The Music of Your Life (4 page)

“Why don't we go in the living room and do that now?” Connie suggests. “Perky, you can play for him.”

“Dah'lin, I can't read a note of music, and you know it,” she says, and it's true: she can't, she plays completely “by ear,” and by ear her fingers fly over the keyboard in a way that reminds you of your other favorite pianist, Miss Jo Ann Castle from the
Lawrence Welk
program, who always plays on abundantly decorated “theme” pianos. (Connie has nixed your ideas for doing this in her home.) Whenever you place a piece of sheet music in front of Perky at the piano, she stares at it blankly for a long time, then finally manages to plunk out a few notes. Soon enough, she stops to light up a cigarette.

“But maybe I can read enough to pound out some chords for you, dah'lin.”

“Ray,” says Connie, standing in the doorway and drying her hands on a dish towel. What she means is
Will you please join your family in the living room and try to show some enthusiasm while you're at it?

As usual, you set the sheet music on the music holder at the piano for Perky. She adjusts the bench for height before sitting down to play, and pushes her jangly bracelets up her arm. She does, in fact, manage to pound out some prompting big chords, and you stand next to her, singing: “With his shiny blade, got it in his hand; gonna chop out the live oaks, that are in this land …”

You haven't perfected it yet, of course, but there's plenty of time for rehearsal; the assembly program is still two weeks away.

“Real good, sport,” Ray says, looking bored.

“Yes, honey, you're absolutely wonderful,” says Connie, visibly excited. “You're a natural. As good as anybody on TV.”

You love her for that. You love her for everything. You'd run and throw your arms around her right now, but you know that would look like you were playing favorites.

“Now how about playing something else, Mother?” Ray asks. “Let's have some real music.”

“Well, lemme see,” Perky says, flicking the flame of her gold lighter against the tip of a Virginia Slim. “I just know my theme songs, you know.” She launches into a medium-tempo drag of “Red Sails in the Sunset.”

“I'll never understand how anybody can play the piano simply by ear,” Connie says admiringly, bringing you over to the couch, and positioning you between herself and Ray. They are both drinking gin and tonics, which always seems glamorous and movie starish to you, but you wonder if it makes Perky feel bad to see them drinking, since she can't join in.

“I swannee it's true, it's the only way I know how,” says Perky, into another chorus, her tough, shiny nails clacking on the keys, as if to add percussion. Perky, a one-woman band. Ray has told you she once held a steady gig playing cocktail piano in the Capri Lounge of the Rembrandt Motor Inn on Highway 301, “before it went to seed and she was ashamed to be seen there, as who wouldn't be?”

“‘Up a Lazy River,' Perky,” you say, wiggling away from Connie and Ray, and pouring ginger ale for yourself into the magic champagne flute.

“Don't you know any other songs?” Ray asks, looking agitated.

“Ray,” says Connie.

“Sing with me when I play it through the second time, dah'lin,” Perky barks to you from the piano bench, and of course you will. You'd obey any command that came from her noirish cigarettes-and-scotch voice. Perky pounds the keyboard hard, her head thrown back and her eyes closed, hands flying and bracelets jangling, high heels pumping the pedals below. You imagine her in her musical heyday on Highway 301: “
The Capri Lounge takes great pride in presenting for your listening enjoyment, the one and only, Miss Perky!
” How you wish you could have been one of her regular ringside customers, shouting song requests above the roar, and emptying change out of your piggy bank to tip her in the double old-fashioned glass on top of the piano.

“Here we go,” she says, and you are ready; you know just when to come in. She has taught you, and all your instincts are musical anyway. The two of you do a bang-up rendition of “Up a Lazy River,” complete with hand gestures you've created to indicate paddling, slow-moving river water, and an old mill run.

Even Ray applauds at the end, with more gusto than usual, which gives you a surprising little electric charge in your chest. The two of you meet each other's gaze, and he gives you a little nod and smiles, but then he cuts it short, as if catching himself, and you look away too, embarrassed.

“Y'all ought to go on the road, honey, you're so good,” Connie says, beaming.

“Yeah, you might could reopen the Capri Lounge,” Ray says, and snorts at his own joke.

“Oh, Ray,” says Connie, with a sigh. “Now will you please go and see your son off to bed? I've still got a mess to clean up in the kitchen.” She winks at him, and then she kisses you good night, and Perky kisses you good night, and you wonder why Ray has to see you off to bed.

It makes you feel nervous, almost embarrassed, to have Ray traipsing up the stairs behind you, neither of you saying anything. You open the door, and he follows you into your room . He rarely comes in here … what does he want?

He walks over to your closet and opens it. From a high shelf he pulls down a brown paper bag; in big letters on one side, it says
Nash's Sporting Goods
. Ray looks at you and makes a silly little “surprise” face. A surprise face? You don't really know how to react to that, you've never seen him make a surprise face before, so you just stare at him, with no reaction. After a second or two, he drops the surprise face and then glances away from you.

“Um … I have something for you, sport,” he says.

He reaches into the bag and pulls out a brand-new baseball glove, stiff and shiny, tan-brown, the color of Sugar Babies. He holds the glove himself for a minute, looking it over and punching his fist a couple of times into the center of it; then, with a big smile, he hands it to you. You stare at it, in his hands, for a second or two, then, realizing that it's a gift and you should accept it, you do so. In your hands, it feels large and cold; the mild, aromatic scent of new cowhide leather fills your nostrils.

Ray clears his throat. “I know they've started to play softball in your grade at school this year, at recess …” he says. “Your mother told me … and … I thought … well, I thought you should have your own glove, sport. So … there it is.”

“Oh …” you say, looking down at the glove, and not at him. “OK. Thank you.”

“We can practice sometime, if you want to, out in the backyard.”

“OK.”

He clears his throat again. “OK,” he says.

He picks up the Nash's Sporting Goods bag from the floor, and holds it. The two of you stand there; from the light socket, Rocky and Bullwinkle stare out, watching, unblinking. You hold the glove, it's still
in
your hand. Should you put it
on
your hand?

“Oh, and there's this. I got you this, too.” He reaches into the bag again and produces a small 45-rpm record in a slick-surfaced envelope with a photograph of a baseball player in mid-swing. The song title is written above the picture: “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

“They had this there, too, so I … I know how much you like music and all.”

He hands you the record, which you take in your other hand and you say again: “Thank you.”

“OK, sport,” he says. “Well … good night.”

“Good night.”

And you remember to give him a hug. And he lets you.

On his way out of your room, he flicks off the light and shuts the door behind him, leaving you standing alone and still in the middle of the floor. The low, muted beams of the corner street-lamp filter in through your window, forming a silvery pool of light on the floor. You stand completely still in the circle of light, in the full-moon shape of it; you stand in it as though it were a spotlight, clutching the baseball glove in one hand and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in the other. Your room glows with the bluish, watery light, and suddenly you feel like you're living inside an old black-and-white movie, you're like a kid character in an ancient two-reeler. But you're another kid—a kid who carries a prized baseball glove, a kid who plays baseball with his dad, a kid who makes his dad proud of him …

And you stand there in the spotlight, holding your props, staring out the window at the streetlamp, not moving, as if waiting for your cue to begin the scene.

In November, a visiting music professor from the local college explains symphonic orchestration to the collective fourth and fifth grades in a special assembly in the Linden Hills Elementary cafetorium. You note that the man refers to himself as “Maestro” several times during his speech. He explains how instruments “come in” at a certain time during a given orchestral work; you think of Perky cueing you to sing after she's played her song one time through. The music man explains “vamping,” how a certain musical phrase will repeat over and over until it is time for a more significant passage of the music to begin.

And this is how you feel: that you have been vamping for almost ten years, repeating the same phrases (“I hate math.” “Can I stay up half an hour later?” “But I don't want to go to bed now …”), writing the same shopworn sentences (“My name is _________; Today is _________; Our president is _________”), living in your dull, non-Hollywoodish town, with its one tall structure, a fifteen-floor combination bank and insurance building commonly referred to by citizens as “our skyscraper.” Eagerly, you have looked up New York City in the World Book Encyclopedia, you have looked up Hollywood, you have memorized the photos and imagined yourself into them. You see yourself thriving in the middle of a bustling crowd on Fifth Avenue, well-dressed and strolling with adult chaperones; you see yourself taking bus tours of the movie stars' homes, saying to the tourists on the bus, “That was where Doris Day lived before she became penniless,” things like that, juicy tidbits the official tour guides would be too ashamed to reveal. You actually begin to pepper your conversations at home and school with references to Bonwit Teller and the Chrysler Building. You pretend your school cafetorium is the Automat, or the Brown Derby. You instruct your mother and Perky to pick you up “at the corner of Sunset and Vine.” The other schoolchildren treat you, when they treat you at all, like a weird, exotic animal in the zoo. Sometimes, they seem to decide that the animal you are should be made extinct.

“You're a faggot, you faggot!” hisses Bully Number One on the playground.

“I'm gonna kick your ass someday, you little pussy,” growls Bully Number Two.

If other bullies are around, bullies numbered three through thirty-two, they laugh and jeer derisively, conspiratorially; they are one.

You rationalize: Perhaps they hate you because you're not only talented, but because you're a good student too. Also: good in music, expert at spelling, accomplished and meticulous with arts and crafts. The teachers constantly praise you … And these are things that make the other children bristle in your presence. You feel their mistrust, their jealousy; you can practically see the venom rising out of their little fifth-grade bodies, rising like vapor, like unleashed, unsettled spirits belonging neither to this world nor the next: swirling in the air, hissing, monstrous, looking to attack. But they can't attack you in the classroom, because you
rule
the classroom, you deliver the academic goods, you have every teacher—language arts, visual arts, music, all librarians—in the palm of your hand. You sing, you draw, you spell, you write, you are a good ambassador for new children from other places.

But then there's the playground.

And this is where they get you. Other children thrive on the playground, they know how to navigate its terrain and use it to their advantage, but to you, the playground is a cruel, barren wilderness for which you have never had a map or guide. It's a desert where no one has thought to build a Holiday Inn. This is where your precious knowledge of Doris Day, arts and crafts, and all things Californian (
Californian!
) carry no weight. And just by running out so far into right field that you've practically exited the schoolyard won't protect you from their vociferous evil.

But it helps.

You can even sing out there, though not too loudly, you with your stiff, new, still un-broken-in baseball glove, a glove that covers your hand so unnaturally it's as if some monstrous, extremity-enlarging cancerous growth had formed there. You wait for a bell to ring, and you daydream and sing, all your favorite songs about lazy rivers, about red red robins, about getting misty …

“You're a big music fan, aren't you?” asks Miss Kenan one afternoon, after school, as you assist her with the daily eraser dusting against the side of the Dempster Dumpster. She is dressed in beige pedal pushers and a white peasant blouse, the kind of outfit you imagine a Hollywood starlet might wear on her day off from the set. You think Miss Kenan is like Barbara Gordon on
Batman:
dressed by day in casual, unassuming clothes, then one spin-around of that closet and: Instant Kinky Wardrobe. You feel you know exactly what Miss Kenan's closet must be filled with at home: go-go boots, discarded trapeze artist costumes (tattered but still spangly), real human-hair wigs, lacy bras from Frederick's of Hollywood like you've seen advertised in the back of
Photoplay
. You imagine she has a boyfriend named Dale or Travis who lies around on the bed late at night in nothing but cutoffs, sweaty and horny, smoking a marijuana cigarette, and saying things to Miss Kenan like, “Swing upside down for me, baby. Let me see what you got.”