The Song Reader (4 page)

He was getting ready for a full-scale meltdown—when Ben told him to go on. “I’ll finish getting everything ready.” His voice was light. “But hurry back. It’s going to be exciting.”

Tommy ran to his room and flopped backwards on his bed. While I was taping on the new diaper, he said he liked “en.” I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking the same thing myself.

I watched the race from the floor by the stereo. I was waiting for the right moment to ask my question, but finally I just blurted it out. “Do you have a favorite song?”

It was one of my sister’s biggest rules: you can’t trust anyone who has a favorite song. “There’s too much out there to love,” she explained. “Any person who can choose just one song must be deaf to the rest of them. It’s like a man who likes a woman only for her looks. It’s nice at first, and she feels great, but give her enough time, she’ll realize she can’t trust him because he’s blind to the rest of her.”

Ben didn’t even have to think about it. He shook his head. “How could you pick between greats like Jim Morrison and John Lennon?”

By the time I heard footsteps on the stairs, I was eager to see him with my sister. Specifically, I wanted to see him stand next to my sister. He seemed about her size, but I had to make sure. She’d dated shorter guys before, but I knew she preferred someone her own height or taller.

But it wasn’t Mary Beth, it was Rebecca. She told Ben that Mary Beth was waiting for him down in the office. He stood up, and ran his hand through his hair again, this time leaving a horn of hair sticking out on the left side. When Rebecca walked across the room and sat in the window chair, he looked at her. “Aren’t you coming?”

“No,” she said. “Mary Beth wants to talk to you alone.”

He raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t object. He said thanks for the race to Tommy and laughed again as they did their goofy hand thing for good-bye.

Rebecca didn’t talk much and she definitely didn’t play with Tommy. She crossed and uncrossed her legs several times and kept looking at her watch. After about twenty minutes, Tommy and I were done with the cars. We went back to cartoons and munching Cheerios from the box. When I asked her if she wanted some, she said no thanks and laughed. “If I pull this off, I’m taking myself out to lunch.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I liked hearing her laugh. It reminded me of her brother. They didn’t seem alike in any other way. On the phone with Mary Beth, he’d called Rebecca “young,” but she didn’t look as young as he did. They both had dark brown hair, but hers was as perfect as his was messy. She was wearing a crisp beige shirt and tan miniskirt. Even her purse looked shiny and flat as a new one.

A lot of Mary Beth’s customers didn’t look as troubled as they were, but Rebecca didn’t look troubled at all. And another thing. The Doors album cover was lying on the floor right by her chair. When she glanced in that direction, I pointed at it and said, “It’s pretty good,” trying to be friendly, but she just shrugged, like she had no interest in the group or the album. Ben, on the other hand, had mentioned Jim Morrison.

It was all very curious, and it got even stranger when Mary Beth and Ben returned. He was barely in the room when Rebecca said, “I hope you’re not mad, bro.”

“I have a right to be, don’t I?” he said.

Tommy ran over to Mary Beth and she picked him up, but she didn’t say anything. Rebecca looked at Ben. “I only did it because I was worried about you.”

“You’re worse than Mom,” he said, but he didn’t sound annoyed.

“Untrue. Mom wants you to go to that old fart Dr. Baker.” Rebecca smiled. “Didn’t I find you someone better?”

He nodded, and shot a quick glance at Mary Beth. They were exactly the same height, I noticed. And Ben was blushing a little, which I thought was a very good sign.

But Mary Beth just looked tired. And the only thing she said when they left was she’d give her left foot for a nap.

Another customer was due in five minutes, but I fired questions at her. What was wrong with him? Could she help? Why did Rebecca pretend to be a customer? Why didn’t she just say these were her brother’s songs? Was he coming back by himself next week? Did he even want her help?

She looked at me. “I gather you liked him.”

“Well, yeah. He was nice to Tommy. He seems to really like music.”

“He does like music,” she said—and then nothing. She headed to the Rubbermaid box in the kitchen where she kept the charts.

I followed her. “He seems pretty smart.”

“I guess he is.” She filed Rebecca’s chart under M and pulled out the next customer’s. “He told me he’s a graduate student in neuroscience and biochemistry at Washington University. It’s in St. Louis.”

She turned around but she didn’t look up from the chart in her hand. She walked back to the living room that way. I was surprised she didn’t stumble into something.

“Come on, Mary Beth.” I was right behind her. “Is he coming back? Tell me.”

“Yeah,” Tommy threw in, although he was throwing the couch cushions on the floor and not really listening.

“Don’t let him pile them too high,” Mary Beth said. She was at the apartment door, ready to go. “I don’t want him falling again.”

“Fine.” I frowned. “Be that way.”

She walked onto the landing, but before she started down the stairs, she popped her head back in. “He doesn’t want to be a customer.”

“Oh,” I said, and exhaled.

“But he is coming back.”

“When? Why?”

“Tonight,” she said, and smiled just enough for me to know the answer to the why part. It was a miracle. My sister was going on a date.

C
ould a wedding be far behind? This was the question I spent hours discussing during the fall and winter of that year with my two best friends, Darlene and Denise. The Ds, as I called them, were almost as interested in Mary Beth and Ben as I was. We all thought it was just the most romantic story, every bit as good as
General Hospital’
s Luke and Laura.

Rebecca hadn’t known what was wrong with Ben when she brought lists of his albums to my sister. He’d told his family he wasn’t going back to grad school in September, but he wouldn’t give a reason. It was Mary Beth who got out of him that he’d lost a close friend in a biking accident last spring. He’d been there; he’d held his dying friend in his arms. After that, school and careers and almost everything else didn’t mean very much.

I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about this, but I had to tell the Ds. We were in eighth grade, surrounded by boys whose idea of a romantic gesture was taking the straw out of their nose. And this was the real thing. A suffering guy who fell madly in love with a woman because she helped him through a terrible tragedy.

Not that Ben ever seemed to be suffering much. If anything, from the very beginning, he seemed like the most together guy my sister had ever dated. But that just made it better. He was wounded, but he could still entertain Tommy and unstop the kitchen sink. He was sad about his friend, but not so sad that he didn’t let out that noisy, happy laugh at least once every time I saw him.

He’d started spending the night with us in October, and by November, he was keeping his clothes and records at our place, rather than his parents’. But it was only temporary, Mary Beth said. She wanted him to go back to school; she kept saying his work was too important to give up now. He was working on what he called “the chemistry of depression.” His research adviser had gotten a grant from a big drug company that hoped to be able to develop a pill using their results.

“Think of the people you can help,” my sister kept saying. “Trust me, Ben, the work you’re doing will be responsible for saving someone’s life someday.”

This from my sister, who always complained about doctors trying to drug away people’s feelings. It had to be love.

Even Juanita Alvarez, my sister’s best friend, was impressed with Mary Beth and Ben’s relationship—and she never thought anybody was good enough for my sister. Juanita had had what Mary Beth called a “very hard life.” She was older, forty, maybe forty-five, and she worked at the diner, too, on the graveyard shift, or as Juanita called it “the truckers, drunks and insomniacs shift.” She’d been divorced twice: she referred to her two ex-husbands as “the Dumb and the Arrested.” According to Mary Beth, the Arrested really had been arrested, for stealing money orders from the QuikTrip, and bouncing checks from Juanita’s account, and was doing eighteen months in the county jail.

Juanita met Ben when he came to the restaurant to change a flat on Mary Beth’s car. It took him almost three hours—he wasn’t what you’d call mechanically inclined—but Juanita didn’t hold that against him.

“You seem happy, kiddo,” Juanita told my sister. Later she told me that she’d never seen Mary Beth happy like this, not in all the time they’d been friends.

Of course I wanted my sister to be happy, but still, it was a little disconcerting at times, how different she was now that Ben was around. When she first told me he was moving in, temporary or not, I was a little worried that our lives would change
too
much. Yet when I told her so, she said my fears were normal. “Any new person added to a family seems too big to fit at first, but somehow they do.” She pulled her blond ponytail tighter. “It’s like a new couch: at first it seems gigantic because your eyes can’t quit staring at it, but after a while the rest of the room starts looking just as big and important as it did before and the couch becomes a part of the whole. You just need to give it time.”

And she was right as usual. By Christmas, I felt like our new couch, Ben, was fitting in fine. He took me to the mall in his almost brand-new VW Rabbit with the cool sunroof. He volunteered to baby-sit Tommy on Saturdays, so I could spend more time with my friends. He did so much for us that Mary Beth called him her house husband, and wondered how we’d ever gotten along without him. But it was only temporary, she still insisted—and finally, he agreed. His savings were running out and he admitted he did miss his research. He would go back to school in January, but he would come back every weekend to be with us.

He left right after New Year’s and he kept his promise. He came every weekend in January and February, even when he had to drive through a foot of snow. On Friday nights when we’d hear him coming up the steps, Tommy would run to the door and start jumping and trying to turn the knob. Ben had bought Tommy a thirty-gallon fish tank for Christmas, and he usually arrived holding a baggie full of water with yet another brilliantly colored fish. Tommy named them all. Aquaman, Wonderdog, Marvin and Wendy, Zan and Gleek. When he ran out of Superfriends, Ben showed him the periodic table and said that the elements would make cool names. Of course Tommy had no idea what the elements were, but he went along, even though a lot of them sounded alike in his rendering: Calcium, Potassium, and Magnesium became “seeum”; Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen, were all just “gen.”

About half the time, Ben also brought something for me. He gave me notebooks and sweatshirts and pens with the Washington University logo; he gave me punk band albums you couldn’t even buy around here, which really impressed my friends.

Mary Beth told him repeatedly not to bring her anything; it was more than enough what he was doing for us. Sometimes she would put her hand on his face and whisper, “This is unbelievably sweet, you know that, don’t you?” Once, when he was riding Tommy on his shoulders to the fish tank, she stopped him in the hall. “Tell me again. What rainbow did you say you came from?”

The last two weekends in March he had to stay in St. Louis and work, but they talked on the phone and wrote to each other every day. Then, the first weekend of April, he walked in the door and told Mary Beth he’d made reservations at Scalatti’s, one of the fanciest restaurants in St. Louis. While she was getting dressed, he slipped me ten dollars, even though I said I didn’t mind baby-sitting Tommy, I had no plans. Actually, I was supposed to meet Denise and some girls from school at McDonald’s, but this was way more important. If all went well, my sister and Ben would come back engaged.

That had to be what was going on. Darlene thought so, too. I called her after Tommy went to bed to discuss. She’d been out sick for days, but she barely coughed as we went through all the evidence. Driving to St. Louis was very significant, I thought. Sure, Ben had taken Mary Beth to St. Louis before, but never on a Friday night, when the drive back and forth would take hours. Scalatti’s was significant, Darlene said, since everything on the menu was over twenty-five bucks. Nobody went to Scalatti’s unless they had something very big to celebrate, she was sure. I asked her if she’d ever been there and she said no, but her parents had when they spent the weekend in St. Louis on their twentieth wedding anniversary.

Ben wasn’t wearing a suit, but he was very dressed up for him: pressed khakis, a button-down shirt and tie—even the scuffed tennis shoes didn’t weaken the effect. Mary Beth had on her burgundy dress with the little flowers and her best black pumps. She even fixed her hair into long yellow rings, although she said it probably wouldn’t last through dinner. Her hair was so straight.

And he’d paid me to baby-sit Tommy. He’d never done that before. It had to mean something, I said, and Darlene agreed.

The big question was: did he have something in his pocket? Darlene laughed hysterically when she asked this, although I knew she meant a ring.

“How would I know?” I was lying on the floor in the kitchen. The chairs were too uncomfortable for what was already a long conversation.

“Please, Leeann. Don’t you think a guy acts different if he has a couple thousand dollars of diamond in his pants?”

“Acts different how?”

“Make sure it’s still there.” More laughter. “Touches his tuna while he’s at it.”

“Gross, Darlene.”

“Come on, they all do it,” she said, still laughing and now coughing. “It’s their favorite thing other than sex.”

When she barked out that she had to get a drink and dropped the phone, I found myself thinking about a night a few months ago when I got up to go to the bathroom and saw Mary Beth and Ben sprawled out on the couch. I tried to hurry, but by the time I was on my way back, he had her shirt pulled up and his face against her breasts. She was telling him to wait until they got in bed so the kids wouldn’t see, but he said he couldn’t wait another minute.

“I have to have you,” he panted. “If I don’t have you now, I’m going to die.”

I ducked into the kitchen so I wouldn’t embarrass them and stood in the dark, the floor tile freezing against my feet, until she grabbed his hand and pulled him into their room. They hadn’t closed the door yet, and as I rushed by, I saw her skirt drop to the floor and heard him gasp, “You’re so gorgeous. God, I want you so much I can’t breathe.”

I ran into my room, my face radiating heat in the cold air of our apartment. Later though, I decided it was kind of cool that they were so passionate. It was just part of being in love.

“You know that song ‘Whip It’ is about this.” Darlene was recovered, and still on the same topic. “Lots of songs are about guys doing—”

“Who cares?”

“Okay, but ask your sister, she’ll tell you I’m right.” She paused and took a drink. “So what do you think is happening? Do you think he’ll ask before dinner or after?”

I was relieved to be back on track. “Before is better.”

“Yeah. Before, over champagne. And on his knees. He has to be on his knees or it doesn’t count.”

“I’m sure he will be.” Ben was a floor person. He was always squatting or kneeling or sitting on the rug with his feet crossed over his legs like in yoga. I took a deep breath. “I wonder how he’ll say it.”

“How he’ll say it? What can he say other than will you marry me?”

“Maybe he’ll recite a poem,” I said. “One he wrote just for her.”

“Does he write poems?”

“No, I guess not.”

Right then and there, I decided the man I married would have to write poems. They wouldn’t have to be good, really, just expressive. Like a song lyric that catches you and stays with you for days and days.

I was still thinking about this when Darlene’s father told her she had to hang up now. I moved to the couch, planning to watch TV, but instead I found myself staring at the ceiling, wondering what my first boyfriend would be like. Even if he couldn’t write poems, it could still work, I decided, as long as he could recite poetry and really feel the words.

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I heard Mom’s voice telling me to wake up and go to bed.

I saw the burgundy dress with all the flowers, but still I didn’t get that it was my sister until she leaned down and touched my face. Mom wasn’t really the touching type. Even when I was little, she rarely touched me unless I was hurt or sick.

I wasn’t even fully awake, but I knew something was wrong. Mary Beth only sounded like Mom when she was very depressed. And Ben wasn’t with her. His absence filled the room like a cold blast of wind.

“What happened?” I said, sitting up.

When she didn’t answer, I snapped on the lamp and looked at her. Her face was unreadable but her eyes were lined with red, like she’d been crying for hours. But this was impossible. My sister hadn’t cried since we found out about Mom.

“Where’s Ben? Is he all right?”

“He’s fine,” she said, in that same flat depressed voice.

She didn’t speak for what felt like minutes. I flashed to how nervous Ben had seemed, standing in his pressed khakis and yellow tie, waiting for my sister to get dressed. At the time I thought it was cute that he was so distracted he couldn’t pay attention to Tommy, couldn’t even remember the name of Tommy’s favorite goldfish, the one that was named after him.

“These things happen,” she finally said, looking at her lap. “You can’t always predict what—”

“I can’t believe it!” I was gulping back my own tears. “Are you saying he broke up with you?”

She nodded weakly.

“It’s not fair!”

“I know, honey. But really, fair has nothing to do with it. People can’t help how they feel.” She glanced at me and back at her lap. Her voice was a whisper. “I just hope you don’t blame Ben too much.”

“What about his stuff?” It was stupid, but I was afraid to ask anything else. Her chin was trembling like she might break down any minute.

“He wants me to send it to him.” She exhaled. “UPS, insured.”

That did it. I jumped up to the album cabinet by the stereo and grabbed a record from Ben’s shelf and smashed it against my knee. The cover was still on: it didn’t snap in half; it didn’t even crack. Before I could smash it again, my sister was there, holding my wrist.

“Stop,” she whispered.

“I hate him!”

“No, you don’t.” She swallowed and her voice got thick. “He’s been good to you.” She ran her hand over her eyes. “He did care about you and Tommy, I really believe that.”

I dropped the record and threw my arms around her. “He cared about you, too. He must have. He did, I know he did.”