Thank You for the Music (24 page)

“It'll catch up to me,” she offered. “One day I'll wake up and look like Mama Cass.”

It was what Roseen would've said.

It was a good thing Joan accompanied Aileen and her father to the park the next day. Having never spent time alone, they wouldn't have known what to say to each other.

They walked around the park in coats, Aileen in a pale blue stocking cap with a white tassel, a gift from Joan. “In summer there's formal gardens here,” her father said. Silence followed. “That's nice,” Aileen said, and Joan perked up to talk about roses. Aileen remembered Roseen saying not to tell her father about Mack and El Greco's.

He'd never even ask! He'd ask nothing! And all of Aileen's secret questions—How can you not miss Roseen? Do you think we'll ever be back together again, ever?—all these questions died in her now, and the girl who'd planned on asking seemed foolish.

“I really love pumpkin pie,” Aileen said.

They drove to a bakery and bought one.

“Wanna go out and hack around?” Blaise said. It was the next morning, the day bright and clear. Aileen would remember the sky as so low and blue she could've peeled it back like fruit rind to reveal something wet and bluer. The yards connected like quilt patches, embroidered with flowers. The sun threw down ropes of light when you squinted.

A boy in a black driveway looked up from a struggling insect under a magnifying glass. “The little fucker's almost cooked,” the boy said, and Blaise said the boy was Mike.

Later in the deep shadows of the woods Mike and Blaise left her by the creek, saying they'd be back in ten minutes. “We need to get something.”

She sat by a rock, surrounding trees twisting in shadow and light and the voice of the creek trickling through her body. She grew tired of waiting and walked until she heard their voices falling from a tree fort.

She climbed the steps nailed to the silvery trunk, ducked in through the floor. The boys saw her head on the floor.

“Get out!” Blaise shouted.

“Aw, let her stay,” Mike said, shining a flashlight on her face. She closed her eyes and boosted herself into the fort. Now Mike shined his light on the walls where women were plastered naked, legs open. “Get out, Aileen, we'll be down in a minute,” Blaise said, softly, but his voice had a strange tremble. The hot pond of light moved from one body to the next. One woman was on her hands and knees with a man behind her holding a whip, another stood with clothespins on her nipples, her tongue out of her mouth.

“Whatta ya think?” Mike said, and now the light was shining between a woman's open legs.

“So what,” was all she could muster.

Mike circled around the walls again with the light, and Aileen felt sick, her face blazing hot with pleasure-pain that settled between her own legs. These women were familiar somehow, they made sense somehow, but never could she have conjured them.

Later walking down a black road Blaise said, “Those pictures are no big deal, everyone has 'em, even fathers, but don't tell anyone.”

“You think I care?” Aileen snapped, anger an arrow over the sorrow she felt now that Blaise was so far from her.

And the women were stuck in her mind, and would be for a long time. And so many of their faces, which she hadn't thought she'd noticed, held the expressions of small girls, pouting and startled. Like they might suddenly look down at their own bodies and ask,
When did all this happen? And where was I?

She took a bus back to them. She stepped down off of it and Roseen lit up. “Hey, babe! We missed ya! Now tell all, we want the details.”

How to explain it was a blur?

“I can't remember.”

“Come on, Aileen.”

She lied, made the visit up. They went to the zoo. The house was dumpy. The new wife's “a bit much.” (They laughed at that.)

“What else?”

“Nothing.”

“We'll ask you later.”

In the car they headed home through the dark with the windows down, salt air lifting Aileen's hair while her mother described their cottage, all decorated for Easter. Not only that, but she got Aileen a new dress that would really do her justice, not to mention Easter hats for everyone,
damn I love the spring.
Roseen honked the horn to emphasize this point.

“Tell her about
her
room,” said Belle, and Roseen said she's gonna die, it's fifty sweet little yellow cardboard chicks on the walls, a nickel apiece and she couldn't resist.

So weeks later at the Wildwood magic show in the Immaculate Heart by the Sea cafeteria that smelled faintly of milk, Aileen watched her own red shoes take her across the black and gray checked floor, following Roseen and Belle and her friend Marie Sysmanski all the way to the first row, where Roseen likes to sit because why not? Someone has to.

Outside it was dark, and a high window framed stars, and across the street the ocean poured itself down on the shore, and Aileen could hear it. Shillone was not yet in sight, the curtain hadn't opened, but Marie Sysmanski was so excited for the magic to begin that she held Aileen's arm, squeezing.

The yellow curtain opened and there stood Shillone, his back to the audience, tall in his purple cape with the letters of his name in bright orange across the shoulders.

The audience said, “Hi, Shillone!”

He turned around. He wore a fake handlebar mustache on either side of his narrow face like two black smiles hovering in the air. His real smile glinted white; to Aileen it looked angry.

She could hear the bustling excitement, the rising expectation reaching a high pitch all around her. But she couldn't feel it. In the darkness Shillone made a glass of water float in midair. Aileen folded her arms and heard Marie gasp. Shillone pulled rabbits out of the hat. Aileen looked over and saw Roseen and Belle consulting each other, mildly impressed.

Shillone made things vanish in the spotlight. A chair into thin air and spoons tossed high that never came down. And how mortifying when his beautiful assistant tripped onto the stage; she'd lost a spiked shoe and had to go back to retrieve it.

“This is the lovely Bonita,” Shillone said, and ordered her into a box, and she was so calm as she turned her face in the spotlight to regard the audience who would watch her be sawed in half. Shillone began sawing the wood at the waist and Marie screamed “No!” and the audience laughed. Aileen squeezed her friend's hand, told her not to worry, but felt strangely angry at Marie for believing this trick.

But when the woman was sawed in half and Shillone pushed the boxes in opposite directions, her feet hanging out of one box, her head out of the other, Marie looked at Aileen, horrified and betrayed.

Then Bonita got out of the box, whole and looking bored, and Marie in confused relief said, “Hey!”

Driving home they were all quiet, listening to Marie, who babbled on about the magic, a sweet, naive little bird.

“Thank you so much!” she said before getting out of the car and racing up to her front door.

Late that night in the kitchen, somehow Roseen and Belle and Aileen ended up congregating.

They sat at the table in nightgowns; nobody could sleep.

Roseen said, “The moon's full to the bursting point.”

“I can feel it,” Belle said.

“Of course you can, it pulls on the tides, doesn't it? And we're eighty percent water, aren't we? And I wish someone would
tip me over and pour me out.
You know?”

Roseen got up, went to the refrigerator. “I'm hungry but I just don't know what for,” she said.

And Aileen will see all of this one day, out in the night, looking in through the kitchen window, grown up in a coat. Roseen will turn around then, a woman who has suddenly walked up to the window of her body and pressed her face there. Roseen. Fiercely lonely.

Don't move.

Leonarda, Leonarda,

Your cassette arrived yesterday, just ten days before Christmas. It was an astonishing gift; I stood on my rickety blue porch in the fog of December, facing the goats (I have two of them), tearing open the thick brown envelope, making sure not to rip through your address—as if it hadn't years ago engraved itself into my heart. But to see it there in your own handwriting (penmanship would be the better word here, since I see a child's effort in that handwriting, and a child's energy) was like seeing a glimpse of your face on a crowded train in Europe, possibly during the war. I know you're thinking “But Francine, you've never been on a crowded train, much less in Europe during the war. You're phobic in crowds and hasn't it been two years now since you've taken off your bathrobe?”

Maybe. But I've changed, Leo.

Now, I'm not saying I've been on a crowded train. Not literally. But you who despise the constraints of the literal— why do you care? I have a lot to tell you. But first, a thank-you for the music.

You know that I of all people understand the difficulties of making a cassette tape. The intricate decision making that happens when considering segues! The knowledge that every segue is an aesthetic confession! What song should follow another—that decision reveals the emotional logic of the moment, but doesn't it seem at the time that the moment is everything? They say the moment
is
everything. All the greats agree on that. But we don't grasp it. We open the cupboard and look for the sugar bowl, but our hearts are in Yugoslavia, or just upstairs in the sock drawer, or wrapped like a snake around the head of a man we saw standing on the corner in his thin gray shorts.

So we miss the moment as a matter of course. But we don't miss the moment when making a cassette tape and finding a segue. We come alive in the moment then. And yet, it's work, isn't it? Can you tell how roaringly touched I am that you have made this for me?

I imagined you'd forgotten me altogether.

I remember many years ago I played you a tape I'd made for that handsome ex–heroin addict priest I worshipped. The tape was entitled
Bessie Smith and the Infinite Longing,
and for reasons that have escaped me, I tried to segue “Dominique” by the Singing Nun with Sly Stone's “It's a Family Affair.” I rubbed those songs together like sticks that might catch fire. You listened and raised your eyebrow and said, “You're kidding, right? You're not putting those songs together, right?”

I blushed and said I'd planned all along to reorder it.

“You need Lou Reed's live version of ‘Coney Island Baby,'” you said. You spoke, as usual, with a certainty that seemed divine. You spoke as if your musical sensibility was a part of nature, not to be argued with. I believed that.

Each song on your tape has become for me a shelter. Even as some of the references to our past shook me to the core. “I can still hear the echo of those bitter words we said,” sings Kim Richey. Let me tell you, old friend, the echo of those words is like a pet I keep in the basement, a mangy one that stalks my house at night.

That's the thing about a good tape though. It shakes you to the core, but then you go live in the songs that shake you, like those houses on stilts by the beach that outlast hurricanes. The songs protect you as they shake you, they're structural wonders with lots of rooms, they have windows, and landscapes. Do you know Jim Hall's version of “Concierto de Aranjuez”?

Speaking of landscapes! I hear that piece and I'm in Morocco, far from the fog and the goats that surround my present life. I'm at a small table outside a café in mid-afternoon, drinking, wizened, remembering love. (Want to join me?) My machine is busted or I'd send this Jim Hall version
pronto.
It's the only song I know that thrusts you into the future and kills you with the future's hard-won nostalgia simultaneously. It's one sorrowful piece of joy! A man I still love sent it through the mail. It's also about how softened your regrets might be if you could only get to Morocco and drink. I regret about one million things even though I'm reading a self-helpy book called
Regrets Can Kill You.
I'm always reading a self-helpy book and letting them insult my intelligence
because they are all true
and everything true is simple.

I took off my bathrobe the day your tape came. I listened and knew my life would change. So what am I wearing now?

Let's put it this way. I look like I could be named Iris Dement. Where'd you come up with her? All these raw women are good for the world. To think through my youth the only woman I listened to (other than the Motown girls) was Laura Nyro. Stacked under my bed in obsessive order, those scratchy 45s. Can we surrey? Can we picnic? Later, at sixteen, I got some Patti Smith—the only person I ever wanted to be, as you may recall. One fall afternoon I thought I had the house to myself. My father, home early from work, walked into the room where I played air guitar, tossing my head wildly and screaming
“Gloria!”
I pretended not to see him. “What the hell's her problem?” he called down the hall to my brother.