by Danyel Smith
Eva had no patience for Dart’s voice, or this new mood swing. He was wet with sweat, his eyes were bright, and he was smiling. She said nothing to him.
“I made a SONG. WE made a song. Me and Eddie. Come look!”
Eva could hear strains of the Temptations, or what sounded like the Temptations. She put her hand over her mouth and coughed.
“I Wish It Would Rain” Nineteen sixty-eight. The rain song. My mom is straight calling me out from the afterworld.
“Eva!” Audrey called. “Come in here!”
Eva and Pritz walked into the miniature living room, which was made up as a sleeping room complete with double bed, nightstand, weak lamp, and huge television. Plus there were albums and cassettes and labeled digital audiotapes everywhere. Audrey grabbed Pritz and Eva by their wrists and pulled them into a bedroom recording studio complete with natty egg-crate foam, a dehumidifier, worn Mackie console, monitor, mixer, and speakers. Audrey, face lit up with delight and possibility, pulled the door closed behind them. With Édouard, Pritz, Eva, and herself in the room, plus the equipment, it was tight. The air had a dense, room-within-a-room, basement studio feel.
The Tempts. Produced by Norman Whitfield. The peak, really, of his first phase with them.
Eva’s leg throbbed, her head throbbed.
Song was their … sixth, yeah sixth, number one hit in three years. Song made Dave Ruffin want the group to be billed as David Ruffin and the Temptations or the Temptations featuring David Ruffin or some such. Basically asked for what Diana and Smokey asked for and got.
She put her hand on her belly. She wanted to sit, but there was nowhere.
So the Tempts cut Ruffin, called Dennis Edwards, and went all “Cloud Nine.”
“I’ll start it again,” Édouard said from his low bench. He looked like a beanbag chair with a proud pillow face attached.
No long lead-in for Édouard’s version. The song started with a piano deeper than the original’s—distorted and slightly more slow. And unlike Ruffin, Dart let go no humming moan before he sang, Sunshine/Blue sky/Please go away.
He sounds amazing.
There was a bass line under the piano, too, completely different from what the Motown players had done, different from what Whitfield had ever imagined.
What Eva could hear most clearly were her worlds ramming together. It wasn’t until Pritz reached for her hand that Eva realized she was trembling. And the wound in her leg screamed.
Pritz looked at Édouard curiously, and he had the answer before she asked it. “No sample,” he said coolly. “It is mine.”
The loop was sparse and clean. Plenty of room left for Dart’s burnished baritone, which, by the time he got to the words day after day, went deeper and scratchy where Ruffin had gone perfectly higher and scratchier. Day after day—Dart sang like it was more bittersweet treat than torture—I stay locked up in my room. Édouard had kept the tambourine sound in its original place, but it wasn’t a tambourine.
Pritz looked at the song’s producer again.
“Little bells,” Eddie said, nodding his head up and down, completely pleased with himself. “And some bigger ones, too. Copper. Old. Lil’ rake ‘n’ scrape for you. But you don’t know nothing about all that.”
Eva didn’t know much about rake ‘n’ scrape, but she knew what sounded good. She’d heard the Temptations version a thousand times. She’d heard the other versions, too, had made it her business to find them, and to have them in her New York and her California apartments. Recorded also by Little Caesar, by Ike and Tina, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack, Aretha, the Chambers Brothers. Gladys Knight and the Pips hit high with it that same damn year. That country guy in the seventies, McClinton Something. Rod Stewart, on a live album, when he was still with the Faces.
Eva made her brain move. She forced her brain to click so her heart wouldn’t stop, or break. The pain in her leg rang through her whole body as her mother’s rain song boomed from the speakers exactly the same, Eva thought, but totally different from the original.
Dart was singing his own background vocals, and sounded more forlorn than ever. Raindrops behind my teardrops … and all the ooooos and ooooooooos. Let it rain.
The room was too small. Eva wanted to cough, but barely had room to lift her arm. She pushed her brain again. Song written by Whitfield along with Barrett Strong—and them helped out by Roger Penzabene. He worked on the song, and then killed himself soon after, sad or mad over his wife’s cheating. He never knew the song was a success, never knew it went gold, never knew it became a classic, a standard, a song really, for all time.
Eva pushed at Pritz. “I need to go,” she said. Then Eva pushed at Audrey, too, who looked at her crazily as she opened the bedroom/ studio door.
Once outside, Eva trudged back toward the Rowe House. It was her home, at least for right now, and she wanted to be in it. Her leg throbbed. She felt dizzy. She hadn’t eaten anything since the day before.
Dart chased her down as she got to the Rowe patio, and Pritz was right behind him. Eva wished they both would disappear. She didn’t want Dart, he didn’t want her. The things they’d shared were passionate but not intimate—meaningful, but without sacrifice or risk or even hints of confession or interrogation or introspection or promises.
There’s no giving in. Or faith. He and I are ports for each other. In this perfect storm.
And when it came down to it, Pritz wasn’t Eva’s friend. Pritz was someone she’d done business with and had known for a long time. Standing there, in the Rowe’s living room, Eva was floored. She looked at the place as if for the first time. It was a vacation spot. Generic and filled with third-best furniture and knickknacks, dry, cracked bars of soap, and items that would go unmissed if the Rowe House were swept up in a hurricane. The Rowe House reminded Eva of her place on Riverside Drive, and of her place in Santa Monica.
No trace of me anywhere. Nothing to say who I am. Nothing to break. Not too much to move.
Eva suddenly hated that she’d put herself in a position where Dart and Pritz were, for watery miles around, the very best friends she had. The only thing she had now was truth. She wanted to tell it, but not to Dart or to Pritz.
But this is what I get.
Her head raged: It’s my own fault. All of it. Everything.
Eva met her own eyes in the mirror. They were red, she was breathing hard, and she needed some water. Eva heard her people come through the sliding door.
She took a long look at herself and decided she was not about to start playing the victim now.
I am completely the same as I was before I got here, Eva thought. Except totally different.
CHAPTER 19
Dart said, “You don’t look all right.”
“You should sit down, Eva,” Pritz said.
“Like you give a shit,” she said directly to Dart. “Oh no, let me get it right—thank you in advance for your sympathy. You’re so happy to give it. I’m sad now, little orphan Eva. But you can deal with that. Save me. Comfort me. Thanks. When I’m strong, though, when I got a plan, you hate me. Fuck you.”
Dart looked at her evenly. “You’re orphaned now? Who died?”
“My mother died.”
“Stepmother.”
“No.”
A long pause. “But your real mother’s been dead.”
Pritz looked at Eva and Dart as they stared each other down. She’d no idea what was going on.
“You can do what you want,” Eva said to Dart. “Because I lied.” Just us, you said. That’s why I don’t like “just” in a statement. It can mean “only,” it can mean right or fair or deserved, but mostly it trivializes what comes after it. Just us. You lied. I lied. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. Billy Preston, piano prodigy, songwriter, vocalist, Beatles collaborator.
Dart left the patio.
There is a song for everything.
“This is how you act,” Pritz said, “when your mother dies?” She was staggered. “Your mother is dead, now, today?”
<
br /> “Yes.” Or yesterday, when my troubles seemed far away.
Pritz needed facts straight. “Did you grieve for her when you told Dart this lie?”
“No.” I’ve been grieving since I was eleven.
And then Eva thought, Is this the kind of stuff you’re supposed to say out loud? “I’ve been grieving for her since I was eleven?” This is why Ron runs? This is me, not “submitting”? This stuff in my head, I should say out loud. It seems weak. Self-indulgent. A bother to anyone else but me.
“Do you need to get back?” Pritz said. “For a funeral?”
“It already happened.”
This took a moment for Pritz to digest. “Do you have anything of hers?”
Fine. I’m going to say stuff out loud. Submit. Eva got up and went to her bag. Came back, limping, with her passport. From one of the clear plastic protective sleeves, she pulled a folded piece of butcher paper. It looked old, but not battered. The handwriting fat from a flying felt tip. In a hurry, Elaine had cut it at an odd angle. Unfolded, the sheet was a parallelogram.
Pritz read it. Eva didn’t have to.
Ned,
It is November 2, nineteen hundred and seventy-seven. In California.
There is no reason to keep up the farce. I wish you all the luck in the world, but I have to get out. No more commitment. No more expectations—you of me or me of you. First I didn’t love you anymore and now you don’t love me. It seemed like I loved you a lot.
I cry and cry. Then I try to be strong and unemotional and none of it changes anything. I think you’ve been waiting for me to lay down this line, because you won’t and I know why you won’t—for Eva.
Our conversations are blank.
“Such is life,” you say, about heartbreaking things.
“Congrats in that regard.”
“You would be missed,” you told me last week, and I was telling you I would leave you and Evey! Missed by who? God? My friends at the café? Not, surely, by you. Evey will miss me some, but Evey understands, or she will, or I’ll be her witch, something for her to face one day, and overcome.
Then you say, “I know how I feel when I don’t want to be with someone and I don’t feel that way about you.” I should be glad of that? To be somewhat desired, and through a negative? I can only say I’m sorry one million times for the things I’ve done. Mostly I’m sorry for leading you to believe I was a nicer girl than I am.
In love before Evey, in love when Evey got here.
Then your moods go into overdrive.
I try to help, but you hate the help.
You crawl into your shell.
I find a man. Like usual. Call me slut all day forever. I do not care.
Maybe you need to come into yourself, recover, blossom on your own. For the sake of it, and so you don’t have to ever say you had any real help. So you don’t have to worry about anyone letting you down. I’m tired of theorizing. I’m so tired of you talking about the things you want to be doing like I’m the one keeping you from doing them. I haven’t been keeping you from doing anything! From being anything! I believe now that we just didn’t work. You don’t like the way I dress. I don’t like the way you dress. My life is too “fast” for you. You need to “be who you’re gonna be when you’re gonna be it.” As if I ever tried to take away your little dreams. Like I haven’t moved here with you, moved there. Every time you wanted to pick up, I picked up. I do wrong things, did wrong things, but you make up stuff to bolster your case for your hiding yourself from us.
Anthony from the café quit. I went to his ship-out, and I’m going to go to his place up north and wait for him. You saw this, and I lied. I know what you think: “Looking for Mr. Groodbar.” I love my Evey. I do. I’m not the bigger person. I’m not doing what’s right. I’m doing wrong. But that’s me. I was happy before I met you. You said my problem is I have no cross to bear. Well I have one now. But I turned it into wings and I’m flying away. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. Not to you but to Eva Lillian. If you make her hate me I will haunt you. If you ever show her this letter, you deserve to die. I’m not right. I’m not on my high horse. But I am The Mother. I claim it and I will claim it no matter how much I won’t earn it. Eva will feel me guiding her to her own freedom and happiness and everything women can have now. The best thing about writing this letter is that you can’t tell me to shut up and you can’t shut me out. You will save this letter forever I know you and I know you will. Remember me you broken broke-down slave-minded son-of-a-bitch. I’m the worst mother in the history of mothers but I love writing this down to you and telling you what to do because I know you’ll do it. I know Mr. Responsibility will do just what I say: Raise my daughter well. So sayeth me! Obey my command! Love forever and ever to my babygirl Eva. She and hers will rule this world, and they’ll see a way to forgiving the weak ones like me.
Elaine Eva Sonnier Glenn
Audrey walked over with her usual tins. Pritz didn’t know what to say.
Audrey sat cracked conch and coleslaw on the patio table, and took the paper from Pritz and read it.
“I thought you hated me, Audrey,” Eva said, and she started laughing. Eva snatched the letter back. “It’s funny to me. Now that you know my mother left, you can like me.” Eva shook off an embrace from Pritz and walked out onto the beach. She climbed out onto a reef and when Pritz got up to go after her, Audrey in her best sagelike tone, told Pritz to be still. Eva sat out there on the pointy rocks and set her mother’s letter on the water. It floated quickly forward, then back farther, in and out with the waves. Eva watched it.
This is dumb, but I’m going to jump in.
Audrey and Pritz both jerked when Eva jumped into the water after the paper. More than the fact that she had lied about it, more, even, than the fact that Elaine was dead, Eva had the bile and shame and overly compensatory ways of one abandoned. Elaine had parted quickly and enigmatically, and so ruthlessly left behind a tinfoil dream of her return for Eva to chew on.
Eva had to swim out, and the note eluded her like it had a motor and mind of its own. At one point, she was underwater for what seemed to those on shore like too long a time. But she came up, took a breath, and swam toward the letter again.
This is so corny. Setting the letter out like some message, and not even in a bottle. Diving in like some kind of self-baptism.
Eva dove under the water again, felt it pressing in against her and all her passages. When she came up, Eva stood in the wet pink sand and blew what seemed the last of her cold from her nose. Coughed everything out of her chest. She put a hand to her stomach and went under the waist-deep water again, swimming strongly toward the floating paper.
In what seemed a panic, Audrey yelled for Dart, who’d emerged from the shower smelling like the starchy steam of rice. Eva wasn’t there to inhale him, but the dank apricot smell was gone. Barefoot in boxers, he walked onto the beach.
“Get to her, D’Artagnan,” Audrey said too breathlessly “Hurry! She’s going up and down too many times.”
Dart ran to the water and was up to his knees when Eva stood in front of him, clothes dripping, hair plastered around her face, her mother’s words running in indigo streams on her palm.
“I’m fine,” Eva said, panting. “I got it.”
“I knew you did.” Dart looked at her wrist. “You lost the bracelet, though.”
“Nah,” Eva said. “I let it go.”
Eva walked through the sand, back onto the patio.
“I thought you wanted to keep him,” Audrey said, handing her a towel. “You should have let him save you, Eva.”
“I know how to swim.” Eva was exhausted and irritated. Her leg was stinging, but felt better. The wound was lightly foaming with salt and felt clean for the first time. “I was all right.”
“We’re all all right. But what else can he do for you?”
Eva said what she knew Audrey already knew. “Because I’m not flailing in the ocean drowning doesn’t mean I don’t need somebody.”
Dart walked past them. “I’m out of here,” he said, tramping pebble-stone and water into the Rowe House. “Peace.”
Pritz had the look—worried, but completely comfortable—of a hip hop Euro-girl around a whole lot of negroes. Eva could almost see the papers flipping on Giada’s old clipboard. She was putting to-gether a plan.
“Eva,” Pritz said, like she was road managing her, “you’ll be fine here for a minute? I have to make a few things happen.”
“Pritz. I know shit seems ridiculous right now. Do what you gotta do.”
“Even with how you lie,” Dart said, putting things in his pack once again, “I want you to know I think you’re extremely decent.”
Eva wanted off Cat Island. The sea was closing in on her.
“Really decent the way you were for a while here,” he said. “The ways you’ve dealt with me, tried to help me, in your way. I gotta get myself back. I don’t know if I’m built for the kind of stuff I asked of you.”
Eva decided to say what she thought. “Why are you going?” She didn’t want him to stay. She wanted his reason.
“I thought I could do it,” he said. “But I feel one-down in most situations with most people, and—”
“And what?”
“I feel that way even more so when I’m with you. I’m gonna go to San Diego—to a spiritual gathering. This thing they have every first of the year.”
Eva looked at him.
He said, “Stop being tough. So tough you lie about your own mother dying. Without a blink. Without a blink for three years.”
“How can I seem tough when I can see myself in the mirror looking like I’ve had some kind of breakdown?”
“You don’t let anybody help you.” Then Dart grabbed Eva’s hands. “I love you, though,” he said. “Platonically, in the true sense of affection for someone. Virtue. Truth. I have so many high hopes for you, Eva.”
“Let go of me.” And she yanked her hands away. She thought of the Police’s “Message in a Bottle”: Seems I’m not alone at being alone/Hundred billion castaways looking for a home.