by Emily Gould
“Sleeping in, I guess. She was really exhausted.” Matt grunted as he crossed one leg over the other, supine on the floor. “How are you feeling this morning, okay or …”
“I’m fine, I’m going to be fine. I want to see Mom.”
“She’ll be up soon.”
“Who’s going to make us breakfast, you?”
Matt sat up. “Is that a challenge? I’m going to make a great breakfast. Your mom isn’t the only one who can fry an egg around here.”
“You know that she is, though,” said Kayla.
“I’m going to wake her up,” Marie said. She walked down the hallway to her parents’ bedroom. When she and Kayla were little, they had waited as long as possible before rushing into her mom’s bed on weekend mornings, but had always delighted in waking her.
“Shh, Mommy’s sleeping,” Matt would say, but they’d known that Laura was just pretending to be asleep. She looked the same now as she had then, one arm flung over her head, eyes squinting shut in a way that genuine sleepers’ eyes never are.
“Mom, are you up? Can I talk to you?”
Laura stirred and pretended (Marie could tell) to wake up. She sat and tugged her T-shirt down over an exposed slice of her stomach. It occurred to Marie that her mom was beautiful; without makeup, with her dark hair a mess and circles under her eyes, she looked young and glamorously disheveled, like she’d been out late partying. She didn’t have any set expression on her face, and for a minute she looked somehow not mommish. Marie had the discomfiting feeling that she was seeing her mother as she really was, as people who were not her daughter saw her. She winced when Laura turned to look at her and something about her expression—a patient brow furrowing, a barely perceptible tightening at the corners of her mouth—transformed her back into a mom. And this was a relief to Marie, as well as something like a disappointment.
Laura reached out her arms and wordlessly invited Marie to come lie down next to her. They snuggled back into the pillows and looked out the window at the leafless trees. The sky was winter-white. They were inside and warm, for the moment. Marie snuggled up to her mother’s side, and Laura ran her hand through her daughter’s hair, stopping at a snarl and patiently unknotting.
“You should comb your hair more often.”
“Like I don’t know that.”
“You know, you’re right. Comb it whenever you feel like it,” said Laura, and instead of sarcasm Laura heard something else in her voice: acceptance, a peaceful kind of giving up. Maybe the crisis had shifted the rules around, and now Laura wasn’t going to bother micromanaging Marie anymore because it didn’t work and because it wasn’t worth it.
Or maybe Laura just had something else on her mind. On their way home from Daisy’s house she’d seen her mother receive a text that had made her face light up with a completely foreign variety of smile, and then just as quickly the smile had disappeared. When she’d asked about it, Laura had said that she was going to play a show soon and that Marie and Kayla should come if it wasn’t on a school night, she would have to check.
“I’m busy then,” Kayla said, even though she didn’t know the date yet. “I have an important book I’m going to be reading that night.”
Laura had shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Marie hadn’t said anything. She knew she would be there. She wanted to be there.
21
Laura called in sick to work, which she almost never did, so that she could prepare for her show. She didn’t actually have to be at the venue until 9:00 p.m., a time of day that usually found her at home, tidying and prepping for the next day of her family’s life or sitting on the couch with her bra off, halfheartedly trying to watch TV and check in on the day’s news. She needed to save her energy for that moment. Somehow Laura knew that if she made herself do any of her ordinary activities—teaching, commuting, taking either of the girls anywhere after school, shopping, cooking, making dinner—she would be depleting some essential resource that she needed full reserves of in order to perform. So she lay in bed until everyone was out the door in the morning, then got up, showered, and forced herself out the front door without even breakfast or coffee. If she had stayed a minute longer in the apartment she would have begun taking the clean dishes out of the dish drainer and replacing them in the cupboards and picking up any of the stray articles of clothing scattered around the living room and moving them to the laundry hamper, and then she’d be doing the laundry because why not, and the whole point of her day off would be defeated.
Instead, she bought herself breakfast and forced herself to open the notebook where she’d started writing the new lyrics to her old song. She sat in the bad-good diner on Seventh Avenue, fried egg congealing on her plate, and tried to summon the words to create the feeling that she wanted people who heard this song to experience. It was hard because it was a feeling that she herself hadn’t experienced in years. She had to remember Dylan in order to call up a flash of it, and then she had to edit out everything that tainted her memory of him. With her eyes closed she channeled their sweaty courtship in his fetid East Village apartment, remembering how it had felt to pine so hard for someone who was in the same room as you were—to want someone so badly it was like missing them while they were right there. There had been something animal and beyond logic about how she’d known, the first time they’d made eye contact, that she needed to fuck him. She would have run miles, committed crimes. The best pop songs were about that feeling, and the very best of them contained a word or a phrase or a tune that made the people who heard them feel it, too, in a homeopathic-level distillation that wouldn’t destroy their lives in the way that experiencing that feeling for real would.
Feelings really could destroy your life, she knew. Lust, love, whatever you wanted to call what she was trying to evoke—it wasn’t something she expected ever to feel again.
On the other hand, she was only thirty-seven years old. It was a fifty-degree late-winter day, just warm enough to make the ground and trees release a hit of wet spring. And Leo was just walking into the diner, coming over to her table. He was wearing a denim jacket over a ripped gray sweatshirt, and he smelled like he’d just woken up and come to meet her without showering or shaving. He smelled like sleeping in a warm bed. He was, very clearly, not a real adult; a real adult would have showered. He slid into the booth across from her.
He glanced over at the waitress. “Ready to go? I’m just going to get coffee first. I’m kind of hungover.”
“You can finish mine, she just poured me a refill,” Laura said, and tried to hand him the cup. But her hand collided with the side of his as he reached for it and the liquid sloshed out onto the saucer. Laura recoiled as though she’d been splashed, but she hadn’t. Instead, she’d been zapped; skin-to-skin contact with Leo traveled up her arm and erased her brain. She couldn’t prevent herself from looking into his face to see whether he’d also felt it. He met her gaze with frank, wide-open equanimity, a blank look that could have meant anything. Then he widened his eyes almost imperceptibly and gently bit his lower lip like “guilty.”
Spending the rest of the day alone with Leo and then the evening onstage with his band was a patently terrible idea. Part of Laura wanted to run out of the diner, back to her apartment, and spend the rest of the day reorganizing the pantry and creating lesson plans for the rest of the spring. But she’d already posted on Facebook about the show. She’d invited Callie. She’d even invited Marie. She didn’t want to disappoint her, though of course she inevitably would, in one way or another.
Leo’s gaze dropped to the notebook and she hastily pushed it into her bag.
“I’m going to see the song soon enough. Is it almost done?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“Then let’s go to the studio and start trying to get it down!”
They walked by her apartment on the way to the train. There was a moment when she could have peeled off, bolted up the stairs, not even explained. It would have been weird, but she could have done it. But inst
ead she kept walking, and in her head the song played on a loop, stuck there as if she’d heard it on the radio instead of made it up herself.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my stalwart writing group: Anya Yurchyshyn, Lukas Volger, Bennett Madison, and Lauren Waterman. Thank you to mom thread, Meaghan O’Connell and Jessica Stanley. This book would not exist without you.
Thank you, Julie Buntin and Heidi Julavits, for giving me the chance to become a writing teacher.
Thank you to Atsuko and Satoru and to Sari Botton, for your welcoming hospitality and writing space in Kingston.
I’m very grateful to the entire team at Avid Reader for taking a chance on Perfect Tunes and working so hard on this book’s behalf. I’m especially grateful to Jofie Ferrari-Adler and Julianna Haubner for their vision and guidance and patience during the editorial process.
Thank you to my family: Kate and Rob Gould, Ben Gould and Alex Willard, Alexander and Tatyana Gessen, and all of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws for supporting me and putting up with me.
Thank you to Ruth Curry, my best friend.
Thank you to Raphael (Raffi) and Ilya, for being the absolute best thing that has ever happened to me even if you do make it much harder to write books, and to Keith for making everything possible.
Thank you most of all to Donasia “Asia” Credle, for your friendship and for taking such good care of my children, and to Rebecca Winkel, for introducing me to Asia and for continually teaching me what it means to be a mother under any and all circumstances.
More from the Author
And the Heart Says Whatever
About the Author
EMILY GOULD is the author of the novels Friendship and Perfect Tunes and the essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She has written extensively for the New York Times, New York, The New Yorker, Bookforum, The Cut, Elle, Poetry, the London Review of Books, The Guardian, Slate, Jezebel, n + 1, and The Economist. She lives in New York City with her family.
www.emilygould.com
@EmilyGould
AvidReaderPress.com
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Emily-Gould
@avidreaderpress @avidreaderpress @avidreaderpress
ALSO BY EMILY GOULD
Friendship
And the Heart Says Whatever
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 978-1-5011-9749-9
ISBN 978-1-5011-9751-2 (ebook)