Everybody Knows Your Name (5 page)

Fight or no fight, there's this slight purpleness under his eyebrows and under his lower eyelashes that makes him look like he's been up late every night for his entire life. But anyway, word in my van was that he's his own legal guardian. I don't know why that is.

He glances back over his shoulder and sees me.

“Come over here a sec,” he calls over the other voices.

“Why?” I call back.

“Just come here.”

“I don't need to say hello to Los Angeles. I live here, basically.”

“I want to show you something. Activate the walk function on your control panel.”

Since last night, I've revisited my feelings about being called a robot. The first thing that pops into your head when you hear you're robotlike is that you're a distant, unreachable husk who's impossible to connect with. But then I woke up today and asked myself,
What kinds of people have
I
said are robots before in my life?
And it's always been the people who are so upbeat and positive that they practically have little birds singing around their heads. So by the time I got out of the platform bed, I'd come around to the idea that Ford's first impression of me didn't have to be dispiriting.

Although I had just woken up from that dream where the two of us were collecting marbles together, and I can't say that didn't factor into my outlook.

Maybe out of lingering fondness for the dream version of Ford, I pretend to press a button on my back, and I get up from the couch. I walk over to the glass and stand next to him.

I see a bunch of treetops. “What is it?”

Ford nods at the window. “The wonder of nature.”

From the awed tone of his voice I think he's about to point out a couple of squirrels or something even more mysteriously beautiful, like a family of deer passing by. Instead he hooks a finger in a belt loop of my jeans, pulling me toward him so that I can look out at a different angle. I'm surprised by the intimacy of that move.

Now I can see past this house's terrace to a neighboring backyard that's a little bit down the hill. There's some sort of fight going on between a blonde woman in a checked one-piece bathing suit and a bald man in a business suit. The woman is standing up in the hot tub, even though it's summer. And he's got a jacket on, even though it's summer.

Ford says, “She keeps scooping up water from the Jacuzzi with her hands and throwing it at him whenever he tries to talk to her.”

The man starts gesturing with his hands. The woman bends and takes both her hands and pushes a wave at him. It soaks his loafers.

The man wrings out the bottom of his pants. He kicks over a fancy urn that makes an echoing clang on their patio. It's so loud, we can hear it softly through the glass from this distance.

I laugh. I've never seen a fancy urn go bouncing. “Can you tell what it's about?”

“Lovers' quarrel.”

The way Ford says this is so Southern that the words sound like they're curling in on themselves. I copy his accent. “Lovers' quarrel.”

Ford takes on my flattened Southern Californian accent. “Lovers' quarrel.”

He sounds like a jokey imitation of a sun-bleached surfer. I mean, he kind of sounds like he's making fun of someone like Scott. The man now storms off back into the house, slamming a door we can't see.

“Are they broken up? Is it over for good?” I ask.

Ford watches the woman in the spa, who just stands there, frozen. “It's up to her,” he says. “He kicked the urn 'cause she still gets to him. Watching them makes me feel right at home, except for them being too civil.”

I think I'm about to hear him talk more about home to make up for last night, but all of a sudden Catherine is behind us, peering over our shoulders. One of her huge hoop earrings actually touches my face.

“What was that noise?” she asks. “Please don't tell me someone's doing construction in the neighborhood. Do I have to go stop a bathroom add-on?”

“Lovers' quarrel,” Ford and I say almost at the same time.

Catherine sighs. “Oh, good.” She pats the side of my thigh. I've never owned a horse, but still, I think this is the kind of pat you might give your pony. “Change of plans. We're doing introductions at the beach because I realized the couch is making it look like everyone's gathered for therapy at a drug addiction center. So we're skipping to taping vocal coaching segments now. Magnolia, you're up.”

“Okay.”

Her phone rings. “One sec,” she tells me, and steps into the kitchen. I see my mom beam at her.

Ford and I remain there, keeping an eye on the woman in the bathing suit. She seems okay, not about to drown herself in the Jacuzzi or anything.

Finally Ford tilts his head down toward mine like he's going to share a secret. “I wasn't trying to be rude with you last night. It was just that I could have told you more and more things, but they wouldn't combine into anything that comes close to the whole picture.”

I let that sink in for a second.

Then I have my say. “Nobody ever understands someone else's life in any kind of complete way, but oh my God, people should still
attempt
to piece something together for each other.” Ford's chin jerks up in surprise. “People still
attempt
to talk about, like, their childhood dogs or some really great Halloween they had eight years ago. I mean, what are you supposed to talk to people about if you can't ask where they're coming from? Really, what were we supposed to talk about last night if the only stuff on the table was from when we met onward? Like, the moon? Did you want to have a conversation about how pretty the moon was?”

“You don't think it was pretty?” he asks slyly.

“Beautiful. So crescentlike. So yellowish,” I say.

“So moon-shaped.”

“So up there, in space.”

He quickly touches under his eye, unconsciously, I think. Now that I'm closer, there definitely is a bruise. “It was bad where I'm from, okay? A bad run. So I'd rather start out fresh here without that on my back, following me around.”

That's all I have to hear to understand what's going on, even though I don't know a single specific about what's actually going on. But now I get it.

Out of curiosity I ask, “Have you ever thought about how it might be
you
following you around?”

Ford looks at me. He says, “Yes.”

Then Catherine is back from her phone call and right away she takes my hand, steering me away with her.

My mom has this issue where she gets worried that black people won't like her. Not that she's ever explained this to me out loud, and I don't even know if she's really aware of it herself. But whenever I've been around her and she's been around a black person, she seems to work extra hard to come off like a cool lady, or at least what she thinks of as a cool lady, because she's nervous about being perceived as a sheltered white one. And that's because in southern Orange County, the truth is that sheltered white ones are mostly what's running around.

So as Stacy, the vocal coach, has me do some warm-up scales at the piano and can tell right away that I'm not trained, my mom jumps in and says, “Natural emotion is what produces a really cool tone in the voice, though. That's what makes Aretha Franklin so amazing.”

At this point, I start hoping that she's not going to rattle off a list of black singers she finds amazing. One of the cameramen is filming us from the other side of the piano. His name is Hector, and he has a cigarette behind his ear.

“And Whitney Houston . . .” Mom continues. “My God, was she gorgeous. I listened to ‘How Will I Know' a million times before my first date with Damien.”

Damien was my dad. This is the first detail I've ever heard about that night. My parents had a habit of never talking about their pasts, and I barely know anything about them outside of what I was around for. Interest takes over my embarrassment. “Oh yeah, where was he taking you?” I ask.

“Stevie Wonder,” my mom keeps going, even though I can tell she definitely heard my question.

Stacy decides to pull the plug on the list before we have to listen to a roll call of the entire Motown catalog. “If they sent Aretha in here next, I'd make her sing scales too,” she says, then takes a last sip of the Frappuccino she's got sitting on top of the piano's high keys. She put her drink there for convenience when she realized I wasn't going to need them. She told me, “You've got one of those singing voices that sounds like there's always a tear hanging in the back of your throat,” but it didn't seem like that was a good thing.

Now that I've done some scales, it's time to talk about my song choice for the first show. I have to pick a hit from the year I was born.

Stacy gives me a once-over. “This is the song that's going to introduce you to America. But it's not just a song. It's a movie you're putting into America's heads about your life. You open your mouth, and you want them to see a whole world built around you instead of just that cheesy-ass stage. They should see you getting up in the morning. They should see what you make yourself for breakfast. They should see you opening your closet and getting dressed for the day—”

“So half of it is picturing the audience naked, and then half of it is helping the audience picture
me
naked.”

“She's kidding,” my mom says to Stacy and the cameraman. “Sometimes people can't tell when she's kidding.”

“I already know that about her from the way she sings,” Stacy says. She evaluates me up and down. “There's an edge to you, and that's what we've got to play up so that people know who you are.” Pulling out a list of old hits, she turns over her right hand and knocks a gold ring that goes across all four knuckles against a title.

I look. It's “Just a Girl” by No Doubt.

“I don't think that's the song,” I say.

Stacy shakes her head once. “No, that's it. Edgy and cute at the same time. It says to America, ‘I'm saucy, but don't worry, I'm still going to be a lot of fun.'”

“But the song isn't transparent. I want to be transparent.”

“But people think it's fun.”

“But I don't want there to be distance between what I'm singing and what I actually mean. Like I want to get up there and have people just, like, know me. Like I'm an open book.”

My mom and Stacy are staring at me.

I try again. “I don't want to put on an act.”

“Yes, that's exactly what you want to do,” Stacy says. “You go up onstage to put on an act. That's what stages are for.”

My mom, who's been sitting sideways in an armchair with her legs dangling over the arm, drops her head back in annoyance. She says my name, but like this: “Magnoliugggggghhhhh.”

Instead of just rejecting their ideas, maybe it's that I have to be more positive and offer something of my own. I take the list from the piano and look it over.

“There's some Hootie and the Blowfish on here,” I say. Not really my kind of music, but has anybody ever seemed more approachable than that band? Also, Hootie and I have a similar vocal range.

Stacy takes her fingers and massages her jaw. “I'm going to take a break and see if they can get me another Frappuccino. Why don't you come get a drink with me?” she says meaningfully to my mom, which is code for,
Why don't you come give me a tip on how to manage this one?

They walk out, comparing rings. Hector lowers his camera and follows them, pulling his cigarette from behind his ear.

I sit down at the piano and pluck out the first few notes of the only song I know how to play, Wham's “Last Christmas.” When I was thirteen, my mom hired a piano teacher to teach it to me before a holiday party. I wasn't learning how to play the piano, just how to play the song. We didn't have a piano until my mom had a white baby grand delivered two days before the event.

After a couple of hours of cocktails, my mom turned down the stereo system, and I came downstairs and played “Last Christmas.” The guests, some of them already drunk, danced in slow motion like huge nerds with swinging arms. Snapping and everything.

They all knew my dad had died two years earlier, but no one was acting like that had happened because one, my mom. And two, after a few months, that's over for other people. But sitting there on the piano bench, I was still unable to grasp that my dad was in a crypt. We'd never see each other again? It seemed impossible, maybe because you just don't picture attending your parent's funeral until you're an adult yourself. You don't imagine that you'll be in braces.

After “Last Christmas,” I went back up to my room, shut the door, and listened to a call-in show on the radio about personal problems. We still have the piano.

“
Shit
, it's that time of year already?”

I look over my shoulder, and there's a sleepy-looking guy I haven't seen before in the doorway. He's got on an oversized football jersey. His hair is a dark bob, if men can have bobs, and he has really bad posture.

“Kidding, kidding, I know what season it is,” he says.

“I know,” I say.

“I just had a baby, so that was new-parent humor about the confusion of time. Those kinds of jokes are mandatory.” He wipes crust out of his eye with his ring finger. “I'm Lucien. I'll be figuring out what's going on with you during any given week and turning it into a piece of drama.”

“You're the story consultant?”

“That's what they're calling me so they can pay me less, but yes. You're . . . Magnolia.”

“Right.”

He takes out a pocket notepad and looks at it. “Seventeen, from Dana Point, kind of rich but not
rich
-rich, here with your mom (who I just met outside), good grades in English but Yale's not going to take you because of your other iffy subjects, went through a semi-recent breakup—”

“Who told you that?”

“They gave me a file. I don't know what comes from where.”

I say, “Oh cool, it's
1984
.”

“Shit, it's that year again?” Lucien breaks into a big, purposely dumb smile. It's jarring because he goes from being half awake to crazily beaming like a cartoon bear. Then he yawns and says, “I was good in English too.”

He starts to walk out. “Okay, well, I wanted to introduce myself. We'll sit down together tomorrow, and you can tell me whom you like, whom you want to destroy. Being around all these people all the time is probably going to be hard for you because you're an introvert.”

Hair practically stands up on the back of my neck. “It says that in the file?”

“No.” He puts the notepad back in his pocket.

“Then how do you know I'm an introvert after talking to me for two seconds?”

“Because you look more exhausted than I do.”