Living Out Loud (35 page)

I wonder if this is hereditary, or whether I simply belong to a family made up of essentially solitary people placed by fate within large and voluble groups. My father, for example, fishes; it is a pursuit some people don’t understand, luring a stupid cold-blooded animal to its death on the end of a piece of string. But fishing has very little to do with fish, at least the way my dad practices it. It has to do with sinking within yourself, charting your course. And I’m all for that.

I also have a child who habitually lapses into the zone look, although at his age I cannot imagine what he is thinking. Friends have started to ask me when he will begin lessons: swimming, piano, art, and the like. I want him to have the best
of everything, but the best of everything for me was often staring off into the middle distance. I want him to have lots of time for that. If I were asked what I am most afraid of his missing in life, I think I would answer “Solitude.” I would say the same for me.

M
ister Ed
is back on television, indicating that, as most middle-of-the-road antique shops suggest, Americans cannot discriminate between things worth saving and things that simply exist.
The Donna Reed Show
is on, too, and
My Three Sons
, and those dopey folks from
Gilligan’s Island
. There’s
Leave It to Beaver
and
The Beverly Hillbillies
and even
Lassie
, whose plaintive theme song leaves my husband all mushy around the edges.

Social historians say these images, and those of Howdy Doody and Pinky Lee and Lamb Chop and Annette have forever shaped my consciousness. But I have memories far stronger than that. I remember sitting cross-legged in front of the tube, one of the console sets with the ersatz lamé netting over the speakers, but I was not watching puppets or pratfalls. I was born in Philadelphia, a city where if you can’t dance you might as well stay home, and I was raised on rock-and-roll. My
earliest television memory is of
American Bandstand
, and the central question of my childhood was: Can you dance to it?

When I was fifteen and a wild devotee of Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, it sometimes crossed my mind that when I was thirty-four years old, decrepit, wrinkled as a prune and near death, I would have moved on to some nameless kind of dreadful show music, something akin to Muzak. I did not think about the fact that my parents were still listening to the music that had been popular when they were kids, I only thought that they played “Pennsylvania 6-5000” to torment me and keep my friends away from the house.

But I know now that I’m never going to stop loving rock-and-roll, all kinds of rock-and-roll: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Hall and Oates, Talking Heads, the Doors, the Supremes, Tina Turner, Elvis Costello, Elvis Presley. I even like really bad rock-and-roll, although I guess that’s where my age shows; I don’t have the tolerance for Bon Jovi that I once had for the Raspberries.

We have friends who, when their son was a baby, used to put a record on and say, “Drop your butt, Phillip.” And Phillip did. That’s what I love: drop-your-butt music. It’s one of the few things left in my life that makes me feel good without even thinking about it. I can walk into any bookstore and find dozens of books about motherhood and love and human relations and so many other things that we once did through a combination of intuition and emotion. I even heard recently that some school is giving a course on kissing, which makes me wonder if I’m missing something. But rock-and-roll flows through my veins, not my brain. There’s nothing else that feels the same to me as, say, the faint sound of the opening dum-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo of “My Girl” coming from a radio on a summer day. I feel the way I felt when I first heard it. I feel good, as James Brown says.

There are lots of people who don’t feel this way about
rock-and-roll. Some of them don’t understand it, like the Senate wives who said that records should have rating stickers on them so that you would know whether the lyrics were dirty. The kids who hang out at Mr. Big’s sub shop in my neighborhood thought this would make record shopping a lot easier, because you could choose albums by how bad the rating was. Most of the people who love rock-and-roll just thought the labeling idea was dumb. Lyrics, after all, are not the point of rock-and-roll, despite how beautifully people like Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell write. Lyrics are the point only in the case of “Louie, Louie”; the words have never been deciphered, but it is widely understood that they are about sex. That’s understandable, because rock-and-roll is a lot like sex: If you talk seriously about it, it takes a lot of the feeling away—and feeling is the point.

Some people over-analyze rock-and-roll, just as they over-analyze everything else. They say things like “Bruce Springsteen is the poet laureate of the American dream gone sour,” when all I need to know about Bruce Springsteen is that the saxophone bridge on “Jungleland” makes the back of my neck feel exactly the same way I felt the first time a boy kissed me, only over and over and over again. People write about Prince’s “psychedelic masturbatory fantasies,” but when I think about Prince, I don’t really think, I just feel—feel the moment when, driving to the beach, I first heard “Kiss” on the radio and started bopping up and down in my seat like a seventeen-year-old on a day trip.

I’ve got precious few things in my life anymore that just make me feel, that make me jump up and dance, that make me forget the schedule and the job and the mortgage payments and just let me thrash around inside my skin. I’ve got precious few things I haven’t studied and considered and reconsidered and studied some more. I don’t know a chord change from a snare drum, but I know what I like, and I like feeling this way
sometimes. I love rock-and-roll because in a time of talk, talk, talk, it’s about action.

Here’s a test: Get hold of a two-year-old, a person who has never read a single word about how heavy-metal musicians should be put in jail or about Tina Turner’s “throaty alto range.” Put “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” on the stereo. Stand the two-year-old in front of the stereo. The two-year-old will begin to dance. The two-year-old will drop his butt. Enough said.

W
e will have a cold antipasto and chicken parmigiana for dinner tonight. I could have told you this a week ago. I could have told you this in March. It is an Italian tradition to feast on Christmas Eve, to crowd the table with calamari and scungilli, bacalla and pieces of fried eel.

But my husband does not eat any of those traditional dishes, so I have adapted the menu. Afterward we will read “A Christmas Carol,” alternating chapters. I realized years ago that he got the best chapters. He gets the first, gets to intone, “Marley was dead, to begin with.” And he gets the last, so that at the end he can say, “God bless us every one!” But it has always been so. It is too late to change now.

Christmas is the mainstay of my year because tradition is the mainstay of my life It keeps me whole. It is the centrifugal force that stops the pieces from shooting wildly into the void. The only way I can bear the changes that grind on
inexorably around me is to pepper the year with those things that never change. Bath and books for the boys before bedtime. Homemade cakes on their birthdays. The beach in August. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Jack Frost nipping at your nose. You name it, I do it.

We buy our tree at the same lot every year. “Where’s the biggest tree you’ve got?” I ask, and as though he knows just what I need, the man who runs the place repeats the same performance every year, looks askance and says, “The biggest?” Then we grin at each other, because we know he will never find a tree higher than the ceiling in the corner of our high-ceilinged Victorian parlor—the traditional place for our tree. It will be decorated, not with any kind of theme or special color, just the hodgepodge of glass balls, pressed tin ornaments, and little stuffed figures I’ve collected over the years. Each year I buy two new ones.

It turns out that this is the sort of person I am. For a long time I wondered, but now I am sure. Sometimes I dreamed of moving on the spur of the moment to Paris, of throwing a pair of black velvet pants and a black silk shirt and some jeans and a T-shirt into a satchel and setting up shop on the rue de Something, writing poetry and dancing till dawn until another fancy struck me. But I never was that kind of person, and I never will be. Perhaps I realized this the first Christmas that I was free, alone, mistress of my own three rooms on the top floor of a little brick townhouse in a city so big no one would know if I missed Mass because I was sleeping one off. And I rounded up the children of my friends and set out little bowls of colored frosting and made them decorate cookies with me. And I dragged home a pathetic little tree and hung the cookies on it. And I went to midnight Mass at the church around the corner and hung my stocking on my mantel and stuffed things in it the next morning. And took the bus home to my family.

I will never jump on the next plane to Paris, never travel
light. I often envy people who can. Their lives seem more exciting to me, less calcified. I am sure that they have unlimited opportunities to re-create themselves, and that they do. I look at Madonna, who was untidy in lace and bracelets last year and this year is sleek in black bustiers and an elegant cap of bleached hair, and think how exhilarating it must be to be that, to be someone new each time you turn around.

I’m not like that. The question of moving the tree this year from one end of the living room to the other is of enormous moment. The idea of getting a slightly smaller, more practical one is simply not to be borne. I will always need my sampler with the Irish blessing, the mirror from my mother’s bureau, my appliqué quilt, the complete Dickens I bought at a flea market for two dollars when I was fifteen, yuletide carols being sung by a choir, folks dressed up like Eskimos.

Sometimes this makes oil and water of my life: getting married in Alençon lace and pearls, and yet keeping my own name; answering all my sons’ questions absolutely truthfully, and then assuring them that Santa does exist; questioning church teachings in my mind, and yet reading the Christmas Gospel in church and feeling the power of its message in my heart. “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger.” The echo I hear is the sound of the years passing: a little girl in a navy-blue wool coat with a velvet collar, a teenager in a camel’s-hair coat with big bone buttons, a woman in fur, in tears, enamored of the ridiculous notion that some things need never change, that some things are safe, holding the hand of her firstborn son in the blood-red shadows of stained glass.