Yet there she was at 3 a.m., awake, after having stared at a blank page for hours. Not a note or a musical riff or phrase written down. She had her guitar, but she was just strumming aimlessly the few chords she knew — over the years she’d learned one or two songs but never put enough time in on it. She was much better with words.
Was it this hard for Smokey Robinson? she thought. How did prolific songwriters like him ever churn out hundreds of these things during the peaks of their careers, sometimes two or three in a single day? She finally wrote:
You can have too much of a good thing.
Much. Such. Touch. Dutch. Guts?
Maybe there was a book about how to do it. But when she thought about going to the library to look for one, she remembered one of her favorite episodes of The Flintstones, in which the characters Fred and Barney basically do the same thing, and the book they find tells them that the keys to writing a hit song include mentioning eyes, the color blue and the word “mother.”
Too much love in your eyes
Too much blue in your eyes
Too much blue-eyed love . . .
Sib giggled to herself over that episode — she had always contended that “The Flintstones,” which made its debut only about a month before she did, was underrated, that around every fifth episode the writers would kick it up a notch and produce something that transcended the charge that the show was nothing more than a Honeymooners knockoff. She remembered that the songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, who’d died not that long ago, appeared in the episode as his animated self. He’d written the music to “Stardust,” which she knew was one of the most beloved songs of all time. Willie Nelson had had a recent huge recording of it. Sib had heard somewhere that it might have been the greatest pop song ever written.
Sib didn’t necessarily want to write a song like “Stardust”; as timeless as it was, she needed a more contemporary lyric and rhythm. She didn’t even care about writing “a hit.” That would be another process, another of life’s mysteries or algorithms that she probably couldn’t find in a book.
But there had to be common threads among the greatest songs of every era. So she decided to choose one from every decade, starting with “Stardust” and the 1920s (she knew it was written then because she’d read Carmichael’s obituary) and going at least through the ’70s, and then analyze them, pull them apart and put them back together, pass them through some ricer in her brain to see what emerged, figure out what made them tick, what made them click. She was looking for songcraft, the art of marrying melody, harmony and words. A lost art, it seemed, lately. This might have made for an even better senior project than “Why Disco Doesn’t Suck.”
Sib had a pretty good idea of where she’d start with the ’60s and ’70s: Beatles, Beach Boys, Dylan, Paul Simon, Motown, Brill Building, singer-songwriters, Elvis Costello, Gamble-Huff. For the ’50s, she could probably just pick any Chuck Berry song to get what she needed. She had “Stardust” from the ’20s. But what about the ’30s and ’40s? What barometers were there for the songs from those eras? What songs resonated during the Depression? The war? The postwar, pre-I Love Lucy years? Those last pre-rock gasps?
Who was the best musical authority (besides herself) on music? That would have been Kieran, of course, and she still had his record collection, but it started in the early ’60s. Rose would have been perfect, but she was gone now, too; maybe her husband the nightclub owner, but she didn’t know him well enough to ask. Then Sib shuddered, when she realized where she had to look.
The word “mother.”
It had taken Sib some time, years in fact, to be comfortable with all the family memorabilia from before the accident. She avoided the framed photographs of the four of them, even as she insisted that they stay up when her father offered to take them down. She would avert her glance, or walk quickly past them, or sit in a chair that didn’t face them. When she was younger, when she was a “they,” she’d always dreamed of inheriting Kieran’s perfect baseball glove, oiled and slept on, under his pillow, until it was broken in, soft and pliant, almost as easy to fold as paper. It had been on the handlebars of his bicycle that day. She just couldn’t bear to have it on her hand after that, and so it stayed on top of the dresser in his room, which her father kept pretty much the same as it was the day Kieran died.
Sib had no problem playing Kieran’s records, though. The collection was so perfect, in content and condition, that keeping them as part of her regular playlist, in regular rotation, became her way of curating her memory of him, of keeping a best part of him active in her life. Anybody could oil a baseball glove. Nobody could break in a record collection the way they could.
But there was a place in the basement that Sib had never gone since the accident, and now she knew it might be what held the key that unlocked the song she was trying to write. She slipped on her tube socks — white, thick, high, wrapping snugly around her calves. Even at this hour of the night, they provided a little adrenaline jolt, as if her body were now expecting her to go for a run or shoot baskets, and they’d also soften her footsteps on the stairs. Her dad was a light sleeper, and this was one night she really didn’t want to wake him up, for him to find out where she was going.
She took a penlight from her night table and made her way out of her room, down the hall and to the stairs. The dark house, the limited vision, didn’t scare or deter her. She’d had some experience with a diminished, deprived sense, after all, and never lost that ability to compensate with her others. She kept the lights off as she felt and listened her way, with what Timmy joked were her Bionic Woman ears, through the kitchen and down to the basement.
Still using only the penlight, she padded her way to the stereo. There was a cabinet underneath with accordion doors. They’d gone unopened since the accident, at least by Sib, much as she’d avoided the family photos or any reminiscing or dredging up.
Sib put her hand on the cabinet door and started to push it open. Then the face came back to her, from the one dream she could remember having while she was drifting in and out of the coma in the hospital.
All these years later, the face, looking down from her bedside, was sharp and clear, almost blunt, not hazy in that dreamlike way. And the voice was unmistakable, a soft clang.
Why wasn’t it you?
Sib opened the door and saw them, the rows of binders, with gold embossing on the different-colored spines. She pulled one out and wiped off the thin layer of dust that had managed to accumulate through the closed door. God, it even smelled like her, beyond the must, that mix of her Dove bath soap and — what? Sib thought. Something outdoorsy. Newly mown grass? Country pines? Basketball leather? Axle grease?
Sib looked up at the corner of the binder she’d pulled out: There was a cracked, curling piece of masking tape, still with enough adhesive on it to stick. She drew the penlight closer to make out the faded writing: “Property of Eugenia Rooney,” written in that familiar up-and-down, sticklike hand, like those readouts from an EKG she’d seen on medical shows.
She opened the binder, which was full of 78 r.p.m. records in manila sleeves, just like the ones for 45s, only bigger and thicker, sturdier.
This was her mother’s girlhood record collection. Sib couldn’t remember her ever playing these records. Every time she or Kieran would ask about them, her mother would say that the 78s were too bulky, that they’d ruin the needle on the phonograph, that they were all so old anyway, why would anyone care about them now, let’s play something new. And then she’d tear into “Downtown” or “She Loves You.”
Don’t dwell on the past, her mother had always said.
Sib carefully flipped through the bulky platters, almost as heavy as their good dinner plates. There were titles by the Andrews Sisters and Bing Crosby, the cast album from Oklahoma, jazzier stuff like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. A version of “Stardust” by Carmichael himself. One entire book was dedicated to Christmas songs, Bing Crosby and Gene Autry and Judy Garland. In another she found Billie Holi
day’s original version of “God Bless the Child.” And the last book, which got into the ’50s, had 78s by Elvis and Buddy Holly. She took the copy of “Oh, Boy,” out of the sleeve and put it on the phonograph. She slid the speed switch all the way to 78 and watched the thing crazily spin to life after more than 30 years. But when she put the needle down, all she got was static, chalkboard scraping; she’d forgotten that 78s needed a special, thicker needle. You always needed a thicker needle to get through to Mom.
Sib put “Oh, Boy” back in its sleeve. Maybe that would be her song from the ’50s, if she decided not to go with “Johnny B. Goode” or “Sweet Little Sixteen.” But as she closed the binder and started to tilt it back in the cabinet, a photograph fell out, a black-and-white snapshot with scalloped edges. There were six people gathered, all of them female, her mother and her three sisters, plus her cousin Colleen, who was probably about 7 in the picture, and, in the center, her ancient grandmother. They were in the front room of Constance’s house, which had been their grandmother’s, and they were all younger, brighter, somehow more vital than Sib usually thought of them (except her grandmother, who died when Sib was an infant and so in the family stories she heard was always old). Maddy, Constance and Bern were all dolled up and ballet erect, as was Colleen, who was wearing what looked like a Sunday dress and had her hair tied back in ribbons. And then there was her mother, on the lower outside perimeter of the photo, wearing a dress and a crucifix — a small static shock to Sib, who was used to seeing her mother in a blouse and pants — and looking as if she were in a three-point stance or a starting block, ready to bolt across the frame. Always the odd woman out.
Sib trained the light on the photo for what seemed like an hour, interrogating each face with the penlight. As usual, no men. Where were they? But the surprise was that for the first time, Sib had to admit the truth of what people had told her her entire life: She looked just like her mother, who, in the picture, was not much older than Sib was now. And there was no mistaking the round face, the slightly boxy but busty and athletic frame, the readiness to spring, the blunt, show-me-what-you-got expression.
Sib tucked the photo into her shorts and stood up, but suddenly felt a wave of something hit her and had to reach for the wall behind the phonograph to steady herself. Her knees buckled slightly as she walked slowly to the stairs, her socks sliding on the floor, and she gripped the side wall — there was no banister — up to the kitchen. She’d regained herself by the time she got back to her room and was in bed when she took out the photo again. Six women. She counted them over and over. But it wasn’t just the number; there was something else about the photo that Sib couldn’t shake. She’d always joked about “where the men were buried” on her mother’s side of the family, until she thought of Kieran and then felt ashamed. But when Sib, in her bedroom in the dead of night, looked at this photo of her mother, her aunts, her grandmother, her cousin, she wasn’t seeing the absence of men. She was seeing a band of sisters, self-reliant, proud, unlacking. A girl group. A coronet of light bulbs lit up around Sib’s head. The picture practically had the same glow as Sib’s favorite album covers — The Supremes a’ Go-Go or the Shangri-Las’ I Can Never Go Home Any More. The girl groups of the ’60s might have been expressions of male fantasies, but in the pictures on those album covers anyway, the women, who were either dancing or simply drinking in one another’s presence, didn’t cry need, like some of the frillier girl groups, or throw confrontation, like some of the “womyn” groups Sib had seen in record stores. They were simply women with women by women for women.
And then she had an idea about what songs she had to study if she was going to write one of her own.
24. New York City, Fall 1982
She must have been to every store around Madison and Fifth a dozen times. Bergdorf ’s. Bloomingdale’s. Prada. Chanel. “All the big ones,” she’d told F. Mostly she just looked — she was still a Sears shopper at heart. And she’d learned her lesson after that Japan tour when she brought back an expensive, custom silk kimono for the mother, and the mother started complaining about the extravagance of the box, the cloth ribbon, the triple-weight, glittered cardboard, the plush pomegranate-colored tissue paper. When the mother finally got to the kimono, she picked it up by two fingers, held it at arm’s length, thanked her, put the kimono back in the box and then asked the brother if he’d written anything new while they were away.
Still, she loved the fact that the best stores in the world were steps away from her hotel. In L.A., nothing was close; everywhere you wanted to go was a negotiation, a journey, an embarkment, and the excursions to and from were as much a part of the experience as the destination itself — how long it took, how much traffic you hit, where you parked, what the smog level was, what you heard on the radio, how many innings of the Dodgers game you missed, what lives you’d lived on the way there and back. In New York, especially if you had money, and she still had some, you could be anywhere, essentially, in no time. To others New York may have been the city that never sleeps. To her it was the city of no time.
“No Time” was also the name of a pretty good song, she often thought, by a pretty good group called the Guess Who, from back in their day.
She corrected the thought: from back in their first day.
She did buy a pricey Hermès scarf for F. at Bergdorf’s, even though she realized F. probably had dozens like it already. Her credit card had her married name on it, but when she handed it over to the salesclerk, an older, sweetly imperious woman with her silvery hair in a bun, she still looked for the glint of recognition, that brief hold of the gaze that said, Don’t I know you? Are you famous? The problem was, that could be said of maybe half the people who shopped in these stores. The clerk turned the corners of her mouth up slightly in a half smile while asking her to sign the slip.
They would be here soon, the parents and the brother, and like a single released in advance of an album, their admonitions were coming back to her ahead of their arrival. Repeating on her like some overplayed Top 40 ear worm. Of course they’d tried to talk her out of going all the way to New York for treatment. There are good places closer to home, they said. Fully tricked-out facilities where you can check in and the doctors can keep an eye on you (which she knew meant where we can keep an eye on you), not some outpatient therapy and overpriced hotel.
Wasn’t it enough that she’d finally agreed there was a problem, that she needed help? Didn’t she have the best doctor? What “facility” was more tricked out than New York City?
No, that wasn’t enough for them. You should have learned your lesson the last time you were in New York, they said, all that money and energy for nothing. And now you won’t have the record-company limo to chauffeur you everywhere. You’ll be out on the mean, dirty New York streets, where cars run lights, people jaywalk, where they overcharge, where they bargain lives down. Potholes, manholes, cellar hatches to swallow you up, where people help themselves to a little something that’s not really theirs in order to survive. One big collision course. In New York, they said, if something is worth having, rest assured that someone else, maybe hundreds of someone elses, wants it just as much or more than you do and will do anything to get it, sometimes just to stop you from having it. A place where people will block your way just because they can. That city will break every promise you ever thought it made to you. You’ll never be skinny enough to fit through the eye of that needle. And now on top of all this, they have that new gay cancer out there, which they’ll no doubt spread to everyone. You’ll never get better there, someone told her, because you don’t know how to cheat, how to protect yourself. Someone will lean out from a window, or across a sales counter, or from around a dim lamppost, or even down from your hospital bedside, and say, “Hey, fool.” And you will turn your head and answer, “Present.”
Well, the joke was on them. If she’d learned anything the past few years, it was that Los Angeles had more than its share of liars, cheats, disease and all-American scum. Strangers bea
ring jeweled ladles. The only difference was that in L.A. they had better tans and fatter asses. All those aerobics classes could never make up for the time spent in cars.
No, she was going to New York. Everything happened faster there anyway. And she needed to get well as fast as she could. Now they’d be here in a few days. A different kind of showtime. Showtime, no time. And she was still not gaining, still hadn’t had the breakthrough, still hadn’t found the corner to turn. As she was out on Madison wondering how she would face them all, she found herself stalled in front of a building she’d avoided her entire stay. It was the building that held the offices of her record company. Its headquarters were still in L.A., but now that so many British acts were scoring for the label, the New York office had become a vital way station whenever these artists, especially those three cute blond boys, came to tour the U.S. It was as if the proximity to London gave the New York reps a better understanding of these acts, who were mostly male and new-wavish, as if the 3,000 fewer miles of ear canal made the New York team hipper and smarter, more in tune, helped them get this sound, which was grittier than the label’s standard fare and not L.A. at all, sooner.
She stopped there finally because she needed to take her mind off the coming family session. She had some friends here still. The New York reps were the ones who actually liked those early tracks from her solo album. When the proofs for the solo-album cover came back from the Vogue photographer, she imagined a poster of one of them on a wall in the New York office.
What really gave her the confidence, though, as she rode the elevator up in the sleek building, was that she’d helped build it. This building. This piece of New York real estate. Her piece of New York real estate. She couldn’t tell you anything about the architecture — she’d gotten through only a year of college when the career started to take off, and most of her courses were in music — and anyway her “piece” of it was probably the equivalent of a set of office suites. But she knew that her record sales had helped pay the rent, the salaries, the recording costs, had helped pay for the promo pics and complimentary albums that went out to journalists, for every flack pitch, for every flack. Had even made the signings and development of those British acts possible. Some of the kinder suits at the label had said as much to the trades, that she and the brother built the label, that without them, there wouldn’t have been a label. The brother, even though he never thought they got their due from the company and had implied more than once that it put out their records with held noses and then raked in the royalties, said this was a bit of an overstatement. H. and his combo built the label, he said. But they kept it going, took the foundation and built it up, and out. Built it into a multimillion-dollar subdivision, he might have said.
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