“Hello, Thomas. It’s Maggie Barlow remember me? Aka Barbra Streisand?” I announce into his answering machine. “Anyway, I have a club date in a few weeks and I was wondering if you’d be available to play it. I have all the charts. So it would be a few rehearsals and then two dates the end of next month. The twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth. Give me a call. Thanks.”
I open my cupboard. The cupboard. The cupboard that stands against the wall in my living room and contains all the “this and that” of my life. This program, that review, this tax return, that playbill, this broken tambourine, that photo album, this sewing kit, and now I look for those charts. Those charts that Goodie had done for me. My music. Our music. We were both eclectic in our taste and had fun putting together odd medleys combining rock and Broadway or blues and standards. Goodie and I worked together on every arrangement so that it sat just right in my voice and expressed just what we wanted. It took a lot of work. We argued, laughed, cried.
I remember standing at the window of his studio one afternoon looking out at the rooftops of West Fifty-fourth Street. “You’ve helped me to fall in love with music,” I said.
Until then music had been a means to an end for me—a way to get noticed, to get a boyfriend, to get a job, to get attention. But Goodie changed that. He made me see that the music wasn’t about me. The music was about the music. The second or third session I had with him, after spending half an hour belting out tunes and trying to impress him with my power and my range, he told me to listen while he sat and carefully played the melody line from one of the songs I had been blasting through. He played it slowly, one note at a time, and then he added chords and a harmony and the music began to swell and I heard it.
“That’s the song,” he said when he finished. “Your voice is just another instrument that serves it. You have to be part of the music and not try to upstage it.”
I’d spent most of my life trying to upstage whatever seemed threatening to me. I laughed too loud, drank too much, stayed out too late, all in an attempt to keep “feelings” at bay. Like the pioneers traveling west in wagon trains, I lit bonfires to keep the scary things away from my campgrounds. I didn’t like feelings, or maybe more to the point, I didn’t know what to do with them. I learned to sing from my mother who sang hymns at the kitchen sink. I can still hear her singing “The Old Rugged Cross” as she carefully dried the cups and plates and knives and forks and put them neatly away. The music seemed to put her in a different place, a place that had nothing to do with two kids and a dog and a mortgage and a Pontiac station wagon, and all the feelings she couldn’t deal with—a place where she could be happy with no thought of us and our scrapes and bruises. So I also learned to let the music take me away from my feelings. I wrapped my talent in a flurry of style and attitude and pizzazz and not much else. Until I met Goodie.
I stand looking at the scraps of my life that are wedged into the five wide shelves of my grandmother’s cherry wood cupboard. An old eight-by-ten photo lands on the floor as I rummage through the piles of things: a coffee tin of miscellaneous buttons, a back-gammon set, a Norman Rockwell one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle unopened (who has the time?), a flashlight without batteries, three yellow legal pads still in the cellophane, a Xeroxed script of Little Red Riding Hood, sides from an under-five on All My Children, a half-empty bag of rubber bands. Toward the back on the third shelf I locate the accordion file marked Goodie/Charts. I pull it out, place it in my lap, and untie the string that holds it closed.
Goodie wrote his charts by hand, music calligraphy, beautiful to look at, on ivory medium-stock composing sheets. He wrote in pencil, soft no. 1 lead, sharpened to a fine point in the Panasonic electric pencil sharpener that sat to the left of his piano. Sometimes I stood beside him and consulted. We discussed ideas for the arrangements and agreed on the key and tempo, but really I just watched. I’m a voyeur in that way. I love watching people do things they do well. I love watching painters paint and potters pot and ballplayers play ball. And I loved watching Goodie write music.
“Did you?” Goodie is hovering near the window, decked out today in a long black cocktail dress with gold lamé elbow-length gloves. “Did you love watching me write?”
“Jesus, you scared me,” I say. “Goodie, are you real? Or am I hallucinating? Not enough blood to the brain?”
“I’m a figment of your imagination, enjoy it,” he replies. “Did you really love watching me write?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Well, I loved listening to you sing.” Goodie circles the room, then perches on the windowsill. “And it’s time now to get out of the Dorothy drag and back on the big-girl stage, Miss Maggie Magnolia.”
“Funny, Charles said the same thing,” I say.
“Charles and I were often of the same mind,” Goodie says. “Especially in matters concerning costumes and cabaret.”
“Well, I like that outfit.”
“Yes, very Audrey Hepburn don’t you think?”
“It’s the first scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” I say.
“It is, isn’t it?” Goodie giggles and struts back and forth. Then he stops. “Okay, enough about fashion. Now stop looking at that music and start singing it.”
“I’ll try. It’s just that . . .”
“No excuses, love. I won’t let you have excuses anymore. Don’t you get it, Maggie? It’s on loan. Your voice, your talent. All of it. Everything’s a rental. So use it up. Wring out every drop before your lease runs out.”
“Yikes, Goodie, you’ve gone New Age on me.”
“New Age, darlin’? I’ve gone completely around the bend. I’m eight inches tall, I’m wearing pink plastic stilettos, and I’m dating G.I. Joe! So listen to me, Mags, dreams really do come true, and now I’m off to a cocktail party. One of the Cabbage Patch dolls is getting engaged to a Power Ranger.”
“I thought Cabbage Patch dolls were babies,” I say.
“In body only. Those kids are wild. It’s quite a scandal and I don’t want to miss a moment.” Goodie blows me a kiss as he motors out the window and into the daylight.
The phone rings. It’s Thomas Garrick, the accompanist. He’s available for the club dates. “That’s great,” I say. “Can we make an appointment for a rehearsal?” We both check our books and agree on two hours day after tomorrow. “Great, I’ll see you then,” I say and hang up.
“God respects me when I work,” an ancient Sanskrit proverb says. “But he loves me when I sing.”
And he really loves me when I am gainfully employed and paying my rent and saving for retirement. I look at my appointment book and realize I have an audition in an hour and a half. Enough reflecting. Time to get it up and get it on and get the job. I check my schedule for the next day and am reminded I’m doing the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio at Trenton, New Jersey. I make a mental note to make sure I still have some blue glitter eye shadow. Thank God I don’t have to squeeze into Dorothy’s pinafore again.
The audition is for a national commercial for one of those room deodorizer things that I never use, but I’m an actress and I can be enthusiastic about anything if it pays well.
I pop a stick of gum in my mouth and light a cigarette and start getting ready. The phone rings. It’s Texas Joe, Goodie’s brother and my old love. We still keep in touch. Maybe Goodie has been visiting him too.
“I’ve got about ten minutes,” I say. “Then I have to scoot to an audition.” Joe understands. He’s actually a little starstruck by me. That shows what a long way civil engineering is from the performing arts—any closer and he’d know I was light-years from stardom.
“I have another grandchild on the way. Beth is due in December.”
“Wow. That makes three, right? Good for you, but I still stay you’re too young to be a grandfather.”
“Well, I got an early start, I was married at twenty-one,” he says.
“That is so scary to me.”
“It’s scary to me too, now,” he says.
“And speaking o
f all that. How’s the love life? Are you still seeing the . . . nurse, is it?”
“Dentist,” he says. “And yes we are still seeing each other. She’s busy. Lots of teeth down here.”
I laugh halfheartedly, take my gum out, and sip the coffee. We talk about the stock market for a few minutes and then about baseball and then about how much we miss each other. It’s the same conversation we always have. I tell him about Jack but don’t mention his name—or age: “I’m seeing someone. We’ve had a couple of dates. You know.” And then we get into a little of the sex thing. Texas Joe and I had great sex. He wore suits all the time and that really turned me on for some reason. So when we talk, it inevitably gets sexy and I get turned on and Joe’s voice gets thick, but today there isn’t time.
“I’ve got to run, Joe. Sorry, but I can’t be late. Thanks for calling. I miss you.” As I hang up the phone, I know I mean it. I do miss Joe. I hold the phone against my cheek for a moment and then realize I’m sitting stark naked on the toilet seat. I pull on a pair of Jockey-for-Her cotton panties and the rest of my under-gear, which is a leopard print bra from Kmart that cost only $6.99. A good cheap fun bra is a real find, and I absolutely recommend Kmart’s annual two-for-one sale.
I take time to put on Paul Simon’s Graceland because it always gets me in the mood for about anything. I approach the mirror. Time to paint the face. At forty-one, I have to say I look pretty good. At least my skin still has a glow and some natural moisture, but time is definitely moving along. My neck is getting that chicken skin thing that my mother always complained about.
“It looks like plucked chicken wattle,” she would say as she tweezed her eyebrows in the magnifying mirror held close to her face. I stand now for a moment and review the subtle changes, which are becoming less and less subtle. I pull the neck skin tight by placing my index fingers under my jawbone and moving them back about an inch. And that does it. It is such an easy adjustment it seems it could be accomplished with a desk stapler and a hot glue gun packaged in an over-the-counter kit with some gauze and surgical tape—“A Brand New Face” by Revlon. And Dee-Honey says I’m still pretty. Even that heckler was jealous. I still have it. I go to the kitchen and get a beer. Here’s to the eternal ingénue, I toast myself.
I sense something awry down south as I apply some eyeliner. My jockeys feel funny. I scratch a little. I check the clock. Time to get a move on. But there is now a good bit of discomfort. I scratch some more. Something feels sticky. I pull down my panties, but the crotch is stuck. Stuck to what? I think. Stuck to my pubic hair! A wad of sticky gray substance is stuck to my pubic hair! What is this? A fossilized egg that has been trapped in my fallopian tube for twenty years, an early sign of menopause, or possibly the Lindbergh baby?
I pull off the cotton jockeys and realize that the gum I had innocently put in my mouth a half hour ago has somehow ended up in my crotch. I think back over the sequence of events:
1. I put a stick of gum in my mouth.
2. I lit a cigarette.
3. I was getting ready to floss my teeth so
4. I took the gum out of my mouth.
5. The phone rang and
6. I put the gum on the closed toilet seat.
7. I answered the phone and sat down—where?
8. ON THE CLOSED TOILET SEAT!
Now what? I’m dumbfounded for a moment and have no idea what to do. I can’t face the emergency room and the rude comments that this situation would elicit. Scissors, I think rather squeamishly. I find a pair and gingerly start to operate. It takes only one snip to realize this is not a good idea. I look in my medicine cabinet and see it. I know it’s my best option. Got to do it. I brace myself and reach for the nail polish remover and cotton balls. I swab it on fast. Yowsa! The stingy paint thinner kerosene stuff in the nail polish remover does the job. I jump in the shower lickety-split and the crisis is over. I consider writing the whole experience down and submitting it to Eve Ensler for her show The Vagina Monologues.
NOTE TO SELF . . .
Keep your gum in your mouth and not in your panties.
I get to the audition. I’m out of breath and a little scorched around the privates, but I’m perky and focused and the casting director, Mike Oft, winks as I leave and gives me the high sign. He’s a nice guy and I’ve booked a lot of stuff through him; he always tries to get me the gig. It’s nice to have someone on your side. Of course, the final decision isn’t his. He’s one of many hurdles on the road to production. There is the client, the advertising agency, the casting director, the agent, the receptionist, the guy who delivers the pizza, and, lastly, the talent. Sometimes the client’s wife or son or accountant or butcher has a say as well. I did a voice-over for a panty hose brand (I won’t name names, but they come in a plastic egg and there is an apostrophe), and the client brought his ten-year-old daughter, Belinda, to the recording session and suddenly Belinda became an expert on phrasing. You never know when talent will surface.
THAT NIGHT JACK and I walk to Lincoln Center. It’s my favorite place in New York. On a night when the fountain is on and the Metropolitan Opera House and Avery Fisher Hall and the New York State Theater and the Vivian Beaumont are all lit up, it’s the most magnificent place in the world. We get a couple of sandwiches and some beer and sit out by the sculpture pond. The night is warm and the music from Damrosch Park wafts through the air and we eat and drink and listen to the sounds of the summer night.
“Heaven, I’m in heaven,” the right side of my brain sings. We walk back uptown and get ice cream cones on the way, a double chocolate chip for me and pistachio for Jack.
“Do you play pool, Mags?” Jack asks as we pass the Broadway Pool and Billiards Hall on Seventy-eighth Street.
“A little. I mean I can chalk up.” I laugh and Jack laughs.
“What do you say we play a few games?”
“It’s kind of late,” I say, although reluctantly.
“It’s only ten thirty. Come on. I’ll show you a thing or two. Pool is fun.”
“Really? It’s been years since I’ve even been in a pool hall.”
“Come on.”
“All right. But I’m going to need a few beers to loosen up.”
“Absolutely,” Jack says and takes my arm and hustles me through the door. And hustle, my friends, is the name of the game.
Jack gets us a table and a couple of Heinekens. Then he explains to me how to choose the right size pool stick.
“Oh, I see,” I say, measuring the stick. “It should just come to here.”
“Right. Now. Easy does it.” Jack takes the frame and corrals the balls.
“I’ll break,” he says. “And you watch to get a feel for it.”
“Sure, I’m all eyes.” I take a long swig of my beer.
Jack aces the first three shots, then scratches on the fourth. My turn. I take my stick and chalk it up.
“Slow and steady,” Jack instructs me. “Here, put your fingers lightly on the table. I suggest you go for the four ball into the corner pocket.”
“Thanks,” I say. “But I thought maybe I would bank the six ball off the back bumper and send it down the lane into the side pocket. Like this.”
I lean over and line up my shot. The six ball kisses the back bumper, marches down the lane, and slips into the pocket like I said it would.
“Four ball in the side.” I love this game. I love the geometry of it, the triangles and rectangles. The pretty patterns the balls make.
“You’re hustling me,” Jack says with a grin.
“You betcha,” I say. “I am hustling your ass. Three ball in the corner.” The ball glides across the green felt as smooth as Kristi Yamaguchi on ice. It’s a three-dimensional algebra problem worked out in bright spheres—an equation in pressure points.
“The last ball off the rail and in the left pocket,” I say, and with that I clear the table.
“You’re good.”
“I know. I need another beer. Loser buys.”
“Coming up
, Miss Minnesota Fats.” Jack kisses me full on the mouth. “Love you.” Then he grabs my ass and I grab his.
“Love you too, big guy. And I love whipping your ass.”
“This game ain’t over yet, Sweet Pea, not by a long shot.”
Jack gets us another round of beers and I rack the balls. We play till they close the joint. We’re drunk and in love and the night feels like a big warm hug.
When we get to my place, we make love. We really make love. We slowly explore the particular ins and outs of each other’s body and then fit them together in a harmony of motion—not the blazing heat of a one-night stand, but the slow burn of desire to make someone, someone you really like, feel really good. And later I sleep in a cool sea of contentment with Jack, the guy from Queens who still lives at home and sells cars for a living, nestled snugly into the crook of my life. I feel happy. Is it possible to be happy? As I close my eyes I think I see Goodie all decked out in a real fairy godmother dress. Not some Barbie thing but chiffon and sequins and a trail of fairy dust from his magic wand. And then just as I sit up he’s gone, but there on the nightstand are a few sprinkles of glitter. Did I leave them there? Did they fall off of some costume jewelry, or was Goodie here for a moment spreading magic? I lie back down and circle Jack with my arm and listen to him breathe. Yes, I think, happy is possible.
Dorothy on the Rocks Page 6