Say yes to everything: Gain.
Autumn in New York. There was a famous song about it. Maybe she’d get to sing it someday. Her fans were always writing to say she should sing the entire American songbook. She’d get around to all of them eventually, she thought. To every season a song.
Say yes to everything: Sing.
Hyperalimentation, that’s what it was. She consented. After a couple of weeks, she’d put on 12 pounds. North of 90 for the first time since, what, 1975? The year her body, and their career, started to collapse. The year of T., her one true love. They dated for a year. But they were both busy with their careers and so broke it off. He was married to somebody else now.
Say yes to everything: Forgiveness. Self-forgiveness. A new true love.
It was all so exciting, feeling her body return. The career would follow in step, she just knew it. At first the weight felt detached, burdensome, as if she were carrying around something separate from her body. She thought of that girl with the backpack, lugging around stuff. But after a couple of weeks, it started to feel like part of her, as if it were moving on some inner wheels. She had her drumsticks in the bed, and suddenly they weren’t so heavy anymore.
Say yes to everything: Drumming.
Then, eureka! Her period. There it was. The monthly friend, that was always the joke in high school. But she did truly welcome it back, add it to the flood of life she was feeling again.
Say yes to everything: Motherhood.
She thought of I. almost the minute her own monthly fluid broke. I. was more than five months along now and just as active as ever, recording, jetting around the city with P., helping her move the hotel room into the hospital, video players and videocassettes and stuffed animals and running shoes and all. That’s what she’d be like when she was pregnant, she thought, a dynamo with a fetus growing inside her, in the recording studio right up to when she went into labor.
She’d go home for the holidays and then be back in New York in early February for the birth. She told I. she knew it would be a boy.
Say yes to everything: Godmotherhood.
After about the third week, she was up to 95 pounds. I. had worried that maybe the weight was coming back on too fast. It took you years to get into this state, she said. Shouldn’t it take at least a couple of years to get better? What about your heart? Can it stand the strain? I. said again and again.
I don’t have years, she said. There’s a new record to make, concerts to give. Besides, I feel fine. That’s what she always said, but now she really meant it. Maybe it was the invigorating autumn air. Plus, her period had returned. Wasn’t that a sign that her body was liking the treatment?
Say yes to everything: Commitments.
When the family was in town, she and the brother did get out to one club, to see a labelmate of theirs, a recent Oscar winner whose music and show were themselves as colorful as peak autumn. They ran into Lou Reed there, decked in his usual sunglasses and black. They nodded cordially to each other across the room. At least he still recognized her. It was a baby step back into the thick of things.
The brother checked out some studios — if she insisted on staying in New York, maybe they could record here, he told her. But he decided they weren’t up to his standards. And she wasn’t going to be staying much longer anyway.
Say yes to everything: The music business.
As her body filled back out, her daily, weekly, monthly planners did, too. That’s how she knew she was really feeling better. Old business cleared up. New business scheduled. Papers from her lawyer arrived.
Say yes to everything: Divorce.
Even this she was pursuing with gusto now. Pay him off and send him on his way. For a year or so she’d gotten to wear a wedding ring and say, “My husband.” Next time, it would be for real. And if her fans didn’t like the fact that she was a divorced woman, then they weren’t really true fans. No one was going to tell her she couldn’t still sing about lace and promises anymore.
After she got up to 95 pounds, the IV was replaced with actual meals. Meals she actually ate. Roll up your sleeves and eat. If that’s what it took. She started to look forward to Thanksgiving dinner. One whole list in her planner was devoted to the things she wanted for the family meal: turkey and all the trimmings, maybe some wine. Writing it down was the first step to keeping it down. Going over it every day in her mind was like rehearsing for a big show.
Say yes to everything: Food.
She even found time, in between all the doctor visits, friend visits, treatments and list-making, to go back to that sheet of paper with the song title from the girl in the record store. One rainy day, out of nowhere, she just started scribbling away, so much that her pen started to run out of ink, and she had to double over some of the lines on the page. She looked for another pen in the room but couldn’t find one. All that money, all this expensive video equipment, and not a simple pen to be found. Well, she had it all in her head anyway; she would finish writing it down some other time.
Say yes to everything: Writing my own songs.
By early November, she was up over 100 pounds. Mission accomplished, she thought. She checked herself out, over the objections of, well, everyone. But she was just too excited. She’d make it back to L.A. for Thanksgiving. In less busy moments, she’d wonder how it happened so fast, what made her finally able to eat again. Was it the family session? Or seeing that bread line? Or the stick-figure receptionist at the record company? Her mind always got busy again, though, before she settled on an answer.
There were still a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving when she checked herself out, but she didn’t head back to the West Coast right away. She had a couple of things left to do in New York.
Say yes to everything: The future.
28. New York City, Fall 1982
On his day off, Andy was in the library, idly flipping through Billboard magazine. He’d long since given up expecting to find any news about her. After their last single fell off the Hot 100 in the spring (it was the lowest-charting of their career), he’d gone so far as to call her record company to see if there were any new releases on the way. The woman on the phone had to take a minute to process the name. Andy could feel her thinking, Are they even still on the label? But then he heard some papers shuffling. No, nothing new on the schedule, the woman said.
The trail had gone ice-cold.
Still, he leafed through the trades. Part of his cop training was that you just had to wait out the perps. They’d always play their hand. Now he really knew what a drill sergeant in the academy meant when he said, “Most of the time you’ll just be bored.”
November. She was probably long gone, he thought.
Then there it was, a small item in the “goings on about town” section. “Attending the ____ show at ____ were Lou Reed and ______.”
She (maybe-she) was still in New York! There was still a chance.
Andy practically leapt up from his chair. The Midtown corner where he first saw her was only a few blocks away. He’d fade into the brickwork and wait for her.
The perps always play their hand, he’d learned. She would show up again. Andy was sure of it now.
29. New York City, Fall 1982
At one of her last sessions with the therapist, they didn’t talk much about eating, or her family.
“I have a question,” she said. “I was watching a cop show last night, and I heard the line, ‘Did she sing?’ Some witness was being interrogated, and later the other cops who hadn’t been in the room said, ‘Did she sing?’ You know, like she was a stool pigeon or something. Why do they always call it that? Singing?”
“Well, what is it that singers do?” he said.
“Oh, come on, are you serious?” she said.
“Very. Can you answer?”
“Singers sing songs. They sing notes. Melodies. They make pretty noises. In tune and in rhythm. If they’re good, and lucky, people listen. If they’re really good, and really lucky, a lot of people listen.”
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“What do witnesses do?” he said. “The ‘stool pigeons.’ ”
She had to think about that for a minute. “They give up information,” she said. “They reveal things.”
“So, isn’t that something like what singers do? Reveal things, in a song, that people didn’t know before? Maybe tell even the people who wrote the song something they didn’t know about it? Make the song give up its secrets, so to speak.”
She’d never thought of it like that before. Stool pigeon. Jailbird. Songbird.
Giving it up. Giving it flight.
Singers reveal things.
30. Queens, N.Y., Fall 1982
Sib watched the numbers on the clock flip over: 3:45. She was now 22. She’d been thinking of the months between graduation and her birthday as a kind of grace period, when she could make some token efforts to find a job, help her dad around the house, listen to records, hang out with Timmy and Larry and not worry about the next phase of her life. But she couldn’t avoid it anymore. She was officially an adult.
As if she needed something else to keep her up. The world wasn’t about to suddenly throw open its doors to her just because she wanted it to or thought she was ready; jobs were still scarce. She was getting some record-review assignments for a few local music rags out on Long Island that paid maybe $10 a pop, when they paid at all, and she landed them mostly because she wanted to write about artists like Luther Vandross and Howard Johnson and Kashif, whom everyone else was too hip to care about (Sib liked these records even as she recognized that they were glossy collections of nice riffs and, in Luther’s case, some virtuoso vocals, but not anything that was going to raise the tide of pop). She was filling in for Larry at the bar occasionally, and reluctantly taking the random $10 or $20 her father would throw her. But no job interviews. The temp places weren’t calling back. She figured it was because she wasn’t pretty or hip-looking enough. Her father even offered to get her some part-time work on a late shift at the Post Office. But she couldn’t go there. She loved her dad and respected his work but going to work at the Post Office would be another of life’s pause buttons that she just couldn’t push.
Her dad. Eventually she would move out, and he would be alone, and lonely. For more than a decade their main purpose in life was helping the other survive, and even if her moving out wouldn’t be as traumatic as losing his wife and son, she knew that he’d still have his routine upended. The Mets hadn’t been any help; they finished the year with another abysmal record, their sixth losing season in a row, with not much hope for next year, save some sudden miracle trade, and her dad of course always watched until the last ugly inning. Now he would be facing another long winter of delivering mail in the cold and snow, while he was living for Opening Day. Even if he was in good shape for a man in his mid-50s (even for a man in his mid-40s), he couldn’t carry that mail sack around forever, skate across icy sidewalks, trek for hours in summer heat, get drenched in sudden storms, dodge growly dogs or people complaining about checks or magazines that didn’t come the day they expected them, averting his glance from the not-infrequent housewife (or -husband) who showed up at the door just when he was depositing the mail in the box in a robe too loosely tied. He’d have to retire one of these days. Sib had mentioned Mrs. Donovan from the bakery a few times again, but her father shrugged her off. Sib knew that she was mostly the reason; her father wouldn’t think about getting his own life in order until he thought she was O.K. With all the key-jangling and foot-clomping and whistling and “accidental” banging into things, she worried that he really thought she was going to lose her hearing again, almost nine years later. He lived for routine.
Sib hadn’t made much progress on the song either. Timmy was back at school, and Larry was off doing whatever Larry did when they weren’t together. And now suddenly there was the kiss. What did it mean to her? Up to that point Sib hadn’t even been sure about her own sexuality. Another thing she kept putting off, another matter she’d deal with when she was a grown-up, another bill that wasn’t supposed to come due for a while. But the kiss had set something in motion. What was helping keep her up now was not the desire to kiss Larry again but trying to figure out what she felt at all. The kiss was pleasant enough, but it didn’t give her the mild static-clingy electroshocks that she had when she saw that picture of her mother and her aunts and grandmother. Maybe Tuke, and not a few of her other “friends” and acquaintances, had been right all those years. But whenever those feelings would bubble to the surface, she’d pop them, just as she did when that vision of Kieran with the other boy in the booth flashed in her mind. She just wasn’t ready to start sorting all of that out.
Music, like the Mets, still really sucked. The new Michael Jackson album was delayed again, but the first single had dropped, and it was some drippy duet with Paul McCartney. After more than three years, this was the best he could do? There was a new double album from Prince, but he seemed a little out there for Sib. Larry of course was raving about it.
Even with nothing she was really dying to buy, she needed to be in a record store. There was an unopened birthday card from Aunt Constance on the mantel downstairs; Constance, the last remaining Rooney sister, living alone in Flatbush, was still doling out her “loving” words of wisdom, even now that she was almost 75. There’d be something written in the card to the effect of, “How’s the job hunt going, dear?” It was Sib’s penance for the check that was enclosed. They’d most likely see her at Thanksgiving, when she’d bring seeded rye bread and a new tablecloth and suggest that they were the tastiest and nicest things there. And tell Sib that she should drink water because it “has a slimming effect.” Just like when she and Kieran were kids and the brussels sprouts were never quite consumed with enough gusto, the shirt never tucked in quite neatly enough, the hair just a little too long.
Yet even with prospects on every front dim, or at best uncertain — work, sex, music, her father, the Mets — Sib felt that something big was going to happen soon. And that feeling scared her most of all, because it was the same feeling of anticipation she’d had that day in the kitchen with her mother and Aunt Maddy and the “elbow” and the magical dollar bills. That’s why she knew she had to take another trip to a record store.
Sib got down on her knees. She prayed first to Rose. Then to Aunt Maddy. “Help me figure this out,” she said. She’d often prayed to them over the years. But now, for the first time, she invoked someone else. “Mom, please,” she said. “Help me with this music. Our music.”
She crawled back into bed. At least her birthday gave Sib a plan. In the morning, she’d hit the bank first to cash the check. Then the subway to Downstairs. She pulled out the notebook and pen and dozed off, eventually writing and then crossing out lines and lines of lyrics for “Too Much Love.”
31. New York City, Fall 1982
How those last two weeks flew. First moving back to the hotel from the hospital, then packing up for the trip back to L.A. All those running shoes. At least they were lighter now. She’d long since dumped the laxatives. Even the ones behind the drapes and the pillows. She hadn’t taken them for months, but now she didn’t even need to have them around anymore. The training wheels were off. It was her first official act on the outside as an (almost) normal-weight woman. She revised her usual room-service orders. No huge meals that she would pick at or stare down or pretend-eat. Just sensible ones. Her eating was wobbly now but true. Nothing wasted or thrown away or pushed around or talked about. Just eaten, still a bit warily, the forks vibrating a bit as she lifted them to her mouth, tasting and chewing the food gingerly, then swallowing almost like taking a deep breath. But eating. Food didn’t make her feel fat now, only tired. It was odd how it felt like a workout, even a salad or a bowl of soup. She had to rest after every meal.
Each day, each hour it seemed, she’d check the mirror, almost to make sure it was all real. Yep, there they were; her hips were back. They were
n’t imaginary now. She would slap and dig her palms in, giddily fill her hands with small globes of flesh. “Some people were just born hippy,” she’d always heard whenever she complained about them. These days she just laughed. That was her. Never hip. Never a hippie. Just hippy. And she was mostly O.K. with that now.
Her front, well, even though her breasts had filled back out a bit, too, she’d never be chesty. That didn’t matter now, either. It was the midsection. She still couldn’t look in any mirror and not see the shadow of her chubby 16-year-old self lurking in there somewhere. That must never happen again, she thought. Sensible eating and exercise must never yield back to her fat DNA.
She could control it, with just a spoonful a day. Right in the drugstore. One bottle instead of the dozens of packages of laxatives. She bought some with the first box of tampons she’d actually be using in years. She could take it after meals but not too soon, so that only a little would come back. That way she could keep most of the food down, get the nutrients, keep the weight over 100 and not damage her throat or vocal cords. Just not let it get out of hand. Just a spoonful with each meal.
Her parents would be here soon to pick her up and fly back out to the coast with her. She’d take her last long walk around the city tomorrow. But first she pulled out a tape recorder and her tablet. She’d finished the song her last night in the hospital and had been humming the melody for days to keep it in her head. Now she was ready to put it down. The first song she’d ever written.
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