Love Is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

  The more she sewed, the easier it got for her to move and breathe, since she now had clothes she could move and breathe in, and feel totally hot while she did so. It was really intense to see how much control over her body she could have by taking control over her clothes. It took a lot of time to make them all, but she could sew for hours. While she worked she would lose all her nervous energy and glow like a conquering goddess.

  She took me to the fabric store whenever she could. She said she liked to get my opinion about what looked cool and what didn’t, but that was a total lie. She just liked having a boy to tote around the fabric store, and I knew it. I was always the only boy there, and she brandished me around the room like my grandmother used to whenever she took me to St. Andrew’s with her. Or, for that matter, the way I did when I had Renée with me in a mildewy used-record store. I was a trophy, and I liked it. While she would pore over the giant books of patterns, I would ask the stupidest questions I could think of in a big, loud voice so she could show off how interested her boy was in sewing.

  “Um, is that an empire waist?”

  “Yes, Rob. Very good. That’s an empire waist.”

  “I see. Why do they call it an empire waist?”

  “It was invented during the Napoleonic empire.” (I have no idea if this is true.)

  “But Renée, explain this to me. Why is the waistline so high? Is that like a fitted boudoir?”

  “I believe you mean a fitted bodice.”

  And so on. I would ask, she would explain. Boring. But I loved it and I knew she did, too, and I loved to pump up her vanity. Renée’s vanity was a beautiful thing. I loved being her prop at the fabric store. In time, I started to love hanging around the store and exploring all the weird stuff they had there. To my fashion-illiterate mind, it was another planet. The signs they had up for fabric were a dizzying barrage of perfect names for new wave bands: Silk Shantung! Corduroy Remnants! Dalmatian-Print Fun Fur! That last one became the title of a mix tape. It also became a pair of pants.

  Renée’s sewing was a way for her to follow the changes in her body. She felt her hips growing more and more Appalachian, marking her as one of her people. She was starting to look like pictures of her late, beloved Mamaw back in West Virginia; sometimes this would make her uncles misty-eyed. Uncle Troy once gave her a hug and almost cried because the hug reminded him of Mamaw’s body. Goldie Hughart Crist died when Renée was sixteen, but Renée felt like she was getting to know her grandmother better than ever now. There was a lot of history in the hips, and Renée was learning her history. With that sewing machine, she was making history of her own.

  Around that time we went to Dublin (the one in Ireland, not the one in Pulaski County) to visit cousins of mine. As we walked down the street, she said, “You know, I’m starting to understand this whole Irish boy/southern girl thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I have the only ass on this entire street. Look around.”

  “I’ve seen your ass before.”

  “Look at the men. The men are walking into walls.”

  “That’s true. I thought they were staring at me.”

  “I have the only pair of hips as far as the eye can see. They have never seen a girl before. Holy shit!”

  “I thought it was my new Suede T-shirt.”

  “None of these women have any ass at all. This is fucking awesome.”

  “It’s a really cool Suede T-shirt.”

  “That last guy turned around three times.”

  And so on. It wasn’t my Suede T-shirt, believe me.

  The sewing built up her strength, that was for sure. She started writing down reminders to herself on an index card and kept it in her pocket all the time. The first line was, “Lots of people like me.” She crossed out “Lots of” and wrote “Enough.”

  I’m very expressive.

  I deserve to feel pretty.

  I kissed the Blarney Stone.

  I am strong. I am brave.

  I’m a good friend. I am a good sister. I’m a good wife. I am a good in-law. I’m a good daughter. I am a good niece. I’m a good beagle mother. I am a good granddaughter.

  I work hard for it, honey.

  I’m Superfly TNT Motherfucker.

  I’m pilot of the airwaves.

  I’m a better third baseman than Brooks Robinson.

  I B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E.

  I have exceptionally beautiful feet, eyes, ears, hips, hair, teeth, breasts, and shoulders. And fingernails. In a different pen, she added, And eyelashes and eyebrows, plus in yet another pen, And nose. And chin.

  I never learned any sewing from Renée at all. That was totally her thing. But the intensity of her presence while she bent over the machine and made it hum—that stayed with me. So did all the pattern lingo and fabric jargon. Just more of that endless, useless knowledge you absorb when you’re in a relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship. When the relationship’s gone, you’re stuck knowing all this garbage. A couple of years after Renée died, I was in a room full of friends watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. Everybody commented on those funny dresses Jennifer Ehle wears. “Mmmm, yes, the empire waist,” I said. “Authentic to the period, but a daring choice, since it usually looks silly on somebody who isn’t very tall. But she wears it well. Nicole Kidman wore one to the Oscars in 1996.” All the heads in the room slowly turned and stared at me. I had no idea how any of this was stuck in my head. My friends waited in silence for some kind of explanation. Nobody was more curious than I was.

  how i got that look

  AUGUST 1994

  The spring of 1994 was marked by two key events in rock history: the death of Kurt Cobain and the birth of Zima. In case you don’t remember, and if you drank any Zima you surely don’t, it was a cheap, fizzy, clear, strong, thoroughly rancid malt liquor marketed as a hipster “alternative” beer with a shiny silver and black label that glowed in the dark. Let me reiterate—it was cheap. One night, Renée started rummaging through the kitchen for mixers. She found a sampler box of miniature liqueur bottles—an untouched Secret Santa gift from a day job she’d had a couple years back—gathering dust on our shelves and started trying out recipes to cut the toxic kick of Zima. Cointreau was too bland. Frangelico was too nutty. But then, one night, in a flash of inspiration that rivals the creative energy of Chuck Berry the night he decided to mix country with the blues, Renée poured in some sickly sweet purple syrup called Chambord. With a little Chambord, a longneck of Zima became a handful of flaming violet glass, a bottle that looked like it could be set on fire and thrown at a bus or drunk with equally destructive effects. One Zima-and-Chambord would knock you on your ass; two would knock you on somebody else’s ass. It was the perfect rock cocktail.

  It became our drink of choice for a long, lazy, rambling fever dream of a summer, when Kurt was dead but the promise of rock was raging on. The radio was playing hits by Hole and Green Day and Weezer and Sugar and Veruca Salt. I would pick Renée up after work at the Fashion Square Mall, then we would go home and set up our wobbly little hibachi in the backyard, grill some hot dogs, turn up the music, invite some friends over, and start mixing the Zima-and-Chambord rocket capsules. To this day, I still see that precise shade of purple sometimes—on some jogger’s track suit, or on some kid’s Mylar birthday balloon—and it always triggers flashbacks that involve a throbbing headache and the cowbell solo in the Offspring’s “Come Out and Play (Keep ’em Separated).”

  Renée made “How I Got That Look” for those nights in the backyard. The title came from a monthly feature in one of her favorite glossy fashion mags, a feature that gave away the secrets of the supermodels. Side One was titled “Pink Chocolate Lipstick.” Side Two was titled “Laminates and Molding Mud.” Her big project that summer was her guitar. With a couple of her indie rock girlfriends, Katherine and Cindy, she started a band called Flirtation Device. Like all girl bands, they spent all their time thinking up cool band names and c
ool song titles and cool ideas for matching outfits, with only occasional efforts to actually play songs. When Cindy and Katherine had their big falling out over a b-o-y (what else), the band was history—but the songs on this tape still sound great, especially with a Zima-and-Chambord or two for audio enhancement.

  Our town finally got an indie-rock club that summer. Tokyo Rose, the local sushi bar, started hosting shows in the basement. It was in a strip mall on 250 East, between the University Laundromat and the Pizza Hut. Our friend Darius talked the owner, Atsushi, into letting him book bands. The basement wasn’t big, but it was friendly, with blue paint on the walls and loveseats you could fall asleep on if the band sucked. On a good night, Atsushi would close the sushi bar, come down with his acoustic guitar, and play his original Japanese ballads. He also sang some tunes in English, like “I Hate Charlottesville,” which always ended up being a big sing-along. At the end of the evening, he would send everybody home with Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” sung in a falsetto that was wasabi on our hearts.

  During this time, Renée quit the makeup counter to spend more time writing about music, and got another job at our favorite record store, Plan 9. Now that she didn’t have to wear a uniform to work, every day was a fashion show. She was inspired to sew more than ever. She sewed her first zippers that summer, although she didn’t really fully get the hang of them for a few months. She would park her Zima-and-Chambord on the window sill and concentrate on her patterns for hours at a time. She went to L.A. to do the Spin cover story on the band L7 and came back having learned all their makeup tips. Renée also took guitar lessons from a brunette named Mark. He was cute; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been invited over to teach her guitar, since he was into terrible jam-bands. He played bass in a Phish cover band called David Bowie. But he was cute. She would make a pizza, he would teach her Beatles songs, and then he would ask her for girl advice. Renée coached him until he snagged a girlfriend, whereupon he couldn’t come over anymore, since his girlfriend didn’t approve of him hanging with a married woman.

  The big crisis that summer came when the power went out for two weeks. We came back from a road trip and found the upstairs neighbors had skipped out on the Virginia Power bill. The phone was dead and most of the food in the fridge was spoiled. We had no hot water. We didn’t have the cash to settle the bill and turn the lights back on, and we didn’t know when we would have the cash. There was no way I could have seen it coming, yet the fact that I couldn’t protect Renée from it drove me crazy. How could something like this just happen? Why couldn’t I do anything about it? I had felt helpless many times, as an adult even, but feeling helpless as a husband was different from anything I’d ever felt in my life. This was just a temporary snag, but it made me realize how many more of these there were going to be. I was going to have to get used to feeling helpless if I was going to remain a husband. And being a husband made me helpless, because I had somebody to protect (somebody a little high-strung, who had a tough time emotionally with things like the lights going out indefinitely). Man, I thought it was tough being broke when I was single, but being broke as a husband is not even in the same category.

  For two weeks, I lay awake at night and said Hail Marys over and over to stop my heart from beating too fast. I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to keep somebody safe, of not being able to protect somebody from all the bad stuff you want to protect them from. Knowing they have more tears in them than you will be able to keep them from crying. I realized that Renée had seen me fail, and that she was the person I was going to be failing in front of for the rest of my life. It was just a little failure, but it promised bigger failures to come. Additional ones, anyway. But that’s who your wife is, the person you fail in front of. Love is so confusing; there’s no peace of mind.

  Every morning at that time, we went to Bodo’s Bagels and split a three-cheese sesame. They always played a mix tape of Rolling Stones tunes there, and I found it immensely comforting. The first song was “Sittin’ on a Fence,” an acoustic ballad with Mick and Keith singing about how stupid people are for falling in love and settling down. I was amazed at how soothing their voices were, two brash and pretty young mod boys, harmonizing so confidently about how people who stay together are suckers, and laughing at them. And they’re right—what could be scarier, stupider, than staying together? How else could you totally guarantee that you would always have reasons to be terrified? “Sittin’ on a Fence,” that was the life for Mick and Keith. (The crazy thing is, Mick and Keith are total hypocrites—they’ve been a married couple longer than my parents. If Keith really believed in “Sittin’ on a Fence,” he’d be Jeff Beck, who never gets trapped in a situation he doesn’t control, and hasn’t made a decent record since he quit the Yardbirds.)

  I was still hanging on to grad school, but things were looking bad. The academic job market had crashed, leaving my whole generation stranded. I had failed in my duty to get Renée out of Charlottesville. She’d made a mistake trusting me. I snagged a job interview at the University of Southern Mississippi: adjunct, four comp sections a semester, for less money than we were making writing record reviews, in the same kind of college town we lived in now, except one where we didn’t know a soul. It was a dismal gig, the academic equivalent of joining Team Hardee’s, but it was our best shot. I didn’t get the job and I got depressed.

  I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Refusal is not the act of a friend,” she said. “You must let me draw the water from the well.”

  “Don’t Barzini me.”

  “You didn’t want that job anyway. I’d follow you anywhere, sweetie, but I wasn’t dreaming about Hattiesburg, Mississippi. You don’t have to promise me anything.”

  “We’ll get out of this town someday.”

  “We like it here. We have each other.”

  “Someday.”

  “I grew up on country radio. You know I’m a sucker for that ‘we got no money but we got love’ crap.”

  “Someday,” I said.

  “Easy,” she said. “We do not have to give assurances as if we were lawyers.”

  Kurt Cobain loomed over everything that summer. It’s hard to explain, so let me rewind to the day his body was found. April 8 was the Friday of the weekend that the English department grad students were hosting a conference of our very own, titled “Cross/Roads and (Re) Mappings” or something like that, in true Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” style. Our friends Ivan and Sarah were coming down from Brown to read a paper about Zizek. Meanwhile, we watched the coverage of Cobain’s suicide on MTV. They were showing the Unplugged special over and over.

  During that first week of April, spirits were high and hormones were in full rage mode. Charlottesville had a particularly huge load of pollen that spring, and I would walk home every day from teaching, kicking clumps of pollen around. The pollen was lush and green, so green it made me a little sick to breathe it in. Everybody was looking forward to having fun that weekend. The weird thing is, we did have fun. Everybody went to parties, brought their friends from out of town, drank a lot, gossiped about Kurt. Nobody was surprised, so nobody was depressed. People cracked jokes, even those of us who loved him. We improvised new lyrics to Nick Lowe’s death ditty “Marie Provost” (“He was our Brando / He hung out with Evan Dando,” etc.). Renée bummed cigarettes and poured Chambord into people’s Zima bottles. News was exchanged jovially. Did you hear that the guy who found the body called the radio station before he called the cops? Did you hear he left a note? Renée and our friend Gina sang “Kurt Cobain” to the tune of “You’re So Vain.” For people who were into music, which meant almost everybody hanging around all weekend, the Kurt Cobain who finally kicked it was the celebrity, as opposed to the guy who had written all his songs and sung them—the musician. The celebrity was dead. The guy who sang on the Unplugged special was a little harder to bury.

  This had to be the least surprising rock deat
h ever. Kurt had been threatening suicide for so long that it amounted to playing a game of Clue with his fans. In Rome, with the pills? No, in Seattle, with the shotgun. Saturday Night Live was already doing “Kurt Cobain almost reached nirvana this week” jokes. He’d posed for more photos with guns than the paper had room to reprint. The Internet barely existed, as far as I was concerned, but it was already raging with a constant stream of Kurt death rumors. When the news arrived on Friday, it was like, Okay, whew, that’s the last time we get this news.

  Many of our friends reported similar reactions—one of my friends, who knew Kurt, was horrified to hear everybody making jokes within minutes of the body being found (“dead men do wear plaid”). Maybe people were relieved, or maybe they were venting their anger at how he’d abandoned them. All I know is how weird it seemed that Kurt provided the theme for such an intense weekend, one I knew I would always remember and always have. The pollen made the air smell sweet. Everybody looked good. The visitors from up north hadn’t had a taste of the warm weather yet. My Boston buddies Ivan and Sarah had never met my friends in Charlottesville, and I got to show them off. The whole summer was going to be great like this, exactly like this. On Sunday, exhausted yet nowhere near hungover, even after sleeping on the kitchen floor all night, the four of us couldn’t find any more Kurt on TV, so we watched The Beast-master.

  The celebrity death was a temporary rush of excitement. But the dead musician didn’t go away, at least not for me. My favorite Nirvana song was “Heart-Shaped Box.” I first heard it in our old Chrysler, stopped at the red light between Cherry Avenue and the train tracks, on my way to pick Renée up from work, just as the sun was setting. As soon as I picked her up, I started trying to describe the song I’d just heard, and what it sounded like, and then after I gave up in frustration, we looked at each other and drove straight to the record store at the Seminole Shopping Center. (Note: the “record store” was a popular retail strategy in the 1990s, a building where people would “go” to “buy” “music.”) We played In Utero all night long. Renée kept arguing that the melody of “Heart-Shaped Box” came straight from Blondie, and singing, “Hey, wait, I’m Francis Bean Cobain.”