A Song to Take the World Apart (3 page)

“In a minute.” Soon, actually. The show ran late and the movie they're supposed to be watching ends in half an hour. It will take them fifteen minutes at least to hike back to the theater to meet Zoe's mom.

“I gotta load out,” Chris says. “And, uh, I guess I wouldn't ask you to help carry equipment, anyway.”

“I'm tough,” Lorelei tells him, puffing up under the worn leather of her borrowed jacket.

“Sure,” he says, laughing. “But I'll see you at school, maybe? Say hi in the halls?”

“For sure,” Lorelei says. She likes the shape of the words in her mouth, the way she can mimic Chris's loose native drawl when he says them. He kind of leans against her arm for a second, and then lopes back to the band. There are layers and layers between them but Lorelei touches the jacket anyway, where he brushed up against her. She rubs her fingertips together and looks at them, like she might actually be able to see sparks there.

She finds Zoe flirting with a serious-looking man at the bar, a twenty-something with a neatly trimmed beard and a solemn, intense gaze. She's trying to talk him into buying her a real drink.

“C'mon,” Lorelei says. She used up all of her boldness talking to Chris; now, under this stranger's eyes, she can barely look up from her shoes. She doesn't want to ruin her friend's fun, but she doesn't like the look of this all that much. “Zo, whatever, we've gotta go.”

“It's no fun here, anyway,” Zoe says. She throws a challenging look over her shoulder as they walk away. The man doesn't respond. “Oh shit, we've gotta get this stuff off,” she says then, to Lorelei, rubbing a thumb against her blush-bright cheek. “Bathroom, c'mon.”

“Sorry to hassle you,” Lorelei says, shouldering the door open.

“It's fine,” Zoe says. She pulls makeup wipes out of her bag and passes them over.

“I mean, you came here for me and—”

“L,” Zoe says. “Seriously.” She keeps wiping at her face, mouth open in a distracted, uneven O.

“Okay.” Lorelei starts with her mascara. The sting of chemicals makes her eyes water. She watches Zoe's reflection in the mirror, her vision blurred by reflexive tears, as her friend's face slowly becomes its familiar self again. This is the girl she knows, soft and private. “Thanks,” she says when they're done. “For everything.”

“I had fun too,” Zoe says. “And. You know. Thanks for trying to keep me out of trouble.”

“Yeah,” Lorelei says. That's the balance of them, the way they work: if Lorelei needs Zoe to tell her it's okay to be loud, to lie to someone's parents and flirt with a boy, Zoe needs Lorelei to keep her at anchor. The flip side of her boldness is that it gets heedless, sometimes. It can skid into reckless. Zoe doesn't like being told what to do, mostly, but she trusts Lorelei to tell her when to stop.

The man at the bar is lost to the crowd by the time they leave.

Outside, the boys are loading equipment into someone's station wagon, Jackson and Bean the drummer slowly losing a complicated game of real-world Tetris. Chris is there too, laughing and not helping, sitting against the side of the building with his legs stretched out across the sidewalk.

He's strumming the unplugged strings of his guitar and singing while everyone else works. Lorelei recognizes the tune: it's from one of the records that Zoe's sister Carina always played when she was still living at home. It's a short song, a woman singing throaty and full over nothing more than handclaps and the cheers of a crowd.
Oh lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.

“You have a goddamn Mercedes!” Bean yells out. “Come help us deal with this Volvo.”

“Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,” Chris rejoins.

The spirit comes over Lorelei: she can hear the next words in her head. She looks at Chris sitting on the sidewalk and thinks,
Of course you're what I want.
She sings out, “Oh lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” finishing his verse as she skips nimbly over his ankles.

She doesn't look back, after. She doesn't think about whether anyone heard her over the street sounds, other voices, passing traffic. She just lets her voice ring out behind her, resonant in the dry, clean desert air. It's the first time she's ever sung out so boldly, and the vibration of it rings through her like a bell, high, sharp, and clear.

She doesn't see—though she will later imagine it, over and over again—the moment when Chris hears her for the first time, when he sits up and stares after her. She'll imagine but never know what he must have looked like, called and compelled: wide-eyed, drawn out of himself, being pulled by something elemental and held in thrall. She doesn't see him opening toward her, brilliant in his unfolding, like a flower bursting suddenly into bloom.

Back at Zoe's, Lorelei is grateful to strip off the jacket and dress and wash the last traces of makeup from her face. She likes the costume but it's nice to feel her own skin again, plain and clean. She packed pink and white pajamas but wears Zoe's clothes instead, running shorts and an old T-shirt worn soft with age.

They curl up in Zoe's bed together, the last whiff of the Roxy's stale smoke and booze and sweat swallowed up by soap and lotion and detergent, and the minty tang of toothpaste. They're old enough to go out and young enough to fit two to a twin.

“So that went well,” Zoe says.

“Mmmm,” Lorelei agrees, touching again the spot on her shoulder that Chris leaned against.

“I've never heard you sing before,” Zoe goes on. “Not really. You have a nice voice.” The words are broken by a yawn. “Pretty.”

“Thanks.”

“You should sing with him sometime,” Zoe murmurs. “Chris.”

Lorelei flinches instinctively. Her grandmother is weird about singing, and about her singing, specifically. There's a rule against it that she's never questioned and never understood. Not doing it is such a deeply ingrained habit that she hasn't thought about it consciously in years, and she's surprised when she runs up against it, a barrier she's almost forgotten was there. “I don't know,” she says, but Zoe is already drifting to sleep, jaw falling slack and breath coming soft and easy.

Whatever madness overcame her on the sidewalk pulls away now.
I didn't mean to do it,
Lorelei thinks.
I won't do it again.
She's never gotten caught up like that before. In the dark in Zoe's bed it's hard to imagine what could have compelled her not just to break but to forget about the rules.

T
HAT NIGHT SHE DREAMS
about it, though it isn't anything like a dream: just a memory that she ghosts through in her sleep.

Lorelei's parents emigrated from Germany along with her grandmother when her mother got pregnant with the twins. It was almost eighteen years ago, now. She's never known exactly why they left, only that when they did, they meant it. They've never gone back, not even to visit. Her parents threw themselves into the work of their American lives when they got here, and left Oma to raise the children. So it was Oma who sat her down the night before she started kindergarten and told her that it was time for Lorelei to learn a secret.

“Do you know what music is?” she asks in the dream, running her fingers through Lorelei's tangled blond curls. Lorelei's grown-up mind is dimly aware of the smallness of her skull against her grandmother's hand.

“Yes,” Lorelei says. She knows she's heard it: snatches of pop songs at the grocery store, and melody blasting out of boom boxes and through open car windows on the boardwalk, near the beach. There are whole communities of German émigrés in other parts of Los Angeles, but her family lives in Venice. Her mother wants to be near the shore.

“You know that we don't have music in this house,” Oma says. She gathers Lorelei's hair into sections and starts to work them into a tight braid.

“Yes,” Lorelei agrees again.

She's never had cause to doubt her grandmother, or question her: this is the woman whose hands keep the family fed and her own hair neat. Oma sorts the bills that come in and pays what needs to be paid. Lorelei's parents work outside the house; Oma is in charge of what happens inside it. In the smallness of this world, Oma is the voice of authority and source of all wisdom.

“It was music that got your mother in trouble,” Oma says. “It was singing that ruined her, because I never taught her how.”

Lorelei doesn't understand how anyone could not know how to sing. She does it all the time, in the quiet under her covers, making up songs about the sea and shore, the sand and sky. She does it to comfort herself when the nights are long and she can't sleep, or when her pulse pounds too hard. Most days her heart beats softly, but sometimes, too late or too early, it thrums up and gets loud and distracting. She feels it, heavy, moving, in her chest. Then it's only song that helps, pulling the frantic flutter up and out of her throat and bleeding off tension into the air around her.

“So I'm going to teach you,” Oma says. “I'm going to teach you how to be careful with your voice.”

It isn't so hard. Her natural register is high and clear. Oma has her sing at the low end of it, where the sound comes out rough with work. “It's okay to sing like this in front of people,” Oma instructs. “In groups, for school. That's fine. But the high notes: never.”

“I like the high notes,” Lorelei says. She sings an anxious little trill to demonstrate.

“Just like that,” Oma tells her. “That exactly is what you never do.”

Lorelei wakes with her mouth closed so tightly that her jaw aches.

Z
OE'S MOM DRIVES HER
home in the morning. Lorelei sits in the passenger seat and fiddles with the straps on her backpack, which seems to get heavier as block after block unfolds through the windshield. In the pale Sunday-morning sunlight she's weighted down by the dirty clothes and unfinished homework she's dragging. The pit of her stomach gets heavy and cold when they pull up in front of her house.

The neighborhood has changed around them since her parents bought the place in the early nineties, and up and down the block people have razed the old structures to put up new, modern ones, square slabs of concrete and glass. Against them, her family's beach cottage looks even older and dingier than it is, with its wooden porch and peaked roof.

The grass out front is sparse and sere after a long, hot summer. The backyard is lush with Oma's well-tended kitchen garden, but there are no signs of life in the front. Other yards have bicycles and surfboards, or pinwheels stuck in their lawns, Tibetan prayer flags and fairy lights strung across their gardens. The Felsons have a plain brown welcome mat on which Lorelei very carefully wipes her feet before taking a deep breath and walking inside.

She doesn't know when this started seeming strange to her. It must have been a gradual awakening: the slow realization that there are different kinds of quiet in the world. Now when the door clicks shut behind her, Lorelei feels the familiar sensation of coming home, and ducking her head underwater. Even the sound of her own footfalls against the wooden floor is muted and faraway when she walks. She goes through the dining room and into the kitchen, to the family room. No one is home.

The second floor is covered in carpets that muffle everything further, dusty things her parents brought over when they moved. Lorelei drops her backpack in her room, kicks off her shoes, digs her toes into the thick rug, and slides her feet back and forth, finding friction.

She spins in a circle and takes it all in, the clean floor and bare walls. There are a handful of photos of her and Zoe and their friends tacked up over her desk, but otherwise: blankness. She takes the little ticket stub from the Roxy and tapes it up next to the pictures. Evidence of one more night outside, and away.

Lorelei takes advantage of no one being home to indulge in a long shower. The ancient water heater warms up slowly, so she runs the water in the tub while she strips off her clothes and brushes her hair. The bathroom fills with pale, thick steam, obscuring her body in the mirror. It's like being surrounded by cottony clouds, high up in the sky. She breathes in deep lungfuls of it: almost as much water as air.

She takes twenty luxurious minutes to wash her hair and deep-condition it. She shaves her legs, working slowly over the knobs and valleys of her knees and ankles. She sings while she does it, humming tunes from last night and a song Zoe played while they were getting dressed this morning. It's an old, absent habit, but last night's dream makes her conscious of it. She wonders if she hums like this at Zoe's or at school and doesn't realize it; she wonders whether humming counts, or if Oma only meant real singing.

Lorelei is curious, now. Something just under her skin makes itself known, like an itch, but a pleasant one. Oma's prohibition was explicitly about singing around other people, and she's all alone in an empty house. There's no reason not to sing, now. Lorelei feels the itch resolve itself in the back of her throat, at the seat of her voice. She decides to let it rip.

It feels
good,
like the vibration of the sound is relaxing each of her muscles in turn. Melody runs hot in her veins and when she sings up high, up into her nose, her whole head buzzes with the resonance of her breath. Lorelei turns off the water and steps out of the shower. She wraps herself in a towel and turns one quick, dramatic twirl, getting really into the belt of a song she half remembers.
Why haven't I ever done this before?
she thinks.

When she opens the bathroom door, her father is standing outside it, glassy-eyed.

“Petra?” he asks.

“No,” Lorelei says. “No, Dad, it's—Lorelei, it's just me.”

Lorelei doesn't look enough like her mother for the mistake to make sense. She wonders if something is seriously wrong with him. He's pale and clammy and confused, white except where he's flushed red. She's never seen him like this before. His displays of deep feeling are usually reserved for her mother, who responds by keeping a cool distance. Now he looks possessed.

“I heard Petra,” he says again. “I heard her singing. I heard her singing for me.”

“That was just me, Dad.” Lorelei has never heard her mother sing. It's impossible to imagine anything as lush and sweet as music coming from her mother's mouth.

“Petra,” he insists, coming in a step closer. He reaches out a hand and his fingertips brush against her collarbone, the top of her shoulder. They don't find what they're looking for. He starts to look past her, like her mother is there, hidden in the bathroom's steamy air.

Oma appears behind him in the hallway. She seems taller, somehow, all of her authority gathered up and held out in front of her. “Henry,” she says. Lorelei has never heard this tone from her grandmother before. It's rough and low and primal. Her father blinks once, twice, and steps back. “It isn't her.”

He turns to Oma. He looks like a child: helpless and exhausted. “I know,” he says.

Henry and Oma regard each other.

“Lorelei, get dressed,” Oma says. She still sounds commanding, but whatever bone-deep power infused her words a moment ago is gone, and she sounds only as bossy as she usually does. Which is still plenty. “Henry—”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

Oma disappears down the hall, but her father doesn't move. He turns to face Lorelei. His eyes find hers and then flinch away.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “You sounded—”

“Like Mom,” Lorelei says. Water drips from her damp hair down her neck and the line of her spine. She shivers against the cool air and clutches her towel closer. “You said.”

“I didn't mean—” He stops and frowns. He's staring fiercely at his shoes. “It's been a long time since she sang for me.”

“She used to, though?”

“She did,” he says. He smiles. The mention of her mother's voice instantly has him distant again. “She— All the time.” The memory stretches, extends itself, and captures him. Then it turns painful, and his expression turns dark. “I thought Oma talked to you about this,” he says. “About not doing that.”

“She did,” Lorelei says. “She just said not in front of people. And no one was home when I got here, so I thought—”

“You have to be more careful than that,” he says. There's something burning behind his eyes, the embers of a fire kept banked for years. For the first time in her life, Lorelei is frightened of him.

“Okay,”
she huffs, and turns toward her room. “I have to go get dressed.”

“Lorelei.”

She turns back. He looks small, still, standing in the long hallway with his arms at his sides, palms turned up like he's begging.

“Don't go messing with things you don't understand,” he says finally. “Please just—don't.”

“I won't,” Lorelei promises. Her father rarely asks for anything. He wouldn't now if it wasn't important. Right? “I won't sing anymore,” she says again.

Instantly, though, she can feel that her promise is a lie. Last night she was wreathed in the band's songs, crowned by them. Chris came over to talk to her and he looked at her like he was thinking about her—only her. And singing just now felt like letting something long dormant inside herself put down roots and send up a stalk, a tendril, a bud. If music is magic, she wants to fall under its spell. She wants it so badly that it's easy to pretend the wanting is all that matters.

Lorelei passes her mother's little office on the way to her room. Petra does the accounting for a fashion conglomerate headquartered nearby; she works long hours in Century City and brings the paperwork home with her. Her door is usually closed.

Today, however, her mother is sitting in the middle of the room in her straight-backed wooden chair, the door half open, ajar as if forgotten. She catches Lorelei's eye as she goes by. If her father looked blank and hollow, furious and then pleading, her mother is stricken, touched by an emotion too deep to name. She shakes her head just once as Lorelei passes, and draws a hand across her mouth, and presses there to keep it closed.

Lorelei goes to Oma's room as soon as she's dressed. “Hey,” she says. She stands in the doorway, waiting to be invited in. Oma is sitting in an armchair by the dark window, knitting. The click of her needles doesn't pause when she nods for Lorelei to enter. “Is Dad okay?”

“You upset him,” Oma says.

Lorelei doesn't sound angry, but being blamed sets off something hot in her chest. “I didn't know you were home,” she says. “I wasn't
trying
to be rude or disruptive, or anything.”

“I know you weren't,” Oma says. She keeps at her work.

The numbness Lorelei felt while it was happening is starting to wear off, and now adrenaline is kicking in. “What just
happened,
then?” she asks. “What even was that?”

“Do you really want to talk about it?” Oma looks up from her knitting, finally, and sets it down in her lap.

“I want to know why Dad was acting like—whatever that was. I don't even know! I thought he was having a stroke.”

“I told you not to sing.”

“That was, like, years ago.”

“Don't tell me you've forgotten.” It's not a question, exactly. The shadows on her face deepen. Oma looks hunted when she says it.

“No,” Lorelei admits. “I just—I don't know, I never really wanted to, so I never thought about why. Or whether I could, or should. And I definitely didn't think it would be because of anything like that.”