Not Your All-American Girl

by Wendy Wan-Long Shang

  “Luck.” I noticed that she didn’t invite me, but honestly I was relieved that I didn’t have to make up a reason not to go.

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, DAVID decided to go to Ear Wax to buy some music for Hector for his birthday. “You want to come with?” he said.

  I nodded. “Hector’s in character,” I said. “He probably won’t listen to anything that’s popular now.”

  “Good point.” David opened his world almanac and looked up bestselling songs from 1958.

  “The number one song of 1958 was the first foreign-language song, ‘Volare.’ It means ‘to fly.’ But there are some Elvis songs on the charts.”

  “I think Elvis is safer,” I said. “You’re a not-terrible friend.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said David. I wasn’t sure if that meant he was better or worse than I expected.

  On our way out, we found Wai Po in the family room with Bao Bao and a box of biscuits. Bao Bao was looking very intently at Wai Po.

  “I thought he was on a diet,” said David.

  I sang the jingle for Diet Coke but changed the words for Bao Bao. “Just for the joy of it … dog biscuit!”

  “Always with the singing,” Wai Po said. “Bao Bao is just as smart as that cat. I am teaching him commands in English and Chinese.”

  As far as I knew, Bao Bao did not follow commands in any language, so two seemed to be stretching it.

  “Watch,” said Wai Po. She turned to Bao Bao and held up a biscuit. “Bao Bao, zuo.”

  Bao Bao sat.

  “Bao Bao, lai.” She made a “come here” gesture with her hand.

  Bao Bao looked confused. After a moment, he stretched his body out on the floor.

  “He thinks she means lie down,” David whispered to me.

  “No! Bao Bao, lai,” Wai Po repeated. Bao Bao rolled over onto his back and waited for a belly rub. David and I laughed.

  Wai Po folded her arms and looked at Bao Bao. Bao Bao wagged his tail and then arched his back, still waiting. Wai Po reached down and scratched his tummy.

  “You know,” she said, “Bao Bao is very smart. He thinks for himself. Not just doing what everyone tells him to do.”

  While David was deciding on music for Hector, I went looking for Patsy Klein. Designer jeans were still my priority, but now that I knew I was getting money from Mrs. Buchanan, I figured I could splurge at Ear Wax, too. I had taped some of Patsy’s songs off the radio, but they didn’t sound as good as when Nashville Nick played them, especially since my tape captured the telephone ringing in the middle of “Crazy.” Ear Wax sold new records and used ones, all mixed together in bins. They also sold tapes. Almost every bit of space was filled with music. Usually when I came here, I started by flipping through posters or the buttons by the cash register before looking at the albums. But this time, I was on a mission. I went through the K ’s. Kajagoogoo. The Kinks. KISS.

  No Patsy.

  “Patsy Klein, I’m searching for you,” I sang, in the achy way Patsy would have, which reminded me that I was looking in the rock section instead of country. Only I didn’t find any Patsy Klein there, either.

  The record clerk was reading a magazine and cranking the Ramones. She seemed to be trying to move as little as possible, except to move a French fry into her mouth from a greasy paper bag. She didn’t even bop to the music. Maybe because she was afraid of knocking over the tapes that were stacked on the counter like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. She was the opposite of Nashville Nick, who was very enthusiastic about sharing his music preferences.

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you have any Patsy Klein?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t look up.

  I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. “Where would I find it?” I asked.

  “Under Klein,” she said.

  “I looked through all of the K ’s.”

  She put the magazine down on the counter in slow motion. “Try C,” she said. She picked up the magazine again.

  “C?”

  She looked at me and saw my button. “Cline,” she said. “C-L-I-N-E.” She said this like I was the stupidest person she’d ever met.

  I walked over to the C’s in a daze. It had never even occurred to me to spell her name with a C. Klein is Jewish. Cline, I was not so sure about.

  Patsy Cline had a section all to herself. She had the most perfect skin you ever saw, and the reddest lipstick, the kind Safta never got on exactly right. Patsy must’ve been an expert at applying makeup. She was definitely not Chinese, but she wore her hair in a way I’d seen Wai Po’s in an old photo. She also wore a cowboy shirt with fringes on it. Tara had a shirt like that for Halloween in second grade when she wanted to be a cowgirl; my parents said spending that kind of money on a costume was foolish.

  I spent a long time looking at that album cover. Patsy Cline didn’t look Jewish. But people said I didn’t look Jewish, either. It was still inside me; it was still who I was. I went over and found the album among the cassettes. Records had better sound quality, but I couldn’t play a record on my Walkman. This tape would be higher quality than what I was getting by putting my cassette recorder next to the radio. I thought about hiding my button before I went back to the counter, but the clerk had already seen it, so I decided to act like I’d spelled it that way on purpose. I went up to the counter and slapped the tape right on it. Clack.

  She rang it up and didn’t even tell me my total, just pointed to it on the cash register: $3.98.

  “Only the good die young,” said the clerk. It was a Billy Joel song, but she didn’t look like the type of person who actually listened to Billy Joel.

  I looked at her blankly. Who died young?

  She pointed at the tape cover. At Patsy.

  Patsy was dead?

  My brain raced to keep up. Patsy was dead. That wasn’t right. Nashville Nick would have said something, wouldn’t he?

  My button business had been pretty steady, so I paid the clerk with some of my profits and waited for David. He had gone with an Elvis album that had old-fashioned lettering on the front. I thought back to the bin of Patsy Cline records. They looked old-fashioned, too. No recent covers. “If Hector sings nothing but Elvis for the next few weeks, this will be all your fault,” I said, trying to think of something besides Patsy.

  It didn’t work. David pointed at the cassette in my hand. “Who is that?” I guessed he didn’t hear what happened with the clerk.

  “Patsy Cline.”

  “Was she the one you were listening to the other night?”

  “Yup.” David would probably know if she was Jewish. He would probably know if she was dead. But there was really only one person I wanted to ask.

  That night, I waited until Nashville Nick played his first song before I called the station.

  “WTRY. Nashville Nick at your musical service.”

  “Hi, Nash, it’s Lauren. Lonesome L?”

  “How’s my favorite Patsy fan?”

  I pulled on the phone cord and let it spring back. “I have a question,” I said.

  “You can ask me anything but my age and my salary. I’ll just say one’s too high and one’s too low.” He chuckled at his own joke.

  “It’s about Patsy.” I had two questions, actually, but I wasn’t sure which to ask first. “Was she Jewish?”

  “Jewish?” He made a clicking sound; my dad did that when he was thinking sometimes. “No, ma’am, I don’t believe so. She grew up singing in her church.”

  I had to hurry to get my second question out. “Patsy is still alive, though, right?”

  Silence. Then, “I am so sorry.” He waited a beat, and then added, “She died in a plane crash. Back in 1963.”

  1963. I started crying. At first I tried to cry quietly, so Nash wouldn’t know, but then I had to take big gulps of air in between so I wouldn’t suffocate.

  “I should have realized,” said Nash. For a moment, his voice lost its usual smoothness. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Of course you couldn’t have known.”

&n
bsp; All my feelings swirled in my chest. The thing was, I still loved Patsy. I loved that when Patsy sang, I felt like someone knew exactly how I felt.

  But when she was Jewish, we had even more of a connection. When she was a Jewish singer in country music, she gave me hope that I could go somewhere unexpected, a not-supposed-to.

  But Patsy was dead before I was born. We didn’t even overlap. I’d never get to meet her.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “Wait—” said Nash. I didn’t wait.

  I hung up and stared at the phone. It looked the same. Same yellow cord. Same gray buttons. It seemed impossible that anything should still look the same after so much had changed.

  I went outside and stood on my driveway in the dark. The stars were small, like someone had sprinkled the sky with glitter. I didn’t know what to do with all the feelings inside me.

  A year after Grandpa Joe died, we went to the unveiling of his headstone at the cemetery. We each picked up a rock and put it on the smooth gray granite. I wanted to honor Patsy the same way. I felt around in my driveway for a rock, but all I found were dark pieces of gravel, which didn’t seem special enough. Then I found a stone that was smoother and rounder than the rest, like a river rock that had gotten in there by mistake. I picked it up and brought it inside. I wasn’t sure where Patsy was buried, so I set my cassette tape on my windowsill and put the stone on top of it. There.

  All this time I had been wondering about a ghost in the theater, and it had been Patsy who was no longer part of this earth. I stood there and mourned Patsy Klein, who was now Patsy Cline, and her beautiful voice that knew how I felt inside. I was mourning something else, too, that was harder to put into words. My connection to a dream.

  ON TUESDAY, THE LEADS GOT THEIR costumes. Tara got a blue dress that buttoned down the top and flared out at the bottom. When she Hula-Hooped, the dress swung like a bell. Mrs. Tyndall sighed.

  “There she is!” Mrs. Tyndall said. “My all-American girl.”

  The day before, we found out on the announcements that Tara had gotten second in county oratory. She said it was okay, because the next phase, regionals, was the same weekend as our show. Still, I could tell that she was disappointed, even if no one else could. Tara’s way of dealing with disappointment, on those rare occasions when it happened, was to act like everything was fine, and she was smiling extra hard.

  She came over and twirled. “What do you think?” she said. She had her hair up in a high ponytail, with a blue ribbon that matched her dress. Her hair had been curled into beautiful, long spirals.

  “Perfect,” I said, feeling my throat getting tighter. She did look perfect, which made me feel more imperfect. Tara would always fit in, would always look like she deserved the starring role. In my mind, I still saw myself in the middle of the Star Search stage, in lead roles that weren’t Bloody Mary. But what was the point? Would anyone else ever think I looked perfect in the spotlight?

  I was not Mrs. Tyndall’s all-American girl. Maybe I wasn’t anybody’s.

  Hector skidded over to Tara. “Word to the bird. You are chrome plated! Love the hair!”

  “When does the ensemble get their costumes?” asked Cheryl.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’re supposed to blend in, not stand out like the leads. Maybe we should dress up as side dishes.”

  “I wish the ensemble cared as much about its sound as its looks,” Mrs. Tyndall said. I thought I had kept my voice pretty low, but apparently not low enough. “Maybe the costumes will come quicker when you all sound better in ‘The King Is Coming.’ ”

  Mrs. Tyndall never thought we sounded good enough. First it was “Everything Is Still the Same.” And now she was holding another song over our heads.

  Maybe this was supposed to be the most I should hope for—a barely costumed ensemble member, out of the spotlight. A few weeks ago, I would have felt lucky to be in the ensemble. Anybody would have. But that was before Tara got the lead. That was when being in the ensemble felt like the beginning. Not the end.

  The ensemble huddled in a circle. “Do that thing,” said Duncan. “Do that thing where you tell us about what kind of person sings the song.”

  Everyone looked at me, waiting. I tried to dredge up something. “I don’t know,” I said. “Happy, I guess?”

  “The King” was one of Elvis Presley’s nicknames, and “The King Is Coming” was one of the ensemble’s big numbers, where we all run around getting ourselves and the town ready for Elvis. The script said Elvis was supposed to come in on a motorcycle suspended on wires, though Mrs. Tyndall said that was not going to happen. And the motorcycle, apparently, was going to be made of cardboard.

  The opening of the song is simple, a series of middle-C notes, sung slowly. A king-is-com-ing-to-our hum-ble town. We go up a note for the hum in humble and down a note in the word town.

  I thought about Duncan’s question. I knew exactly what kind of person would sing “The King Is Coming.” Someone who was excited to meet the person they idolized. Who could think of nothing else until the moment happened and then would talk of nothing else afterward. The way I would have felt if I were going to meet Patsy. The way I had fantasized that someone would feel about meeting me one day.

  Singing had always made me happy, but when I opened my mouth to sing this time, sadness poured into me, drowning me. My lungs tightened, struggling for air. My eyes watered. It was all a tease, a cruel joke. I wasn’t going to be a star.

  I shut my eyes, willing myself not to cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

  If I cried, the ensemble wouldn’t know what to do. We wouldn’t get our costumes. Mrs. Tyndall would win again. If I started crying, I might never stop.

  Then a voice in my head said, “Don’t sing.”

  So I didn’t.

  Somehow I made it through the rest of practice, faking my way through the songs, the right mouth shapes and expressions. I opened my mouth in a round O when we sang, Here comes that singing dynamo, born and raised in Tupelo! I made an excited face when we pointed and sang with increasing volume, I can see him! I can see him! I CAN SEE HIM!

  I was wondering if anyone would notice that I wasn’t singing, when Mrs. Tyndall called me over. “I’d like a moment to speak to you,” she said.

  I dropped my head and walked over to her. Tara and I normally walked home together, but she was walking out with Hector and Jennifer. She waved.

  I motioned for her to come with me. If Tara was with me, then Mrs. Tyndall couldn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, yell at me. But Tara wasn’t looking in my direction anymore.

  Great. I turned to face Mrs. Tyndall, bracing myself for another scolding. But she smiled.

  Smiled?

  “I want you to know, Lauren, that I know you’ve been trying to be a better member of the ensemble. Especially after the Hula-Hoop incident. I see how the other members look up to you, and that you are acting like the leader I knew you could be,” she said. “In light of that, I would like to offer you a small solo in the Elvis number.”

  She meant the part of the song where different people sing about what they’re doing to make the town better for Elvis. There was a line for a girl to sing: I’m washing the windows till they gleam! In the cutest town he’s ever seen! Right now, we were singing it all together, but Mrs. Tyndall was making it a solo.

  And offering it to me.

  And not even noticing that I didn’t sing.

  “Um,” I said. Maybe my singing didn’t even matter.

  Mrs. Tyndall looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and irritation. It must have felt like seeing Bao Bao not getting excited over a treat.

  “I think you should give the solo to Hallelujah,” I said finally. “Or Cheryl.”

  “That’s not your decision,” said Mrs. Tyndall. “You’re really not taking it? Don’t expect me to offer it again.”

  “I understand,” I said. And nothing more.

  The rain makes me think of all sorts of songs. “Raindrops Keep Fal
lin’ on My Head.” “Singin’ in the Rain.” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” But when I woke up the next morning to a cool spring rain, the songs weren’t coming out of me. I could think of them, the way I thought about math problems, but they weren’t bubbling up inside me anymore. Wherever they had been before was a dead space.

  I went down to the kitchen to have breakfast. When I said good morning, Wai Po jumped about a foot in the air.

  “Ai ya! You scared me. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  “I didn’t sneak up on you.”

  “I usually hear you coming down the hallway because you are singing this thing or that thing. You are never quiet. Sneaking!”

  I didn’t argue with her. I poured myself a bowl of cereal and listened to the sound of crunching in my head. David walked in and stopped. “Oh, you’re here.”

  “You’re a genius.”

  “No, it’s just that I usually hear you when you get up.”

  “That’s what I said,” Wai Po chimed in. “Singing.”

  “How am I supposed to know the weather if you’re not singing about rain or sun or whatever.”

  “Duh. Look out the window.” I hated when David was like that, all smug and know-it-all. It was worse when he was right.

  “Oh, come on,” said David. “One little tune. What about ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider’?” He started making the finger motions.

  “Sing it yourself,” I said.

  I faked my way through another practice that afternoon. In some ways it was easier, because we were rehearsing another song that starred Tara, “All-American Town,” so I just had to stand in the background and be part of the chorus. But in another way, it was worse.

  My town’s an all-American town,

  We all say “how do you do?”

  When the day starts anew.

  Tara skipped around the stage, waving to the audience and then waving to the people who represented the town. We were all supposed to smile adoringly at her and wave back.

  My town’s an all-American town,