Screaming Divas (12 page)

Trudy's gaze finally came to a rest on Cassie and Adam, and she made a beeline for them.

“Cassie!” She looped her arm around her waist and smacked her on the cheek, then nodded coolly at Adam.

“Trudy,” Adam said, stepping away.

Cassie watched Adam for a moment, admiring his feline movement, until another stab of pain distracted her.

If anyone could provide her with immediate medication, it was the lead diva. Trudy was a walking pharmacy with a pill for every mood. Cassie whispered her symptoms.

Trudy's face took on a glow. “I have just the thing.” She rummaged around in her mudcloth bag (a souvenir from one of her dad's trips to Africa) and brought forth a handful of red capsules. “Take two and call me in an hour,” Trudy said.

Cassie swallowed the pills without water and waited for them to take effect.

Harumi showed up then, on the heels of Alan, and they started setting up their equipment.

By the time the art lovers and scenesters started flowing through the door, Cassie's headache had been subdued. The pain had given way to a dreamy haze. Words felt heavy in her mouth. The air resisted her limbs. Still, she managed to drag herself onto the makeshift stage. She tuned her guitar and when Trudy gave the signal, her hands moved automatically.

They bullied their way through “I Hear a Symphony” and “Come See About Me” and “Baby Love.”

Cassie looked out into the crowd and saw the heads bobbing, the feet tapping, people careful not to spill their drinks. Jan and Lynn, the owners of The Cave, danced at front and center. Incredibly, they seemed to be enjoying the music. It could be that they were just drunk, but maybe they really would let the Divas play at their club.

She saw Adam at the back, staring at her. Some woman with a pad of paper stood at his elbow. From time to time she scribbled something. A reporter, Cassie thought. And there was Noel, the infamous Noel, a wry smile pasted on his face. He probably thought their music was awful.

Cassie didn't care about the critics. She didn't even really care what the audience thought. She was riding on a magic carpet over fields of daisies. She felt lovely and lazy and warm.

At the front of the stage, Trudy was gasping, working up energy for the next number. She edged over toward Cassie and said, “Let's do ‘Crashbaby.'”

Cassie nodded.

“Do you want to sing?”

Cassie shook her head. She didn't want anything to disturb the woozy, comfortable state she was in.

Trudy nodded, then tossed her head like a wet dog. Drops of sweat splattered the stage.

How weird to watch Trudy thrash around singing her song. Cassie's lips moved with the words that she had scrawled on paper. Those words had risen from her memories, from the core of her, from a black night long ago. Now, they were floating over the heads of the young men and women in their little black dresses and thrift shop jackets. They were weaving among the junk sculptures, sailing out the window and to the moon.

The rest of the evening passed like a dream. During “Lady Lazarus Rises Again,” someone accidentally knocked one of Adam's pieces onto the floor and the music was stopped. Adam raged around like a Picasso bull, calling Trudy names.

Cassie was too whacked out to drive home, so she crashed on Trudy's sofa. She didn't crawl into bed with her as usual, because Noel went home with them, too.

Cassie remembered thinking that it was odd because Noel was living with Wendy, but then again, her father had slept with other women when he'd been married to her mother. Men were like that. She heard Trudy giggling on the other side of her door, and then she dove into a deep sleep.

She woke once to the smell of cigarette smoke and Noel sitting in the corner, staring at her. In the morning, she wasn't sure whether he'd really been there or not.

When Harumi stumbled into the kitchen for breakfast, she was surprised to see her father there. Normally on a Saturday morning he would rise with the robins, eat quickly, and start in on the chores of the day. He'd have the lawn mower cranked before most decent people were out of bed. And on the days that he allowed himself leisure, he'd be the first one out on the golf course, the first fisherman on the lake. So what was he doing, still reading the newspaper at half past nine?

“What is this?” he asked as soon as she walked into the room.

Harumi plopped down on her chair and reached for the carton of orange juice. Her ears were still ringing from the night before and cigarette smoke clung to her hair.

Mr. Yokoyama stabbed his finger at the newspaper, at a black and white photo buried somewhere between world news and sports. “I said, what is this?”

Harumi wasn't a morning person. She liked to eat her corn flakes in silence as she gathered her thoughts around her. Usually the only other person at the table was Koji, and he was too busy wolfing down toast and eggs to think of conversation. It was too early in the morning for the harangue she felt coming on.

Harumi reached for the newspaper then, when her father refused to hand it over, got out of her chair to look over his shoulder.

The newspaper was opened to the arts page, something that rarely interested her father. She read the headline: “A Gallery of Garbage Draws More Than Flies.” She looked at the pictures. There was a photo of one of Adam's sculptures, a figure of a man made out of bicycle handlebars, paint cans, wire, and hubcaps all welded together. Next to that was a picture of the band: Trudy sneering into the camera, Cassie bent over her guitar in fierce concentration, Harumi contorted with her bass in the air. Alan was lost in the grainy shadows, which was just as well since he wasn't a real band member. Their names were printed underneath.

“Oh, no,” she whispered under her breath.

Then she felt the sting of a slap. She pressed her palm to her face. For a moment, she could only stare at this slump-shouldered man, her father. He had never struck her before. She could tell by the way that he lowered his eyes that he was ashamed of his actions, but she knew that he would never apologize.

“What was that for?” she asked. She wouldn't shout or cry. She would stay calm.

“You lied to us.”

Yes, she had, but she was sure that there was more to his anger than that.

She could sense his struggle to find words to match his feelings. Her father rarely became angry. Mrs. Yokoyama was the one who ran around shrieking about every injustice that befell her. Mr. Yokoyama lacked the vocabulary for confrontations. He knew how to make rules, but he didn't know what to do when they were broken.

“And what is this name, ‘Screaming Divas'? It sounds like a bunch of crazy women.”

“It's just a name,” Harumi said. “It doesn't mean anything.”

“The newspaper says that you could not play your instruments well and that your music was junk. Like the sculptures.”

Harumi felt as if she had been slapped again. No one had ever criticized her playing before. Besides, they hadn't been all that bad. Sure, Trudy's singing was off-key from song to song and Cassie's fingers fumbled once in a while, but they had energy. The crowd had enjoyed them. And she'd had a blast, up there on the stage with the Divas.

“Is that what you're mad about?” Harumi asked. “That some reporter says we played badly?”

She went back to her chair, weary from the fight. She grabbed a banana, although she'd suddenly lost her appetite, and began to peel it.

“No,” her father said.

When Harumi looked up, she was shocked to see tears glistening in his eyes.

“I'm angry because you are wasting your talent. You were born to be a wonderful musician, and you betray yourself.”

That old argument. Harumi felt doors clanging shut within herself. Why couldn't they just let her live her life? Let her have friends, a hobby,
a little fun
once in a while
? For once in her life, she felt free and full of possibility, which was maybe odd since her musical potential was all that her family had focused on for as long as she could remember. But now she was making her own decisions, her own mistakes, and she was happy. Finally. Why couldn't they get lives of their own?

“No more rock ‘n' roll,” Mr. Yokoyama said, folding the newspaper. “I will buy you a new violin, if that's what you want.”

Harumi watched him get up from the table and leave the room. She tore the banana peel into thinner and thinner strips.

There was no way she'd desert her friends. And no one was going to bash them in print like that ever again. They'd practice. Screaming Divas would become a legend.

Mrs. Shealy was hosing the flowerbed when Esther pulled into the driveway on Saturday afternoon. She watched her daughter park and climb out of her car with a load of metal.

“What in the world?”

“I'm going to be a drummer, Ma,” Esther said.

Her mother bent down and turned off the water. “Are you out of your mind? You'll be going to college in the fall and you're working at the gallery. What do drums have to do with all this?”

“I'm going to be in a band,” Esther said. “With Harumi.”

Her mother rolled her eyes.

Okay, they both knew that, musically speaking, Harumi and Esther were worlds apart. When Harumi had been rising up through the ranks of the Suzuki School, Esther had begged her parents to let her learn to play the violin. Finally, after weeks of tears and tantrums, they'd given in. They couldn't afford Suzuki, but some cousin had an old violin in the attic that just needed dusting off, and a lady at the Baptist church gave lessons from her home.

Esther had tried hard, at first, to follow her instructor's directions. But daily practice was boring, and her mother, who was against the idea from the beginning, made no effort to discipline her. Running through the sprinkler and cutting paper dolls out of magazines was better for a child than trying to turn her into a mini-adult like Harumi.

After two months, Esther still couldn't read music and her bow's screech across the strings made the music teacher's dog howl with pain. “You're just wasting my time,” the teacher said with a sigh. “You may as well go play.”

Esther had cried all the way home. To make her feel better, her mother had dug up a pair of combs and a roll of wax paper. They'd made their own instruments and played music on the front porch. The violin was sent back to the cousin.

Well, drumming was about rhythm. Esther wasn't musically inclined, but she figured she could keep a beat.

Opportunity was arising. Esther had heard, one late night at The Cave after dancing for hours with Rebecca, that Alan might be leaving the band. Word had it that Noel was through playing house and ready to start up again. Ligeia was being brought back to life.

She'd found this drum kit at the Salvation Army store. It was dented and tarnished, but it would serve well for practice. If she could manage to sell that new Blue Sky assemblage that had come into the gallery last week, she could use the commission to invest in something better.

She struggled to get all the components out of her tiny hatchback.

Her mother didn't offer to help. She shook her head and went into the house.

A few hours later, they were all sitting around the dinner table—Esther's parents, Mark, and Esther. She wondered if they were the only family in America that ate together every night.

Esther's dad was still wearing his South Carolina Electric and Gas uniform. He spent all day scaling posts, fixing wires. The sun had burned deep lines in his face.

“So what's new?” he asked, as he did every night.

“Nothing,” Mark mumbled, as usual, digging into a mound of mashed potatoes.

Esther didn't say anything. She'd tried to talk to her parents about the gallery, but they'd never heard of Blue Sky, they'd never even been to an art museum. They had absolutely no interest in art or her job.

“Esther's going to play drums in a band,” her mother piped up.

“Drums?” Her father looked at her in disbelief. “Drumming is a man's job, isn't it? I've never heard of a girl playing the drums.”

Esther sighed. Why did her parents have to be the dullest, least hip people on earth? “Get out of the Dark Ages, Dad. Women can do anything, haven't you heard? There are women doctors now. Women astronauts, women pumping gasoline.”

Her father shrugged. “If you're trying to get a boyfriend, that might not be the right way to go about it. Guys might be afraid you'd start beating them with those sticks.”

“Who says I'm trying to get a boyfriend?”

Esther knew that her parents worried about her. They'd married young, just out of high school. They didn't seem to understand Esther's apparent lack of a social life.

“Esther couldn't get a boyfriend even if she tried,” Mark said with a chuckle.

“Shut up, wiener.” Sometimes she wondered if he'd heard any rumors.

Someone's older brother or sister might have spotted her with Rebecca. And Rebecca herself was so indiscreet.

What would they do if they found out?

Late one afternoon at Goatfeathers, Trudy handed over a sheet of notebook paper full of smudges and scribbles to Cassie. “What do you think?”