Byrd Read online

  She memorizes her favorite parts. “Warm but not hot.”

  High school.

  Girls huddle in the hall talking in whispers, pretending not to notice when people eavesdrop. They wear makeup. They wear halter tops and hip-hugger jeans that show their navels. They carry little purses for their lipstick and lunch money and cigarettes. Boys love and fear them. Addie sometimes wishes she were one of them. She wishes she were one of anything.

  She reads. She reads Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. She believes Franny and Zooey have something to teach her, even if they’re high-strung and always talking in italics, even if the things they call phony, things that really get under their skin, are things that only privileged people or New Yorkers ever have to deal with. She recites Franny’s Jesus prayer. She goes on Franny’s cheeseburger diet. She doesn’t have a mystical experience, but the ritual is comforting. Eaten every day, even a cheeseburger (she likes hers with pickles and mayonnaise) can be holy.

  She reads The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. A Separate Peace. Huckleberry Finn. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. To Kill a Mockingbird. A Clockwork Orange. Light in August. Brave New World. Mrs. Dalloway. In Cold Blood. The Stranger. All the King’s Men. She reads Daybreak by Joan Baez and Tarantula by Bob Dylan, a book that makes her decide to write poetry because she sees how you can write anything and call it a poem.

  She and Roland have one class together, an elective called “The American Counterculture” taught by Mr. Saraceno, a young teacher with horn-rimmed glasses and black hair that curls down onto his shoulders. He wears jeans and blazers with patched elbows and comes from “places too many to name.”

  They read the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, William Burroughs. They talk about sex and drugs. They can’t believe they have a teacher like Mr. Saraceno in Carswell, and figure he’ll get fired when their parents find out what he’s teaching.

  In his class, Addie is outspoken, brazen, always raising her hand, always arguing. “Why weren’t there any women Beats? It’s not like women hadn’t already been part of the literary scene. Look at Edna Millay in the twenties. She wrote better than any of these guys. She was a bohemian. She was sleeping with everybody in Greenwich Village while Jack Kerouac was being fussed over by his mother and all those Catholic nuns who thought he was some kind of saint.”

  “There were women Beats,” Mr. Saraceno says.

  “Spectators,” Addie says. “Disciples. They sat around listening to all that crap poetry, snapping their pretty fingers. They cooked and cleaned and had sex and helped their men get famous. And ended up in mental hospitals, hanging themselves. They didn’t write, and if they did, why aren’t we reading it? They were nothing like women now. Look at Joni Mitchell. She’s a poet and a painter and a musician.” She pauses to catch her breath. “You know, Mr. Saraceno, American counterculture didn’t begin and end with the Beats.”

  Roland, sitting in the desk behind hers, leans forward. “Tell it, baby,” he whispers. She can feel his breath in her hair.

  Smokers congregate at the wall outside the Language Arts building after class and light up. The guys walk out in a row, three or four across, bent-kneed, jeans scraping the ground, long hair fanning out over the collars of their denim jackets. They lean against the wall and shake cigarettes out of Winston and Camel and Marlboro packs, cup their hands around matches, narrow their eyes, lean back, blow smoke rings, flick ashes.

  Addie sits on the ground, the brick wall warm against her back, her composition book open on her knees, her long red hair falling around her like a curtain.

  Betsy in her wrinkled shirt

  makes coffee out of kitchen dirt.

  She tries to write like Edna, like Joni, with rhythm and rhyme.

  I’m seventeen, my skin is pale,

  my eyes are green, I bite my nails.

  I wish that I were someone else.

  When she writes, the rest of the world disappears. She doesn’t notice when Roland sits down beside her.

  “Can I see?” he says.

  This is the first time he’s ever sought her out. He barely knows her, though she knows everything about him. He’s a musician, a guitarist. He has a Fender Stratocaster strung backward so he can play it left-handed. His favorite thing to talk about is music; his favorite music is the blues. Duane Allman is his hero. He is still mourning Duane’s death.

  When he talks about music, people flock to him. When he talks, he’s a star.

  He doesn’t wear his hair long. He doesn’t wear T-shirts or jeans to school. His mother, Pet, won’t allow it. Pet is famous for her rules. Roland has to wear corduroy pants, shirts with collars.

  He doesn’t complain or apologize when he talks about Pet; he talks about her like she’s a character in a book. His Pet stories make him popular. Because of her, people are kind to him. Girls especially.

  “I mean, if it’s okay,” he says to Addie. “I don’t mean to be presumptive.”

  “Presumptuous,” she says, and hands him her notebook.

  A red-haired woman sings the blues

  to skinny boys in lace-up shoes.

  She sings because they ask her to.

  She sings and they applaud her.

  She sings “My Baby” by request—

  they always like the slow ones best.

  You’d think by now they would have guessed

  she’s Janis Joplin’s daughter.

  He reads slowly, moving his lips. His bangs fall in his eyes. He pushes them away and they fall again. He pushes them away and looks up. “Have you ever tried putting your words to music?”

  “No. I’m just trying to write poems.”

  “This is good,” he says. “This is good enough for a song. I play guitar, you know. I’ve got lots of ideas for tunes but no lyrics. Maybe we could write something together.”

  “Maybe,” she says. They’ve never had a real conversation and here he is, asking her the most personal thing imaginable. Write something together.

  “What are you doing this afternoon?” he says. “I’ll be practicing, if you want to come over.”

  This is how Roland’s mother greets her: “Is Roland expecting you?” Pet has a sharp face and beauty-parlor hair—frosted, with tight curls. She doesn’t offer Addie a drink—no Tang or iced tea or lemonade or tap water—even though it’s a warm afternoon and Addie has walked a long way.

  The Rhodes house is in Country Club Hills, a brick house with green trim—not grimy-schoolroom green like Shelia’s, but a clean, pale, yellow-green Roland’s mother calls celery. Everything inside, too, is celery—walls, carpets, countertops, vinyl floors.

  “Roland’s in the basement,” Pet says, and leads Addie to the stairs.

  What Pet calls the basement is actually a giant sun-filled room with sliding glass doors that open onto a patio. There’s a wet bar and a fireplace and a TV and a console stereo and all the furniture you can think of, plus Roland’s guitar and amplifier, and still so much empty space you could turn a cartwheel across the floor.

  “You came,” Roland says. “I didn’t know if you would.”

  He puts on the Allman Brothers, At Fillmore East, and plugs in his guitar. This is how he practices, playing along on “Whipping Post” using Pet’s brown glass Valium bottle as a slide. He sits on a bar stool, bent over, his dark bangs hiding his eyes, as if he has to go to some secret place to find the song. He plays fast, putting in lots of extra notes, filling every space with sound.

  Addie slips off her shoes, draws up her knees, and basks in the moment—sun slanting in, the plush celery armchair, Roland playing for her. A moment as unlikely as it is perfect.

  It’s a long moment. “Whipping Post” is a twenty-two-minute jam, all of side four. When the song ends, the tone-arm on the stereo retracts, and Addie applauds. “You’re amazing,” she tells him. She feels like a Beat woman, except Roland really is amazing, worthy of applause.

  He sets his guitar in
its stand. “Too much, wasn’t it? I got a little carried away. I’m not used to an audience. I need a cigarette.”

  She follows him out onto the patio, into the yard, to a shady spot behind a tall row of boxwoods. He lights a Camel, takes a drag and passes it to her.

  “Who do you listen to?” he says, casually exhaling a plume of purple smoke, as if the question were casual, which Addie knows it is not.

  She wants to say the right thing. She could humor him and say Dylan or the Stones or Howlin’ Wolf. None of those would be a lie. She could be ingratiating and obvious and say the All-mans. “Joni Mitchell,” she says.

  “Right,” he says, “of course,” and laughs.

  “She’s a genius.”

  “She’s got that fluttery voice. It gets on my nerves.”

  They finish their cigarette and go back inside and Roland starts the song again from the top. This time he relaxes into it, holding notes, bending them. He turns up the distortion on his amp to get a bluesier sound, more like Duane. That raw, run-down, lied-to sound.

  Addie closes her eyes. The less he tries to impress her, the better he plays.

  He’s almost at the end—it’s all double-stops and chords now, loud, wailing, building to the full-on heartbreak of the final chorus—when they hear a pounding overhead.

  Pet.

  “Roland,” she calls from the top of the stairs, “you have homework.”

  He stops abruptly, without protest, without complaint, as if he’d been expecting the interruption. He turns off his amp, takes off his guitar, wipes the neck with a chamois cloth, then lays it gently in its case, the way you’d put a child to bed. He turns off the stereo, lifts his album by its edges and slides it into its cover.

  “I like listening to you,” Addie says.

  “I like playing for you,” he says. “You and me, we’re not like everybody else.”

  That night she lies awake in her blue bedroom with her headphones on, listening to Joni, whose high, sad voice drowns out everything. She tries to imagine being Joni—brilliant, beautiful, always in and out of love, able to write and sing and paint about it. Joni even has her own music company, Siquomb, a word she made up, an acronym for “She Is Queen Undisputedly of Mind Beauty.” Addie tries to imagine herself as queen undisputedly of anything.

  Flower Street is quiet. Every now and then a car drives by, flashing its headlights through the dotted swiss curtains. Addie imagines it’s Roland coming for her in his father’s Buick. She imagines him parking along the curb, lighting a cigarette, waiting. There’s no time to get dressed. She will slip out in her nightgown, run barefoot across the grass. Her feet will get wet from dew. She won’t be able to see his face in the dark, only the glowing orange tip of his cigarette. He’ll push open the passenger door and say to her, Come on, let’s drive to the lake. And they will, they’ll drive to Old City Lake and park near the dam, and the night will be spacious and peaceful with only the lapping of the water, and she’ll lean against him and point at the trees on the far bank and say, Look, lightning bugs.

  “I love how you’re not afraid to speak up,” Roland says. They’re at the wall, sharing a smoke between classes. “I love all the shit you know. How do you know so much?”

  “I read,” she says.

  “I don’t. The only book I’ve ever read start to finish is On the Road.”

  “Too bad you didn’t pick a better one,” she says.

  His laugh is like a dry cough. Huck-huck-huck. Self-conscious, like he’s laughing at the sound of himself laughing. “I had a head injury when I was young. My brain hurts when I read.” He tells her the swimming pool story. He tells it as if he’s letting her in on a secret he’s never told anyone, and she pretends she’s hearing it for the first time.

  “Music is how my brain works,” he says. “Ever since I hit my head, the only way I can think is in music. Which is cool when you’re playing guitar, but not when you’re not.”

  “Most people would kill to play like you.”

  “I just wish I knew how to do anything else,” he says.

  She reaches over and touches his hand. If she were a Beat woman, this is when she might kiss him. Not a real kiss, no big deal. Lips lightly brushing lips. A suggestion of a kiss.

  “I love how he lets me hear his mistakes,” Addie tells Shelia. This is the first time they’ve played cards since she started spending afternoons at Roland’s.

  Shelia plays the ten of spades. “You’re such a groupie.”

  “Girls, hush,” Betsy says. She is frying fruit pies and watching the Watergate hearings on the little TV she has moved into the kitchen. Watergate is Betsy’s soap opera. She knows all the characters. Her heroes are Senator Sam from North Carolina, with the gavel and the eyebrows and the deep drawl, and Howard Baker from Tennessee. Two Southern gentlemen politely bringing down the government.

  “I don’t get it,” Shelia whispers. “It’s not like he’s Eric Clapton.”

  “He’s good,” Addie says, “but that’s not the point.”

  On TV, Senator Sam bangs his gavel. Betsy turns off the frying pan. The kitchen smells like apples and brown sugar and grease. “Shelia,” she says, “take a dollar out of my purse and you and Addie take my car to the Winn-Dixie and pick up a carton of ice cream to go with our turnovers. Vanilla or butter pecan, you girls decide.”

  A Saturday like every Saturday. Bryce is up early for his golf game, which means the whole house is awake. Addie pads into the kitchen, where Claree is serving Bryce’s breakfast: scrambled eggs, soft, with a dash of Tabasco. She sets his plate on the table, and his coffee. She watches him butter his toast like it’s his dying act. Addie knows what she’s thinking: this is the last time today they will see him sober.

  Sam comes in and pours himself a bowl of Lucky Charms, carries it to the living room, sits down on the floor in front of the TV and turns on Road Runner cartoons. He’s wearing his idea of a golf outfit: knit shirt, khaki shorts with long pockets for collecting golf balls, Hush Puppies, and white socks with red rings around the top. He has worn a spot on the carpet from camping by the front door. He studies the TV screen, his face bright, hopeful, his whole body tense, as if maybe Wile E. Coyote’s latest Acme device will be the one that finally works; maybe this time he’ll trap the Road Runner. Sam is so intent, he seems not to notice when Bryce comes through the room. Bryce has to step over him on his way out. “So long, buddy.”

  Sam doesn’t answer. On TV, Wile E. Coyote gets blown up. Again.

  Outside, Bryce’s car pulls away. Sam finishes his cereal, takes his bowl back to the kitchen and rinses it, then heads outside to play kickball with the kids across the street. Their noise fills the house—high-pitched voices yelling made-up rules, the rubbery thumping of the ball.

  Half an hour later Sam is back, red-faced and wheezing, his golf clothes dirty.

  “Are you okay?” Addie asks.

  He drops into Bryce’s chair and puffs on his Primatene inhaler until he has enough breath to talk. “He never takes me golfing.”

  “Why do you even want to go?”

  Addie pictures Bryce and his friends on the golf course, humming around in their little carts. Sun pounding, dew boiling off the grass, the hot green smell of everything. After every hole they tip their flasks and wipe their mouths on the backs of their hands. Bryce tells a joke and they all laugh. He tells the punch line again and they all laugh again. Bryce laughs hardest. He’s glad to be away from home, glad not to know about Sam getting red dirt on his chair, or Claree in the back yard in her pedal pushers, hair piled on her head, sweat streaming down her face, trying to start the mower, or Addie, who’s about to desert them both and escape out the front door, just like he did.

  Pet and Roland’s sister have gone shopping in Greensboro, his father is out buying gas for the lawnmower, and Roland’s been getting high, Addie can tell. His eyes are bloodshot and he smells smoky-sweet.

  She follows him downstairs. He opens the stereo, puts on an album and sits down
beside her on the sofa. The sofa is fat and soft. Roland is wearing his Saturday clothes: white T-shirt, cutoff jeans, and crew socks with spent elastic. He props his feet on the coffee table. His socks bunch around his ankles.

  There’s a crackle from the stereo, then a swell of strings.

  “What’s this?” Addie asks.

  “A surprise.”

  The music is lush, an orchestra, nothing like what they usually listen to. Roland sits closer. His leg touches hers.

  “Want to dance?” he says.

  They get up and he puts his arms on her waist. The music rises and falls. They stand close, swaying gently, barely moving.

  “What is this?” she asks again. Not that it matters. He’s holding her. Music to be held by.

  “Percy Faith. ‘Theme from A Summer Place,’ the old man’s favorite. Romantic, isn’t it?”

  She rests her head on his shoulder. No more talk now. Only the swelling orchestra. Only the dance.

  Until, from above, a roar—a car in the carport. A single slam of a car door.

  Roland doesn’t lose the rhythm. He keeps swaying, not letting go.

  More sounds from the carport. Clanks, thunks, sputtering, and a small explosion—Roland’s father starting the mower.

  Roland stops. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.

  She always imagined sex would be mysterious. That it would happen in a dark, quiet place. Not in Roland’s parents’ room on a bright Saturday with the sun squeezing in through closed blinds and a towel on the bedspread to keep it clean. Not with Roland’s father’s lawnmower making loud circles around the house, growling past the bedroom window.

  She thought Roland would say things. Kiss her.

  She thought it would take a long time. She didn’t know it was possible for him to finish so soon: the minute he touched her, before he was even inside her.

  She thought that afterwards she would be the shy one, that he would be the one to hold her and ask if she was okay.