The Music of Your Life

by John Rowell

  And through the clear champagne glass, brandished aloft, still wet and fizzy with ginger ale, you see the dark, backlit, silhouetted figure of your father standing in the doorway, watching you, only watching you, watching only you, and saying nothing. Just watching, his arms folded across his chest. You want to suddenly throw your champagne flute at him, and scream out that he doesn’t belong in the Saturday Night Ballroom, that in his tacky UNC alumni jacket he isn’t dressed for it, and who in New York café society would want a local yokel like him at their swank parties anyway?

  But the two of you just stare at each other. And you say nothing. And he says nothing.

  He just turns and walks away.

  You drop the sheers and stand there in your pajamas. You’re Cinderella and it’s the stroke of midnight, and your beautiful dress is only ragged curtains again. And your champagne is only ginger ale, after all.

  And from the console, the orchestra swells, the song ends, and the audience in the Saturday Night Ballroom bursts into wild applause.

  Though it is deep into autumn, winter almost, in the Mid Atlantic states it is still warm enough for children to have recess outside during the middle of the school day, so the girls go off together to play hopscotch, and the boys are sent out to the baseball field to play softball. This means, to ward off even more ostracism, you still have to carry the hateful baseball glove to school every day. You’ve been sitting on it while watching TV to give it the more acceptable folds and creases you’ve noticed in the other boys’ gloves. It was the only way you could think of to break it in. (“Oh yeah,” you even once heard yourself say to one of the bullies who questioned the suddenly used-looking glove, “my dad and I play every Saturday. He pitched for Carolina, you know.”)

  But now you’re deep in the outfield, way out, where you always go. A few weeks ago, Eric Tuthill was out there with you too, but recently the other boys have caught on to his athletic prowess and he is now playing second base. They recruited him away from you; he seems happier. Sports skills are so much more important to other ten-year-old boys than the kind, welcoming ambassadorial skills you have, which only adults seem to appreciate. Besides, Eric told you recently that the other guys thought you were a sissy for singing the stupid “Long John” solo in the assembly program. You knew that already, of course; you wanted to tell Eric he was behind the times, the bearer of yesterday’s news, but you said nothing. He liked you for a while, after all. Instead of responding, you merely went blank and walked away.

  But none of this really matters, because you’re just happy to be way out in the outfield by yourself, away from the immediate softball activity and the all-consuming, nothing-matters-but-this-game aggression with which the boys play. Quietly, and with a minimum of what would surely rate as telltale movement if they could see it up close, you pretend you’re in the Saturday Night Ballroom with Eddie Edwards and assorted Rockefellers and Astors and Sinatras. You are into a second chorus of “When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along,” in fact, when something as foreign and unknown as a softball comes crashing through the roof of the King and Queen Room, landing at your feet.

  “Oh my,” says Noël Coward, with whom you’ve been hobnobbing. “What is that?” He peers quizzically down at the ground through his monocle.

  “Perhaps it’s time for a word from our sponsors,” says Eddie Edwards, still dulcet, still soignée, but suddenly uncharacteristically nervous. And then he is gone.

  You pick up the foreign object, and look about you at other schoolchildren. What are they doing in the Saturday Night Ballroom?

  Three boys are running gleefully around the field, shouting, cheering, clearly winning at something, but what?

  Other boys, non-cheerful ones, start to walk toward you, throwing down their gloves: angry. Immediately, you sense that you’ve held the ball too long, and you throw it to them, but it doesn’t go far, it just kind of plunks on the ground like a thudding piano chord in the lower keys. It doesn’t seem to make any difference anyway; they are close now, a mob.

  “Oh, dear,” says Noël Coward, and disappears.

  “You stupid little pussy!” says Bully Number One, close upon you now, in your face.

  “You stupid asshole!” says Bully Number Two. “What the hell do you think you’re doing out here, faggot?”

  And it’s a silent but menacing Bully Number Three who throws the first punch, directly into your arm. THWACKK!!!!

  “Can you fight back, faggot?” asks Number One, rhetorically. “Huh? Can you fight back?” And he shoves you down to the ground and kicks your leg, hard.

  You struggle back up, but Number Two is there with a blow to your chest. POW!!!!!

  You feel the tears heat up in your eyes, stinging, full, overflowing. You wish someone would come help: Perky, your savior Miss Kenan—Where is she???—maybe Eric, but you see him hanging guiltily back, not really joining in but not doing anything to stop it, either. Or Ray. You wish Ray were here! He would push aside these bullies, Mr. All American Baseball Player of 1957, he would make hash of these uncultured, alien children, these ingrates who don’t even know what standards or ballrooms are, who don’t know where Manhattan is—they can’t even spell it. But they can kick, and kick hard BAMMMM!!!!!!!!, and you need Ray to save you. And he would save you, you tell yourself, he would scoop you up in his arms, and wipe away your tears and protect and hold you and love you like all fathers do their sons. He would, you know he would.

  The kicks and the punches are almost rhythmic now—perhaps the Bully Orchestra was merely vamping—and you’re down on the ground and then up, and then down again, and then up, and the kicks and punches are like rhythm, they are like percussion, a different kind of “hit parade.” THWACKK! POW!BAMMM!

  And this … is the music of your life.

  “You gonna lose another game for us, pussy? Huh, sissy? You gonna lose another game for us?”

  And somewhere, in the distance, a bell rings. A bell … does … finally … ring.

  A bell. A tone. It’s music!

  B flat …

  Or C sharp?

  THE MOTHER-OF-THE-GROOMAND I

  Mother steps out into our carport from the side door of our house and jangles her big ring of keys to get my attention.

  “Hampton, do you want to drive?” she calls out to me.

  Do I want to drive? I’m already in the passenger seat, with my seat belt and shoulder strap fastened and the door locked, holding a full-to-the-brim traveler’s mug of hot coffee in my left hand, and an open copy of the current issue of Movieline magazine in my right. Would that suggest the appearance of someone who wants to drive?

  I am forced to balance the sloshing mug between my knees so I can roll down the window.

  “No, Mother, I do not,” I say.

  “Well, OK then,” she says, and locks the house door and gets into the car.

  “Mother, you know I haven’t driven you anywhere since I was sixteen and you kept slamming down imaginary brakes on the passenger side,” I tell her. “It was severely traumatizing.”

  “Oh, Hampton. I’ve never seen anybody hang on to things as long as you do. That was so many years ago.”

  So many years ago? Mother’s unexpected reference to my age makes me bristle, even though I know she probably didn’t intend it as a dig.

  “It wasn’t that long ago, Mother. I’m only thirty-three.”

  “I know,” she says, buckling up. “As old as Jesus when he died.”

  “Yes,” I say, “as old as Jesus, but not nearly as accomplished.”

  “Well, my heavens,” she says. “Who is?”

  And we pull out of the driveway.

  All right, all right, I know how this looks. I don’t lead the unexamined life, after all. It’s pretty damn silly for a guy like me to be going out shopping with his mother on a weekday morning in the middle of October; I know that. However, in my defense, this is not just any old shopping day: we are, after all, searching for a mother-of-the-groom dress that
she can wear to my younger brother’s upcoming wedding. And since I am, shall we say, unmoored at present back in New York, where I so-to-speak live, I have volunteered to come down and spend a few weeks with my parents getting things ready for Topher and Mary Beth’s big event. It is to be the social event of the season, which, in our town of Mullens, isn’t very difficult to achieve. Anything a cut above, say, an old bank executive’s retirement party or the Mullens Junior High Sadie Hawkins Dance would register as the social event of the season around here. True, the reception is taking place at the nearby Carolina Pines Country Club, which the locals refer to exclusively as “the CPCC,” as in “Are y’all going to the CPCC for dinner?” or “Weren’t the debs pretty this year at the CPCC?”

  “I hope we find something for me to wear so I don’t have to walk down the aisle in a potato sack,” Mother says, navigating with Richard Petty—like skills onto the interstate, pointing us out of town, heading north.

  “Where are we going again, Mother?” I ask.

  “We’ll end up in Raleigh, I’m sure, but there are a couple of places on the way that Sybil Scruggs told me about. She found a perfectly beautiful dress at one of these places for her daughter’s wedding last May. Perfectly beautiful. But I’m sure I won’t find anything. I’m sure I’ll end up in a potato sack.”

  “Will you please stop talking about a potato sack, Mother?” I say, somewhat harshly, because with her you must. “Nobody is going to wear a potato sack to Topher’s wedding, you least of all. Now, please.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she says, and I can tell she’s about to be ominous. “Nothing I’ve tried on in any store does anything for me whatsoever, so …”

  “Well, Mother, why do you think I’m here? I mean, this is the reason I’m here, isn’t it? To help you and Daddy with all of this?”

  “I guess …”

  “You forget I was a waiter at Caroline Kennedy’s wedding, and I took notes. Everything is going to be great. We will find you a dress.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she says. “We’ll see … I just hope everything we look at isn’t tacky. I would just hate to look tacky at my child’s wedding.”

  “Mother … tacky. Good Lord … Can we please get a sausage biscuit at the next Hardee’s? Or a gigantic Bloody Mary?”

  “Oh, Hampton,” she says, passing a slow-moving car on the right. “You don’t want to put on weight before your brother’s wedding.”

  I get the biscuit, of course. Actually, I get two. I live for them; I find you can’t get good sausage biscuits in New York. I would move back down here for those alone except I would end up looking, as Mother always says, “as big as the side of a house.” Fortunately I’ll only be here for two weeks, and being with my family will raise my stress level, and thus my metabolism, so I’m sure to burn up the extra calories I accumulate from assorted southern foods. Last summer, I had Mother send up biscuits and pimento cheese, and barbeque and Brunswick stew from the Pretty Pig Bar-B-Q restaurant in Mullens, and I hosted a North Carolina-themed evening for my friends in New York. And it turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, a true Mary Richards party. Can you imagine how disappointing it was to see a bunch of Chelsea gym bunnies standing around trying desperately to pick the fat out of the pork and refusing outright my carefully prepared platters and bowls of coleslaw and Brunswick stew? I ate that pimento cheese, ordered for twenty-five people, completely by myself every day for almost three weeks.

  My brother, Topher (derived from Christopher because I, as an apparently verbally challenged three-year-old—imagine!—was only able to say the last part of his name), lives in Atlanta with my soon-to-be sister-in-law Mary Beth, but my parents haven’t quite figured that out. They think Topher lives in his little apartment, and Mary Beth lives in her little apartment, and that the two of them meet for chaste dinners and movie dates on Peachtree Street. Mother and Daddy, even though they are forward-thinking Presbyterians and moderately liberal Democrats, just never quite assimilated the deeper meanings of the sexual revolution. I could help, I suppose. I could reveal to them the inner workings of my sexual orientation, or at least the Cliffs Notes version, but I haven’t—yet. To my credit though, I don’t make up girlfriend stories or talk about pretend dates. To their credit, they don’t ask, though I’m anticipating some “And when are you getting married, Hampton?” questions during the next two weeks. Not from Mother and Daddy, necessarily, but from “well-intentioned” family friends and relatives. It’s bad enough I’ve had to lay my job woes at my parents’ feet in the last couple of months and, on top of that, borrow money from them. (Of course I’m hoping “borrow” ends up being a loose term.) Insult to injury: to be fired from your eight-year job as a leading actor in a children’s theater company because one day the producer happened to overhear some grubby little brat in the first row say something to the effect that you looked too old to be the young prince. The nerve! Who knew they were breeding pint-sized Addison DeWitts in rural upstate New York? In my defense, I ask if you know how unflattering and primitive the stage lights are in an elementary school cafetorium? My God, Brad Pitt wouldn’t look good in those conditions! I still burn when I think about it. When I stop to think about all the sad productions of Toby Tyler, Rumpelstiltskin, Goldilocks, whatever that I played in up and down the East Coast for what amounted to practically chicken feed … Do people have any idea how unglamorous it is to have to struggle into a ratty old bear costume in a middle school band room in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and wait to make your entrance from the “wings” of a stamp-sized stage at one end of an acoustically challenged gymnasium by shouting out: “Who’s been eating our porridge?” When I think of the disgrace, when I think how I should be acting in Coward and Wilde and—

  Oh, God. I’m starting to sound like Norma Desmond. In fact, I believe I am the Norma Desmond of children’s theater.

  “Now help me look for Berean Street, Hampton,” Mother says, slowing the car down. “That’s where this first place is.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Fuquay Varina.”

  “Mother, how do you expect to find something fashionable in Fuquay Varina? Why don’t we just go on to Raleigh?” I have ulterior motives; in Raleigh, I am sure I will be able to get her to buy me a smart sweater or jacket in one of the preppy collegiate stores in Crabtree Valley Mall that I practically lived in when I was in college here.

  “Well,” she says, “Sybil Scruggs’s dress was perfectly beautiful. And she got it here.”

  “What’s the name of the place?” I ask, testily.

  “The Bridal Barn.”

  “Well, that sounds exciting.”

  “Hampton, you’re so … I don’t know what. Oh, there it is. Berean Street.”

  Mother turns the car onto a side street and sure enough, there a little ways down is a store shaped and painted like a faux barn in cherry red with a little white silo on the side. A small, marquee-like electric sign, the kind usually more associated with fast food and quick-mart—type establishments, reads: THE BRIDAL BARN. For all your wedding and formal needs. Serving the Heart of Carolina since 1967.

  Mother checks her hair in the rearview mirror before getting out of the car.

  “I need a permanent,” she says. “I look like the Wreck of the Hesperus.”

  “Mother, you look fine. I don’t think we have to worry about how we look in this place.” I steal a quick glance in the mirror myself.

  And we get out of Mother’s tasteful gray Chrysler Cordoba and walk across a loose gravel driveway into the Bridal Barn.

  “How’re y’all doing today?” asks a pert, plump, white-haired woman seated on a swivel stool behind the cash register. Her nametag reads: BRIDAL BARN: Evelyn Boals. A yellow tape measure hangs around her neck.

  “Fine, how are you?” Mother answers, still touching up her hair.

  “Doing just fine,” says Evelyn. “What can we help you all with today?”

  “I’m looking for a mother-of-the-groom dress.”

>   “I see. Are you the one getting married?” Evelyn says to me. I’m sure she’s certain I will answer in the affirmative.

  Well, no, Evelyn, you see I’m—

  “It’s his brother,” Mother offers. “His younger brother is the one getting married.”

  “I see. Well, I’m sure we can find you something. Let me go get Mavis. It’s her turn.”

  She leaves the cash register and heads toward the back of the store, where a frowsy, gray-haired woman, stick-thin in a royal blue dress, stands smoking a cigarette in the frame of an open doorway, outside of which appears to be a tobacco field. Mother and I start to peruse some of the racks of dresses that are mostly encased in clear plastic zip-up bags. The two women return from the back. Their differing sizes make them look like a female Abbott and Costello.

  “This is Mavis,” says Evelyn, heading over to another customer, whose arrival in the store has just been heralded by a jingle bell on the inside of the door.