“I had four husbands. Four! All named either Carl or John. That’s my type, I guess. Some women like tall, dark and handsomes, I like Carls and Johns! Carl was a real piece o’ work, though. What an asshole!” She whaps me on the thigh, laughing, and I laugh with her. “Honey, you think you know what’s goin’ on, you don’t! You don’t ever know what’s goin’ on!” She’s beautiful. She laughs again—hoots, her jet-black curls quivering. “We had the prettiest flower garden, though. We lived on Broadway; you know where that is?”
“Yeah,” I point out the bus window. “Right there.”
“Mm-hm!” She looks grave. “Nobody on Broadway has a garden, but we did. I grew daisies and black-eyed Susans. People don’t like daisies—Carl didn’t care for them, but I grew ’em anyway ’cause I do like ’em. And they grow. I tried roses and tulips and they died.”
“Dandelions grow pretty well,” I say as we drive past a bright yellow yard full of them.
“Yes, they do. So they call ’em weeds!” She admires the dandelions going by. “Those pretty yellow flowers! It’s a shame.” She shakes her head.
“At least they don’t know they’re weeds. They don’t speak English.”
“No, dandelions don’t speak English.” She stares out the window and then says matter-of-factly, “That house burned down. The whole thing. At night. I got the kids out of bed and we all watched. It was cold outside, too. The neighbors woke up and made coffee and brought us some blankets to wear. Stuff was explodin’ inside, and people would scream every time stuff exploded.
“Then the newspaper came and took a picture and the police and firefighters were all there. It was in the paper the next day, but in real life? It was covered in ice!”
How awful. “Wow. I’m sorry.”
“Mm-hm. The cat ran away from the fire and didn’t come back, but the refrigerator didn’t burn.”
“I’m ninety-five! Ninety-five years old!” a woman yells at me, her textured face cracking open in an enormous smile as she takes her seat.
Wow. “Well . . . that’s a lot!”
“It’s a lot of years,” she agrees, her dark eyes shining. “Ninety-five today!” she exclaims.
“Happy birthday.”
“Thank you.” Smiling sweetly, she turns to the other passengers. “I’m ninety-five!” she announces to the bus at large, and then says it again to each new person who boards the bus. She repeats “I’m ninety-five!” every couple of minutes for the entire bus ride, shaking her head like she can’t get over it.
Everyone on the bus is grinning; no one looks annoyed. I wonder if she did the same thing when she turned ninety-four or if it’s just the round number that impressed her when she woke up this morning.
Each passenger waves and calls “Happy birthday!” to her as they step off the bus. So do I as we pull up to my stop and I stand to leave. Then she looks up at me, glowing, swelling with pride, and grabs me by the arm. “Once, I was a little girl,” she breathes. “It’s miraculous. A miraculous miracle.”
♋ walking in the dark
i could glow
i could glow and swell
i could, well, grow
I want old ladies to look the way they do on The Andy Griffith Show: change purses and cotton dresses, straw hats with netting, my clunky black shoes. Adorable and creepily religious. They really don’t, though. They can be adorable and creepily religious, but I dress like an old lady—they wear polyester. Polyester space suits sometimes, lots of gold and silver. And baseball caps, with running shoes on their feet.
It must be because clothes fall apart now. Old people on Andy Griffith dressed the way they always did because they still had those clothes—they were made to last. But our old people don’t dress the way they did when they were young ’cause by then, planned obsolescence had kicked in. So they’re forced to buy new clothes and they put them together weird. Lots of “sport wear” and “active gear,” when all they’re gonna do is sit. It’s incongruous.
Mayberry dresses were made for sitting. Sitting on the front porch shelling peas, sitting in church praying for sinners, sitting on the bus talking shit.
A tiny old woman’s tearful eyes flit nervously from passenger to passenger as we drive away from her stop. She wears a baseball cap over her pixie haircut and enormous baubles on her ears. I offer her the seat next to me, which she stares at suspiciously, then, with the motion of the bus, falls into against her will. Smiling weakly, she is attempting to settle herself and her purse when an involuntary noise from a man with Tourette’s sitting in the back of the bus makes her jump spasmodically. She thumps back down on the seat, panting, hand on her heart. When the man makes another sound, she flinches, squeezing her eyes shut, and covers her mouth with her hand.
It does sound like the Three Stooges are sitting back there, but the other people on the bus are used to it. This lady looks like she couldn’t get used to anything. As the bus moves along, she continues to twitch and jump with each sound the Tourettic man makes, over and over again, then looks at me, exhausted. “The Lord smiles on him,” she says gravely.
“That’s good,” I reply, “’cause the bus driver doesn’t.” Each time the poor man makes a sound, the driver looks at him accusingly in the rearview mirror.
“He sinned and the Lord made him sick,” explains the woman. And then smiled at him? What a messed-up god. When someone behind us sneezes, she squeals, then drops her face into her hands.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
“No,” she says, her voice shaking.
“What’s wrong?”
“I have to go shopping.” Her eyes are red and swollen.
“Oh.” I know how she feels. “That’s too bad.”
“Yes, it is,” she nods. “You see, I never, ever leave the house.”
“Never?”
“Nope,” she answers defiantly, shaking her head, lips pursed. “Never have, never will.”
“Oh.” Interesting. “Not even to . . . take a bus somewhere?”
She continues shaking her head emphatically. “I won’t do it and nobody can make me.”
I shake my head along with her. “Why not?”
“Well,” she looks around the bus like she has a secret, then leans in close to me and whispers, “Look what they did to Jesus!”
♋ gazebo tree
bless my baby eyes
don’t you know jesus died?
i’m better off inside
One old lady dies on the bus. She isn’t sitting next to me, but I can see her across the aisle. I watch her finish a bottle of something and go to sleep. When we get to the bus station, there is an ambulance waiting for her, but she’s already dead.
The bus driver looks sad; the other passengers, alarmed.
“Canary in a coal mine . . .” says one.
♋ hook in her head
i saw this lady close her eyes
the bottle slipped between her fingers
and slid along the aisle
I sit on my grandparents’ porch in the dappled Chattanooga sunshine and play records I found in their attic: Sing-along Folk Songs for Children.
Pressing thick plastic disks of bright red and milky blue over the spindle on my little portable record player, I listen to people who’re probably dead now sing scratchily:
“Hi-ho, the dairy-o” . . . “A kid’ll eat ivy, too” . . . “Pop goes the weasel” . . . “The cheese stands alone!”
I’m stunned. This is the music regular kids listen to?
It’s insane.
I’m still.
Not “outer peace,” not pretend-still-ready-to-explode, but soft, planted. “Therapeutic levels” are not the happy ending the soothers implied, though. This state of being is more like a failure of some kind—a failure to thrive. I’m pressed down and ill and that makes me “calm.”
The pills make my hands shake so bad I can’t play guitar, they give me crashing headaches and zits, they make me throw up and pee blood. I’m a different shape now: s
wollen, and I can smell the toxic compounds on my skin—but I’m here. You’re supposed to stay here, right? And play by the rules? That’s the polite thing to do. And I imagine I’m not alone in this. There must be thousands of us, sorta messed up, trying to be like other people instead of how we are.
♋ vena cava
we come
gray and hopeful
Really, I take the pills because if I disappear, then the band won’t get to live in a van and play every night.
The white-noise bells still play sometimes, but I hardly notice them. They keep me occupied while I stare out the bus window, these tones and wind chimes, whistling and waves, that sometimes fold themselves into innocuous melodies. That’s music now: an interplay of gentle noises, still wholly other than me, but now it’s vague, dreamy. Like it was before the Doghouse: floaty angels. Not real pressing or vivid or evil. Arrangements are easy to hear and understand; they’re stretched out and subtle rather than racing by. Syllables slip past unobtrusively. Sometimes I feel like memorizing this gentle music, sometimes I let it float away.
Pills can’t make it stop altogether; that’s sort of encouraging—a miraculous miracle. I listen because I no longer need to smash my hands over my ears when it plays.
I’m still too numb to care about much, but the drug cocktail type of numb is kind. Pills pat your hand and let things be as they are, just like the soothing mental health professionals who prescribed them for me. No cure, just Band-Aids. And acceptance.
They should call these magic beans “shame reducers.”
But then, I guess, everybody’d take ’em.
♋ candyland
don’t look for shame
you’re better off without it
Standing at a pay phone in the pale yellow light of a summer evening, I call each band member, one by one, just to hear their voices. It’s medicine, listening to them talk on the other end of a pay phone—everything they say is sweetness washing over me.
I need it. This has been a bitter month.
♋ silver sun
only sweetness
that’s all
to shake off the bitter
And it sounds like my bandmates’ve been talking to each other in my absence, ’cause they all say the same thing: they tell me they wanna quit school and focus on Throwing Muses. They must’ve thought I disappeared ’cause I was losing interest. “I’m cool with that,” I say. “I don’t have a lot going on right now.”
When I hang up after the third phone call, I stand, staring at the phone, wondering what “focus on Throwing Muses” means exactly. So I start all over again, calling each band member in turn.
“People’re always telling us we’re wasting time in Providence,” explains Tea. This is true, people do tell us that; I never knew what it meant. But by the end of six phone calls, we’re moving to Boston, where, apparently, no one wastes time.
We’ll go apartment hunting together and I’ll call whatever we rent “home.” I can handle that, I think. I’m still now. Turns out there’s just a fine line between belonging everywhere and belonging nowhere anyway.
I used to see my bandmates as my allies in evil, the best devil’s angels our religion could create. Now they seem to clear the air, make everything clean and good—regular angels, forgiving me for the blast of heat I injected into our lives and our sound. ’Cause there’s no devil’s breath in those lungs: Tea, Dave and Leslie smite the disease right out of religious disease and leave only religion. Their energy is forward movement, not downward spiraling.
I watch my shaking hand hang up the phone. Oh, yeah. Lithium tremors. I can’t play guitar anymore.
Sitting on Jeff’ s floor, I run painstakingly through Throwing Muses songs, one after the other, begging my twitchy hands to straighten up and fly right. I’ve been avoiding the guitar because of its creepy powers and I don’t wanna ask for trouble; I just gotta know I can still play, for the band’s sake. When I took the guitar out of its case, I promised myself that the minute I felt charged or evil, I would put it down and walk away.
Turns out I was flattering myself, though, ’cause evil wants nothing to do with this screwed up monster body. My hands shudder and fumble their way through mild approximations of the songs, sticking to the strings, then slipping off the strings, muting ringing tones and then letting ugly notes ring when they should’ve been muted.
Syncopated rhythms are particularly embarrassing; they just sound like stuttering fragments. They trip, slip and fall. Eventually, I put the guitar back in its case, wondering why the devil hast forsaken me and how I feel about that. “Goddamn it,” I mutter.
Jeff is sitting on his bed, reading and eating pastry out of a box. The lizards are frozen forever on their canvas casket above his head. No one ever bought that particular painting. “Done?” he asks.
“Nope. Finished.” I lean back on the guitar case.
“That all sounded funny,” he says helpfully. “Maybe you do too many drugs.”
I sigh and talk to the lizards instead of him—it’s hard not to look at them. “Yes,” I answer. “Yes, I do.”
Jeff nods, chewing. “Want some?” he asks, holding out the pastry box.
I shake my head, still staring at the lizards. “I have to learn to play guitar and do drugs at the same time.”
“It can’t be that hard,” he says, finishing the pastry and closing the box. “Some of the dumbest guys I know do it.”
My brother and I sit in the backyard, trying to build hay bales out of grass clippings, mimicking the real hay bales we see beyond the barbed-wire fence at the edge of our yard.
It’s frustrating. The hay bales themselves are perfect: tawny, bristly boxes stacked in pyramids. Our grass bales are all different shapes, none of them nice. They look like something a cow spat out.
“Make your fingers work,” my brother says accusingly. “Then make my fingers work.”
The summer people out the window are glistening. Cars shine, even the sidewalk shimmers. This bus is taking me to Betty’s house, or thereabout. Wherever I feel like hopping off, I can find my way to Betty. ’Cause I know the island by heart, but also ’cause it’s not a very big place. As long as I’m willing to melt on the shining sidewalk with the tourists—it’s hot out there. I’m glad I’m not Burning Me anymore; I’d be catatonic in this heat.
Betty has a party every Fourth of July and I figure this is a good opportunity to deliver what she might see as bad news. Throwing Muses moving to Boston will not make her happy, but at parties, Betty’s surrounded by admirers and in sparkle mode, so it shouldn’t make her too unhappy. It’s foreign to me, this desire to have a bunch of fawning party guests hover around you, but that kind of loving attention is something she seems to crave. Probably Hollywood asserting itself again. Betty loves to adore and be adored.
I haven’t seen her in such a long time. I’m a bloated, vague, shaky me, with zits and a goddamn snake bag, but I gotta see her; I miss her. I’m lonely without her. And loneliness, I’m thinking, may be a sad little first step toward recovery.
♋ summer street
one lonesome body
one lonesome song
no lonesome body
no lonesome song
Betty lives in whiteness. Her walls are white, her sofa’s white and her carpet’s white. Betty’s hair is white tonight. And the flowers she’s spread everywhere. It’s a blinding lifestyle that she lives. She says it’s “calming.” I think it looks like a dentist’s office.
The front door is open, so I step inside. When Betty sees me from across the room, she wells up, walks slowly toward me and envelops me in a long, tight hug. Does she greet all her guests this way? She says nothing, just steps back to look at me, holding my hand, then walks into the kitchen, wiping her eyes. Betty is so Betty.
She often does a slow degrade at parties: sparkles and then collapses. It’d be nice if the party-guest love drug would keep her blood flowing with self-esteem long enough for her to feel happy forever, b
ut I know she’ll be crawling her way back up to okay tomorrow, praying for fans to hide from.
I have to wait out the initial blast of Entertaining Betty and then grab her for a conversation before Collapsing Betty kicks in. Sitting on one of her white couches, holding my bag, I watch her flit from guest to guest, laughing, hugging. When I notice her moving from stage two (flirtatious) to stage three (humming), I know I have to grab her before she starts singing, because the songs she sings will trigger memories and those memories will trigger collapse. Quickly, I take her aside and tell her I’m moving to Boston with the band, that she’ll have to do school alone next year. She covers her mouth with her hand, looking horrified: horror-movie horrified. She stares at me like I’m the Blob. “But sweetheart!” she cries. “Oh no, you can’t!”
I’m alarmed. “It’ll be alright,” I say gently. “Father McGuire’ll buy your coffee.” Tears pour down her cheeks. How does she do that? “Oh no!” she gasps.
I’m not sure she ever did quit drinking. She sure seems drunk; I hadn’t planned on her making a scene. Nervously, I glance around the room. People with cocktails in their hands glare at me suspiciously, like I’m hurting their queen.
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