Tempo Change

by Barbara Hall

  Now my mother was yelling and my mother did not yell. I didn’t understand how this had all come together and turned into such a mess. Maybe I needed an angel or some Guidance to talk to and help me.

  I said, “Mom, it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen.”

  “It is going to happen,” she said. “He says he’s coming. He wrote because he wanted me to be prepared. But I can’t go there now, Blanche, don’t you see? I can’t go with you. I can’t be a part of it.”

  “There’s nothing to be part of,” I yelled back.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m not going. There’s no Coachella because Viv talked to an angel or a spirit or something and now she doesn’t want to sing.”

  This shut her up and I could see a thousand things going through her head at once.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying, either. But you don’t have to worry about anything because there’s no Coachella and we can all just stay here and waste away in Santa Monica and never do another important thing, just the way you and Ed the Guitar Guy would want it. A quiet, sad, meaningless life.”

  Now her brain switched again. “Is that how you see me?”

  “Isn’t that how you see yourself?”

  “No. You are harsh, Blanche. And it isn’t how I see you.”

  “Well, it is me. I used to have nothing going for me, then I had a little something, and now I’m back to nothing.”

  “Blanche, it’s not like you to talk this way.”

  “How do you know what I’m like? You just work and hang with the Twelve Steppers and Ed the Guitar Guy. You surrender to some mysterious Higher Power and make yourself okay with everything around you like you don’t have a say in it. I tried to go for something. I worked really hard and it fell apart.”

  “I work really hard,” she said quietly. “I don’t just surrender and let things happen to me.”

  “You don’t just surrender? Isn’t that what the program is all about?”

  “No. You surrender the things you can’t control. If you’d come with me to a meeting you’d understand.”

  I was glad she didn’t drink anymore but there was a part of me that thought she could just not drink, without all the literature and meetings to go with it.

  “That’s not what you did when he left? You didn’t just surrender to a life without him?” I asked.

  “He left, Blanche. I had to accept it. Would you rather I hadn’t? Would you rather I kept drinking?”

  “I don’t even remember you drinking.”

  “That’s a good thing.”

  “I don’t know what I’d rather, Mom. I know you went from this great exciting life to working in a clothes store and dating Ed the Guitar Guy and it looks a lot like a big compromise. Like giving up. I don’t want my life to end up that way.”

  “I haven’t given up. I tried to rebuild. My life isn’t boring. It’s what I want.”

  “Then why do you still get upset when anyone mentions him? What about the hole in your life? What about the gaping wound? Can somebody around here be consistent? The whole thing is like a song out of tune.”

  She shook her head. “You are so much like him.”

  “I am? Since when?”

  “Your father said he had a vision. No else could see it. He was furious all the time because no one else could see what he saw. He wanted to be special and then he was shocked by how lonely it was. How impossible to get people to walk beside him. He used to say he had no one to play with. He hated routine and the norm, but he wasn’t strong enough to cope with the alternative.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “He felt like no one understood him. No one could follow him. Is that how you feel? A private school education, a job and friends—does that make you unhappy?”

  “I don’t know how I feel.” I lied. Because that was exactly how I felt.

  My mother tucked her hair behind her ears and pinched her nose at the bridge. She said, “I’ve never been propelled by those inner voices. It’s just not in me. I’m not brave enough to go there.”

  “Brave enough to go where?”

  “Wherever those voices take you. Whatever it is that makes you want to sing and play I never heard that sound, Blanche. I tried really hard, for him. Now I’m trying for you, but I’m just a normal person. You’re brave enough to go inside the whole dream. He talked brave but then he lost it and threw us away, too. He may still have his vision but at what cost? Don’t let it be that way for you. Don’t be like him, be yourself.”

  “I’m not brave,” I screamed at her. Enough to raise her head and get that scared look from her eyes. “I’m not brave at all. I just act that way.”

  Her shoulders softened and she smiled.

  “What’s the difference?” she asked. “You are not running away like your father did. I know that about you.”

  I looked at her for a long time. My mother had finally asked me a question that shook me to the core. She thought she had the answer, but did I? I had no idea how to answer.

  I got up and walked out of the house.

  The way I was sure he used to do.

  Ed the Guitar Guys Guitar Place

  FIRST I WALKED TOWARD THE OCEAN BUT IT WAS DARK AND cold and the harmless homeless people made me feel uncomfortable.

  A lot of what was upsetting about the Fringers was how much I had put myself out there. In many ways I had finally shown everybody how I was able to do it. I had tried so hard. Jeff had once said it was hard to admit you wanted something. I wasn’t sure what the other side of the argument was. With that thought in mind, I headed back toward Main Street and Peace Pizza. I suspected Jeff was working the late shift. I hoped so. I had taken a few weeks off to put Coachella together and I hadn’t seen him in a while. I hadn’t been in touch either by e-mail or by phone, and he hadn’t, either.

  As I approached Peace Pizza I saw through the big window that Jeff was standing at the register. He was giving change to a girl about my age. She wasn’t anyone I knew. She was a normal-looking teenage girl in jeans and a T-shirt. She had straight dark hair with nothing in it and she was holding a piece of pizza in one hand and putting the change in her pocket with the other. Jeff was talking to her the way you would to a customer. I couldn’t even say he was flirting with her.

  It was just the image that disturbed me. A normal guy talking to a normal girl. When Jeff and I talked, for example, it probably looked like a normal guy talking to a crack hair girl whose clothes were from the Whatever’s Clean collection. I felt as if I shouldn’t be thinking so much about Jeff. What did I think, anyway? So what if he inspired me to write a song? So what?

  Jeff might have looked up and glanced at me before I turned away. But I hurried on. He wouldn’t get the chance to run after me, not that he would. He said he liked me but what could that lead to anyway?

  I walked quickly along Main Street and before I knew it, I was halfway to Venice. I had gone past the fancy clothing stores, including Biscuit, and the bike shops and yoga shops and ice cream boutiques. I barely paid attention to anything I saw so it was a wonder that I ever saw the small, discreet, tasteful little neon guitar and the sign that said ED’S GUITARS. I’d never noticed it before.

  The lights were on but I didn’t see anyone moving around. Looking through the window, I saw there were rows and rows of beautiful guitars, all different sizes and colors. It looked like expensive candy. And the way they all lined up next to each other, you could tell that someone cared about them and wanted each one of them to have the right home.

  I knew who that person was. It made me think differently about Ed.

  I touched the door. I didn’t mean to open it, or maybe I meant to.

  I didn’t honestly mean for a bell to go off when I stepped inside, though. I had hoped I could just slip in and slip out. I wanted to smell the guitars. It’s hard to explain but they have a smell. And the best way I could ever describe i
t would be to say they smell like potential. Ambition and desire. If such things had a smell.

  “Sorry, I’m just closing up,” came a voice from the back.

  I tried to hurry out before the voice became a person.

  “Blanche,” he said. “Is that you?”

  He had come from a back room and was silhouetted in the light. Like one of the guitars on display.

  I turned. “Ed?”

  “Yeah, me.”

  “So this is your place?”

  “Yeah, imagine that,” he said. He moved forward and now took the shape of an actual person. He had some papers in his hand and keys dangled at his waist. “I’m just filing invoices. You want to play something, go ahead.”

  “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

  “I’m not bothered. I was about to call your mom to see if she wanted to grab something to eat. I didn’t mean to work so late. The hazard of being in business for yourself. Nobody tells you when to quit.”

  “Ed, I might not call my mom right now if I were you.”

  “Why not?”

  I opened my mouth and then I couldn’t have been more surprised if a flock of geese had flown out of it. Because I started to cry.

  Ed stared at me and let me cry without moving toward me or saying things would be better.

  He just waited for a break in the action and said, “Let me close up and we’ll go get some coffee.”

  We went to an Irish pub around the corner and he ordered fish and chips and I ordered a Coke and didn’t say anything at first. There seemed to be local college students sloshing beer and leaning on each other and laughing out loud. Ed saw me watching them.

  He said, “You’ll probably want to go to college back East?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  We sipped our drinks.

  Finally he said, “So what’s it about?”

  I shrugged. “What’s what about?”

  He said, “Why don’t we just not do the part where I have to drag it out of you?”

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s some bedside manner.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” he replied. “And you came looking for me.”

  “I did not.”

  “Is this about your band?”

  I told him about Viv and how she was dropping out because of God and how I had decided to scrap the plans. I did hold back on the information about my mom. I knew I couldn’t leave until I told him, though.

  He asked me, “And the part where your mom is melting down about something? The reason I shouldn’t call her?”

  You could say that I tried very hard to undersell it. “You see, I had e-mailed my father and he was coming to the show. My father contacted my mom before I could tell her. So I had opened a big honking can of worms that I couldn’t put back.”

  He nodded and ate his fish and chips, as if that helped him think better.

  Finally he said, “That wouldn’t really work out so well. Her seeing him at Coachella.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t.”

  “So tell me.”

  “I can’t tell you, Blanche. It’s a complicated thing between adults. A short answer is that they have all this history. They never had a clean break and there are all these emotions not yet tied up. He wouldn’t handle it so well, either, especially if I was there.”

  I didn’t know what to say about that. It was hard to imagine my father being intimidated by Ed the Guitar Guy. But maybe guys like Ed the Guitar Guy didn’t pick up on how not intimidating they were. Maybe he was a stud in his own mind.

  Then I reiterated how it didn’t matter because Coachella was never going to happen. Because I’d lost my band.

  He nodded.

  I said, “I think it’s ridiculous that my mother is jealous of my relationship with my father. She wants to deprive me of it. Isn’t that something that belongs to me?”

  “Technically, yes. I’m sure if she were a perfect kind of person, she’d be able to step back and let it play out. But she’s not. She’s somebody who thought life would turn out one way and it turned out another.”

  “Isn’t that everybody?”

  He shook his head. “Some people don’t dream so hard.”

  “Would that be you, Ed?” I said it straight out.

  “Blanche, you’d be surprised but probably.”

  “And is dreaming hard an affliction, something to be avoided?”

  “It just depends on if you can handle it,” he said. “More importantly, if it’s your dream. In her case, your mom was riding on his.”

  “Don’t you feel weird talking about my mother this way?”

  “I’ve said it all to her. She knows. She’s working on it.”

  “So you’re fixing her?”

  “No, I have my stuff. I’m just a guy from a small town in the Midwest who didn’t want to die there. I got out but I took plenty of baggage with me. Nobody’s fixing anybody.”

  I didn’t ask him more. I’d gone as far as I wanted to down the road of what their relationship looked like on the inside.

  “Anyway,” he said, reaching for his wallet, “I don’t see why you can’t go to Coachella. You could find another way up there.”

  “Ed, it’s not a transportation issue. I don’t have a band.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Okay, we don’t have a singer.”

  “They’re your songs,” he said. “I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to sing them.”

  “I can’t sing.”

  “My experience tells me there are very few people who can’t sing. There are mostly people who don’t.”

  “So you’re telling me to sing?” I asked. “Do you have any idea what my mother would think about that?”

  He laughed. “Well, this is a separate issue. I’m telling you that you probably can sing if you want to. You can probably do anything if you want to. The things that fall by the wayside are the things we let go. I never would have let go of my own band if I hadn’t found something I liked better. I liked selling guitars better. The gravest illusion we impose on ourselves, Blanche, is that life just happens to us. But the truth is, we make choices. When you say yes to one thing, you’re saying no to another. And vice versa.”

  “Did you ever think of being a philosophy professor instead of a guitar salesman?”

  He laughed. “Everybody has a philosophy, Blanche. It just comes down to how you use it. Every time I sell someone a guitar, I know it has the potential to change their lives. The rest is up to them. I just deliver the tool. I mean, what can I say? I like selling the tool.”

  He walked me back to the house and told me to say hello to my mom. He’d call her the next day to make sure she was okay. He didn’t say anything else.

  When I went inside, my mother’s bedroom door was closed and the light was off.

  I lay on my bed and stared at my father’s guitar until I felt like it wanted to talk, wanted something from me, and then I turned over so I wouldn’t have to see its scarred face or hear its silent demands. As much as I didn’t want to, I thought about what Ed had said about making choices but finally just fell asleep.

  That Night I Had a Dream

  I WAS BACK AT THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR TO MY PARENTS’ IN Silver Lake, with the ladies who took care of me, Joss and Mimi. They were exactly as I remembered them. They always had an attitude that everything was particularly right in the universe and there was nothing to worry about. The foster kids were all there, too, and I saw their faces, one by one, all their different skin shades and expressions of concern and hope and worry and pleasure.

  In the dream, I was reading to them. I taught myself to read at age four, legend has it, and so it really had happened that they would gather around me to listen to me read from various picture books. I remembered the feeling I had then, of being a kind of leader, and feeling proud that I had this special skill. I remembered wanting to share that with them and being glad that I could. My p
lace, in those days, was that I could read. It mattered to me. It mattered to them.

  Before this dream, I would have sworn up and down that my being special was centered around having a famous father. But it came back to me, again, that I had no sense of my father’s being famous. What I realized was that in that little backyard world, I had my own fame. I liked it a lot. And I moved into the dream feeling all peaceful and excited, two warring emotions that came together perfectly, and I had a sense that this was how all of life was supposed to feel.

  The discrepancy in the dream was that I was my true age, fifteen, and everyone else had stayed exactly the same. I saw the eager faces of the foster kids staring up at me and I felt like I had to stop reading and tell them that something was wrong. I had grown up. But I knew if I stopped reading, they would stop looking so happy, and I just had to keep that happy expression on their faces. The feeling that had started out as being needed, in a good way, changed into a heavy sensation of being required and demanded.

  It started to thunder in the distance and I could see dark clouds gathering. This wasn’t a feeling that I knew much about in life, as thunderstorms were almost as rare as blizzards in L.A., so it seemed like an event I had conjured. Something I had seen in a movie. I was excited about the thunderstorm but I was also afraid and had a vague understanding that it couldn’t be real. That all these worlds had no right to converge.

  Someone in the group started to cry; I was really torn about whether or not to stop reading. The thunder grew louder and all the kids became distracted and I just kept reading, trying to keep them from being afraid. After a while, the kids ran away and I was suddenly alone, reading to an empty yard. My father came out into the yard then and I smiled when I saw him and finally stopped reading. I stood and walked toward him and then he was my mother, also stopped in time, a very young version of her with short curly hair and a wide smile. I walked up to her and said, “Mom, there’s no one out here. It’s storming and we should go inside.”

  She said, “Go get them back, Blanche. The kids will listen to you.”