The Song Reader

by Lisa Tucker

  Mary Beth thought a song from high school was only important if it was reported for several weeks in a row, and Nicole didn’t have any of these. But Nicole was desperate, and finally, Mary Beth suggested she make a note of every bit of music that came into her mind—phrases, lines, commercial jingles, anything. Even if it seemed totally meaningless. Even if it passed through her mind so quickly she wasn’t sure it was a real song.

  The very next Saturday, my sister uncovered the source of Nicole’s trouble. The key was a phrase, “hope you know it, baby,” that came into Nicole’s mind several times. Nicole could hear the melody of those five words, but that was all. When she hummed it to Mary Beth, though, my sister recognized the song immediately. It was an old R&B tune called “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind.” She got out her lyric book, and when she recited two lines from the first verse, Nicole leaned back in her chair and just stared at my sister. The lines were about someone laughing while another person cried—and this had just happened to Nicole last week. But she’d convinced herself it didn’t matter. Her boyfriend Jeff said she was being too touchy. He wasn’t laughing at her, he was just laughing. And she was always crying over nothing, wasn’t she?

  The music was trying to tell her how she really felt about the way Jeff treated her. When my sister told me about it, her voice was full of wonder. “Somewhere in Nicole’s brain every word of that song was still stored. And so the phrase was like a message from her unconscious coming to help her.”

  “Is she going to break up with him?”

  “I don’t know. But even if she doesn’t, she knows what’s going on now.” Mary Beth tapped her fingernail on the chart. “That’s what the song did for her. It revealed her to herself.”

  After her success with Nicole, my sister set about collecting evidence that even very small phrases from songs can be messages from the unconscious. But she still wasn’t satisfied. She was looking for the one customer who would pull it all together. A customer who had even less knowledge about their problem than Nicole had had. A customer whose mind used music to tell them the deepest truths about themselves that they could not have known otherwise.

  And then, in early July, she found Holly Kramer.

  Holly had gotten Mary Beth’s card from Rose, and she’d called my sister the very same night. She was in bad shape. She wasn’t sleeping, she wasn’t eating much, she’d lost all interest in her husband—meaning sex of course, but Mary Beth wouldn’t say that around me. Worst of all, she claimed she had no songs now and never had.

  “Why call a song reader?” I asked.

  “Good question,” my sister said. “I guess because she’s already tried a shrink and pills and even a psychic.”

  After Holly’s first appointment that Saturday, Mary Beth told me it was going to be a really difficult case. “Having no songs is like having no dreams. It only happens when your mind is shutting down. Hiding from something.”

  She was making pizza rolls for Tommy. He’d been cranky all day, and now he was in his room, throwing toys out of his toy box. She stuck the pan in the oven and I looked at her. “What could it be?”

  She yelled for Tommy to come in the kitchen. “It’s hard to tell. Holly really didn’t say all that much. When I asked her whether she felt sad, she said no, she just didn’t see the point of life.”

  I tried to imagine feeling this way, but I couldn’t. I was feeling restless that summer. If anything, I wanted more life.

  Tommy ran in and Mary Beth picked him up. “I’m seeing her tomorrow,” she said. “Just for a little while.” She nuzzled Tommy’s neck. “I gave her an assignment to listen to the radio for four hours this afternoon. Find out if anything sticks with her.”

  I was very surprised; Mary Beth never saw customers on Sunday. I didn’t mind babysitting Tommy again, but I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of my sister changing her routine for this Holly Kramer person, whoever she was. We didn’t know her, really. Until a few days ago, we’d never even heard of her.

  We certainly heard about her plenty after that. Some days it seemed like Mary Beth would wake up and talk about Holly and come home from work ready to talk about her again. Even though the radio assignment worked, Mary Beth had no idea why Holly picked the songs she did. And there were only two: the Rolling Stones’s “Angie” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” We had the Rolling Stones album and Mary Beth tracked down the other one on a used LP at the Trading Post. “They’re both sad, that’s for sure,” she said. “And there’s something in that Lightfoot thing I can’t put my finger on.”

  When Holly mentioned the line she kept hearing, Mary Beth was even more puzzled. It was from the Gordon Lightfoot, about feeling like a ghost that no one can see, and Holly reported it for three weeks straight. The third week, Holly was sobbing a little on the machine and I wanted to put a C by the line, but Mary Beth thought Holly was more angry than sad. “Listen to the way she’s spitting out ‘ghost.’ That isn’t crying, that’s hatred.”

  It was a mystery though, since Holly said she was happy with her husband and Mary Beth believed her. She’d met Holly’s husband Danny: a sweet, boring guy who worked hard for his family and coached Little League on the weekends. I suggested perhaps a previous boyfriend but Mary Beth said, “No one in love is that angry with a man from the past unless he’s around again—and Holly says no one new or old has come into her life lately.” I kept going, I said maybe it’s her kids, and Mary Beth frowned. “Leeann, when you have kids you’ll realize how ridiculous that is.”

  Whatever the problem was, I was getting tired of it. I was used to Mary Beth fixing people and sending them on their way. Then too, I was completely sick of that Lightfoot song. I was fourteen now, and painfully aware that a lot of the songs Mary Beth’s customers reported were totally uncool. The Police were cool. The Cars were cool. Queen, Tom Petty, John Cougar: all fine. But Gordon Lightfoot was like Barry Manilow or Olivia Newton-John: if you were ever caught listening to that stuff, you’d be ruined.

  It was the first week of August and we were in the middle of a heat wave that scorched grass and melted pavement from Boise to Oklahoma City. Everyone wanted it to rain, even the kids talked about it. Every day the temperature reached a hundred or more, and the humidity never went below ninety percent. How could it go on like this much longer? At night our place was so hot that Mary Beth worried about Tommy getting heat sick. She put the biggest fan we had right by his bed, but he still kept getting up, crying that his sheets felt “sticky.” After she settled him back, she’d sit by the breezeless back window, listening to “If You Could Read My Mind,” over and over. Sometimes I sat with her, but usually I was on the phone with one of the Ds. Darlene had landed herself a boyfriend, an older guy named Greg, and she was trying to set me up with his friend Jason so we could double-date. Denise was being reassured that if I went with them, it would be merely a fact-finding mission, to see if this Greg was as bad as we feared.

  We’d heard he had a bad temper. Of course he also had a car and a job and the money to take Darlene out on real dates.

  When Jason finally called on Friday afternoon, I said yes before he’d even told me what movie we were going to see. Of course I still wanted a boyfriend. Even tainted love sounded better than sitting home, eating too many potato chips, and watching Saturday Night Live.

  Plus, the movie theater would be air-conditioned.

  When I told Mary Beth about the date, I made her promise to be done with all her customers by three o’clock on Saturday. I needed time to prepare. And I reminded her of that promise that morning—but when three o’clock came, she was still downstairs in her office with who else but Holly.

  I waited until almost four, partly because I didn’t want to bother them, but mainly because I didn’t want to walk around downstairs with Tommy and risk running into our landlady Agnes. She loved to speculate about Tommy’s background, never with Mary Beth though, only with me. So far she’d guessed that he was African, Puerto Rican, Jamaican, Gree
k, and Egyptian. Usually I didn’t say anything, but the last time I said, “Hey, I think you’re right. He’s really a pharaoh!”

  Luckily before we hit the bottom step, Mary Beth and Holly were out of the office and headed to the front door. I grabbed Tommy’s hand and we made it to the porch in time to see Holly getting in her blue Chevy truck. In all the times she’d been here, I’d only caught glimpses of her. Most of Mary Beth’s customers came upstairs at some point—to get a drink or use the bathroom or just say hey to me and Tommy—but Holly never did. My sister said she was shy, and she certainly looked it. She was a good ten years older than Mary Beth, but she had the slumped-over shoulders and downcast eyes of an awkward kid. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, no makeup, no heels, no jewelry that I could see. The overall impression you had looking at her was of someone trying hard not to make any impression at all. She was skinny, she was pale, she was in every way forgettable, except for her hair. It was thick and shiny and the most beautiful red, and it came all the way down her back, much longer than mine and even longer than my sister’s.

  Mary Beth was walking slowly, clearly exhausted, but I didn’t care. I was tapping my foot on the porch and pointing at my wristwatch.

  “Oh, my God, I completely forgot!”

  “You sure did.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

  I told her it wasn’t necessary, but she insisted. First, she said she had to get me something brand new to wear—to build confidence. I told her there wasn’t time, but we hopped in her Ford and hurried to Penney’s, even though it was so hot Mary Beth could barely hold the steering wheel and Tommy was in a bad mood because I’d been too distracted to put him down for a nap. He darted around opening and closing the dressing room doors while I tried on shirt after shirt, finally settling on a soft black jersey with a scoop neck and cap sleeves. Mary Beth said it made me look sophisticated. “Which you are, of course,” she said, standing behind me in the mirror and smiling.

  When we got home, she gave me a little packet of expensive shampoo that had come in the mail, stapled to a coupon. After I washed and blow-dried my hair, she brushed it and then twisted the front locks into perfect little braids. She had me sit right by the fan, so I wouldn’t sweat on my new shirt. When I was all ready, she went into the back of her closet and pulled out a dusty shoe box. Inside were what she called her “magic shoes.”

  Tommy said they were “sparkly.” They were shiny red with little straps around the ankles. I looked at her, wondering why I’d never seen them before.

  “Wear these shoes,” she said. “They will give you your center. If you forget who you are, look straight down at the shoes—they will remind you that you are Leeann Norris, a wonderful girl, with a home full of people who love you.”

  “Full of people?” I glanced in the hall mirror to see if the makeup stick was still doing its job—hiding my new, angry zit. “Last time I looked there was just Tommy and you.”

  “And Big Bird!” Tommy said. He was holding his stuffed Big Bird and pulling the voice cord over and over.

  “And Big Bird.” I smiled at Tommy. He’d insisted on wearing a shirt that didn’t really fit anymore. He was three and a half now, but he still had his baby fat tummy. It was so cute on him, but it made me suck in my own stomach. I was always afraid of being fat, but so was everyone else, even Denise, who wore a size four.

  “Very funny, Leeann,” Mary Beth said. “You get my point, don’t you?”

  Jason was already downstairs, ringing the doorbell. I told her yes and I was grateful for the shoes, even though they were so big I had to keep my toes curled down all night to keep them from falling off. And I convinced myself that maybe they were magic later, when Jason gave me my very first kiss and it wasn’t even awkward. The talking part on the way to the movie had been tough, since Jason and I didn’t really have anything in common—and Darlene was too busy smiling at Greg to do more than glance in the backseat—but the kissing part during the movie was actually pretty good. I wasn’t worried that there was something wrong with my breath or my lips or anything else. I had the magic shoes, and I was all right.

  We were in Greg’s Camaro, driving away from the theater, when Greg said we were going up to the river bluffs. I shot a look at Darlene, but she didn’t say a word. The bluffs were the big make-out place, that much I knew, but what guys like Greg and Jason considered making out, I wasn’t sure.

  “I have to call my sister first,” I said. It was almost eleven, and I’d told Mary Beth I’d be home by then. Greg pulled into the next gas station. The phone booth was so bright and hot I felt dizzy.

  When I told Mary Beth what was going on, she paused for a long minute. “Tell them you have to come home.”

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Tell them I’m in a very bad mood and you’ll be in trouble if you don’t.”

  I let out a long, deep breath. It was as close as I could come to thanking her.

  Greg grumbled about having to drop me off, but Jason didn’t complain. As I got out of the car, he said he’d call me. I wasn’t sure if he meant it, but I wasn’t sure if I cared, either. I’d had my first date, that was the important thing. In one day, I had changed into someone who dated boys rather than just whispering their names and letting out sighs.

  When I walked in the door, Mary Beth grabbed my hand and pulled me into the kitchen. It was time to eat ice cream and talk, she said. An occasion like this should always be capped off with a Nutty Buddy.

  I smiled and wondered for the hundredth time how Ben could have left her. She was always so good at knowing what mattered to other people and reflecting it back so it seemed both the most natural thing in the world and as particular and special as their birthday.

  I’d given her the highlights of the date; I was down to the bottom of the cone, when it hit me that our stereo wasn’t on for the first time in weeks. I asked my sister what happened with Holly.

  “She had a real tough time today.” Mary Beth was still licking the top of her Nutty Buddy. “But I think she’s going to be all right now.”

  I looked at her, surprised. “You mean you figured it out?”

  “No, Holly did.”

  She always said this. It was one of her biggest beliefs: that she was only a guide. She could ask the right questions and interpret the music, but the customer had to do the real work of accepting what the music was trying to reveal.

  “I should have known what was going on,” she continued. “Looking back now, I see all kinds of clues. She kept mentioning her dad at the weirdest times.”

  “Her dad?”

  “That’s who she felt like a ghost around.” She was down to her cone now, too, and she was wiping nuts from the table onto a paper towel. “You know, in the song.”

  “Didn’t you tell me Holly’s father is George, the hardware store guy?”

  She nodded.

  “And he owns that store?” I sounded irritated, and I was suddenly. “He owns that store, and probably lives on the hill just like Holly?”

  The hill was a neighborhood on the west side of Tainer that was home to most of the richer people in town, including the mayor. Very few of Mary Beth’s customers were hill people. She said they usually saw shrinks for their problems, not song readers.

  “What are you getting at?” She was holding the crumbled-up paper towel, but she hadn’t moved to the trash.

  “Holly’s dad was there when she was growing up. They had piles of money.” I paused, but I couldn’t stop myself. “I just don’t see what she could possibly have to bitch about.”

  “There’s a lot to life you don’t know about yet.” Mary Beth’s voice was soft, but I rolled my eyes. “I’m serious, Lee. Trust me, there are worse things than being left. Much worse.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, but I turned away from her because I had a feeling I did know what she meant and I felt a little sick. We knew Holly’s father George—he’d sold us the child-proofing web for Tomm
y’s window. He was a loud, big-faced, blustery man who told jokes no one thought were funny. At least my sister didn’t. I didn’t really understand most of them.

  He seemed harmless enough, though. He seemed like any other old guy.

  “That’s Tommy,” she said, and stood up. It was thundering, the way it did almost every night, but there was never any rain. Once the sound woke him up, he remembered how hot he was and started yelling for my sister.

  Usually it took her a while to settle him, but this time she was back in only a minute—with Tommy right next to her. He was blinking and rubbing his eyes but he was wearing his getting-away-with-something grin.

  I looked at him. “What do you think you’re doing, you little goof?”

  “Mama says I get to sleep in her bed.” He climbed up to the chair with his booster seat. Mary Beth was getting his apple juice box from the refrigerator.

  “Why? Is something wrong with yours?”

  “It’s sticky!” he said, and grinned wider because he knew I’d laugh. I’d just told him this morning that sticky and sweaty weren’t the same thing.

  We were still sitting at the table when the rain started. It was very sudden: one minute there was nothing, and the next we were running around checking windows, talking about how hard it was coming down as it pounded against trees and rattled the metal gutters.

  It was after midnight and Mary Beth told Tommy they had to get to bed, rain or no rain. “You should come in my room, too,” she said to me. “We can move the big fan in there, and listen to the storm and cuddle.” She smiled. “That way if we lose power, we’ll be together.”

  I started to say no, but I realized I didn’t want to be alone yet. I couldn’t stop thinking about Holly and her dad. That wasn’t tainted love, it was disgusting. It even made me feel weird about kissing Jason, although I knew that didn’t make sense.