The Music of Your Life

by John Rowell

  I feel like a new man, and my mind is racing about various things. I careen the Dirt Devil down Beach Drive and turn onto Yaupon Boulevard for the first time in two weeks. I don’t know why, but I feel so encouraged to see that someone, probably some lonely, horny teenager, has spray painted the big city limits sign so that it now reads: “Welcome To Fuck Island.”

  “Oh mah God,” says Tammy Buttry, from her usual outer office/ reception area perch when I walk in the door of Bledsoe Real Estate, and her eyes go all deer-in-the-headlights at the sight of me, though she quickly starts trying to act nonchalant and friendly, saying “Welll … hey you, let me give you a biiig huuug.” And she does, wrapping her fleshy arms around my neck and nearly choking me to death with the smell of some cheap Sam’s Club perfume. But I know she’s secretly disappointed to find out that I’ve actually recovered from my exile, that I didn’t have to be carted off in a straitjacket to the Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh after all. And I’m sure she’s absolutely aching to pick up that phone and call everyone who knows us on the Island to report that I’m up and around and to say Well, I just can’t believe it, I thought T.J. had a complete nervous breakdown, didn’t you? until she gets somebody to agree with her.

  “Well hey to you too, Tam But,” I say, which is what I call her, and which I know gets under her splotchy, milky-white skin something fierce, even though I say it with undiluted sweetness.

  She smirks a little smirk right back at me, and I can tell she’s about to say something that will be mean deep down and sugarcoated on the surface.

  “T.J., we were all so worried about you and your … your little time-out,” she says, oozing concern. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yes I am, Tam But, and thank you so much for your card,” I say, oozing sincerity right back at her. Poor Tammy; she has never forgiven me for beating her out in auditions for Nunsense at the Duck Island Playhouse, in which I broke the gender barrier with my highly acclaimed performance as Sister Mary Amnesia. (Well, I was highly acclaimed by the Wilmington Star-News, though maybe it doesn’t count so much since the reviewer, Stephen Brickles, has a thing for me and is always trying to get me to go out with him.) One day soon after that, when I was on the phone trying to get a condo deal to go through, I heard Tam But in Rollie Bledsoe’s office, all pitiful and crying on his shoulder, saying: “It’s not fair that T.J. is a guy and he gets to play Sister Mary Amnesia! It’s just not faiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrr, Rollie!!!! WAAAAAAAA!”

  “Is that you, Talbert?” Rollie calls out from the inner office. “Come on in, come on in.”

  “I’ll just go talk to Rollie now, Tam But,” I say, heading for Rollie’s knotty-pine door.

  Tammy glares at me sweetly and says: “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” but I can see her hand is already beginning to creep up to her Rolodex; she just can’t wait to start making calls. God, that girl is so small-town. It’s pitiful.

  “Come in, Talbert,” Rollie says, shutting the door behind us. “I have a paycheck for you.”

  Rollie’s desk is littered with ham biscuit wrappers and rental and lease agreement papers and 7-Eleven Big Gulp plastic cups. There is a large framed photograph of Rollie with his wife, daughter, and son enjoying a camping trip in the woods; a setting which, unfortunately—and I hate to be mean—makes them look like the innocent family in a horror movie who goes on vacation and is never seen nor heard from again.

  “Thanks for understanding my predicament, Rollie,” I begin. “You know, sometimes all you need is some rest and then you’re back in action.”

  “Yeah,” he says, and he pauses for a long time. “Well, it hasn’t been real busy since you’ve been gone, Talbert. You know, now that the summer craziness has died down and we’re into the off-season. I believe Tammy and I can probably handle most everything around here for a while.”

  I smile, and then look down at the floor. I know what’s happening; I don’t need a house—or a condo—to fall on me. “Oh …” I say, still looking down, knowing I should put up a little more of a struggle about this, but, hell, I didn’t like this job, anyway. He’s probably doing me a big favor.

  “I’m sorry, Talbert, it’s just that we don’t really need three people here in the off-season. Business just doesn’t warrant it.” At least it sounds like telling me this actually pains him, so I can’t hate him too much.

  “No, no problem, Rollie, I understand …” I say, looking up from the floor.

  “Talbert, you’re … you’re a fine fellow, you are, we just … you know … it’s …”

  He’s lurching now, stuttering out the same information, just in different sentences, trying to couch the blow I guess, and I don’t really want to stick around and listen to it. For my own sake, I’m going to remain noble and dignified, make him think that losing my job doesn’t really matter to me, that I’ll take it on the chin and rise above it. I gaze out the window, and then into the middle distance, heavy-lidded but magisterial, instantly calling up my own personal reserves of smiling-through-tears, with visions of Mildred Pierce and Stella Dallas filling my mind—wounded and broken, but head held high.

  He’s still rambling, saying something about “Maybe next spring, when tourist season kicks back in, we can see how things stand, if you’re available …”

  “Sure, Rollie, of course, thank you,” I say, if only to shut him up. And even though inside I feel like Joan Crawford, or Barbara Stanwyck at her most beaten-down, I extend my hand to him in a good, strong masculine way, firmly shaking his short, pudgy one, and looking him squarely in the eye. He isn’t completely a weasel, and I wish I could hate him more than I do. Truth is, Rollie has always been pretty nice to me.

  “You know, Talbert,” he says, walking me to the door. “My wife and I always enjoy reading your articles in the Quacker. We always check to see what you have to say about a movie before we go see it, we really do. Even though we didn’t agree with you about that last Steven Seagal movie; I mean … it was just fun to us. Man, that guy … whew, he can kick some butt, can’t he?”

  “I’m not a fan of Mr. Seagal,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, I gathered that from your review there, pardner. Hey, maybe you can get Ralph to give you a few more assignments over at the paper.”

  “Well, thanks,” I say, maintaining composure worthy of a spring debutante, “but I’m working very hard on finishing my novel, and I’m going to be directing and starring in a show over at the Playhouse, so I’ve got a lot going on.” Rollie has no idea that I’ve just gilded every lily in the pond.

  “Oh, well, sounds like you do, then. Now you come by and see us, Talbert, don’t you be a stranger, you hear? And you take care of yourself.”

  “Will do,” I say, anxious to get out of Bledsoe Real Estate.

  He shuts the door behind me, giving me a chance for a moment with Tammy, who, I now figure, has known all along that I wasn’t getting my job back.

  But of course, in true Tam But form, she is radiating saccharine sweetness as I walk past her, and as she opens her mouth to say something—something I guarantee would be unnecessary, inane, and probably ungrammatical if I allowed her to say it—I throw up my hand to silence her, and I whisper: “When you speak of this, years from now, and you will … be kind.”

  Her mouth just freezes in mid-O. I have silenced the Tam But.

  And though I know she doesn’t get any of my references, at least she can tell it’s an exit line, that I’ve made it my moment, not hers. And I walk out of the office proud, dignified, head held high, as behind me the thin screen door thwacks anemically against its frame.

  And on the porch, to no one in particular, I hold the paycheck in the air, and say to the nonexistent crowd clamored before me:

  “This … is … Mrs…. Norman … Maine!”

  1:15 P.M.

  I deposit my check at Coastal Savings and Loan, though I make sure to do it in the ATM anteroom so as to avoid seeing people I know inside the bank, especially my friend Kelly, who works there as a
teller; she would want to take me to lunch. I’ll see them all soon enough; I need a careful reentry, one of my own design and execution.

  I slide back into the Dirt Devil and decide, spur of the moment, to head out to Charlotte Watkins’s house. Something I heard myself saying in Rollie’s office has given me an idea I want to pursue—funny how sometimes when you tell a lie it makes you want to go out and make it true—and I am so grateful to be back to my old self, to be back in touch with my own special inner creative spark and to be receiving signals from it that make me want to go out and do, do, do. In my bed during my self-imposed exile, I didn’t hear my spark call to me at all, not even once, and that only added to my fear about Donny. But now, cruising around my sleepy little one-fish town in the Dirt Devil has given me a new focus, despite losing my job, and I am Making Plans.

  I tempt my fates and turn on WAVE to see if they have any new musical words of wisdom for me; what suddenly fills my car is Diana Ross singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” which is OK, I can get some inspiration from that, but then when the song ends, the local news on the half hour begins with: “The search continues for Donny Tyndall, the six-year-old boy who has been missing for two weeks. Law enforcement officers say a three-county-wide manhunt has turned up nothing new—”

  Immediately I flick the dial to the only other station you can get in our town, the Christian station WGOD, and they’re playing the Happy Goodman Family’s rendition of “I’ll Fly Away,” and to make myself feel better, I start singing along with Sister Vestal, imagining her beehive do and powder blue muumuu and white patent leather pumps tapping the studio floor. “I’ll fly away …I’ll fly away …” but then an ad comes on for Marsh County Christian Day School, an institution of lower learning that I can’t abide, because it is funded by archconservatives and because I have always believed the rumor that little Mindy Kazyre went around town telling, which was that teachers at MCCDS would occasionally introduce snakes into the classroom. I stop singing and turn off the radio.

  While I’m sitting at the stoplight (there is more than one around here, but barely), waiting for it to change, who walks in front of the Dirt Devil but Claudia Davenport Shields, fresh from the TV studio, I guess, dressed to what she obviously thinks is the nines and the height of lady journalist couture, but in the glaring light of day that hair looks brassier than it does on camera, and her makeup is heavy and stagy-looking. Oh, I am just dying to roll down my window and yell out: “Hey, Claudia! It’s get PET! Get PET! Git it?” But I realize it’s probably not a good idea for me to trash the biggest local celebrity to her face, since I am endeavoring to become a local celebrity myself, and I may need her promotional help at some point if I’m to accomplish that.

  Up ahead, on my way to the outskirts of town where Charlotte Watkins lives, I decide to turn onto Myrtle Street to say hello to Hazel Toomey and Jessie at the Biscuit Break. I haven’t had one of Hazel’s biscuits in two weeks, and she was good enough to send me a card with a free-biscuit coupon while I was convalescing.

  I decide to go up to the drive-thru window because I think it will be more of a surprise for Hazel if she sees the Dirt Devil slowly creeping into view.

  Hazel pulls open the glass window as I approach.

  “Well looky here! I thought that was you, Talbert Moss! Oh Lord, child, how in the world are you? We was so worried about you, you sweet thing. Give me a kiss.”

  And Hazel leans awkwardly out the drive-thru window, forcing me to lean awkwardly out of my window, so she can plant one on me. Hazel is in her mid-seventies, and has been making biscuits on Duck Island for fifty years. This morning, Hazel’s big, frowzy gray wig sits cocked at an unnatural angle, sort of on an incline toward the right side of her head, and I want to reach up and adjust it for her, so people won’t make fun of her for the rest of the day. Hazel’s been through chemo and lost all her hair, but she doesn’t seem to think anybody knows that. No matter what, she still gets up every morning to come in and start rolling that dough at four-thirty. Suddenly, thinking about that makes me feel kind of ashamed to have been laying up in the bed for two weeks like a sick person when I wasn’t truly sick. I vow to make up for lost time.

  “What in the world was wrong with you, did they say?” Hazel asks, looking at me over the tops of her ancient silver-plated cat-eye glasses, which are attached to a chain hanging around her neck.

  “Oh, just a bug, I guess. I’m fine now, though.” I’m not sure who she means by they, but I have no way of knowing how local gossip has spiraled out of control. I’m sure it’s been said I’ve had everything from pneumonia to Lyme disease to sleeping sickness to Lord knows what. Fortunately, I still have traces of my end-of-summer tan, and my days of rest have left my eyes clear and white and blue, plus I still have summer blond highlights in my hair. I also have good calves, which is fortunate, because I near-about live in khaki shorts and deck shoes, no socks, all through the spring, summer, and fall. I’ve always felt that I was presentable to both men and their mothers.

  “Thank you for the coupon, Hazel,” I tell her. “I’ll have a ham and cheese biscuit.”

  “You got it, sugar pie. Coming up, you just wait right there.”

  Just inside the drive-thru window, next to the cash register, I see that Hazel has posted a new sign that reads: “Employees must wash”—and here she has pasted a cut-out illustration of the Praying Hands—“before returning to work.” This is odd, because it’s only Hazel and Jessie who work here. Hazel must have suddenly gotten the notion that Jessie is unclean, or perhaps she put it up to remind herself. Also, in the window, facing out, is a small poster of Donny Tyndall, with his little smiling face and blond head of curls, clearly an Olan Mills kindergarten portrait. Above, it says: MISSING. Then: Donny Tyndall, age 6, last seen in the vicinity of Dodd County. Reward. Please contact Marsh County Sheriff’s Office.

  I stare into his little eyes for several seconds, and then I feel my own eyes start to sting and—

  “Well, look what the cat done drug up to the pick-up window,” says Jessie, appearing suddenly, opening up the glass and looking askance at me like I was something out of the prison reformatory program. She is wiping her flour-covered brown hands on a rag.

  “Hazel said that was you, but I had to see it with my own eyes. Boy, I heard they were about to pack you off to Dix Hill.”

  “Well, Jessie,” I say, suddenly feeling slightly defensive. “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

  “Uh-huh. I never heard anybody say anything about being dead, just that you wouldn’t get out of the bed for two weeks. What in the Sam Hill was wrong with you, laying up there in the bed like that, Talbert?”

  “I was … I don’t know … I just didn’t feel well …” I don’t like being questioned so point-blank like this. Where is Hazel with my biscuit? She at least seemed glad to see me.

  “Sounded like a movie-star disease t’ me,” Jessie continues, eyeing me up and down. “Laying up in the bed like that, well and healthy. Shoot. Your mama came by here, I never felt so sorry for anybody in all my life, worried sick, didn’t know what to do. You ought to be ashamed, making folks worry about you like that, when there wasn’t nothin’ wrong with you, and you a fully grown man …”

  I bite my lower lip. I thought people around here would be happy to have me back dancing among them, favoring them with my cheerful, revived self.

  “Well, I’m sorry, Jessie,” I say, looking at her. “Don’t you ever get depressed or anything?”

  She looks back at me all hard and sarcastic, and then says: “Are you kidding me, Talbert, or what? Shoot. Hell yeah, honey, I get depressed, but I come in to work.” Then she lowers her voice to say: “What’s Hazel gonna do, sick as she is, if I don’t come in here and help her run this place?”

  Hazel appears back in the window, squeezing in next to Jessie. Yes, that wig is definitely listing. Oh, it’s so damn sad. I think I’m just gonna break down right here, this has become the worst part of the entir
e day.

  “Here you are, Talbert,” Hazel says, handing me a small white paper bag. “Now, honey, give me your hands.” There are two other cars behind me in the drive-thru line, but I don’t think she’s noticed. I pass my hands through the window. Hazel’s gnarled, bony hands grasp and rub mine, and she closes her eyes.

  “Let’s us just say a little prayer thanking the Lord that you’re doing all right, and let’s pray for that Tyndall boy, too. Come on Jessie, let’s all hold hands …”

  And the two of them pray, with lots of Oh Lord’s and Yes, Lord’s and Praise Be’s all coming out at me through the little window, and the people behind me in line are starting to honk their horns, which seems to me a sadly inappropriate musical accompaniment for Hazel and Jessie’s lamentations; I know I ought to turn WGOD back on just to provide the right musical backdrop for our prayer session, but mostly I just want to get out of there and eat my biscuit. Finally I wrest the moment away from them with a big “Amen!” and the Dirt Devil and I peel out from the drive-thru with a big rubbery screech that I hadn’t intended, but don’t have time to go back and apologize for.

  2:00 P.M.

  The biscuit makes me feel better, and I’m reminding myself that by day’s end, I will have convinced the all-powerful, all-important Duck Island Playhouse artistic director Charlotte Watkins to back the fabulous theatrical plan that I’m about to lay at her feet. I don’t really like Charlotte all that much, truth to tell, but she does pull the strings at DIP and I know she thinks I’m talented. Still, I wonder if she has forgiven me for getting all the good reviews as Sister Mary Amnesia in Nunsense back in the spring. Charlotte directed our production, naturally, and also conveniently gave herself the starring role of the Mother Superior. But here is what Stephen Brickles wrote in the Star-News: “As Sister Mary Amnesia, the brilliant, talented, and handsome Talbert John Moss gives a performance that is, well, unforgettable (ha, ha), but as the Mother Superior, Charlotte Watkins is, decidedly, inferior.” I saw Stephen in a bar after that, and as I warded off his brazen overtures, I said, “No more Rex Reed for you, mister.” I’m sure he thought that was ungrateful and I know the next time I’m in a show, he’ll crucify me.