Thank You for the Music

by Jane McCafferty

  “We could be arrested,” she said, handing me the orange, which seemed brilliantly orange under that green tent of ours. “I’ve been here before, and a security guard once gave me a warning.”

  “If I get arrested, I get arrested,” I said.

  She smiled and lowered her eyes, then looked up at me.

  “We’ll leave one at a time,” she said. “I’ll go first. You enjoy the orange.”

  She slipped out from under our covering. She left without another word, and I knew not to stop her. I stayed there with the rain pounding the plastic over my head for an hour or so, ate the orange on the Astroturf, and that was the world. My head hummed with a kind of light. I said the name of my son and the name of my wife. This became a kind of prayer. I can’t explain it.

  I finally got up and walked out of the stadium. I climbed the fence, and walked back to my car, and drove on, listening to the radio. And for a while after this, I allowed every word that every person said, every random face lost and alone in a crowd, to somehow penetrate my heart with stabs of light.

  EMBRACED

  IT WAS THE MONTH AILEEN’S PARENTS SEPARATED, when her mother said to her, “Just call me Roseen,” and her grandmother, who lived with them, said, “Then you might as well call me Belle.”

  They said it in the car on the way to Jersey. They said it out of the blue, as they rounded the top of the Delaware Memorial Bridge at dusk, the sky a wild flame. It was early summertime, many years ago, and Carole King on the radio sang “So Far Away.” It broke Aileen’s eleven-year-old heart every time she heard it.

  “We got our whole lives in front of us,” Roseen said at the wheel.

  “And this time we’ll avoid the slithery and banal,” said Belle.

  “The slithery and banal can kiss my ass,” Roseen joked back.

  Aileen wished her mother wouldn’t say “ass.”

  When they got to Wildwood, Aileen was relieved to soon find other Catholic girls like herself, who wanted to dress up as nuns and have May processions (even in July) or mock funerals, or play Saints—a game where one girl stood against the wall getting pebbles thrown at her by the other girls—or Communion, where they broke Nilla Wafers and served up the hosts to each other’s tongues, or Confession, where you got in a dark closet and told your fake sins, the more outrageous the better. These girls, Kathleen and Margaret and Deirdre and Marie, all claimed to have seen the Virgin come out of the sea one night. Aileen thought this was thrilling, and made the mistake of mentioning it to Roseen. “Honey, Mary wouldn’t be caught dead in Wildwood. She goes to places like Lourdes over in Europe if she goes anywhere.”

  By then Roseen and Belle were tired maids, cleaning out rented houses so the next group of tourists could move in. Belle would start to tell Aileen a story about what slobs people were, and Roseen would hush her, saying Aileen didn’t need to know the grit. Roseen, instead, told Aileen how one of the realtors tipped her fifty bucks for having good legs.

  After they cleaned, they’d come home for drinks. It was dusk, and the floor lamp was on in the corner of the cottage living room.

  “Care for some wine?” Roseen said to Aileen one night.

  “I’m only eleven!” Aileen protested.

  “In some of the best foreign countries children drink all the time.”

  Aileen crossed her arms. She was tired and sunburned. She’d run on the beach all day, eating peanut butter sandwiches filled with sand. “This isn’t a foreign country,” she said.

  Roseen poured Belle and herself some wine, and sighed. “If you don’t watch out, Aileen, you’ll end up like Ada the Fringer.”

  Aileen refused to ask who Ada the Fringer was. It would be several years before she discovered Ada was an example of the wallflower in what had been Roseen’s high school home-economics textbook. Ada the Fringer sat on the sidelines in drab clothing with bad posture, and never smiled.

  “You need to loosen up a little, that’s all,” Roseen persisted. Belle in a corner chair had her head back, her eyes closed.

  “Leave her be,” she said. “Get the poor kid some Kool-Aid.”

  “Yum yum,” Roseen said, but went and got Aileen a cup of Kool-Aid so she could join in on the evening toast.

  Their ritual: first they toasted to something abstract like world peace or the future; then they toasted a person. You had to be quick and shout out a name all at once so they clashed in the air.

  “To Betty Grable!”

  “To Jackie O!”

  “To Dred Scott!”

  And the summer would soften into late August, the darkness falling earlier, a slight chill in the air, the tourists growing scarce and finally the town emptying so the real people could get on with their lives.

  And they were real people now, when for years they’d been “shoe boxers,” coming down to the beach for a long day, using the public showers, or mere renters for a week in The Sands motel. Now they could say of the tourists, “I thought they’d never leave” and “They get louder and more demanding every year.”

  Aileen attended a new school, Immaculate Heart by the Sea, and got a job all her own, sweeping the theater on the boardwalk every Sunday afternoon, the beautiful deserted boardwalk that ran parallel to the ocean, ghostly and abandoned in the wavering winter light, amusement rides closed down or hauled away, shooting galleries boarded up, and only a few bars, some fry joints, the bingo hall, and the Apollo movie theater left open for locals. Aileen loved her job. She dusted maroon velvet seats, swept up the crushed popcorn, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, cups, and once a mortifying beige bra she had to hide from the manager, Shillone, who was a magician and considered his theater job a measly hobby. While Aileen swept in the dingy light, Shillone worked in the high-ceilinged lobby counting money on the glass counter, half watching a church service on a black-and-white TV so he could ridicule it.

  Aileen had already been to early mass at John the Divine’s, sitting near the votive candles with the old people hunched in dark coats. Belle and Roseen after a morning of coffee and cigarettes in pastel housecoats at the kitchen table would make it to noon mass (the noon mass priest was better looking) in heels and hats and flowery dresses. They’d leave before the closing hymn to beat the crowd. “We’re in Sin City,” they’d agree from behind the netted cages of their hats, the shadows of the nets delicate and dark on their faces.

  “Sister Ignatious said without the benediction it doesn’t count,” Aileen warned.

  “You tell Sister to go take a flying leap,” Roseen said and laughed.

  “Fine, end up in purgatory, see what I care!”

  “Oh Aileen, you don’t really believe all that crap, do you?”

  Once after work, Shillone showed Aileen his room above the theater. It was barren looking, the intense order of it sad, somehow. He had a cot in the corner with a green blanket tucked tightly over white sheets that were turned down perfectly with a stiff, ironed look. A black-and-white photo of Ava Gardner sat framed on his bureau and was signed “You’re a Touch of Venus, Baby!—Ava.”

  One large window looked out at the ocean.

  “So now you know how a real magician lives,” Shillone said. He watched her closely as she gazed around the room. Before she left he said, “Wait, you ain’t seen the closet!” He opened the door and a strong smell of cedar emerged as he pulled down the lightbulb chain. The deep closet was a little library, all magic books, he said. “And see that blue chest with the stars? My cape is resting in there. It can’t come out until the night of a show.”

  Aileen nodded. Shillone took his black top hat from a high shelf and put it on his head and looked down at her. “I learned everything the hard way,” he said. He walked over to the mirror and looked himself in the eye. Aileen watched him, and could see her own reflection, watching. “Anybody ever beat you? Any parent ever kick you in your sorry little stomach?”

  Aileen shook her head no. Why was he asking her this?

  “They can damage the solar plexus. You like my shoes?” h
e said.

  They were strange with pointed toes, the color of bitter chocolate. She did like them and told him so.

  “It’s a long road that ain’t got no turns,” he said.

  Aileen just watched him. He held his own gaze, and now his hat was tilted at an angle.

  “What do you got to say for yourself?” Shillone said, still looking at his own eyes.

  Aileen said, “Nothin’ much.” She could try to explain that she felt she’d fallen into a dream, but knew Shillone would not be prepared to listen.

  “If anyone big ever tries to beat you, you kick him right here,” Shillone said, his hand on his crotch. “You kick him as if your whole life depended on it, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Strive to remember there’s magic in the world.”

  “Okay.”

  “And all you got to do is learn a trade, move away, and never give nobody evil the time of day ever again.”

  He winked. He came over and shook her hand as if they were both a couple of businessmen.

  After Shillone’s Aileen ran down the beach; it was dark. She ran and thought of telling her father all about the magician and his advice and his cedar closet. She could see her father’s face, struggling to look interested.

  “Is that right?” he’d say. “You don’t say,” he’d say.

  She missed the smell of him, his bristly face at night giving her a kiss. She missed her brother, Blaise, who never returned her calls these days. She clenched her eyes shut against the stars and asked the Virgin Mary to please help her get up off the sand and find her way back to the cottage.

  “Now don’t ever go into detail about El Greco’s or Mack and them to your father,” Roseen said one day when they were taking a drive.

  Mack was Roseen’s boss at El Greco’s Beef by the Bay, where she now hostessed, and also her new romantic interest. Aileen had overheard her mother tell Belle that he was quite the Italian stallion.

  “I’m not telling Daddy about Mack or anything else. If Daddy saw you and Mack he might think you lost your lid.” Mack was the type to ask Aileen on the phone, “So how’s that delicious mother of yours?”

  “Mack’s all right. He’s up front.”

  “Might be up front but he wears too much perfume.”

  “Cologne, Aileen, cologne. And I don’t know why I even care what your father thinks,” Roseen said.

  Aileen stared out the window at the marshlands, urgent and green under a wet gray sky, reeds coming to life for spring, racing in the wind as if to leave the earth and fly.

  She remembered her brother’s only visit, how they walked together for hours along the highway, the marshes stretched out on either side of them all the way to the horizon, making them feel unreal, dreamlike, so they’d kept looking over at each other. Blaise with dark hair in his eyes and his voice cracking with change, transistor radio in his hand. James Taylor, “You’ve Got a Friend.” Her whole body had to brace itself against the sadness of this song whenever it came on. And really, why was it so sad anyway? What was so sad about telling someone they had a friend when they were down and troubled?

  Later she’d taken Blaise to meet Shillone, but he hadn’t understood how wonderful a place it was—hadn’t grasped how Shillone was like some kind of strange miracle man, tucked away like a secret she’d discovered. Blaise had simply jiggled his knee and stared out the window, ignoring Shillone while Aileen talked nervously about nothing she could recall, trying hard to fill any silence. It was the first time she ever felt like Roseen—the way Roseen would orchestrate people. But it didn’t work.

  “He’s weird,” Blaise said, as they walked home. “You shouldn’t go there.”

  “He’s my friend.”

  Blaise shrugged and fell silent.

  After he got on the bus to go back home that night, Aileen cried as the bus rolled down the road. Roseen gave her a stiff hug, patting her on the back quickly, a space between them built of fear becoming palpable, the source of it so old and complex it would never be mentioned, much less understood. And like anything with substantial roots, the space was growing. They walked down the narrow street in the dark.

  “Visiting,” Roseen said and sighed. “It’s always a strain.”

  “We should all just get back together,” Aileen said, though she knew the statement was ridiculous.

  “Yeah, I could marry your father and his new wife-to-be,” Roseen said. “Wouldn’t that be a cute threesome?”

  Aileen looked up at her mother’s face in the dark. “Well? Wouldn’t it?” Roseen said, smiling down at her.

  Aileen kept walking.

  “Don’t you even worry,” Roseen said.

  The night Aileen’s father decided he couldn’t stay, Roseen had taken a vase and thrown it down the length of the upstairs hall. It crashed and shattered in the dark. She and Blaise had frozen in their beds, their bodies listening. It was not like all the other fights—no extended screaming or crying. Instead a dead silence filled up the house like water. And Roseen said Bastard, her voice choked, muffled. And then for the first time ever they heard their father cry. “I’m sorry,” he said through his weeping. “I’m so sorry.”

  This was the memory that would rise in Aileen’s throat and make her double over in a fit of coughing.

  They were out for a drive one day. Going out for a ride in the car was a treat.

  “You all right?” Belle said to Roseen.

  “Just sittin’ on top of the world kickin’ the globe,” said Roseen at the wheel, chain-smoking in a horsewoman’s hat.

  “Okay, Aunt Rita, bless her soul,” said Belle, because that was what dead Aunt Rita had always said.

  “Somebody sing somethin’,” Roseen said, miles later, and Belle sang “Make the World Go Away.”

  “Not that,” Roseen said.

  Aileen sang “American Pie,” every word, and they clapped.

  Later Belle began making her lists, which was how she dealt with the past.

  “Old neighbors,” she’d announce out of the blue. “Sicilianos, Hydes, Tigues, Nibilitskis, Brennans, Glaziers, Keoughs. . . .”

  “Colors of rooms in Forty-seventh Street house after the war,” she’d say, eyes narrowing.

  “Blue, blue, white, peach. . . . Hey, Roseen, was the kitchen blue after the war or had your father painted it by then?”

  “Oh hell, don’t ask me!”

  Aileen didn’t know her grandfather, though he was sometimes mentioned in a list. He’d vanished with a woman Roseen and Belle referred to as Big Ass. Anytime Aileen tried to find out about her grandfather, Roseen and Belle did imitations, contorting their faces and deepening their voices.

  “It’s Friday night,” they’d say. “Let’s stay home and read The Encyclopedia of Common Disease!”

  “Feel my head? Am I warm? Do I look a little wan?”

  “How ’bout the night he started screaming about his pancreas?”

  “Big Ass didn’t know what she was in for.”

  They laughed, and Aileen in the backseat waited for the silence that followed when both of them would clear their throats and turn toward separate windows.

  One night Aileen overheard Roseen screaming at Belle, saying she didn’t understand a thing about love, just set a terrible example. “Maybe you wanna joke your way to the grave, but I think there’s more to it than this.”

  Belle’s face caved in. Then they were crying on opposite sides of the room until Roseen said, “Leave me alone!”

  Before Belle turned to leave, Aileen ran from that cracked door, exploded out of the cottage into the dark and all the way up to the ledge by the sea. It was black with creosote. She loved the smell. She breathed it in. Held her arms tight around her stomach.

  Prayed to Mary. A very short but intense little prayer:

  Help.

  Belle and Roseen decided to drive Aileen to the new suburb near Lititz, Pennsylvania, where her father, his new wife, and Blaise were living now.

  In a public bathroom off
the turnpike, Aileen watched Belle and Roseen redo their faces. Belle took cold cream and removed her eyebrows, then put them on again, arching them even higher so that Aileen wondered whether the brows were reflecting an inner state or helping to create one.

  “You’re overdoing it,” Roseen told her.

  “Last time I checked this was my face.”

  “Aileen, don’t lean against that wall,” Roseen said. “You don’t know who’s leaned there before you.”

  “You think the whole world’s contagious!”

  “You better believe it is.”

  “I sat down on the toilet seat without putting paper down first,” Aileen said.

  Roseen turned from the mirror, wide-eyed, stricken. “Tell me that’s a joke,” she said.

  “Okay, it’s a joke,” Aileen lied.

  Roseen turned back toward the mirror. “It damn well better be.”

  “It is.”

  “These damn lights make me look like I got one foot on the banana peel.”

  “You look fine,” Belle said. “Pipe down.”

  Roseen was dabbing streaks of red onto her cheeks. Then she took out what Aileen had heard her call her foundation and applied it down either side of her nose, telling Aileen for the third time that it was a trick to make a wide nose seem narrow, a long one shorter, and she should learn the trick since it looked like Aileen’s nose was already headed off in the wrong direction.

  “Ask me if I give a crap,” Aileen said, but she blushed and fought tears as she bent to tie her shoe.

  “If you don’t give a crap, nobody else will,” Roseen said. “Count on that.”

  Aileen, for the first time, had a hermit vision then. She’d live in the mountains, dark wild hair hanging to her feet, she’d sleep in a shack flanked by dogs. One friend, who was also a hermit, would visit once a week.

  “You wait, girl, in a year or so you’ll be damn glad you’ve got a mother who knows how to bring your best face forward.”