Don't Blame the Music

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Anthony smiled and nodded and said things like, “Wow” and “Say, that was great,” and “Ashley, you are something else!” and my sister blossomed like a daffodil in the first heat of spring.

  Anthony had understood. We had not. She needed praise, not condemnation. How thick we had all been. How important it had been to us to show Ash our disapproval. We thought we were supporting her, but we had not even tried. Anthony was the first to bother.

  I turned to my mother, but she was watching the game. I had forgotten there was a game. I glanced at the field and decided not to bother. Anyhow, things were going to get interesting here on the bleachers, because Shepherd Grenville had spotted Anthony.

  Shepherd never wastes time. If there’s something to be in on, she arrives immediately. She stepped up the crowded bleachers like a ballerina doing the long-awaited solo. When she arrived in front of us, however, there were no seats, and no place for people to squeeze to give her any room. So she crouched, managing somehow to look utterly attractive and demure in the most awkward of positions.

  “So this is the infamous Ashley Hall,” said Shepherd, smiling a firm smile, as of one eager to meet a colleague. “What a pleasure.”

  Ashley simply looked at her. She said to me, over Anthony’s body, “Who is that person?”

  “That person is Shepherd Grenville,” I said. And then, because I knew Ashley would say something nasty, and I yearned for it, added, “She’s the yearbook editor. She’s just full of exciting nifty little ideas about the yearbook, Ashley.”

  Ashley laughed. How pretty she was! I tended to forget that she was one beautiful woman. “Yearbook. Exciting,” said Ashley. “That sounds mutually exclusive to me. No way to put those words together. But then, if a person has nothing better to do, I suppose it fills the time.” She proceeded to ignore the crouching, waiting, smiling Shepherd and continued her conversation with Anthony.

  I tried to catch her eye. To thank her for responding so well to an obvious cue line.

  But she was absorbed by Anthony.

  I was surprised at how well they reacted together! Ashley, who obviously badly needed the admiration, and Anthony, who thrived on caressing girls one way or another.

  Meanwhile, Shepherd’s knee joints were killing her. Pretty soon she was going to have to stand up straight, and there would still be no place to sit down, and we would still ignore her, and she’d look like a fool.

  Hate me more than ever, of course.

  But she wasn’t acting as if she had found the journal, so who cared?

  “So,” said Shepherd rather loudly, “the staff meeting is on Monday, Beethoven. You have something ready or not?”

  “Beethoven?” repeated my sister, distracted. “Beethoven?”

  I had forgotten that Ash had never heard this nickname.

  “Your sister,” explained Shepherd.

  Ashley stared at me. “You don’t have a musical bone in your body.”

  “That’s why we call her Beethoven,” agreed Sheppie happily. “Sort of like calling a tall person Shrimp.”

  “I like it,” said Ashley, assessing me as Beethoven. “Ludwig. Beethoven. Maybe that’s what I’ll call her. Susan never did fit. Too dull.”

  Shepherd loved that. “Well, she isn’t terribly exciting,” said Shepherd.

  Ashley looked at Shepherd.

  It was like a test. Would Ashley defend me, or side with Shepherd?

  Ashley said, “Nothing in this town is exciting. You have to leave town even to think about excitement.”

  Around us the crowd screamed madly as the New Canaan team carried the ball toward the goal. Ash glanced at the crowd with great loathing, that they would scream over the possession of a piece of leather and not scream for her music.

  Shepherd took Anthony’s hand to balance by when she got up, and she didn’t let go either. “We have to run along,” she said cheerily. “See you Monday, Beethoven.”

  Anthony did not free himself, but went with her. “Great to meet you, Ashley,” he said, with a smile that reinforced it.

  Ashley smiled at him, a smile our mother or father would have loved to get.

  I watched them descend, tapping people on the shoulder, picking their awkward way down, annoying everybody.

  My heart pounded as I noticed Whit standing at the north end of the bleachers, leaning against the fence that wrapped the playing field.

  I was amazed at the speed of the physical reaction to him. My whole body knew he was there, and equally cringed and yearned.

  Every love lyric I had ever heard or written passed through my mind, a blur of crushes, and they all made sense. I could not bear it if Whit Moroso thought I was worthless.

  “I’m going to get popcorn,” I said.

  “Bring me some,” said my mother and Ashley simultaneously.

  “Okay.” Actually I didn’t think anybody was selling popcorn, and I didn’t have any money with me, but it was a good excuse. I followed the route Shepherd and Anthony had made, annoying everybody even more, hitting knees, little kids, and handbags.

  Whit saw me coming and turned away.

  I had to chase him.

  It seemed to me I now spent all my time either running from or running after Whit Moroso.

  You would think the shame of it would have stopped me, but it didn’t. I just lugged the shame along as I chased, flushed with humiliation, thinking—if he has the journal … Thinking—if Carmine convinced him …

  “Whit!” I yelled.

  The racket from the playing field, and the cheerleaders, and the whistling wind, drowned me out.

  But he wasn’t running and I was and eventually I got to him. He stood there, expressionless as always, waiting for it to be over.

  “Whit, did Carmine talk to you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need to explain things.”

  “I’m not interested, Susan.”

  He had to be interested!

  “You don’t know what it’s like!” I cried, hanging onto him. “My sister is home. Ashley is a terrible person. She’s done terrible things. Even our dog is afraid of her. She—”

  Suddenly Whit grabbed me, his fingers tight on my jacket. His grip didn’t hurt but it frightened me. His eyes were bright with anger. “You think you’re the only one with troubles?” he said softly. “You think having a rotten sister is a ticket to being rotten yourself?”

  Rotten? Me?

  “Last night,” I told him, my voice shaking, “Ashley sliced off a lock of my hair with a bread knife. She has a boyfriend who is evil. And when Carmine was driving me home I panicked.”

  “Oh yeah? Carmine is evil?” he said roughly.

  “No, no, no! But I couldn’t have my mother see me getting out of his car. She doesn’t know he’s kind and bright and a great musician. In fact, the more musician he is, the more terrified of him she’d be. She might think I was going to behave like Ashley. Take drugs and sleep around and go to California and—”

  “Okay,” said Whit. “Okay. Stop. I get the point.” He took his hand away. Mine had dropped already. He stepped back to separate himself from me even more. “Don’t panic,” he said. “It isn’t that important.”

  “It is that important!” Whit didn’t know he had become the center of my universe. Anything to do with him was important. But he had no further use for me.

  He just wanted this scene to end. I remembered then that Whit had not cared for an audience. All those bleachers full of people—Ashley could have them. Whit did not want an audience.

  Love me back, Whit, I thought.

  But he merely waited for me to pull myself together. Two tears spilled onto my cheeks but I controlled the rest. The bitter wind hurt where the wetness lay. I brushed the skin with the back of my hand. Whit did not comment.

  “What do you mean, I’m not the only one with troubles?” I asked him. “Do you have troubles?”

  “What a strange thing to say,” said Whit. “Nobody’s life is easy, Susan. It’s silly to th
ink other people are out there having an easy time of it. They’re not.”

  I disagreed with him. Cindy and Emily and Shepherd and Anthony and people like that sailed smoothly through life. I waited for Whit to tell me what his troubles were but he didn’t open up. He was thinking of them, though. He looked both older and younger than I had ever seen him. Vulnerable, I thought. As if he hurts inside.

  There was no confiding. He did not trust me.

  Gently, facing slightly away from me—or perhaps away from the cruel wind—he said, “I’ll help you with the record idea. No problem. Now don’t overreact, Susan. Let me know how the meeting with the yearbook staff goes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Great,” he answered, but the word didn’t mean great, or even okay; it meant at last this scene is over. He walked on, and waved at me without turning to face me.

  Twelve

  SUNDAY WE WENT TO church.

  We don’t go very regularly anymore, the way we did when Ash and I were little. Mostly we go only if my parents are up early, and the Sunday paper is boring, and my father doesn’t have eleven hundred projects to tackle in the basement.

  Today none of these things applied.

  I don’t think my parents intended to pray about Ashley, because I think they had tried that over the years, and achieved nothing, and lost interest in that technique.

  I think they wanted an hour of relief from her.

  An hour to be utterly civilized, and sing familiar hymns and hear familiar prayers and see familiar faces.

  Ashley was asleep when we left so she had no opportunity to threaten to join us.

  Church was calming.

  Perhaps because it was an hour set aside to think of higher things. Perhaps because our minister is not very interesting, and the sermon lulled me into a calm that was really boredom. Perhaps, when we prayed to be relieved of all anxiety, I was.

  But I think it’s more the shape of church.

  The reliability of it all.

  The institution that has been here thousands of years, will be here generations more. My problems are fleeting; its are everlasting.

  And more down to earth, when they make a plea for money for the soup kitchen in New Haven, and tell you how many hungry mouths need to be fed during the coming winter, your rotten sister recedes in importance.

  So after church we went to the coffee hour and chatted up people we hadn’t seen in ages, and took a leisurely drive home, by way of the doughnut place, and decided that afternoon we would take a family drive.

  We turned into Iron Mine Road feeling pretty good. I felt I could deal with whoever had found my journal. I felt I could face Whit and Crude Oil without weeping. I felt senior year would go on, and I would be all right, and all trials would pass.

  And there were police cars in our driveway.

  “Oh, no, please no!” whispered my mother, clutching my father.

  My father sucked in his breath and muttered things to himself, or to God, but I couldn’t quite hear.

  Bob’s van was there. The police had Bob propped up against the side of it, legs spread, hands up, frisking him. A bad scene in a bad cop show—only it was our driveway.

  Ashley was screaming and yelling, and cops were holding her, and she was writhing like some sort of little animal, trying to kick their shins.

  Neighbors—Mrs. Boyd, the McLeans, everybody—were standing on their porches or in their yards.

  Loud, incredibly painfully loud music blared everywhere.

  My mother did not even try to get out of the car, but just sat there, her head sunk in her hands. My father leaped out, going to help the policemen hanging on to Ashley.

  I could not think of anything but stopping the music. At that level it was not music. It was an assault on every sense; like a battlefield; like guns instead of drums. I turned off the radio in the van, but the blaring went on. I turned off the radio in Dad’s pickup truck, but the blaring managed to continue even then. In the house I found the kitchen radio, my bedroom radio, the television, a portable radio, and the radio we never use that’s incorporated in the stereo system—all turned up full volume. They were all on the same station except the television, of course, which was screaming out cartoons.

  The cessation of rock music was a slap of silence.

  It had a sense of familiarity. Crude Oil, I remembered. The pain of Whit washed over me again. I staggered to the front door. My sister was getting arrested and I was thinking of a crush that had gone nowhere.

  When I got outside, Mrs. Boyd was comforting my mother. Bob had been put into the backseat of a police car, which could not have been an easy task, given Bob’s weight. “He violated parole,” said Mrs. Boyd rather happily. “Isn’t it a good thing I called the police. That gets rid of him for a while.”

  I looked at my neighbors and realized that they had suffered along with us. Not wanting to interfere, wanting to let Ashley come back to the fold, wanting to let us be—but frightened of Bob, frightened of Ashley, locking their doors even as we had locked ours.

  Ashley was a fountain of bad words, spewing them everywhere, at the police, at my father, at the world.

  On the grass near the police car was a black-and-white splotched notebook.

  I approached it timidly. I pushed it with my toe to see if it was mine. And it was.

  From the backseat of the car Bob laughed evilly. “You thought you had some good stuff in there, didn’t you, little girl?” he screamed. “Well, you didn’t. We were going to pirate it, but there was nothing worth a nickel in that stupid notebook. A lot of emotional crap. Nothing good.”

  Bob had read my notebook.

  Nausea welled up in me. Dizziness swept over me.

  Ashley giggled. A high-pitched crazy little giggle.

  My journal.

  I felt, to use the crudest terms I knew, truly shit upon.

  I would have used tongs to pick up the journal, but there were limits even to my silliness. I leaned over without fainting, picked it up, and took it inside. I stared at it for a long time, and then I opened the kitchen garbage and stuffed it into an empty Rice Krispies box and covered that with used napkins and tied the plastic garbage bag shut.

  Outside the police cars drove off.

  They took Bob.

  They left Ashley.

  I thought, That isn’t fair. Why didn’t they take Ashley? Why did they give her another chance? Why do we have to take more of this?

  I almost crawled up the stairs to my room. I thought, I’ll get under the covers where I can’t see the walls and I’ll be safe under there.

  Upstairs, Ashley had turned her bed upside down. Not the mattress but the bed itself. The result, with high pencil posts, was a queer sort of cage, with the mattress stuffed on the floor. Perhaps she was making herself a cave. I squatted down to look inside.

  Inside all my stuffed animals were lined up. Teddy, Eeyore, two zebras, a few rag dolls, a heart pillow, Kanga with Roo in her pocket, a Garfield, and a Snoopy. My favorite teddy, dressed like a detective (Bearlock Holmes), sat in front.

  I looked closer.

  Ashley had brought her bread knife up here.

  Their little throats oozed stuffing.

  Thirteen

  “WAYNE,” SAID SHEPHERD, CONSULTING her legal pad, “we’ll hear from you first.”

  She had managed to intimidate all fifty of us. How utterly poised and elegant she looked. You could not imagine Shepherd ever failing. Like the goddess figurehead on a whaling vessel, facing waves of icy water, she would sail on. The rest of us would probably fade at the first high wind.

  Wayne was caught by surprise. He glanced across the room, was appalled by the number of faces and spoke from his seat. “No, no, Wayne,” said Shepherd. “Come up front where we can all see and hear.”

  I think Wayne would gladly have been hit by a car rather than stand in front of us, but he obeyed, shuffling up next to Shepherd. “Well, like, I’m doing sports,” mumbled Wayne, not looking at anybody. “And
like, we thought maybe this time instead of just still photographs of each team, and like a list of like the trophies and stuff they won and all …”

  He had nothing in his hands. Shepherd had known enough to have legal pads and file folders to hold. She stood there like a teacher, or a jailer, and smiled while Wayne flushed and stumbled his way through his idea. Wayne’s a fairly good round-about athlete, on several teams, but a starter on none. I like Wayne. Considering how unnerved he was to be in front of us, he did a good job. Certainly we all knew what he was saying.

  Shepherd interrupted gently to summarize for him, as if we could not possibly have grasped his idea. “In other words, Wayne, you are going to have a series of action photographs, so each two-page spread will resemble an actual game in progress.”

  Wayne nodded. “But like some of the time we had pretty lousy teams.”

  We all laughed.

  Wayne managed half a grin and said, “We can’t show the action there because like we don’t want to show a score of losing fifty-six to three. Like say the fencing team? This is the first year we’ve had fencing and we’re pretty bad. Sorry, Derek,” he said to the lone fencer in the room. Derek just shrugged, smiling. “So like we’ll show like the equipment and the expression on the face behind the mask like.”

  Shepherd said, “Like, well, like I think we like see what you have in mind like, Wayne.” Her mimicry was perfect. She made Wayne sound dumb without making herself sound mean. Several people, including Jeffrey and Emily, laughed at Wayne.

  I hated her.

  Wayne’s idea was excellent, and the sports section would be infinitely more memorable the way he was designing it. But she had made him look like a fool.

  But then, the more fools she had around her, the more she would shine.

  I was suddenly aware of a very strange thing.

  My dislike of Shepherd was much stronger than my dislike of Ashley. Somehow Ashley, no matter how rotten she was, wasn’t as rotten to my mind as Shepherd. How odd, I thought. Why do I feel that way? Ashley has never given me any hope. Things are worse than ever.