Thank You for the Music (18 page)

Wasn't that what love was for? Telling each other stories? She had thought so.

The last man had extracted all her stories, his listening like a drug. She would talk and talk, then feel almost empty. Trains ran right through his backyard. They would sit up in bed and watch them, and she would weep without him noticing. He'd been older; the ghost of her father had sometimes drifted into the room on the scent of his shaving cream in the dark mornings.

Now with Ben, she didn't want her stories to fill the space between them. She didn't want her history, her memories, which had been sculpted too many times for those other loves. She wanted to be present to the present, leaving the past behind like a sealed box in the attic of a house in a dream. She wanted this love with Ben to be more about the body, less about all those words she'd always needed. When Ben asked her about where she'd lived as a little girl, about who her family was, she'd tell brief half-truths. The man with the trains in his yard had left with her stories in his heart and even if he returned now to give them back, she wouldn't want them. “Keep them,” she imagined herself saying. “I don't need them anymore.”

“The thing about New Zealand is so much of it is still untouched.”

“Untouched is good.”

The store was suddenly full: the afternoon rush—the late lunchers, the vitamin people with their obsessive label-reading eyes, the doctors and nurses who needed a pick-me-up. Marianne and Ben hustled to serve them, Ben pulling fruit juice from the back room to restock shelves, Marianne at the register ringing up algae mixes, kefir, bean dips, organic chocolate bars, and fat-free everything.

She worked, she remained conscious of Ben, no matter where he was in the store. He had taken off his flannel shirt. She could see his arms in his white T-shirt, the muscles that weren't the self-conscious muscles of a health-club member, but rather his because he was Ben: a generous person who was always helping friends move in and out of apartments. A person who would stop to push a stranger's stranded car off the highway in a rainstorm. Her mind was fired by his presence, and by the oddities of the regular customers who were like actors marching across the stage of the store. Marianne didn't know if Ben's heart felt as though it would burst when these people revealed themselves, but her own did, her own heart filled with the gestures and auras of customers, and there were times when each one seemed so
sacred
(her father's word) she wanted to reach over the counter and grab a hand, touch a face, her body filled with the wild energy of wonder that any of them were here, that they existed at all.

Whenever one of their favorite customers came in, Marianne behind the counter would clear her throat to alert Ben, as she did now, because Wagon Woman was entering in her wig and purple minidress. One of the city's more visible and personable transvestites, Wagon Woman's real name was Odessa, but since she pulled friends and strangers around in a large, rumbling wood-sided wagon that recalled prairie days, much of the city thought of her as Wagon Woman. Yesterday the friend being pulled around was Harry the Dancing Stain, a skinny man with warm irony in his eyes, a man known for introducing himself as Harry the Dancing Stain without explanation. Today the wagon was empty.

“Hi, Odessa,” Marianne greeted him.

“When will we get our wagon rides?” Ben called over.

“You have to stand in line, precious. I got a friend outside.”

“So what'll it be today?” Marianne said.

“Four cheese on rolls and two bottles of apricot soda with a brownie.”

Marianne smiled at him. “You're always so sure about what you want.”

“You love me,” Odessa said.

“Probably,” Marianne agreed.

When the wagon rumbled out the door to the sidewalk, four or five regular customers came and went, all of them doctors and nurses infected by the brilliant spring day, a day when even in the littered city the blue air seemed to quiver with the energy of birds.

A couple of college students came in, draped around each other, obviously rich kids from Penn looking like catalogue people. The King of Fortieth Street came in singing “Solid as a Rock,” the ironic theme song for a smart man who had lost his mind. He had white hair and blue eyes that were angry, amused, and proud all at once. He sang his song today looking straight at Marianne.

She thought his voice with its odd quaver was almost beautiful. She liked that he was strong enough to be in on the joke of his own insanity; that's what his eyes told her. But he was not one of her favorite customers. He singled her out with his furtive looks. He sensed, perhaps, that she instinctively
understood his rage, understood that he hated himself for his wild displays even as he smiled. “You and me, girl, we're special,” he said once.

“Not me.”

“I can see you better than you see yourself.”

“I don't think so.”

“Am I hittin' too close to home?”

Her face would redden, and he'd smirk and wink, almost cruel. “Quit your job and go read Herman Wouk!” he said today, then saluted her and turned to leave.

“Who's Herman Wouk?” Marianne mumbled to the air. A nurse buying flowers shrugged and laughed.

The rush was over. Ben came up behind Marianne and pressed his lips to her neck. It sent a chill throughout her body, and for a split second she saw the face of the man who'd broken her heart. “Don't resist remembering,” the therapist had told her. “The memory will get scarier. The mind's just a rebel. Tell it what to do and it wins every time. Just let the memory come, and go.”

Marianne turned to Ben, and touched her hand to the side of his face.

“Let's go in the back,” he said. “I'll lock up the store for ten minutes. We'll leave the sign on the door.”

She hung the sign, she locked the door, she led the way, pulling him by the hand into the back room. It was small and dark and filled with boxes, enough of them already collapsed and folded up to make a bed.

They dressed, combed each other's sweaty hair, and walked out of the dark and into the store. The air held sharp little points of colored light; their legs were weak beneath them. They wanted to go back to the makeshift bed. But already the customers waited on the other side of the glass door.

The afternoon sun was deeper now, streaking across the store, orange on the far wall where the vitamins were shelved. This batch of customers, more leisurely than the lunch crowd, trickled into the store, so that when the couple with the child walked in, Marianne was ringing up a young man's bag of coffee beans and chatting with him about a pizza place. She saw the child and tried not to stare, tried to keep talking. The child was frail and bald with illness, a girl in a long-sleeved pink sweatshirt with a rabbit decal, her legs spindly under a light blue skirt that seemed made from the sky. The child glanced over at Marianne once, her face devoid of expression. The parents beside her embodied a depth of exhaustion that changed the atmosphere of the day, dark circles, taut mouths, an air of fatigue like a heavy curtain surrounding them. Marianne saw the man put his hand on his child's bare head like a firm cap for a moment.

She'd made a mistake; the customer was telling her he'd been overcharged.

“Sorry,” she said, clearing her throat to call Ben over, and hardly knowing why. She rang the order again. Again she overcharged him. Her face reddened as she laughed, ringing it up a third time while the child in the blue skirt walked in front of the glass doors of the refrigerator, her reflection passing before the colored bottles of juice. The father looked suddenly at Marianne, as if he thought he knew her. She handed the patient customer his bag. She lowered her eyes. She had seen all the father's human will exposed, his raw desire just to make it through the day.

“I want a Coke,” the child said, pointing.

The father walked over and stood beside her. “No Coke, honey.”

“I want Coke.” Her voice was steady and clear as water over stones. Her voice was pure desire.

“You can pick out any of the juices. No Coke.”

Now the mother walked over to them.

“I don't want juice.”

“Look, hon, they even have pineapple. You love that.”

“I want Coke,” the child stated again, her voice even clearer, the insistence in it somehow beautiful. Why didn't they cover her head? Marianne remembered a favorite doll she'd had when she was eight, whose hair she'd chopped off, whose cloth chest had torn. Her parents hadn't had much money, but they'd taken her to a place called the Doll Hospital one autumn night.

“I really, really, really, really, really want Coke,” the girl said, and Marianne felt the words lodged in her own throat. The girl repeated this, her voice rising in the store, other customers looking over at her now. The father crouched down before the child and put his hands steadily on her arms. A customer asked Marianne, “How late are you open?”

“How late are we open, how late are we open,” Marianne said. “Um, six.”

More customers lined up. She could hear the rising desperation of the father's voice. Now her fingers were blunt, useless on the register. “Ben?” she called out. “Can you take over the register?” The father said, “Orange, tomato, grape, apple, kiwi, pineapple, apricot. That's a lot of nice choices.”

“Coke!” the girl shouted. She turned around in a circle. She looked around at the customers. “I want Coke!” she told them. And then again, louder, her voice trembling but still strong.

“Hey now, come on now, honey.” The mother tried to pick her up in her arms.

Now she shouted. “I want Coke!” Any insularity the family had was ripped away. The girl had torn it, the girl was tired of her parents' protection and assurances. The child wanted them to know she knew they were lying, and she wanted her
life,
she wanted her life and was calling it Coke.

The father picked her up; she fought him. He carried her out of the store, his eyes closed, his wife following with her chin held high. The child's desire to live was so thick in the store that Marianne rushed into the back room to get away from it. She was assaulted by the lingering scent of their love-making. She left that darkness and walked out onto the sidewalk. She could see the girl a half block away in the arms of her father, her head down now.

Back in the store they worked in silence. Marianne filled the bins of coffee for the next day. Her hands, she noticed, trembled. She could not stop imagining the girl and her parents walking past the campus toward the hospital for more tests, the tulips and bare skin of students, the laughter and daffodils and blossoming brightness of trees like claws tearing at them, the blue air stinging the child's lungs as she gulped down the day.

She was grateful to Ben for this silence. She looked over at him and smiled. He smiled back.

He cleaned the glass of the front door, and when it neared six o'clock the homeless men and women were gathering, and Ben said, “I'll take the stuff out.”

“Great.”

She watched them gather around him, patient as he handed out the sandwiches. She remembered the flowers and bread and chocolate and went to the door herself, setting it all outside for the taking. They scrambled forward, one woman saying God bless you honey God bless you honey over and over again. Every baguette, every candy bar, every last spring flower was gone.

Slowly they walked home together. Ben held her hand. Walnut Street was filled with kids in blaring rap. They walked to Forty-fourth and Sansom, past Wanda Jackson's porch, where little girls jumped rope and a blind man preached. They crossed the street and climbed the steps to Ben's place.

That night in Ben's room, with its light-up globe and forty-cent chairs and its mattress by the window, after canned Hmong food from the market beneath them, they held each other, voices and music below them in the street rising as if in a dream they shared together. Each time Marianne closed her eyes she saw the girl who wanted to live, and remembered herself, not wanting to live, all those months after the man who'd been like a father had told her, “It's time for both of us to move on.”

For him she had come close to dying.

She closed her eyes and saw her own father's face.

This child with the bald head would live now forever in her heart's new center like a cold light.

“Tell me,” Ben said, his voice tender, full of hesitation. “If you want.”

She couldn't move. But words were frantic in her throat, rising slowly to enter the air, to circle around the intransmutable girl, to continue the story of who she was, who she might be.

E
LIZABETH
T
INES HAD OWNED HER HOUSE
for almost twenty years now—since 1968—having inherited it from an eccentric and semifamous artist uncle she'd never known existed. She had not been aware that any blood relation of hers had been rich, much less famous, and the discovery had made her see herself differently, as if being related to him gave her potential, somehow, or would have given her potential had she known about him when she was a child living for years on canned goods, shadowed by a towering Methodist church in two rooms with her parents.