Thank You for the Music

by Jane McCafferty

  “Look, we’re from Balteemore,” he said. “We’re not spring chickens no more. We’re trying to make a living. And you two, you two are fuckin’ up the whole shimmyshangin’ nine yards. Every time I get the pins in the air, one of you says somethin’ mental.”

  A silence fell. They all looked at each other.

  “Okay,” Thomas finally said. “We’ll take a vow of silence. I mean, anything to help your pins stay in the air.”

  The clown turned and walked away.

  “You really hurt his feelings now,” his wife said. “You people understand nothing.”

  A feeling in the hall assured them the aging clown from Baltimore indeed had been inexplicably wounded. They were suddenly acutely aware of the clown’s fragility. Within the awareness was a knowledge of their own strength, and futures, which were vast and unknown, and carried within their hearts like wild seeds. They began to feel guilt-ridden and generous, but it was too late.

  “Would you love him if he was a clown?” said the clown’s wife, nodding toward Thomas, and staring at Kate.

  Kate nodded her head.

  “Would you love him if he lived on nothing but fried chicken and cried if he didn’t get his chicken at exactly the same time each day?”

  “Sure I would,” Kate said, and squeezed the damp hand of Thomas, her heart pounding.

  “You don’t know a damn thing about it,” she said. “You don’t know a damn thing. You and your skinny little boyfriend who reads you poems. Let me tell you somethin’, college girl, you could never love the clown I love. You don’t got the heart. And if you can’t shut up in here, least you could do is change the subject.”

  But now the clown had wandered back. Oddly enough, he was smiling.

  “Look,” he said, his arms extended as if to embrace all three of them. “Someday we’ll all be dead. So very, very dead.”

  The clown bent his head to the left, his eyes downcast, his lips holding a clownishly sincere smile of sympathy for all their mortal selves.

  “Dead,” he repeated. “All four of us. Under the ground. Gone. Isn’t that some bullshit? You understand me what I’m saying here?”

  “Why don’t you two just come on in,” Kate said.

  They entered. First the clown’s wife removed her mud mask in the little bathroom. She emerged white-faced and wide-eyed. Then Thomas poured them each a glass of Red Moon wine. The clown spoke of his life. He had most recently been a dishwasher. He had broken too many dishes. He had been so nervous. Things hardly ever worked out. Life was hard on the nerves, that’s one thing he knew. He sighed. A silence fell, and the mystery of their breathing together deepened.

  “It’s good to be here!” the clown finally said.

  They toasted to being alive. Then the four of them sat in a row on the double bed, their legs dangling. The clown’s feet in his shoes were enormous. They laughed at that. A fire truck roared by in the street below. They listened, waiting as it passed. They sipped their wine.

  THE DOG WHO SAVED HER

  WHEN SHE WAS A LITTLE GIRL, she had a picture book set in Venice. The child in the book stepped out of his front door, into a little red boat, and went to see his friend.

  “I want to live there,” she told her mother.

  “Oh!” said the mother. “Do you?”

  “I do, and I will someday!”

  And this story was recounted by the mother many times to others: “It was very peculiar when she spoke of Venice like that. Her eyes were shining. It was like the Virgin Mary was with us.”

  This was how the mother spoke in those days. She seemed unaware of her audience, who wanted small talk about the wild Maine weather, nothing more. People snickered behind her back, which pierced the observant child to the core; she hated those people, and yearned to protect the mother from cold hearts. But it proved impossible.

  They left Maine, they went someplace to start over. Philadelphia, which did not help. Her mother grew very depressed for a few years, did not wash her hair, and wore sleeveless blouses in the dead of winter. Her upper arms turned purple in the cold, as if badly bruised. She shaved her eyebrows off and replaced them with severely drawn black arches. Her gray-green eyes glazed over, and she smoked on the back stoop at night. Sometimes the child would lean out of her bedroom window and hover in the dark above her mother, trying to think of words to say that might bring her back in. Then one night she saw the mother kick an alley cat.

  “Don’t!” the child screamed down into the dark. The mother looked up, embarrassed. Her hands flew up to cover her face. “Get back in bed!” And then a long pause. And then, “You need another mother! Not me! I can’t do this anymore!”

  But the next day her Frosted Flakes were waiting for her in the dull blue bowl, as always, and she sat in the nook while her mother sat in the living room smoking in front of the television. The girl wanted to say, “You scared me last night, kicking that poor cat,” but was afraid to say anything at all. She ate her cereal. Her father left for work. The house filled up with her mother’s music. Tom Jones singing “With These Hands,” “With these hands, I will cling to you.” The mother would sit listening in a chair, as if to a lecture, her jaw thrust forward, her head nodding when she most agreed with Tom.

  In school all day the girl clenched her eyes shut against the memory of the night before. The cat had screamed, sounding almost human. The girl was one of those sentimental children who refused to kill bugs, even in self-defense. She’d cried hysterically when Edgel Tosh cut a sidewalk worm in half. He’d thrown one half in her face. “It’s just a stupid worm!”

  She also had a pet mouse named Ave Maria whom she loved. She once gave Ave a ride on the Tom Jones record, around and around on the sleek blackness, a mouse merry-go-round. It was a secret, this ride on the record, between the girl and the mouse.

  The mouse had contracted chronic murine pneumonia soon after that. Its breath squeaked, then rattled, its nose ran and its eyes watered. The girl, who believed the Tom Jones record had somehow sickened the mouse, said, “Ave needs to go to the vet.” The mother said, “Yes, she certainly does.” And away they drove! The mother wasn’t the sort to say, “Ah, she’s just a mouse.”

  The vet, a kind man with a silver beard, gave Ave Maria a prescription for Tylan, a good antibiotic. The mother spent money they didn’t really have. “Don’t tell your father,” she warned, driving home. Ave recovered.

  So. To see her mother kick a cat and kick it hard—twice— was shocking. It changed everything, somehow, subtly but distinctly. The girl moved further inside of herself. She brought milk in bowls to the Philadelphia alley cats when her mother wasn’t looking, as if to repay a debt. She prayed more than usual. For animals, for starving people. She prayed for her mother’s happiness, which finally came, but it was too bright, too big.

  The mother was so happy she smiled constantly, laughed loudly at even the slightest joke. The girl felt the laughter cling to her own skin. She tried to scrub it off in the tub. “Why are you scrubbing so hard?” the mother said, and then laughed loudly, and the sound echoed, bouncing off the tile walls.

  The mother now had orange hair, high and starchy on her head, a red mouth, and sunglasses. She always had a mouthful of Certs. It took her an hour to get dressed just to go to the grocery store. She said to the girl, “Why do you walk like an ape with its head down? Do you want a big hump on your back someday?” and “Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone, sister!” Always beaming, and snapping her fingers, but something brittle underneath. And when the girl wouldn’t smile back: “You get that look off your face before I slap it off.” And sometimes did.

  But then Ave the aging mouse grew ill again. The vet said, “Mycoplasma pulmonis. I’ll give you an antibiotic. Try different bedding, and avoid sawdust or shavings or hay. Shredded paper is okay.”

  “But I already use shredded paper. She likes her bed.”

  “Try CareFresh.”

  They tried, but Ave Maria didn’t make it. So
mehow the mother knew to wait before saying, “Let’s go shop for another mouse.” Knew, somehow, not to say, “Smile and the world smiles with you,” at least for a few days. Her mother’s friends, two sisters named Jean and Joan, drove over to visit in their inherited orange ambulance and took both the girl and her mother out for ice cream on Pine, and the fatter sister raised up her cone like a glass of wine and said, “To Ave.”

  But when the girl consoled herself the next day by wearing her cousin’s hot pants and halter top, her mother slapped her face twice and called her you little huzzy bitch right there in front of the refrigerator, the clock on the wall like a shocked face. So confusing, the contradictions.

  But who really remembers? Not the girl, who is now a young woman in faded overalls and a T-shirt. Memory for the young woman has become a surreal painting on the bottom of a sea. She doesn’t dive. She’s lived far from her parents for years, far enough away so that the painting is beautiful with detail that emerges in waking dreams: mother in pink summer dress handing out orange Popsicles to the whole neighborhood.

  Mother jogging in place on the front porch watching it snow, window open behind her so she can hear Tom Jones singing “What’s New Pussycat.”

  How she made tomato sauce. The very best.

  How she took Ave to the vet.

  How she worked in an office for Larry the Loser, told funny stories about him. “He thinks his ass is ice cream and we all want a lick.”

  Driving to a diner, late at night, after seeing Mission Impossible. “Get anything you want, sugar bird.”

  Polishing her red shoes.

  All the betrayal, rage, and shame, all the scrubbing of the skin, the slaps and darknesses, the reasons, all gone—what painting could hold it in place?

  So Julie, after several glasses of red wine, had called her mother up from Lyon, France, where she’d been living with a friend, tutoring children in English, and cleaning an old man’s flat.

  “Come see me! The fares are cheap! You deserve to see Europe! Come on, it’s great, and Aunt Zilsy is in Paris. We’ll travel. I’m on holiday!”

  “Give me one good reason why I would want to visit Aunt Zilsy,” she’d said, but Julie heard how her voice had inflated with hope, with a notion that she was lucky to have her daughter calling her to invite her to come to France. France! It was like the moon. But she would go. We’ll have some laughs.

  In the train station Julie had spotted her mother before her mother spotted her. Julie’s heart sank as the patchwork quilt disintegrated, replaced by the wavering threads of dread, by a knowledge of her mother’s vulnerability, masked as it was by the new strawberry-blond hairdo, the bright, flowery wool dress, the one hundred and eighty pounds, the pointytoed, pointy-heeled fake cowboy boots! Cowboy boots! Since when! And she has two enormous suitcases, and one tiny one, and she’s only staying for a week?

  Julie wants to throw a dark cape around her mother, and send her back home.

  Her mother doesn’t understand the part about how everyone hates Americans.

  Julie hides behind a post and watches her mother pull a compact mirror out of her expensive purse and apply her lipstick. Smack.

  She waits. She breathes, then marches toward her mother. She feels the station go silent, as all eyes turn to see the American reunion.

  The flowery redheaded mother envelopes her girl. Cries a little.

  “I can’t believe I’m here!”

  The mother, up close, is childlike. The green eyes so real, so full of what passes for love. The daughter can’t bear it.

  “Come on, Ma,” she says, and feels she’ll cry. “I’ll show you the apartment.”

  “Very clean!” the mother says. It’s her highest compliment. She says it no matter where they go—even in Paris, at the Louvre: what a clean museum!

  “Ma, did you think Europe was filthy or something?”

  “I sure did!”

  She does not remove her sunglasses.

  In Aunt Zilsy’s flat, they meet a Cambodian refugee who says his name is Bob. Aunt Zilsy (the family eccentric) has taken Bob in. Bob sort of cleans the place, and takes care of the cats, Gandhi and King. The cats slink up against the mother’s legs and Julie remembers suddenly the night her mother kicked the cat so long ago but look how the memory collapses inside of her—and now it’s all too vividly present, not just the kicked cat but childhood itself, that sickening conglomeration of that which can’t be named—and what she wants is to be alone with her confusion. But her mother and Zilsy and Bob are all saying what they should do is go to Vienna. “In saucy dress,” Bob says, pointing to Julie’s mother. Nobody looks at Bob and says “Saucy?” A mother-daughter trip to Vienna! Bob agrees, shaking his head, even though it’s likely he has no clear idea what they’re talking about. He smiles, he likes the redhead lady in the saucy dress, he likes her big laughter, he nods and laughs with her since let’s face it, life, at the moment, is good. Life, Bob knows, could get a whole lot worse. Looking at him, Julie decides to get over it. Just have fun!

  Not so easy. In Vienna they have a barren room—beautifully barren—Julie would see the beauty under other circumstances. Now it’s a prison. After a day of walking the streets of Vienna—fresh bread, good black coffee, little miniature houses displayed in a park for the coming Christmas season, a tiny bookstore where her mother had nearly shouted, “Excuse me! Sir? Sir? Excuse me! Do you have Frommer’s guide to Vienna?” even after Julie had pleaded with her not to. Not only did they have no Frommer’s guide, they did not speak English, and the man looked disdainfully at Julie’s mother, and Julie could read his mind, how he dismissed her mother, silly American tourist, and this called up the fierce fire of her loyalty. She sneered at the man. My mother’s suffered in ways you can’t fathom, miester, says the sneer. Get off your Viennese high horse, ya big snob! A blatant, long, childish sneer. “Let’s get out of this dump,” she said loudly. (She was going a little crazy.) Maybe she’d end up like Zilsy, who never threw anything away, who sent Buddhist birthday cards to prime ministers, kings, queens, presidents, popes.

  And once out of the bookstore, Julie had said to her mother, “I can’t believe you just asked for Frommer’s guide to Vienna.”

  Her mother laughed a little. They walked on. Silence. And then, “Julie, You’re so furious with me! It’s like—it’s like you can’t stand me!”

  “It’s nothing like that. I’m just tired or something.”

  The mother said nothing to this.

  They continued their walk around the dark city.

  Even without this rising tidal wave of childhood confronting Julie in the guise of her mother, it should be said that her tendency toward depression was keen, and always present. A wrestling match with depression, that’s what her life had been—nothing out of the ordinary for our time. She was the sort who smelled the Holocaust in the air all through Europe, especially on the trains. And now even more so in Vienna. She’d read all of Primo Levi. Elie Wiesel’s Night. Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life. Seen so many documentaries! Shoah, the whole thing, huddled alone with her boyfriend in that old college-town theater run by vets and poets. These knowledges choked her because after all she was only twenty-five, and who don’t they choke, really? Her mother, she knew, could not get near that history. Her mother had no desire to wrestle with horror, no ability. Or even to admit its existence. No choking for her. It would be years before Julie would understand her mother’s wisdom.

  They try to sleep in the double bed in the barren room.

  “I want to go home,” the mother says, finally.

  “I’m sorry this isn’t working.” I’m suffocating, I don’t know why, and I can’t explain a thing. You deserve better.

  “I’ll go back to Zilsy’s, and fly out of Paris. Your stepfather can send me more money if I need it.”

  “Okay.”

  “What the hell is going on? Do you mind letting me in a little?”

  “I don’t know. I’m—I don’t know.”

&nbs
p; “You don’t know.”

  “I just want to go to Venice.”

  The mother sits up. Peers at the wall. “Venice,” she says. “Jesus. You always wanted to go to Venice, and now you’re going. You do manage to get what you want, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You could be such a spoiled brat! Let’s face facts.”

  “Whatever you say.” Heart racing now.

  “I didn’t mean that! You weren’t a spoiled brat! I’m just scared! I don’t know you!”

  Julie is frozen in the bed, turned on her side, looking at the opposite wall.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

  Out of bed, her mother calls her stepfather. “I’m homesick,” she tells him. “I’m coming home tomorrow. This was a disaster.”

  On the train to Venice Julie is telling strangers her name is Vanessa. Vanessa deGroot is the name she’s chosen for herself. She’s borrowed it from her old kindergarten teacher, whom Julie had loved fiercely at age five. Now, Julie as Vanessa deGroot on a train is no whim; it’s not the fanciful play that so often takes place between strangers traveling. It’s a need, a requirement born of desperation. She cannot bear to be who she is. She feels she would gag if she had to say her real name aloud. She is at the end of her rope of self.

  Have you ever been there? It’s like you have a very high fever. You’re in a room, alone, and nobody knows it. You can hear children below you playing in the street. Nobody will come to take your temperature. The fever will go on rising. Underneath the fever is panic buried by sorrow. Is there an end to the rising? You don’t know. A part of you hopes to burn, burn. The bigger part wants to be saved. Wants someone, anyone, to come to the window and offer you the water of life again, in a small cup.

  It’s Venice now. Her dream city.

  Beautiful Venice, with its squares and its alleys, its tiny streets and all those waterways, and languages clashing in the air. But the loneliness in her is so threatening everyone she passes averts their eyes, shielding themselves from her awful contagion. Can’t somebody see past it? She thinks of Bob the Cambodian, steers herself away from self-pity.