by Rona Jaffe
She thought for a moment or two about leaving a note, but she had nothing to say to anyone anymore. Her songs would speak for her. She just wanted to be dead, to be out of this pain and humiliation, and finding her body would make that perfectly clear to anyone who had a question.
Billie stood barefoot on the cool bathtub ledge, the rope around her neck. She was taller then than the rod she would hang from, but she would leap. Unconsciousness would come quickly. She tried to think of an appropriate last thought, but the only one that came to her was inappropriate: it was of her parents, who had loved her and been good to her, and how sad they would be. I can’t help it, Mama and Daddy, Billie thought. You couldn’t protect me from this.
She flew out into the air to become an angel, and that was all she knew.
* * *
When she woke up she was on the tile floor in a pool of blood, and it was still dark. She didn’t even know where the blood was coming from, although she knew she was bleeding, and she knew she was alive. Her head hurt so much from where she had hit it that she didn’t even notice her neck. She slept there, on the bathroom floor, until wan light came in through the edges of the drawn blinds, and then she got to her feet and managed to get to the sink and the mirror.
She almost didn’t recognize the woman she saw there. Her hair was dark and matted with blood, she had a black eye, and her neck was so swollen it went down from her jaw to her shoulders in a straight line like the enormous necks she had seen on some wrestlers. There was a ragged tear on the skin of her throat where the rope had wrenched it before everything came down, and she was afraid to touch it. It was scabby now and turning purple. Stupid bitch, she told herself. You couldn’t even get that right. She leaned over the sink and threw up.
She didn’t know if she should wash off the blood or try to get to a hospital. St. Vincent’s was not far away. Now that she was alive, hung over, and sober, the attempted suicide and any thoughts of trying again seemed behind her. Maybe having survived was a sign. At least, having tried was a gesture of great drama and importance, a catharsis of a kind. She looked and felt so battered that her feelings about Harry and the agent and the music world that had betrayed her were numbed.
She put on her shoes and coat and went out into the street to get a cab. It was not until the driver turned around and asked, “Where to?” that Billie realized she could not answer him. She tried to speak and no sound came out at all.
The driver took her to the hospital anyway, she looked that bad. In terror and with no command of sign language and no inclination to write, she was not able to answer any of the questions they put to her in the emergency room of St. Vincent’s, so they let her show them her identification and fixed up her wounds. It was too late, the resident said, to stitch her neck. There would be a scar. A cut like that had to be stitched right away, he said, or not at all. She was unable to talk because she had fractured her larynx. It would heal, and she would be able to speak again, although he wasn’t sure if she would sound the same.
“Just don’t try to sing,” he said, with a pleasant laugh, and Billie realized he didn’t recognize her.
Just don’t try to sing. . . .
She stayed in Toad’s apartment and healed, being good to herself. She cut down the drinking to a normal amount, although for a while she didn’t feel like drinking at all, and the only drugs she took were aspirin and a little grass. She hadn’t been this healthy since she was that kid who had just come to New York, before it all started—the bad times and the good times and the bad. She had the shower rod repaired. She cleaned the apartment and kept the refrigerator stocked with nourishing food. She took walks around the city the way she had when she was twenty, but this time she couldn’t think of any lyrics for her songs. Instead, she thought about her life, what she had done to herself and what she would do now. She waited for her speaking voice to come back and it finally did, but it was unrecognizable. She knew she would never sing again.
When you’ve reached the depths and paid your dues, Billie thought to herself, it’s as if God had given you a second chance. If I give in to despair again I’ll only be that foolish woman who was in love with Harry Lawless and lent him her life. At least I had my career when I could. That’s something I’ll always have: the experience and the glory and the memories. I destroyed any hope of having a singing career again when I killed my voice instead of myself, so all the worst things I could have imagined have already happened to me. Now I’m going to be happy. Now I’m going to be brave.
She thought about ways to make money that she might enjoy at the same time, and always her thoughts came back to what she had learned at her father’s roadhouse. He had taught her well. She could open a small bar and restaurant here in New York City, and she would attract interesting people, maybe people in the music business, and when she was working there she wouldn’t ever be alone or lonely. So now when she took her walks she looked for available spaces to open her place. She would call it Yellowbird, because that sounded hopeful, and it would be a monument to her mentor, Janis Joplin, because she didn’t want it to be a mausoleum to her own past; that would be too morbid, and besides, most people hadn’t ever known who she was, and she was sure that of those who had, plenty had forgotten.
She would need a loan, and for that she would need her father’s advice. She was not ready yet to face her parents in her condition and have to make up lies. She would do that when she was better.
Toad came back between his road tours and she practiced her first lie on him. Her swollen neck had gone back to normal and she put on a turtleneck sweater to cover what she knew was going to remain an ugly scar. “The worst laryngitis,” Billie told him. “Shit, was I sick! I was in bed for a week.”
“It’s going around,” he said. “You sound like hell.”
And I’m going to continue to sound like hell, Billie thought, and for the first time her throat hurt from choked-back tears, not injury, and she had to fight the wave of emotion that almost overwhelmed her because she had not been ready for it. I have a right to grieve, she told herself. It isn’t weakness, it’s natural. When Toad went out to the clubs with the rest of the band she pleaded illness so she wouldn’t have to go with them, and when she was alone and safe she sobbed all night, deep, hurting sobs that left her well again. Even the timbre of the sobs sounded strange, but she was just going to have to get used to it.
A few steps forward, a few steps back, Billie thought. From now on I’m going to be nice to myself.
When she found the location she wanted for Yellowbird she flew back to Texas to see her parents. Her second lie was ready. “I had nodes on my vocal cords,” she told them. “The surgeon took them off. I’m still healing, but I won’t be what I was. I don’t want to be mediocre, I’d rather retire and do something else.” She told them her plans. “Daddy, the one thing you didn’t teach me was how to get a loan.”
He took her to the bank where he had gotten his own financing, where he had done business all his years, and they trusted her. She knew it had been a good move to get the money here, not back in New York, not that she would have been turned down in New York, but here she was still a star.
“Aren’t you hot, honey?” her mother said when Billie kept wearing her turtleneck.
“No,” Billie said. Of course she was hot, Plano was hot, but she never wanted her parents to know how she had betrayed them and their love by trying to kill herself instead of asking them for help. She was still their daughter and they would have thought they could have done something, but the truth was there was nothing they could have done. If she had been sane enough to take her grief home to the place where she was still cherished, she would have been too sane to get up on the rim of that tub with a shredded piece of packing rope around her neck.
“Well, I sure am,” her mother said, fanning herself.
Billie flew back to New York, rented herself her own cheap apartment, and got to work
on her new career. When Yellowbird opened, her parents came to New York—their first trip to this city—to celebrate with her. Billie was wearing a black chiffon dress with a matching scarf wound around her neck, which was fine because it was autumn. Her speaking voice, of course, was still the same.
“You ought to sue that surgeon,” her father said. “He should have done a better job.”
“I’m sort of grateful to him,” Billie said. “I’m going to like my new life.”
“That is true,” her father said. “You can take it from me, that is so true.”
Yellowbird did well from the beginning, and Billie didn’t know why any more than she had known why about the ups and downs of her music career. She was still dealing with the fickle public, but they liked her. People dropped in because it was a neighborhood place and was different, and then they told their friends. Out-of-towners came in, and a lot of men. They liked to talk to Billie and get occasional free drinks. Sometimes celebrities dropped by. They liked that it was hard to find. Night birds came because they liked the ambiance. The restaurant critics, when they got around to reviewing Yellowbird, gave her mediocre reviews for the food, but that was okay because one star for a convenient neighborhood restaurant really meant two because people were lazy. Besides, Billie had grown up on that food and she didn’t know what they were talking about. Obviously her regulars agreed with her.
Yellowbird was everything she wanted. It was small and manageable and income-producing, and she was able to rent a nicer apartment in a new high rise around the corner so she could be close to work. After a while Billie felt confident enough about herself to have her first affair, with a man she met at the bar, and when that was over she had another. She realized she could still pick and choose. She doubted very much that she would ever fall in love again—she was too wounded and too independent—but sex and romance were fine, too. She felt she had lived an entire lifetime in the decade that had just passed, and she could hardly wait to see what the next decade would bring her.
Chapter Twenty
GARA WAS GLAD that her mother had always been very close to her aunt and uncle and their spouses, because after her father’s death the burden of becoming her mother’s constant companion would have fallen to her by default, and she didn’t know how she could continue to be kind to and supportive of May when what she really wanted to do was fight with her. It was unconscionable to fight with the bereaved, Gara thought, although occasionally she reminded herself that she, too, was bereaved and deserved some consideration.
It was easier when she and Carl took May out to dinner at a restaurant, because her mother had good manners and even seemed a little cowed by Carl—after all these years!—and they were able to talk about a variety of things. Carl loved to hear her mother talk about how cute, how smart Gara had been as a child and was even now. Sometimes at these dinners the two of them clucked over her talents and foibles as if she were their child. It was a strange bond, but Gara liked it when they started their little routine. It made her feel warm. I may have married my good father, she told herself, amused, but it hasn’t stopped me from sleeping with him.
But despite the encouragement of her aunt and uncle and their spouses, and her own greatly increased filial attentiveness, her mother did not want to try to have a life of her own, did not know how to, and Gara felt both resentful and guilty. There were the many phone messages from May when she knew perfectly well Gara was with patients and had turned on the answering machine, and there were the calls that reached Gara too early in the morning and too late at night, and there were the times when, knowing she had not been attentive enough, Gara had to put in the call herself and talk for an hour about nothing, and somehow always ended up defending herself about something anyway. They were in touch constantly now. It was not the calls she minded but their content. Her mother still managed to make her feel as uncomfortable as she had when Gara was growing up.
She knew her mother was lonely, but sometimes she wondered if her mother was that much lonelier than she had been before she became a widow. Gara wished she had not been an only child. If she’d had siblings they could have talked to her mother on the phone too on these empty evenings, watching their egos slipping away under the assault; they could have taken May out to dinner, her sisters could have gone shopping with her and asked for advice, and reluctantly—or perhaps willingly—accepted complete control.
Would these never-to-be-born sisters and brothers have gotten along with May better than she did? Would the configuration of the family have happily lightened the burden on her as the one, or would there have been rivalry, competition, even resentment? What if May had alienated them even more than she had Gara, and Gara had been left alone with her anyway? She pictured a selfish sister living in Europe (a sister who had fled for her life to a different continent), forgetting to call; a wandering, wastrel brother (a vulnerable boy struggling against his own parent-child bond that had been too strong) vanished somewhere on the West Coast, surfacing only to ask for money and introduce another grandchild they wouldn’t see again for years. She would never know.
She talked to her best friend Jane about it. Jane’s father had also died comparatively young, and Jane’s mother, like Gara’s, had never worked and didn’t know how to fill her time. “Well, it’s easier for me to deal with my mother,” Jane said, “because I have sisters and we share her.”
“I wish I did.”
“I know, it’s hard for you. I really understand. You know, my mother is difficult but not nearly as difficult as yours is. Mine never really brought us up. She let us do whatever we wanted. So in a way she’s always been the child. I mean, she’s harmless.”
“Harmless . . .” Gara said wistfully. “How I would love and protect a harmless mother.”
“It’s hard anyway,” Jane said. “Even with the grandchildren, although they do help amuse her. They adore visiting her because she dotes on them and lets them do just what we did when we were kids, run wild and have Twinkies for breakfast.”
“I could not imagine my mother being a good grandmother,” Gara said. “I always pictured her scaring them about all the perils in the world.”
“Oh, mine does that,” Jane said, and laughed. “We ignore her.”
Gara was surprised. “It never occurred to me that if I had children they and I would become a ‘we’ to gang up against my mother. That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“They gang up against me, too,” Jane said. “You only discover these things after you’ve had children.”
“So where were you to tell me this before it was too late?”
“It’s not too late. You and Carl can still have a baby. That doctor who told you thirty-six was way off. Things have changed. Women are having them now when they’re thirty-nine. You have a whole year to get on it.”
Gara smiled. “We’re too content with things the way they are.”
Five years went by. May was her mother and May was the child Gara had never had, demanding constant gratification like an infant, suffering from separation anxiety like a four-year-old, insisting on winning every minor skirmish like an adolescent. When Gara and Carl went to Europe for their brief vacations May would panic. She kept calling, asking when they would be coming back, and because she wanted to be sure not to miss Gara she called in the middle of the night. It was not night for her in New York. Of course as soon as she telephoned, Gara was wide awake.
“Will you remember Passover?” May said for the third time. “It’s going to be at Aunt Laura’s this year, and she wants you and Carl specifically to know you’re expected.”
“We’ll be home next week,” Gara said, annoyed. “Passover is next month.”
“Just so you don’t forget. Maybe you should bring her something nice from Paris. She likes Lalique.”
“I think I’ll do Passover and then you can all bring me Lalique,” Gara said.
“Why are you always so na
sty to me?”
“I don’t know,” Gara said. “Do you think it’s so ludicrous that I might have a family event at my place?”
“Go ahead,” her mother said, in that voice that meant: You wouldn’t know how. Gara didn’t know if she knew how or not, but she knew she would never do it as long as someone else wanted to.
“What kind of perfume do you want me to bring you?”
“Something we can share. Get a big bottle and we’ll each take half. What about Shalimar?”
“I hate Shalimar,” Gara said. She didn’t want to smell like her mother. “Is Shalimar what you want? I’ll get you your own bottle.”
“That would be nice. And you know what else you should get? My friend Gertrude likes to buy a Hérmès scarf and cut it in half and stitch the hem, and then she and her daughter share it. They’re too big anyway. Gara, buy a Hérmès scarf and then you and I will share it,” May said in all seriousness.
“Motherrr!” Her voice sounded to herself as if she were still fourteen years old. “People don’t cut Hérmès scarves in half! That’s destroying a work of art.”
“Gertrude and her daughter don’t mind.”
“I’ll buy you your own scarf. What color would you like?”
“You don’t know by now what my favorite colors are?”
“All right, I’ll surprise you and you won’t like it.”
“I always like it,” her mother said, offended.
Gara remembered the “silver” pin but said nothing. She also remembered the scarves, the bracelets, the gloves that were never worn, not exchanged, simply put away like a reproach.
“Put Passover in your calendar,” her mother said.
“It’s there,” Gara said. “The calendar comes with it.”