Songs without Words

by Robbi McCoy

  Peggy gave Harper a glass of orange juice and set a place at the kitchen table. Through the sliding glass door, Harper could see the backyard. Eliot was out there, sitting on the edge of the pool, his feet in the water, his bare back to the house. Peggy put a plate of pancakes in front of her.

  “Okay,” Nate said with finality, putting his pan in the sink. “Kitchen’s closed.”

  Peggy sat beside Harper at the table while Nate joined Eliot by the pool. Harper cut a bite-sized triangle out of a pancake and put it in her mouth.

  “Do you remember what we did last night?” Peggy asked quietly.

  Harper nodded and swallowed, wondering why Peggy was talking about it. That was the absolute wrong thing to do.

  “Well,” Peggy persisted, “what do you think?”Her expression was hopeful.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, did you like it? Do you think we could do it again?”

  “I don’t think we should do it again,” Harper said. “We wouldn’t have done it at all if we hadn’t been drunk.”

  Peggy looked disappointed. “It wasn’t because I was drunk.”

  Harper remembered that Peggy had said she’d wanted to do it for a long time. She had even mentioned love. So she was serious. She had these kinds of feelings for Harper.

  “Well, that’s why I did it,” Harper said. “And I don’t want to do it again.”

  She was uncomfortable, even frightened. “I never want to do it again,” she said more firmly. “And you shouldn’t either.”

  Peggy sat back in her chair and lowered her gaze, staring at her hands in her lap. Harper ate her pancakes without tasting them, feeling the awkward silence in the room. She knew she’d hurt Peggy’s feelings, but she didn’t see any alternative. If only Peggy had been quiet about it, if only she had acted like nothing had happened, then they could have gone on like before.

  Eventually, Harper said, “You know, that Eliot is sort of cute.” Through the glass door, she saw Eliot shove Nate into the pool. “I think I might like him.”

  Chapter 5

  JUNE 11

  Harper put her black symphony slacks on a hanger and hung them in the closet beside a black blouse, one of three such outfits she used as performance costumes. She had one jacket, also black, with a velvet collar, velvet cuffs and velvet placket down the front. They were all cleaned, pressed and ready to go in the fall. Likewise, she filed away her sheet music and programs and notes from the last season. The small bedroom she used as a music room was tidy, occupied by her guitar, cello, instrument cases, music chair and music stands.

  As she put the last of the programs in a drawer, the yellow cover of a slim photo album caught her eye. She lifted the cover without removing the album from the drawer, not really wanting to see the photos but unable not to look. There was no need to, though, because she had looked at them so often over the last two years that she had memorized everything about them. On the inside cover of the album she had written “Chelsea” and nothing more. The picture on the first page was one of Harper’s favorites, taken the day they were hiking near Pacific Grove and monarch butterflies had swarmed around them in a cloud of orange. One had lighted on Chelsea’s hair. That’s when Harper had snapped the photo. Chelsea looked surprised and delighted with that butterfly perched on her head. So happy. She’d been looking at Harper, of course, taking the photo. It wasn’t just the butterfly that gave her such a joyful expression, was it?

  She closed the album and shut the drawer. She didn’t want to look at those today. It was a kind of self-torture anyway, and she was done torturing herself with memories of Chelsea.

  Harper felt restless. Chelsea had symbolized a huge turning point in her life, she had thought. Yes, she had broken off permanently with Eliot, but nothing else had really changed, not even the house. Her environment had remained static, like a museum display. She lived among relics.

  That was going to change, though. Her intended summer projects included some serious redecorating, starting with the front room. She would repaint and get new furniture, replacing the worn brown sofa and the leather recliner that she and Eliot had picked out the summer she bought this house.

  She observed the one bookcase in the room. It wasn’t used for books, of course. She saw no reason to have books in her house; she worked in a library. She brought home one book at a time, whatever she was reading. She kept a dictionary and a couple of volumes of poetry on hand, but very little else. Instead the shelves displayed photos, family pictures and a few memorable vacation scenes. Among these was the photo Wilona had taken of her wielding a hammer on that Habitat for Humanity house ten years ago. Dressed in khaki shorts and a paint-stained T-shirt, she looked like she knew how to swing a hammer. Of course, Wilona had taken at least a dozen shots. It was possible that she didn’t look quite so competent in any of the others.

  At the very least, she thought, she should update the photos of her niece and nephews. The images were now four years out of date, freezing the children in time at ages twelve, five and one. Beside them were mementos from Harper’s travels, global and spiritual, including the netsuke Hotei, Buddhist god of happiness, rendered in ivory-colored polymer. I should get rid of that, she thought, smiling at the laughing fat man who didn’t look so much happy as dyspeptic.

  The walls of Harper’s house were mostly bare, decorated with only a handful of framed prints, a couple of which she had decided to replace this summer. She didn’t like putting art on the walls just for the sake of covering up the space. She didn’t mind a bare wall here and there, especially since the house was so small. Too many things would merely create clutter. In addition to the prints, though, the walls in the front room were home to her medieval musical instruments. On the wall across from the sofa hung a lute and a lyre. Above the sofa was a mandolin. She wouldn’t change those. They were permanent fixtures. The latest addition to this collection of instruments, a handsome maple psaltery, hung in the bedroom. It had been a gift from Chelsea, presented with a quotation from Chaucer, pronouns altered:

  She kiste her sweete and taketh her sawtrie, And pleyeth faste, and maketh melodie.

  Harper remembered playing the psaltery, or trying to anyway, on the occasion of that gift, her birthday two years ago. Though the attempt had been awkward, Chelsea had been delighted with a reasonably recognizable rendition of “Greensleeves.” They had sat here in Harper’s living room while she played and sang that beautiful old song. And now, like so many things, that song had taken on a new, bittersweet edge through its association with Chelsea. Harper could now only sing it with a wistfulness just marginally removed from sadness.

  Greensleeves, now farewell, adieu

  To God I pray to prosper thee

  For I am still thy lover true,

  Come once again and love me.

  If she had known how everything was going to turn out, she would have chosen a song that day that she liked a little less. “My heart remains in captivity,” she sang in her head, realizing with dismay how utterly true that was. But it wouldn’t be true for long. She was determined to leave Chelsea behind, just as she had done with Eliot. Her summer plans were already rapidly coalescing, the days filling with activities that had nothing to do with Chelsea.

  On one wall of the pantry, on a wide bulletin board, Harper had hung three pages of a wall calendar—June, July and August. She liked to be able to see the summer at a glance like that, writing in all her appointments, trips, anticipated visits and visitors. The more days with scribbled notes, the better, she reasoned. She wrote in her dates for her annual trip back East, working it around music festivals, Shakespeare in the park, the Renaissance Faire.

  With dismay, she noticed that she had gotten “Greensleeves” stuck in her head. She turned on the radio to NPR. It was the jazz hour and they were playing Abbey Lincoln singing “The Music is the Magic.” “Greensleeves” couldn’t possibly stand up to that.

  Somewhere in this summer lineup, Harper thought, looking over her calend
ars, I need to find time to meet a fascinating woman and fall in love. Just for the fun of it, she taped a fortune cookie fortune on June 29. She had gotten it just two days earlier, and it had seemed so portentous that she had hung onto it.“Do not shut the door to your heart when true love comes knocking.” June 29 was an arbitrary date, but, looking at it, she felt chills, as though she had just imbued it with some marvelous significance.

  Fantasizing meeting the woman of her dreams on June 29, she tried to imagine what she would look like. The list of women for whom she had felt physical desire was short, too short to draw conclusions about her tastes. Would she be blond and blue-eyed like Chelsea or dark-haired and lithe like Astral? Or perhaps curvy and round-faced like Peggy? Looking back, with her current perspective, she had to admit that she had shared Peggy’s feelings, at least a little, all those years ago, but it had been too much for her nineteen-year-old mind to comprehend, hit with it as unexpectedly as she’d been.

  Whenever Harper imagined a female object of desire these days, she invariably invoked the form of Chelsea. That was probably why she had gone out with Lynn in the first place, because of her blond hair and blue eyes. Harper hadn’t expected Lynn to be like Chelsea based on a couple of similar physical traits, but it had made it easier for her to imagine making love with her. Ultimately, they were nothing alike. Harper was disappointed with herself, in how she kept comparing everyone to Chelsea.

  Astral had in no way resembled Chelsea, but, of course, that had been nothing to do with love. They had met last spring at the Northern California Women’s Music Festival in Laytonville, the only such event Harper had ever attended. It was a liberating experience and, with all of that female artistic energy present, it was a natural for Harper.

  Astral, which was almost certainly not her real name, had been dark-skinned, dark-haired and dark-eyed. She was extremely confident about her desirability, and once her sights had landed on Harper, the rest was easily foretold.

  The resort was packed with women, many walking about fully or partially nude, displaying a dazzling range of body types. Sitting on the grass, Harper stripped to the waist in the shade of pine trees to listen to a band playing traditional African instruments. When a rock singer with a guitar took the stage, she slipped her shirt back on and went over to browse the craft tent. After that, she wandered into a Middle Eastern dance class. Although she would have enjoyed the event more if she had been with someone, she was having a good time talking to people, listening to the different types of music, soaking in the lesbian culture. The vibe here was not like anything she’d been around before, and she always relished an adventure. After the dancing, she stopped to listen to a woman playing a long-necked stringed instrument that she thought at first to be a strange type of lute. The musician was dressed in orange silk pants and wore nothing else other than several colorful bracelets and necklaces. Her upper body was decorated with black markings, tribal designs that circled her breasts and belly button. Similar designs looped around her upper arms. Her body was exotic, a match for her music.

  Looking through the CDs the woman was selling, Harper learned that the instrument was a tanbur and the music was Turkish folk tunes. She lingered as the woman strummed her instrument, watching Harper with increasing interest. When her song ended, Astral sold Harper a couple of CDs and gave her a business card. They talked for a while about folk music and about traditional instruments, their obvious common ground. As they spoke, Harper’s gaze followed the spirals around Astral’s breasts, around and around, ending at dark, erect nipples.

  Astral handed over her instrument, and Harper awkwardly attempted a tune.

  “You could play this,” Astral said, delighted with Harper’s musical attempt. “You just need a few lessons.”

  “Do you play any other instruments?”

  “Bouzouki,” Astral said and, then, shrugging, as though she were reluctantly unveiling herself, “and guitar.”

  “Me too,” Harper said. “The guitar. Not the bouzouki. But I’ve always wanted to try it.”

  “I’ve brought one with me,” Astral said. “If you want, you can come play with me this evening.” Astral grinned, her long lashes briefly obscuring her eyes.

  After a light dinner, Astral led Harper to her home for the weekend, a cramped nineteen-foot-long Airstream travel trailer. They sat in front of the gleaming silver trailer in two lawn chairs and played folk songs on the tanbur and bouzouki while drinking cold beer from the trailer’s refrigerator. Astral had put on a shirt, which helped Harper focus on playing the notes. They sang softly into the cool evening as the last pinks of the sunset gloomed into midnight blue and purple.

  “Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter.” Astral’s voice was sweet, her harmonizing delightful, and the tune was slow and thick.

  Harper felt relaxed, as she normally did when playing music. There was no conversation between them other than Astral’s occasional instruction on the playing. She was the choreographer of this night’s duet, and Harper was content with her role.

  When the beer was gone, Astral put the instruments away and asked Harper inside. Harper squeezed past her in the Airstream, making her way to the back where a low bed occupied the entire width of the trailer. As soon as Astral had closed the door and shut off the main light, Harper found herself being rapidly undressed. She hadn’t had a lover since Chelsea and was nervous, but also excited. She knew it would be different, that she and Astral were just two women satisfying their lust, and she was happy with that. She was, in fact, anxious for the anonymous encounter, as if Astral would somehow rescue her body from Chelsea’s grasp and free her. She had no illusions about her place in Astral’s plans and didn’t care to know her real name.

  Astral had obviously not been intending to spend the night alone. She had equipment—a box of potions and toys and precautionary devices. Harper learned a great deal that night about the ways women could enjoy one another’s bodies. She hadn’t kept Astral’s card, but she did still have the CDs, and whenever she played the strange Turkish music, she remembered keenly the torrid night in that stuffy trailer.

  Having settled on the dates for her visit back East, Harper telephoned her mother, noting, as she lifted the receiver, the beeping that indicated a voice mail message.

  “You can put me down tentatively for July twenty-sixth,” she told her mother. “Let me know how that works for everybody.”

  “Okay. That’s about when we expected. I’ll check with Neil to be sure.”

  “How is Neil these days?” Harper asked.

  “Apparently Sarah is giving them some problems this year.”

  “Sarah? Sweet, studious Sarah?” Harper glanced at the photo of the innocent-looking twelve-year-old on her shelf, thinking again that she should update her pictures. The last time she had seen Sarah was at her Sweet Sixteen party last July. Sarah had been remarkably well-behaved despite the yard full of exuberant teenage girls. She had seemed, even then, childlike, but with an underlying air of deep insight that had intensified Harper’s growing appreciation of her.

  “I told them to expect it,” Alice said, “to prepare for the rebellion. It’s inevitable. Girls are so difficult.”

  “What form is the rebellion taking?” Harper asked, ignoring the implied complaint her mother was making about daughters.

  “Oh, you know. General disobedience. Just last weekend, they told her she couldn’t go on an overnight beach party. She went anyway. Came back totally defiant. No apology, no remorse.”

  “And still a virgin?” Harper asked.

  “I don’t think Neil is privy to that information. She really doesn’t tell them much. Oh, and she got a tattoo.”

  “Where?”

  “Lower back.”

  “Uh-oh.” Harper said. “Not a virgin.”

  “I suppose they will all survive, but Neil and Kathy are banging their heads on the wall, wondering what they did wrong. I think they’ve grounded her for the next five years.”

  Harper laughed. “
And how is Danny?”

  “He’s out of work. He’s moved in with us again.”

  “Oh? Tough luck.”

  “Well, it’s not so bad,” Alice said. “He’s a good boy.”

  “Mom, he’s thirty-five years old! How does Dad feel about having him back home?”

  “He doesn’t mind. Danny’s a help around the place.”

  There was nothing surprising about this. Danny was like the space shuttle, launching into orbit briefly with the best of intentions and then returning to base to sit idle in the hangar until the next time he felt compelled to earn his keep. Harper and Danny were close, but their lives had taken widely divergent paths. Danny had gone to seminary and become a priest, which was a great joy to their mother before he changed his mind a few years later. He loved theology, the scholarly pursuit of it, but he didn’t see how to integrate that into the everyday practice of Catholicism. Since leaving the priesthood ten years earlier, Danny had drifted, mainly in and out of his parents’ home.

  Unlike Danny, Harper had rejected the Catholic faith of their childhood almost as soon as she could consider that as a possibility. She’d become a Buddhist for a while, then a Taoist and then a naturist for a summer. That had been interesting! She had tried various other philosophies and ideologies and had ended up absorbing little bits of them all without ever finding one that worked for her. None of them ever made her feel like the search was over. None of them stemmed the restlessness that was always with her. Sometimes she thought that maybe the search was all there was, that the answers, like the systems of belief created to answer them, were mythologies too.

  For a while Harper had thought that she had found the answer in Chelsea’s arms. She had never felt such a complete physical and spiritual connection with anyone before. She had loved the way her body rose up to meet Chelsea’s touch without engaging her brain at all. Maybe she finally did know the answer to life’s great mystery, but she was no closer to finding it, or finding it again anyway. She wasn’t even sure you were allowed to find it twice in one lifetime. Allowed by whom? she asked herself, amused at this lingering remnant of belief in the supernatural.