Don't Blame the Music (3 page)

Ashley slid out of the car and stood in the gutter.

The green car wavered on, caught in its own nightmare.

My mother moved stiffly out onto the steps, her hands to her heart, her lips moving soundlessly.

Ashley, Ashley.

Her cry of joy broke the sense of nightmare. Laughing ecstatically, holding out her arms, my mother ran to her older daughter. Joy filled me too. I guess no matter how bad the memories of past homecomings, a homecoming must always mean joy. I went to Ashley too, and we both embraced her, and we kept repeating the syllables of her name and crushing her to us, and feeling the boniness of her thin body in our arms.

Ashley did not hug back. She stood there, waiting for us to be done.

My father appeared and he too could not speak at first, and when he did it was a whisper. “Ashley, honey,” he breathed, and when he reached his daughter, he picked her up, because he is a huge man and she was tiny and fragile. “Welcome home sweetheart,” he said, his voice breaking, and he set her down.

“Hello,” she said, rather irritably, brushing us away like mosquitoes. She walked on into the house.

It struck me that she had nothing with her.

Nothing.

No suitcase. No purse. Not even pockets.

Ashley had gone out to conquer the world. She had come home with literally nothing. We, with our eight rooms, our closets, attics, drawers, and boxes. Our three sheds, our garage, our two acres.

My very own sister did not even have a toothbrush.

Dad held the screen door for Mom and me. A queer thing happened. We three did not look at one another. It was as if we were afraid to see what the others were thinking. We were waiting. Waiting to see who, and what, this year's Ashley Elizabeth Hall might be.

I
FOLLOWED ASHLEY INTO
the kitchen. You're not really home until you get to the kitchen. A front hall is just a corridor, but a kitchen is home. Even Ashley knew it. She walked slowly around the old pine table, its finish long gone from generations of scrubbing, and squeezed into the narrow place where the fourth chair was jammed.

We were a three-person family using a table that, naturally, had four sides, and therefore four chairs. But the fourth chair was just a place to set groceries on, or library books. Ashley went to that fourth chair like an animal seeking its lair, and when she sat down she sagged, as if all energy had left her forever. The chair was not merely an awkwardly placed shelf.
It was hers.

This burned-out woman was not the buoyant happy girl who cuddled me when I was little. Nor the crazed violent girl with the shaved skull. This was a third person entirely.

The memory of her own chair was all she had for her twenty-fifth birthday.

“I'm glad you're back, Ashley,” I said to her.

No reaction.

I sat down in my chair, next to hers, and leaned forward, putting my hand on her bony knee. “I've missed you.”

Now she looked up. Her eyes were dark in an impossibly white face and the circles beneath them were not from makeup. “You didn't miss me,” she said. Her voice was brittle and sharp. It went well with her body. “Any more than I missed you. Don't offer me charity. I won't take it. I'll just hate you for it.”

I jerked back as if she had scalded me, which satisfied her. What a first sentence for her to utter! I put my hand awkwardly on my own knee and looked nervously at my parents, who were standing in the kitchen door. They exchanged sick looks.

But I too hated charity. I had not liked it one bit when the trig class offered to help dear stupid Susan. How strange, I thought. Ashley and I have that in common, then. Sisterhood is in there somewhere. We just have to locate it.

Because this was no rock star dropping in between engagements. This was no victorious career woman spending a night between New York and Boston.

This was defeat.

My parents sat down with us and I knew in a moment my mother was going to do poorly. Joy combined with nerves made her dithery. It was the kind of thing I could overlook, but Ashley never overlooked anything. “How nice you look!” piped my mother to the daughter who looked dreadful. “I've always liked pearls. I'm so glad to see you wearing pearls.” She actually clapped her hands a little, to demonstrate how glad she was.

Ashley was utterly contemptuous. “The pearls are fake,” she said in a voice that dripped sarcasm, just as the pearls themselves dripped in ugly tangles from her throat. “They explode when I touch them. Shower the fans with acid.”

My mother gasped, too horrified to see the exaggeration.

“That's nothing,” I said to Ashley. “I have rubies that throw knives.”

My father grinned. My mother stared at me in confused anxiety. Ashley's face merely quivered. I did not know what that meant, but it was preferable to the sagging emptiness.

The timer on the stove rang gently. All the sounds in my mother's house are gentle, from the doorbell to the clothes dryer timer. I thought,
she's
the one we have to worry about, with Ashley here. Not Ash, but Mom.

“Dinner,” said my mother tensely, as though “dinner” were yet another appalling guest. She glanced around helplessly, unable to imagine what step to take next.

“I'll fix it,” I said. “You talk to Ashley.”

I got the pot roast out of the oven, spooned off some fat and began beating flour into it for gravy. My mother folded her hands like a little girl and put on a bright voice to match. You could almost see her dressing a little Ashley for dancing class. “Well, darling! How have you been?”

“How does it look?” said Ashley.

Mom withered.

“You look good to us, sweetheart,” said my father. Dad is an electrician and a football coach. He has a tendency to talk as if he's in a perpetual halftime meeting. “You're alive and you're home,” he said, as if priming her for a better quarter. “We've done a lot of worrying in the last few years, sweetheart.”

If he thought that would thaw his daughter's heart, he was wrong. “I'm not your sweetheart,” she said. “Or your team either. And don't try to lay some guilt trip on me just because you wasted your time worrying.”

Mother cringed, but Daddy simply nodded. In his view you won some and you lost some and you never worried about a play that was over. “Were you in New York?” he asked.

How odd that would be—Ash barely forty miles away all this time! I had pictured her in California, which seemed suitably remote in distance and style.

“I've been everywhere,” she said. “Don't hassle me. I didn't come home to be interrogated.”

Why did you come home? I wondered. Are you desperate? Hiding?

“Warren, darling,” said my mother nervously, “don't question her so much. She's been home only ten minutes.” Mom patted Ashley frantically on the shoulder, the hair, the back. Ashley removed her hands as if they were dead fish.

“I think it's fairly reasonable for a father to wonder when it's been twenty-four months since the last communiqué,” Dad pointed out.

“We don't share reasons,” said my sister. “We never have. Don't shove me, Warren, and I won't shove you. I just need a little space. And tomorrow I'll need the car.”

Her demand was so sudden nobody was prepared for it. I knew they wouldn't give her the car. I could still remember years ago a high-speed chase on the turnpike that ended when Ashley totaled the car. Nobody got hurt. I don't remember what punishment Ashley got, if any, from the legal system.

“Don't call me Warren,” said my father, rather pleasantly, and rather firmly. “And you may not have the car. It's your mother's car. When you have a job, and you're earning money, you can buy your own car.”

I finished setting the table and putting the serving dishes out. My mother found the harsh talk unbearable and compensated by getting even more bubbly. “Well, darling,” she said to Ashley in a giddy voice. “What a good night you chose to come home! Pot roast, buttermilk gravy, biscuits, mashed potatoes, and green beans.” She looked at the food happily, and I knew she rejoiced she had made a big dinner. What if Ash had walked in the night we had frozen fish sticks or ordered pizza? But pot roast with buttermilk gravy—that's homecoming food.

“I can see what you're having. Don't run through a menu for me.”

At least she didn't call my mother “Janey.” I changed the subject, making a real effort not to sound bubbly like Mom or football-coach stern like Dad. “You know what, Ashley?” I said. “It's my senior year in high school. I'm on the yearbook staff. I'm music editor. And I'm taking trigonometry, and British lit, and—”

“Music editor?” repeated Ashley. “How stupid. There's nothing to do except get the captions right under the concert choir photographs.”

“That's exactly what I said, but the editor told me to come up with something innovative and unique.”

“I've been doing things that are innovative and unique for years now,” said Ashley, “and none of them would fit into a yearbook.”

My mother definitely did not want to hear about any innovative and unique activities Ashley might have gotten into. “What a nice color sweater you have on, dear,” she said. “I love it on you.”

I almost gave her as disgusted a look as Ashley did. “It's the only thing the Salvation Army had,” said my sister.

“Oh, honey, why didn't you call us?” cried my mother. “I would have sent you money! I would have sent you clothing.”

“I didn't want to hear your voice.”

Another chilling remark. Delivered simply, as one stating an obvious fact—say, that the Atlantic Ocean separates us from Europe.
I didn't want to hear your voice.

Mom began serving pot roast. Her hands were shaking. My father was not looking at Ashley, but at Mom, and rather sadly. Suddenly I knew that my mother was desperate—frantic—for proof that she was not a failed mother. That daughter number one really was a neat little suburbanite underneath it all. But Dad knew better. And his grief was for his wife, not for Ashley.

I stared at them all, and I did not know where my grief lay.

But I understood something I had never thought about, or known existed. Our house was run gently and smoothly because my mother was fragile—not Ashley. Ashley, thin and tired and defeated as she might be, had the strength of ten. My mother did not.

“Where
have
you been, Ash?” I said, unable to resist the topic. “Detroit? Dallas?”

“Every city in America has a roach-ridden, urine-stinking motel where I have slept,” she said. “I have peddled my act in every corner of this worthless nation.”

I could see my father getting ready to defend America against the charge of worthlessness. We had enough troubles without bringing America into it. “You're in luck,” I said lightly. “We feature hot showers and roach-free accommodations.”

Ashley gave me a long assessing look. I did not know if I got a passing grade or not. But at least I was getting a chance, which was more than Mom and Dad got. She poked at her food. “I guess that's as good a reason as any,” she said finally.

My heart ached.

Whenever my mother is upset, she eats. The more she heard Ashley's flat dead voice, the more she ate. She piled the mashed potatoes onto her plate and added enough gravy to float them out to sea.

“You got fat,” Ashley accused her. “Fat people have no discipline. They're slovenly.”

My mother sat very still.

My father sucked in a deep furious breath.

“It's only five or ten pounds, Ash,” I said instantly. “I don't call that fat. I call it minor padding.” I smiled at my sister, willing her not to make things worse.

“Oh, Christ,” said my sister wearily. “You're one of these sugar-and-cream types, aren't you? Always finding the silver lining. Do me a favor, Susan?”

“Sure.”

“Shut up.”

There was a long, long pause. Nobody ate. Four forks played games on four plates. I had rather hastily jumped to the conclusion that I, Susan Anne, would be the savior in a difficult situation. Ashley had rather hastily pointed out to me that no, I wouldn't.

My father said, “We're glad you're home, Ashley. We're glad you knew you could come home. But I am going to have to require you to be courteous to your mother and your sister if you're going to live here.”

Ashley raised thin eyebrows over glittering sunken eyes. “Oh, you are, are you?”

My fingers tightened on the raised grapevine pattern of my water glass. My mother's chin trembled. My father's jaw bunched.

The telephone rang.

It sounded like a cry to battle. We leaped with jangled nerves. I had forgotten there was an outside world: other people, other places. Ashley had always been able to do this: envelop people so totally in her own personality that other thoughts shut down.

Dad leaned way back in his chair. Normally my mother would yell at him, for tilting an antique on two legs like that, but tonight she didn't notice. Grabbing the kitchen extension he said, “Yes? Yes? Who is this, please? Just a moment, please.” He cupped his hand over the receiver. “A boy named Anthony for you, Susan.”

Oh, no.

Oh, major league no.

I was stretched to the breaking point dealing with Ashley, ripped and torn with thoughts of my mother and my father and how the four of us were going to exist under one roof. How could I possibly talk with Anthony, of all people, right now? I doubted I could talk to Cindy, who understood everything. But Anthony? Explain to him—without sobbing and falling apart—why I had leaped out of his car?

More than anything, I did not want Ashley to be part of my relationship with Anthony. And I knew she was girl enough, and sister enough, to grasp right off that Anthony meant a lot to me. And somehow, in some cruel way, Ashley would jeopardize that, on purpose.