Thank You for the Music (23 page)

Aileen had already been to early mass at John the Divine's, sitting near the votive candles with the old people hunched in dark coats. Belle and Roseen after a morning of coffee and cigarettes in pastel housecoats at the kitchen table would make it to noon mass (the noon mass priest was better looking) in heels and hats and flowery dresses. They'd leave before the closing hymn to beat the crowd. “We're in Sin City,” they'd agree from behind the netted cages of their hats, the shadows of the nets delicate and dark on their faces.

“Sister Ignatious said without the benediction it doesn't count,” Aileen warned.

“You tell Sister to go take a flying leap,” Roseen said and laughed.

“Fine, end up in purgatory, see what I care!”

“Oh Aileen, you don't really believe all that crap, do you?”

Once after work, Shillone showed Aileen his room above the theater. It was barren looking, the intense order of it sad, somehow. He had a cot in the corner with a green blanket tucked tightly over white sheets that were turned down perfectly with a stiff, ironed look. A black-and-white photo of Ava Gardner sat framed on his bureau and was signed “You're a Touch of Venus, Baby!—Ava.”

One large window looked out at the ocean.

“So now you know how a real magician lives,” Shillone said. He watched her closely as she gazed around the room. Before she left he said, “Wait, you ain't seen the closet!” He opened the door and a strong smell of cedar emerged as he pulled down the lightbulb chain. The deep closet was a little library, all magic books, he said. “And see that blue chest with the stars? My cape is resting in there. It can't come out until the night of a show.”

Aileen nodded. Shillone took his black top hat from a high shelf and put it on his head and looked down at her. “I learned everything the hard way,” he said. He walked over to the mirror and looked himself in the eye. Aileen watched him, and could see her own reflection, watching. “Anybody ever beat you? Any parent ever kick you in your sorry little stomach?”

Aileen shook her head no. Why was he asking her this?

“They can damage the solar plexus. You like my shoes?” he said.

They were strange with pointed toes, the color of bitter chocolate. She did like them and told him so.

“It's a long road that ain't got no turns,” he said.

Aileen just watched him. He held his own gaze, and now his hat was tilted at an angle.

“What do you got to say for yourself?” Shillone said, still looking at his own eyes.

Aileen said, “Nothin' much.” She could try to explain that she felt she'd fallen into a dream, but knew Shillone would not be prepared to listen.

“If anyone big ever tries to beat you, you kick him right here,” Shillone said, his hand on his crotch. “You kick him as if your whole life depended on it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Strive to remember there's magic in the world.”

“Okay.”

“And all you got to
do
is learn a trade, move
away,
and never give nobody evil the time of
day
ever again.”

He winked. He came over and shook her hand as if they were both a couple of businessmen.

After Shillone's Aileen ran down the beach; it was dark. She ran and thought of telling her father all about the magician and his advice and his cedar closet. She could see her father's face, struggling to look interested.

“Is that right?” he'd say. “You don't say,” he'd say.

She missed the smell of him, his bristly face at night giving her a kiss. She missed her brother, Blaise, who never returned her calls these days. She clenched her eyes shut against the stars and asked the Virgin Mary to please help her get up off the sand and find her way back to the cottage.

“Now don't ever go into detail about El Greco's or Mack and them to your father,” Roseen said one day when they were taking a drive.

Mack was Roseen's boss at El Greco's Beef by the Bay, where she now hostessed, and also her new romantic interest. Aileen had overheard her mother tell Belle that he was quite the Italian stallion.

“I'm not telling Daddy about Mack or anything else. If Daddy saw you and Mack he might think you lost your lid.” Mack was the type to ask Aileen on the phone, “So how's that delicious mother of yours?”

“Mack's all right. He's up front.”

“Might be up front but he wears too much perfume.”

“Cologne, Aileen, cologne. And I don't know why I even care what your father thinks,” Roseen said.

Aileen stared out the window at the marshlands, urgent and green under a wet gray sky, reeds coming to life for spring, racing in the wind as if to leave the earth and fly.

She remembered her brother's only visit, how they walked together for hours along the highway, the marshes stretched out on either side of them all the way to the horizon, making them feel unreal, dreamlike, so they'd kept looking over at each other. Blaise with dark hair in his eyes and his voice cracking with change, transistor radio in his hand. James Taylor, “You've Got a Friend.” Her whole body had to brace itself against the sadness of this song whenever it came on. And really, why was it so sad anyway? What was so sad about telling someone they had a friend when they were down and troubled?

Later she'd taken Blaise to meet Shillone, but he hadn't understood how wonderful a place it was—hadn't grasped how Shillone was like some kind of strange miracle man, tucked away like a secret she'd discovered. Blaise had simply jiggled his knee and stared out the window, ignoring Shillone while Aileen talked nervously about nothing she could recall, trying hard to fill any silence. It was the first time she ever felt like Roseen—the way Roseen would orchestrate people. But it didn't work.

“He's weird,” Blaise said, as they walked home. “You shouldn't go there.”

“He's my friend.”

Blaise shrugged and fell silent.

After he got on the bus to go back home that night, Aileen cried as the bus rolled down the road. Roseen gave her a stiff hug, patting her on the back quickly, a space between them built of fear becoming palpable, the source of it so old and complex it would never be mentioned, much less understood. And like anything with substantial roots, the space was growing. They walked down the narrow street in the dark.

“Visiting,” Roseen said and sighed. “It's always a strain.”

“We should all just get back together,” Aileen said, though she knew the statement was ridiculous.

“Yeah, I could marry your father and his new wife-to-be,” Roseen said. “Wouldn't that be a cute threesome?”

Aileen looked up at her mother's face in the dark. “Well? Wouldn't it?” Roseen said, smiling down at her.

Aileen kept walking.

“Don't you even worry,” Roseen said.

The night Aileen's father decided he couldn't stay, Roseen had taken a vase and thrown it down the length of the upstairs hall. It crashed and shattered in the dark. She and Blaise had frozen in their beds, their bodies listening. It was not like all the other fights—no extended screaming or crying. Instead a dead silence filled up the house like water. And Roseen said
Bastard,
her voice choked, muffled. And then for the first time ever they heard their father cry. “I'm sorry,” he said through his weeping. “I'm so sorry.”

This was the memory that would rise in Aileen's throat and make her double over in a fit of coughing.

They were out for a drive one day. Going out for a ride in the car was a treat.

“You all right?” Belle said to Roseen.

“Just sittin' on top of the world kickin' the globe,” said Roseen at the wheel, chain-smoking in a horsewoman's hat.

“Okay, Aunt Rita, bless her soul,” said Belle, because that was what dead Aunt Rita had always said.

“Somebody sing somethin',” Roseen said, miles later, and Belle sang “Make the World Go Away.”

“Not that,” Roseen said.

Aileen sang “American Pie,” every word, and they clapped.

Later Belle began making her lists, which was how she dealt with the past.

“Old neighbors,” she'd announce out of the blue. “Sicilianos, Hydes, Tigues, Nibilitskis, Brennans, Glaziers, Keoughs. . . .”

“Colors of rooms in Forty-seventh Street house after the war,” she'd say, eyes narrowing.

“Blue, blue, white, peach. . . . Hey, Roseen, was the kitchen blue after the war or had your father painted it by then?”

“Oh hell, don't ask me!”

Aileen didn't know her grandfather, though he was sometimes mentioned in a list. He'd vanished with a woman Roseen and Belle referred to as Big Ass. Anytime Aileen tried to find out about her grandfather, Roseen and Belle did imitations, contorting their faces and deepening their voices.

“It's Friday night,” they'd say. “Let's stay home and read
The Encyclopedia of Common Disease
!”

“Feel my head? Am I warm? Do I look a little
wan
?”

“How 'bout the night he started screaming about his pancreas?”

“Big Ass didn't know what she was in for.”

They laughed, and Aileen in the backseat waited for the silence that followed when both of them would clear their throats and turn toward separate windows.

One night Aileen overheard Roseen screaming at Belle, saying she didn't understand a thing about love, just set a terrible example. “Maybe you wanna joke your way to the grave, but I think there's more to it than this.”

Belle's face caved in. Then they were crying on opposite sides of the room until Roseen said, “Leave me alone!”

Before Belle turned to leave, Aileen ran from that cracked door, exploded out of the cottage into the dark and all the way up to the ledge by the sea. It was black with creosote. She loved the smell. She breathed it in. Held her arms tight around her stomach.

Prayed to Mary. A very short but intense little prayer:

Help.

Belle and Roseen decided to drive Aileen to the new suburb near Lititz, Pennsylvania, where her father, his new wife, and Blaise were living now.

In a public bathroom off the turnpike, Aileen watched Belle and Roseen redo their faces. Belle took cold cream and removed her eyebrows, then put them on again, arching them even higher so that Aileen wondered whether the brows were reflecting an inner state or helping to create one.

“You're overdoing it,” Roseen told her.

“Last time I checked this was
my
face.”

“Aileen, don't lean against that wall,” Roseen said. “You don't know who's leaned there before you.”

“You think the whole world's contagious!”

“You better believe it is.”

“I sat down on the toilet seat without putting paper down first,” Aileen said.

Roseen turned from the mirror, wide-eyed, stricken. “Tell me that's a joke,” she said.

“Okay, it's a joke,” Aileen lied.

Roseen turned back toward the mirror. “It damn well better be.”

“It is.”

“These damn lights make me look like I got one foot on the banana peel.”

“You look fine,” Belle said. “Pipe down.”

Roseen was dabbing streaks of red onto her cheeks. Then she took out what Aileen had heard her call her foundation and applied it down either side of her nose, telling Aileen for the third time that it was a trick to make a wide nose seem narrow, a long one shorter, and she should learn the trick since it looked like Aileen's nose was already headed off in the wrong direction.

“Ask me if I give a crap,” Aileen said, but she blushed and fought tears as she bent to tie her shoe.

“If you don't give a crap, nobody else will,” Roseen said. “Count on that.”

Aileen, for the first time, had a hermit vision then. She'd live in the mountains, dark wild hair hanging to her feet, she'd sleep in a shack flanked by dogs. One friend, who was also a hermit, would visit once a week.

“You wait, girl, in a year or so you'll be damn glad you've got a mother who knows how to bring your best face forward.”

“The hell I will,” Aileen said, and this made them laugh, the sound of it bouncing off the tile. Aileen stared up at them. They were like members of a cult she knew she'd have to join, eventually. She sensed the cruelty in the pleasure they took now.
Can't stay eleven forever, honey. Soon you'll be one of us.

When they neared Haven Crest it was dark. Streetlights rained down. They circled the block like a shark.

“Not all it's cracked up to be,” Roseen said, but Belle seemed mesmerized.

“Ground control to Major Belle,” Roseen said.

“Hmmm.”

“Just please get a load of that tacky joint over there with the drooling statues.”

“Hmmm.”

Aileen's father's house was big brick with black shutters, a moonlit maple in the front yard.

“I changed my mind,” Aileen said. “I'll just stay in the car and drive back with you two, okay?”

“Go on,” Roseen said. “And take good notes while you're there.”

“It's only a few days,” Belle said.

“Tell Blaise to come out and give us a hug,” Roseen added.

Aileen grabbed her flowered suitcase and got out of the car. She felt them watching her walk up the path. If she stopped walking her legs would fly away from her body back to them.

Inside Aileen sat with them in the large living room, in chairs that seemed too far apart. Blaise was not home. The color TV was huge, commanding, a console, it was called. Aileen's father gave her ice cream and praised her appetite to his new wife, Joan, who wore a pantsuit and gold bracelets. She smiled politely and listened to everything said with interest so sincere it was painful.

“Wish I could eat like that and keep a figure like yours,” she told Aileen, then looked quickly over at Aileen's father to see whether she'd said the right thing. Aileen had been prepared to dislike this woman, and now she wanted to rescue her.