But all I had back then for medicine was the fortune of meeting you.
It was a mere four days after I walked out of Saint Jerome’s Home for Unwed Mothers, my would-be son adopted by the loving couple with a good home.
Nobody in my family came to meet me. They had their own problems. I was alone. I was still bleeding from the birth. I was afraid to ask anyone if I was bleeding to death. I half hoped that I was.
I was six days away from my seventeenth birthday.
I remember how you stood in the middle of that narrow city street offering me a cigarette you’d rolled yourself, saying, “It’s European.” Something about the way you said it, and the way you were dressed in that old black coat, caused the land to shift. I believed for a moment I’d been transported to Holland, the air suddenly strange and charged with Anne Frank, windmills, and children’s wooden shoes.
I love you, I wanted to say then; it’s true. That was the nature of my heart back then. But I had decorum. We were strangers, we were girls. I was quaking with the emptiness my baby left behind. But I so adored your face, your dark eyes, the way you flicked your hair back like a boy, your boots, your certainty, your invitation. “Hey. Let’s take a walk.”
I could only follow you, speechless.
We went through the yellow woods; I saw a child’s toy—a horse head on a stick, the kind kids gallop around on, abandoned in the leaves. Together we walked out to a field and climbed a water tower. I sat beside you looking down at the shimmery world.
“Looks better from a distance, huh?” you said. “Check out the wildflowers down there.”
(I can still hear you, all these years later. In case you ever have a moment where you think “nothing I’ve ever done in my life really matters,” you can think again; taking me up there mattered, mattered like breath.)
Up on the water tower, we looked down. Purple, yellow, last flowers of autumn. Red leaves flying like tiny carpets. You rolled a smoke. Smiled at me with eyes so kind they seemed more dog than human. Held my hand, just like we were six. I was filling up with you, Leonarda. It was as if you’d begun replacing the baby I’d handed over to the woman in the yellow scarf who had said, “Thank you so very much, you have no idea what this means!”
“I think I have a pretty good idea what it means,” I’d said, groggy from some pain medication they’d given me. The baby looked at me when I said that.
Up there on that water tower, on your purple transistor radio given to you by your mother when you were twelve, we heard the song “If You Don’t Know Me by Now” and you said, “This song is so great it makes me want to fly off this tower!” You stood up and flapped your arms. You howled with pleasure into the sky of autumn geese. I sat smiling, terrified. “Please sit down.”
You laughed at me. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
In a plaid thermos you had whiskey and we sipped and floated in the clouds and if you don’t know me by now, you will never ever ever know me, and I said, um, I, um, and you said, What? and I said, Nothing and you said, Come on, stranger, spit it out. But words failed me. I needed a song to explain. And I wasn’t a musician. If I’d been born a musician, I’d never have had the problems I’ve had. I believe that. God gave me the heart of a musician without the talent, maybe just to see what would happen. Satisfied, God?
Against the sky that day with you I just listened and felt the absence of the little boy who’d kicked me so hard, wanting out, wanting to meet me. He ran his eyes over my face as we said good-bye. I can sometimes touch my face and feel the trail his eyes left when he did his looking.
I always thought if I’d met you before I’d given that baby up, you’d have found us a way to keep him.
We’d have lived, the three of us, in that shack you found down in Matson Run.
We’d have taught him all the good songs, he’d have turned into the kind of DJ who understands that “Unsatisfied” by the Replacements is the real national anthem. Not just for the words but for the raw pain in that singer’s voice.
I do wonder if he’ll ever try to find me.
I do think if he did, I’d dress up like another kind of person altogether, and pretend I was a musicologist, so he didn’t have to feel his biology like a dark shadow.
So I play this tape and feel you’re still beside me, up on that tower where we began, and still I feel music can remake the world.
Didn’t Otis Redding come on next that day?
Listening now for a moment I feel six days away from seventeen again.
A tape will come your way sooner than you think. I’m getting a job in a market. I can do it. I can do many things with music like this on my head.
Until then, don’t judge me. My falling to pieces back then was not due to a bad attitude. Please believe in things like biochemistry, or maybe even the soul.
Will you visit me?
Don’t pity me because I have no husband with a sailboat, no membership to a country club. (I sort of can’t believe you do.) I hope he’s deeply kind.
I’m writing a book about America.
Don’t pity anyone. You just don’t know. Maybe they feed stray cats. Maybe feeding stray cats gives them more pleasure than you can imagine, not to mention the pleasure the cats get. Perhaps a child with an overworked mother eats tomato soup with them four times a week. This child, Bernadette Opal Greer, who is mildly retarded and gets teased on the bus, this child whose sloppy face will get her exactly nowhere, this child knocks on my door late at night three or four times a week, just so I can put on her favorite song, Marvin’s “Mercy Mercy Me.” She listens and watches the goats in the backyard, who in the darkness are curled up asleep. Upon her face is light that nobody could ever capture. See what I mean?
I will always love you.
Francine
Perennial
Books by Jane McCafferty:
THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC
Stories
ISBN 0-06-056453-9 (paperback)
In fourteen original stories, Jane McCafferty illuminates modern life, weaving her love of music throughout the lives and stories of her characters. From two middle-aged strangers who meet in an empty baseball stadium during a rainstorm, to a twenty-three-year-old man who brings his sixty-two-year-old wife home to meet his parents, to a young couple who live next door to an unemployed clown and his wife, these stories are at once unexpected and enthralling.
ONE HEART
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-109757-8 (paperback)
This inspiring debut novel from this multi-award-winning author recounts the lives of two sisters whose experiences often separate them, but whose love for one another is complicated and deepened over a lifetime.
“Told in direct, plain-spoken language, Jane McCafferty’s first novel gathers genuine emotional depth.” —New York Times Book Review
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Available wherever books are sold, or call 1-800-331-3761 to order.
About the Author
JANE MCCAFFERTY grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and received her B.A. from the University of Delaware and her M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of the novel One Heart. Her previous collection of stories, Director of the World, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and she’s had six stories listed in Best American Short Stories. She has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize and an NEA fellowship for her fiction. McCafferty lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.
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ALSO BY JANE MCCAFFERTY
One Heart
Director of the World & Other Stories
Copyright
THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC. Copyright © 2004 by Jane McCafferty. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive,
nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 0-06-056453-9
EPub Edition August 2013 ISBN 9780062325501
04 05 06 07 08 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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