The Song Reader

by Lisa Tucker

  I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I heard Mom’s voice telling me to wake up and go to bed.

  I saw the burgundy dress with all the flowers, but still I didn’t get that it was my sister until she leaned down and touched my face. Mom wasn’t really the touching type. Even when I was little, she rarely touched me unless I was hurt or sick.

  I wasn’t even fully awake, but I knew something was wrong. Mary Beth only sounded like Mom when she was very depressed. And Ben wasn’t with her. His absence filled the room like a cold blast of wind.

  “What happened?” I said, sitting up.

  When she didn’t answer, I snapped on the lamp and looked at her. Her face was unreadable but her eyes were lined with red, like she’d been crying for hours. But this was impossible. My sister hadn’t cried since we found out about Mom.

  “Where’s Ben? Is he all right?”

  “He’s fine,” she said, in that same flat depressed voice.

  She didn’t speak for what felt like minutes. I flashed to how nervous Ben had seemed, standing in his pressed khakis and yellow tie, waiting for my sister to get dressed. At the time I thought it was cute that he was so distracted he couldn’t pay attention to Tommy, couldn’t even remember the name of Tommy’s favorite goldfish, the one that was named after him.

  “These things happen,” she finally said, looking at her lap. “You can’t always predict what—”

  “I can’t believe it!” I was gulping back my own tears. “Are you saying he broke up with you?”

  She nodded weakly.

  “It’s not fair!”

  “I know, honey. But really, fair has nothing to do with it. People can’t help how they feel.” She glanced at me and back at her lap. Her voice was a whisper. “I just hope you don’t blame Ben too much.”

  “What about his stuff?” It was stupid, but I was afraid to ask anything else. Her chin was trembling like she might break down any minute.

  “He wants me to send it to him.” She exhaled. “UPS, insured.”

  That did it. I jumped up to the album cabinet by the stereo and grabbed a record from Ben’s shelf and smashed it against my knee. The cover was still on: it didn’t snap in half; it didn’t even crack. Before I could smash it again, my sister was there, holding my wrist.

  “Stop,” she whispered.

  “I hate him!”

  “No, you don’t.” She swallowed and her voice got thick. “He’s been good to you.” She ran her hand over her eyes. “He did care about you and Tommy, I really believe that.”

  I dropped the record and threw my arms around her. “He cared about you, too. He must have. He did, I know he did.”

  When she didn’t respond, I said, “Maybe he’ll realize he’s made a mistake. You know, like the guys always do in the songs.”

  She laughed, a weak laugh but better than nothing. So I kept it up. I lowered my voice to sound like a guy’s, knelt down and grabbed her foot, and sang the first verse of “Baby Come Back.” Then I went through a few lines from “Miss You,” while pretending to collapse in grief. I got back up and belted out all I could remember of “I’m Sorry,” clutching my heart like the pain was overwhelming.

  It was working, she was laughing—until she turned toward the kitchen, where the bouquet of dried lilies and violets Ben had given her when they first started dating was sitting in an empty wine bottle on our table. She mumbled that she had to check on Tommy and disappeared down the hall. I sat very still until I was sure she wasn’t coming back; then I picked up Ben’s album from the floor. It was Talking Heads, a group he’d introduced me to, a group I liked, but still I took off the cover, and scratched her name across the grooves of Side Two with a ball-point pen.

  I’d already put the scratched record back when I remembered the ten-dollar bill he’d given me in the pocket of my jeans. I ripped it up and slid the pieces in the cover before stuffing the album back on the shelf.

  • • •

  If Ben had just hurt my sister, I think I would have gotten over it soon enough. But there was something else at stake here. Something that kept upsetting me every time I thought about it for months.

  It was back in December, when he was still living with us. Weekdays, Mary Beth would go to work and Tommy would stay at Mrs. Green’s until she picked him up at four-thirty. Ben had offered to take care of him, but Mary Beth said no. She wanted him to spend the time reading and researching. She was still trying to motivate him to get back to his own science work. When I got home from school, he’d be lying on the couch, sometimes with a chemistry journal but just as often with nothing. (He was thinking a lot in those days, but Mary Beth said that was good, too. He had a lot to think about after what had happened to his friend.) But he always sat up and said hi and asked how my day was, usual things. And then we had a routine. We’d go into the kitchen for a snack, usually potato chips and dip, and head back into the living room to watch TV.

  Ben was funny about the TV. He’d never owned one before; he said his parents had been opposed to television while he was growing up, and he hadn’t thought of buying one in college or grad school. I thought this meant he’d only want PBS or the After-School Special, but I was way off. He was so TV starved that he was happy watching anything now, no matter how awful.

  I was a little TV starved myself, since my sister always insisted on the stereo. Ben liked to joke that we had to get our TV fix before MB came home. (MB was his pet name for her. I thought it was sweet, even if it did sound like a nuclear weapon.)

  Most of the time we just sat there and watched, but occasionally we’d talk through the commercials. If he’d had a good day reading, he’d bring up some point or another, although I usually couldn’t follow it. Mary Beth loved to hear him talk about his brain chemistry stuff, but I thought he was more confusing than the worst junior high teacher. Sometimes he told me about his family. Just little comments, like his dad was a college professor. His mom didn’t believe in serving dessert. His sister Rebecca used to date a golf fanatic.

  I made little comments, too, about school and my friends. Rarely about the family, because he knew the family already, that is Tommy and Mary Beth. One time I told him that Linda, Tommy’s birth mother, had given us a letter for when Tommy was older, but the letter didn’t say I’m sorry for giving you up or I loved you or anything normal, but just went on and on about all the troubles she’d had. She even wrote a paragraph about how men were scum, which Ben agreed was a pretty lousy thing for a mother to tell a son.

  The topic of my mother came up one night when Mary Beth called to say she’d be late. She told Ben she was picking up Tommy and heading to the cemetery, to put a Christmas wreath by Mom’s grave. He offered to go with her, but she said she wouldn’t be long. When he hung up, he said he was sorry; he should have put me on with my sister, since I would obviously want to go.

  “Not really,” I blurted. “I mean, it’s okay.”

  He sat back down on the floor next to the coffee table. “Why not?”

  “It’s kind of complicated,” I said. I was on the couch. The Rockford Files had gone to commercial. I had no excuse not to look at him.

  “Give it a try.” He tilted his head to the left in that sympathetic way he had, and smiled. “I like complicated.”

  I said okay, but I really didn’t plan to tell him much. I started with the little fact that I hated the cemetery, and then I said that Mary Beth didn’t mind it; plus, she and Mom were a lot closer, and then he asked why they were closer, and I found myself blabbing about the two phases of our family: Before, which I knew almost nothing about, but had heard contained a nice house and a swing set and a father who worked and a mom who stayed home; and After, which I also knew very little about, except that it started when I was a baby after Dad lost his job and we moved to this apartment on top of Agnes’s house and Mom got her job at the insurance company.

  “When I was a kid, she worked constantly.” I grabbed another potato chip. “That’s a big difference
. She had a lot more time to spend with Mary Beth.”

  “Makes sense,” Ben said.

  “Plus, Mary Beth is more like her. I mean, she isn’t really like Mom, but she’s a lot more like her than I am.”

  “MB told me your mother was a very strong woman.”

  “True,” I said, although strong wasn’t exactly the word to describe Mom. She’d grown up in an orphanage outside town. It was closed by the time I was born, and she never talked about it, or about her parents. She always said, “I care about them just as much as they cared about me.”

  One of my earliest memories was the time she slammed her hand in the car door when we were leaving Kroger. Her hand looked as purple and swollen as a fetal pig, but Mom not only didn’t cry, she wouldn’t let me say a word of comfort. “I wasn’t paying attention,” she said, through clenched teeth. “I got what I deserved.”

  I remember I had a huge wad of gum in my mouth, and as I watched her try to bend her crushed fingers over the steering wheel, I sucked in my breath and accidentally swallowed it. I’d been told you weren’t supposed to swallow gum, and all the way home, I wondered if it would get stuck in my stomach or even kill me. I never thought of asking Mom. I was afraid she’d say I deserved it, too.

  “But she wasn’t mean or anything,” I said to Ben, and laughed. “I don’t know why I used to be a little scared of her.”

  It was out of my mouth before I could stop myself, but it was true—I used to be afraid of my own mother. I’d never told this to anyone. Not any of my friends and definitely not Mary Beth.

  My sister was our mom’s biggest fan and most loyal defender. One time when I just hinted that maybe Mom didn’t relate that well to me because she had me later in life and I was obviously an accident, my sister said I was way, way off. Mom loved me to pieces, she insisted. Mom would have given her life for me without pausing for a second.

  Later it hit me that she hadn’t denied I was an accident.

  I expected to feel terrible now that I’d blabbed my big secret to Ben, but it was just the opposite. The relief was so strong, it was all through my body, like I’d finally confessed to a murder. Afterwards, I was on such a roll, I didn’t even try to stop myself. When Ben asked what my dad was like, I volunteered the whole story of going to his apartment, and how depressing it was, but later when I remembered the Laundromat, how much better I felt because I knew I’d loved my father. That was very important to me, I said. Knowing I’d loved him, even if he was kind of nuts.

  The Rockford Files was over and so was some game show, but I was getting to a big point. I could feel it coming as I spoke, even though I didn’t know what it was. It was the strangest thing, how much of this was news to me, too. It was like my voice was telling my brain what I really thought.

  “I’ve wondered a lot what happened between my mom and dad. Like, why did he leave and was she sad about it? I’m thinking maybe she wasn’t. You know, cause she hated weakness.”

  “I see what you mean,” Ben said quietly.

  “It wasn’t her fault, though. It’s like Mary Beth says, people can only be who they are. Even if she kicked him out, she couldn’t help it I guess.”

  I was picking my thumbnail, vigorously, because I’d just realized that last part wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true, because Mom had stayed married to Dad. Why would you stay married to a man—and continue to wear your wedding ring—if you wanted him to leave you?

  Which meant the big point, the thing that was coming next, wasn’t true, either. But I heard myself saying it anyway. I heard myself say that maybe my mom didn’t relate to me very well because I reminded her of my dad.

  “In what way?” Ben said. A perfectly normal question, but it convinced me for sure I had no idea what I was talking about. I didn’t look like Dad, and I certainly didn’t act like him. We had nothing in common, as far as I knew.

  I paused for a moment; then I sat up straight. “I think this theory lacks substantiation.”

  It was what Ben always said when he didn’t agree with some science article. I figured he’d start laughing and he did. But when I tried to tell him that everything I’d said was probably crap, he shook his head. “Even unsubstantiated theories usually have a grain of truth in them, Leeann.”

  “Maybe,” I said, but I feigned a sudden interest in the TV. Mary Beth and Tommy were due home any minute, and I was feeling both embarrassed and really anxious. Of course he’d have to tell my sister about this conversation—why hadn’t I thought of this before? Even if I asked him not to, it would just backfire and make him more convinced that he should, for my sake.

  I spent the next few days in a nervous fog, but by the weekend, I was okay again. As strange as it seemed, Ben obviously hadn’t mentioned our talk to Mary Beth, because she never mentioned it to me. Maybe he just assumed she already knew all this. Or maybe—and this was what I liked to think—he understood that I wanted this to be kept strictly private. This could even be the point of sharing something big, I thought: that after you did, the other person really understood you.

  Ben and I never had another discussion about my parents. Within days it was Christmas, and then he went back to school, and when he came on the weekends, there was always so much to do with Tommy and Mary Beth. But still, I was sure something had changed between us, and I convinced myself he thought so, too. When he would bring me an album, I would listen carefully to every word, in case he’d picked this one because there was a message in it for me.

  I never found the message, but I was still looking when he left. And then it all suddenly fit together: the reason he’d never mentioned the topic again and the reason he hadn’t told my sister about it and the reason he hadn’t sent me a message. He wasn’t all that interested. He was just being nice, the same way he’d been nice to Tommy. He’d probably forgotten my heartfelt revelation the same way he’d forgotten the name of Tommy’s favorite goldfish.

  By the time I found out how wrong I was, I’d let what happened with Ben develop into a full-blown betrayal. Sometimes I even thought he’d tricked me into talking about my parents, just like he’d obviously tricked my sister into believing they had a future together. I hated myself for trusting him, but I hated him more for being someone you couldn’t trust. A typical man, as my sister’s customers would say. Only nice when they need you. Incapable of really caring about you. Always ready to leave you without warning, without even saying goodbye.

  chapter

  five

  The summer of endless love was long gone. It was 1982, and I called this the summer of tainted love. The song “Tainted Love” wasn’t all that popular with Mary Beth’s customers, but it was very popular with my friends. We played the record constantly; it expressed how we felt now. Ben had been gone for three months; we knew he wasn’t coming back. We no longer believed Luke and Laura would stay together. We didn’t even know if Charles and Diana would last, although Denise claimed they couldn’t get divorced even if they hated each other. It was against the rules for royalty.

  Tainted love: the theme of the summer, maybe even of the whole town.

  These days, it seemed like everyone who came to my sister was nursing a heartbreak. In the space of only a few months, Mary Beth had discovered affairs between near strangers, and babies born whose daddies didn’t know them, and hatreds so intense friends hadn’t spoken in years. Compared to all this hidden agony, Rose driving Clyde’s truck through the window of his place that Saturday in June was almost a relief.

  If there was anyone left in Tainer who hadn’t heard of Mary Beth, Song Reader, they had to hear after what Rose did. For a week, there was police tape around Clyde’s tobacco store, smack in the heart of downtown. And Rose worked afternoons at the Photomat. She loved to lean out the window of her little booth, and tell yet another person her story and the moral: if only she’d listened to Mary Beth, she’d have known that Clyde was no damn good.

  When Rose asked Mary Beth for a stack of her song reader cards to hand out with the pi
cture envelopes, my sister complied. It was her calling, she reminded me. She had to make herself available to anyone who needed her.

  Mary Beth had reacted to losing Ben by working ten times harder than before. Every week now she took on new customers, sometimes at the astonishing rate of five or six at a time. As soon as she got home from the diner, she snapped on the stereo, and until Tommy went to bed it was turned up loud enough so she could hear it while she made dinner and played with him. After he was asleep, she kept it on but lowered the volume and did whatever she had to do in the living room—sort laundry, pay bills, sew a button back on—pausing every once in a while to make notes on one of her charts. We were never in her car without the radio playing. FM was the one thing she’d insisted on, not power steering, not air-conditioning, even though it was pushing ninety degrees when she traded in her old Buick for a used Ford at the Deals on Wheels over on Twain Boulevard.

  She was still working out the details of her theory that music and memory were related. She’d gotten a new idea after she did Nicole Lowrey’s reading last March. Whenever I saw her scribbling thoughts in her notebook, I remembered how excited she’d been about telling Ben the idea—and that she never got the chance. It made me hate him even more.

  When Nicole first came to my sister, she was unhappy but she didn’t know why. For the first few weeks, her chart was no help: lots of sixties’ songs, which my sister knew was pretty standard for somebody in their thirties like Nicole. One of Mary Beth’s first observations when she started her readings was that for most people, the songs they hear in high school stick with them the longest, but that a lot of times, when they hear the songs later they don’t mean what they did originally. “Everything’s new then and the music gets attached to all of it,” she told me. “Even if you heard a song right when your boyfriend was dumping you, when you hear it later, it doesn’t make you feel sad, it makes you feel that newness. That’s why oldies stations are so popular, they cheer people up.” She laughed. “They make you think you’re in high school again and that high school was actually fun.”