by Erin McGraw
“I know you weren’t, Joyce.”
Tears crowded her voice. “This is what I saw. They all were coming to church, so many people. I couldn’t play well enough for them. They needed someone good, and what they had was me.” She tucked her hands under her thighs.
“You were exactly good enough,” I said, the words I was supposed to say. “You were what brought them. They wanted you.”
“That is not possible,” she said.
I put my hand on Joyce’s knee, pants that probably haven’t been washed in a month, and felt the alarming warmth of skin beneath. “You understand what happened, don’t you? You were rewarded for giving what you have in worship. You were given a vision.”
“I am crazy,” she said. “And you’re seeing it.”
“You are blessed.”
“So blessed that you want me to play on Sunday?”
It took a while for her to go home, tears still rimming her eyelids. After I hear her car leave the parking lot I walk away from the organ, an instrument I don’t think Joyce will want to touch again, and go back into the worship space. No noise troubles me other than my firm footsteps on the rug. I sit for a while in one of the pews, looking toward the lectern where I usually stand, but nothing feels strange. I won’t tell anyone about Joyce. She wants her vision to be a secret, and so do I.
Easing out of the pew, I press my cheek to the cool wall. I have never seen hundreds of people in this church. One Christmas, we got ninety-seven envelopes in the collection basket, our all-time high. I have done my best to be sincere, and to give voice to God. I have given this my life.
The plaster under my cheek has grown warm. I turn back to face the empty church, clear my throat, and say, “‘For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability.’” The words fall to the floor. I can preach all night if I want to.
“Who among us hasn’t wanted to be given five talents? We know all about one talent, or even two. Who gets five? I’d like to meet that person. I’d like to know what it feels like.”
Happiness
When her daughter is finished trying on clothes, Mrs. Bryant watches the young woman head out to the parking lot, then comes back to the dressing room and tries on every piece her daughter just discarded. She judges her arms in the silk tank, her butt in the Japanese denim jeans, alert for sag or pull or dimpling. I make no comment when she cries. She’s probably forty-five, could pass for thirty-five, wants to be twenty-five.
The other sales clerks circle Mrs. Bryant, who is blood in the water. One day, when I wasn’t working, another clerk sold her $2,000 worth of denim she will never, ever wear. “We’re not running a charity here,” said the other clerk. Not at Barneys prices, we’re not.
Mrs. Bryant’s hair shines like ice over her shoulders. Her bras and panties match; when Mr. Bryant undresses her he finds a lovely little package. The wallet inside her handbag costs as much as my monthly rent. These are not reasons to hate her. When she comes into the store she looks as dazzled and lost as a child. This isn’t a reason to hate her, either.
I’m not normally a nice person. Once I sold a girl a pair of $1,800 Manolos that were a full size too small; she was already limping when she posed in front of the mirror. “Look at how they lengthen your legs!” I said.
A customer looks at a pair of shoes and thinks about the night they would mean—the party they promise, the pictures, the life. I help her see that life, and then I embellish it, because it’s my job to see more than she does, and to increase her joy.
Mrs. Bryant doesn’t see a new life. She drags in her daughter, who flees after half an hour. Her daughter started college, then stopped, and now has started again. “I don’t know what she wants,” Mrs. Bryant says. Her daughter’s first major was something like economics, or maybe computers. The new major at the new college is foreign relations, which Mrs. Bryant can remember because her daughter keeps bringing foreigners home.
“I’m not very smart,” Mrs. Bryant confides. “So I have to look good.”
“You’re right,” I said. She’s already trying to see the future, making plans. That makes her smarter than most of our clients, who can’t imagine seeing past tomorrow.
Mrs. Bryant doesn’t know my name. After all this time, this embarrasses her. Every once in a while she takes a stab, murmuring Linda or Sharon. It’s Emma.
Yesterday, while admiring her in a cocktail dress with a back so low the fabric looked as if it would slip right off in a shining puddle, I said, “I have breast cancer.”
“This would be a good dress for you to wear. No one would be looking at your front.”
“But I don’t go anywhere I could wear that dress.”
“Wear it to work,” she said. She left without buying anything, but she’ll be back. I haven’t worked here for seventeen years for nothing.
None of the other sales clerks know that I’m sick. Treatments will start soon. I’ve bought a wig and told my oncologist that the most important thing is suppressing nausea. “I can’t go darting out of the dressing room during a fitting,” I said.
“You can’t expect to keep working,” she said. “Soon the fatigue will just be too great. You need to make plans.”
“You’re a size 6, aren’t you? But such a lovely, long torso. You should come in. I have a blouse that will look like it was made for you.”
“You’re trying to change the subject.”
“Do you want me to hold the blouse for you?”
A different sales clerk would have flattered her and called her a 4, but my way is better. Soon she will trust me, and then she will stop talking about me not going to work, where I can find clothes for her and hide them from the other clerks.
I’ll be able to lie down when I get home. There’s no one in my apartment who needs anything. The husband left when I told him to, with a minimum of fuss. The boyfriend proved stickier. He liked having an apartment with clean windows.
“No kids? Really?” We met at a cocktail party, which I thought meant that he often went to cocktail parties. I was still young, and dumber than Mrs. Bryant. I didn’t know that he was an electrician, a project of the hostess, and when I did find out, an electrician seemed exotic. He was handsome, of course. Projects are.
“Is that strange?”
“Don’t you want some of you to be in the world after you die?”
“I think the world has all of me it needs.”
Later he would agree, but first we had to get through the bagels in bed, and then the brittle texts, and then the money. “It’s easy for you,” he said. “You don’t have children.”
I had clean windows and a stocked refrigerator. A drawerful of plunging, painful bras that I bought thinking of him. Soon they will be useless.
“Do you have someone you can rely on, who will get groceries for you on days you can’t get them for yourself?” the doctor asked.
“Of course.”
“I’ll need the phone number,” she said.
I gave her Mrs. Bryant’s number, the only one I have memorized. I call it twice a week with news of sales and new shipments. “Just ignore any calls from the hospital,” I’ll say, and she will.
She’s coming to the store this afternoon. I’ve brought rolling racks into the dressing room and arranged clothes as she does in her own closet, white to black, spring to winter. The clothes are youthful and for three hours I will have to think of nothing more than how they rest against her lovely skin.
Before she can touch a single blouse I will ask, “Would you care for a beverage?” This is what happiness is. I create it.
Dogs
Rain makes the job harder. Roxie, the big Newf mix, would happily walk in a hurricane, but nervous Jackson won’t even let me put his collar on if there’s thunder within fifty miles. Every dog that gets wet has to be washed, meaning that I come home smelling like dog shampoo, a point Mom m
akes. She had different hopes for my life.
We used to fight—when high school didn’t work out, and then college. The office-skills training course. The paralegal training, the medical assistant’s degree, the New Attitudes section at Macy’s. “Is it drugs? Is that the problem?” she said. “No,” I said, which wasn’t quite a lie. I would have flunked all of her intended careers no matter what, though I admit the weed helped. She looked at me and saw potential, which is a mother’s right. I looked at myself and saw a train that had already arrived at its station.
Every day has a specific order, to accommodate the owners’ schedules and the dogs’ needs. Within those stipulations, though, I have a little leeway, and I make sure my workday ends with Hairy and Chester. Hairy and I have been working on a new trick; I say, “Who’s Hairy?” and he rockets into my arms. At fifty pounds, he’s a substantial rocket, and more than once I’ve landed on my ass, the ecstatic dog licking my face. It’s like being licked by a mop. We both love it.
If I like a dog, we work on tricks. The owner doesn’t need to know. Everybody wants me to spend time with their dog, not just blast through a ten-minute walk; part of the exclusiveness of my service is the guarantee that I’ll spend at least half an hour with every dog—no TV, no texting. I’ve taught dogs to walk on their hind legs, to clap their paws when the doorbell rings, to sit every time the refrigerator door opens. I taught Otis, a seventeen-year-old shepherd with glaucoma and hips that had turned to concrete, to wag every time I said his name. When he died, I cried all weekend.
“Sometimes animal trainers go to Hollywood. They work on movies and TV shows,” Mom said.
“I walk dogs. Nobody in Hollywood is going to care about that.”
“You could try. Ambition doesn’t cost anything.”
Ha.
I used to draw. It was the one thing I was good at in high school, and the only class I could stay awake in. As soon as the teacher started talking, I was nodding along. Shape, line, negative space—I got it. At lunch I stayed in the art room, still drawing, still silk-screening, still doing whatever we were doing. The first teacher, Mrs. Ramos, told me I was good. The second one, Mr. Lennox, told me to enter a contest. “I’m not going to do it for you,” he said. “But this is where you belong.” So I sent six sketches to a statewide competition that would have given me a scholarship. Looking back, I wonder what I would have done with it, but the question didn’t come up. The sketches came back crumpled; someone had scrawled “Promising?” at the bottom of one.
“Who’s Hairy?” Boom.
Chester is amiable and lazy, and has no interest in learning to sing on command or vault over the sofa. Neither does Duke, the fat papillon who still hasn’t, at age five, figured out the rudiments of saving his pee for outside. The dogs who are fun to train are the ones who know the sound of my car after they’ve heard it twice. They lie down and wait when my phone rings. As soon as they learn a trick, they start embellishing it, like the Doberman who bounced on the end of the diving board to get extra height, then turned around in midair before he hit the pool. He had to do it three times before I understood that he was showing off.
I would tell my mother about that Doberman, but the story would make her sad. Sad is where she has lived since her stroke. Her speech is still the same, but she can’t walk anymore, or lift her hand high enough to comb her hair. I do it for her, every morning and often at night, too. She says, “Do you think there’s a God?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“I do. And he hates me.”
I keep combing. Maybe if Dad was still home, he could have found a way to soothe her, but he ran off years ago, when people at his church found out about the secretary and the missing money and the mission he wasn’t really funding in Uganda after all. Mom called that his pastoral trifecta.
Once, after he and Mom quarreled, he took me for a walk—nowhere in particular, just walking to be walking. We walked so far that my legs gave out, and he carried me home. I relived that memory until I wore it out, but sometimes it still comes back to me, his heavy hands gripping my legs. If I knew where he was, I would fly to him.
Mom knows that. Every once in a while she says, “When your father was still in Florida”—or the Caribbean, or Brazil. He bilks other parishes in her stories, and fathers other children. That might all be true. She tells me these stories with an expression of sorrow, but the stroke left her face twisted.
I do my best with her, though I can’t make her hair as pretty as it used to be, and she prefers Meals on Wheels food to mine. Once I was helping her out of the tub and she pushed my face away from hers. “You smell,” she said. “I’m glad your father isn’t here to see this.” No telling which of us she was talking about.
I help her with physical therapy in the evenings. The doctor is still hopeful that Mom might regain a little bit of movement, but only with exercise, which Mom hates. I stand beside her bed and say, “Lift your arm just a little, Mom. Just an inch.”
“Why?”
That’s a stumper. She’s never going to be able to comb her hair. She can eat only by dropping her mouth to the edge of the plate and pushing food in, which she prefers to being fed. “You must love this. I eat like a dog,” she said last night. I didn’t tell her that I loved her, because she didn’t want to hear it.
Instead I said, “Just an inch.” When she managed it, I didn’t tell her how well she was doing or praise her progress. I know how training works. I said, “More.”
Job
After the last show, when the passengers demand “Shout” like they always do, Raoul comes to his cabin next to mine and listens to “Giant Steps” eight times in a row. He’s a kid, and he still thinks he’ll have a life that will let him play Coltrane.
Cruise musicians are supposed to be kids, and this job is great for them. They learn ten words in ten different languages, and they get to try out sex in every port. For a horn player with fresh ink on his music B.A., a cruise-ship gig is a step into the land of professionals. For a sixty-two-year-old guitarist perched on a stool in the Cool Brews Lounge singing “Fire and Rain,” every day is ground glass in the soul.
I knew roadies for the Eagles. I knew J. D. Souther.
There’s a girl on this cruise who comes to hear me every night. It’s been a while since once of these. She looks like she’s sixteen, and I’m waiting for her father to introduce himself. The first few days, when we were out of Piraeus and heading for the islands, she just listened. Now she knows my set list and asks for “Fire and Rain” or “Take It Easy” night after night. The songs her parents listened to. Grandparents. She has light brown hair long enough to sit on and big, cowlike eyes. When I play “Yesterday” before my second break, she smiles at me as if we’re in on a joke together. All I can think of is banging her until the whole ship rattles, which is why I make sure we never spend one second together that isn’t in the company of fifty people.
“Where did you grow up?” she asks. The bartender will serve anybody out of diapers, so she’s drinking a margarita. I’m drinking a Coke.
“California.” I smile but resolutely do not ask where she’s still growing up. This is not a friendship.
“How long have you been playing on ships?”
“Since before you were born.”
She dips a finger into her margarita and rubs the salty rim of her glass. “You don’t need to be afraid of me.”
“Yes, I do,” I say, and she smiles.
Her favorite song is “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” which cannot be played by a solo guitarist. By Mykonos, our fourth night out, I’ve written an arrangement that I can limp through, and she rewards me with a smile that throbs through my whole body. She brings me a little straw pelican from her shore excursion, and for one night I put it on my dresser. The next morning I brush it into the trash can, where it belongs.
I haven’t asked her anything about herself, but I know a few things: She knows a lot about flowers and enjoys looking at Mediterranean hillsides. S
he likes goats. After I play “Tequila Sunrise,” she orders one. “I’d forgotten about these,” she says, and I remember drinking them night after night in Topanga Canyon with Linda Rondstadt, who talked about Mexican music that I thought was stupid. Without my asking, the bartender brings me another Coke. The cruise still has six nights to go.
Things I do not know: What her father looks like. Whether there’s a boyfriend back home. Where her cabin is. Mine is as far below decks as you can get without actually being on the rope deck, and I share it with the ninety-pound drummer who hates me because I get out of the ship band’s eight o’clock Hooray for Hollywood show to play on my stool in Cool Brews. Corinne—her name is Corinne—went to the show with her parents, then slipped out and came to hear the end of my set. I was furious because my heart jumped to see her.
Rhodes, then Patmos, Santorini, and over toward Italy. We end with two nights in Venice, including the only night excursion, to the Lido. The whole cruise leads up to that night, where everybody dresses up and pretends they know how to play baccarat. Passengers come back on the ship with bow ties undone and hair falling down, drowning in sex smell. The bands in the Lido play real music, for people who know how to listen. I tried for years to get a Lido gig.
“Are you going?” Corinne asks. Her foot’s been tapping my ankle for the last half hour. At first I kept moving my leg.
“Are you?”
“I have until tomorrow to sign up.”
“You should go. It’s an exciting part of the trip.”
“Wow. I guess you all get the same script.”
“Who else have you been talking to?” It comes out rough, and she smiles. Jesus.
“Our waitress. Don’t be jealous.” I go silent, and her smile widens. “Or do.”
I’ve already been on break too long. I need to get back to my stool. “If I ask you to go, will you?” she says, her foot with its slight sandal resting on my ankle.
