We stood on the sidewalk, the city sweeping past us, and glancing over at Henry, I could see sweat beading on his forehead. He gripped my hand tighter.
“So much to see, huh?” he said, laughing uncomfortably. I watched him check his old wristwatch, the crystal long since broken. “Well?” he asked.
“Let’s go to the park,” I said.
He nodded. “Sounds good.”
With several hours before we needed to be at Chloe’s house, we strolled north along Madison Avenue, our hands growing sweaty, and as we passed by giant flagship stores and chic little boutiques, there was the desire to go in and look at the dresses, suits, shoes, books, scarves—all those things we could not and would never find in Little Wing. And yet, standing before the shop windows in our sneakers and shorts, sweating, Henry in his battered Milwaukee Brewers cap, there was also the notion that perhaps we were better off pounding the pavement, stopping at food carts and shaved ice carts, rubbernecking the people and buildings. We had only a general idea where the park was and where we had come from, and were terrified and too embarrassed to ask for directions. So we wandered.
In the park, Henry removed his shirt and we sat on it, watching the joggers and jugglers, the young families and dog people throwing frisbees.
“I’m going to take a nap,” I told Henry, my head in his lap. I threw an arm over my eyes to shade out the light.
“Do you want my hat?”
“No,” I said. “That thing reeks. You need to wash it.”
“Naw,” Henry said, “I could never wash it. That’d be sacrilege.”
* * *
While the rest of us doggedly plowed our way through college or two-year technical schools, Lee was forming short-lived bands, traveling the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic, playing bars, fraternity parties, and talent competitions. Word came back to us every so often that he was picking up momentum, that some record label or another was interested in signing him, that a celebrity had seen him play in Chicago, or Boston, and dispensed some champagne-and-caviar advice, but it never seemed to pan out and every year was another year Lee grew older, and the notion of his musical success seemed less and less likely.
His friends, Henry included, understood. They were defensive of him, of his dream. In crowded dorm rooms and in smoky off-campus apartments smelling of spilled beer and stale bong water, they played his demo tapes to strangers, people we hadn’t grown up with, people whose parents didn’t clip out every positive newspaper article, every wishy-washy concert review ever published about Lee.
“He’s going to be famous,” they’d say. “You hear that? You hear what he just did there?” I can still see Henry, going over to the stereo and rewinding a few bars of music, turning the volume up, and then hitting Play. “There.” He’d point at the speakers. “And there again. Do you hear that? You’re not supposed to play the guitar that way. You take guitar lessons or go to Juilliard or some shit, they’ll beat that right out of you. But the thing is, that’s Wisconsin. That’s winter, right there.”
After college, Henry and I split up for a while. This is a polite way of saying that we wanted to have sex with different people, though our timing never seemed to be quite in sync back then. When I loved him, he was interested in Tara Monroe or Rachel Howe. Whores, I thought at the time. Likewise, when he was in love with me, when he wanted me back, there were months when I thought I might prefer Cooper Carlson or Bradley Aberle. Or Leland.
Lee had just broken up with his band, a group of guys who weren’t from Little Wing, but from the nearby town of Thorp. They had grown tight together, even toured in Germany, France, and England. They were close to honing, calibrating a sound of their own, something new, something that at first I didn’t like or couldn’t appreciate. It didn’t sound like Lee’s music, or at least not anything I recognized as Lee’s music. It was cold, lonesome, and discordant. The best I can describe it is the way sound travels in winter, when everything is cold and still. How, at first, there is no sound. You can’t imagine anything living or moving around. And then, after you tune your ears, after you wait, you begin to hear the crows in the treetops, the barely perceptible sound of their flight, their wings on the crystalline air. And then more: a far-off chainsaw, a motor idling, ice forming, creek water burbling past that ice, icicles dripping, birdsong. Layer all those tiny noises beneath Lee’s sad, sad falsetto, and you had an anthem for our place on earth.
He was depressed, living in a rented room, in a huge farmhouse outside town. No one had seen him; he wasn’t coming into town, he wasn’t drinking at the VFW. He was living like a coyote, out on the margins. And I wasn’t talking to Henry, so I heard none of the intimate reports I normally would. But then a letter came to my parents’ house, addressed to me, though I’d moved to Wabasha, Minnesota, after graduation.
“I could hardly read the envelope,” my mom said. “It looks like a kid addressed it.”
“You didn’t open it, did you?” I asked nervously.
“Should I have?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll be home next week. Please put it in my old room.”
That next week, I drove home in my old Pontiac, the heater close to dying. I had to drive wearing my parka, mittens, and hat, a layer of long underwear beneath my clothing, just in case, and on the coldest evenings I frequently had to stop the car and scrape the windshield because the defroster was so useless. I was working two jobs in Wabasha: answering the telephone at a hair salon and in the evenings, waitressing at a fried chicken and beer bar. My hair always stank of fried chicken grease, even though the stylists gave me all their free samples of designer shampoo and conditioner.
“Honey,” they would say, “most of us buy expensive perfume to get the right guy. You’re the only one we’ve ever met who is trying to catch the dudes going around smelling like a bucket of extra-crispy wings.”
I don’t remember that time of my life, that so-called freedom, as being particularly happy. I was living in a studio apartment, eating for free at the bar at night, neck-deep in credit card debt, and working around a salon full of female egos all day long.
“Hey, Fried Chicken,” they’d joke, “how’s that college education treating you now?”
Or,
“Who majors in English? Couldn’t you speak English before college?”
If I met men, it was at the bar. Men working the railroad, married men, many-times divorced men, sad men, old men. Most of the time, they treated me with respect. Some I got to know pretty well, what drinks they favored, what sports teams they wanted to follow on the corner televisions, whether they’d had a good day, or a bad one. Some nights, though, I was treated a little more shabbily. My ass would get pinched, some guy with a wedding band would leave me his telephone number on a receipt, or a hotel key and a condom beside it. But that didn’t happen too often.
All just to say: I was happy to be returning to Little Wing for a weekend of my mom’s cooking, for free laundry, a respite from the bar. And an envelope from Lee waiting for me. Keyed up to open his letter, and excited to be out of Wabasha, I drove the Pontiac recklessly, slipping on black ice, swerving away from raccoons and wayward deer. After pulling into my parents’ humble one-lane driveway, I waited inside the car a moment, collecting myself. I could see my mom’s face peeking around the drapes, then again from the front door, where she stood, waving at me, her slippers pointed out into the chill of the night. I pulled a laundry basket from the car, my toiletry bag atop it, and walked up the front path toward her.
“Hey Mom,” I said.
“So good to see you,” she said, hugging me, though my arms were full and I could not return the embrace.
“Mom, let me put this stuff in the wash real quick while I’m thinking about it.”
“Oh, you let me do that. Go find your father. I think he’s in the living room.”
I shut the door, happy to be inside that familiar house, its smells and drafts and sounds so much the fabric of my life. I removed my shoes, rubbed my feet against
the thick brown hallway carpeting. Mom had clearly spent hours getting the house in order for my arrival. I could see the lines of the vacuum sweeper in the carpeting, could see that all of the candles burning in the dining room were new and tall, that from the oven gasped rich food smells. Casserole, I knew, of course. Hamburger, corn, onion, ketchup, and cheese casserole.
“Hey Dad,” I said.
He sat in his chair, reading the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram. The television was muted, but I knew that Dad liked to look up from his paper occasionally to monitor the world, now and then turning the sound up to listen to the weather report, or sports scores. The rest of it depressed him to tears, he said, that’s why he would never move away from Wisconsin.
“Hey pumpkin,” he said, rising from his chair to kiss me. I hugged him fiercely. “You smell good,” he said. “What is that? Like some kind of expensive lavender shampoo? Burdock? What is that?”
I looked at him. “You have to be kidding me, right?”
“No, you should tell me what it is, so I can get a bottle for your mother.”
“Seriously. You’re fucking with me, Dad.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m not screwing with you. I like the way you smell. See if I compliment you again.”
I slumped into a chair. “God, I love this house.”
He looked over the V of his newspaper and then settled his eyes on me. “You all right, kid? You look a little tired. How’s Henry? You guys still incommunicado?”
“Dad.”
“What? I’m not allowed to ask?”
“I’m just not in the mood.”
“Well, I don’t know what you birds call it these days, but I wouldn’t experiment too long. I think you might regret losing him.” He smiled at me, turned the pages of his paper, and then held them up again, like a blind between us. “Dads know these things.”
I sighed heavily. Mom appeared from the basement, where I could hear the washer, the water sloshing, the air already heavier and filled with the smell of soap. “Hot dish?” she asked.
After dinner I indulged them, revealing only the highlights of my recent employment history while also motioning toward brighter prospects on the horizon. Possibly graduate school in Minneapolis or Madison. Maybe a paralegal program in Milwaukee. It felt like a job interview, like my mom was actually interrogating me for a newly open position as her adult daughter. She smiled at me, took my hand, told me how proud they were. I kissed them both good night and went up the stairs to my room. Moments before I had feigned sleepiness, but now my body felt electric. The letter was sitting on my bed, Lee’s handwriting one rectangular smear of graphite. I lay on the bed, ripped open the envelope, and read.
He hadn’t talked to anyone since coming back. He felt like a failure for the band’s dissolution. He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know about the new music he was making. He was lonely. He was considering giving it up and applying for college. He was thinking about a normal job. He was thinking about moving away. A telephone number was scrawled beside PS at the very bottom of the page, as if an afterthought.
I folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope. I went to the bathroom, showered, and stared at myself through a smudged porthole of clean glass in the otherwise foggy mirror.
I was, he was, we were all in that peculiar rut of our midtwenties, when just enough of our friends or classmates had found some measure of success, so that it taunted those of us who hadn’t. Kip was down in Chicago and already he was living in a huge condo in the John Hancock building and had season Cubs tickets and a vintage Mustang that he drove along Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue, the ragtop pulled back so that the quartz obelisks of the city’s skyscrapers swam above him. Eddy and Henry had gone down for a weekend and come back with tales of Brooks Brothers suits, five-hundred-dollar steak dinners, and Northwestern coeds who looked like runway models, ballerinas, or the heirs of a social stratum many castes above our own. Kip, I was told, served a martini to a young woman using her high-heeled shoe as a flute.
I dressed quickly, dried my hair, stuffed Lee’s letter in my pocket, and readied myself to find him. In the kitchen, I dialed the telephone number, holding my breath while I listened to the rings. I could hear my parents moving clumsily around the floor above me, like livestock.
“Hello?”
“Lee?”
“Beth? That you?”
“Yes,” I exhaled. “I got your letter. Want a visitor?” I noticed my fingers playing with the cord, winding it around my wrist and knuckles, until the fingers turned white.
“Yeah, come on over. Can you find it okay?”
“I’ll find it,” I said.
Mom caught me at the door, struggling to put on my winter boots.
“I thought you were tired,” she said, crossing her arms. “It’s almost ten o’ clock.”
“I know, Mom,” I said. “I just have to go check on something.”
She raised her eyebrows at me. “When should we send out the search parties?”
I stood and reached for the doorknob. “I’ll be home for breakfast.” I gave her a peck on the cheek.
“You need to take a shower to go check on something? And perfume?”
“Mom.”
“Watch those roads.”
I didn’t know what I was doing, except that I was curious, that I was also lonely, that I wasn’t constrained by anyone or any relationship, and driving in my rusty Pontiac in subzero temperatures, one headlight out, I couldn’t feel the cold. Cold, my dad always told me, is all psychological, all in your head. I could hear him: “People in Florida think that sixty degrees, fifty degrees is cold. The key is good socks and a good breakfast. But more than that, the key is being happy. And more than that, the biggest key is working hard.”
I ground my heel into the accelerator and drove through the night, out into the country. Lee had sketched me a map, indicating my parents’ house with an asterisk, or maybe a star, his own address with an X.
The night was bright with starlight and the searchlight of a nearly pregnant moon. I pulled onto the gravel driveway and a dog began barking. It sounded like the loudest noise in the world. I parked the Pontiac beneath an ancient oak tree and checked my reflection in the mirror. I could hear the dog’s claws against the ice and gravel, coming toward me. Too excited to be frightened, I stepped out into the night.
It was one of those giant old yellow-cream brick farmhouses surrounded by winter fields of stubble corn and snow. It can be difficult to find the front door of such houses, when in every direction the house faces fields and the infinitely straight grid of county roads. Those old American four-squares are inevitably wrapped in deep porches and always without a doorbell or mailbox. I noticed a few windows going from dark to light above me, and curtains being pulled aside at the bottom corners. Eventually, I found what I took to be the front door and knocked.
Lee answered, and I breathed a deep sigh, smiling at him. He smiled back as he motioned me in. “Shush,” he scolded the dog. “Come in or stay out,” he whispered to it. The dog wagged its tail and slipped into the house.
“Yours?” I asked.
“Naw,” he said, giving me a hug, “It’s Joaquin’s. He lives upstairs too. So you got my letter?”
I almost patted my back pocket, but instead nodded, unsure what else to say. “Show me where you live.”
An old woman padded out of the kitchen in a pink muumuu, her long white hair a cape behind her trailing down just above the backs of her knees. She wore tortoiseshell glasses and clutched a cup of what smelled like chamomile tea. She smiled at us.
“I made a bed up for you,” she said.
“Mrs. Cather,” Lee said gently, “this is my sister, Beth. Beth, Bea Cather.”
I looked at him, confused at first, and then catching on. “Pleasure,” I said, extending my hand. He nodded and winked at me, gamely.
She set her tea down on a coffee table littered with National Geographics and took my hand in both
of hers, and they were trembling, birdlike little hands, blue-veined, warm, and dry. She looked at my red-cheeked face with watery eyes. “Your brother plays beautiful music,” she said. “He’s the finest guitar player I’ve ever heard.”
“Oh, Bea,” Lee said, laughing, “come on, now, don’t embarrass me.”
“No,” Bea said, pointing a finger at him, “he’s too modest. Was he always that way? So humble, I mean?”
“Always,” I said, nodding theatrically. “Nothing is ever enough with Lee.”
“Well, I suppose maybe that’s a good thing,” Bea said. “Nothing more unattractive than a blowhard. My first husband was like that. He could spend all day telling you that his farts didn’t stink. Gets to the point where you just tune it out.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “Leland said you might be tired from your traveling, so I made up a bed for you. It’s in the room next to mine. I didn’t want you upstairs, near all the boys. Those Mexican men, I tell you. Hard workers, all of them. And fine accordion players. But they all fancy themselves Casanovas too. If I was twenty years younger. Anyway. It is a pleasure to meet you. That brother of yours is an angel.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Good night, Bea,” Lee said.
“Good night, darling,” she called, mug back in hand, her slippers scuffling along the old wooden floor.
“Casanovas?” I asked.
“Uh, yea. Bea rents out the whole top floor to farm workers. So I share a bathroom with them—Joaquin, Ernesto, and Garcia. And they do like the ladies. It’s true.”
Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel Page 9
