The Original 1982

by Lori Carson

  Again and again, I run a scene: Ashley carrying the baby on a suburban street, surrounded by snowdrifts and bare trees. The wrong music can crush a moment like a petal under a boot. But when it’s right, it makes you feel everything else, the white-winter sky, Ashley’s loneliness, the curiosity in the baby’s expression.

  This is how my days take shape: Mornings I work on the score. In the afternoon, I run errands, or go to an AA meeting, or meet Alan for lunch. In the evening, I make dinner for myself in the kitchen and eat it in front of the TV on a chipped white plate. I watch crime dramas. The same show plays on different channels, from different years. It’s strange to see the lead detective with long hair and short, at thirty and forty. Time compressed.

  On the weekends, I make myself get out for a run. The park is full of children playing soccer and other games. I jog past them at my slow, steady pace. I hear their high-pitched voices, the whistles of the coaches, parents applauding from the sidelines. How has this happened? I’m on the periphery, a solitary animal in a world of connected creatures.

  Eighty-two

  Maeve calls to invite me for the Fourth of July weekend. She and Alan have rented a cottage in the Hamptons for the summer. “It’s pretty rustic,” she says, “and north of the highway, so don’t get too excited.”

  I know the Hamptons from family vacations, making out in the dunes with my boyfriend as a teenager. North or south doesn’t matter to me. But after hours of sitting in traffic on the LIE, we make the turn onto 27, and though I recognize the flatness of the landscape and the quality of the light, I can see that the beachy villages of my youth have been replaced by rich suburban towns. Only the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton looks the same. We drive around the block to find a parking spot and wait ten minutes for a booth in the back. The kids order milk shakes and french fries, but it feels more like a film set than the real thing. From across the room, we watch as a former New York City mayor is seated. A popular TV star comes in and takes a stool at the counter. We pretend to ignore them, just like everybody else.

  Later that day, six-year-old Samantha tells me she’s never going to get married or have children. “I’m going to live in my own apartment and have three cats,” she says.

  I laugh. She has no idea that it’s the fate that’s supposed to fill single women everywhere with dread.

  We’re on the beach at the end of Ocean Road and have wandered far from the crowd and our blanket. I’ve started to think about the cooler, full of sandwiches and cold drinks, waiting for us. “Look,” Samantha says, and points to a modern house that sits very close to an eroding sand dune. We can see right through its windows to the front room. All the furniture is white. “Why would they build it so close to the water?” she asks. “Aren’t they afraid it’s going to fall in?”

  “When they built it, there was probably a lot more sand,” I tell her. “But you’re right. It’s in a precarious spot now.”

  “What’s ‘precarious’?”

  “Not very secure—or at risk. You know what that means?”

  But she’s no longer paying attention. Behind us, a boy and his father are launching a kite. We watch as the wind takes it, lifting it higher and higher.

  “I’m getting kind of hungry,” I say. “How about you?”

  “Not really.” She shrugs. Her hair is springing free of its unruly ponytail; red tangles and corkscrew curls whip about in the breeze. A pair of green goggles dangle from her tiny neck. She’s thoroughly coated in sunscreen and sand.

  “Let’s head back, anyway,” I say. I reach out to hold her small white hand; she lets me take it for a moment before yanking it free to run off in the wrong direction.

  “Nyah! Nyah!” she calls. I refuse to chase her and stand there waiting until finally she meanders back in my general direction, refusing to acknowledge me. Though I know it’s ridiculous, it hurts my feelings. We ignore one another all the way back to the blanket.

  “Kids are always testing you, to see what they can get away with,” Maeve says later. Her hair is wet and slicked back. She’s been in and out of the water all day. Samantha is digging a hole in the sand with a plastic shovel. Alan and Justin are playing paddleball at the shoreline.

  We stay until the sun is going down and the beach is emptying of sunbathers, their bright blankets and towels, umbrellas and coolers. Our skin feels salty and sunburned, and we’re tired in a good way. The day reminds me of other days, other beaches, other summers. Everything is bathed in a golden light as we traipse over the white sand, like a caravan to the parking lot.

  Eighty-three

  On Saturday night after a dinner of hot dogs and lobster rolls in Sag Harbor, we take the ferry over to Shelter Island to see the Fourth of July fireworks. We set our blanket in the sand, shoulder to shoulder with all the others on the beach, and it occurs to me the world is becoming so crowded that one day having a solitary experience will be the greatest of luxuries.

  When the fireworks begin, Samantha crawls onto her mother’s lap and Alan reaches for Justin. I recall being a kid with my own family at Eisenhower Park, feeling small, my father’s arms around me as the explosions reverberated in my belly.

  Above us, the fireworks are so close they seem to take up the whole sky: bright snowflakes, flickering chrysanthemums, rockets, sparkly cascades, and once a flag that dissolves even as it forms.

  “Ooooooo,” Samantha says.

  “Ahhhhh,” says Justin.

  We smell the gunpowder as bits of glowing ash float down. When it seems the finale is about to start, we gather our things, hoping to beat the crowd to the parking lot. The children and I watch the last explosions through the rear window of their parents’ Passat, on the dark road back to the ferry. I’m seated between them and feel like a child myself, but also like a mother must feel, tired, sandy, children reaching for an arm or shoulder to lean against.

  Eighty-four

  After everyone has gone to bed, I find the stiff black composition book that I purchased earlier in the day and open it to its first lined page. Before personal computers, I kept journals, or diaries, in notebooks like it. I have stacks of them in storage somewhere. These days, I rarely write longhand. Who does? I use my laptop for everything. But my hope is that by doing it now, my memory will be jogged; events that seem lost will reappear. Once my pen begins to move on the page, it will all come back to me.

  As quietly as I can, I make my way to the kitchen, at the back of the house. The kids are asleep across the hall. It’s good to be in a house full of sleeping people, cozy and safe.

  I fill a teakettle with water, turn up the flame beneath it, choose the largest mug I can find and a strong black Irish tea. I stand over the kettle and wait, afraid of its piercing whistle. At the first wisp of steam, I remove it from the burner and pour the hot water. The scent of the tea is lovely. I find myself humming very quietly.

  Time feels generous. It seems to stretch ahead for hours. Carefully, I carry the tea back to the little room where I’m staying. There’s a child’s desk in the corner. On it sits the composition book, open and waiting. If I describe you well enough, will you come to live inside my words the way a soul occupies a body?

  Holding the mug in two hands, I blow on it and take a sip. Then I place it down beside me on the desk and begin to write.

  By morning, my hand is aching and I feel possessed by a kind of exhausted joy. In the east there’s a pink edge to the sky. I stand and stretch my arms over my head, pull the stiff sheet back on the single bed, and lie down to close my eyes.

  Eighty-five

  The group is a little more ragtag than it was seventeen years ago when we were last together to record Room Inside. JC is living with his drum kit in a basement practice room. Dave teaches music at a high school in Pittsburgh. Alan and Fish both have working wives and young children, so it was hard for them to get away. We’re still getting drum sounds when Kid shows up, trumpet in hand. He’s wearing a jaunty cap. “Anybody got any weed?” he asks, half jokingly.
<
br />   Drugs and alcohol have taken a toll; a couple of us are sober. We talk about the ones we knew who have overdosed, or drowned, or died of other things. Musicians don’t fare well over the long haul, but remarkably, we’ve all made it this far. And everyone is still doing it—still playing music, undeterred by poverty, family life, career ups and downs.

  When Marianne Mercurio comes through the door with her cello and her black motorcycle cap, I have to sit down. No one else has her laugh like a dolphin’s cry. She’s living in Woodstock now. Her long silky hair is gray and rough at the edges.

  Some of the cues I’ve written are easily identified by my friends. Pieces of melody, hooks and bridges, from the songs of Room Inside. When we finally get to the redo of “Still True,” we’re warmed up, and it’s satisfying to play the song from start to finish. We get four or five takes of it, back-to-back. I’m in the vocal booth, isolated from the rest of the band, but can see them through the little window. It feels like I’m singing the song to them.

  Baby, all I’ve ever looked for is a safe place,

  All I’ve ever longed for is your warm embrace,

  All I’ve ever wanted is you.

  Take a good look and you’ll know,

  It’s still true

  I sing it better now than I did when I was young. I have a bit more vibrato, and my tone is warmer. It’s true of everyone, I think. A lifetime of doing one thing makes you good at it, and all of us together are a rocking, breathing, back-and-forth machine.

  We order food in and listen to the playback, talk and laugh, so our bellies hurt. I remember a time backstage with Marianne and Alan at a club in Baltimore, or Philly, or some other city. They were pretending to be sumo wrestlers, walking around in a crouch, yelling in fake Japanese. Until they fell over, laughing so hard they were crying.

  So many good times. What a shock it is to realize we were living in a time, like “after the war” or “during the Depression.” It had just been now to us. It felt like everyone, and everything, would always be like that.

  “When are you playing out?” Kid asks me, and I tell him I haven’t played a show since Monday nights at Luna Park. “Why not?” he wants to know, and they all listen while I explain it.

  I’m too old. I’ve done it too many times already, earned my place with the club owners, booking agents, record companies, and the press. It’s a never-ending battle. I don’t have it in me to do it again. It’s all true but sounds like a bunch of excuses.

  “You’ve still got fans out there,” Kid says, and I feel that shift in perspective, a reminder that I haven’t wasted my life, as I sometimes thought. I’d made something beautiful.

  Eighty-six

  The house my mother lives in is not the house where I grew up. I can barely recall the earlier house, though I spent eighteen years in it. Twenty-five years have passed since that house was sold and my parents moved into their “new” house. Now my mother lives alone there. I know the day will come when the house will be empty, but I can’t begin to imagine it. Sometimes it hits me that I’ll never see my father’s face again. But I know losing my mother will be worse.

  Walking briskly, it takes ten minutes to reach her house from the train. I like this town, more village than suburb. It’s full of mature trees and expensive landscaping. I pass a number of massive stone churches. My mother’s white split-level with black shutters is the most modest house on an avenue of impressive colonials with screened-in porches and deep green lawns. From the corner I can see my sister’s SUV already parked in the driveway. My mother has turned seventy-six, and we’re gathering to celebrate her birthday, just the family. It’s the first year she is older than my father lived to be.

  My sister’s kids are home from college but have summer jobs. Josh is a busboy at an Italian restaurant, and Mack is working as a caddy at his father’s club. They’re supposed to drive down from Greenwich together, late in the day. I’ve lived out of town for half their lives and have missed a lot of birthdays and graduations. When they were small, my sister used to take them to see me play at Tower Records or Borders Books. I doubt they’d even remember it, but at the time, those performances had gone a long way toward winning their affections.

  My brother-in-law, Stephen, has his nose in his BlackBerry as I come through the door. He’s an attorney whose hours are never ending. He looks up and waves a greeting.

  I walk past him to find my mother and sister sitting outside on the back deck. It’s shaded by tall trees. I can hear children laughing and playing in the yard next door.

  “I’m never letting you go back to California,” my mother says as I hug her.

  I lean in to give my sister a kiss. She’s an attractive woman with my father’s dewy eyes. “How was the train?” she asks.

  “Fine,” I answer, though it’s well known in my family that I dislike the Long Island Railroad and try my best to avoid it.

  I settle into one of the sixties lawn chairs that are almost as old as my sister and I. We have a view of the kids next door jumping into their pool. We hear their squeals before the splash. “Someone’s going to fall and crack their head open,” says Lynn.

  “I hope not,” my mother says.

  As I watch them, I can easily see it happen. One of the small blond girls will hit her head and sink to the bottom of the pool. I can be over there in three seconds, I think. I see myself diving to the bottom to rescue her. I’d place her small body on the cool concrete and breathe life back into it, press down on her lungs until she coughed up pool water and opened her eyes.

  But no one hits her head, or falls, or requires rescuing. They play and swim until their mother comes out. She waves to us and wraps the girls in flowery pink towels. They follow her inside, chirping like birds.

  Later, we’re seated around the kitchen table when the phone rings. My mother quickly hands the receiver to my brother-in-law. The boys have been in an accident, she says. I hold my breath, sure that my earlier fear, about the neighbor girls, has been a premonition. But though the car was totaled, Josh and Mack have walked away without a scratch. Thank God, we say.

  My sister and brother in-law leave immediately to retrieve the boys from the Bronx hospital where they’ve been taken. My mother and I sit outside on the front steps and wait. We watch the cars going by, a couple of dog walkers across the street. It’s nice to sit with her in the dark. I look for fireflies, but there aren’t any.

  “How are you, really, honey?” she asks.

  “I’m fine, Mom,” I say. “I’m thinking of coming back to New York, selling the house.”

  “Oh, you know I’d hate that,” she says, lightly sarcastic, meaning the opposite.

  When Lynn, Stephen, and the boys return, we sing and blow out candles and make wishes. My mother carefully tears the wrapping paper from her presents. We watch two grown boys, miraculously unharmed, wash their birthday cake down with cold glasses of milk.

  Eighty-seven

  As I listen to the music, my head centered between two monitors, Alan’s closet-size studio seems to expand past its walls. We’re layering guitar figures with transparent noise. Alan’s got a bunch of guitar pedals he’s trying. How to describe the thing music does? It’s like drugs without drugs, God without religion, happiness for no reason. We laugh when something sounds beautiful, or loud, or silly, or wrong. We laugh until it’s just right, and then we get quiet.

  After we finish for the day, I ask Alan to come downtown with me. I’m in the mood to listen to songs that have just been written. He says he can’t because he and Maeve have plans. I let him off the hook because I know he has no patience for most singer-songwriters, especially not the ones who go on and on.

  A whole scene has sprung up on the Lower East Side during the years I’ve been away. There’s a new generation of singer-songwriters, open mics, and hourly time slots at half a dozen clubs on Ludlow, Orchard, and Allen streets. I’m prepared to go by myself when I think of calling JC. I haven’t spent any time with him in years, but once he�
�d sort of been my boyfriend. It had been good to see him again at the recording session.

  I agree to meet him downtown at his practice room on Second Street. It’s surprisingly tidy and organized, a tenement basement with carpet on the walls and floor, and black paint on the ceiling. JC’s drum kit, travel cases, extra snares, and cymbals take up most of the space. “Where do you sleep?” I ask him, and he points to the spot where he drags out a rolled-up futon mattress every night. He showers at the gym, he says, and sometimes lifts free weights there, too.

  “I’m used to it.” He shrugs. “It’s not so bad.” He still looks good, although you can see the years of whiskey on him. He’s heavier now and not quite as pretty. Once he was a handsome boy who used his smile to great advantage. The first time he used it on me I’d smoked all his cigarettes, though I didn’t smoke. It was at an industry thing, a Christmas party. I’d been smitten on the spot.

  Now I know him too well. Still it’s fun to flirt, if you can call it that. He’s halfheartedly trying to seduce me, and I’m laughing.

  “What happened to the guy?” he asks.

  “What guy?”

  “The suit. Didn’t you have a boyfriend? I saw a picture of the two of you in one of those rags at the grocery checkout.”

  “He left me for another woman.” It still hurts to say it.

  “No! Was he a fucking idiot?” JC rubs my shoulder.

  “I guess he was.”

  “You’re still gorgeous, you know,” he says.

  And I say, “Come on, J.”

  “I mean it!”

  It feels good to be desired. So I let him kiss me, though we’re in a basement, and I’m afraid there might be rats watching us. “Let’s go hear some music,” I say after the kiss.

  JC shakes his head at me as if we’re still kids and I’m being a tease. “Do you mind if I smoke a bowl before we go?” he asks.

  “Knock yourself out,” I tell him. Some things never change.

  There’s an open mic going on at the Rock Den, and the club is packed when we get there. We find a spot at the bar and JC orders us a couple of shots, though I’m sure he remembers I’m sober. Onstage, a dark-haired girl is singing quietly, sweetly. She cradles a Gibson hollow body in her arms. She’s been raised on jazz, or influenced by singers who were raised on jazz: Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Jeff Buckley. Her melodies travel from major to minor and back again.