An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  The memories softened her toward him, made her resolve to be more patient, more understanding – though she could not imagine how she could avoid feeling like a cat with its back up in his presence. He was constantly underfoot; then disappeared when she needed him. He was quiet when she wanted to talk, talkative – about things that bored her to tears – when she wanted to be alone. He tried too hard to please her; he didn’t try at all.

  It was Claire so near leaving, she reminded herself. That’s why she felt so restless, why Charlie was driving her crazy. It was being so sad about Jo. But it wasn’t only that. It was also the Philadelphia woman, who’d been arrested for crimes committed in the seventies and whose case was regular fodder on the evening news, always accompanied by clips of her stalwart husband, her bewildered teenage daughters. It was the news about Iraq.

  It was like Vietnam, as Diane had said. Lies upon lies. Just this week, one of Bush’s former advisors had spoken out against the impending war. There was scant evidence tying Saddam Hussein to terrorist organizations, he said. Even less evidence tying him to 9/11. And as for the alleged meeting between one of the terrorists and an Iraqi official in Prague, Vaclav Havel himself had “quietly” called the White House, debunking the story.

  Yet “proof” of the meeting had been the lead story on last night’s news.

  Neither of them said a word about it. Charlie just stood, switched off the television and put Yo-Yo Ma’s Goldberg Variations on the stereo.

  “Do we have to listen that again?” Nora asked.

  He turned to her, confused, the empty CD case still in his hand. “Is there something you’d rather listen to?”

  The Rolling Stones, she felt like saying. “Yeah, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaciton.” But they didn’t even have a Rolling Stones CD in their collection. They never listened to anything but classical music. Though, lately, she’d been listening to the oldies station in the car.

  “Oh, forget it,” she said. “The Bach is fine.”

  But once Charlie had settled into his easy chair, eyes closed, to enjoy it fully, she’d gone outside and walked toward the forest until there was no sound but the rustling trees, the chirp and whirr of insects. Then just stood there for a long time, seething at the sight of him framed in the living room window.

  Glancing at him now, still chatting companionably with Mo, Nora wondered whether she and Charlie would be so at odds with each other if Claire had decided to go to Oberlin, as she had originally planned? If she hadn’t been shocked into remembering her own young self, would the two of them have gone on living more or less as they always had once Claire left, growing older and older until, like Jo, they became doddering, frail ghosts of themselves?

  Stop, she told herself. Lately, her mind felt like a grocery cart with a bad wheel, always veering off in some direction she did not want it to go. She focused her attention on the activity outside the arena: teenagers lounging on the benches that circled clusters of big trees, laughing and talking, their instrument cases at their feet. Some held hands, leaning into each other as close to kissing as you could get without actually doing it. A group of tuba players clustered near the information center, fooling around, the comic bellow of the instruments mingling with the “whoosh” of an espresso machine nearby and the crunching sound of blenders making smoothies with fruit and ice.

  Inside the open-air arena, it was cool and dim. The last rays of the sun fell first on Green Lake and set it glittering, then slanted across the arena like a wand, illuminating whole rows of seats and the moths fluttering in the red rafters high above. Nora chatted with Diane, who raised an amused eyebrow at Mo and Charlie, who were reminiscing about concerts they’d heard as campers, sitting out on the lawn because they couldn’t afford to buy tickets then. Claire and Dylan had disappeared among the young people clustered down front, near the stage. Jo sat beside her, on the aisle, quietly lost.

  She perked up, though, when the music began, lifting both hands as if to capture the notes in them, and Nora saw a glimmer of the old Jo in the simple pleasure on her face and in the way she watched a young father who stood nearby, swaying to the music, an infant bound to his chest in a corduroy snuggly. Was she remembering how they used to bring Claire here when she was just a little girl, wondering what had become of her?

  She wondered it herself sometimes, remembered Claire at two, three, four, and how it had felt, then, to be all Claire wanted, the center of her life. How she had known Claire absolutely – her needs and moods. Claire had belonged to her in a way Nora had not fully appreciated until she started kindergarten, her own life that Nora could never fully know.

  It was natural, of course. There was your life with your parents, and . . . your life. Her relationship with her parents had been unusually distant and strained. But even Jo hadn’t been privy to everything about Charlie’s life once he left childhood.

  A glimpse now and then was probably the best you could hope for, a little window opening. In fact, just that morning, cleaning the kitchen countertops, she had noticed Claire’s portable CD player on the countertop and picked it up, thinking she’d set it on one of the piles in the hallway to make sure Claire wouldn’t forget it. But on a whim, she put the earphones on and pushed PLAY.

  To her surprise, she heard Janis Joplin. “Piece of My Heart.” Then “Somebody to Love,” “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” It was the mix Dylan had made for her, Nora realized. “He’s kind of a sixties freak,” Claire had said when she told her about it. “Like you couldn’t figure that out. Duh. His name?”

  Perhaps Nora shouldn’t have, but she sat down and kept listening – “Revolution,” “Light My Fire” – until Bob Dylan’s gravelly voice singing “Like a Rolling Stone” undid her, the plaintive harmonica that seduced the truth and laid it bare. Listening to that song when she was young, she had heard it as a taunt directed at those in the older generation who thought they knew everything, who refused change. “Never trust a person over thirty,” they said then, only half-joking. Bob Dylan was all about that, wasn’t he? At the base of all his mysterious metaphors, wasn’t he really just saying, “Get out of the way, old man. It’s our world now.”

  But listening this afternoon, in her own kitchen, what she heard was the terrible loneliness in his words. The sense that everything you believed in and expected life to be could just dissolve – and where would you be then?

  She had felt utterly untethered for a moment – and felt it again, now, as night chased the last of the light away and stars punctured the clear, black sky.

  17

  “Go Now!”

  On Claire’s last morning at home, Nora stood at the window and watched her walk slowly through the meadow, trailing her fingers among the flowers as she went, then slip through the trees onto the lake path, Astro trotting along happily behind her. Later, Claire stood in the yard, throwing his Frisbee for nearly an hour, ruffling his fur, leaning down to let him lick her face each time he returned and laid it at her feet.

  In the afternoon, they went to the nursing home, where Claire knelt beside her grandmother and talked to her quietly, remembering happy moments they’d shared, while Jo gazed at her benevolently, confused. “Is it okay with you if I go over to Dylan’s for a little while, to help him pack?” Claire asked, exiting into the sunshine. “He’ll give me a ride home in time for dinner.”

  “Sure,” Nora said, and watched her walk up Main Street, heading for the house he was sharing with some other college students for the summer. He had little to pack, Nora knew. A duffel’s worth of clothes, a few books, his computer, stereo, CDs. Claire just needed to be with him; they’d been inseparable since he arrived in May, and she probably could no longer imagine a day without him somewhere in it. Maybe she’d talk to him about how it had hurt her to say goodbye to Jo, how she dreaded leaving Nora and Charlie the next morning and just wished it were over, the two of them already in his truck, driving south. Maybe they wouldn’t talk at all but would fall into each other’s arms and make love in Dylan’s
room for the last time. Another last, she thought – one she hadn’t considered till this moment.

  Halfway to her car, Nora turned and headed for Diane’s shop, hoping that by this time of afternoon it would be empty – the tourists back in their cottages, napping, the Traverse City ladies on their way home to fix supper for their families. It was. Diane appeared at the door of the storeroom when the bell rang with Nora’s entry.

  “Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Show me some paint chips for the girls’ room – or something, would you?” Nora said. “I swear to God, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown before Claire actually leaves tomorrow morning.”

  Diane peered at her over the half glasses she wore for reading or working at the computer. “You look all wound up.”

  “I am,” Nora said. “Can you walk? Just a half hour or so. Enough to – I don’t know.”

  “Yeah,” Diane said. “Just let me close up here. And, ha! Be careful what you ask for. I do happen to have some paint chips for you to look at.”

  “Good,” Nora said. “Give them here.”

  Diane fanned out a dozen or so, all shades of green, and handed them to Nora. “Mo says I should stop looking at the names and just look at the colors,” she said. “But I mean, really, under the circumstances, don’t you think it’s a better bet to paint the room something like ‘Green Thoughts’ or ‘Oatlands Spring Kiss,’ as opposed to, say, ‘Grassy Knoll’? Even if we like ‘Grassy Knoll’ a lot?”

  Nora laughed. “I’m with you,” she said.

  “Seriously,” Diane said. “What do you think?”

  Nora looked at the color chips. “ ‘Frosted jade’? ‘Grass Root’? I like those. And ‘Aspen Field.’ It’s cheerful, the color of a Granny Smith apple. ‘Green Thoughts’ is good, too.”

  “I think, any of those,” Diane said. “With a kind of mossy pink trim? Or maybe pale, pale blue?” She rolled her eyes. “I told Mo, ‘Grassy Knoll’ with red trim. She was not amused.”

  “I’m amused,” Nora said.

  “Of course.” Diane grinned. “I knew you would be. I counted on it.”

  She took the paint chips back, set them on the counter near the cash register, then locked the front door and put the “CLOSED” sign in the window. Nora was already feeling better when they slipped out the back door and set out walking. The route to the beach took them past the rundown clapboard house where Dylan lived with his friends. The front windows were open, music pouring out of them – something Nora didn’t recognize.

  “Claire decided to go over and help him pack after we saw Jo.”

  “Right,” Diane said. “The same three tee shirts he’s been wearing all summer? That should take, maybe, twelve seconds.”

  “I know. I know. It’s not even like it upsets me, or even worries me that, well, you know. It’s –”

  “You’re jealous,” Diane said. “Hey, aren’t we all? God. They’re just so – alive.”

  It was near four o’clock and, at the public beach, mothers were packing up their coolers and blankets and beach chairs. Cranky, sunburned children trudged through the sand, laden with buckets and shovels, dragging rubber rafts behind them. At the shoreline, a young woman threw a pink rubber flip-flop into the lake for a shaggy, tail-wagging mutt that plunged into the waves and swam after it.

  They headed north, walking at a brisk pace on the narrow strip of flat, wet sand at the water’s edge, skipping sideways to avoid the occasional wave that washed up high enough to threaten their dry shoes. The sun was strong from the west, glittering the water where it slanted down. The rainbow sail of the little sunfish skittering by glowed with it. The wet Petoskey stones shone as if someone had polished them.

  “So, you’re a wreck,” Diane said, when they’d gone a ways. “How’s Charlie doing?”

  Nora shrugged. “You probably know more than I do,” she said. “What does Mo say? He’s not talking to me. Is he talking to her?”

  Diane smiled. “They . . . commune,” she said. “Honestly, do you think two less verbal people ever lived? I shudder to think what would have happened to them if Betty’s fantasy had actually come true and they’d gotten married to each other. Can you imagine it?”

  Nora could, actually – and thought Charlie, at least, would be quite content in a relationship that made such small use of words.

  “I have to drag things out of Mo,” Diane went on. “I swore when I left Bob that I’d never, ever get into those never-say-anything-you’re-really-feeling kind of relationships again. Enough! She hates it, but the truth is I’m good for her and she knows it – though, I suspect Betty feels pretty much the same as Bob’s mother did about me.” She sang a bar of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.”

  “That’s you, all right,” Nora said.

  Diane laughed. “I shouldn’t complain. I sure as hell wouldn’t be closing up the shop early to go walk on the beach if Mo weren’t so careful with her money. I wouldn’t have the shop. She wouldn’t be working for Charlie at minimum wage. Not that –”

  “It’s okay,” Nora said. “I know what you mean. And I know Mo’s a . . . comfort to him. I’m grateful for that.”

  “She doesn’t talk about him,” Diane said. “I’d tell you if she did.”

  “I know that,” Nora said.

  Diane looked at her. “Did something happen between you and Charlie?” she asked.

  Nora shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.” Nothing. That’s the problem. He’s so – quiet. It’s like he’s not even there.”

  “He’ll come around once Claire is gone,” Diane said. “Poor guy. I watch him look at her and, my God, it’s like he’s looking at someone he knows is going to die. And Jo. That’s got to be part of it, too. None of us was prepared for that. What I think is, he’s been hijacked by his emotions and doesn’t have a clue what to do about it.”

  “I do think he’ll be better once she’s gone,” Nora said. “Different, anyway. He has to be. But how are we going to get used to being just us, without her?”

  “You will,” Diane said. “Nora, you will.”

  They walked quietly all the way back to town, both of them lost in their own thoughts. Diane, perhaps, fixing up the apple green room she meant to make for her daughters in her mind’s eye. Nora hoping Diane was right, that life with Charlie would get better once their dread of Claire’s leaving dissolved into her actual absence.

  She fixed an early dinner – fried chicken, tomatoes from the garden, corn on the cob. Warm peach cobbler made from Jo’s recipe. Everything her daughter loved. Claire was beside herself with excitement. She couldn’t wait to meet her roommate, Emily. She hoped she hadn’t forgotten to pack anything. This time tomorrow she’d be there!

  The naked sadness in Charlie’s face made any annoyance Nora had felt toward him give way to the urge to protect him, if only she could. Still, people sent their only child off to college all the time. Of course, it was painful. But they’d be fine. She’d make things fine between them. Claire would leave and make her own life, as all young people must, and she and Charlie would find a new way to be together. People did this all the time, too. They had emotional crises, too, rehashing the past, agonizing over what might have been. Eventually, they got it together and moved on. Which was exactly what Nora meant to do herself. It wasn’t as if she could actually change anything.

  But that night, she lay sleepless trying to imagine how she would go on, what this new life with Charlie could be. The digital clock clicked off two o’clock. Then three. Four. Nora got up, shrugged on her robe and padded down the hallway to Claire’s room, where she stood in the doorway a long time and watched her sleep, Astro curled up at her feet. The room looked cavernous in the moonlight, stripped of its posters and decorations. The floor was unnaturally bare, the usual clutter having made its way into boxes and suitcases, the occasional shopping bag – all of which were lined up in the downstairs hallway, ready to be carried out to Dylan’s truck in the morning. Downstairs, she made herself
a cup of tea, sat down at the kitchen table and picked up the Newsweek Charlie had abandoned there.

  She opened the magazine randomly to a photograph of the Philadelphia swim mom, in prison garb, almost unrecognizable from the beautiful blond woman who’d been arrested months before. Bravely or foolishly, she had spoken out about the impending war, comparing it to Vietnam, and said she did not regret having worked to end that war in the 1960s and ’70s. Someone had to do something then; someone had to do something now.

  It was a sidebar to the major article about Iraq, which reported that seven out of ten Americans supported military action in Iraq; fifty-nine percent were ready to use ground troops. This despite the fact that even some Republicans warned that the President was rushing the country into war; countries who had supported the Gulf War were unwilling to provide staging areas for U.S. troops; and even if Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, it was likely that they lacked the range to be dangerous to American citizens. Not to mention the fact that the Iraqi people had done nothing to bring down the wrath of the United States upon them.

  People saw what they wanted and needed to see. Nora knew that. She had been ignorant about Vietnam until Wayne Dugan forced her to think about what was happening there, until she heard the Marine speak at the demonstration in Dunn Meadow. Even then, she hadn’t wanted to think about it. But after her brother’s death, she had been drawn to the fringes of demonstrations, where she stood watching, listening. Waiting, she realized only later, for the moment when it would be clear what she should do.