Thank You for the Music

by Jane McCafferty

  He looked up at us. He had urgent blue eyes. “You’re all too young to understand,” he said. “You live with a woman for forty-eight years. Her biggest fault is too much garlic on her food, and maybe she had to get the last word in. Bitchy once a month, even after the menopause. We got the dog sixteen years ago. A mutt. A pup. She took care of it just like it was a baby. She talked to it that way. We’d had a baby together. A smart girl. The girl grew up and moved to San Diego. The girl got breast cancer when she was forty. Survived. We lived through that together. Luck was on our side. How lucky we were. And look here, she played piano!”

  He closed the book of pictures before we could see. He rested one of his hands on top of it, the other hand coming up to cover his eyes. He stood up. “I’m sorry, I am not prepared. I wasn’t prepared. For the weight of it. I am sorry to go on. Berna, may I go to my room? I thank you. The dog died a peaceful death in my arms. A lovely way to go. They should do it for human beings. You have a fine son. Good night, now. The dog was named Belle.”

  As he walked away Jude’s hand took my own under the table.

  “He’s a nice old man,” Jude said. “I wish I’d known one good thing to say.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Me too.”

  Jude squeezed my hand.

  Then, the strangest thing happened. We heard the old man singing. Not softly. He was belting it out in there, a song I’d never heard. “All the lilies, all the lilies, lighting up her face!” He had a terrible voice, a comic voice, and who would have thought he could be so loud?

  We sat and wondered if we should go to him. If this was a sign of unraveling. But nobody moved.

  “The man needs to sing,” Berna said. She smiled.

  We ate her warm, fresh bread. “The lilies, the lilies, the lilies in the snow!”

  We laughed a little. The song did not soften, if anything he got louder and more off-key. It went on and on. We almost got used to it.

  We learned Griffin had been accepted to veterinary school in Philadelphia. We drank to that—brandy. I kissed him.

  When the old man fell silent, we all rose from the table. He’s sung himself to death, I thought, as we all seemed to tiptoe toward his room.

  But the old man met us halfway there. He was bundled up in a parka. He said he was going out for a walk. He was going to sing in the great outdoors, he said. He was not prepared, he said. We saw he was weeping.

  I wanted to embrace this man. But he was nobody any of us could embrace. He was a force for whom you simply had to get out of the way. You had to move aside and let the old man go into the great outdoors, unprepared.

  We saw him, later, Jude and I. We were in our car, beginning our ride back home. The old man was headed back to Bern and Griffin’s house, where he would find fire in the stove, and some companionship, and something else I don’t want to shrink by naming. We didn’t stop and ask the old man if he needed a ride up the hill.

  “If I lost you,” Jude said, “I’d be walking like that. I’d be out walking alone for the rest of my life.”

  His words had the near ring of sincerity, and touched me for a moment, even as I didn’t believe them.

  “I couldn’t stand it,” he said. “You’re my whole life.”

  “Well, I hope if you sing you sound better than he did,” I said, and Jude said nothing, wounded, perhaps, that I wasn’t engaging his fears.

  For the first time in years, I rested my head on Jude’s shoulder as he drove. This was more awkwardness than it was comfort. But it was something. We rode through the dark like that, in a new kind of silence, a silence made of fading echoes, the echo of an old man’s song, the echo of pain and resentment and lies that break hearts, the echo of all we’d ever meant to be for one another.

  We were hungry. We stopped and had a meal in an all night diner, Jude and I. The booth was aqua and small. We ate in silence. We could hardly take our eyes off each other. We are what we are, we seemed to be saying in that quiet. We are what we are.

  We were filling up so we could go on home to continue our broken, indelicate story.

  LIGHT OF LUCY

  THE SOLITARY PARENTS, each in a parked car at midnight in front of the enormous inner-city high school, were mostly exhausted as they sat waiting for the ski-trip bus to pull up. This ski bus was always late, but the parents came on time anyway.

  Some closed their eyes, heads back, while others stared through the dark windows into the darker Pittsburgh night as if it were an opponent who’d already beaten them down. Some leaned forward on the steering wheel and chewed gum. A few curled up in backseats, heads against doors, and when fifteen minutes had passed and the bus had not arrived, they slept, the buzz of talk radio lining their dreams, caller after caller fervently opinionated about Elian, the little Cuban boy whose mother had drowned trying to get to America.

  Finally, one man got out of his car. He could no longer stand his own company in that small space. He’d had a large cup of Mini-Mart coffee; if he had to be up, then why not be truly awake? He wanted to pace on the sidewalk in the dark of this rather mild January night, and smoke. This, he imagined, might be a signal to some other parent in a parked car to get out and talk. Just some small talk. Hey, what’s up? Ski bus is always late, so what are we doing here? Why can’t we take the hint and show up late? He smoked, the ember blazing its orange invitation. Come on, people. Aren’t we all people here? How ’bout a little human interaction? Like in the old days?

  Whatta ya say? Anyone still alive?

  Maybe everyone was sitting there judging him for inviting cancer into his lungs. A slovenly weakling at the mercy of a horrible appetite. “I just started smoking again last week after ten years of quitting,” he considered yelling. “So wipe those superior looks off your faces!” though he couldn’t see their faces. If he yelled anything at all, they’d think he was crazy. Then they’d all lock their car doors, like people had when he used to walk certain places with his black friend Darren in the seventies. Darren would say, “Watch the hands as we pass by.” And you’d see all these white hands reaching for their locks, and Darren would smile sweetly at each car, and sometimes even knock on the window and shout, “Good evening!”

  He hadn’t seen Darren since 1980. Darren had gone west on a Greyhound with his dreams and a Chinese girl who’d changed her name to Misty.

  Well look at this! A human woman is rolling down her window.

  “Yo,” she said, “mind if I bum a smoke?” and he said, “I don’t mind at all, as long as you smoke it with me out here,” and she said, “Too cold, man,” and he walked over, crouched down by her half-opened window, and gave her a cigarette. His impulse was to joke her out of her car—come on, it’s fifty degrees, it’s a bit of spring we got here—but when he saw her face, he was glad she wouldn’t be joining him. It was not her lack of beauty but her lack of restlessness that had disappointed him. Her face was so rigidly set it promised nothing, not even the drama of some private, ordinary pain that simply needed to be coaxed out of her. If she’d revealed anything, even the weighty cost of her own boredom, he would have tried. But she didn’t even meet his eyes as she took the cigarette. She wore a red hat that was probably her son’s, and under her big parka he noticed flannel pajamas. This touched him for a moment, and he softened. “Nice p.j.’s,” he tried. She was examining the cigarette.

  “Glad it’s not menthol,” she said and rolled up the window. He stood there for a moment before turning away.

  Glad it’s not menthol, he mocked silently to himself. Is that all the charm and personality she could muster on this January night? Is that all she had to spare? One life, he wanted to call to her, you got one life and this is one night in that one life, and your nights are numbered. Do you care? Do you not grasp that life could be more like the movies if only you got out of your stupid car and opened your heart, not wide, not with any degree of trust, or, hell, even interest, but rather like you open the front door for the cat, just enough for the animal to slink through into the open
air?

  Was everyone so tied to their own litter box they couldn’t imagine it otherwise?

  You could open your heart like a door for an old cat to this guy who got downsized last Thursday, to a guy whose antidepressants were finally kicking in a little—amazing, really, that a little pill could lift a giant weight a few inches off the heart—a guy who went to this very same high school twenty years ago, and if he allowed himself might be filled with despair to acknowledge that twenty years had really passed. He remembers thinking in high school that the men on his boyhood street were pathetic for hanging on to the high school football team as their source of major pleasure, remembers his own father going to the games alone with a flask of whiskey, his own father knowing all the stats of guys he himself could only watch move through the halls, guys with nicknames that seemed to come out of the air—Rocco Ramone, Lymon the Brick, the brothers McPherson, better known as Tank and Monster, and the beefy sideburns guy who called himself Unitas. They were the young brutes his father liked to spend his Friday nights on, while he himself sat in an empty South Side boxcar down by the river sharing homegrown, or the throat-scalding resin of homegrown from precious little pipes, and a case of the cheapest beer—not Iron City, but Schaefer, the one beer to have when you’re having more than one—with loyal degenerates, skinny guys named things like Timmy and Fizzy and Boink, and one huge redheaded girl, Patsy Prizandance, who was a passionate atheist who could fix cars and quote Albert Camus. Their old tape player blasted Sly and the Family Stone or Springsteen, or old James Brown, and then later at night the Byrds and Pink Floyd. They felt so alive then! He’d go home on those nights and his father would sit with him in the kitchen, telling him all about the football game, and he’d felt the least he could do was listen to the old man, pretend to be excited, and pretend it wasn’t sad, this old guy so hooked into the high school life and a job in the mill.

  A job that would send every one of his five kids to college.

  Now, he understood. Now he himself was known to go to a high school game or two on Friday night, and what the hell, he’d say, it’s damn good ball. It’s cheap entertainment.

  He looked at a small green car under the streetlight. A woman in that car seemed to be looking out at him.

  Life could be like a movie where a sort of average-looking woman with her hood up gets out of her car and smokes with a restless man, and the two start talking about Life itself, and maybe the woman says, “Yeah, I’m divorced,” and the man says, “Join the club,” and the woman says, “I work two jobs and sleep five hours a night, ya know,” and the man says, “I know, and I bet you tell yourself you should be grateful, right?” And then under her hood in the streetlight, a certain glow on the woman’s face could appear like hope. Because here, finally, was a man who could see her as she’d been as a child, before some crucial sense of expectation had collapsed inside of her. “So what’s it all about?” he could say, just like he used to talk when he was sixteen, in Arby’s with Matilda Waldman, the first girl he truly loved and who loved him back. Until she got her fine Jewish hook nose operated on. She came back to school, the very school in front of which he now paced, she came back the first day of eleventh grade with the same hair, the same mouth and eyes, the same nice big-thighed body, but her nose was Barbie’s nose, and it made her a different person. “I liked your real nose a lot better,” he’d told her, “it had more, um, history.” And she shrugged and said that her new nose was her real nose, and that her “birth nose” had been bad for her self-esteem, and that’s why she’d been such a burnout head with him for the past year, and really, he should do something for his self-esteem too. Did he want to be a burnout head all his life? He hadn’t known how to answer that. She said she really wanted to remain friends, but she also wanted her freedom. “Oh, freedom,” he’d said, “so you’re too good for me now without what you call your old birth nose?” “No, no, no,” she’d said, and tears of shame were in her eyes because she knew he’d spoken some truth. She was already popular, with her Barbie nose leading the way. He had imagined the old nose, the one he’d kissed, abandoned in some bag of medical waste. He felt a little sick.

  He’d been ruthless after that—showing her his indifference, and once, when she’d called him crying after some debate club Ron guy shattered her heart, he’d listened, then said, “So you want me again?” and she’d sniffed, “Sure, you’re my friend.”

  “Friend, huh, well, I’ll get used to that like the man a-hangin’,” he’d blurted, and hung up, having no real idea what he’d meant by that—it was his grandfather’s expression. He was a bit shocked at his coldness, but not so ashamed that he had tried contacting her again. He still remembered the sturdy streak of pleasure he felt in the middle of his regret, like a wire holding him back from the lost world of conventional decency.

  If this were a movie tonight, Matilda Waldman herself would be in one of these cars, and she’d see him, and she’d come out and say, God, you look just the same except you’re kind of, well, bald, no offense, and, like, forlorn-looking or something, and did you gain weight? And he’d say, You came back! You finally realized the best thing in life was to sit in Arby’s with me. It struck you, in a blaze of the most exquisitely American retrospect, that life had gone downhill ever since! How are you, anyhow? Having a hard time decorating your cubicle? Need some extra Paxil? You think the little Cuban Elian will ever be able to really go home again?

  After another cigarette he walked up to a random car and knocked on the window, his breath a cloud steaming the glass. Was it a woman? He hoped so, and it was, and when she rolled down the window, he saw it was not only a woman, it was the woman he suddenly knew he might very well have been waiting for his entire life. It was apparently, against all reason, Lucille Ball.

  “Jesus,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said, behind her sunglasses, which she briefly lifted to wink at him. Her long lashes were heavily blackened with mascara, as usual. “Desi’s a ski bum,” she said. “Refuses to grow up. And he wouldn’t miss these trips for the world. Get in! I’m so bored. I feel I could yodel on the roof, baby doll!” She laughed. She had that same scratchy, husky voice she always had.

  “Lucy!” he said. “Finally someone who understands!” He got into the passenger seat. He stared straight ahead.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she said in her husky voice.

  “Watching me, huh?”

  “That’s right, sugar plum.”

  “Watching me like God, right?”

  “Yes, like God. We’re all watching each other like God. You know that by now, don’t you, honey?”

  She snapped her brilliant orange head back and laughed at this, and just then the huge ski bus pulled up. It was close to one A.M. now, and the high school students stepped down into the night, their faces beautiful because they were young and all different colors and lit by the headlights of their parents’ cars, and the cars were roaring back to life, the parents pinning their eyes open. He saw his own daughter, a girl who would one day appreciate her height but who now walked like an old ape, hunched, shoulders folded inward, eyes down, brown hair like curtains on either side of her face, and what would she say when she saw him with Lucy? Did she even know who Lucy was?

  “Julie!” he called out the window. “Julie, over here!”

  The girl aped over to the car and her face contorted to show her father she was not amused to find him hanging out the window with a moronic expression on his face.

  “Hey, kiddo, how was it?”

  “What are you, like, doing in this car?”

  “Take a look at who’s driving, hon,” he said.

  The girl stooped down and looked inside. Lucy gave her a little wave. The girl did not wave back, or even smile. She had never been a particularly friendly girl, not even when she was small.

  “Can we go?” the girl mumbled. “Can you say good-bye to your little friend?”

  “The night is young,” he s
aid. “And Lucille Ball here might have plans.”

  The girl bent down again and stared. “Woh,” she said, “she does look like Lucy!”

  “Correction. I am Lucy.”

  “Isn’t Lucy totally dead?”

  “Really?” said the husky-voiced woman with the thick black eyelashes. “If I’m dead I’d better let your father drive.”

  “Dad, are you and your new friend, like, on drugs tonight?”

  “Speaking for me, yes.”

  “Oh, this is just great.”

  “I’m on Paxil, like I told you. It’s working. I’m alive again, the world is alive, and Lucy wants to—I don’t know—what do you want to do, Lucy?”

  “Let’s just go for a little spin.”

  “A little spin,” he repeated. Her voice was so perfectly Lucy’s voice he had to pinch himself.

  A tall boy approached the car and slipped into the backseat.

  “Hey, Dez,” Lucy said.

  “Shit,” said the boy. “Who’s this?”

  “This is a man named—hey—what’s your name?”

  His daughter leaned into the car and spoke to Lucy’s son. “It’s my dad. His name is Rob,” she said. “He’s an ordinary guy named Rob. He’s also currently unemployed.”

  “Huh,” the boy mumbled.

  His mother was fiddling with the radio.

  “She really does look like Lucy though,” his daughter said. “I mean, who’s in the trunk, Fred and Ethel and Mr. Mooney?”

  “You’d better get in and buckle up,” the boy said.

  Lucy turned out to be a surprisingly deft driver, easing slowly into the city street now crowded with other cars of sleepy parents and skiers. She asked them all if they could enjoy a little hot chocolate from CoGo’s.

  “Sure,” he said, and she turned on the radio.

  In Pittsburgh you could always hear oldies on the radio. It was apparently the most nostalgic city on earth. Or maybe it was that way everywhere in America. The Shirelles were singing “Baby It’s You”—a song popular before his time, but he knew it well, as did Lucy, who sang along huskily. “This one takes me back,” she said. “New York City. Ricky despaired that year. He thought he was over the hill. Meanwhile, all the ladies on the street were dropping at his feet. It wasn’t easy for me, but I sure managed well, don’t you think? I still dream of Ricky, if that’s what you’re wondering.”