Straight Up

by Lisa Samson

  I cannot hear Solo leave the house, though I try. He moves so quietly and never by accident.

  Mary-Margaret 1991

  Mary-Margaret cuddled the baby girl, not daring to attach her to her breast. She’d tried to keep from conceiving. They couldn’t afford the six already at home.

  She had only herself to blame

  Frank made himself clear the day their previous child, Barbra, screamed her way into the world. “If you get pregnant again, MM, we’ll have no choice but to give the baby up for adoption.”

  “But Frank, I can’t help it. We can’t stop making love, you know.”

  “You’re the devout one, not me. I’ll use protection anytime you say so.”

  “You don’t love the kids?”

  “Of course I do.” He sat down at the kitchen table with her as she nursed Barbra, and ran a tender hand over the baby’s head. He’d have a million children with MM if he could afford them. He’d made that clear too. “I’m a mechanic.”

  “I’ll get a job.”

  “How can you with all these kids?”

  “They’re beautiful, Frank. We make beautiful children.”

  Frank knew that, of course. With their dark hair and with eyes a color you couldn’t put a finger on, the Salatin children threw the everyday features of the neighborhood kids into sharp relief.

  Who’d have thought a mechanic and a waitress could create such beauty?

  “This has got to be it, MM. We’re done.”

  And that was final.

  But now she lay in the hospital bed again, and this time the little baby in her arms wouldn’t be coming home.

  Georgia

  The briny smell of the harbor, usually humid and thick, rarely reaches me up here on the eighteenth floor of my building. My father gave me the condo after Sean left and Dad moved to New York. From my balcony I cannot focus clearly on the foam cups, shoes, bits of paper, plastic drink bottles, or storm debris that accumulate around the edges of the Baltimore Harbor.

  But I stand here at my window almost every morning no matter how late I’ve fallen asleep the night before, and I grasp my mug, holding it against my chest while watching the harbor waters begin to glisten in the city’s awakening. Somehow Baltimore if bold enough and tough enough not only to take everything in stride, but to somehow grasp it all to her sagging bosom. The strains of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique, the second movement of course, play inside me … softly at first, then gathering almost enough strength to carry me along in its current.

  And then—when the commuter traffic condenses; when the crosswalks resemble swollen, rushing arteries; when I’ve dry heaved my way into a horrible headache, held down the resulting painkiller while lying under a cool rag; when I can finally face the acidity of the coffee—I retreat to my piano. I sit before the keys, praying that this day, something will come. When nothing does, I turn on a little Ella Fitzgerald, and she comforts me. Godmother of soul. My jazz lady.

  Like my mother, I became a musician. She played piano frequently at the Ten O’Clock Club, a place she and her best friend Drea owned together. Artists flowed through that place in a steady stream like warmed butterscotch over ice cream. My father was on assignment most of the time, and Mom liked it that way. “A little Gaylen goes a long way,” she always said, and she’d laugh at her own joke, tossing back her dark waves and winking at me.

  The cool factor of life growing up in a jazz club exceeded anything else I could imagine. I didn’t miss swim lessons or cookouts on the patio. I was relieved not to have sleepovers or large birthday parties at the bowling alleys: bulky groups of children, strident voices shrieking, feet pounding the carpet, and mayhem spattering the air with discordant drops of sound created a rhythm in which I found no place to sway. Marching-band stuff.

  For sitting atop the big Steinway at the club, I grew, pressing my ear to the cool surface, feeling the shiny black lacquer heat up beneath my head as I listened to the inner soul of Mom’s playing. It went down inside of me somehow, and when I started to press the keys myself, it wasn’t long before my progress was noted as something approaching exceptional.

  Not my words, there.

  “Georgie, come on down from there and sit beside me,” Mom would say after a while. And we’d park on that bench as though sewn together by two invisible threads, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, while she taught me chords, simple chords at first. “Start with the root.” She touched a note. C.

  I played the C an octave higher.

  “Now, count four keys up.” She touched her index finger on each key, black and white, and ended on an E. “And five keys down.” She landed on a G. “Now play all three together and that, my dear, is a C chord.”

  “How about a D?” I asked. I think I was five.

  “Same principle, four up and five down. See if you can figure it out.”

  After about ten minutes, I was off. Finding simple chords all over the place. She taught me how to find minors and sevens and nines and elevens and wonderful progressions that utilized them all.

  Polly Bishop gave me my life in more ways than one.

  The musicians at the club picked up where Mom left off, eagerly imparting their secrets after she died. I was young, posed no threat, and perhaps in me their genius might live on in some measure of obscurity incapable of eclipsing their singular glories, their whimsical, powerful styles. I am an amalgam, an assemblage of other people, a winsome Frankenstein capable of groove, of cool, and while those who heard my jazz back in my high-school days said I had a style all my own, I knew down inside I’d never come up with anything truly original even if I lived three lifetimes. Not if I compared myself to my mother.

  I adopted Ella Fitzgerald as my replacement mother later that year. She could take a rainy day, roll it around her vocal cords, and sing out sunshine anytime she wanted.

  I chose to study classical music in college, the organ my preferred instrument. Who can compete with the likes of the jazz greats? My uncle Geoffrey suggested it when I played Bach on the piano at the club the day after my high-school graduation. I was seventeen.

  He sucked in his breath. “Oh, Georgia. Why didn’t we ever see this coming?”

  I shrugged.

  “Let’s get you started at Peabody right away.”

  And my mother was too dead to protest, I guess.

  I didn’t get accepted to Peabody, wasn’t good enough at that point. But Uncle Geoffrey knew an old man who gave organ lessons, who played Carnegie Hall in the thirties. We took to each other right away. Robert Darling and I loved each other. We knew it the moment our eyes sparkled into each other’s with that telling familiarity: I have found a soul like me. Robert Darling wore plaid suits with tattersall shirts and striped ties. Robert Darling made goulash. Robert Darling lived alone in a little apartment complex off of Loch Raven Boulevard except for twenty-two tropical fish that tinseled up the tank, their colors shimmering under the fluorescent light overhead.

  Robert Darling made the musical switch feel okay.

  Robert Darling moved off to Tucson to live with a niece a few years ago.

  And now, because somehow I believed that if God gave me musical talent the only place to use it for Him was in church, I’m stuck.

  The Grotto, the church where I minister as music director, sent a nice bouquet of flowers here to the condo—lots of crabbed yet somehow beautiful twiggery, some Queen Anne’s lace, and bells of Ireland. I’ve never connected with anyone there at that church, and I doubt I’ll go back. I feel something bleeding inside of me, from that dark, sealed container somewhere deep in my cells. I feel it bleeding into the light spaces, wetting them down, drowning them. I never really liked the music at that church anyway—all those predictable praise-music chord progressions. It’s pretty hard to get excited about D, G, A, B-minor, E-minor chords over and over again. And when I tried to throw in something a little bit offbeat, well, forget it. “Too jazzy, not garage enough, Georgia,” the hip pastor would say. I did like Robbie though. H
e had a good heart. Just didn’t know music for squat.

  Now Grove Church where I ministered before—hardly better. Nothing but Bach and, to mix things up in a crazy way, some Fanny Crosby. At least I used my classical training there. I thought maybe I could maneuver the Grotto in a jazzy direction, but they were too steeped in the pop culture to sip anything truly edgy.

  Oh, I don’t want to play another song again.

  I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.

  This morning I hate music. I don’t even like Ella very much. I stand up from the piano and trudge into my bedroom. I have to get dressed. And I have to brush my hair. Brushing my teeth will require heroics.

  Usually I turn on the radio. Not today.

  No music at my dad’s funeral later on this morning. He didn’t like it much after Mom died.

  I pass the little mahogany cabinet in the living room, the door swung open, inviting. Maybe just a smidge, just a tiny tip to get me through all this.

  And the smell of these people. These TV people. Perfume and coffee and gasoline and rubber. I don’t even know who they are. Producers he worked with? Who? One woman wearing something with a fox collar weeps with large, silent-screen movements. She pushed past me several minutes ago and won’t leave the casket, closed now before we head out to the grave site.

  I’m relieved the viewings have ended.

  When my mother died, her viewing felt like a party. I almost expected her to sit up, call for a piano, and instigate a jam session with all her musician friends who had gathered right here at this same funeral home.

  And the bells of the church across the street bonged as we left from her final viewing. But no casket descended those steps into a waiting hearse. Instead, a bride emerged, veil flying in the breeze like a joyful song behind her, and she and her groom floated down through handfuls of Minute Rice into a horse and buggy.

  I was twelve.

  But today, the only breeze that blows slices me clean down to the soul. And brides always turn into old women.

  Mary-Margaret

  Mary-Margaret stares down into the smooth face of her nameless newborn, heart rent to rags by the stripping mouth of fate. She hands the child over to the social worker and wonders what the world will hold for the beautiful child she’ll always call Miranda.

  Frank helps her climb into the old Econoline; all the kids yell her name and are happy to see her. She smiles and greets them like always.

  That night at home Frank says, “See, MM? We still have each other and these kids.”

  “Who does Miranda have?”

  “You just need time, babe.”

  But who can forget her child, no matter how long she climbs out of bed, throws on her robe, makes breakfast, buys thread, reads Golden Books, joins a diet club, plans weddings, organizes forty years’ worth of photos, and adds to a soon-coming grandchild’s layette?

  “It’s not just this baby, Frank. We’re not just giving away a child, we’re giving away a life. We’re giving away her relationship with Barbra, and her relationship with Greg, and her relationship with Heather, and her relationships with Abbey and with Erin and with Meg.”

  “I can’t do this anymore, MM. We can’t afford it.”

  “Then fix it. Call the urologist, and may it be on your head.” She turns her back to him in the bed, and he waits for her to cry. But she doesn’t. And her silence fills him with fear.

  On his own, he tries to get the baby back, but it isn’t possible. And he can’t tell MM. Best to keep the break as clean as possible.

  Georgia

  Whenever I feel sorry for myself I remember guitarist Charlie Christian. Charlie Christian was born in 1916 and died in 1942. Poor baby.

  The son of a blind guitarist-singer, with siblings who played as well, Charlie was engaged by Benny Goodman to play as a frequent guest on Benny’s radio show. Charlie gained respect as a nationally renowned jazz soloist and died of tuberculosis before the first year ended.

  Wonder what he would have done had he lived?

  He sure as thunder wouldn’t be tying one on in a darkened apartment in Baltimore, Maryland. I can sure as thunder tell you that.

  My little cat, Miles Davis, looks at me with those large green eyes as if to say, “I’m a cat, for cryin’ out loud, and I know better!”

  And he’d be right. He always is.

  I have good reason, though.

  He came to the funeral this morning. Sean did. The man who is, yet isn’t, my husband. And he looked so handsome, his mahogany skin gleaming and supple, his long dreadlocks infused with chestnut and gold. The product of an African American father and an Irish mother, Sean holds the world inside of him. I’ve never seen a more gorgeous human being who’s less aware of his physical blessings.

  I hope he’s happy at that monastery place in Richmond. I hope it’s worth it.

  I don’t know how he heard about Dad’s death, and I don’t want to, really. Probably UG called him, because Uncle Geoffrey sticks his nose into everybody’s business and somehow does it so gracefully you can’t be angry at him for long.

  Sean knew better than to put his arms around me, but he walked me to my car and suggested a time to get together. He’s coming over at seven tonight.

  I’m not going to let him in.

  I grab some Wild Turkey. It was on sale.

  He left me years ago. Seven years ago. And he made his choice. I can’t go back to the old days.

  Why can’t I be more like Herbie Hancock? Mom took me to see him in the eighties. While purist Polly Bishop only played acoustic, Herbie obviously never met a keyboard he didn’t like. He began playing the piano at only seven years old and played concertos with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at eleven.

  So whenever I feel down and depressed, I try not to think of him.

  I’m not going to think of him right now either.

  Move over, Miles, I think I want to pass out now. Or at least try.

  But until I do, I’ll slip back into my red rubber sandals and dance around while my mother plays something. Let’s think about what she’ll play. I can’t remember her music, so maybe I’ll just make something up inside my head.

  Yes, there’s a nice theme.

  I’ll just go with that.

  Fairly

  My father loved color. Not on himself—he wore only black. He was an artist; Mom was a social worker. He searched for meaning and expressed it; she gave it. They were inhabited by gentle spirits: kind, generous, big-hearted, curious. I never once heard my father utter a cruel word about anybody. And Mom, sometimes furious at the evil in the world, somehow never lost the compassion inside her eyes, even though at times her profession bowed her back and left her numb.

  And on those evenings when the storms of the world flooded over the banks of her soul, Dad would rub her crazy-tiny feet and tell her stories about places where the rivers flowed with wine, the mountains were made of cheese, and grapes were always in season. She’d fall asleep to his soothing voice, and he’d stay there on the couch, legs falling fast asleep, not daring to wake her from the healing sleep she needed so desperately.

  They weren’t good looking. Cool looking, yes. But not beautiful or winsome. Rather horsy in a slightly beatnik fashion, they laughed and drew people to them with something so lovely inside, the honey fell like rain all around them on whoever happened to be nearby.

  I missed them so overwhelmingly, at times I was forced to take long walks no matter the weather. And in the cold of winter, I’d feel my mother’s warm hands inside my gloves. In the onslaught of a dense rainfall, I’d feel the dry softness of my father’s shirt as he held me against him when I cried because I got made fun of at school for my old-fashioned shoes, or the fact that my lunches were mostly bread and butter and a piece of fruit.

  But they did the best they could with who they were.

  Hort looks so dried out now. He hasn’t spoken for two days.

  I know I will miss him every bit as overwhelmingly as I miss my parents.

&n
bsp; I love him. I love Hort.

  I rarely see the wrinkles on his face or the way his chest has started to droop a bit. I love Hort because he is Hort: kind, giving, smart, funny, and embarrassed about his stutter. Inside, there still lives the young man who ran track in college, loved to go to festivals and eat ethnic food, the guy who stood in line for hours to get front-row seats to the Rolling Stones concert, who wore Adidas sneakers because they felt good and looked cool all at the same time and failed to notice when Nike came to the forefront.

  I love Hort because he is shy. I mean, a bachelor till forty-eight?

  He carried me through his English comp class, helping me at least once a week. It was during his class I was called out to the hallway by my uncle, who lived in New York at the time. Hort stood next to me when I heard the bad news.

  “Fairly, your parents were, well, honey…,” and Uncle Geoffrey looked down. “They were in an accident. Your father was killed instantly, and your mom was flown to Shock Trauma.”

  And it was to Hort that I turned then, burrowing my face into his chest as his arms closed around me and I wailed.

  I’ve spent more than anyone’s fair share of time in waiting rooms this year, and more time now by Hort’s bedside, so I read a lot of books. Funny books. Books with happy endings about big families or two aged sisters who solve murder mysteries in small towns; books that lift their characters out of the gutter. I reject books that examine people pore by pore with a dispassionate magnifying glass and then end, leaving me in the midst of their sufferings without one speck of hope, as if I can begin to cope or deal with that kind of literary correctness from my husband’s deathbed. I want books with talking animals and sometimes even flying cars and wizardry schools. Too much time to think depresses me because I always stare at Hort and start likening myself to a volcano that’s been dormant just a little too long.

  And don’t you wish places like Narnia and Hogwarts really existed?

  Memories that were so gorgeous in the making—sunsets in Key West or even on the balcony of the apartment overlooking Central Park, strolls through museums, ice-cream eating contests—are now so hideous in the recalling. I am twenty-six and will most likely be widowed by year’s end. I’ve experienced the one, all-consuming love of my life, and he’s all but dead.