you can love me anyway
New song is done. It’s burgundy and ochre with a sort of Day-Glo turquoise bridge—another tattoo on this pathetic, little body. I’m running out of room. I almost called off the Muses’ weekly Sunday afternoon practice, thinking I’d be in the throes of musical whooshing, but the song finished writing its parts and organizing its thoughts by the time the rain stopped.
I’ll teach it to the band this afternoon; they’ll like this one. It’s a Doghouse song, of course. All songs are Doghouse songs now. I can’t even remember what it was like to hear a song that didn’t grab my face and shout at it. Must’ve been soothing. But this is electrifying.
And now, everything is okay: the world is silent except for real things. I hear birds again, cars. When the rain stopped, dog walkers just appeared on the beach, like spontaneous generation—they seemed to rise up out of the sand with their Dunkin’ Donuts coffees and Labs named Bailey. I could hear them talking to their dogs, to each other; it was beautiful. I’m so relieved the song is over and so happy with it that I love the dog walkers. All of them. And the birds and the cars and the damp sunshine.
I hear the song, too, but the sound it makes is inside my head, not outside. It’s only there because it got stuck there, the way any song will if you hear it too many times. Inside means everything is fine.
♋ carnival wig
i won’t be afraid
when my ears ring
and my head spins
Dave is late for practice, so while we wait for him, Tea and Leslie and I pick up cans of spray paint and draw and write with them on the walls of his parents’ attic. This goes on for hours. Dave’s parents are parked at the bottom of the stairs, newspaper and knitting in hand, but no sign of Dave. So the girls and I play spray-paint tic-tac-toe, draw spray-paint portraits of each other and leave spray-paint messages for Dave about how late he is and how we have better things to do than spray paint messages on the wall to him about how late he is.
Eventually, the air is full of paint droplets and noxious fumes, so we have to open a window and lie on the floor for a while. “I bet he’s picking up garbage,” says Tea slowly and deliberately through her dizziness.
I’m also having trouble thinking clearly. “I know he’s picking up garbage.”
“There’s an actual cloud of paint in here,” adds Leslie dreamily.
The Muses’ sound is something of a free-for-all: we can play whatever we want, as long as it doesn’t remind the others of a beer commercial. Dave has embraced this anything-but-suck aesthetic with charming exuberance. He is a classically trained snare prodigy who refuses to play cymbals but is willing to hit just about anything else—hubcaps and mixing bowls, for instance, or whatever he finds in the street on the way to practice. We’ve all watched him get lost in the world of pings and knocks; he definitely loses track of time. Lying on the floor is really all we can do about this. “Are his parents down there?” whispers Leslie. Tea nods.
I lift my head, whispering too. “They weren’t late.”
Leslie looks concerned. “What’s wrong with them?”
“Brain damage.” I let my head drop again. “From paint fumes.”
“They’re proud of Dave,” says Tea. “They like everything he does.”
“So, what, we’re, like, a finger painting taped to the fridge?” asks Leslie.
“Sure.”
I think about this. “That’s amazing.”
“It is amazing,” says Leslie.
“It is.” Tea thinks. “They might still have brain damage, though.”
When he finally appears, Dave has an armload of garbage that will be his instrument for the day. Shaking up a can of spray paint, he begins decorating the garbage. We all groan. “Put that away!” yells Leslie.
“Aren’t you a snare prodigy?” I ask him from the floor, through my headache and nausea. “Why don’t you just play the goddamn snare?”
“Look at this!” he exclaims, holding up a piece of twisted metal and spraying it red.
Sitting up to admire his garbage, I notice that he’s wearing a coat. I’m stunned. “Dave . . . what the hell?”
Dave and I always believed that coats were for wimps who couldn’t handle seasons: “coat slaves.” Geez, people, get a grip! Seasons happen! And that vision was for wusses: people who couldn’t hack the rough-hewn, fuzzy life we lived—slaves to their glasses—when we could play entire shows without seeing anything. It was the only thing we were smug about, really, our ability to live blind and cold.
Then, a few months ago, he showed up at our attic practice space wearing glasses. I felt betrayed, but he was transformed. “Trees have individual leaves, even when they’re far away!” he insisted, his eyes and new lenses shining.
I tried it ’cause I do everything Dave says. I bought black square men’s glasses like Dude wore when I was a kid and I loved them but I wasn’t prepared for vision. Such sharp edges . . . vision hurts. There was a lot of stuff my glasses showed me that I really didn’t want to know about. Plus, in the mirror, without the forgiving Vaselined lens of nearsightedness, my face was disappointing. It had individual pores. “I’d rather navigate in a cloud,” I told him, taking off my glasses. “I like sound. Hearing is an honest sense. I can do without the others.”
“Mmmm . . .” Dave frowned thoughtfully. “It could make us look clumsy, though, to be, you know, bumping into stuff all the time.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “Sometimes we seem illiterate, too.”
He nodded. “I’ve noticed that.”
I put my glasses back on and looked around, wincing. “God, there’s just too much stuff out there. I don’t like being forced to see everything I’m facing.”
“I get that,” he said. “There is too much stuff out there. But maybe some of it’s . . . good?”
♋ flood
my aching eyesight
Dave was right. Dave’s always right. I even bought contacts so I can look at stuff all the time, because he said some of it was good. I pick and choose among visual elements as best I can—have joined the ranks of the glasses slaves. But a coat? A coat? Et tu, Dave?
Dave unzips his coat to show me how it works. “See? We can still wear T-shirts, but if we wear our T-shirts underneath coats, winter won’t hurt!”
“But it’s spring!”
“Winter happens annually, Kris.”
“So?” I whine. “Wear a wig!”
“Seeing turned out to be okay sometimes, right?” he asks gently.
“What?” I whip my head from side to side. “Who said that?”
He sighs. “It’s dumb to live blind and cold when we have tools at our disposal to prevent it. It just weakens us, gives everybody else a head start.”
“Coat slave,” I mutter under my breath.
Dave sits behind his kit, zips his coat back up and reaches for his sticks. “I heard that.” Taking a deep breath, I stand at the mic, focus on the far wall of the attic and start the new song. I forgot what it sounded like; quietly, it had tiptoed out of my head.
So here’s what it sounds like: ugly. Butt ugly. The strange kind of butt ugly—clay molded into some weird shape you’ve never seen before. Organic, yeah, but . . . organic what? And why would you wanna look at it? It’s an owl pellet, a deformed stalactite. But it’s great. This tattoo is wicked cool.
Tea and Leslie sit on their amps, holding their guitars and watching me, the floor in front of them littered with Leslie’s sheet music. Can’t they close their eyes or look somewhere else? Singing is such a dumb thing to do. I guess that’s why normal people only do it in the shower.
Soon, though, the girls’re blotted out by burgundy and ochre, shot through with neon blue-green. When I finish the song, there’s a little freak standing in the middle of the room: a song body, and I’m burning hot. A song may be born of electricity, but it lives as heat. Now I don’t just resent Dave’s coat; it’s actually making me sick to look at it. How can he be cold? He’s just being stubbo
rn.
I look at my friends. They all look back at me, but no one smiles or acknowledges that they’ve heard anything. They just look thoughtful. God, it’s hot. I can’t swim or race out into rain right now, so I suck down a glass of ice water Dave’s mother gave me and it helps. Water is the perfect antidote to the musical desert, the hot, dry, killer-beautiful landscape of songs.
Focusing on the far wall again, I start the song over from the beginning. Two bars in, there is a shattering bang! Sudden gorgeous noise all around me, the sound of three musicians jumping in with six feet. Enormous, crazy big. They play so loud. And somehow, their entrance is timed perfectly. They seem to have worked out their musical responses in their hands, knowing intuitively to bypass their brains: a gut reaction poured through muscles. What kind of love is that? What kind of trust? I watch them as they play, touched and baffled. They work hard, temples throbbing with the effort, locked in to shifting time signatures they’ve never heard before. It’s like I’ve been playing with matches, my bandmates turning my sad little arson into a celebratory bonfire.
Their musical replies are elegant: Dave’s manic snare patterns that mirror my guitar parts plus a hypnotic rolling over the whole kit; Leslie’s complex, melodic bass lines, more like bass leads, first pounding, then airy; Tea’s distinctive guitar parts, neither rhythm nor lead, bouncing off mine, high melodies jumping up above the mix, low ones pushing up from underneath; and then fractured vocals, all mixed up, dancing in and out of rhythm, banging into each other. My bandmates are a freakin’ superteam; look at ’em go.
That Mexican biker was right—it’s muscular. Sun-dappling splashed across the fog I brought to practice. Still not pretty, but at least I’m not alone in it anymore.
♋ honeysuckle
your temples throb with effort
and your notes hit every target hard
There is a phenomenon known as “paradoxical undressing” that affects those dying of hypothermia. Freezing to death, people tear off their clothing as they’re overcome by imaginary heat. Lost in blizzards, on snowy mountains, in frozen forests, their bodies become convinced that they’re burning, not freezing.
Honestly, I’m so shy that I find most contact with people deeply unsettling, but songs—the alive kind in the air, injected with evil from the Doghouse—mean that I’m burning with sound, not frozen with fear. ’Cause they’re my way down to where we all are.
I didn’t ask to go down to where we all are, but as it turns out, I’m a member of a deeply social species in which the only truths worth speaking are the most naked. In other words, I had planned on wearing all my clothes into these freezing woods—songs ask me to wear none.
♋ serene
lose control
But way beyond stripping off clothes, the musical kind of paradoxical undressing strips you down to your bones. And as it turns out, we all have pretty fucking similar bones.
Who knew?
Dude plays guitar for me before school, to cheer me up. I have a school-morning stomachache and can’t finish my oatmeal.
He sits at the table with me and plays “Wabash Cannonball,” “The Cuckoo” and “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” which is not a very cheerful song. It’s about a dead goose and the gander who’s crying because his wife is dead and all the little goslings who’re crying because their mother’s dead. My oatmeal gets colder and colder.
Eventually, I drag myself out the door to catch the school bus, the sad melody of weeping baby geese in my head.
A few hours later, Crane is called to the school because I’m crying behind a bookshelf and won’t come out. “She says she’s crying about a song,” the teacher tells her on the phone, “but I think she might actually be sad about something.”
I have no idea how many times we play it, but when the new song begins to sound realized, we’re completely spent. This one’s so intense, it’s making me overheated and sick. So is Dave’s dumb coat. And the lingering paint fumes. We’re catching our breath before starting again when Dave suddenly stands up and drops his sticks onto the snare drum with a clatter. “Shopping!” he announces. The girls unhesitatingly stand up to leave.
“What?” I ask into the mic.
“You’re getting a coat today,” says Dave.
I freeze. “Unpossible.”
“No,” he answers matter-of-factly, “it’s not. You’ll see.” Checking his watch, he says, “St. Paul’s is still open. C’mon.”
“Only if they come, too,” I say, pointing at the girls.
“I’m not shopping,” says Leslie.
Tea, placing her guitar on a stand, shakes her head. “I have a coat.”
“Aw, come on,” I plead. “Get another coat.”
Leslie holds her bass in its case and waves. “Have fun!”
“Bye!” calls Tea, already halfway down the stairs.
I look at Dave. “I hate shopping.”
“I know you do,” he answers. “Which is why you don’t have a coat, which is why you need to go shopping.”
So Dave and I walk to the thrift store to buy me a goddamn coat. The rain stopped early this morning—it is a warm, glistening, sunny day. Not the sort of day that’d make anybody buy a coat. Days like this make people throw coats away. “I’ll try it,” I tell him. “But only ’cause you said to.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Sometimes you’re right about things.”
Dave nods emphatically. “Yes, I am.”
“But only sometimes.”
His mouth tightens. “Right.”
“I’m not promising anything.”
“No.”
“It’s spring.”
“Yep.”
I look at him. “Even coat slaves stop wearing coats in the spring.”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah.”
“And I’m always hot.”
“I know.”
“And it smells weird in there.”
Sighing, he holds the door open.
While I plow through hundreds of gigantic old-lady coats that smell like mothballs and dust and are too big to fit my car, never mind my body, Dave holds up different combinations of feather boas and golf shirts, asking if they “work.” I say that they all do. He drops his arms to his sides, framing himself in pink and yellow feathers. “You can’t like all of them.”
“I don’t like any of them. I just think they work.” Dave stares at the neon-pink feathers, then the neon-yellow ones. “If that’s the look you’re going for, you succeeded.”
Then he sticks both boas on a hat rack and pulls a big old-man suit off a hanger. I stop plowing through coats and watch as he drapes the heavy brown jacket over his shoulders, pulls on the fat-old-man pants that go with it and walks up and down the aisle.
“Those pants are way too big,” I say, staring. “So’s the jacket. The whole suit is too big. Maybe you should look for a Sunday-school suit in the kids’ section. You look like you raided grandpa’s closet.”
“I did. Just not my grandpa.” He stares at the floor where his feet used to be, then looks over at me. “You should take fashion risks.”
“You shouldn’t wear that, though.”
“Too risky?”
“Too hot.”
“It is hot in here.” He lets go of the suit and it falls to the floor. Stepping out of it, he pulls a small blue wool coat with a fur collar off of a hanger and hands it to me. “Here,” he says, “I got this for you.”
I’m sure that when this coat was made in the forties, it was a fancy item for a fancy lady, but I got it at a thrift store in the eighties and it looks it. It’s ragged and most of the buttons have fallen off. I already looked a little bag lady to begin with—my skirt looks like it was made from curtains, my T-shirt’s torn and grimy. This coat isn’t helping.
♋ marriage tree
like an old man in a dress
treat me like a twelve year old man
I’m practicing wearing my new coat. Driving the Bullet around, all wearing a coat and whatnot. I’m
sweltering, but, as I understand it, that’s what a coat is for, so it’s going pretty well, I guess. Only thing is, nobody else is wearing a coat. The sidewalk people look happy and sunshiny in their T-shirts.
Driving to the Doghouse, I park across the street from it and stare at it through my fur collar, just to think for a minute. That place was a cartoon nightmare. It wrapped me in my own skin, crammed it full of explosives and locked it shut. I couldn’t move when I lived there. Now I can’t be still.
I start the engine. The Bullet shudders and coughs. Stillness is dangerous, anyway; it’s best to keep moving. The engine heaves, then settles into a comfortable rumble and I pull away from the Doghouse.
Gonna head back to Providence, back to Napoleon’s. Gotta find somebody to crash with me under those sad Christmas lights, though; I don’t wanna sleep alone tonight. And I really hope those godforsaken donuts’re gone. At least let godforsaken Fish Jesus be funny again.
I pull my collar up around my face and swelter some more.
♋ fish
lonely is an eyesore
I drag my mother’s wedding dress down the attic stairs and put it on over my jeans and T-shirt so I can watch TV in a wedding dress. The dress is very long; I have to stand on a footstool to keep it from dragging on the ground.
It’s still too long, though, so I get a chair and put the chair on top of the footstool.
Balancing on top of the stool and chair, I spread my white pearled skirts around me and watch game shows. Women scream and cry, but they’re happy.
Rat Girl: A Memoir Page 11
