Final Vinyl Days

by Jill McCorkle

  Sometimes I think of the woman, cheered by the long-awaited phone call that she is pregnant. The nurse on the other end is relieved. Everyone is overjoyed. She goes upstairs to take a nap and never wakes, an ectopichem orrhage. Would the fanatics in the street argue that the life within, this bundle of cells unintelligible to the human eye, killed her, these people who rummage the back-alley dumpsters of emergency rooms to find some hideous example of sin in a jar, these people who take someone else’s worldly loss and turn it into a freak show? I can barely keep my car on the road when I see them gathered in protest, their hideous pictures waving in the air. “Why don’t you get a life?” I want to yell. “Go after handguns. Go after R. J. Reynolds.”

  I dreamed of my grandmother; I lifted her as she had once lifted me, my feet potty-black from her garden, through the damp, dirt-floored shed where she stored her jars of tomatoes and peaches, floating jewels, pickled and preserved. In the dream I watched people wandering, stones overturned, granite lambs tilted on the heaving mounds of cracked earth. Was this Judgment Day? “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” she said, and I was there holding her pulling her closer, corn and tobacco fields beyond the upturned graves, holding her, and whispering the song she made up years before, a lullaby sung to the tune of an unknown hymn, you’re my baby, you’re my baby, you’re my baby, yes, you are.

  When I was fifteen, I spent many afternoons cruising the streets of my hometown with a friend who drove a baby-blue Mustang. It was a car to be envied, and we were like queens, the radio blasting the top forty, our suntanned arms hung out the window to flick our cigarettes. I was a bonafide smoker then, a pack of Salems in the zippered part of my vinyl purse, fifty cents in my pocket in case I ran out. Sometimes we drove way out of the city limits, out where we were surrounded by flat fields and little wood-framed houses, churchyards overgrown, the rush of the brisk country air drowning out the music of the radio. Those rides gave me such a rush, tingling scalp and racing heart; I felt powerful, like I could look out over those fields to the end of the world.

  Now I find my daughter all dressed up in front of a mirror. She is almost five and is wearing a faux-leopard poncho and a little pillbox hat with netting over her face. Her high heels are silver sequined and wobbling to one side. She has a pencil held between two fingers and with her other hand on her hip, takes a deep drag from the imaginary cigarette. She tilts her head back, purses her lips and blows at her image, eyes closed while she says, “I must be running now, my dear.” She turns quickly and stops when she sees me there, her shoes leaving marks as if she had suddenly put on brakes. “Oh, hello,” she says in the same affected tone. “I’m pretending it’s long, long ago. Back when cigarettes were good for you.” With that she takes another puff and blows her smoke my way, and I lean close to breathe it all in. I breathe in as much as I can take for now.

  PART II

  Final Vinyl Days

  I’ll never forget the day Betts moved in. How could I? Open the apartment door, and there she is, with two suitcases, a purple futon, and two milk crates full of albums.

  It was 1984, the day after Marvin Gaye died. That’s how I remember so well. I had just gotten home from my job at Any Old Way You Choose It Music, where the Marvin Gaye bin had emptied within a couple of hours. I’d spent the afternoon marveling at what happens when somebody kicks. Marvin’s bin, other than for the Motown faithfuls and a brief flurry after The Big Chill, was long neglected; I had even dusted it back when everybody was BeeGee Disco Crap berserk. Now Marvin is dead, and there’s a run on his music. I had watched the same thing happen with Elvis and John Lennon, always good sellers, but incredibly so when they died.

  “You want me here don’t you?” Betts asked. Her thick, dark hair was to her shoulders, and her eyes were wide open, always as if she were seeing the world for the first time, like every object caught her attention. She stared at me; I was the object of her attention for the moment. “I mean I’ve been staying here every night, so I might as well have my things, right? And by the way,” she was saying, “I could use some help.” The purple futon was unrolled and already halfway inside the apartment. “We don’t need this, but Helen said she didn’t want it.” Helen, the roommate, was a physics major who liked to test all the physical properties during sex. Betts had said (before she started coming to my place) that it was driving her crazy (the shaking plaster and peculiar sounds). I didn’t tell her, but it was driving me crazy, for different reasons, the main one being that I was a wee bit curious about what took place on the other side of the wall that separated Bett’s room from Helen’s. Bett’s side was pretty tame: a bulletin board covered in little notes and photos and ticket stubs, a huge poster of a skeleton. She was majoring in physical therapy and was taking it all seriously (too seriously if you ask me), or depending, not seriously enough. “I am not a masseuse,” she said often enough with no smile whatsoever. Short on sense of humor but long on legs. Sometimes you buy an album for just one song, thinking that the others will start to grow on you. When she finally got the futon in, she dug out her Duran Duran album, and that’s when I drew the line. We were from different time zones. She had a whole list of favorite good old songs: “Afternoon Delight” and “Muskrat Love” were two.

  I played Marvin: “Stubborn Kind of Fella,” “It Takes Two,” “Mercy Mercy Me.” She just shrugged and went back in my room to arrange her little junk on the top of my dresser and the back of the commode. I sat there with Marvin, tried to imagine what it must feel like to know that your old man is about to kill you like Marvin did.

  “Why did he wear that hat all the time?” Betts asked looking the same way she did when she asked me why I still wore my hair long enough to pull back in a ponytail. “Is he the guy who sings that ‘Sexual Healing’ song?” She was standing in the kitchen with a two-liter Diet Coke in one hand and a handful of Chee-tos in the other. She’s a healthy one. She bitches about an occasional joint. It’s okay for her to go downtown and pound down beer with her girlfriends, but for God’s sakes don’t do anything illegal in moderation. “We’ve got to fix this place,” she was saying. “And did you say you were going back to graduate school in the fall?”

  “No.” I shook my head. She was peeking under a dishcloth like she expected a six-foot snake under there. She sounded like my mother, asking me if I said what she knows I never in the hell did. Those were her words, graduate school. When my mom does it, the secret words are electrical appliance store. My old man owns one in a town so big it actually has two gas stations, and he’d rather pull his nose off of his face with a wrench or beat up a new Maytag washer than to have me in his employment. Mom says things like, “Didn’t you say you were looking for a job where you can advance in the business?” That’s when I always click the phone up and down or flip on the blender and plead bad connection. It’s a real bad connection, Mom.

  And there stood Betts, swigging her Nutrasweet, eating her fluorescent cheese, waiting for an answer.

  “You know that night we first met, you said you had been in law school and were thinking about going back.”

  “I said that?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Did I tell you I quit law school and joined VISTA? Spent a year in the Appalachian mountains with diarrhea?”

  She nodded a bored affirmative.

  “Did I tell you I loved it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s because I didn’t. But what I learned in that year is that I could do anything I wanted to do, you know?”

  “So?” She took a big swallow of her nutrasyrup, then wiped her mouth and hands with enough paper towels to equal a small redwood. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m doing it.” I lifted the stylus off of Marvin and cleaned the album, my hand steady as I watched the Motown label spin. She was still staring in disbelief. A real bad connection. As good looking as she was, it was a real bad connection. I left for five minutes, long enough to go pee and see her little ceramic eggs filled
with perfumed cedar shavings on the back of the john, and in that five minutes, she put on Boy George. What we prided ourselves on most at Any Old Way You Choose It Music then was that we did just that, chose it without regard to what sells and top tens and who’s who. Like if I was in one mood, I might play the Beatles all day long, might play “Rubber Soul” two times in a row. I had whole weekends where all I played were the Stones, Dylan, or the Doors and then followed it with a Motown Monday, a Woodstock Wednesday. Some days I just went for somebody like Buffy St. Marie or Joan Baez, which surprised the younger clientele, people like Betts, people who might say, who’s that? Screw them.

  “You mean you’re going to work there forever?” Betts asked. Boy George stared up at me from the floor. Bett’s fingers were tapping along to “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”

  “I’m buying in,” I told her, which was not entirely a lie. The owner, a guy my age who had already made it big in the local business scene, was considering it. He graduated with a D average from a second-rate junior college and received a small empire already carved out by his old man. I graduated from the university with a 3.7 in English and philosophy, highest honors for some old paper I wrote about Samuel Coleridge, and what I got was one of those leather kits for your toiletries. What toiletries? I had wanted to ask my mom, who told me she remembered me saying I needed one of those. Yeah, right. I need a toiletries kit.

  “I’m doing okay,” I said and lifted the stylus from Boy George, searched in earnest for the Kinks so Betts could ask some more dumb questions. She came over and knelt beside me, put her head close to mine, little orange Chee-to sparkles above her lip.

  “I know you’re doing okay,” she whispered and pressed her mouth against my neck. “You’re better than okay,” she said. “My friends all think you’re interesting in a kind of weird way, you know, mysterious.”

  Her own anatomy was doing quite nicely. Too nicely really, because it was making me a dishonest person. I was thinking bad connection, bad connection, while I let her play her albums and pull me to the floor.

  “Isn’t it great I’ve moved in?” she asked ten minutes later as the needle hugged the wide smooth grooves of the last song, a long and silent begging to be lifted.

  “Isn’t it going to be wonderful?” she asked.

  But all I could think about when I closed my eyes was Marvin standing there in his hat, his old man with pistol aimed.

  Betts moved in the day after he died. He hadn’t been dead three months when she moved out. She pled guilty to not truly loving me, and I turned on the somber broken-hearted look long enough to pack up her books and hand them out to the squat-bodied pathology resident she’d taken up with and who was waiting for her. “Here’s a live one for you,” I told him and patted her on the back.

  I didn’t miss her so much as I just missed. The jerky young store owner was still dangling his carrot about maybe letting me buy in. I told him he was getting too far away from the old stuff, the good stuff, but he insisted that we go with the flow. He didn’t want me monopolizing the sound system with too much of the old stuff; he said Neil Young made his skin crawl. He was sick over the fact that he hadn’t kept the Rick Nelson stock up to date. I figured what the hell, did I really want to be in business with such a sleaze? I took a little vacation to get myself feeling up, to get Betts out of my bones, and then I was back full force, nothing on the back of my john, no album that never should have been on my shelves in the first place. But before too long, there I was hanging up T-shirts of the Butthole Surfers. Things were getting bad.

  I thought they couldn’t get any worse, but I let a couple of years spin by and they did. There were prepubescent girls with jewelry store names running around shopping malls singing songs they didn’t deserve to sing. It was plagiarism; it was distasteful. Where were the real women? Where was Grace Slick? Then there was a run on Roy Orbison’s music, and once again my jerk of a boss was in a state of panic that he’d missed yet another good-time oldie postmortem sale. He was eating cocaine for breakfast by then and had a bad case of the DBCs (Dead Brain Cells). I might sleep around now and then; I might even end up with somebody who was born after 1968, but at least I’m moral about it. He gets them tanked and snorted and then goes for the prize. One step above being a necro if you ask me. And what really pisses me off is that society sees me as the loser, the social misfit who’s living in the past. The guy drives a BMW and owns a condo and a business, stuffs all his money up his nose, pokes teenage coeds who don’t remember that he did it. And he’s successful.

  I was about to the point where I couldn’t tune it all out, when I wound up with a bad hangover that turned into the flu and landed me in one of those fast-food medicine places. You know, a Doc in the Box, planted right beside Revco so you can rush over and fill your prescriptions. I felt like hell, and I was about to stretch out on their green vinyl couch and snooze, when I saw someone familiar. It was Marlene Adams, a girl from home, a woman of my time, no ring on her hand, good-looking as ever. I sat straight up and was about to say something when she turned calmly and called my name. “I was wondering when you’d recognize me,” she said and laughed, her eyes as blue as the crisp autumn sky. “I had heard you were still living around here. Who told me that? Somebody I saw at a wedding not too long ago.” For a split second I was feeling better, like grabbing a bucket of chicken and sitting in the park, throwing a Frisbee, going to some open-air concert.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” she said, and I felt her gaze from head to toe. It was the first time in years that I was worried about how I looked. “Neither have you.” I sat up straight, smoothed back my hair. God, why hadn’t I taken a shower? “Why’re you here?” I asked and glanced to the side where there was a cloudy aquarium with one goldfish swimming around. “I thought you were some place like California or Colorado or North Dakota. I thought you were married.” I thought that fish must feel like the only son of a bitch on the planet, thirty gallons of water and nobody to swim over and talk to.

  “Divorced. I’m back in graduate school, psychology,” she said and laughed. “And I’m in this office because I fell down some steps.” I turned back from the dismal fish to see her holding out her right foot. Her ankle was blue and swollen. She had on a little white sock, the kind my mother always wore with her tennis shoes, with little colored pom-pom balls hanging off the backs.

  “Can you believe it?” She shook her head back and forth. “It was really embarrassing. There were loads of people in the library when it happened.” She leaned back, her thick hair fanning behind her as she stared up at the ceiling. I kept expecting her to say something really stupid and mundane and patronizing like So, you say that you’re living here but not in graduate school, you sell albums and tapes to coeds you occasionally sleep with, you say that you have a hangover, what I’m hearing from you is that you are in search of a sex partner who has possibly heard some songs from your youth.

  “I’m just as clumsy as I was the time we went camping,” she said, her voice light and far removed from the monotone I’d just imagined. “Remember? You swore you’d never take me again?”

  “And I didn’t,” I said. “I never got the chance.” I turned back to the fish. It was an awkward moment. You don’t often get to discuss breaking up years after the fact, but we were doing it. She dumped me, and now that I had reminded her of that fact, she was talking in high gear to cover the tracks. Why does it take so long to get seen in this place? and Do you ever get home? Does your dad still have the refrigerator store and is your mom well?

  I was relieved when the door opened and the nurse called me in. “See you around,” I said politely, half hoping that she’d disappear while I was gone. Marlene and I were the same age, from the same small town, the same neighborhood, even. I had known her since my family moved there when I was in the fifth grade and we had all run around screaming the words to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” while making faces and crossing our eyes like Ringo did. Our common ground and memories was wh
at had brought us together that month in college to begin with.

  I thought about it while they stuck a thermometer in my mouth and instructed me to undress. Marlene had been pretty goofy as a kid, and though I considered her a friend, I never would have ridden my bike over to her house to visit. She had this dog named Alfie who smelled like crap, which left Marlene and her wet-dog-smelling jeans rather undesirable. In junior high, Matt Walker and I had suggested we put Alfie in front of a firing squad, and Marlene didn’t speak to me for weeks after. No big deal, but then in high school we got to be pals just sort of hanging outside in the breezeway where you were allowed to smoke in between classes. Can you believe they let us smoke at school? That they, the administrators, those lop-sided adults had designated an area? I spent a lot of time there, and so did Marlene. She was on the Student Council, which most of us thought was a bunch of crap. She was forever circulating some kind of petition. She was really into womanhood, which I found kind of titillating in a strange way, don’t ask me why, though I never did anything about it at the time. She was a hard worker, a smart girl. That’s the kind of shit people wrote in her yearbook if they wrote anything at all. Nineteen seventy was not a big year for yearbook signing. But then, get the girl off to college, and there is major metamorphosis. It was like I could watch it happening there in a poli sci lecture, blond streaks in her hair that hung to her waist, little shortie T-shirts and cutoff jeans, her tinted wire-rim glasses (aviator style, like Gloria Steinem) always pushed up on her head. Guys waited to see where she was going to sit and then clustered around her. God, she was beautiful, and then I had to take a turn just sitting and listening to all that was going on in her life, just as she had listened to me there in the smoking area. I had a girlfriend here and there along the way, but I guess I was really waiting for Marlene to come around. Her boyfriend had been drafted, and though she told me how lucky I was not to have been taken (lucky break, legal blindness; my brother winged me with a sharp rock when I was seven), I could tell that I was weakened in her eyes. There would have been much more admiration had I had twenty-twenty vision and fled to Canada. It was a brief affair, the consummation of any likes we’d had for each other since adolescence, and then it was over, one fiasco of a camping trip, pouring down rain, Marlene spraining her thumb when she tripped over a tree limb and landed face down in the mud. It amazed me the things that that damn thumb hindered her from doing. It was a loss of a weekend.