Where We Are Now (20 page)

I loved Uncle Gaylord and the Zanies though I barely knew them. I loved their trained nonchalance, their apparent indifference to their own beauty, and to the risks they took. They lived, I thought, in their own perfectly contained world with costumes, trumpet fanfares, and glitter—surface glamour they didn't appear to notice. In the sweet dustladen air of the hay barn, the light slowly filling the open door, they performed quietly without announcement—one or another would count, in Italian always—without their spangled costumes, music, or spotlights, without Annette's cannon even. Designed by her grandfather, a pneumatic device within the barrel propelled her into the air in slightly varying curves. Years of practice on the trapeze trained her to land on the safety net correctly, though she sometimes had to change her arc in flight. Usually she landed perfectly; only once, Uncle Gaylord told me, she broke her arm.

Whenever a throw was completed on the trapezes, a man standing on the ground with both arms outstretched
proclaimed, “Hoop-la!” celebrating the action completed. It was Annette's father maybe. There were a bunch of them, two parents, five children, their five husbands and wives, three grandchildren, none of them my age. They all lived together, traveled together. Determined to leave my own family, I wondered at their closeness. Some of them must have lost their tempers sometimes, yet how could grudges be held by people who made their living flinging themselves into mid-air?

I saw them so seldom I couldn't keep them straight although I remember Grandmother remarking on their politeness. They stayed once, for a farm dinner served at noon. We sat at a long table on the side porch while Grandmother and Minnie carried out bowl after bowl of food—heaps of fresh vegetables and platters of fried chicken. It was June. It must have been because of the corn. Does anybody eat like that any more? A parade of food. The Zanies ate with great pleasure bestowing compliments until praises seemed heaped as high as the platters. Grandmother said it was just everyday cooking.

“So well mannered,” she commented afterward. She hated cooking, yet was vain about hers.

What had she expected, that they would chew with their mouths open and throw food? Impossible. The Zanies were so foreign Grandmother had almost no expectations of them. I was the one with expectations. Didn't most mothers hope their daughters would marry happily? Sally said I had a checklist in my mind: She and Whoever were to have matching backgrounds, educations, religions, skins, and politics, if possible.

She told me. “ Max has only got a high school degree, but he did some work at the community college in Austin. He likes history like Daddy does. That's good, isn't it? I mean I never did. There's a balance.”

“Why must he wear three earrings?”

“Better than a tattoo. Musicians…. He just likes earrings. They don't mean anything. He likes girls too.” She grinned.

They had been living together for a year then, and this was the second time she'd brought him home. We had these supposedly exploratory conversations when they visited. Max always followed Marsh off to the barn and the corrals. I worked at a counter chopping an onion, peeling carrots, silently cursing, “Oh hell, hell, hell!” while thin vegetable skins piled up on the wooden block. Sally sat at the kitchen table watching me. Like my grandmother, she disdained cooking.

Max's parents lived in a little town in West Texas. His father owned a hardware store. He was a Democrat. “He's not terribly liberal. I mean he's the type who thinks everyone ought to have a job except his wife. Singing is Max's business.”

She was as cheerful as she could be; underneath that happy veneer, I sensed defiance.

After their first few visits, Marshall and I counseled each other every time they returned to keep quiet, to say nothing about the boy; she would only like him more if we said a word against him. Whenever we were tempted, we'd change the subject. Marsh talked a lot about the news or reported on a horse he was training. I relied on gossip from friends in Santa Fe, or even the weather when necessary. We skirted any mention of music or marriage. We had strong memories of nay-saying elders. Grandmother had not wanted me to marry him. The aunt who raised Marsh, the same one that gave him his liberty, had her own set of opinions. She'd said the Moores sounded like southern decadents before she'd met one of us. Marsh declared he found decadence terribly appealing. Remembering our own defenses, we kept silent when Max first appeared. It would wear out, we thought. At
least it would wear thin. He'd be touring, and Sally would be lonely. But no. His band hadn't reached touring level then. They had made two tapes, and neither one had taken off. All he needed was one song, one little song, and he didn't have it yet. He had Sally.

By the time he found two or three successful songs and was touring, Sally took a job as a receptionist in a hotel in Austin where her French and Spanish were useful only to visiting foreigners. She was fluent in both after four years in college, a semester in Paris and a summer in Madrid. Sometimes I wish I'd done the same, but my grandmother and uncle held me close while I fought against their old-fashioned ideas of my safety and their responsibility. Both of my parents died in foreign countries; leaving home was dangerous. I didn't know how Max's parents felt about his impending marriage. He went on singing, lighting in Austin whenever he could.

My daughter was a widow before she married. She laughed and vowed she didn't care. Two of her closest friends were already married to band members. Max's group continually evolved. Players seemed to come and go like guests at Sally's hotel. Guitar players were particularly slippery although Max, the drummer, and the keyboard man formed a constant nucleus.

“So far it's okay, really, Mom. I never wanted a regular life. You know that. I've never wanted the suburbs, the two-car garage, the matching pots and pans. I just want to be married to Max, to go where he goes, or to stay and wait if I have to.”

Finally I asked, “Children? What about children?”

“Later maybe.”

“What about you? What about sitting around waiting for somebody else's fame, somebody else's songs to make it to the charts?”

“Being impatient won't help him. Did marrying keep you from doing something?”

“Oh, Sally, who doesn't have dreams!” I'd thought I might live in New York, work for a paper, become a foreign correspondent, roam the world; instead I met Marsh and, except for a few trips abroad, a New Mexico horse farm was as far as we went. I let my dreams go for others. A regular life, Sally might have said although I didn't have the matching pots.

The vegetables I'd sliced during this exchange were all piled up for a stew. I laid the knife aside and washed my hands.

“Isn't there anything you particularly want for yourself?”

“Max,” she said.

Marshall had another set of worries. “The get-rich-quick mentality in that business is bound to attract sleaze … like racing. We ought to talk to Fergus about it.”

My only first cousin Fergus was in the country music business. We'd grown up together and, at odd moments, usually about family questions, still depended on each other for advice.

“It's a hell of a life,” he said. “Problem is nearly every young guy with a guitar thinks he'll make it to the top. Most of them don't and if they do, there's hundreds of traps to fall into.”

We'd could only hope Max made it and had enough good judgment, enough good luck, to avoid the traps.

“If he doesn't, Marshall, I'm afraid our daughter will be stuck with a leftover adolescent, a guy with little education—”

“Marianne, she's not marrying an idiot!”

“Oh, I know she's not. I guess I'm just being pessimistic.”

“Sally's in love with Max.”

He was, I admitted, an amiable young man. Completely ignorant about horses—we had thorough-bred hunters and jumpers—he was willing to spend hours down at the barn
and in the rings talking about their various dispositions and Marsh's training methods. He was equally willing to learn to ride. He also wanted to learn how to jump.

“Not until you're a seasoned rider, “Marsh cautioned him. He would have to practice in the ring every day, take a lot of trail rides, and before he had a secure seat, he'd have to learn how to fall, an ability all riders, even the strong ones, cultivated.

Marsh reported he was good with horses, always a mark in anyone's favor. We saw he was intelligent. Slowly, as we began to know him better, Marsh began to like him. It was different for him…. If he'd had a son … if he'd had a boy already—There was a long list of boys who'd mucked out stables and helped with the horses, but no one had fallen into a son's role. Perhaps Max would. On the other hand, I didn't quite trust him. He was too young, too unformed, too willing to go anywhere and try anything. He seemed to appreciate Sally's linguistic ability for the help it would give them when they traveled. He never mentioned anything else she might do except talk to the natives.

Marshall argued, “What else does Sally want? Has she ever said she wanted to live abroad? Maybe she means to stay at home and raise babies.”

“Not any time soon, and where's home? They haven't even said if they're going to keep on living in Austin.”

I fell into a chair in our bedroom. How silly to quarrel about our daughter, about the what-ifs and maybes. Perhaps I had become like my grandmother or worse, trying to plan too far ahead, to think of not only Sally but her children too, if she had any. I began to feel ashamed of my instinct to fill up the vast and empty future safely and said nothing.

A day before the wedding Fergus rolled off the plane from Nashville. He wore his usual cowboy boots. Except for the Shetland pony we both rode as children, Fergus hadn't been near a horse in years, nor did he plan to be although he would sometimes sit on a top rail and watch me exercise one of ours in the ring. Country-western recording was his business, not his way of life. Nevertheless he turned up for most family celebrations looking like somebody's slightly disreputable foreman.

“We ran out of whisky at four this morning, honey.”

“Fergus! For heaven's sake!”

“Too much good company!” He hiccuped then, standing in the middle of the main hall of the Albuquerque airport.

“Oh, come on, you clown! I've got a wedding on my hands.”

Luckily Annette's plane was coming in much later and Kate, able to get away from the paper only three days, was scheduled to arrive just before. They would drive up to Santa Fe together. I took Fergus home and turned him over to Marsh. Now, a day later, he was red-faced still but sober.

We watched tall, blonde Max and my determined daughter marry on our patio with the garden blooming all around them, a late July full moon shining, and Max's band playing the most utterly unromantic music I had ever heard at a wedding reception.

“I need to talk a little business to that boy. His band sounds pretty durn good to me,” said Fergus.

“You're conditioned.”

Annette put her arm around me. “It's better than continual drum rolls, honey.” She winked at Fergus. Obviously she didn't miss the circus. She was seventy and
had performed until she was thirty-eight. By then Gaylord had bought his liquor store in Tulsa, and Annette began collecting antiques.

“Permanence,” she said. “Perhaps I always wanted it after so many years of touring. I have an aunt in Italy who retired from the circus to run a pensione, a home for the homeless.”

Sally floated past us holding onto Max's hand. The band quieted a little and began playing old songs I'd been hearing most of my life. Marshall two-stepped precisely around the patio with our daughter while Max danced in the center with his mother. His father Albert, tall like Max, stood by me.

“Who could have known he'd turn out to be a country rock musician? We sent him to the best military school in New Mexico.” He smiled.

Marshall and I had already agreed we liked Max's parents. Tina was a painter. Max's musical leanings were all her fault, she insisted. They came from her side of the family.

While I watched Marshall lead Tina to the dance floor, Annette joined me. Although he'd been dead fifteen years, these were the times she probably missed Uncle Gaylord most. She had stayed on in Tulsa. Why hadn't she returned to her family in Florida, or Florence, or wherever they landed?

“They never settled really,” Annette said. “My parents, after they retired, kept a condo in Miami, an apartment in Venice and traveled back and forth. By the time Mama died, I was the one who had settled. Papa wouldn't come to me in Oklahoma. He wanted to speak Italian to everybody around him again … in the streets, everywhere, so he stayed in a village near Florence with my older sister. Do you remember her? Bianca, the oldest, the most peaceable one of us. Being head of a circus family was hard. Papa was our benevolent dictator, the one we counted on to take care of every dispute. We had lots of them.”