Thank You for the Music
THESE
S
TORIES
H
AVE
A
PPEARED IN THE
F
OLLOWING
P
UBLICATIONS
“Family on Ice” in
Glimmer Train
“The Pastor's Brother” forthcoming in
Iowa Review
“Guiding Light” in
Glimmer Train
“Berna's Place” in
Witness
“Brother to Brother” in
Fugue
“You Could Never Love the Clown I Love” in
Gulf Stream
“The Dog Who Saved Her” in
Witness
“So Long, Marianne” in
West Branch
“Elizabeth Tines” in
Heart Quarterly
“Stadium Hearts” in
Story
“Embraced” in
Epoch
“Thank You for the Music” forthcoming in
Witness
F
OR MY BROTHERS
, D
AVID AND
M
ATT
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deep gratitude goes to my agent, Nicole Aragi, my editor, Marjorie Braman, and to Daniel Lowe, who generously read and commented on these stories first.
To all those at HarperCollins who worked in various ways to turn the manuscript into a book: thanks for that labor.
I'd also like to thank readers Daniel Arp, Jane Bernstein, Kristin Kovacic, and Bill Deasy for their helpful comments on some of these stories; Paul Ingram and John Evans, for working hard to launch my novel; and Jim Schley, steadfast reader and priceless pen pal through the decades.
Special thanks to Peter Stine, whose always excellent
Witness
helped to inspire many of these and other stories, and to all my family, old teachers, students, and increasingly dear friends, old and new, near and far, whose humbling influence is both irreplaceable and impossible to measure.
ONTENTS
You Could Never Love the Clown I Love
AMILY ON
I
CE
N
OT THAT YOU ASKED
, but I'm an X-ray tech going to night school for anthropology.
I have a daughter, who is seven, and spends a lot of time with her father in the suburbs.
I have the kind of loneliness that makes me sit too close, on purpose, to strange men on buses. Men who smell good, who read books, whose shoes are not too shiny, not too scuffed.
I have not learned to appreciate solitude.
And yes, I know this attitude has long been out of vogue. All the magazines have headlines that shout
SINGLE
?
CELEBRATE
! Everyone seems to talk about being a
woman warrior
who works out six times a week. It makes me want to take up smoking again, and sit in a bar all afternoon the way I did in my twenties.
In my present social life that matters, I'm the third wheel. The other two wheels are Henry and Lydia, and wouldn't you know it, Henry loves Lydia and
Lydia loves life,
art, sports, and perhaps, though we're not sure yet, Henry. He's enjoying the toying, delicious, piercing pleasure-pain of not knowing. She calls him Henri, like she's French, not in a pretentious way, but in a way that makes you recognize her humor, her great accent, and her big vision of the world, like Paris is always in the air even though it's Pittsburgh. She wears a black beret at an angle you might have to call jaunty. She would never eat cheese doodles for dinner with a loud TV like some people I know; she'd prepare thick split pea soup, eat quietly with classical music on the radio, stare into her small backyard, where she once kept a warren of little white rabbits who slept on her couch when it was cold. She is the sort of woman who always thinks before speaking, and who never says “um” or “ya know.” She wears bright silk scarves tied around her head, and is constantly clearing her eyes with drops of Visine, her only addiction. If her eyes get any clearer, any bluer, any more beautiful with wide-eyedâwhat is it? wonder?âthey'll crack like windows in a hurricane.
And now she's invited the two of us to go ice skating with her entire family. Did I mention that I love Henry?
Henry the divorced insomniac
, the owner of a used bookstore? Did I mention that the very idea of a family that goes ice skating together is beyond my ken? And that's the first time in my life I've used the word “ken,” so sorry for being fancy, as my grandmother used to say.
She also used to holler, “It's always funny, 'til somebody loses an eye!”
She's dead now, like so many others in my family, but even if they were alive they wouldn't be caught dead on skates. Most of them managed to fall on their asses wearing shoes. Many of them would've considered me heroic for holding down a job, and raising a kid. “How do you do it?” they'd ask, if they weren't dead.
I have to envy Lydia, whose mother used to play the clarinet each morning to rouse her children from slumber, whose handsome father, a minor-league baseball player, decided he wanted to learn to quilt, so took a quilting class in Bloomfield with several old Italian women, and made something beautiful to hang on the wall. I have to envy Lydia with a passion I believe warps my soul. Nobody
drank to excess
in her family, much less
did heroin,
nobody ever
threw slabs
of Christmas roast beef at the ceiling or drove a car through a living room wall, or disappeared for seven years, or became a transvestite (nothing against transvestites), and you can see this by looking at themâ physical beauty, yes, but somehow quaint and New Englandy, like people in old photographs: Observing their profiles you feel the romance and heirloomy fullness of their story, the certainty that generations from now, their children's children will say, “And that's why I play the clarinetâit's a tradition, you seeâ”
Tradition! It's very true some people still have them, and not just farmers. I keep thinking I need to invent some traditions for my daughter.
Her name is Rhonda and she's never seen her aunts. One of them has been telling me for eight years she'd love to see me if it weren't for “the troubles.” Like she's in Ireland! My other sister and I are simply not speaking for reasons I couldn't bear to bare right now. Rhonda did see my parents before they died, but what can a kid say to a three-hundred-pound woman who smokes her way through lung cancer? What can a kid say to a dry drunk so mortified by emotion he kept his heart in a glass cage up in the attic? Or somewhere. I was grateful to them for dying. They'd died a long time before their real deaths anyhow. And I didn't want my kid looking at them too closely here in the age of genes-are-us. Instead I make up lies about them. “Your grandmother was an excellent seamstress, and
quite
the muckraker. Sympathy for the Underdog was her middle name.” “Your grandfather was valedictorian and a friend to all animals.” I buy old photos in antique stores and educate her about her ancestors. I pick the most interestingly dignified photos I can find, and all she can say is, “Why didn't they smile back in the olden days?”
Anyhow, she's lately spending most of her time with her father and his girlfriend, Sandy Meg. Since Sandy Meg is loaded with stockbroker money, when my daughter comes home she's always got several new Barbiesâthe kind in lavish ball gowns I could never buy her. I benefit from this, since it's clear Rhonda feels a little guilty about preferring Sandy Meg's bubbly wealth and wry electric company to my own. This guilt makes her more affectionate and charming to be with. She pretends to be interested in the gorilla book I bought her last year. She cleans her room without my having to ask. In her seven-year-old eyes I see pity when I try to tell her I think there might be more to life than Barbies. Poor Mom, the brown eyes say, don't you get it? And then a kind of resignation sets in: Oh well, so I have a mother who doesn't understand how sparkly life can be.
Even at age seven she knows there are worse things.
It's a little complex watching someone you desperately love trying to impress someone they desperately love. I sit there in the restaurant called Champs with Henry and Lydia around a little table, and when Henry starts talking about all his work with Habitat for Humanity, it's clear to me he's doing this so Lydia's bleeding heart will swell, and when she seems a little bored with his description of drywall, I secretly feel happy. (What kind of love is it where you're rooting for your loved one to fail? Why am I so comfortable with the conventional selfishness of this desire?) I try to steer his attention my wayâ hey, Henry, over here, I
love
drywall stories, my eyes pleadâbut of course he's looking at the Visine Queen in action and thinking what next to sayâdid she know he used to live down the street from Arlo Guthrie? That gets her. She blinks back the excess eyedrops. She's an Arlo Guthrie fan! Bingo. Let's hope Arlo doesn't get Huntingtons, she says. Yeah, man. She loves “Coming into Los Angeles.” She remembers her hippie cousin playing it for her when she was eight.
The two of them are off and running, and they love Woody Guthrie too, and Lydia says she cried the first time she heard Springsteen sing “This Land Is Your Land,” and why can't that be the national anthem? Henry says he can't believe itâhe's always wondered that himself! He sounds pathetic now, like a me-too boy, not a thirty-five-year-old insomniac bookstore owner, and if Lydia would recoil a bit I'd have to put my hand on his knee to comfort him.
I have known and loved him now for over two long years. I bought him warm cinnamon buns each morning for four months after another woman broke his heartâa red-haired nurse who'd published a parody on those books of affirmations. In the red-haired nurse's book, the affirmations were all like “Today I will finally embrace the fact that I am a complete loser and will remain as such.” It's true, she was brilliant, and I too was half in love with her, and part of what bonded Henry to me was the empathy I felt when he lost this genius.
I feel for him still. I know he is the son of a foul-tempered autocrat and a woman who chased neighborhood children from her lawn with a broom. My heart breaks a little seeing his effort in the face of Lydia's reserve.
He glances over at me once. Contained in such moments is the possibility that he actually loves me, and simply doesn't know it yet.
I sigh, move my body protectively toward him. But then something barely perceptible shifts in the atmosphere.
Lydia and he are suddenly having a moment.
They're having eye contact where you can feel a kind of sticky rainbow arching between them.
I take my body back, and look out the window of the little coffee shop. I avoid the eyes of the white-haired woman hunched in her black coat, standing alone on the corner as if she's suddenly forgotten her name, where she's going, or where the hell she's been. Why is she looking at me?
Christmas Eve. My daughter is spending it with Dad and Sandy Meg. We've taken a bus to the corner of Oak Ridge Lane, then walked into the canned air of a cul-de-sac. I miss my car, but it's not time, money-wise, to get it fixed yet, and Rhonda thinks riding the bus is thrilling, especially the golden ones. I kiss her good-bye at the suburban curb in the powder-pink hooded coat Sandy Meg's mother bought her. The kind with a furry hood that frames her fat little face so you have to kiss it more than usual. My ex-husband calls out from a second-story window, “Merry Christmas,” but before I can return the greeting he appears to have ducked. The window is empty. He was this way when I was married to him tooâ said things and disappeared before I could think how to respond. In the windows they have blue candles. When I was a child I burned my tongue on one of those things. “Don't let her lick the candles, okay?” I call, and Sandy Meg nods and squints. Did you just say something about licking the candles? she wants to say, but won't. “Thanks, Sandy,” I say, because I can't bring myself to call her Sandy Meg out loud. “Merry Christmas,” she calls, with a certain droll irony in her voice that I appreciate. She might be rich, but she's a thinker. She's got a cold eye peeled on the familiar little drama we're caught in.