The Song Reader (3 page)

I told Dad this, and he fell apart. He started crying and grabbing up the laundry. I tried to tell him I’d just wear something dirty, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He hurriedly gathered up every slightly dirty thing in the house, even the bedsheets and the dusty guest towels hanging in the rings by the bathroom sink, while I grabbed my lunch box and shoes. We rushed out of the house like it was about to collapse around us and headed to the Laundromat.

I sat up on the big brown plastic table in the middle of the place, dangling my legs, watching him. I remembered how he’d adjusted his glasses on the end of his nose, straining to read the little faded tags on shirts and underwear, trying to sort everything into piles for washing. He swore whenever a tag was completely illegible or missing, and nervously tried to match these tagless items by sight with the large piles of laundry on the table. He even asked me about some of these things, one tense question after another, not waiting for my response. “Do you think these purple jeans belong with the black sock pile or the blue jeans pile? They are jeans, but they’re not as light as these blue ones. Oh hell, I’ll just wash them by themselves…How about the striped stuff—does it go all together: striped towels, shirts and underwear? Or do the shirts go with shirts and towels with towels?…Let me see that tag again on the red and white blouse over there.”

It took him a very long time to sort the laundry. When he finally hit the start button on the last washing machine, his shoulders loosened and he breathed a heavy sigh of relief. When it was time to dry the stuff, though, he ran out of quarters. Because the change machine on the wall was broken, we had to walk to the bank around the corner, but Dad couldn’t decide whether to take our laundry, dripping wet, with us, or leave it there—he’d seen the large sign on the wall that said Do Not Leave Laundry In Dryers. This choice made him tense all over again. Only when I told him that Mom and Mary Beth did it all the time, that we’d even gone grocery shopping while the laundry was drying, did he agree to leave the clothes and go.

I never made it to school that day. I saw several school buses drive past the big glass window of the Laundromat, already taking kids home, while Dad was still busy folding our clothes into neat fabric squares. He must have completely lost track of time, because when we got home he was surprised to see Mary Beth and Mom sitting at the kitchen table. Mary Beth had been sleeping when we left—she was a senior, and high school didn’t start for another week—but Mom wasn’t supposed to be released from the hospital until one o’clock that afternoon. Dad was supposed to pick her up; he’d told me that over and over while we were doing the laundry, but I couldn’t tell time yet so I couldn’t tell him that one o’clock was long past. I found out later that Mary Beth had picked her up, after Mom had waited almost an hour for Dad and finally called home.

At first, Dad was confused. He thought Mom had gotten out early and started to ask her why. But when she interrupted him to find out how my first day of school had gone, he seemed to suddenly remember why we went to the Laundromat to begin with. He put down the laundry basket in the middle of the kitchen floor and covered his forehead with his hand. I saw the look of alarm in his eyes, the fear and confusion in his slack, open lips, and I reached out to take his arm. Before he could speak, I told Mom I had refused to go to school, that Dad had tried to get me out the door but I’d insisted on staying home and helping him with the laundry.

She started to fuss at me, but when she looked closely at Dad’s face she stopped. She got up, motioned him into their bedroom, and closed the door behind them. I guess he must have told her something like the truth because she never mentioned that first day of school again.

I watched the bright colors of our clothes spinning in the dryer as I remembered all this, and I was only a little sad. Mary Beth had said if you find yourself stuck on a song, there has to be a reason—and I was amazed at how right she was.

The song was “Please Come to Boston.” I didn’t know where or when I’d heard it, but I’d been humming it for days, including this very afternoon in the Laundromat. And it fit amazingly well. The song was about a girl wanting a man to stop drifting and come home to her. I’d been thinking about Dad for weeks. No wonder that tune was on my mind.

I was planning to tell Mary Beth about this, but then I went home and looked up “Please Come to Boston” in her book of lyrics. All I’d known was the melody and the words of the first verse. I didn’t realize that the chorus had “a man from Tennessee” and a girl who was his “number one fan.”

It fit all right, but it was so embarrassingly obvious I couldn’t bring myself to share it with her. The only thing that would have been worse was if the chorus had said the man was from Shelbyville, Tennessee: my dad’s hometown.

M
ary Beth’s song reading caught on quickly, but it wasn’t until late in the summer of ’81 that she became known all over Tainer. My sister called it the “summer of endless love,” both because “Endless Love” was the number one song reported by her customers, and because everyone who came to her suddenly seemed to be obsessed with romance.

Maybe it was because Prince Charles had just married Diana. Maybe it was because Luke and Laura on
General Hospital
were finally getting engaged. Whatever the reason, the women who flocked to my sister that August wanted to know one of two things. Would
he
ever show up? Or was
he
here already, in the form of the ordinary guy they were seeing, the one with smelly socks and a dirty car and an irritating tendency to cry over baseball?

Tainer was a small town, but it was big compared to the tiny places around it. Most of them had one traffic light, tops, where we boasted of eleven. They had one corner with a Fina or Texaco; we had two grocery stores, a strip mall, and a theater that could show four different movies at the same time. True, we didn’t have any cool clothing stores, as my friends liked to point out, but we had a good-size JC Penney. Then too, Tainer had all the guys. Even if they didn’t live here, they had to pass through. The plastic factory that employed most of the county was down on River Road. The only farm equipment place for fifty miles was a few blocks from our neighborhood, over on Twain Boulevard.

My sister’s customers would often find men, but they usually lost them just as fast. The guys around here worked, but according to the women, that was about all you could say for them. It had something to do with the town’s history, or so the joke went. The local legend was that Tainer was founded by a trader from back east who was heading down south on the Mississippi and got tired and just stopped. On the wall of Mr. Lucas’s drugstore, he had a plaque that read Tainer. Put Up Your Feet and Stay Awhile. This used to be the town slogan. The women who came to my sister insisted it was an all too perfect description of Tainer’s couch potato men.

Or as one of Mary Beth’s customers put it, “I am woman, hear me roar. I am man, hear me snore.”

I was used to hearing this kind of thing. One of my earliest memories was of Mom telling me how ridiculous it was that men were considered tougher. “Women give birth,” Mom said, “and most men can’t even stand the sight of blood.” I nodded, but I was wondering what blood had to do with birth. At six, I had given up the stork theory for the much more reasonable conclusion that the baby popped out of the mom’s belly button.

I was used to hearing this kind of thing, but it didn’t change how I felt. I was thirteen that summer, and I knew “Endless Love” by heart, along with all the other romantic songs my sister’s customers reported. I’d been imagining what love would be like for a long time. It started with my parents’ honeymoon at the Lake of the Ozarks. The one and only fact I knew about the trip was that they’d bought a rocking chair from a little craft store on their way home. They strapped it to the top of their Mercury, but they didn’t tie the ropes tight enough and it fell off and slammed into pieces on the highway. It was late and the road was almost deserted, luckily, because if that flying rocker had hit another car, the people inside could have been killed.

My version supplied the missing details. How she told him it was all her fault because her side of the rope was too loose, but he said no, it was his fault because he hadn’t used a double knot on the back piece, and how they put their arms around each other then and said that it doesn’t even make sense to talk about fault when you’re in love. How they both cried, not because of their lost rocker, which they knew was only a thing even if it would be impossible to replace (it was a very special, one-of-a-kind rocker: hand carved with flowers on the slats that looked just like the roses at their wedding), but because they were so grateful no one had been hurt. Being in love is like that, they both said later. It makes you care about everyone more, almost as if you’re in love with the whole world.

My deepest wish that August was for my sister to fall in love. If only she would get married like Prince Charles and Lady Diana, I would get to be a bridesmaid and wear a beautiful gown. But she hadn’t even had a date for more than a year, because she was already in love—with a thirty-three-pound, two-and-a-half-year-old.

Tommy was pretty irresistible. The baby nobody wanted had grown into the cutest toddler. His skin had become a rich, golden brown and he still had those beautiful black curls. He gave the goofiest sloppy kisses and this whole-faced grin when you came in the room that made you feel like you were the most important person on the planet. He’d waddled at eighteen months, and now he could walk perfectly and talk in sentences. And he seemed to be over his biting phase, which made hanging out with him a lot more relaxing.

I didn’t mind taking care of him on Saturdays so Mary Beth could meet customers downstairs in the office. I wouldn’t have minded baby-sitting him in the evenings, too, except she hadn’t gone out in the evenings since Tommy came to live with us.

She’d set up a permanent schedule at the diner—Monday through Friday, seven to four—so she could leave Tommy with Mrs. Green, an older woman in our neighborhood who took in four toddlers. Mrs. Green was sweet, but Mary Beth felt Tommy needed her personal touch as much as possible. “Human beings weren’t born in litters, you know,” she would say.

I thought what Tommy needed was a father. I knew Mary Beth could find someone if only she’d try. She’d never had trouble attracting men. Being tall and blond didn’t hurt, although I knew it was something else, too. She seemed incapable of being needy. Unlike so many of her customers, she never wanted more from a guy than he wanted to give.

Whenever I asked her why she wasn’t married yet, she always shrugged off the question. I might have thought she just didn’t care about that part of life, but she certainly didn’t sound that way talking to other women. “A man has to be more than a paycheck and fun on Saturday night,” she would say. “There has to be a soul connection, an unbreakable tie to your heart that can’t be confused with hope. When you find that, trust me, you’ll know.”

It was talk like this that helped make her an authority on relationships to her customers. They believed her when she said she was sorry but reporting lines from “Endless Love” was actually a bad sign. It was the kind of song you only sing when you’re not in love, but desperately want to be. “Bette Davis Eyes,” also popular that summer, was better, because it hinted at the confidence you feel when you’re having a good time with a man. Best of all was something intensely personal and not current. A song associated with happiness in the past that comes back to you suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere—because you’re happy again.

For one person, it could be a show tune they sang in high school; for another, a lullaby their mother used to sing as they went to bed. When Janine Thompson started seeing a new guy, her chart was filled with lines from Bing Crosby songs. Mary Beth helped her remember her sweet grandpa had always listened to Bing Crosby, so of course she should keep dating this man.

I loved listening to my sister talk about these things. After Tommy was asleep, we’d sit on the floor with the windows open and the fan blowing, updating the charts, preparing for the next Saturday. Of course if the chart was a guy’s, I’d pump my sister for what he looked like. But the chart was almost never a guy’s, and when it was, Mary Beth would roll her eyes as though I’d asked something as irrelevant as whether he preferred waffles or pancakes.

She herself was tired of all these romantic problems. She’d taken to groaning whenever she heard “Endless Love,” and I heard her complain more than once that she wanted a chart with “some meat on it.”

Rebecca Mathiessen seemed to fit the bill. She showed up in the middle of August with a list of songs that filled four charts, both sides. Her problem had nothing to do with a boyfriend, Rebecca was clear about that. Otherwise, she didn’t say much, but normally that wouldn’t have been a problem. Normally, my sister could figure out the trouble from the songs the customer couldn’t get out of her head.

“But no one can hear this much music,” my sister insisted. She was sitting at the kitchen table, making stacks of the coins she’d dumped out of her tip jar to roll up for the bank. “And why won’t she tell me what lines affect her? Something’s not right here.”

Rebecca was an unusual customer in another way. Her family lived a full forty miles from Tainer, in a town that wasn’t even a town, really, since most of the people who lived there commuted to St. Louis. St. Louis was a long commute, sixty or so miles each way, but Rebecca made the trip every morning to work at an advertising company. She thought nothing of the drive to Tainer. She told my sister that she got her card from a hairdresser who knew the owner of the beauty shop here in town, A New You.

Mary Beth wondered if Rebecca wasn’t serious about the reading, but Rebecca kept saying she was. In the office, she even cried once or twice, but her tears weren’t connected to the music she reported. One time Mary Beth asked if any songs upset her, and she said, “Yes, but don’t put them on the list. They have nothing to do with why I’m here.”

Finally, Mary Beth told Rebecca she couldn’t help her if she wouldn’t be honest. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” my sister concluded. “Until you do, this reading is bound to fail.”

Rebecca nodded but she didn’t come forward with anything. But then the next Thursday, we got a phone call. Mary Beth was listening to The Doors (one of the groups on Rebecca’s list—she was still trying) and getting dinner ready; I was playing hide-and-seek with Tommy. At the moment, he was curled up on the couch with a pillow over his face. I was looking everywhere.

Mary Beth picked up the phone and I watched spaghetti sauce drip off the spoon in her hand while she listened and then said, “Yes, of course,” a little stiffly.

“Who was that?” I said.

“Rebecca’s brother. He wants to come with her this week.”

She was back at the oven and Tommy was yelling one, two, three. He wanted me to find him and he always forgot who was supposed to count. I said, “I bet he’s in the kitchen,” loudly, and followed Mary Beth. “Why would her brother come?”

“Maybe he thinks I’m ripping her off. He made a big point of telling me that Rebecca is young and very vulnerable.” Mary Beth shrugged. “He sounds like a jerk, but he might be able to give me something to work with for Rebecca.”

On Saturday, Mary Beth had just finished wiping up eggs from Tommy’s high chair when they rang the doorbell. She ran downstairs to meet them and Tommy and I settled back to watch
Superfriends,
his favorite cartoon. But a few minutes later, there was a knock on our apartment door.

“Ms. Norris told me to wait here while she’s seeing my sister.” He glanced around me to where Tommy was flopped on the couch and crossed his arms. “Is it all right if I come in?”

“Sure,” I said, although it wasn’t. I was still in my pajamas; I hadn’t even brushed my teeth yet. Why didn’t Mary Beth let him stay in the office?

He walked in but he didn’t sit down. When Tommy waved at him, he smiled and said, “What are you watching?”

Wrong question. Tommy could never say
Superfriends
without naming every superhero on the show, and their powers, and the colors of their suits, and just about anything else he could remember. Rebecca’s brother nodded along pleasantly with no sign of what Mary Beth called The Reaction. In some people, it took the form of saying how incredibly good Tommy looked, over and over again, as though they were surprised. Others just stared like they’d never seen anyone like him before, which, as Mary Beth pointed out, was probably true. There was no one else on earth as sweet as her little boy.

“What’s your name?” Tommy asked. Since this one required an answer, I was prepared to translate. Tommy tended to leave off the first letters of words and only Mary Beth, Mrs. Green and I could reliably decode “At ur ame?”

“Ben,” Rebecca’s brother said, and walked over to Tommy and leaned down and stuck out his hand. Tommy didn’t know he was supposed to shake it. He stuck his hand out, too, but a few inches away, as though it was a special superpower greeting.

Ben laughed, and I took a good look at him. He was wearing old jeans, a baggy T-shirt, and scuffed-up tennis shoes, and his hair was pretty messy, too, although I could see why: just since he’d been here, he’d run his hand through it several times. His eyes had dark circles underneath them, like he was worried or sad, probably about Rebecca. I figured him to be twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. Almost exactly my sister’s age.

He had a really noisy laugh, but I didn’t mind. It seemed genuine, not at all like the way a jerk would laugh.

After a half hour or so, he and Tommy were getting along so well that I decided to get dressed and brush my teeth. When I came back, they were lining up Hot Wheels on the armrests of the couch. Tommy said they were going to have a race.

“You have to come with me first,” I said.

“No.”

I grabbed his hand. “Come on.” I didn’t want to say it with Ben there, but when Tommy kept pulling, I leaned down and whispered, “You need to be changed.”

Tommy was going through a phase where he got upset if anyone mentioned his diaper. Mrs. Green thought it meant he was ready to be toilet trained; Mary Beth worried that something had happened in day care to make him self-conscious. There was no choice this time, though. The smell was the first thing I noticed when I came back into the living room.