A Song to Take the World Apart

by Zan Romanoff

  That night what Lorelei responds to is the bright, high wail of a horn playing when a boy from the marching band steps in to add a trumpet blast or two, the fuzz of the guitar, and the clear kick and thrust of the drummer’s beat. She’s never been surrounded by so much at once before, listening to a song someone made up because he felt like it.

  Her skin prickles and burns, and gets tight and dry over her bones. Her throat wells up with choked-back notes. Her body wants to open itself up from the center, turn itself inside out to touch everything at once. The thrum of her pulse falls into the rhythm of each song, like her body recognizes the beat.

  Chris stands tall in the spotlight. He sweats and spits and swaggers. The press of bodies all around her crowds Lorelei too closely, and she wants to jump up next to him and take up space the way he does. Chris and the band demand things: the stage floor, and the people to watch them, and the very air in the room, which they fill to bursting with the vibrations of their voices.

  Lorelei is small. She’s been small. The music makes her want to be bigger.

  She’s dizzy and light-headed afterward, when they finally stop, bereft in the sudden hugeness of the silence.

  “Oh man, I can’t hear shit,” Zoe says, beaming, sticking a pinkie right in her ear.

  Lorelei almost can’t understand her. She’s still listening for the last echo of the last song, trying to get the melody back in her mind.

  A few minutes and a second cold Coke bring Lorelei back to herself. Now that she’s used to the noise and the people, she can start to pick out groups of her classmates in the crowd. A handful of tables crammed into a corner on the far side of the room seems to be the gathering spot: she recognizes Jackson the bassist’s girlfriend, Angela, and her crew of friends. They’re all draped on each other, laughing and drinking from dark glass bottles with the labels peeled off.

  The boys are starting to load out, pulling equipment offstage, but they pause to say hi to those girls. Jackson tugs Angela off her feet and spins her around in a circle. Lorelei looks at Chris again and tries to look like she’s not looking. He moves around easily, like he’s used to this chaos. There are so many girls so much closer to his orbit.

  He greets them all evenly, though, weaving his way through them like he has somewhere else to be. Lorelei watches Chris as he comes up behind one of the chairs at the far side of the group.

  A middle-aged woman is sitting in it, her ankles neatly crossed and her handbag in her lap. Her dark hair is pulled back from her face, which is bare. Lorelei must have seen her and managed not to notice, before. The woman doesn’t look like she wants to be noticed. There’s something shrunken about her, trembling, like she’s only barely clutching herself together.

  Chris drops a kiss on the top of her forehead. For one wild, hysterical second Lorelei thinks, That cannot be his girlfriend, and then it comes to her, sharp and clear: that’s his mother, at his gig, his mother is here, keeping an eye on him.

  The upside of having two overworked parents and being raised by her no-nonsense grandmother is that no one has ever shadowed Lorelei. No one hung around to make sure she felt okay on playdates or sleepovers, or on the first day of school. Lately she watches other girls get pink and flustered when their parents show up on campus or drop them off at parties. It’s funny to see her friends trying to navigate between the well-behaved girls they’ve always been and the independence they’re just starting to claim. It’s like watching the tide pulling away from the shore only to come rushing right back.

  Lorelei has never felt that particular pull. Her mother let her go when she was a baby, first to Oma, and then, later, to the school system and her classmates’ parents. She’s always been able to separate herself from her family.

  Chris’s mother stands and smiles at him, and for just a moment it undoes the primness of her face. She wraps her arms around his broad shoulders and musses his hair. He smiles back, radiant. Lorelei looks away from them. It seems private. When she turns back, Mrs. Paulson is shouldering her way through the crowd, and her mouth is set in a long, firm line again, and Chris is looking past her. This time, Lorelei meets his gaze without being able to stop herself.

  It takes a few minutes before he finds a way to drift over. He makes it look casual.

  “I feel like I know you,” he says.

  It’s just a line. Lorelei is disappointed to realize that he doesn’t remember her, but why would he? It was five minutes, one time. She pretends like she doesn’t remember him, either, and tries to play it cool.

  “I know,” she says.

  “Do you, um, do you go to Venice?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m a sophomore.”

  “Cool.” Chris rocks back on his heels and smiles at her. “I’m a senior there. What did you think of the show?”

  “It was great,” Lorelei says. She wonders if she’s being too enthusiastic, and bites down hard on her lower lip to keep it from trembling, or from smiling too widely. “I mean, you know. You guys sounded—um—really good.”

  “Good or great?”

  Zoe elbows her in the ribs. “I’m Zoe, by the way,” she says.

  “Lorelei,” Lorelei offers.

  “Laurie?”

  “Lorelei,” she says again. She can hear her voice getting lost in the room.

  “Okay,” he says. She isn’t sure he’s gotten it at all. “Chris.”

  “Cool,” Zoe says. “I’m gonna get one more drink—you guys want anything?”

  “Nah.” Chris holds up a water bottle. “I’m cool.”

  “Uh, me too,” Lorelei agrees. Panic lances through her, and she frowns hard at Zoe’s retreating back. She has no idea what to say to Chris, how to talk to boys or how to talk about music, and she can’t talk about school.

  “Have you seen us play before?”

  “No,” Lorelei admits.

  “Probably for the best. We’re, uh, well…This is for sure our best show to date. Bean—our drummer—he’s new, he’s great.”

  “Yeah,” Lorelei agrees. “Where did you guys pick him up?”

  “Harvard-Westlake, if you can believe it.” Chris shakes his head. That makes Bean a private-school kid, an alien from the other side of the city. Lorelei has only just learned to recognize the names of these places, which uproot people from their neighborhoods and gather them into little rich-kid knots. “But he’s talented, so whatever.”

  “Yeah.”

  There’s a silence. Lorelei feels the gap in their conversation like a physical thing.

  “You guys gotta head out soon? Catching a ride?” Chris asks. Lorelei flushes and then flushes harder, embarrassed, even though she knows that it’s invisible, under her makeup, in the blue and purple light. It’s so careful, catching a ride, so that neither of them has to admit that someone’s parents will be picking her up.

  “In a minute.” Soon, actually. The show ran late and the movie they’re supposed to be watching ends in half an hour. It will take them fifteen minutes at least to hike back to the theater to meet Zoe’s mom.

  “I gotta load out,” Chris says. “And, uh, I guess I wouldn’t ask you to help carry equipment, anyway.”

  “I’m tough,” Lorelei tells him, puffing up under the worn leather of her borrowed jacket.

  “Sure,” he says, laughing. “But I’ll see you at school, maybe? Say hi in the halls?”

  “For sure,” Lorelei says. She likes the shape of the words in her mouth, the way she can mimic Chris’s loose native drawl when he says them. He kind of leans against her arm for a second, and then lopes back to the band. There are layers and layers between them but Lorelei touches the jacket anyway, where he brushed up against her. She rubs her fingertips together and looks at them, like she might actually be able to see sparks there.

  She finds Zoe flirting with a serious-looking man at the bar, a twenty-something with a neatly trimmed beard and a solemn, intense gaze. She’s trying to talk him into buying her a real drink.

  “C’mon,” Lorelei
says. She used up all of her boldness talking to Chris; now, under this stranger’s eyes, she can barely look up from her shoes. She doesn’t want to ruin her friend’s fun, but she doesn’t like the look of this all that much. “Zo, whatever, we’ve gotta go.”

  “It’s no fun here, anyway,” Zoe says. She throws a challenging look over her shoulder as they walk away. The man doesn’t respond. “Oh shit, we’ve gotta get this stuff off,” she says then, to Lorelei, rubbing a thumb against her blush-bright cheek. “Bathroom, c’mon.”

  “Sorry to hassle you,” Lorelei says, shouldering the door open.

  “It’s fine,” Zoe says. She pulls makeup wipes out of her bag and passes them over.

  “I mean, you came here for me and—”

  “L,” Zoe says. “Seriously.” She keeps wiping at her face, mouth open in a distracted, uneven O.

  “Okay.” Lorelei starts with her mascara. The sting of chemicals makes her eyes water. She watches Zoe’s reflection in the mirror, her vision blurred by reflexive tears, as her friend’s face slowly becomes its familiar self again. This is the girl she knows, soft and private. “Thanks,” she says when they’re done. “For everything.”

  “I had fun too,” Zoe says. “And. You know. Thanks for trying to keep me out of trouble.”

  “Yeah,” Lorelei says. That’s the balance of them, the way they work: if Lorelei needs Zoe to tell her it’s okay to be loud, to lie to someone’s parents and flirt with a boy, Zoe needs Lorelei to keep her at anchor. The flip side of her boldness is that it gets heedless, sometimes. It can skid into reckless. Zoe doesn’t like being told what to do, mostly, but she trusts Lorelei to tell her when to stop.

  The man at the bar is lost to the crowd by the time they leave.

  Outside, the boys are loading equipment into someone’s station wagon, Jackson and Bean the drummer slowly losing a complicated game of real-world Tetris. Chris is there too, laughing and not helping, sitting against the side of the building with his legs stretched out across the sidewalk.

  He’s strumming the unplugged strings of his guitar and singing while everyone else works. Lorelei recognizes the tune: it’s from one of the records that Zoe’s sister Carina always played when she was still living at home. It’s a short song, a woman singing throaty and full over nothing more than handclaps and the cheers of a crowd. Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.

  “You have a goddamn Mercedes!” Bean yells out. “Come help us deal with this Volvo.”

  “Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,” Chris rejoins.

  The spirit comes over Lorelei: she can hear the next words in her head. She looks at Chris sitting on the sidewalk and thinks, Of course you’re what I want. She sings out, “Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” finishing his verse as she skips nimbly over his ankles.

  She doesn’t look back, after. She doesn’t think about whether anyone heard her over the street sounds, other voices, passing traffic. She just lets her voice ring out behind her, resonant in the dry, clean desert air. It’s the first time she’s ever sung out so boldly, and the vibration of it rings through her like a bell, high, sharp, and clear.

  She doesn’t see—though she will later imagine it, over and over again—the moment when Chris hears her for the first time, when he sits up and stares after her. She’ll imagine but never know what he must have looked like, called and compelled: wide-eyed, drawn out of himself, being pulled by something elemental and held in thrall. She doesn’t see him opening toward her, brilliant in his unfolding, like a flower bursting suddenly into bloom.

  Back at Zoe’s, Lorelei is grateful to strip off the jacket and dress and wash the last traces of makeup from her face. She likes the costume but it’s nice to feel her own skin again, plain and clean. She packed pink and white pajamas but wears Zoe’s clothes instead, running shorts and an old T-shirt worn soft with age.

  They curl up in Zoe’s bed together, the last whiff of the Roxy’s stale smoke and booze and sweat swallowed up by soap and lotion and detergent, and the minty tang of toothpaste. They’re old enough to go out and young enough to fit two to a twin.

  “So that went well,” Zoe says.

  “Mmmm,” Lorelei agrees, touching again the spot on her shoulder that Chris leaned against.

  “I’ve never heard you sing before,” Zoe goes on. “Not really. You have a nice voice.” The words are broken by a yawn. “Pretty.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You should sing with him sometime,” Zoe murmurs. “Chris.”

  Lorelei flinches instinctively. Her grandmother is weird about singing, and about her singing, specifically. There’s a rule against it that she’s never questioned and never understood. Not doing it is such a deeply ingrained habit that she hasn’t thought about it consciously in years, and she’s surprised when she runs up against it, a barrier she’s almost forgotten was there. “I don’t know,” she says, but Zoe is already drifting to sleep, jaw falling slack and breath coming soft and easy.

  Whatever madness overcame her on the sidewalk pulls away now. I didn’t mean to do it, Lorelei thinks. I won’t do it again. She’s never gotten caught up like that before. In the dark in Zoe’s bed it’s hard to imagine what could have compelled her not just to break but to forget about the rules.

  THAT NIGHT SHE DREAMS about it, though it isn’t anything like a dream: just a memory that she ghosts through in her sleep.

  Lorelei’s parents emigrated from Germany along with her grandmother when her mother got pregnant with the twins. It was almost eighteen years ago, now. She’s never known exactly why they left, only that when they did, they meant it. They’ve never gone back, not even to visit. Her parents threw themselves into the work of their American lives when they got here, and left Oma to raise the children. So it was Oma who sat her down the night before she started kindergarten and told her that it was time for Lorelei to learn a secret.

  “Do you know what music is?” she asks in the dream, running her fingers through Lorelei’s tangled blond curls. Lorelei’s grown-up mind is dimly aware of the smallness of her skull against her grandmother’s hand.

  “Yes,” Lorelei says. She knows she’s heard it: snatches of pop songs at the grocery store, and melody blasting out of boom boxes and through open car windows on the boardwalk, near the beach. There are whole communities of German émigrés in other parts of Los Angeles, but her family lives in Venice. Her mother wants to be near the shore.

  “You know that we don’t have music in this house,” Oma says. She gathers Lorelei’s hair into sections and starts to work them into a tight braid.

  “Yes,” Lorelei agrees again.

  She’s never had cause to doubt her grandmother, or question her: this is the woman whose hands keep the family fed and her own hair neat. Oma sorts the bills that come in and pays what needs to be paid. Lorelei’s parents work outside the house; Oma is in charge of what happens inside it. In the smallness of this world, Oma is the voice of authority and source of all wisdom.

  “It was music that got your mother in trouble,” Oma says. “It was singing that ruined her, because I never taught her how.”

  Lorelei doesn’t understand how anyone could not know how to sing. She does it all the time, in the quiet under her covers, making up songs about the sea and shore, the sand and sky. She does it to comfort herself when the nights are long and she can’t sleep, or when her pulse pounds too hard. Most days her heart beats softly, but sometimes, too late or too early, it thrums up and gets loud and distracting. She feels it, heavy, moving, in her chest. Then it’s only song that helps, pulling the frantic flutter up and out of her throat and bleeding off tension into the air around her.

  “So I’m going to teach you,” Oma says. “I’m going to teach you how to be careful with your voice.”

  It isn’t so hard. Her natural register is high and clear. Oma has her sing at the low end of it, where the sound comes out rough with work. “It’s
okay to sing like this in front of people,” Oma instructs. “In groups, for school. That’s fine. But the high notes: never.”

  “I like the high notes,” Lorelei says. She sings an anxious little trill to demonstrate.

  “Just like that,” Oma tells her. “That exactly is what you never do.”

  Lorelei wakes with her mouth closed so tightly that her jaw aches.

  ZOE’S MOM DRIVES HER home in the morning. Lorelei sits in the passenger seat and fiddles with the straps on her backpack, which seems to get heavier as block after block unfolds through the windshield. In the pale Sunday-morning sunlight she’s weighted down by the dirty clothes and unfinished homework she’s dragging. The pit of her stomach gets heavy and cold when they pull up in front of her house.

  The neighborhood has changed around them since her parents bought the place in the early nineties, and up and down the block people have razed the old structures to put up new, modern ones, square slabs of concrete and glass. Against them, her family’s beach cottage looks even older and dingier than it is, with its wooden porch and peaked roof.

  The grass out front is sparse and sere after a long, hot summer. The backyard is lush with Oma’s well-tended kitchen garden, but there are no signs of life in the front. Other yards have bicycles and surfboards, or pinwheels stuck in their lawns, Tibetan prayer flags and fairy lights strung across their gardens. The Felsons have a plain brown welcome mat on which Lorelei very carefully wipes her feet before taking a deep breath and walking inside.

  She doesn’t know when this started seeming strange to her. It must have been a gradual awakening: the slow realization that there are different kinds of quiet in the world. Now when the door clicks shut behind her, Lorelei feels the familiar sensation of coming home, and ducking her head underwater. Even the sound of her own footfalls against the wooden floor is muted and faraway when she walks. She goes through the dining room and into the kitchen, to the family room. No one is home.