The Song Reader (5 page)

When she didn’t respond, I said, “Maybe he’ll realize he’s made a mistake. You know, like the guys always do in the songs.”

She laughed, a weak laugh but better than nothing. So I kept it up. I lowered my voice to sound like a guy’s, knelt down and grabbed her foot, and sang the first verse of “Baby Come Back.” Then I went through a few lines from “Miss You,” while pretending to collapse in grief. I got back up and belted out all I could remember of “I’m Sorry,” clutching my heart like the pain was overwhelming.

It was working, she was laughing—until she turned toward the kitchen, where the bouquet of dried lilies and violets Ben had given her when they first started dating was sitting in an empty wine bottle on our table. She mumbled that she had to check on Tommy and disappeared down the hall. I sat very still until I was sure she wasn’t coming back; then I picked up Ben’s album from the floor. It was Talking Heads, a group he’d introduced me to, a group I liked, but still I took off the cover, and scratched her name across the grooves of Side Two with a ball-point pen.

I’d already put the scratched record back when I remembered the ten-dollar bill he’d given me in the pocket of my jeans. I ripped it up and slid the pieces in the cover before stuffing the album back on the shelf.

•  •  •

If Ben had just hurt my sister, I think I would have gotten over it soon enough. But there was something else at stake here. Something that kept upsetting me every time I thought about it for months.

It was back in December, when he was still living with us. Weekdays, Mary Beth would go to work and Tommy would stay at Mrs. Green’s until she picked him up at four-thirty. Ben had offered to take care of him, but Mary Beth said no. She wanted him to spend the time reading and researching. She was still trying to motivate him to get back to his own science work. When I got home from school, he’d be lying on the couch, sometimes with a chemistry journal but just as often with nothing. (He was thinking a lot in those days, but Mary Beth said that was good, too. He had a lot to think about after what had happened to his friend.) But he always sat up and said hi and asked how my day was, usual things. And then we had a routine. We’d go into the kitchen for a snack, usually potato chips and dip, and head back into the living room to watch TV.

Ben was funny about the TV. He’d never owned one before; he said his parents had been opposed to television while he was growing up, and he hadn’t thought of buying one in college or grad school. I thought this meant he’d only want PBS or the After-School Special, but I was way off. He was so TV starved that he was happy watching anything now, no matter how awful.

I was a little TV starved myself, since my sister always insisted on the stereo. Ben liked to joke that we had to get our TV fix before MB came home. (MB was his pet name for her. I thought it was sweet, even if it did sound like a nuclear weapon.)

Most of the time we just sat there and watched, but occasionally we’d talk through the commercials. If he’d had a good day reading, he’d bring up some point or another, although I usually couldn’t follow it. Mary Beth loved to hear him talk about his brain chemistry stuff, but I thought he was more confusing than the worst junior high teacher. Sometimes he told me about his family. Just little comments, like his dad was a college professor. His mom didn’t believe in serving dessert. His sister Rebecca used to date a golf fanatic.

I made little comments, too, about school and my friends. Rarely about the family, because he knew the family already, that is Tommy and Mary Beth. One time I told him that Linda, Tommy’s birth mother, had given us a letter for when Tommy was older, but the letter didn’t say I’m sorry for giving you up or I loved you or anything normal, but just went on and on about all the troubles she’d had. She even wrote a paragraph about how men were scum, which Ben agreed was a pretty lousy thing for a mother to tell a son.

The topic of my mother came up one night when Mary Beth called to say she’d be late. She told Ben she was picking up Tommy and heading to the cemetery, to put a Christmas wreath by Mom’s grave. He offered to go with her, but she said she wouldn’t be long. When he hung up, he said he was sorry; he should have put me on with my sister, since I would obviously want to go.

“Not really,” I blurted. “I mean, it’s okay.”

He sat back down on the floor next to the coffee table. “Why not?”

“It’s kind of complicated,” I said. I was on the couch.
The Rockford Files
had gone to commercial. I had no excuse not to look at him.

“Give it a try.” He tilted his head to the left in that sympathetic way he had, and smiled. “I like complicated.”

I said okay, but I really didn’t plan to tell him much. I started with the little fact that I hated the cemetery, and then I said that Mary Beth didn’t mind it; plus, she and Mom were a lot closer, and then he asked why they were closer, and I found myself blabbing about the two phases of our family: Before, which I knew almost nothing about, but had heard contained a nice house and a swing set and a father who worked and a mom who stayed home; and After, which I also knew very little about, except that it started when I was a baby after Dad lost his job and we moved to this apartment on top of Agnes’s house and Mom got her job at the insurance company.

“When I was a kid, she worked constantly.” I grabbed another potato chip. “That’s a big difference. She had a lot more time to spend with Mary Beth.”

“Makes sense,” Ben said.

“Plus, Mary Beth is more like her. I mean, she isn’t really like Mom, but she’s a lot more like her than I am.”

“MB told me your mother was a very strong woman.”

“True,” I said, although strong wasn’t exactly the word to describe Mom. She’d grown up in an orphanage outside town. It was closed by the time I was born, and she never talked about it, or about her parents. She always said, “I care about them just as much as they cared about me.”

One of my earliest memories was the time she slammed her hand in the car door when we were leaving Kroger. Her hand looked as purple and swollen as a fetal pig, but Mom not only didn’t cry, she wouldn’t let me say a word of comfort. “I wasn’t paying attention,” she said, through clenched teeth. “I got what I deserved.”

I remember I had a huge wad of gum in my mouth, and as I watched her try to bend her crushed fingers over the steering wheel, I sucked in my breath and accidentally swallowed it. I’d been told you weren’t supposed to swallow gum, and all the way home, I wondered if it would get stuck in my stomach or even kill me. I never thought of asking Mom. I was afraid she’d say I deserved it, too.

“But she wasn’t mean or anything,” I said to Ben, and laughed. “I don’t know why I used to be a little scared of her.”

It was out of my mouth before I could stop myself, but it was true—I used to be afraid of my own mother. I’d never told this to anyone. Not any of my friends and definitely not Mary Beth.

My sister was our mom’s biggest fan and most loyal defender. One time when I just hinted that maybe Mom didn’t relate that well to me because she had me later in life and I was obviously an accident, my sister said I was way, way off. Mom loved me to pieces, she insisted. Mom would have given her life for me without pausing for a second.

Later it hit me that she hadn’t denied I was an accident.

I expected to feel terrible now that I’d blabbed my big secret to Ben, but it was just the opposite. The relief was so strong, it was all through my body, like I’d finally confessed to a murder. Afterwards, I was on such a roll, I didn’t even try to stop myself. When Ben asked what my dad was like, I volunteered the whole story of going to his apartment, and how depressing it was, but later when I remembered the Laundromat, how much better I felt because I knew I’d loved my father. That was very important to me, I said. Knowing I’d loved him, even if he was kind of nuts.

The Rockford Files
was over and so was some game show, but I was getting to a big point. I could feel it coming as I spoke, even though I didn’t know what it was. It was the strangest thing, how much of this was news to me, too. It was like my voice was telling my brain what I really thought.

“I’ve wondered a lot what happened between my mom and dad. Like, why did he leave and was she sad about it? I’m thinking maybe she wasn’t. You know, cause she hated weakness.”

“I see what you mean,” Ben said quietly.

“It wasn’t her fault, though. It’s like Mary Beth says, people can only be who they are. Even if she kicked him out, she couldn’t help it I guess.”

I was picking my thumbnail, vigorously, because I’d just realized that last part wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true, because Mom had stayed married to Dad. Why would you stay married to a man—and continue to wear your wedding ring—if you wanted him to leave you?

Which meant the big point, the thing that was coming next, wasn’t true, either. But I heard myself saying it anyway. I heard myself say that maybe my mom didn’t relate to me very well because I reminded her of my dad.

“In what way?” Ben said. A perfectly normal question, but it convinced me for sure I had no idea what I was talking about. I didn’t look like Dad, and I certainly didn’t act like him. We had nothing in common, as far as I knew.

I paused for a moment; then I sat up straight. “I think this theory lacks substantiation.”

It was what Ben always said when he didn’t agree with some science article. I figured he’d start laughing and he did. But when I tried to tell him that everything I’d said was probably crap, he shook his head. “Even unsubstantiated theories usually have a grain of truth in them, Leeann.”

“Maybe,” I said, but I feigned a sudden interest in the TV. Mary Beth and Tommy were due home any minute, and I was feeling both embarrassed and really anxious. Of course he’d have to tell my sister about this conversation—why hadn’t I thought of this before? Even if I asked him not to, it would just backfire and make him more convinced that he should, for my sake.

I spent the next few days in a nervous fog, but by the weekend, I was okay again. As strange as it seemed, Ben obviously hadn’t mentioned our talk to Mary Beth, because she never mentioned it to me. Maybe he just assumed she already knew all this. Or maybe—and this was what I liked to think—he understood that I wanted this to be kept strictly private. This could even be the point of sharing something big, I thought: that after you did, the other person really understood you.

Ben and I never had another discussion about my parents. Within days it was Christmas, and then he went back to school, and when he came on the weekends, there was always so much to do with Tommy and Mary Beth. But still, I was sure something had changed between us, and I convinced myself he thought so, too. When he would bring me an album, I would listen carefully to every word, in case he’d picked this one because there was a message in it for me.

I never found the message, but I was still looking when he left. And then it all suddenly fit together: the reason he’d never mentioned the topic again and the reason he hadn’t told my sister about it and the reason he hadn’t sent me a message. He wasn’t all that interested. He was just being nice, the same way he’d been nice to Tommy. He’d probably forgotten my heartfelt revelation the same way he’d forgotten the name of Tommy’s favorite goldfish.

By the time I found out how wrong I was, I’d let what happened with Ben develop into a full-blown betrayal. Sometimes I even thought he’d tricked me into talking about my parents, just like he’d obviously tricked my sister into believing they had a future together. I hated myself for trusting him, but I hated him more for being someone you couldn’t trust. A typical man, as my sister’s customers would say. Only nice when they need you. Incapable of really caring about you. Always ready to leave you without warning, without even saying good-bye.

T
he summer of endless love was long gone. It was 1982, and I called this the summer of tainted love. The song “Tainted Love” wasn’t all that popular with Mary Beth’s customers, but it was very popular with my friends. We played the record constantly; it expressed how we felt now. Ben had been gone for three months; we knew he wasn’t coming back. We no longer believed Luke and Laura would stay together. We didn’t even know if Charles and Diana would last, although Denise claimed they couldn’t get divorced even if they hated each other. It was against the rules for royalty.

Tainted love: the theme of the summer, maybe even of the whole town.

These days, it seemed like everyone who came to my sister was nursing a heartbreak. In the space of only a few months, Mary Beth had discovered affairs between near strangers, and babies born whose daddies didn’t know them, and hatreds so intense friends hadn’t spoken in years. Compared to all this hidden agony, Rose driving Clyde’s truck through the window of his place that Saturday in June was almost a relief.

If there was anyone left in Tainer who hadn’t heard of Mary Beth, Song Reader, they had to hear after what Rose did. For a week, there was police tape around Clyde’s tobacco store, smack in the heart of downtown. And Rose worked afternoons at the Photomat. She loved to lean out the window of her little booth, and tell yet another person her story and the moral: if only she’d listened to Mary Beth, she’d have known that Clyde was no damn good.

When Rose asked Mary Beth for a stack of her song reader cards to hand out with the picture envelopes, my sister complied. It was her calling, she reminded me. She had to make herself available to anyone who needed her.

Mary Beth had reacted to losing Ben by working ten times harder than before. Every week now she took on new customers, sometimes at the astonishing rate of five or six at a time. As soon as she got home from the diner, she snapped on the stereo, and until Tommy went to bed it was turned up loud enough so she could hear it while she made dinner and played with him. After he was asleep, she kept it on but lowered the volume and did whatever she had to do in the living room—sort laundry, pay bills, sew a button back on—pausing every once in a while to make notes on one of her charts. We were never in her car without the radio playing. FM was the one thing she’d insisted on, not power steering, not air-conditioning, even though it was pushing ninety degrees when she traded in her old Buick for a used Ford at the Deals on Wheels over on Twain Boulevard.

She was still working out the details of her theory that music and memory were related. She’d gotten a new idea after she did Nicole Lowrey’s reading last March. Whenever I saw her scribbling thoughts in her notebook, I remembered how excited she’d been about telling Ben the idea—and that she never got the chance. It made me hate him even more.

When Nicole first came to my sister, she was unhappy but she didn’t know why. For the first few weeks, her chart was no help: lots of sixties’ songs, which my sister knew was pretty standard for somebody in their thirties like Nicole. One of Mary Beth’s first observations when she started her readings was that for most people, the songs they hear in high school stick with them the longest, but that a lot of times, when they hear the songs later they don’t mean what they did originally. “Everything’s new then and the music gets attached to all of it,” she told me. “Even if you heard a song right when your boyfriend was dumping you, when you hear it later, it doesn’t make you feel sad, it makes you feel that newness. That’s why oldies stations are so popular, they cheer people up.” She laughed. “They make you think you’re in high school again and that high school was actually fun.”

Mary Beth thought a song from high school was only important if it was reported for several weeks in a row, and Nicole didn’t have any of these. But Nicole was desperate, and finally, Mary Beth suggested she make a note of
every
bit of music that came into her mind—phrases, lines, commercial jingles, anything. Even if it seemed totally meaningless. Even if it passed through her mind so quickly she wasn’t sure it was a real song.

The very next Saturday, my sister uncovered the source of Nicole’s trouble. The key was a phrase, “hope you know it, baby,” that came into Nicole’s mind several times. Nicole could hear the melody of those five words, but that was all. When she hummed it to Mary Beth, though, my sister recognized the song immediately. It was an old R&B tune called “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind.” She got out her lyric book, and when she recited two lines from the first verse, Nicole leaned back in her chair and just stared at my sister. The lines were about someone laughing while another person cried—and this had just happened to Nicole last week. But she’d convinced herself it didn’t matter. Her boyfriend Jeff said she was being too touchy. He wasn’t laughing at her, he was just laughing. And she was always crying over nothing, wasn’t she?

The music was trying to tell her how she really felt about the way Jeff treated her. When my sister told me about it, her voice was full of wonder. “Somewhere in Nicole’s brain every word of that song was still stored. And so the phrase was like a message from her unconscious coming to help her.”

“Is she going to break up with him?”

“I don’t know. But even if she doesn’t, she knows what’s going on now.” Mary Beth tapped her fingernail on the chart. “That’s what the song did for her. It revealed her to herself.”

After her success with Nicole, my sister set about collecting evidence that even very small phrases from songs can be messages from the unconscious. But she still wasn’t satisfied. She was looking for the one customer who would pull it all together. A customer who had even less knowledge about their problem than Nicole had had. A customer whose mind used music to tell them the deepest truths about themselves that they could not have known otherwise.

And then, in early July, she found Holly Kramer.

Holly had gotten Mary Beth’s card from Rose, and she’d called my sister the very same night. She was in bad shape. She wasn’t sleeping, she wasn’t eating much, she’d lost all interest in her husband—meaning sex of course, but Mary Beth wouldn’t say that around me. Worst of all, she claimed she had no songs now and never had.

“Why call a song reader?” I asked.

“Good question,” my sister said. “I guess because she’s already tried a shrink and pills and even a psychic.”

After Holly’s first appointment that Saturday, Mary Beth told me it was going to be a really difficult case. “Having no songs is like having no dreams. It only happens when your mind is shutting down. Hiding from something.”

She was making pizza rolls for Tommy. He’d been cranky all day, and now he was in his room, throwing toys out of his toy box. She stuck the pan in the oven and I looked at her. “What could it be?”

She yelled for Tommy to come in the kitchen. “It’s hard to tell. Holly really didn’t say all that much. When I asked her whether she felt sad, she said no, she just didn’t see the point of life.”

I tried to imagine feeling this way, but I couldn’t. I was feeling restless that summer. If anything, I wanted more life.

Tommy ran in and Mary Beth picked him up. “I’m seeing her tomorrow,” she said. “Just for a little while.” She nuzzled Tommy’s neck. “I gave her an assignment to listen to the radio for four hours this afternoon. Find out if anything sticks with her.”

I was very surprised; Mary Beth never saw customers on Sunday. I didn’t mind baby-sitting Tommy again, but I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of my sister changing her routine for this Holly Kramer person, whoever she was. We didn’t know her, really. Until a few days ago, we’d never even heard of her.

We certainly heard about her plenty after that. Some days it seemed like Mary Beth would wake up and talk about Holly and come home from work ready to talk about her again. Even though the radio assignment worked, Mary Beth had no idea why Holly picked the songs she did. And there were only two: the Rolling Stones’s “Angie” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” We had the Rolling Stones album and Mary Beth tracked down the other one on a used LP at the Trading Post. “They’re both sad, that’s for sure,” she said. “And there’s something in that Lightfoot thing I can’t put my finger on.”

When Holly mentioned the line she kept hearing, Mary Beth was even more puzzled. It was from the Gordon Lightfoot, about feeling like a ghost that no one can see, and Holly reported it for three weeks straight. The third week, Holly was sobbing a little on the machine and I wanted to put a C by the line, but Mary Beth thought Holly was more angry than sad. “Listen to the way she’s spitting out ‘ghost.’ That isn’t crying, that’s hatred.”

It was a mystery though, since Holly said she was happy with her husband and Mary Beth believed her. She’d met Holly’s husband Danny: a sweet, boring guy who worked hard for his family and coached Little League on the weekends. I suggested perhaps a previous boyfriend but Mary Beth said, “No one in love is that angry with a man from the past unless he’s around again—and Holly says no one new or old has come into her life lately.” I kept going, I said maybe it’s her kids, and Mary Beth frowned. “Leeann, when you have kids you’ll realize how ridiculous that is.”

Whatever the problem was, I was getting tired of it. I was used to Mary Beth fixing people and sending them on their way. Then too, I was completely sick of that Lightfoot song. I was fourteen now, and painfully aware that a lot of the songs Mary Beth’s customers reported were totally uncool. The Police were cool. The Cars were cool. Queen, Tom Petty, John Cougar: all fine. But Gordon Lightfoot was like Barry Manilow or Olivia Newton-John: if you were ever caught listening to that stuff, you’d be ruined.

It was the first week of August and we were in the middle of a heat wave that scorched grass and melted pavement from Boise to Oklahoma City. Everyone wanted it to rain, even the kids talked about it. Every day the temperature reached a hundred or more, and the humidity never went below ninety percent. How could it go on like this much longer? At night our place was so hot that Mary Beth worried about Tommy getting heat sick. She put the biggest fan we had right by his bed, but he still kept getting up, crying that his sheets felt “sticky.” After she settled him back, she’d sit by the breezeless back window, listening to “If You Could Read My Mind,” over and over. Sometimes I sat with her, but usually I was on the phone with one of the Ds. Darlene had landed herself a boyfriend, an older guy named Greg, and she was trying to set me up with his friend Jason so we could double-date. Denise was being reassured that
if
I went with them, it would be merely a fact-finding mission, to see if this Greg was as bad as we feared.

We’d heard he had a bad temper. Of course he also had a car and a job and the money to take Darlene out on real dates.

When Jason finally called on Friday afternoon, I said yes before he’d even told me what movie we were going to see. Of course I still wanted a boyfriend. Even tainted love sounded better than sitting home, eating too many potato chips, and watching
Saturday Night Live.

Plus, the movie theater would be air-conditioned.

When I told Mary Beth about the date, I made her promise to be done with all her customers by three o’clock on Saturday. I needed time to prepare. And I reminded her of that promise that morning—but when three o’clock came, she was still downstairs in her office with who else but Holly.

I waited until almost four, partly because I didn’t want to bother them, but mainly because I didn’t want to walk around downstairs with Tommy and risk running into our landlady Agnes. She loved to speculate about Tommy’s background, never with Mary Beth though, only with me. So far she’d guessed that he was African, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, Greek, and Egyptian. Usually I didn’t say anything, but the last time I said, “Hey, I think you’re right. He’s really a pharaoh!”

Luckily before we hit the bottom step, Mary Beth and Holly were out of the office and headed to the front door. I grabbed Tommy’s hand and we made it to the porch in time to see Holly getting in her blue Chevy truck. In all the times she’d been here, I’d only caught glimpses of her. Most of Mary Beth’s customers came upstairs at some point—to get a drink or use the bathroom or just say hey to me and Tommy—but Holly never did. My sister said she was shy, and she certainly looked it. She was a good ten years older than Mary Beth, but she had the slumped-over shoulders and downcast eyes of an awkward kid. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, no makeup, no heels, no jewelry that I could see. The overall impression you had looking at her was of someone trying hard not to make any impression at all. She was skinny, she was pale, she was in every way forgettable, except for her hair. It was thick and shiny and the most beautiful red, and it came all the way down her back, much longer than mine and even longer than my sister’s.

Mary Beth was walking slowly, clearly exhausted, but I didn’t care. I was tapping my foot on the porch and pointing at my wristwatch.

“Oh, my God, I completely forgot!”

“You sure did.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

I told her it wasn’t necessary, but she insisted. First, she said she had to get me something brand new to wear—to build confidence. I told her there wasn’t time, but we hopped in her Ford and hurried to Penney’s, even though it was so hot Mary Beth could barely hold the steering wheel and Tommy was in a bad mood because I’d been too distracted to put him down for a nap. He darted around opening and closing the dressing room doors while I tried on shirt after shirt, finally settling on a soft black jersey with a scoop neck and cap sleeves. Mary Beth said it made me look sophisticated. “Which you are, of course,” she said, standing behind me in the mirror and smiling.