Queen of the Fall

by Sonja Livingston

  There are no guarantees in any family, of course, and such things as illness or despair can appear anywhere—but about certain facts, such as the completion of high school and avoidance of teen pregnancy, background makes all the difference and his nieces will not miss a step. It’s not my husband’s fault that his family is so intact; it has, after generations, only recently seen its first divorce. He can’t help the stable home, the doctor father, and good schools. And why should he? Isn’t that exactly what I’d choose for her if I could? So much is dumb luck; why should those born into fortune bear any blame for burdens not handed down? They don’t. Of course, they don’t. Such are my thoughts as I think of my girl and look out the window and can find nothing more to say.

  The thing about the rain is that eventually it must let up.

  Even now it has tapered a bit, and when I look out the window there are still the maple leaves almost plastic from the sheen, yes, but there is also the mock orange tumbling onto the garage, a rush of petals weighing the branches, as if richer for the weather. I do not say that the mock orange requires so much rain to be lush. I do not pretend that mock oranges in yards with less rain are as not as full or as grand, I only say that you notice it more when the rain goes on for so long. You notice such things, and what is there to do but run through the rain to take in the branches? Even when there is no fruit, even when the perfume is hidden—there is still the shock of blossoms, and what can you do but give thanks?

  What I will say when I see her? I fear my judgment will show and is anything more corrosive than judgment? Or perhaps I’ll go to the other extreme, loading her up with diapers and teething rings and celebrating this event in a way that says I endorse her choice—if it is a choice, because when you’re sixteen, what in God’s name is choice?

  The most I can I hope for is to love in a way that neither holds back nor says that this is the best thing she will ever do.

  And will you think less of me when I say that, in this moment, I cannot know if my grief is entirely about this child making another? In this moment, as a woman in her forties without children who has taken a sprig of mock orange into her hands, no longer expecting scent but marveling instead over the flowers, I must admit that I hear the sound of another bell ringing—something that knows better but keeps chiming anyway, saying that yes, this is perhaps the best thing she will ever do.

  The Lonely Hunters

  AL GREEN’S VERSION OF the song is over six and a half minutes long—just enough time to break you in two and put you back together again. Released by the Bee Gees in 1971 London, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” was brought home by Green in 1972 Memphis. The words become birds in Green’s mouth, soaring, then spiraling in sudden downward flutters. And it’s not the lyrics so much as the extended rises that matter, the calling out and all that’s left unsaid that make Green’s version the saddest song ever sung. So when he appears to Ally McBeal at the end of season two wearing a bow tie and singing this very song, how could I not feel my own throat go dry?

  The human heart varies in weight from seven to fifteen ounces, and is usually no more than a pound. Yet even those few ounces sometimes feel like lead. An organ, yes. Flesh and blood, but more than that. The heart is the word we use to speak of the human core, the place where spirit and soul and feeling reside.

  The ancient Egyptians believed the goddess Ma’at kept a scale with which to weigh the human heart. Upon death, the goddess plucked a feather from her headband, setting both heart and feather upon her scale. Only those hearts weighing exactly the same as the feather were allowed to continue their journeys toward the heavenly home of Osiris.

  I didn’t watch Ally McBeal when the show first aired. I tend to be about a decade behind on TV, watching Seinfeld long after it ended, cracking up about the Soup Nazi years after everyone else. Same with Ally. By the time I tuned into the quirky lawyer panicking over the dangers of not marrying by thirty, the character would have been well into her forties and most probably still single.

  There’s nothing better than snow and evenings of hunkering down in the early dark of new winter. Warm soup, thick bread, the scent of wood smoke. But as the season progresses, a feeling of containment comes like clockwork. No matter the many pleasant people or objects by my side, a mild madness descends, a sort of cabin fever, making me wish for wings. I settle instead for hobbies. One winter I decorated birdhouses, crafting nearly forty, each with a different theme—I attached white picket fencing to the Cape Cod and hot-glued Turkish coins to the one meant to represent travel. Another year I reread every single Nancy Drew mystery from childhood. Only when I began to develop a complex theory of gender politics based on Nancy and her chums did I finally give them up. I cultivated a grove of miniature orange trees for a few years, wringing my hands while waiting for the scented petals to come and cheat March of its gloom.

  This year I gave up attempts at hobbies altogether; instead I took to bed in the early evenings, spending hours tucked away and watching episode upon episode of Ally McBeal.

  The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was written when Carson McCullers was twenty-three. She’d hopped a steamship in 1934, leaving Georgia for New York as soon as she could. Only seventeen, McCullers had already out dreamed her surroundings. In this way, McCullers is like Mick, the young girl in her novel who loves music so desperately she attempts to patch together a violin with parts from a smashed ukulele. The girl is so eager for strains of Beethoven that she burrows into the hedge near houses with radios and open windows, waiting hours sometimes for the music to come.

  I should not have been surprised when Al Green appeared to Ally McBeal. I should have seen the soul singer coming a mile away. Ally had already been visited by apparitions of a dancing baby and was going through a rough patch, what with the mess she’d made with the handsome Dr. Butters and all. And the show had made a point of flexing its musical muscle, featuring guest spots by Barry White and Jennifer Holliday, as well as providing Ally with her very own group of backup singers—the Pips to her Gladys Knight, an imaginary trio swaying behind her, doo-wopping to every movement of her life.

  Of course, Al Green woke Ally one night with his singing. Of course she stood, first in wonder, then crumpled into his arms for a slow drag around the bed. Of course. Al Green’s rendition of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”: Is there any better anthem to the gorgeous ache of living?

  Back to Egypt, back to the goddess Ma’at with her feather and scale. While the purest hearts were allowed to continue toward the reeds growing along the Nile, those hearts found too heavy were fed to the soul-devouring creature called Ammit, or tossed into the fiery lake over which she presided. Either way, since ancient times, the heaviest of hearts have been fed upon by demons, while at their lightest, the heart can feel like a feather hovering toward a field of rushes.

  Ally McBeal was a critical success, though some criticized the character’s short hemlines, impractical footwear, and regular flights of fancy, declaring that Ally was not only an unprofessional and ill-informed representation of a Harvard-educated lawyer, but a gigantic step backward in the depiction of modern woman.

  Exactly which television characters qualify as good role models for girls is unclear. Women still reign supreme on advertisements for cooking products and cleaning supplies, after all, appearing nearly ecstatic as they scrub floors and change diapers. Of course, men do laundry and cook supper, but not in the world of television advertising, where a woman engaging in self-indulgent rumination seems an improvement by comparison—or at the very least spares us the sight of a lawyer presoaking casserole dishes and shampooing the carpet before running off to a bail hearing.

  The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is nothing so much as a sad sweet song. More than anything else in the novel, more than the mutes or the doctor or any of the other lonesome characters, I’m taken in by Mick and her desire for music. The sound of harmonicas rises from back porches in the sagging mill town, and we’re told that as a baby, Mick was calmed by her Daddy sing
ing “Dixie” while beating out a tune against the coal scuttle. But the girl’s head is stuffed with symphonies. Despite her lack of instrument. Despite the slump of the town under the Georgia sun and the weight of their days, leaving them too tired to think of anything as fruitless or vital as beauty. Despite all that, music buds within her.

  Al Green turned from the limelight to gospel music in the mid-1970s—an unexpected move for someone who’d risen so far from Forrest City, Arkansas, a place strung with cotton fields and a federal prison, a town that calls itself the Jewel of the Delta. One of ten kids and the son of a sharecropper, Green had made good with a series of number-one hits, helping to solidify the sound of American soul music.

  The story goes that the singer experienced a religious transformation after a girlfriend scalded him with hot grits. She seems to have been lovesick, and Green refused to marry her. That his most recent album had hit big with a track called “Let’s Get Married” must have added to the sting—as did his bringing home another woman. After burning him with the pan of steaming grits, it’s said that she found Green’s gun and turned it on herself, leaving a note declaring her love.

  She’d been beautiful, with kids and a husband in New Jersey, but the world remembers her mainly as the one who burned Al Green with grits, a woman gone mad with longing, the person whose death sent Al Green back to Jesus.

  In my favorite episode, Ally’s law firm defends a man who sees a unicorn. A bond trader, he’s been fired for the insanity of his claim—how can people trust their portfolios to a man with full-blown hallucinations? Aside from all the unicorn talk, the man seems fine, and what is faith anyway but belief in the unseen? And we know a secret. Ally has seen one too, as a child.

  “People who see them share some of the unicorn’s traits—they’re lonely, with virtuous hearts,” the bond trader says.

  The man, though fired, is gleeful and delighted to have been singled out for unicorn visitation. By episode’s end, the unicorn appears once again to Ally. Fiction, of course, but even a cynic can hold her breath as Ally approaches the majestic creature that has materialized in her downtown law office. Even the most hardened of viewers, one who knows she’s being manipulated but looks into those horse eyes, warm and dark, remembers that she too once loved unicorns.

  I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know.

  —CARSON MCCULLERS, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

  After a few episodes of Al Green apparitions, Ally’s therapist, played by Betty White, tires of hearing her client whine about her relationship woes and musical hallucinations and finally succeeds in getting Prozac into Ally’s hands. An episode-long philosophical struggle ensues, culminating in Ally’s decision to flush the psychotropic pills down the toilet. She will not surrender her inner Al Green, she decides, nor the music that only she can hear. She’s plagued by invisible music but chooses to believe in the power of the dream—one she did not summon and that costs her greatly but is so radiant she cannot flee.

  I watched every show, even after things went south in season three (a senior partner becoming obsessed by the wattle of Janet Reno’s neck, lawyers dancing to Barry White in the unisex bathroom, and Jon Bon Jovi as Ally’s plumber)—crazy piled upon crazy, I kept watching. Because for all the make believe, for all the Betty White as drug-pushing therapist, for all the dancing babies symbolizing biological clocks and the strange and labored sexual fixations, ultimately, Ally’s aloneness was pulsing and unabated and the truest thing I’d ever seen on TV.

  Green wind from the green-gold branches, what is the song you bring?

  What are all songs for me, now, who no more care to sing?

  Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,

  But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill . . .

  —FIONA MACLEOD, “The Lonely Hunter”

  The title of McCullers’s novel was taken from “The Lonely Hunter,” a poem written by Fiona MacLeod in 1896. Fiona MacLeod, it was discovered upon death, was actually William Sharp, a Scottish writer who’d assumed the feminine pseudonym for the writing of his romantic poetry. Some say he adopted the Fiona persona to keep his scholarly reputation unsullied by sentimental verse, while others believe that he fell so hard for a woman he could not have that writing love poems as Fiona was the best way he knew to be near her.

  It’s so strong in some, the voice. To Carson McCullers, the gift was given. And to Fiona MacLeod and William Sharp. To the television character Ally, not so much the voice as the ability to recognize it when a good one comes along. Al Green’s voice seems to have always been there. Before striking out on his own he’d been part of the family gospel act, but was given the boot when his father found him listening to the secular sounds of Wilson Pickett. But whether the young man sang gospel or soul, the voice was there.

  It’s still there, at the Full Gospel Tabernacle down near the Mississippi state line, where he rouses congregants with his Yes, Jesus, and Thank you, Lord. But it’s only when, in midsentence, he breaks into song—then sings my soul my Savior God to Thee—it’s only then, the choir coming in—how great Thou art—as everything moves upward, the Reverend Green’s voice going low and ragged then rising, expanding, the choir pouring themselves out, something like a hard ringing of bells, that the hearts of those present for a moment take flight.

  If I were a writer for Ally McBeal, I would not have ended the series by surprising Ally with a daughter from a botched egg donation a decade prior. I would not have allowed the eccentric senior partner to evolve into a mariachi singer at a local Mexican restaurant. More than anything, I would have not let “To Sir with Love” be Al Green’s swan song from the show. It’s a fine song, and it was touching to see Al and Ally dancing down the streets of Boston, the lampposts strung with fairy lights, both characters smiling as Al trails off into a swirl of stardust. If only he could have stayed a bit longer. He might have fixed a decent meal for Ally, who’d grown thin over the years—a plate of collards and pork ribs. He might have sung some more about the heart, his and hers and ours. They might have headed down to Memphis, where they’d scratch their names on the bricks outside Graceland while Al tells Ally about Stax and Hi Records and the sounds of the city back in the day. They’d head toward the Mississippi, following the bends of the river before hopping a trolley to an evening of southern fried and Beale Street.

  I have tried to fill my heart with honey, which is not as silly as it sounds, given the way the liquid shimmers, the slow soak of it into each of the cells. I’ve succeeded with gin or brandy and sometimes love. Some use the pages of their Bibles to set papier mâché casts over the heart, while others survive on celery sticks or a Mozart sonata or by memorizing a certain turn of verse by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Some allow themselves the impossibility of unicorns; others reread books from childhood or follow the sound of Al Green as he stomps his feet and shouts praises that flare without warning into love songs.

  Despite all this talk of feathers and goddesses and bittersweet songs, it’s not the heart I speak of. Not really. The Italian word for gypsy, zingaro, is perhaps a better word. Heart is merely a convenience, a sort of shorthand for what’s contained within the cautious body—the spark that thrives on wonder, that which is flung wide or ratcheted shut until it seems all but sealed but remains open, if only just a touch; the thing that moves and changes even as we seek to know it, that which stalks and stalks but cannot be satisfied. Not fully. Not permanently. The part of us that continues to yearn, to try, and to dream, despite the fact that there’s a certain space within us incapable of being filled, and that learning to live with this is a part of our humanity. But what does the heart know? Zingaro cuore. So great are some hungers, so unrelenting, that whatever even halfway fills them must be tried—miniature orange trees and birdhouses and homemade ukuleles. What can we do but feed, then feed again, the tender shoots within us?

  Something Like Joy

 
; YOU USUALLY GET HERE this early?” asks a woman, sixty or so, white uniform dress, stockings, white shoes, as she drops her clothes into an open machine.

  “No,” I say, “I’ve never been before noon.”

  “I love this place early,” her voice is soft but strong, the accent more Mississippi than Arkansas, “before everyone else gets here with their big bags of clothes and children piled up all over the place.”

  I like the quiet too, the waiting while clothes spin and soak and dry, flipping through magazines and staring out into the parking lot, watching people come and go with their takeout boxes of BBQ, all of it in a sort of suspended animation—the Laundromat, where nothing is expected beyond feeding quarters to machines and scooping soap and softener at the appropriate times. But this morning is different. It’s my birthday, though that’s something no one else can see. No, the real difference is that I have plans while I wait. A tall coffee and a stack of student papers on the table near my basket.

  “I just got off work,” she says while letting the lid to the washing machine come down, “I work from six to ten every morning.”

  She works at the elementary school nearby, and says no when I ask if she’s a nurse, smiling in a shy way that reminds me of Rose Middlebrooks from junior high, the friend I’d forgotten until this very moment, with eyes as brown and skin as golden as the woman standing at a washing machine thirty years later. “In the cafeteria,” she says, “fixing breakfast.”