The Song Reader

by Lisa Tucker

  I’d find new friends, she insisted, of course I would. And Holly had already written her with the news that Mike was going to California for college. “I know that will be so hard for you, honey. A new start could be good for you, too.”

  When we got off the main road, the sun was lower in the sky, shining pink and orange on the cornfields. The cemetery was surrounded by farmland. As we drove up to the gates, I found myself remembering back to the first time we came here, when the director gave us a tour and told us his cemetery “served customers” from five counties. I was ten and I thought he meant they served food like at Mary Beth’s diner. I wondered who would ever feel like eating at this place.

  The last time we were here was in the fall, before Mary Beth got sick. I hadn’t been here since. I hadn’t even thought about coming here, unfortunately.

  Mom’s grave looked downright forlorn. There were weeds sprouting around the headstone. The tulips Mary Beth planted years ago had bloomed as always, but they were wilted and brown, probably because of the dry spell a few weeks ago. And the worst part, the remains of some teenagers’ idea of fun were scattered around the left side of the plot: half a dozen crushed beer cans, twice as many cigarette butts, candy bar wrappers, and potato chip bags.

  Mary Beth dropped to the ground and grabbed a handful of weeds, pulling so hard she took the roots with her. I knelt down, too, and started gathering up the trash. There was too much to carry, so I went to the trunk of the Ford and found an old grocery bag. I stuffed all the garbage in the bag, and then walked up the lane to the Dumpster by the caretaker’s house. When I got back, Mary Beth was finished with the weeds, but she was still kneeling, staring at the headstone.

  I sat down next to her. It was so quiet. The air was getting cooler, hinting at the coming night.

  “I was just thinking, when we’re in Louisiana, there’ll be nobody to watch over her anymore.” Her voice was scratchy and deep, like she was choking back a sob. “She’ll be an orphan all over again.”

  I put my arm around my sister. She snuggled into my neck, and it felt so familiar. I remembered what it felt like to take care of her, for her body to feel as known to me as if she were my child.

  We sat in silence for a while. I knew she was trying not to cry. Finally she whispered, “Why don’t you feel sorry for her, Lee?”

  “What?”

  “Dr. Kaplan told me you don’t feel sorry for her. You feel sorry for Tommy and for Dad and for me, but you never feel sorry for Mama.”

  Mary Beth leaned back. The brightness was still there, but focused now. It was in her eyes. Her eyes seemed like they could see right into my soul.

  “I do feel sorry for her sometimes.” I paused and realized I had to say it. I’d been planning to say it for weeks. I took a breath, but it didn’t help. I was so nervous my voice came out like a squeak. “But I think what she did was wrong. To Dad. I think it was a terrible thing to do.”

  “Do you have any idea what her life was like?” Mary Beth jumped up like I’d slapped her. She walked to the big oak tree across from the grave. “Do you even know why she married him?”

  “No, no one ever told me.”

  “Okay, I’m telling you now. She married him because she had a toothache.”

  “Come on, Mary Beth.”

  “It’s true. She was right out of high school, fresh from the god-awful children’s home, and working at the plastic factory. There were no benefits then. The pay was like a dollar an hour. She didn’t have the money to get her impacted wisdom tooth out. She could barely afford the room she was renting and enough food to keep her from being too dizzy to stand on the assembly line.”

  “And Dad gave her the money?”

  “Yes. He was older; he’d been working at the factory longer. He never liked buying anything, you know how he is. He had some money saved, and he slipped it to her in an envelope.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “It is sweet, but it’s not a reason to get married, is it? Mom was eighteen, Leeann. Two years older than you are. She married him because she felt grateful, pure and simple.”

  I paused for a moment. “She never loved him?”

  “Of course not. They had nothing in common except being poor. You know that as well as I do.”

  She was right, I did know this, but I still didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to pretend Mom saw his smile, appreciated his sweetness, loved him for his gentleness. I wanted to pretend their entire marriage wasn’t a lie. “Well, she should have had the guts to say so. That’s what I think. She should have been honest.” I was standing, too, now, working up to a sputter. “Why couldn’t she have told him to leave? Why did she have to—”

  “Told him to leave?” Mary Beth laughed a harsh laugh. “Do you really think Mom could have done that? You heard how she talked, all those things she said. Over and over. ‘I got what I deserved.’ ‘I made my bed, now lie in it.’ ‘I can’t have my cake and eat it, too.’ ‘If you dance, you have to pay the fiddler.’ ‘You reap what you sow.’”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense.” I was trying not to yell. I was trying to remember how sick Mary Beth had been, how sick she still might be. Yet she certainly didn’t seem sick. Those bright eyes were boring a hole right through me, telling me she was right about everything, the way she always was before. “Mom had an affair with that guy, Mr. Stanley. You can’t say she was trying to do the right thing then.”

  “No, she wasn’t. It’s true.” Mary Beth looked up at the branches of the oak tree. Her voice grew soft. “I wish you could remember her then, Lee. You know how she was, always so hard, but when she got with Will, she was like a girl. She wore pretty dresses instead of those hideous pantsuits, and she let her hair hang on her back, rather than twisting it into that ugly knot. For the first and only time in her life, she woke up smiling. She told me once if there was a heaven, it would be just like the feeling she got being with him.”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “She was only thirty-seven years old. Younger than Holly. Younger than a lot of my customers who never had half the responsibilities she did. Why didn’t she deserve love? Why? Tell me. God, if only you could have heard her saying how bad she wanted this chance!”

  Mary Beth paused but I knew there was something else she had to say. She was chewing on her bottom lip, and her eyes were darting back and forth, as if she was trying to come up with the right words. I wasn’t messing with my chin scar; I wasn’t trying to figure anything out. I wouldn’t even say I was thinking. I don’t know how it happened that I suddenly knew what it was.

  “So you had to help her. You had to make him leave.”

  Dr. Kaplan had it wrong. Mom’s happiness was the motive, but Mary Beth was the one who did it. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Mom was too much a believer in punishment to risk something like this.

  The only thing I didn’t know was whether it was planned or just an impulse. Did my sister see me standing in Woolworth’s and just grab me? Or did she work out all the details: exactly how long she’d wait before she called Mom and said she’d found me; what she would tell Dad to make sure that the guilt he always felt was sufficiently, terrifyingly magnified; how she’d handle me, even though it was very unlikely I’d cause any problems. I was such a quiet child, everybody said so. Shy and fearful, just like my father.

  When I asked Mary Beth if she planned it, she said she couldn’t remember. Her chin was quivering. She was looking at her hands. “I spent so long trying not to think about it, those memories are just gone.”

  I could feel my eyes well up, but I sniffed hard and turned to face the hill on the other side of the cemetery. The sun was so low now it seemed to be sitting on the ground. In a minute, it would disappear and the only light would be the strange brightness of Mary Beth’s eyes.

  “You have to understand.” She was whispering. “I would have given anything to make them happy together. It’s the only birthday wish I ever had. He knew she didn’t love him, that’
s the thing. He was always apologizing to her, wishing he could be what she wanted. She would yell at him, and he was so pitiful sometimes, it would just break my heart. I thought he would be better off, I really did. It’s like that song, ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ Poor Daddy, I thought he needed a place to go where—”

  “But you let him leave thinking he hurt me. You made him think that. Jesus, what gave you the right?”

  “It was a horrible thing, but it didn’t feel like a right. It’s always been this way. It’s like people need things and I have to do something about it. I have to help them. It was like that with Mommy. She always talked like she wanted to die. Even when I was little, she would say the only thing she looked forward to was sleeping. She wished she could sleep forever, never wake up. Daddy said she didn’t mean it, but I knew she did. All my life, I was just trying to keep her from leaving me.”

  Mary Beth was swallowing back tears, and I felt bad for her, but I had to say it, “So you picked her over him? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I know, I know. I shouldn’t have done it, but Mommy was so much worse off. She couldn’t even listen to music. She bought records for me and you; she even bought records for Dad, but when we tried to get her to listen to them, she couldn’t relax enough to hear it. They never had music in that home she grew up in, did you know that? I used to imagine her a little girl without any songs, with nothing to relieve all her sadness. Dad’s mother really loved him, but Mom had nobody. She never did.”

  Before I could say anything, Mary Beth reached for my hand. “We just need a new start. That’s all we need.” Her voice was pleading. “Can’t you see it, honey? The Norris gals, doing the big town of Waterproof. Maybe we’ll even get us a house there with a huge garden. White and yellow roses like we had at the old house.”

  I didn’t pull away and I didn’t interrupt while she spun the fantasy of our new life. She wanted to make it up to me, I see that now. She was still convinced that what she’d done wrong was the most important thing about her and always would be.

  When she asked if I was ready to leave, I said, “I have to do something first. You can stay here. I’ll be really quick.”

  “Sure.” She squeezed my hand, but she didn’t ask me where I was going. Maybe she was afraid I wasn’t coming back. “You don’t have to rush, though,” she said, and exhaled. “There’s lots of time.”

  But I did need to rush. I had to get to Juanita’s before Tommy was in bed.

  Of course I was thinking about her song, but it didn’t occur to me that I was song reading. I’d forgotten that she’d predicted this. “Someday you’ll be doing readings yourself, hon,” she used to say, and I would say no. I don’t have the gift.

  No matter how many problems a customer has, you have to find the one thing they really care about, the thing that will give them the strength to handle all the rest. This is the gift, and maybe I did have it at that moment; maybe that’s how I knew what had to happen next. The words she’d sung seemed like a message straight from her heart to mine, telling me how to give her back her life.

  Forgiving her might take me years, but of course I wanted her to have this chance. She was my sister. She had clutched me to her, a motherless child even while my mother was alive, and called me honey and sweetie and baby princess.

  Tommy was in his pajamas, and sound asleep by the time I drove back to the cemetery. I’d told Dad and Juanita that Mary Beth had to see him first, but we would all be home very soon. He felt warm and heavy as I carried him to her and put him in her arms.

  She said his name and pulled him to her chest and then he opened his eyes and told her he wasn’t tired before he said, “Mama!” and started laughing at his luck, to wake up and find his mother home. It was too dark to see her face, but her voice was relief mixed with something that could only be called joy. That’s what I remember.

  Turn the Page for

  Up Close and Personal

  with Lisa Tucker

  Up Close and Personal

  with the Author

  1. SONG READING IS SUCH AN UNUSUAL IDEA. CAN YOU TELL US HOW YOU CAME UP WITH IT?

  Like most writers, I’ve always been fascinated with words, but growing up, we didn’t have many books. We didn’t even have magazines, but we always had a record player. My earliest relationship with words was through songs, and I’ve found that’s true for a surprising number of people. The specific idea of song reading came to me about ten years ago, when I became very interested in psychology, especially how memory works. When it hit me that the songs people remember may say something about them, I decided to test the theory on my family and friends, just like Mary Beth does in the novel.

  2. YOU’VE DONE SONG READING YOURSELF THEN?

  Yes, but I’ve never made any money for it, or even received afghans and cakes like she does! Some of the charts in the book were developed from my experiences; most are invented. Of course now that I’ve written this novel, I’m always being asked questions about songs and I love that. When people tell me about their music—favorite songs, favorite bands, the songs they can’t forget—I feel very honored. I know they are entrusting me with a little piece of their heart.

  3. WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO WRITE ABOUT TWO SISTERS? DO YOU HAVE A SISTER? IS THE NOVEL IN ANY SENSE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL?

  I decided to write about two sisters because that’s what the narrator, Leeann, was interested in talking about. It sounds odd, but the voice really does control a lot more of the story than I understood before I became a writer. Once I heard Leeann speaking to me, I had to follow her around, see what she would show me next. That said, I’ve always been interested in sisters, because I think it’s such a complicated bond. The novel isn’t autobiographical except to the extent that I adore my own sister and am grateful to her for believing in me and helping me understand the meaning of family.

  4. THE SONG READER IS VERY LYRICAL, BUT IT HAS ALSO BEEN CALLED A PAGE-TURNER. WAS HAVING A STRONG STORY LINE IMPORTANT TO YOU AS A WRITER?

  Yes, definitely, because the novels I love most work on many levels: they have beautiful language and memorable characters, but they also have a great plot. In graduate school I studied nineteenth-century American writers like Hawthorne and Melville—and those writers told stories! Moby Dick isn’t just a treatise on language; it’s an adventure story about a whale hunt. The Scarlet Letter isn’t only about American history; it’s also a beautiful tale of forbidden love. Some writers claim the traditional story form is dead, but I couldn’t disagree more. I think we will always need new stories; they give shape and meaning to our lives.

  5. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF “HOME” SEEMS TO BE A CENTRAL THEME IN THE SONG READER, AND YET MANY OF THE CHARACTERS’ CRUCIAL REVELATIONS TAKE PLACE AWAY FROM HOME, IN KANSAS CITY OR ST. LOUIS, IN THE HOSPITAL OR THE CEMETERY OR EVEN IN THE CAR. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WHY THIS MIGHT BE AND WHAT IT MEANS IN UNDERSTANDING THE NOVEL?

  It seems to be one of the themes of American culture—that you have to leave home to find it. The Wizard of Oz is probably the best example. I think most people do find it easier to think about their lives in a new way when they’re away from their familiar settings: on vacation, for example, or going off to college. Especially if the family is very fragile, as it is for Leeann and Mary Beth, the very act of asking certain kinds of questions might seem to put the home at risk. What I hope is that the end of the novel finds them with a chance at making a home that is more stable because they have faced up to their past. I certainly wanted to give them more family, and I think Juanita and Henry and Ben and Tommy can be that.

  6. SPEAKING OF CARS, I NOTICED MANY SCENES IN THE SONG READER TAKE PLACE IN CARS. IS THIS BECAUSE CARS HAVE RADIOS, AND SONGS?

  Of course the songs are part of it, but the other part is that a car allows people to say things to each other without having to be face to face. It’s part of the meaning of the book, this difficulty so many people have talking about their deepest selves. If the songs give the characters a language for what
they can’t say otherwise, then the car gives them the ideal place. Plus, I love my car. Someday I’d like to write an entire novel set in a car…

  7. I’M FASCINATED BY THE CHARACTER HENRY. THE FIRST SCENE IN HIS APARTMENT IN KANSAS CITY HAS BEEN CALLED ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE IN THE BOOK. WAS IT HARD TO WRITE ABOUT SOMEONE WITH THE PROBLEMS HE HAS? DID YOU DO ANY RESEARCH ON MENTAL ILLNESS?

  In some ways it was difficult to write Henry because I was determined to make him a fully rounded character rather than a stereotype of the mentally ill. I did do a lot of research on mental disorders, but in the end, I wanted Henry’s condition to be a mystery to the reader so the reader would be in the same position as the people in the novel. We don’t know what is wrong with Henry. Even if we had a label to attach we still wouldn’t really know why he is the way he is. Today we would probably look for a biochemical explanation, but I’m still fond of Juanita’s favorite reason for Henry’s troubles: that he hasn’t been loved enough to get him over all the hard parts.

  8. THE MOTHER IS ARGUABLY THE MOST DIFFICULT CHARACTER IN THE BOOK. HOW DID YOU FEEL ABOUT HER? WAS IT HARD TO WRITE HER?

  I suppose it must have been hard because I avoided writing about her until late in the revision process, when I realized Leeann had said almost nothing about her mother. It’s funny, I really don’t like novels that blame mothers for everything, and I certainly hope The Song Reader isn’t interpreted that way. I feel very sorry for Helen. The harm she does to her daughters—and I think she harmed Mary Beth much more than Leeann, because Mary Beth didn’t have an older sister to serve as a buffer—is due to her own terrible unhappiness with what her life has become. Some of this is her fault I guess, but fault doesn’t interest me. I’m interested in compassion, and I think this is the saddest part of Helen Norris: she has no compassion for herself, and so she can’t really sympathize with her daughters.

  9. ONE OF YOUR REVIEWERS HAS SAID THAT EVERY PAGE OF THE SONG READER INSPIRES COURAGE. WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS MEANS?