Thank You for the Music (25 page)

All the other songs I liked were sung by men. I never stopped to consider it. I tried to prefer Ringo out of pity and to prove that cuteness was subjective. I slept with pictures of the Reverend Al Green tucked into my pajamas. I swung on the swing set at school and sang “Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless.” When I was eleven I wrote Neil Young several letters telling him how he and I were similar. Thanks for including “Powderfinger,” by the way.

I look like I could be named Iris Dement (Yes, I know in the real world she's young with all her teeth, and pretty but that makes no dent with me.) You know how my tongue savors a good name. And Iris Dement is really the aged widow of a dead coal miner, whose imagination was born too late, who wears loud gold lamé slippers in the grocery store, as we did in our twenties, living in that microcosm of friendship where everyone around us seemed to be behind glass, like shoppers staring in on bargains they'd never buy. Let me tell you something. I put on one of those old outfits (Rhondina's thrift store finally closed, by the way) and I ventured outside feeling I could emerge into the world only because I was:

       
1. Armed with new name (Iris Dement)

       
2. Wearing gold lamé slippers like we did in our roaring twenties

       
3. Listening to your tape on my Walkman

       
4. Wearing what we used to call our ironic lounge wear

Ironic lounge wear on a middle-aged agoraphobic looked quite different than it did on the two of us when our long hair shone and boys trailed behind us. I knew this, but I was Iris Dement in that grocery store, able to buy beans and a Clark bar without succumbing to my usual fear. My hands didn't shake, I didn't imagine a wolfman was hiding behind every pillar, I thought not
once
of biological, chemical or nuclear warfare. Somehow I was stationed in my body. When it began to tremble, I simply walked right into that Nancy Griffith song about the kids who meet in Woolworth's! I walked right in through the back door of that old song, and I put on my Woolworth's uniform, and decided I was the manager.

How clearly I could see those sweet kids, Eddie and Rita, Rita behind the counter smiling and shining, Eddie pushing a mop. Did he have a cowlick? I was consumed with affection for them. I told them they should get married but not have a baby. (I'd heard the song before and knew the baby would die.) But of course being young and beautiful and in love and mere characters in a song, they just stared at me with a kind of pity. You poor dumb Woolworths manager, what do you know? I wanted to wrap my arms around them and take them home and keep them safe. The world would eat them with a fork and knife. And they'd just keep on dancing.

So I walked out of that grocery store rewinding that song, so as to stay inside it. You know this is a city of helicopters and makes me nervous. I walked home, eyes on the sidewalk, and was safe again.

I listened to that song forty times. I do this sometimes. It's like I can't stand the joy or the pain in a song, I want to play it so it won't be able to take me with it anymore, I want to play it until I'm deaf to it. Like Billie Holiday's best songs. Don't you want to play them until you're deaf? Am I the only one who ever wanted to have sex with a song?

Now let's talk about “Walkaway Joe” by Trisha Yearwood. Somehow I knew that song was what inspired you to make a tape, since
I
was that girl in that song, sixteen and stupid, my poor mother worried sick as I fell for Sunshine Lamont in his loud car, his brutal kisses, his child inside me after our second date—I hear the song and remember lying under Sunshine praying to die. Something was so wrong with me. They'd diagnose it today. They'd give me the proper prescription.

But all I had back then for medicine was the fortune of meeting you.

It was a mere four days after I walked out of Saint Jerome's Home for Unwed Mothers, my would-be son adopted by the loving couple with a good home.

Nobody in my family came to meet me. They had their own problems. I was alone. I was still bleeding from the birth. I was afraid to ask anyone if I was bleeding to death. I half hoped that I was.

I was six days away from my seventeenth birthday.

I remember how you stood in the middle of that narrow city street offering me a cigarette you'd rolled yourself, saying, “It's European.” Something about the way you said it, and the way you were dressed in that old black coat, caused the land to shift. I believed for a moment I'd been transported to Holland, the air suddenly strange and charged with Anne Frank, windmills, and children's wooden shoes.

I love you, I wanted to say then; it's true. That was the nature of my heart back then. But I had decorum. We were strangers, we were girls. I was quaking with the emptiness my baby left behind. But I so adored your face, your dark eyes, the way you flicked your hair back like a boy, your boots, your certainty, your invitation. “Hey. Let's take a walk.”

I could only follow you, speechless.

We went through the yellow woods; I saw a child's toy—a horse head on a stick, the kind kids gallop around on, abandoned in the leaves. Together we walked out to a field and climbed a water tower. I sat beside you looking down at the shimmery world.

“Looks better from a distance, huh?” you said. “Check out the wildflowers down there.”

(I can still hear you, all these years later. In case you ever have a moment where you think “nothing I've ever done in my life really matters,” you can think again; taking me up there mattered, mattered like breath.)

Up on the water tower, we looked down. Purple, yellow, last flowers of autumn. Red leaves flying like tiny carpets. You rolled a smoke. Smiled at me with eyes so kind they seemed more dog than human. Held my hand, just like we were six. I was filling up with you, Leonarda. It was as if you'd begun replacing the baby I'd handed over to the woman in the yellow scarf who had said, “Thank you so very much, you have no idea what this means!”

“I think I have a pretty good idea what it means,” I'd said, groggy from some pain medication they'd given me. The baby looked at me when I said that.

Up there on that water tower, on your purple transistor radio given to you by your mother when you were twelve, we heard the song “If You Don't Know Me by Now” and you said, “This song is so great it makes me want to fly off this tower!” You stood up and flapped your arms. You howled with pleasure into the sky of autumn geese. I sat smiling, terrified. “Please sit down.”

You laughed at me. “I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere.”

In a plaid thermos you had whiskey and we sipped and floated in the clouds and
if you don't know me by now, you will never ever ever know me,
and I said, um, I, um, and you said, What? and I said, Nothing and you said, Come on, stranger, spit it out. But words failed me. I needed a song to explain. And I wasn't a musician. If I'd been born a musician, I'd never have had the problems I've had. I believe that. God gave me the heart of a musician without the talent, maybe just to see what would happen. Satisfied, God?

Against the sky that day with you I just listened and felt the absence of the little boy who'd kicked me so hard, wanting out, wanting to meet me. He ran his eyes over my face as we said good-bye. I can sometimes touch my face and feel the trail his eyes left when he did his looking.

I always thought if I'd met you
before
I'd given that baby up, you'd have found us a way to keep him.

We'd have lived, the three of us, in that shack you found down in Matson Run.

We'd have taught him all the good songs, he'd have turned into the kind of DJ who understands that “Unsatisfied” by the Replacements is the real national anthem. Not just for the words but for the raw pain in that singer's voice.

I do wonder if he'll ever try to find me.

I do think if he did, I'd dress up like another kind of person altogether, and pretend I was a musicologist, so he didn't have to feel his biology like a dark shadow.

So I play this tape and feel you're still beside me, up on that tower where we began, and still I feel music can remake the world.

Didn't Otis Redding come on next that day?

Listening now for a moment I feel six days away from seventeen again.

A tape will come your way sooner than you think. I'm getting a job in a market. I can do it. I can do many things with music like this on my head.

Until then, don't judge me. My falling to pieces back then was not due to a bad attitude. Please believe in things like biochemistry, or maybe even the soul.

Will you visit me?

Don't pity me because I have no husband with a sailboat, no membership to a country club. (I sort of can't believe you do.) I hope he's deeply kind.

I'm writing a book about America.

Don't pity anyone. You just don't know. Maybe they feed stray cats. Maybe feeding stray cats gives them more pleasure than you can imagine, not to mention the pleasure the cats get. Perhaps a child with an overworked mother eats tomato soup with them four times a week. This child, Bernadette Opal Greer, who is mildly retarded and gets teased on the bus, this child whose sloppy face will get her exactly nowhere, this child knocks on my door late at night three or four times a week, just so I can put on her favorite song, Marvin's “Mercy Mercy Me.” She listens and watches the goats in the backyard, who in the darkness are curled up asleep. Upon her face is light that nobody could ever capture. See what I mean?

I will always love you.

Francine

Perennial