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Thank You for the Music
Stories

Chapter One

Family On Ice

Not that you asked, but I'm an X-ray tech going to night school for anthropology.

I have a daughter, who is seven, and spends a lot of time with her father in the suburbs.

I have the kind of loneliness that makes me sit too close, on purpose, to strange men on buses. Men who smell good, who read books, whose shoes are not too shiny, not too scuffed.

I have not learned to appreciate solitude.

And yes, I know this attitude has long been out of vogue. All the magazines have headlines that shout SINGLE? CELEBRATE! Everyone seems to talk about being a woman warrior who works out six times a week. It makes me want to take up smoking again, and sit in a bar all afternoon the way I did in my twenties.

In my present social life that matters, I'm the third wheel. The other two wheels are Henry and Lydia, and wouldn't you know it, Henry loves Lydia and Lydia loves life, art, sports, and perhaps, though we're not sure yet, Henry. He's enjoying the toying, delicious, piercing pleasure-pain of not knowing. She calls him Henri, like she's French, not in a pretentious way, but in a way that makes you recognize her humor, her great accent, and her big vision of the world, like Paris is always in the air even though it's Pittsburgh. She wears a black beret at an angle you might have to call jaunty. She would never eat cheese doodles for dinner with a loud TV like some people I know; she'd prepare thick split pea soup, eat quietly with classical music on the radio, stare into her small backyard, where she once kept a warren of little white rabbits who slept on her couch when it was cold. She is the sort of woman who always thinks before speaking, and who never says "um" or "ya know." She wears bright silk scarves tied around her head, and is constantly clearing her eyes with drops of Visine, her only addiction. If her eyes get any clearer, any bluer, any more beautiful with wide-eyed -- what is it? wonder? -- they'll crack like windows in a hurricane.

And now she's invited the two of us to go ice skating with her entire family. Did I mention that I love Henry? Henry the divorced insomniac, the owner of a used bookstore? Did I mention that the very idea of a family that goes ice skating together is beyond my ken? And that's the first time in my life I've used the word "ken," so sorry for being fancy, as my grandmother used to say.

She also used to holler, "It's always funny, 'til somebody loses an eye!"

She's dead now, like so many others in my family, but even if they were alive they wouldn't be caught dead on skates. Most of them managed to fall on their asses wearing shoes. Many of them would've considered me heroic for holding down a job, and raising a kid. "How do you do it?" they'd ask, if they weren't dead.

I have to envy Lydia, whose mother used to play the clarinet each morning to rouse her children from slumber, whose handsome father, a minor-league baseball player, decided he wanted to learn to quilt, so took a quilting class in Bloomfield with several old Italian women, and made something beautiful to hang on the wall. I have to envy Lydia with a passion I believe warps my soul. Nobody drank to excess in her family, much less did heroin, nobody ever threw slabs of Christmas roast beef at the ceiling or drove a car through a living room wall, or disappeared for seven years, or became a transvestite (nothing against transvestites), and you can see this by looking at them -- physical beauty, yes, but somehow quaint and New Englandy, like people in old photographs: Observing their profiles you feel the romance and heirloomy fullness of their story, the certainty that generations from now, their children's children will say, "And that's why I play the clarinet -- it's a tradition, you see --"

Tradition! It's very true some people still have them, and not just farmers. I keep thinking I need to invent some traditions for my daughter.

Her name is Rhonda and she's never seen her aunts. One of them has been telling me for eight years she'd love to see me if it weren't for "the troubles." Like she's in Ireland! My other sister and I are simply not speaking for reasons I couldn't bear to bare right now. Rhonda did see my parents before they died, but what can a kid say to a three-hundred-pound woman who smokes her way through lung cancer? What can a kid say to a dry drunk so mortified by emotion he kept his heart in a glass cage up in the attic? Or somewhere. I was grateful to them for dying. They'd died a long time before their real deaths anyhow. And I didn't want my kid looking at them too closely here in the age of genes-are-us. Instead I make up lies about them. "Your grandmother was an excellent seamstress, and quite the muckraker. Sympathy for the Underdog was her middle name." "Your grandfather was valedictorian and a friend to all animals." I buy old photos in antique stores and educate her about her ancestors. I pick the most interestingly dignified photos I can find, and all she can say is, "Why didn't they smile back in the olden days?"

Anyhow, she's lately spending most of her time with her father and his girlfriend, Sandy Meg. Since Sandy Meg is loaded with stockbroker money, when my daughter comes home she's always got several new Barbies -- the kind in lavish ball gowns I could never buy her. I benefit from this, since it's clear Rhonda feels a little guilty about preferring Sandy Meg's bubbly wealth and wry electric company to my own. This guilt makes her more affectionate and charming to be with. She pretends to be interested in the gorilla book I bought her last year. She cleans her room without my having to ask. In her seven-year-old eyes I see pity when I try to tell her I think there might be more to life than Barbies. Poor Mom, the brown eyes say, don't you get it? And then a kin of resignation sets in: Oh well, so I have a mother who doesn't understand how sparkly life can be.

Even at age seven she knows there are worse things.

Thank You for the Music
Stories. Copyright © by Jane McCafferty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.