Joy

by Erin McGraw

  “Manny! Manneeeee!” Right in front of us, Row 4. Five of them. They’ve got glow sticks and a sign done in glitter that reads MEMPHIS MORNING, the lesser of our two hits. I stick a buzz roll in and they shriek like they’re sixteen, which they haven’t seen since Carter was president. “We’re your groupies!” one of them said after the Dayton show. I gazed in despair at her double-knit pantsuit and white walking shoes, and she stuck out her tongue and grinned. They’re loaded when they come to the shows, and they shout all our lyrics back at us. When Jimmy forgets words, he just turns the microphone to them.

  Right now he’s prancing across the front of the stage, pumping his fist and trying to get the rest of the audience to clap along while I hit the cowbell. He’s giving it his all, and his hair streams behind him, gray, fuzzy, and two feet long. “Jimmy!” our groupies moan.

  If one of us was stupid enough or drunk enough to even feel one of these women up, she’d probably hit him with her handbag. We are strictly the extras in the group fantasy these gals are having. When they drive home, they will scream with laughter, tease each other about which of us is hottest, and decide it’s Jimmy. Then they’ll pull up our next date on somebody’s phone and figure out whose car they can take and what casserole to make ahead for their husbands and kids.

  “Rock and roll!” The stage groans.

  The band suffered its own group fantasy when we put together this reunion tour, teetering on two dimly successful songs from 1974, when I thought I had something to say, Jimmy had friends at WXRT, and girls actually did want to hang around and fuck us, for one night, if there wasn’t a bigger star nearby. The whole thing worked when we could tag on to group concerts, and fans waiting for Aerosmith or Queen were willing to spend our set getting high. Both our hits were on Phoenix in Flames, the only record anyone remembers. The second album, Dog Logic, sold less, and the third didn’t even get released. “Boys,” said our manager, and shook his head. We were back on the sidewalk in ninety seconds, the shortest meeting on record.

  The groupie with the curly blond hair is standing on her seat, waving the glow stick in an ecstatic arc over her head while Jimmy saws away on his solo. She’s so drunk, it’s amazing she can stand up. Jimmy—what the hell?—is at the edge of the stage, hauling her up. I glance at Rick, who is making are-you-out-of-your-mind eyes. Jimmy’s got her up on stage now, and she’s waving the glow stick in front of his eyes as if she can hypnotize him. I can tell from here that she’d blow 0.2 in a Breathalyzer. Jimmy pulls her in close to sing the last note with him, and she’s within a couple of octaves. She glances around the stage, beaming as if she’d just won an award, and her co-groupies are scrubbing the air with their glow sticks. The ride home is going to be epic.

  The groupie turns around and grins at me, running her tongue over her wrecked lipstick. Before I can respond, she’s got her shirt off and is flashing her soft, collapsed boobs. The stage cam projects her boobs on the Dinkytron, and for the first time tonight, the crowd roars. She shimmies, holding the boobs in her hands like twin Jell-O molds. Decent friends would be getting her covered. Her friends are whistling and pumping their fists.

  This is all Jimmy’s fault, but she’s making straight for me, boobs wobbling in her hands. When she gets close, she twiddles her nipple, her eyes so glazed they look like melting ice.

  The whole audience is on its feet, stomping and screaming, finally sounding like a rock-and-roll crowd. She’s so close that my sweat splashes onto her floury skin. The first time I glance at her, she’s grinning, but the second time, the grin is fading, and her boobs seem to be melting in her hands, and I won’t be able to take it if she cries. I lean away from the drum set and do a bunch of nine-stroke rolls right on her boobs, keeping the strokes light so I won’t hurt her. The song’s over anyway; it’s not like the band needs me. The crowd goes berserk, but what I watch is her face, waiting for the smile to come back.

  It’s like sunrise. Even her boobs seem to smile. She raises her arms and yells, “Rock and roll!” Nobody but me has noticed that this song is about heartbreak and the impossibility of starting over, “Memphis” a metaphor for what once was. I wrote the lyrics. Nobody remembers that, either.

  She leans toward me with a foxy smile and gestures for me to put my ear down to her mouth. “I’m going to be sick,” she says, and then turns around and heaves like a pro. The Dinkytron catches every drop, and the cheers rock the rafters.

  Rick has always said that no fans should be allowed backstage after the shows, but nobody before has ever wanted to come. We get the shirt back on the blonde, whose name is Nancy, and she stretches out on the cracked couch while her friends rotate around her. “How far do you have to drive back tonight?” Rick asks.

  “Just to Indy. A little over an hour.”

  “More if we have to stop.”

  “There’s that good all-night diner at State Road 38. It has clean bathrooms.”

  Nancy moans. Her face is white as a moon, but at least her friend dabbed the vomit off her mouth with a damp napkin. “She’s going to need some water,” Jimmy says.

  “Bed,” Nancy mutters. She looks like what she is now, every inch of sixty years old, with hips that hurt and a dye job that’s giving out. When she first listened to us she had no idea how a life could dissolve, leaving you with nothing but your own sorry body. That’s why she’s here. I rest my hand on her shoulder and she manages a tiny smile.

  “Don’t go just yet,” Rick says, clicking away on his phone. “I’m comping you all tickets for the Terre Haute show.”

  “I’m not sure—,” one of the friends says.

  From outside in the parking lot, fans are bellowing the words to “Memphis Morning.” They howl like wolves, and somebody yells, “Rock and roll!” His voice sounds torn, and it dissolves into a fit of coughing, but others—his friends—cheer him on.

  “You did that,” I say to our girls. “You’re in the band.”

  L.A.

  I was savagely cranky the morning I met my first single bride. My husband, Bill, had come home at 3 a.m. His job—he got paid for this—was to escort that day’s new talent around West Hollywood and Silver Lake, making sure no paparazzo had the chance to snap her sitting alone or looking bored. Plastered, Bill had giggled when he tiptoed into the bedroom, knocking over the lamp and stepping on the cat’s tail, and when I snapped at him he informed me that the new talent didn’t whine. “I’ll bet she doesn’t,” I said, and locked my mouth tight. While Bill snored all over the bed, I sat rigid in the living room and watched CSI until it was time to go to work.

  Seeing the girl waiting for me at the shop’s front door, I wasn’t as kind as I might have been. She wasn’t to blame for the broken lamp or the cat who was probably still under the bed, but when I said, “How can I help you?” I made the question sound like what I really meant: What the fuck do you want? She looked puffy and bruised, not the kind of rose that usually came into Monica’s Bridal surrounded by a bouquet of cooing friends and cousins and mother, stepmother, grandmother, sister, neighbor, dog groomer, manicurist, and spray-tan applier. This was L.A., and people liked to pile onto each other’s dreams.

  “I want this.” She held up her phone and showed me a disaster of a dress, layers of frosting-white ruffles into which a disdainful model had been inserted. If the soft, terrified girl in front of me tried to put on this dress, she would dissolve into hyperglycemia.

  “That’s special order. When is the wedding?”

  “There isn’t a date yet.”

  “How about a venue? This train is awfully formal.”

  She shook her head.

  I tried for a joke: “You’ve got a groom, right?”

  “He’s coming. An astrologer told me to be ready.”

  For the second time in twelve hours, I closed my mouth before I could say anything more. The girl was trembling. We still hadn’t stepped past the front door. She said, “I’ve looked at a lot of dresses online, and this is the one I want.”

  �
��It’s important to see how a dress actually looks on you,” I said, sinking gratefully into the honed-smooth speech. Bridal shops attract the floridly crazy, and at least once a month we got a girl planning her wedding to Prince Harry, but this girl didn’t have a fake British accent or a smile she flashed for invisible photographers. Nevertheless, she looked wounded, and I blazed with quick fury at the careless men I imagined who had created this shaking child. “Would you let me show you some different styles, just so you can see them on? We can take as long as you want. I want you to have the chance to be surprised. Just like your husband will.”

  “I already know what I want. But we can try on dresses if you don’t have anything better to do with your time.”

  “We have all the time in the world,” I said gently. I hadn’t learned yet that the single brides don’t need special handling. No matter how much they tremble, they are bulletproof.

  I thought that girl was a one-off, bearing her sad, unique brand of delusion, until the next one came in a few months later, and three more since her, girls wearing engagement rings they’ve bought themselves and carrying fabric swatches and dye charts in their purses. Weddings take planning. Venues are sometimes booked two years ahead. No sane girl is going to leave the most important day of her life to chance.

  “Where are you going to live, after the wedding?” I asked another girl.

  The single bride shrugged. “We’ll figure something out.” She savored we, a pronoun she didn’t yet have experience with.

  Bill explains to me after every night he comes in late, which is every night, how nothing happened between him and the new talent. It’s his job to escort her and make sure her needs are tended to. It’s his job to make her look happy in the brilliant Hollywood light. “You wanted to move to L.A.,” he says. Sounding wounded is his long suit.

  “That was my mistake. Now I want to move somewhere sane.”

  “What would I do there?”

  Good question. L.A. fits him like an Italian suit. I’m the one with, he once told a laughing roomful, midwestern values. I grew up in Ohio, like him, and went to a university there, unlike him. We got married in front of a judge, which my mother said wasn’t a wedding at all. I wanted to come to a city. Now Bill’s the happy one.

  “I don’t want a June wedding,” my latest single bride tells me. Her tattoos peek colorfully through the lace across her shoulders. “June brides are a cliché. I don’t want to have to share my day.”

  This one’s name is Isabel. Her cake will have musical notes made of lilac fondant. A backup singer, Isabel is looking for a groom who plays the drums, because drummers have great arms and are more trustworthy than guitarists.

  “What will you do if you don’t find one?” I say around the pins in my mouth.

  “I guess I could go to Nashville, but we’d have to come back here for the wedding. I put a deposit on the reception hall.”

  “He might have his own ideas. There are reception halls in Nashville, too.”

  “This is my special day, not his.”

  For a moment, I think she’s showing a flash of humor, but she is studying her reflection, her mouth firm. “I grew up in Omaha. I didn’t come to L.A. to be like everybody else.”

  “You sound amazingly like my husband.”

  “Does he know any drummers? My psychic told me to ask everyone I meet.”

  “What else did your psychic tell you?”

  “Ask for what you want. Otherwise you’ll always be settling. There’s no reason not to have everything you dream of.” I’m kneeling at her feet, gazing up at her, my mouth full of pins. From this vantage she looks gigantic, a massive, frumpy goddess. “Can we let this out a little across the neck?” she says, and I nod and get to work.

  That night Bill is actually home for dinner, a once-a-week event. When he comes in the door he looks tired, but in his pegged jeans and schoolboy blazer he also looks adorable, and about fourteen years old. I feel a hundred and eight. “We need to talk,” he says.

  “Do you know any drummers?”

  “I’m not even going to ask.”

  “My client wants a drummer. She says she can have anything she wants if she asks for it.”

  “Ha. A million bucks,” he says.

  “Two million. And a Beemer.”

  “Quit thinking so small. A Bentley. And the house to go with it.” He’s finally stepped away from the door and poured himself onto the couch. It isn’t the conversation he’d meant to have, but he’s always taken opportunities that present themselves. It’s why I asked him to marry me. I asked, and he did. “A plane,” he says.

  “Where would we go?” I know my mistake as soon as the words are out of my mouth.

  “Who said anything about ‘we’?” He smiles. The L.A. sunset floods the room in golden light.

  Before

  Like that, he was old. I didn’t recognize him when he crossed the street toward me, my own father. He took one look at my face and put his hand, the scent and weight of a tobacco leaf, on my shoulder. “Oh, honey.” That was before it got bad.

  He used to run two companies, because one company was boring. He used to ski. He never once helped me with my homework, but he let me drive his Corvette from the time I was five. I steered; he worked the pedals. White, red interior, ’61. “I never should have let it go,” he says on the days he remembers it.

  “It burned oil. You couldn’t keep it out of the shop.”

  “Who cares? I had a Corvette. What do I have now?”

  “A Corolla.” Jesus, he should remember at least this one. He complains about it often enough.

  His mind is like a canal lock, letting water rise, then letting it flow out again. Every once in a while a deep-hulled memory comes along, and I let myself be encouraged. He says, “The top of that Corvette must have weighed fifty pounds. By the time I wrestled it off, I’d have to take a shower. Your mother would glance at me and say, ‘Taking the car out, dear?’”

  “She loved it, too.”

  “She sure did. She’d wrap up her hair in a scarf, put on sunglasses, and sit in the passenger seat until I took her somewhere.”

  “Where did you take her?”

  “There was a place that served Polynesian food. Does that still exist?”

  I hurry upstairs and wrap my untidy hair in a gauze scarf, grab some cat-eye sunglasses and, in an inspired moment, Mom’s old driving gloves. She said they made her feel like Grace Kelly. Maybe not the best way to remember her.

  “Hot-cha! Where are you going?” Dad says.

  “With you. We’re going to test-drive a convertible.”

  “Oh, now.” Suddenly he looks insecure, and my heart crumples. Not yet, not yet, not yet.

  The BMW dealership is only a few miles away. I drive us there in the Corolla while Dad fumbles with his seat belt. Miraculously, he’s able to connect the Z4 seat belt on his first try, and he grins at me rakishly. “Let’s go, Pearl!” Who is Pearl? No telling.

  The grin ebbs when I pull out of the parking lot, and by the time we’re in traffic, he’s grabbing the dashboard and arm rest, his face white. I’m only going 30. I get back to the dealership as fast as I can at 30 mph, and he’s sobbing with fright. The s.o.b. salesman who looks like he was up all night doing cocaine says, “A little more than the old man can take?”

  “He used to be a test pilot,” I snap, helping my sobbing father unfold himself from the passenger seat.

  “Sure he did,” the s.o.b. says.

  Back in the Corolla, his tears finished, Dad looks out the safe window and says, “What state have you taken me to?”

  “We’re still in L.A. We never left.”

  “Don’t lie to me. I’m not that old.”

  “There’s the freeway.”

  “That’s not a freeway. That’s—When I was your age, I had girlfriends. You need to bring home your boyfriends. Every girl should bring home her boyfriends.”

  This is almost flattering. He hated my ex, recognizing before I did how brut
ally dull the man was. “Tell me about your girlfriends.”

  He shifts restlessly under the seat belt. The topic sentence is all he’s got.

  He breaks things—the electric toothbrush when it slips from his palsied hand, the blown-glass thimble that was the only pretty thing to come home from my honeymoon. In the light it looked like a green flame. “You shouldn’t have left it on the shelf,” he says when I come in.

  “It’s okay, Dad.”

  “Are you crying?”

  I wasn’t, yet, not really. The tears come a minute later when he looks at the floor and says, “Why is there glass?”

  Every week I throw into the recycle bin pamphlets about health care, residential care, in-home care, outpatient care. My sister calls and says, “Decisions have to be made.” Dad’s old friend Lois calls when he’s napping, and I tell her that he’s fine, just fine.

  The friend who actually visits is Jake, who Dad loves because Jake was a navy pilot and he now has a German shepherd. Jake and the dog hesitate at the front door, and I say, “Come in. Please.”

  At the sound of toenails scrabbling the floor, Dad’s head jerks up. He rushes at the dog and I cry out, but before I can do anything, Dad and the immense dog are rolling on the floor, the dog’s tail, the size of a baseball bat, pounding the floor, Dad’s laughter round and huge.

  Jake says, “I thought he might like this.” His tears fall right onto his dark shirt.

  For an hour after the dog leaves, my father is humming the Air Force Hymn, and then he turns on the news. It’s a good day. “Where are my shoes?” he says as I’m setting the table for dinner.

  “You’ve got them on, Dad. Planning on taking a walk?”

  “Not these. My shoes.”

  They’re his, all right. Ancient Adidas that threaten to split any minute. “These are yours. Nobody else would have them.”