They were noisy, making their way together toward the exit and, because I was sitting closest to it, me. Two of them were security guards, wearing gray shirts with the red logo of a security company. They had oversized walkie talkies hanging off their hips. The guy losing his shit over a question about a fever he may or may not have had walked in front of them. He wore a purple Sacramento Kings shirt and black shorts. A handful of tattoos peeked out from under the sleeves of his shirt onto his biceps, out from his shorts onto his thighs and up through his collar onto the base of his neck. Sacramento Kings shirt walked past me in the waiting room and our eyes met. He was out of breath, but leaned in toward me. “They don’t give a fuck. This is why we’re all fucking dying.” His eyes were glassy.

The security guards weren’t getting paid enough to manhandle the guy so they just encouraged him repeatedly to calmly leave and let him say the things he needed to say along the way.

I have nothing to say. I can’t say anything. I feel like I am breaking the same way all the time. Just two questions about whether or not I have a fever away from kicking the chairs over. I’m rarely in control. Seeing someone about that, too. The copays are just as awful. By the time they call me into the room, I want someone to ask me if I have a fever because I don’t know what will happen.

“Any trauma to the shoulder?”

“I’m not sure.”

The physical therapist held a geniometer to my elbow and gave me instructions to keep my elbow here and move my palm here. “Stop when it hurts,” she said. The device measures angles and looks like two transparent rulers that swivel on a hinge. I don’t need the numbers. I can’t move my right arm like I can move my left.

The physical therapist was a white woman with thin blond hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Her computer was at a strange looking desk on wheels. She pulled a lever on the side and lifted it so she could stand at it and type in the numbers from her device. In profile, her posture looked like she was trying to demonstrate something to me about how I’m supposed to stand, where my shoulders are supposed to be, and lifting my chin, and how all of this will do such and such to alleviate nerve impingement.

She moved my arm more. She had more questions.

“When I sleep,” I told her, “my five year old puts his head against this spot.” With my left hand, I indicated the small valley between my chest and shoulder. “That’s when I first noticed it.”

“You have kids?”

I nodded. “Yeah, and maybe we shouldn’t co-sleep anymore, but humans have to be the only animals that kick their young out of the nest like that.” I meant it as a joke, but it didn’t go over. If the way it came out made me sound like an asshole, she didn’t let on.

“It could be that sustained pressure is negatively contributing to the inflammation there,” she said. As she spoke, she pressed three fingers against her own shoulder.

“The pain is more on the outside–”

She interrupted me, “no I’m saying that’s where the pressure is, which is then causing an inflammation and impingement,” she left the nouns off the rest of the sentence and touched my shoulder with her fingertips instead, drawing a line around the exact shape of the pain in my shoulder. She walked to a shelf and handed me a small pillow. “Can you please show me how you position yourself when you sleep.”

I laid down on the exam table, flat on my back. I pulled the pillow up to my right side. It wasn’t as long as the boy. It didn’t have legs that dangle and kick against my knees and hips. It didn’t get hot. It was not heavy enough to press down with the weight of its head into the inside of my shoulder, where the collar bone disappeared behind some muscle and then the ball joint of my shoulder rose up on the other side. It doesn’t refuse to close its eyes. What is it about the dark that makes all little boys afraid? I never once told him about the monsters in his closet or under his bed, but he acts as though he knows they are there. With my arm around the outside of the body, I could sort of cocoon him in a way. I could make his body an island in the infinite ocean of his father.

“I meant the pillow under your head. Do you sleep with a pillow under your head?”

“Oh.” I sat up on the exam table, holding the pillow, which was just a pillow and not a boy.

She put black KT tape on my shoulder and carefully lifted my elbow, moving my arm in small circles and watching my face for signs of wincing. She placed my palms on the wall and told me to push my chest forward. She had long latin names for all of the ways in which my body protested.

“If it hurts, I want you to stop,” she said very clearly. She paused to make sure I understood her. “Can you do this at home?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll add it to your program then,” she said, leaving me alone at the wall. She typed something into her computer. I turned around to see her peeling off the pillow’s flimsy cover, tossing it into a “dirty linens” bin, and then refitting a fresh one. “This isn’t one of those things where we want to push through the discomfort.”

In the car on the ride home, it occurred to me too late that there was one night when the youngest came bounding into the room and I was sleeping on my stomach. He jumped toward me with his folded knees landing on my extended arm. I woke up to the sound of my own voice shouting at him, then looked down at my own body to see that I was sitting up, clutching my limp right arm against my body with my left hand. Maybe that was the trauma. Maybe it was one night and not a thousand of them strung together.

A mother, I think, would have understood this much better–how becoming a parent initiates a sort of co-ownership of one’s body. And how the other owner acts so destructively. I wasn’t ready for it. For the 9 months leading up to the birth of my first son I just kept thinking “what on earth do I have to do with any of this?” Every father is lagging behind in that sense. We have to overcome a certain distance to become a parent instead of starting with it literally inside of us. We don’t know or understand the way that it hurts and the way that you just have to keep going. None of this was in any of the books that told me how important it was to be calm and talk through difficult situations with your child.

When I got home, my oldest sorted through the printed pages that my $20 had gotten me. He wanted the tape on his shoulders too, but I was able to talk him out of it by telling him it was stickier than a band-aid and wouldn’t feel good when it came off.

“How are you supposed to do this one?” He asked, holding up one of the pages. On it, a cartoon man was standing with his hands against a wall. Blue arrows wrapped around his shoulders. His head was bigger than his torso.

“OK,” I said. “I’ll show you.” We moved into the living room together and placed our hands on the wall. “Yours don’t have to be as high as mine. Just as high as your shoulders is OK. I’m taller so mine are up here.” I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. I didn’t.

He matched my posture. I leaned in toward the wall, trying to repeat the motion I learned just a few minutes earlier. I could feel my chest muscles stretching, my shoulder blades winging out instead of coming together. I adjusted and concentrated on the position and pull of the bones against the weight of my body leaning. I looked left.

The boy’s chest was almost against the wall.

“Don’t push until it hurts. It’s just a stretch. It’s not a contest.” As the words left my mouth I realized that I was doing exactly what I told him not to. I could feel something sharp starting in my shoulder and moving down toward my elbow, through it, and up toward my wrist. I closed my eyes and leaned out of the stretch. Just a touch. The sharpness retreated back into my shoulder as a dull, familiar ache.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said.

“Mine does,” I said. I focused on my own position again. We were quiet for a few seconds. I took a few deep breaths. When I turned to look at him again he was so far into the stretch that I thought his elbows might touch behind his back. “Can’t you feel something in your shoulders?” I asked.

He didn’t respond.

I stopped my stretch completely and stepped toward him. I placed a flat palm against his upper back. He could take it so much farther than me without feeling a thing.

“This is easy,” he said.

“Well it’s easy because you still have good posture.”

He likes to hear the things he is doing better than me. I showed him one or two more stretches before I lost him to the screen again. Him and his brother watched TV and fought over the remote until it was time for bed. At the end of the routine, I told them both that I couldn’t lay down with them. Not tonight anyway.

The youngest told me he’d only go to sleep if he could wake up and come into my bed.

“But what if I have a dream that I’m eating a sandwich, and then I eat you?”

“Dad, that’s not real.”

Once the boys were both asleep, I had things to do.

In a drawer in the garage, I found a pair of headphones from when I was doing video production work a few years back. I took them into the house and wiped them clean with a damp paper towel. I plugged them into the digital piano and put them on. Even so, when I touched the first key, I made sure the volume was low. I lifted one side of the headphones off my head to make sure I was preserving that specific and sacred silence of a house with children sleeping.

I played the major triad and added the 7th. I buried myself in it. Moved the whole shape down in the key a few steps and it became a minor 7th chord. The same question, but darker. Moved it up to the fourth. The fifth and bring the 7th down half a step. It didn’t feel like playing anymore. I did it maybe thirty times in a row until I felt a soreness in my wrists and tendons. I kept on leaning into it until it felt like if I played it one more time, they’d call security to come drag me out of Radiology, and then I played it one more time.

I knew just enough about what I was playing to be able to resolve the question if I wanted. Just lift that 7th half a step and play the octave. Do that and the question gets answered. Every time I touched the seventh, the ink around the curve of the question mark got thicker. Everything can be my fault — from the unwelcome apparition of a Gorgon to the evidence under the BED that proves I stole the BAG with an angry FACE.

“I don’t understand, but I’m sorry,” this combination of notes seemed to be saying on my behalf to the big no one who couldn’t hear it anyway.

“If it hurts, I want you to stop,” she had said. “Can you do this at home?”

But that’s not how any of this works, is it?