I didn’t even care that across Telegraph and down a few doors, there was a new store idiotically called RECORDS—AT A DISCOUNT! My main response to the unexpected competition was to joke around with Stephanie and Brett about how stupid the name was and how stupid the punctuation was.
“Just think,” Brett said, getting it immediately. “Some guys had a meeting to figure out what to call the new store. They prob’ly argued about it! And this is what they come up with? Sheesh!”
“Can’t you just see it?” Stephanie added. “Prob’ly one of ’em said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea! Let’s have all three! Caps, and italics, and exclamation!’”
“Right, like people wouldn’t notice the store otherwise!” I could barely get the words out because I was laughing so hard, maybe too hard. I’d been feeling awkward since Brett had kissed me on the forehead, partly because I kept waiting for the right moment to tell Stephanie, if only to show her I didn’t care that much about Declan Wilder. But the opportunity never seemed to come up. The more days went by, the more I worried that if I brought it up now, Stephanie would think I thought it was a bigger deal than it was.
It was a week after Helvetica’s surgery, and the cat was sleeping in a carpeted triangle of sun in the upstairs hallway, dark stitches across her shaven belly. Stephanie had an orthodontist appointment, and I decided to stay at the house to get a head start on our Latin translation. But then, Brett’s door was open.
He was feeding his fish, and when I came in and stood next to him to watch, he put his arm around me, and I put my head on his shoulder, and then he put down the little shaker of fish food and he asked me if I’d ever been kissed before, and I said no, and then he turned me toward him and kissed my forehead again, and then my cheeks, and then, tentatively, my lips. Then we looked at each other, and then we kissed again on the mouth, harder this time. He tasted like warm milk and honey, but with a smoky undertone. I could feel the faintest brush of his tongue on the inside of my lips, which made me breathless, but the smoky taste made me pull back.
“You okay?” Brett smiled, and his eyes crinkled.
Was it tobacco I tasted? Grass? I didn’t want to sound like an idiot, so I didn’t ask.
He stroked my hair, which I now wore loose. “You don’t even realize how cute you are,” he observed, looking amused. It was kind of condescending, actually, but I felt my private parts growing warm.
We heard the front door just then, and Stephanie came tromping up the stairs. Later, I made her walk me to the bus stop so I could tell her everything, because even though she was always warning me not to get my hopes up about stuff, she’d still listen and help me sort things out. She was happy for me, but she told me that Brett was seeing a lot of this other girl, Cornelia Wang, whose name I recognized from Hildy.
Sure enough, a week later, when I was coming over, Brett was sitting on the front porch with four other kids. He had his arm around a beautiful girl, and the whole group was laughing and laughing. You could smell pot all the way up the stairs. Brett waved at me and smiled his crinkly-eyed smile.
Just then I heard someone calling my name from across the street. “Martha!” It was Clifton Cray, on his way home from King Jr. High, his violin in tow. He was walking with his buddy Ben, who seemed to be his only black friend and, come to think of it, the only kid I ever saw him hang around with. I smiled and waved.
When I was in eighth grade and Clifton was in seventh, I’d seen other black kids acting like he didn’t exist. One time, a group of noontime basketball players pretended not to even see or hear him when he asked to join in the game. But if the black kids considered Clifton too puny to bother with, that protection didn’t extend to the white kids, who would call Clifton a shrimp, a peanut, a 99-pound weakling, “Crayon,” a weirdo, an egghead, or a spaz—and would take turns pummeling him after school. I felt terrible about this, but didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. I was glad to see no one was following him today or giving him any crap.
The girl Brett was with had shiny black hair that was so long, it looked like she’d had to push it aside (no, probably fling it aside) to sit down. She was wearing faded cutoff jeans, a gauzy blouse, Mexican huaraches, and silver dangling earrings. “This is Martha,” Brett said to her, “remember? The girl I was telling you about who has perfect pitch, and who knows all about music theory? Martha, this is Cornelia. My girlfriend.”
“Wow, nice to meet you!” Cornelia enthused. She was a little overly impressed, in that way people are about stuff they don’t know anything about but want to seem like they appreciate.
Shoulder, be heavy. “I think you know my sister Hildy,” I said. “From Chem class?”
“Hildy Goldenthal! Sure, I know her. Whoa, you don’t look anything alike.”
It wasn’t exactly jealousy I felt. It was more a combination of feeling stupid and knowing I’d lost the game. It would be too exhausting to fight the way things were: Brett was sixteen and I was fourteen. Cornelia was beautiful and self-confident, and I wasn’t either one. But why had Brett kissed me and told me I was cute just when he was getting serious about Cornelia Wang? It was baffling, and kind of infuriating.
I thought of all the things I didn’t like about Brett. He loved that awful, preachy Youngbloods song urging everybody to “get together and love one another right now.” His favorite Beatles songs were invariably the ones I found the most tedious and annoying, like “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” I hate to admit this, but I even found myself using my mother’s criticism of Brett’s grammar when he was little to bolster my case.
Then I realized Brett had introduced me to Cornelia without mentioning the fact that my father owned Smoke and Records. Or that Hildy was my sister. Or even that I was Stephanie’s best friend. He introduced me as me. Goddamn it! It was impossible to be mad at Brett Kenyon.
A cool thing happened a few days later, though: Declan Wilder stopped me in the hall to talk. Apparently he had just realized that the ridiculous girl who’d been too thickheaded to figure out he was cutting class to smoke pot was Martha Goldenthal, daughter of Jules Goldenthal, proprietor of Smoke and Records. Declan had become interested in Richard Strauss after seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey. My father had reluctantly sold him the obvious, Thus Spake Zarathustra, with the understanding that Declan then also had an intellectual obligation to purchase Don Quixote with Pierre Fournier on cello. Declan had been getting musical advice from my father ever since. (Why hadn’t I seen him at the shop? Duh, he probably went during school hours.)
I told Declan that Strauss was one of my favorite composers, too, especially the Rosenkavalier suite, and that it was nice there was one good composer in that family, since (and here I pretended I’d never liked Johann Strauss waltzes) Richard Strauss’s uncle’s music was so syrupy, it made your tongue curl. Declan smiled. He didn’t know Rosenkavalier but said he’d check it out.
I did what I could to pretend I didn’t like Declan. At least he wasn’t mean about it. He called me “Miss Martha” and told me I took everything too seriously. I kept trying to figure out what it meant to take things too seriously. I even risked Stephanie’s eye-rolling by asking her to decode it for me. I couldn’t quite absorb her explanation, and you know what? I still can’t remember what she said. The whole business was like my trying to understand history or news articles. Just when I think I’m going to hear the thing that’ll enable me to crack the secret code, I suddenly realize I’ve stopped paying attention at the exact wrong moment, and once again I’m too late. It’s like being trapped in some awful Greek myth.
Hildy fretted that some of the LPs at RECORDS—AT A DISCOUNT! were cheaper than they were at Smoke and Records, but my father shrugged the new store off. “They’re a bunch of ignoramuses over there,” he reported to me and Hildy after going over to have a peek. “A few Mozart symphonies, but no string quartets!—goddamned idiots. And not only that—” he shook his head in disgust, mostly
addressing Hildy even though I was the one who cared about music—“they shoved George Gershwin into the classical section. In between Elgar and Haydn! Can you imagine?” Was there any question Gershwin belonged in the jazz section, alongside Cole Porter?
I agreed with my father about how music should be organized. And I had to admit that when he thought a record was great, it really was great. Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn with soprano Janet Baker and the London Philharmonic. The first movement of the Brahms E-minor cello sonata, Opus 38, with André Navarra on cello. More Brahms: in the piano quintet, Opus 34, that scherzo that you couldn’t help bobbing your head to. César Franck’s Prelude, Fugue and Variations, Opus 18. Practically any Schubert lieder performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. More Schubert: that funereal cello solo from the piano trio, Opus 100.
In other words, I believed in my father. In a way, I believed in him more than anyone else in the family did, because the thing he was best at—finding great music—was deeply important to me, too. But somehow, that wasn’t the same as being on his side.
Hildy more than compensated. Without my father’s having asked her to, she’d started working the smoke shop cash register after school. “What, he can afford to pay you?” my mother demanded, because he wasn’t giving my mother enough money for the mortgage anymore.
Hildy said no, she wasn’t being paid.
“Oh, so he’s exploiting you.”
“No! I’m learning, and I’m helping,” Hildy said. Eleventh grade was supposedly a heavily academic year, but Hildy didn’t seem to have homework, and my mother was always bitching at her for not being productive, or constructive, or self-disciplined, or blah blah blah. Why wasn’t my mother happy that Hildy was trying to save the family some money by taking over shifts for a paid worker?
It wasn’t that long ago that I was sure my mother would be nicer to Hildy if she just took school more seriously, the way I did. Lately, I had to admit that no matter what Hildy did, my mother didn’t like it. But it was as if my brain couldn’t deal with that idea, because I still wished Hildy would try harder to make my mother happy. I kept trying harder, didn’t I?
“If Jules were any kind of responsible parent,” my mother told Hildy, “he’d find a way to cover his expenses. And he’d want you out of there! You think he can protect you from riots and tear gas?”
Of course my mother didn’t know that Hildy had already gotten tear-gassed last year; she happened to be at the store when “all hell broke loose,” as my father put it, during a campus protest of the My Lai massacre. In fact, Hildy had only narrowly escaped being tear-gassed recently during the People’s Park protest that Greg Gold had taken her to, along with the rude sign he was carrying. They had left just before “all hell broke loose.” Brett, unfortunately, had stayed, and had wound up being shoved around and elbowed hard in the nose, besides getting gassed.
Drew, too, tried to help my father out. It started because he loved to climb the wooden ladder up to the tiny mezzanine at the back of the record shop, squeezing in behind that big speaker my father had used to break up the Nazi riot years before. Then Drew would read comic books, or play solitaire with a greasy deck of cards that someone had left on a shelf underneath the cash register. The plywood floor up in the “tree house,” as we called it, was littered with dirt-black pennies and little tubes of industrial-strength colored construction paper that lay flat until the coins were put in. Drew would sit cross-legged on top of the coins and paper tubes, shuffling the cards like an expert, arranging them in Klondike formation over and over again, making stacks of pennies to bet against himself. Hildy and I would climb the ladder and peek in every now and then to check on him. Sometimes from the main part of the store, we could hear him swearing “Shitballs!”—presumably because he wasn’t doing well at cards.
The coins were the runoff of heavy canvas bags that were filled to bursting and not securely tied. My father didn’t have the patience to deal with the pennies from the two cash registers, so he shoved fistfuls of them into the bags and lugged them upstairs every now and then until he could make rolls out of them—something he never got around to.
It was only a matter of time before Drew had taught himself to make five stacks of ten pennies each from the supply on the floor, hold a finger inside a paper tube, and slide the grimy coins gently inside the wrapper, making sure they all went in at the same angle so they’d lie flat against each other. Then he’d correct the diagonal so the coins were straight, and expertly fold both ends of the tube. “Extra money, Dad,” he’d shout proudly, jumping down the last rung of the ladder and presenting a stack of pink cylinders in a filthy open palm. “For the rent.”
When Drew had finished with all the pennies on the floor and started tackling the contents of the canvas bags themselves, Hildy and I decided to help. It was cramped with all three of us up there, but it was also kind of fun. The tree house had no air or light, just a rectangular hole about the size of two record albums cut out of the plywood, so you could see what was going on downstairs if you didn’t stand up all the way. There was a dim light bulb that had to be tightened or loosened by hand every time because there was no switch or even a string you could pull. It kind of gave me the creeps to be the first one to get up there, and since Drew didn’t seem freaked out by it, I always let him go ahead of me.
One time in the middle of December, with Holy Hubert’s preaching and the drummers in lower Sproul Plaza still audible underneath side five of the St. Matthew’s Passion, the three of us wound up making so many rolls of pennies that the empty canvas bag we put them back into was too heavy to lift up. We had to spill out all the pennies from another bag onto the floor so we could distribute the load into two sacks that could be carried down the ladder. I was worried my father would get mad at us for making another mess up there, even though Drew was the one who had cleared the floor in the first place. But all Hildy and Drew could think about was the $25.50 we’d wrapped.
I let them lug the sacks to my father. “Dad! See all the money we made?” Drew enthused, clunking his sack of wrapped pennies down in front of the glass display case. I ducked into the tiny bathroom to wash my hands, which were black with grime. There was no good soap in there, just a small dry piece of Ivory with gray gouges in it from all the dirt. There was no towel, either, and virtually no toilet paper. The water barely came out of the faucet. I did the best I could and blotted my hands on the sides of my jeans (Stephanie’s jeans, actually) on the way out.
“Jules, uh, I hate to bother you—” Bob Metcalf was saying.
“I know, I know, payday,” my father answered with irritation. “Just take it out of the register, wouldja? I’m busy here!” He was squatting in back of the glass display case taking inventory, a yellow order pad in one hand and a Lindy ballpoint pen in the other. A Sherman cigarette dangled from his mouth, unlit. It was only recently that he smoked anything besides his pipe and cigars, which he’d always said were healthier than cigarettes because you didn’t inhale. Now he was never without his Shermans, long dark-brown cylinders that came in a white box with dark red swirls on it.
There were a couple of thunks as Bob snapped down the spring-loaded metal pieces that secured the bills in their respective compartments in the cash register. He was keeping track, I was sure. He had to be.
“Hildy! Marthy! Let’s take the sacks to the bank!” Drew said.
Just then, a heavily made-up woman in a bright yellow knit suit made her way into the store. She had too much gold jewelry on, and poofy, fake-looking hair. She was probably some student’s mom, or maybe a professor’s wife. “Excuse me,” she said, her voice raised over the music, “do you carry White Christmas here?”
“Uh-oh,” Hildy breathed. My father routinely ignored petty theft, like the kid who’d come in earlier today and stuck an Almond Joy in his back pocket before sauntering out. But when it came to bad taste—well, all hell might break loose. My heart raced as my father rose and put the Lindy pen behind his ear, set the order pad o
n top of the counter, and came out from behind the display counter.
“White Christmas,” he repeated slowly, having taken the unlit Sherman from his mouth.
“Yes! The Bing Crosby,” the woman said. “Oh no, you’re out of it?”
I knew my father wasn’t out of it. “Madam,” he said loudly. “White Christmas is available only in our—Turlock location.”
Bob Metcalf tried to stifle a laugh. Of course Smoke and Records didn’t have a branch in the Central Valley town of Turlock, which my father called the armpit of the cosmos.
The woman looked confused, and Hildy took pity on her, leading her toward the Telegraph Avenue doorway. “Try Mr. Lucas at On Record. Down in the next block,” she advised, pointing southward on Telegraph.
“White Christmas,” my father muttered. “Jesus Christ.”
“Isn’t that the whole point? Jesus Christ?” I tittered. My stomach was still churning, not having caught up with the relieving fact that the woman had left without realizing she’d been publicly humiliated.
“You guys!” Drew complained. “The bank!”
“Okay, Drewy, we’re going,” Hildy said, hoisting her canvas bag as my father pulled out his heavy chrome lighter and lit the Sherman. When he shut the lighter, it made a nice, substantial click. There was something reassuring about that sound.
“Fifty-one rolls are too heavy for girls,” Drew declared, slinging his own bag over his bony shoulder with effort and reaching for Hildy’s, but she kept the second bag, and the three of us walked down Telegraph.
There was no line at the bank. It was decorated for Christmas, with jars of cellophane-wrapped candy canes all over the place. Even though it was kind of redundant, given that we could have whatever we wanted at the store, I grabbed three candy canes.
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