Songs Only You Know
Page 32
A couple years later, in the 12-step meetings I’d attend, they’d call moves like this “pulling a geographic.” Getting up and out of Dodge, thinking a change of scenery might allow you to be born anew. I’d spend months sitting in the basements of Brooklyn churches before realizing those survivors were right about a lot of things, so many of them having nothing to do with booze or drugs, exactly, but something they called my spiritual condition. Though once I was able to walk alone down Atlantic Avenue without a second thought for anything but the day—the insane, unknowable possibilities—I felt like someone had died in place of me, that an entire history had happened in order to allow me to save myself. I don’t mean Christ or anyone I’d known or any conscious plan, but some faceless confusion I have no business trying to name.
I was lucky to be anywhere.
I was lonely and exhausted and afraid of everyone I met, but when I awoke each morning, remembering exactly where I was and where I’d been, something as simple as brewing the coffee made me grateful. Made me wonder about the infinite things I was only beginning to enjoy, which somehow added up to the first real triumph of my life. On quiet streets, the flapping of birds’ wings echoed against the brownstone, and from the river the boats could be heard moaning in the night. Music played everywhere, sometimes bittersweet to hear. Sometimes a gift in that I’d at last learned how to listen, to appreciate the creation of a great tune in a way only someone who’s written hundreds of bad ones can. To find one of my band’s old albums, discarded in the used bin at an East Village record shop, was to hold it for a moment and remember our songs, hoping they’d remain there among the others, growing dusty and silent.
As I was packing my books, about to move away from Dearborn, I found the letter Caitlin had written me, folded inside my twenty-second birthday card. By that time it was nearly five years old. I’d never have said that there weren’t a thousand things I would have done differently or that I didn’t wish she were here in my place. I’d ask myself: If I could tell her one thing, would it be I’m sorry or I love you? So many things she’d wished for never came to be—that we’d spend a day laughing as we had when we were children. Some pain never vanishes, only subsides. But once I’d read her letter several times, until I lay shaking on the floor of the house I was soon to leave, I discovered something in it that let me know she wanted me to live.
It wasn’t so much her words but a special rhythm within the sentences. I heard her voice, the way everything she’d said was about wanting to know who I was.
The picture of us as children sits on my desk.
A poster she gave me is framed on my wall.
There are days when I’ll think I see her on the subway or at a concert or in line at the movies. Always a lone girl, often someone shaped nothing like her; sometimes she even has black hair. Maybe it’s that I’ll feel her near me before I even look, and when I do it’s what’s in the girl’s eyes that is familiar. Caitlin had lonely eyes—there’s no way around it. So I smile until she knows it’s her I’m smiling at, until the crowd shifts and she is gone. Once or twice I’ve stopped on the street, believing, if for a millisecond, that my dad was approaching. A stocky man with thin hair combed across his forehead, striding muscularly forward, gazing intensely ahead, searching for what I imagine to be his family. I realize I’m the age he was when I was born—twenty-seven—but soon enough I’m older, finally learning to carry with me the love he was able to give while leaving behind so much that belonged to him and him alone. Only when the man catches me staring do I turn away, allowing myself to pretend it’s my father, both of us on our way to something good.
MOM AND I ARE in a Brooklyn hotel, lying in separate beds and watching old movies, whatever comes on the television. It’s Mother’s Day 2009, and I’m feeling myself for the first time in a couple of weeks. I’ve lost eight pounds; my hair is matted to my head after days of having sweated myself dry. My hands tremble. My kidneys ache. Mom grasped her chest when she first saw me. She and I drift in and out of awareness, all day long. She sleeps just as much as I do, though she’s not sick. Yet she coughs as she dreams, her nervous tic manifesting itself even when she’s at rest. Sometimes, with a deep, bronchial rasp, she wakes herself to ask, “Are you still there?”
“Right here,” I say, looking over, knowing she’ll remember.
The swine flu scare is still flashing on the news, media pandemonium, but I’ve made my way through the worst of it—an early case I must have contracted from my morning subway ride or the crowded coffee shops where I drain pots and read slowly and carefully the first books I’ve opened in years. When I’m up to it, Mom and I will walk over to an Italian place we like, where I won’t be able to get much down. Her favorite spot is the Botanical Garden, though we won’t make it there today. She makes do with the restaurant, a changeless Brooklyn establishment that feels passed down from the old country. “These are real Italians,” she says, thrilled to see only this crevice of the giant world I’ve moved to. Our being together is what matters. I’m weak and clammy, just beginning to believe I’ve beaten the virus. But before Mom’s eggplant Parmesan arrives, we’ll get to talking, the same conversation we’ve been having for a while now, an ongoing story no one but us would have the patience for.
We come a little closer to it, and let it go again. We hear their voices, speaking to us in every tone they took over the years. We forget certain angles of their faces and nuances of their moods, only to remember them together—she and I. Finding happiness inside our memories is what’s hardest; but I believe we will. Sometimes we leave them be, and then they’re there in our smiles, with us during the seconds we hold on to each other, just a little longer, as the taxi honks in the street.
“LaGuardia Airport,” I tell the driver.
Mom’s suitcase swings from my arm, a blue floral ribbon tied around its handle so that she knows it’s hers. Soon she, too, will be moving. Far north, to the most beautiful part of Michigan, a quiet place that will seem made for her and that, because she’s there, I will think of as home.
I say, “I’m gonna call to make sure you get back all right.”
“Okay,” she says. “Don’t worry if I don’t answer. You know how I am with the phone.”
The cab door opens, and this is when it hurts to watch her go. But I’m here, feeling this moment, without a song or lyric in mind. I see the lines in her face, the faintest age spots on her neck—so much time in the sun, digging in her garden. The years have complicated her smile, and she’s beautiful as ever, those great blue eyes somehow larger than before as they take me in. Caitlin’s earrings dangle from her lobes, though Mom hasn’t mentioned them. She doesn’t have to.
“You look great,” I say.
And she says, “I hate to see you so pale, so skinny,” because she knows it won’t be long, this time, before the worst has passed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANK YOU:
Alice Tasman for unwavering belief and calm, kind advice when it was needed most; Mark Doten for digging into this story with such care and acuity, and for seeing light where others saw only darkness; all the incredible people at SOHO, especially Meredith Barnes, whose rapid fire smarts and heart-driven enthusiasm helped carry this book into the world.
Others who helped in big ways: Stephen O’Connor, Patricia O’Toole, Lis Harris, D. Foy, Jeff Rhoda, Sami Jano, Sara Faye Green, Daniella Gitlin, Victoria Loustalot, Jay Goldmark, Akiva Freidlin, Dan and Jenny Jaquint, Jeff Gensterblum, Jenny Gensterblum, Chadwick and Ling Whitehead, Kris Kaczor, Laura Jean Moore, Leslie Maslow, Mike Gardner, Ryan Sult, Evelyn Somers, Alia Habib, Richard Locke, Mary Morris, and Diane Wakoski; thanks, also, to The Anderson Center and The Jerome Foundation for their support.
Though many could not be directly referenced in this story, I owe a great deal to the friendships I made while dreaming the musical dream—so nice to meet you on the other other side.
William Thomas Arnold and Andrew Fullerton and Brian Repa and Scott Stimac and Mike Warden
—without their large lives and permission to write about them, I would not have been compelled to write this particular book.
John Kaplan’s guidance and mentorship had profound influence on my ability to recast these experiences, and to endure the consequences of doing so.