Thank You for the Music

by Jane McCafferty

  “Hi, Odessa,” Marianne greeted him.

  “When will we get our wagon rides?” Ben called over.

  “You have to stand in line, precious. I got a friend outside.”

  “So what’ll it be today?” Marianne said.

  “Four cheese on rolls and two bottles of apricot soda with a brownie.”

  Marianne smiled at him. “You’re always so sure about what you want.”

  “You love me,” Odessa said.

  “Probably,” Marianne agreed.

  When the wagon rumbled out the door to the sidewalk, four or five regular customers came and went, all of them doctors and nurses infected by the brilliant spring day, a day when even in the littered city the blue air seemed to quiver with the energy of birds.

  A couple of college students came in, draped around each other, obviously rich kids from Penn looking like catalogue people. The King of Fortieth Street came in singing “Solid as a Rock,” the ironic theme song for a smart man who had lost his mind. He had white hair and blue eyes that were angry, amused, and proud all at once. He sang his song today looking straight at Marianne.

  She thought his voice with its odd quaver was almost beautiful. She liked that he was strong enough to be in on the joke of his own insanity; that’s what his eyes told her. But he was not one of her favorite customers. He singled her out with his furtive looks. He sensed, perhaps, that she instinctively understood his rage, understood that he hated himself for his wild displays even as he smiled. “You and me, girl, we’re special,” he said once.

  “Not me.”

  “I can see you better than you see yourself.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Am I hittin’ too close to home?”

  Her face would redden, and he’d smirk and wink, almost cruel. “Quit your job and go read Herman Wouk!” he said today, then saluted her and turned to leave.

  “Who’s Herman Wouk?” Marianne mumbled to the air. A nurse buying flowers shrugged and laughed.

  The rush was over. Ben came up behind Marianne and pressed his lips to her neck. It sent a chill throughout her body, and for a split second she saw the face of the man who’d broken her heart. “Don’t resist remembering,” the therapist had told her. “The memory will get scarier. The mind’s just a rebel. Tell it what to do and it wins every time. Just let the memory come, and go.”

  Marianne turned to Ben, and touched her hand to the side of his face.

  “Let’s go in the back,” he said. “I’ll lock up the store for ten minutes. We’ll leave the sign on the door.”

  She hung the sign, she locked the door, she led the way, pulling him by the hand into the back room. It was small and dark and filled with boxes, enough of them already collapsed and folded up to make a bed.

  They dressed, combed each other’s sweaty hair, and walked out of the dark and into the store. The air held sharp little points of colored light; their legs were weak beneath them. They wanted to go back to the makeshift bed. But already the customers waited on the other side of the glass door.

  The afternoon sun was deeper now, streaking across the store, orange on the far wall where the vitamins were shelved. This batch of customers, more leisurely than the lunch crowd, trickled into the store, so that when the couple with the child walked in, Marianne was ringing up a young man’s bag of coffee beans and chatting with him about a pizza place. She saw the child and tried not to stare, tried to keep talking. The child was frail and bald with illness, a girl in a long-sleeved pink sweatshirt with a rabbit decal, her legs spindly under a light blue skirt that seemed made from the sky. The child glanced over at Marianne once, her face devoid of expression. The parents beside her embodied a depth of exhaustion that changed the atmosphere of the day, dark circles, taut mouths, an air of fatigue like a heavy curtain surrounding them. Marianne saw the man put his hand on his child’s bare head like a firm cap for a moment.

  She’d made a mistake; the customer was telling her he’d been overcharged.

  “Sorry,” she said, clearing her throat to call Ben over, and hardly knowing why. She rang the order again. Again she overcharged him. Her face reddened as she laughed, ringing it up a third time while the child in the blue skirt walked in front of the glass doors of the refrigerator, her reflection passing before the colored bottles of juice. The father looked suddenly at Marianne, as if he thought he knew her. She handed the patient customer his bag. She lowered her eyes. She had seen all the father’s human will exposed, his raw desire just to make it through the day.

  “I want a Coke,” the child said, pointing.

  The father walked over and stood beside her. “No Coke, honey.”

  “I want Coke.” Her voice was steady and clear as water over stones. Her voice was pure desire.

  “You can pick out any of the juices. No Coke.”

  Now the mother walked over to them.

  “I don’t want juice.”

  “Look, hon, they even have pineapple. You love that.”

  “I want Coke,” the child stated again, her voice even clearer, the insistence in it somehow beautiful. Why didn’t they cover her head? Marianne remembered a favorite doll she’d had when she was eight, whose hair she’d chopped off, whose cloth chest had torn. Her parents hadn’t had much money, but they’d taken her to a place called the Doll Hospital one autumn night.

  “I really, really, really, really, really want Coke,” the girl said, and Marianne felt the words lodged in her own throat. The girl repeated this, her voice rising in the store, other customers looking over at her now. The father crouched down before the child and put his hands steadily on her arms. A customer asked Marianne, “How late are you open?”

  “How late are we open, how late are we open,” Marianne said. “Um, six.”

  More customers lined up. She could hear the rising desperation of the father’s voice. Now her fingers were blunt, useless on the register. “Ben?” she called out. “Can you take over the register?” The father said, “Orange, tomato, grape, apple, kiwi, pineapple, apricot. That’s a lot of nice choices.”

  “Coke!” the girl shouted. She turned around in a circle. She looked around at the customers. “I want Coke!” she told them. And then again, louder, her voice trembling but still strong.

  “Hey now, come on now, honey.” The mother tried to pick her up in her arms.

  Now she shouted. “I want Coke!” Any insularity the family had was ripped away. The girl had torn it, the girl was tired of her parents’ protection and assurances. The child wanted them to know she knew they were lying, and she wanted her life, she wanted her life and was calling it Coke.

  The father picked her up; she fought him. He carried her out of the store, his eyes closed, his wife following with her chin held high. The child’s desire to live was so thick in the store that Marianne rushed into the back room to get away from it. She was assaulted by the lingering scent of their love-making. She left that darkness and walked out onto the sidewalk. She could see the girl a half block away in the arms of her father, her head down now.

  Back in the store they worked in silence. Marianne filled the bins of coffee for the next day. Her hands, she noticed, trembled. She could not stop imagining the girl and her parents walking past the campus toward the hospital for more tests, the tulips and bare skin of students, the laughter and daffodils and blossoming brightness of trees like claws tearing at them, the blue air stinging the child’s lungs as she gulped down the day.

  She was grateful to Ben for this silence. She looked over at him and smiled. He smiled back.

  He cleaned the glass of the front door, and when it neared six o’clock the homeless men and women were gathering, and Ben said, “I’ll take the stuff out.”

  “Great.”

  She watched them gather around him, patient as he handed out the sandwiches. She remembered the flowers and bread and chocolate and went to the door herself, setting it all outside for the taking. They scrambled forward, one woman saying God bless you honey God
bless you honey over and over again. Every baguette, every candy bar, every last spring flower was gone.

  Slowly they walked home together. Ben held her hand. Walnut Street was filled with kids in blaring rap. They walked to Forty-fourth and Sansom, past Wanda Jackson’s porch, where little girls jumped rope and a blind man preached. They crossed the street and climbed the steps to Ben’s place.

  That night in Ben’s room, with its light-up globe and forty-cent chairs and its mattress by the window, after canned Hmong food from the market beneath them, they held each other, voices and music below them in the street rising as if in a dream they shared together. Each time Marianne closed her eyes she saw the girl who wanted to live, and remembered herself, not wanting to live, all those months after the man who’d been like a father had told her, “It’s time for both of us to move on.”

  For him she had come close to dying.

  She closed her eyes and saw her own father’s face.

  This child with the bald head would live now forever in her heart’s new center like a cold light.

  “Tell me,” Ben said, his voice tender, full of hesitation. “If you want.”

  She couldn’t move. But words were frantic in her throat, rising slowly to enter the air, to circle around the intransmutable girl, to continue the story of who she was, who she might be.

  ELIZABETH TINES

  ELIZABETH TINES HAD OWNED HER HOUSE for almost twenty years now—since 1968—having inherited it from an eccentric and semifamous artist uncle she’d never known existed. She had not been aware that any blood relation of hers had been rich, much less famous, and the discovery had made her see herself differently, as if being related to him gave her potential, somehow, or would have given her potential had she known about him when she was a child living for years on canned goods, shadowed by a towering Methodist church in two rooms with her parents.

  She slept now in the room where the uncle had slept, and still a painting of a woman in a red rowboat hung in a gold frame near the window on the wall—the uncle’s artwork. When first she’d moved in at age forty, she had looked at the picture as a shrine, her gratitude seeming to sink into the painted water, which was endlessly deep, the appropriate container for emotion whose power transformed that part of her that had come always to expect the worst. To her the modest house, divided into upstairs and downstairs apartments, was stunning; the windows framed the hills of a city she suddenly loved, and when the fog rolled in it seemed like heavenly blankets, whereas before she had hated its ghostly persistence in softening the harsh edges of faces and battered buildings, edges that always returned when the fog retreated.

  Slowly she had grown accustomed to being the owner of the blue house on the wide, flowery street, accustomed to being a landlady to people downstairs who never seemed appreciative enough of the beauty they were renting. Mostly they were young people who were products of money. They took their fashionable clothes and clear complexions and high expectations of the future for granted, and this gave them an ease that tempered their youthful energy. At their age she’d been wild to escape, hungry and watchful of everything like a skinny animal. And yet all that watching— where had it landed her?

  Her marriage at seventeen to a handsome thirty-year-old man obsessed with betting on horses had lasted two years, and then, pregnant and on her own, she had worked for Mad Maids, Inc., cleaning houses with two older women named Connie and Bonnie who suggested she go by the nickname Jonny just for the sake of the business. So she had, she had become a Mad Maid and taken a boy’s name and each day life was good because Connie and Bonnie said it was good, and they all met in their uniforms every morning at dawn in a little café that looked out over the Pacific, where Jonny would sit on the round stool between the older women at the counter trying to dream up a future she could believe in. Despite the baby growing inside her, she’d had so many visions then— herself as pediatrician, herself as modern dancer, stewardess, so she could travel—she entertained all possibilities.

  “You’re smart, girl,” Bonnie would say, whenever she tried to speak of the future. “You can do anything you want, can’t she, Connie.”

  It was because she liked words; Connie and Bonnie had never heard words like “ludicrous” and “countenance” and “rendering.”

  “Hell, you could be a lady rocket scientist one day for all we know.”

  But her own heart had been unable to hold on to the roots of her dreams; they dangled in space, then vanished. Moments came when she was suddenly overcome by fear so powerful she wanted to cry out, and so laughed too loudly, her face reddening when the false voice echoed in her head. She would swing violently into a region of self-contempt, seared by these feelings that seemed to her like revelations. “Yeah, I’m about as smart as a bowling ball without any holes,” she’d say. “And as lucky as the alley it’s rollin’ down.”

  Years passed. Elizabeth worked, tended to her child, a wiry boy named Curtis, and slept. She did other things too— went to movies, bars, read magazines, fell in and out of love with men who were versions of her long-ago husband— obsessed men, self-involved men, addicted men whose love for her ran out after five or six months. For years she drank coffee with a woman who lived across the street, and the friendship gave her real pleasure, but she worked long hours, and her life was essentially a routine she endured. “Girl, you’re one of us,” Connie and Bonnie started to say to her, and there came a day when she stopped hearing the irony and embraced it as a compliment. She began to feel she belonged with the women, that it was her lot in life. She had cut herself off from her parents, and even when her son began to look like her father, she had little desire to see them again.

  And now Elizabeth was sixty, still called Jonny, though Connie and Bonnie were both dead. She worked alone, with a concentration that made cleaning a kind of meditation. The quiet days went fast. She did not mind the work because she knew she could quit, knew she could survive on the money she made as a landlady, if necessary. Her son had grown up and married a woman from Pennsylvania; they lived there, childless, content to be so. He was a decent man, warmhearted, but so busy on his little farm, so full of his feeling for the land he tended, visits were few and far between. He would call, expecting her to make him laugh with some story from her life, some little observation she had made. “The woman whose house I’m cleaning now has twin ferrets,” she’d say. “How am I supposed to clean with a couple of asshole ferrets on my heels?” she’d add, if the ferrets themselves weren’t amusing enough.

  She broke her ankle one day walking down Clayton Street after working in a pink Victorian. It hurt badly; she limped home in her white dress and white shoes, sweating with pain, and Bennet, one of the downstairs tenants, was outside on the front stoop with a glass of orange juice. He got up and helped her, though he himself, she knew, was thin because he was sick. She had known that the day he’d shown up to rent from her. His face had struck her immediately with what looked like willed happiness, but a dry rope of fear had risen in her throat when she considered his illness; they were always finding out new ways you could catch it, weren’t they? And would he be bringing his friends around? But she had surprised herself by speaking through that fear and reaching another part of herself, not out of any allegiance to her own sense of morality, but as an instinctive response to the young man, whose silent presence was so oddly kind.

  “The place is yours,” she’d told him that day, after showing him the rooms. And he had commented on their beauty and order as few tenants did. “You really keep this place nice,” Bennet said. “Honey, I was born to keep places nice,” she told him, and saw his eyes darken with amused interest.

  And now, her ankle throbbing as he helped her up the steps and into her living room, she was acutely aware of the strength in his thin shoulder, and aware of herself as a woman who hadn’t touched another human being in years. How did that happen? she wanted to ask someone in that moment. How did it happen that a woman like me went for years untouched?

/>   In his old blue Chevy he took her to a doctor an hour later, waited while her lower leg and foot were wrapped in a cast, and on the ride back home suggested she lay her head back and rest. But she felt she couldn’t; she felt she ought to repay him somehow, or at least aim to entertain him a bit.

  “So you like my perfume? It’s called Lysol.”

  “Sexy,” he said. “You like your job?”

  “Do I like being an interior sanitation engineer? Hell yes, wouldn’t you?”

  He laughed. “What’s the best thing about your job?”

  “Sometimes I get the windows so clean I make them cry,” she said. “That’s one helluva moment for me.”

  He laughed again.

  “You’re all right,” she told him, and a silence settled into the car.

  As he drove for a moment she turned to watch the side of his face, and saw a naked expression in his eyes that made her think of a child. She turned back to the road, remembering his touch as he helped her up the path. She wanted to reach over and touch his elegant hand on the wheel, and felt herself fill up with wonder in the face of this small, odd desire.

  Months later they sat in his kitchen, Bennet with a vivid green scarf around his head, both of them in thick sweaters. Outside late autumn rain fell through fog. A candle was lit on the round table. They drank tea from a blue pot with the moon painted on the side of it—a gift from Bennet’s sister Anne, who came by once a day, serious-faced in her bright skirts and sandals. Elizabeth had cleaned his apartment all morning, and now the tile floor and surfaces of the wooden counters gleamed.