Sing You Home (21 page)

I think we both knew tonight would end up like this—in spite of its humble beginnings of an Italian dinner and a bad movie. How does sex ever happen between couples, except as an electrical storm that’s been gathering in the space between the two people, which finally combusts?

But this is different. Because even though it’s Zoe’s first time, I’m the one who has everything to lose if it’s not perfect. Namely, Zoe.

So I tell myself that I’m going to let her go at her own pace, which means the most incredible torture, as her hands move from my shoulders to my ribs to my waist. But then she stops. “What’s the matter?” I whisper, imagining the worst: she is disgusted by this; she is feeling nothing; she knows she has made a mistake.

“I think I’m scared,” Zoe confesses.

“We don’t have to do anything,” I say.

“I want to. I’m just afraid I’m going to do it wrong.”

“Zoe,” I tell her, “there is no
wrong.”

I slip her hands beneath the hem of my shirt. Her palms brand my stomach; I am sure I will wake up with her initials seared into my skin. Slowly, her hands inch up, until they are touching the lace of my bra.

Here is the thing about lesbian sex: it doesn’t matter if your body isn’t perfect, because your partner feels the same way. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never touched a woman, because you
are
one, and you already know what you like. When Zoe finally takes off my blouse, I think I cry out, because she covers my mouth with hers and swallows the sound. And then her shirt comes off, too, and the rest. We are a tangle of smooth legs and peaks and valleys, of sighs and pleas. She grabs for me, and I try to slow us down, and somehow we meet in the glorious middle.

Afterward, we curl together on top of the covers. I can smell her skin and her sweat and her hair, and I love the thought that, even when she is gone, my sheets will still retain that memory. But things that are this perfect don’t last very long. I have been down this path before with a straight woman, so I know that having a fantasy come true doesn’t always mean it will be permanent. I can believe Zoe wanted this to happen between us. I just can’t believe she’ll want it to continue.

She shifts in her sleep and rolls over, so that she is facing me. Her leg slides between mine. I pull her closer, and wonder when the novelty of me will wear off.

Two weeks later, I am still waiting for the other proverbial shoe to drop. Zoe and I have spent every night together—it’s gotten to the point where I don’t even ask if she wants to come over after work, because I know she’ll already be there waiting with Chinese takeout or a DVD we had been talking about watching or a fresh-baked pie she insists she can’t eat by herself.

There are moments I cannot believe how happy I am. But there are just as many moments when I remember that, to Zoe, this is still just the bright, shiny new toy. In private, Zoe is so, so gay. She reads all my back issues of
Curve.
She calls her cable company and gets Logo. She starts talking to me about Provincetown: if I’ve ever been, if I’d ever go again. She acts the way I did when I first embraced who I really was—like I’d been let out of my cage for the first time in twenty years. However, she’s never told anyone—not even me—that she’s fallen for a woman. She’s never been in a relationship before that causes people on the street to whisper when she walks by. She’s never been called a dyke. This isn’t real yet, for her. And when it is, she will come back to me and tell me it’s all been a wonderful, fun mistake.

And yet . . . I’m too weak to turn her away now, when she wants me. When it just feels so damn good to be with her.

Which is why, when she asks me to observe her second session with Lucy, I immediately agree. I had asked to be there last time, but now I wonder if that was only so that I’d get to see Zoe working, and not because I was thinking of Lucy’s welfare. Zoe had refused anyway, and she was right—but she’s changed her tune this week, after Lucy’s abandonment. I think, frankly, she wants me there to bar the door if Lucy tries to run again.

Today I help her lug in a bunch of instruments from her car. “Lucy plays this?” I ask, as I set down a small marimba.

“No. She doesn’t play any musical instruments. But the thing about the ones I’ve brought today is that you don’t have to play an instrument to sound good. They’re all tuned to the pentatonic scale.”

“What’s that?”

“A scale with five pitches. It’s different from a heptatonic scale, which is seven notes, like the major scale—
do re mi fa so la ti.
You find them all over the world—in jazz, blues, Celtic folk music, Japanese folk music. The thing about it is that you just can’t play a wrong note—whatever key you hit, it’s going to sound good.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You know the song ‘My Girl’? By the Temptations?”

“Yeah.”

Zoe lifts the lap harp she’s holding and plays the instrumental intro, those six familiar rising notes that repeat. “That’s a pentatonic scale. So is the melody that the aliens understood in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
And a blues scale is based on a minor pentatonic scale.” She puts down the harp and hands me a mallet. “Try it.”

“Thanks but no thanks. My last experience with an instrument was violin, when I was eight. The neighbors called the fire department because they thought an animal was dying inside my house.”

“Just
try
it.”

I take a mallet and tentatively strike a bar. And another. And a third. Then I hit the same pattern. Before I know it I’m striking different bars, making up a song as I go. “That,” I say, “is pretty cool.”

“I know, right? It takes all the stress out of music.”

Imagine if there was a pentatonic scale for life: if no matter what step you took, you could not strike a wrong note.

I hand her back the mallet just as Lucy sulks through the door. That’s really the only way to describe it—she takes a look at Zoe and then glances at me and realizes she is not going to escape as easily this time around. She throws herself into a chair and starts gnawing on her thumbnail.

“Hi, Lucy,” Zoe says. “It’s good to see you again.”

Lucy snaps her gum. I stand up, grab the trash can, and hold it under her jaw until she spits it out. Then I close the door of the special needs room, so that the noise in the hall doesn’t interrupt Zoe’s session.

“So, you can see that Ms. Shaw is with us today. That’s because we want to make sure you haven’t got a pressing appointment somewhere else again,” Zoe tells her.

“You mean you don’t want me to ditch,” Lucy says.

“That too,” I agree.

“I was thinking, Lucy, that maybe you could tell me one thing you liked about our last session, so that I could make sure we get to do it again . . .”

“That I cut it short,” Lucy replies.

If I were Zoe, I’d probably want to throttle the kid. But Zoe just smiles at her. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll make sure we keep things moving along then.” She takes the lap harp and puts it on the desk in front of Lucy. “Have you ever seen one of these?” When Lucy shakes her head, Zoe plucks a few strings. The notes are sporadic at first, and then rearrange themselves into a lullaby.

“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,”
Zoe sings softly,
“Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”
She puts down the harp. “I never really understood those lyrics. I mean, wouldn’t you rather have a mockingbird that could say everything you taught it to say? That’s so much cooler than a piece of jewelry.” She strums the harp a few more times. “Maybe you’d like to try this?”

Lucy makes no move to touch it. “I’d rather have the diamond ring,” she says finally. “I’d pawn it and use the money for a bus ticket and get the hell out of here.”

In the year I’ve known Lucy, I have never heard her string so many words together in a response. Stunned—maybe music does work wonders—I lean forward to see what Zoe will do next.

“Really?” she says. “Where would you go?”

“Where
wouldn’t
I go?”

Zoe pulls the marimba closer. She begins to tap out a rhythm that feels vaguely African, or Caribbean. “I used to think of traveling around the world. I was going to do that after graduating from college. Work in one place, you know, waiting tables or something, until I got enough cash to travel somewhere else. I told myself I never wanted to be the kind of person who had more stuff than she could carry in a knapsack.”

For the first time, I see Lucy actively look at Zoe. “Why didn’t you do it?”

She shrugs. “Life got in the way.”

Where, I wonder, did she dream about going? A pristine beach? A blue glacier rising from the center of an ice field? The crowded bookstalls on the banks of the Seine?

Zoe begins to play another melody with the mallet. This one sounds like a polka. “One of the really cool things about these two instruments is that they’re tuned on a pentatonic scale. Lots of world folk music is based off that. I love the way you can hear a piece of music, and it brings a snapshot from another part of the world into your mind. Next best thing to being there, if you can’t hop a plane because you’ve got math next period, for example.” She taps the mallet, and the tune sounds Asian, the notes jumping up and down the scale. I close my eyes and see cherry blossoms, paper houses. “Here,” Zoe says, handing the mallet to Lucy. “How about if you play me a song that sounds like where you wish you were?”

Lucy takes the mallet in her fist and stares at it. She strikes the highest bar, just once. It sounds like a high-pitched cry. Lucy strikes it one more time, and then lets the mallet roll from her fingers. “This is so unbelievably gay,” she says.

I can’t help it, I flinch.

Zoe doesn’t even look in my direction. “If by ‘gay’ you mean happy, which you must, because I can’t imagine you’d find anything about playing a marimba that points to sexual orientation—well, then, I would have to disagree. I think Japanese folk songs are pretty melancholy, actually.”

“What if that’s not what I meant?” Lucy challenges.

“Then I suppose I’d ask myself why a kid who hates being labeled by everyone else, including therapists, is so willing to label other people.”

At that, Lucy folds back into herself. Gone is the girl willing to talk about running away. In her place is the familiar drawstring purse of a mouth, the angry eyes, the folded arms. One step forward, two steps back. “Would you like to try the marimba?” Zoe asks again.

She is met by a stony wall of silence.

“How about the harp?”

When Lucy ignores her again, Zoe pulls the instruments aside. “Every songwriter uses music to express something she can’t have. Maybe that’s a place, and maybe that’s a feeling. You know how sometimes you feel like if you don’t let go of some of the pressure that’s inside you, you’re going to explode? A song can be that release. How about you pick a song, and we talk about the place it takes us when we listen to it?”

Lucy closes her eyes.

“I’ll give you some choices,” Zoe says. “‘Amazing Grace.’ ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends.’ Or, ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.’”

She could not have picked three more diverse options: a spiritual, a Green Day song, and an Elton John oldie.

“Okay, then,” Zoe says, when Lucy doesn’t respond. “I’ll pick.” She begins to play the lap harp. Her voice starts out on a husky low note, and swings upward:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound . . .
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found.
Was blind, but now I see.

There is a richness to Zoe’s singing that feels like tea on a rainy day, like a blanket over your shoulders while you’re shivering. Lots of women have pretty voices, but hers has a soul. I love how, when she wakes up in the morning, it sounds as if her throat is coated in sand. I love how, when she gets frustrated, she doesn’t yell but instead belts one high, operatic note of anger.

When I look over at Lucy, she has tears in her eyes. She furtively glances at me, and wipes them away as Zoe finishes the song with a few strokes plucked on the harp. “Every time I hear that hymn I imagine a girl in a white dress, standing barefoot on a swing,” Zoe says. “And the swing’s on a big old elm tree.” She laughs, shaking her head. “I have no idea why. It’s actually about a slave trader who was struggling with his life, and how some divine power got him to see the person he was meant to be instead. How about you? What does the song make you think of?”

“Lies.”

“Really!” Zoe says. “That’s interesting. What sorts of lies?”

Suddenly Lucy stands so abruptly that she knocks over her chair. “I hate that song. I hate it!”

Zoe moves quickly so that she is only inches away from the girl. “That’s great. The music made you feel something. What did you hate about it?”

Lucy narrows her eyes. “That you were singing it,” she says, and she shoves Zoe out of the way. “I’m fucking done.” She kicks the marimba as she passes. It sounds a low good-bye.

Zoe turns to me as the door slams behind Lucy. “Well,” Zoe says, beaming. “At least this time, she stayed twice as long.”

“The dead man on the train,” I say.

“I beg your pardon?”

“That’s what the song makes me think of,” I say. “I was in college and I was going home for Thanksgiving. The trains were full, and I wound up sitting next to an old man who asked me what my name was.
Vanessa,
I told him, and he said
Vanessa What?
I didn’t know him, and I was afraid to give out my last name in case he was a serial killer or something, so I told him my middle name instead:
Vanessa Grace.
And he started singing to me, substituting my name for
Amazing grace.
He had a really beautiful, deep voice, and people clapped. I was embarrassed, and he wouldn’t quit talking, so I pretended to fall asleep. When we got to South Station, the last stop, he was leaning against the window with his eyes closed. I shook him, to tell him that it was time to get off the train, but he didn’t wake up. I got a conductor, and the police and ambulance came, and I had to tell them everything I knew—which was almost nothing.” I hesitate. “His name was Murray Wasserman, and he was a stranger, and I was the last person he sang to before he died.”