Thank You for the Music (14 page)

“Would you love me if I was one inch tall?” Kate suddenly said, her eyes held wide on the starless sky.

“One inch tall?” He laughed hard at this, his eyes stinging with tears, and then settled down and said, “If you were one inch tall, I'd just keep you in my pocket.”

“If I could take a pill, a pill to make me one inch tall, I would take it, and I would live in your pocket forever. I would. That would be my world. I wouldn't have to deal with the world people call the real world.”

He kissed the top of her head. The pins crashed. The clown said, “Fuck this.” Then it seemed he was heaving his pins at their wall.

“I thought I was whispering,” she said, alarmed.

But naturally, a knock came at the door. They opened it.

“Would you love me if I was one inch tall?” Mud Mask asked them in her singsong little voice of mockery.

“I was whispering!” Kate said. “What are you doing, leaning your ear up against the wall? Can't two people in love have some privacy?”

Mud Mask shook her head, lit herself a cigarette, inhaled, exhaled, kept shaking her head. “In love,” she murmured. “Is that what you tell yourself these days?”

“What do you mean these days? You've only known me for three weeks. Why is this even your business?”

“Look, my little chickadee,” the mouth in the green face said. “These walls are like yay thin. In Bal-tee-more the walls are thick. We're not used to this. I can practically hear you breathing when I'm sound asleep.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“Lots of what's true tends to be ridiculous now, don't it, sis?”

Kate and Thomas just looked at her. They could smell the heavy odor of fried chicken being twisted and battered by the odor of her smoke. The clown's wife had more to tell them:

“I hear this conversation of yours every day, and I think to myself, can people really live that way? Would you love me if I was fat? Would you love me if I was old? Would you love me if I was one inch tall? What's next? How 'bout would you love me if I was a shoe covered with dog shit?”

Suddenly the clown appeared. He did not have his makeup on, but on his feet were the enormous clown shoes. He had grizzled gray hair, a belly, and wore a white T-shirt.

“Look, we're from Balteemore,” he said. “We're not spring chickens no more. We're trying to make a living. And you two, you two are fuckin' up the whole shimmyshangin' nine yards. Every time I get the pins in the air, one of you says somethin' mental.”

A silence fell. They all looked at each other.

“Okay,” Thomas finally said. “We'll take a vow of silence. I mean, anything to help your pins stay in the air.”

The clown turned and walked away.

“You really hurt his feelings now,” his wife said. “You people understand nothing.”

A feeling in the hall assured them the aging clown from Baltimore indeed had been inexplicably wounded. They were suddenly acutely aware of the clown's fragility. Within the awareness was a knowledge of their own strength, and futures, which were vast and unknown, and carried within their hearts like wild seeds. They began to feel guilt-ridden and generous, but it was too late.

“Would you love him if he was a clown?” said the clown's wife, nodding toward Thomas, and staring at Kate.

Kate nodded her head.

“Would you love him if he lived on nothing but fried chicken and cried if he didn't get his chicken at exactly the same time each day?”

“Sure I would,” Kate said, and squeezed the damp hand of Thomas, her heart pounding.

“You don't know a damn thing about it,” she said. “You don't know a damn thing. You and your skinny little boyfriend who reads you poems. Let me tell you somethin', college girl, you could never love the clown I love. You don't got the heart. And if you can't shut up in here, least you could do is change the subject.”

But now the clown had wandered back. Oddly enough, he was smiling.

“Look,” he said, his arms extended as if to embrace all three of them. “Someday we'll all be dead. So very, very dead.”

The clown bent his head to the left, his eyes downcast, his lips holding a clownishly sincere smile of sympathy for all their mortal selves.

“Dead,” he repeated. “All four of us. Under the ground. Gone. Isn't that some bullshit? You understand me what I'm saying here?”

“Why don't you two just come on in,” Kate said.

They entered. First the clown's wife removed her mud mask in the little bathroom. She emerged white-faced and wide-eyed. Then Thomas poured them each a glass of Red Moon wine. The clown spoke of his life. He had most recently been a dishwasher. He had broken too many dishes. He had been so nervous. Things hardly ever worked out. Life was hard on the nerves, that's one thing he knew. He sighed. A silence fell, and the mystery of their breathing together deepened.

“It's good to be here!” the clown finally said.

They toasted to being alive. Then the four of them sat in a row on the double bed, their legs dangling. The clown's feet in his shoes were enormous. They laughed at that. A fire truck roared by in the street below. They listened, waiting as it passed. They sipped their wine.

W
HEN SHE WAS A LITTLE GIRL
, she had a picture book set in Venice. The child in the book stepped out of his front door, into a little red boat, and went to see his friend.

“I want to live there,” she told her mother.

“Oh!” said the mother. “Do you?”

“I do, and I will someday!”

And this story was recounted by the mother many times to others: “It was very peculiar when she spoke of Venice like that. Her eyes were shining. It was like the Virgin Mary was with us.”

This was how the mother spoke in those days. She seemed unaware of her audience, who wanted small talk about the wild Maine weather, nothing more. People snickered behind her back, which pierced the observant child to the core; she hated those people, and yearned to protect the mother from cold hearts. But it proved impossible.

They left Maine, they went someplace to start over. Philadelphia, which did not help. Her mother grew very depressed for a few years, did not wash her hair, and wore sleeveless blouses in the dead of winter. Her upper arms turned purple in the cold, as if badly bruised. She shaved her eyebrows off and replaced them with severely drawn black arches. Her gray-green eyes glazed over, and she smoked on the back stoop at night. Sometimes the child would lean out of her bedroom window and hover in the dark above her mother, trying to think of words to say that might bring her back in. Then one night she saw the mother kick an alley cat.

“Don't!”
the child screamed down into the dark. The mother looked up, embarrassed. Her hands flew up to cover her face.
“Get back in bed!”
And then a long pause. And then,
“You need another mother! Not me! I can't do this anymore!”

But the next day her Frosted Flakes were waiting for her in the dull blue bowl, as always, and she sat in the nook while her mother sat in the living room smoking in front of the television. The girl wanted to say, “You scared me last night, kicking that poor cat,” but was afraid to say anything at all. She ate her cereal. Her father left for work. The house filled up with her mother's music. Tom Jones singing “With These Hands,” “With these hands, I will cling to you.” The mother would sit listening in a chair, as if to a lecture, her jaw thrust forward, her head nodding when she most agreed with Tom.

In school all day the girl clenched her eyes shut against the memory of the night before. The cat had screamed, sounding almost human. The girl was one of those sentimental children who refused to kill bugs, even in self-defense. She'd cried hysterically when Edgel Tosh cut a sidewalk worm in half. He'd thrown one half in her face. “It's just a stupid
worm!
”

She also had a pet mouse named Ave Maria whom she loved. She once gave Ave a ride on the Tom Jones record, around and around on the sleek blackness, a mouse merry-go-round. It was a secret, this ride on the record, between the girl and the mouse.

The mouse had contracted chronic murine pneumonia soon after that. Its breath squeaked, then rattled, its nose ran and its eyes watered. The girl, who believed the Tom Jones record had somehow sickened the mouse, said, “Ave needs to go to the vet.” The mother said, “Yes, she certainly does.” And away they drove! The mother wasn't the sort to say, “Ah, she's just a mouse.”

The vet, a kind man with a silver beard, gave Ave Maria a prescription for Tylan, a good antibiotic. The mother spent money they didn't really have. “Don't tell your father,” she warned, driving home. Ave recovered.

So. To see her mother kick a cat and kick it hard—twice— was shocking. It changed everything, somehow, subtly but distinctly. The girl moved further inside of herself. She brought milk in bowls to the Philadelphia alley cats when her mother wasn't looking, as if to repay a debt. She prayed more than usual. For animals, for starving people. She prayed for her mother's happiness, which finally came, but it was too bright, too big.

The mother was so happy she smiled constantly, laughed loudly at even the slightest joke. The girl felt the laughter cling to her own skin. She tried to scrub it off in the tub. “Why are you scrubbing so hard?” the mother said, and then laughed loudly, and the sound echoed, bouncing off the tile walls.

The mother now had orange hair, high and starchy on her head, a red mouth, and sunglasses. She always had a mouthful of Certs. It took her an hour to get dressed just to go to the grocery store. She said to the girl, “Why do you walk like an ape with its head down? Do you want a big hump on your back someday?” and “Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone, sister!” Always beaming, and snapping her fingers, but something brittle underneath. And when the girl wouldn't smile back: “You get that look off your face before I slap it off.” And sometimes did.

But then Ave the aging mouse grew ill again. The vet said, “Mycoplasma pulmonis. I'll give you an antibiotic. Try different bedding, and avoid sawdust or shavings or hay. Shredded paper is okay.”

“But I already use shredded paper. She likes her bed.”

“Try CareFresh.”

They tried, but Ave Maria didn't make it. Somehow the mother knew to wait before saying, “Let's go shop for another mouse.” Knew, somehow, not to say, “Smile and the world smiles with you,” at least for a few days. Her mother's friends, two sisters named Jean and Joan, drove over to visit in their inherited orange ambulance and took both the girl and her mother out for ice cream on Pine, and the fatter sister raised up her cone like a glass of wine and said, “To Ave.”

But when the girl consoled herself the next day by wearing her cousin's hot pants and halter top, her mother slapped her face twice and called her
you little huzzy bitch
right there in front of the refrigerator, the clock on the wall like a shocked face. So confusing, the contradictions.

But who really remembers? Not the girl, who is now a young woman in faded overalls and a T-shirt. Memory for the young woman has become a surreal painting on the bottom of a sea. She doesn't dive. She's lived far from her parents for years, far enough away so that the painting is beautiful with detail that emerges in waking dreams:
mother in pink summer dress handing out orange Popsicles to the whole neighborhood.

Mother jogging in place on the front porch watching it snow, window open behind her so she can hear Tom Jones singing “What's New Pussycat.”

How she made tomato sauce. The very best.

How she took Ave to the vet.

How she worked in an office for Larry the Loser, told funny stories about him. “He thinks his ass is ice cream and we all want a lick.”

Driving to a diner, late at night, after seeing
Mission Impossible.
“Get anything you want, sugar bird.”

Polishing her red shoes.

All the betrayal, rage, and shame, all the scrubbing of the skin, the slaps and darknesses, the reasons, all gone—what painting could hold it in place?

So Julie, after several glasses of red wine, had called her mother up from Lyon, France, where she'd been living with a friend, tutoring children in English, and cleaning an old man's flat.

“Come see me! The fares are cheap! You deserve to see Europe! Come on, it's great, and Aunt Zilsy is in Paris. We'll travel. I'm on holiday!”

“Give me one good reason why I would want to visit Aunt Zilsy,” she'd said, but Julie heard how her voice had inflated with hope, with a notion that she was lucky to have her daughter calling her to invite her to come to France. France! It was like the moon. But she would go.
We'll have some laughs.

In the train station Julie had spotted her mother before her mother spotted her. Julie's heart sank as the patchwork quilt disintegrated, replaced by the wavering threads of dread, by a knowledge of her mother's vulnerability, masked as it was by the new strawberry-blond hairdo, the bright, flowery wool dress, the one hundred and eighty pounds, the pointytoed, pointy-heeled fake cowboy boots! Cowboy boots! Since when! And she has two enormous suitcases, and one tiny one, and she's only staying for a week?

Julie wants to throw a dark cape around her mother, and send her back home.

Her mother doesn't understand the part about how everyone hates Americans.

Julie hides behind a post and watches her mother pull a compact mirror out of her expensive purse and apply her lipstick. Smack.

She waits. She breathes, then marches toward her mother. She feels the station go silent, as all eyes turn to see the American reunion.

The flowery redheaded mother envelopes her girl. Cries a little.