Music From Another World: One of the most empowering books for women, bestselling author Robin Talley’s gripping new 2020 novel

by Robin Talley

  Then the pain came, and everything turned upside down.

  At first, all I knew was that something had slammed into my back, jamming me right between the shoulder blades and knocking the breath out of my chest. I stumbled forward, and my face crashed into the back of the tall girl in front of me. She stumbled, her high heels wobbling, and turned to scowl at me from under a thick layer of jet-black mascara.

  “I’M SORRY!” I whipped up my hands, shouting so she’d hear me over the pounding music. My nose was throbbing and I was seconds away from keeling over.

  “FUCK YOU!” a guy shouted behind us. It had to be the same one who’d shoved me. I steadied myself and craned my neck around to scowl at him, but he wasn’t looking at me. He’d turned to the side, and he was pulling back his fist, snarling at a shorter guy who was wearing a dog collar and snarling right back at him. I dodged fast to avoid getting an elbow in the face.

  “Shit!” The tall girl grabbed my wrist. “This way!”

  I followed her into the crowd, my heart thudding. I’ve seen fights before, but never this close.

  The music from the stage never faltered even as the crowd surged, some people moving toward the fight and some running away. The tall girl let go of my wrist after a minute, but I kept following her and her friends until there was enough distance between us and the fight. I sagged against a wall that smelled of old beer and something worse, trying to catch my breath.

  “You okay?” The tall girl leaned down with her mouth set into a thin, worried line. She reminded me of a younger version of my mom, if my mom wore liquid eyeliner and fishnet gloves. “Fuck, did he hit you?”

  “I’m fine.” The band’s music kept thumping away, and all I wanted was to get lost in it all over again. The point of coming to shows is not having to think, but between almost getting knocked down and your letter running through my head, tonight was turning out to be unlike any other show I’d ever been to. “Sorry I bumped you.”

  “All right, if you’re sure…” The tall girl nodded, not looking especially sure herself, and went back to her friends.

  I nodded at her retreating back—and that was when I noticed Midge Spelling standing a few feet away.

  Have I told you about Midge? She’s the singer for the Prudes, the first band I ever saw live. You should check to see if your store has any of their records. Their music’s just okay, but Midge is amazing. I’ve seen her perform a couple of times now, and she’s got—I don’t know if it’s what my English teacher calls “stage presence” or something more, but she’s amazing when she sings. It’s impossible to look anywhere in the room but at her.

  I met her once, weeks ago, but I figured she wouldn’t remember me. So it was a total shock when she walked right up to where I was standing against that beer-smelling wall and asked, “You got a light?”

  She was wearing a fitted denim jacket over an even more fitted blue, green, and yellow striped dress with a red belt. She had red tights on, too, and matching red lipstick. I don’t know how I hadn’t spotted her in the crowd before.

  “Sorry. No.”

  “S’okay.” Midge motioned wordlessly toward a guy across from us. He smiled, leaned over, and lit the cigarette dangling from her lips. I expected her to start talking to him, or at least walk away from this gross wall, but she turned back to me instead.

  My face was getting warm. Having her stare right at me was unsettling. As though she could tell everything about me, just by looking. “I met you that one time, right?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” I figured she wouldn’t remember my name, so I added, “I’m Sharon.”

  She blew smoke at the ceiling. “Cool. I’m Midge.”

  “I know.” All of a sudden, I was babbling. “I saw you. With your band. You were incredible.”

  “Thanks.” Midge smiled, but it was a mature, unbothered smile. As opposed to the goofy grin that was probably on my face. “The guys are great.”

  “Yeah, they are.” I tried to think of something to say about the three men who’d clanged out the music behind Midge on the stage, but all I could remember was her crooning into the microphone. “Have you ever thought about going solo?”

  She laughed. “You ever seen a girl punk singer without a band behind her?”

  “No.” Now I felt stupid for asking.

  “Relax, it’s cool. You ever listen to the Runaways? They’re an all-girl rock band. Their stuff’s rad.”

  I shook my head. Midge was somehow managing to make me feel both completely out of place and like I was the coolest person in the club at the same time. “I’ll look for their record.”

  “Do it.” Midge lifted her chin toward a guy who’d just come in. He waved her over, and she glanced back at me. The briefest, most dismissive glance I’ve ever seen. “Hey, so, later.”

  “Later,” I said. To her back, because she was already walking away.

  I don’t know, Tammy. I’ve never seen a punk band whose music had anything close to the power of Patti Smith’s, but the energy at these shows is incredible all the same. Almost like a high.

  Sometimes. Then there are nights like this. When I almost get my nose broken and embarrass myself in front of girls who are infinitely cooler than I can ever hope to be.

  When I got home, it was late. I thought Mom would be in bed and Peter would be out when I came in the front door, but no. They were sitting on the couch together, watching a rerun of one of those Love Boat movies and passing a box of Lorna Doone cookies back and forth.

  They didn’t notice me coming in. Two of the passengers on the show were about to make out, and Mom and Peter were both leaning forward, staring intently at the screen.

  “Hi,” I said.

  They glanced up. “Hi, sweetie,” Mom said, pulling another cookie out of the box.

  “Hey, Shar.” Peter pointed to something on the screen and elbowed Mom. She laughed.

  “Well, I guess I’ll go upstairs,” I said, though they hadn’t asked. “I should write to my pen pal.”

  Peter half waved, but Mom didn’t seem to notice I’d said anything. She was reaching for another cookie.

  This is embarrassing to say, but…sometimes I’m not even sure I fit in my own family. My brother seems to like me, most of the time, but my mom… I don’t know how much she wanted to have me in the first place. She always used to talk about how hard it was having two babies at the same time. Maybe she would’ve been happier if it had just been her and Peter all along.

  Sorry to suddenly get morose. Lately I’ve just been feeling kind of… I don’t know. Lost, or something.

  Yours truly, Sharon

  P.S. Right, another question. My favorite Bible story is, um… Jonah and the whale. I used to love going whale watching. I always imagined jumping off the boat and hanging out inside a whale for a few days. I don’t think I realized how much that would have sucked.

  P.P.S. I laughed when I saw you crossed out “Shit” in your last letter. You don’t need to cross out curse words. I can handle them. How about we make another pledge? Let’s not cross anything out, or go back and reread our letters before we send them anymore. Let’s just write what we want to write and not worry about it. All I do is worry most of the time, and it would be nice to have a break, you know? I’m going to start by not rereading this letter, even though I probably wrote a lot of embarrassing stuff.

  Friday, August 12, 1977

  Dear Sharon,

  Thanks for that letter. It was fun reading about the show you went to. That’s the kind of thing you usually put in your diary? My diary isn’t nearly as interesting.

  I wish I could come to a show with you someday. I’m sorry you almost wound up in the middle of some guys having a fight, though! I was scared for you just reading it.

  And I love your idea about not crossing things out or going back to reread our letters before we send them. There�
�s basically no one I’m totally up front with that way, so it’ll be a whole new experience for me.

  Anyway, sorry, I know this letter’s coming in a strangely shaped package. I made something, and…well, there’s no one I can show it to here. My friends probably wouldn’t understand it, and my family definitely wouldn’t. I thought you might, though. I’m nervous sending it to you, since I don’t usually show my art to anyone, but you did something different in your last letter to me, too, so…like you said, here goes.

  This is my newest collage. I just finished it. I’ve been spending almost all my time lately working on that event I told you about, and it’s helped to have something else to do that I actually enjoy.

  It probably still needs work. The background isn’t quite right, so I might redo it after I’ve gotten more practice crosshatching. The ocean turned out okay, especially the waves, but the bridge doesn’t look the way I wanted it to. It’s a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge I found in a magazine. You know that obviously. It’s just that there’s nothing down here like the Golden Gate.

  I can’t wait to hear what you think!

  Yours truly, Tammy

  P.S. Happy belated birthday! I didn’t mean for this to be a birthday present, but if you want, maybe it could be.

  Fall, 1977

  Monday, September 5, 1977

  Dear Diary,

  It’s strange to be writing here again. I just looked at my last entry, and it was from way back in July—that time Peter got upset because Mom said she was voting for Dan White. I’ve been writing to Tammy more and more since then, so I haven’t needed to use this diary as much. It’s odd mailing those letters off, because I can’t read back over what I’ve written the way I always did with my diary, but I love reading the letters she writes back.

  I’ve told her about all the shows I’ve gone to in the past couple of weeks. Describing them to her is almost more fun than the shows themselves.

  And last week I told her something I’ve never told anyone, about the time freshman year when Rhonda and I tried smoking pot for the first time in the church bathroom, and convinced ourselves we were about to get sucked into the toilet. I’ve never had the nerve to tell Peter that story—he’d laugh at me for days. But Tammy just wrote back that she doesn’t like to smoke, either, because once her sister went to pet a neighbor’s dog while she was high. It ran away, and she tried to chase it and wound up tripping and breaking her wrist.

  She tells me things she doesn’t tell other people, too. A few weeks ago she even sent me a collage she made.

  When I opened the package it looked fragile, and I was so careful unwrapping all the tissue paper Tammy had wrapped around it, I spent a full five minutes to get the collage free. Then another ten minutes studying every inch of it.

  I wouldn’t even have called it a collage. When I think about collages, I think about my kindergarten art projects, when the teachers would set out bottles of Elmer’s glue and piles of ripped construction paper and tell us to do whatever we wanted as long as we didn’t put glue in anyone’s hair. What Tammy made is nothing like my sticky childhood creations. This isn’t a kid’s craft project—it’s art.

  I wrote back right away to tell Tammy exactly how awesome I thought it was. When she replied, she seemed almost embarrassed, and she kept saying it wasn’t a big deal that she’d sent it to me, but… I kind of think it was.

  I owe her a letter tonight. We write more often now than we did at first, and there’s a lot I want to tell her.

  I need to write this diary entry first, though, because I have to write about what’s going on with Peter. It hurts to keep a secret from Tammy, since I’m totally honest with her about everything else, but I don’t have a choice.

  It started when Kevin came over for dinner tonight. Mom was cooking when he arrived, so I brought him up to my room to see the collage. He hadn’t been over since I got it.

  “Wow, that’s amazing.” Kevin took a step back, studying it. I’d dug out an old frame that used to hold my sixth-grade softball-team photo and, after several tries, I’d managed to slide Tammy’s collage in without having to bend the cardboard backing. I’d torn down my old posters and hung her collage right in the middle of my bedroom wall. “Who made it?”

  “My pen pal down in Orange County. I told you about her, remember?”

  “Oh, right. She must be a good pen pal to be sending you her artwork.”

  “Yeah, she’s awesome, actually.”

  Kevin tilted his head, his eyes running over the lines of the collage. I shifted my weight from foot to foot as it occurred to me that Tammy might not have wanted me to show her work to anyone. She already said she couldn’t show it to any of her friends. But it was too late to do anything about that now.

  The collage is intricate—layers on top of layers on top of layers. The bottom layer is part drawing, part photo. Tammy drew the ocean in black ink with thick, dark waves crashing onto a rocky beach. The water dominates the entire image, and there’s a black-and-white newsprint cutout of the Golden Gate Bridge perched on top. Somehow, Tammy made the photo look as though it blends almost seamlessly into the drawing, but she also angled it unnaturally high, so that the bridge looks impossible to reach. Behind the dark water there’s a tiny hint of a horizon, but nothing more.

  Pasted in among the waves are uneven, mismatched letters, blue and green and black, cut out on stark white square-shaped backgrounds. They look as if they’ve been cut from magazine pages, and they’re the only parts of the collage that have any color at all. NOTHING STOPS THE OCEAN, BABY, the disjointed letters spell out across the top of the collage, and at the bottom another line says, NOTHING STOPS THE TIDE.

  No two letters in either line are the same size or type. The colors are similar, but there are slight variations in the shades that somehow complement each other perfectly. I can only imagine how many magazines Tammy must’ve gone through to find exactly the right mismatched letters.

  The first time I looked at her collage, I studied those letters for so long I didn’t even notice the eyes, but once I did they were all I could see. They’re fixed carefully all over the entire collage, tucked away, so small they don’t draw your attention until you know they’re there. Tiny eyes from tiny black-and-white images, cut so precisely there isn’t a sliver of space around them.

  Like the letters, the eyes are different, too. Beady eyes, bright eyes, wrinkled eyes, round eyes, angled eyes, cartoon eyes—there are dozens of them, maybe hundreds, buried in the waves.

  I’ve had it on my wall for weeks now, and every time I walk into my room, I stare at it. I can’t decide if it’s creepy or brilliant. Maybe it’s both.

  Kevin traced his finger over the letters. I wondered if he’d noticed the eyes yet. “I love the poem.”

  “Poem?”

  “Yeah, see?” He pointed to the word “ocean,” but the cutout letters didn’t look any more poetic to me than they had before. “It’s about the inevitability of the human condition.”

  “Ah…right.”

  “Mom sent me up here to make sure you two weren’t in your room.” Peter’s voice behind us made me jump, but Kevin was already smiling when he turned around. He’s always liked Peter. “Guess now I can either go lie to her and have you owe me, or tell the truth and get into Heaven.”

  “As if Heaven would be any fun without Kevin and me.” I stuck out my lower lip.

  Peter rolled his eyes. “Dinner’s ready.”

  We followed him downstairs, where Mom was spooning out chicken salad. Hardly a fancy meal, but at this point Kevin’s been over for dinner enough times that Mom doesn’t bother bringing out the china. He’s still super polite with her, though, and by the time we’d made it through dinner he’d managed to compliment the same-old, same-old chicken salad half a dozen times.

  “Delicious, as always, Mrs. Hawkins,” he said, after he swallowed the last b
ite of his second helping. “Thank you again.”

  “It’s always nice to have extra teenage boys around to finish off my leftovers.” Mom smiled at him.

  Peter stood up and started clearing the plates, even though Kevin was still dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “What time do I need to be home tonight, Mom?”

  “You’re going out?” She frowned. “It’s a school night.”

  “Don’t remind me.” Peter groaned as he reached for the empty chicken salad bowl. Tomorrow’s our first day back and I don’t know who’s dreading it more, him or Mom. She usually takes on a part-time job in the summers, and this year she worked nights shelving books at the library over on Portola. She’s been going to bed as soon as she gets home and sleeping in until ten in the morning, but starting tomorrow, we’ll all need to be at school at 8:00 a.m. again. “I’m meeting some friends to study for the SATs.”

  It was such an obvious lie that Kevin immediately had to muffle his laughter, but Mom only smiled. “In that case, make sure you’re home by nine.”

  “It might take a little longer. We’re meeting at Dave’s, and he lives all the way up past Market.”

  “Ten, then. Not a minute later.”

  “Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.” Peter bent down and kissed her on the forehead. She went on smiling that same indulgent smile.

  “Hey, if Peter’s going out, can Kevin and I go see a movie?” It was worth a try.

  “Oh, yeah, I want to see that one about the killer whale,” Kevin added. “You saw the poster, right? It’s like Jaws, but with, you know, a whale.”

  Mom smiled at Kevin again, but her expression was more strained now, and she turned to me before she shook her head. “You need your sleep. Besides, those horror movies are all trash.”

  Peter hurried into the kitchen with a stack of plates. At least he didn’t stick his tongue out at me. I jumped up, reached for the glasses, and hurried to carry them in after him.

  “Hey.” I set the glasses by the sink and dropped my voice. “What was that about? You haven’t talked to Dave since eighth grade.”