Читать книгу Diary Of A Blues Goddess - Erica Orloff - Страница 14

W alking home from Red’s, I thought back to high school, when I was the helpless victim of a mother who believed fashion can be bought at places with bright fluorescent lights, wide aisles and endless rows of sales racks—much of it polyester-laden. While the princesses and prom queens of my high school wore designer jeans and carried purses with labels on the outside tipping off others to their two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar price tag, I was relegated to wearing no-name jeans and no-name sneakers, and slinging my shiny pink lip gloss in a worn-out denim purse. My mother refused to believe this mattered in the social feeding frenzy that is high school.

“Georgia, who cares what you wear? It’s what’s inside that counts,” she’d tell me, while she calmly folded socks or cooked her tuna casserole. Easy for her to say. Mom lived in a Carol Brady bubble. She didn’t have to sit in lunchroom no-man’s-land, with only Damon for company. My mother didn’t have to face down Casanova Jones in social studies as he undressed me with his eyes and flirted shamelessly, while I felt hopelessly clumsy, embarrassed by a chest that had unexpectedly grown out of control, as far as I was concerned. Damon and I did our stupid “We must, we must, we must improve our busts” exercises. But I guess my body took that mantra too much to heart. As a woman’s body replaced my baby one, as I developed into this curvaceous 1960s Playboy ideal when the rage was waiflike, I felt even more like an outsider.

My mother, on the other hand, lived her life like a television show. She bought the perfect laundry detergent for the whitest whites and the brightest colors. She whipped up meals she meticulously cut from the back of Campbell’s soup can labels and mounted on recipe cards. She knew one hundred and one ways to prepare Jell-O. She entered bake-offs. She ironed my underwear. She made every one of my childhood Halloween costumes, including a lobster complete with giant claws the year I was obsessed with crustaceans. In short, she was the picture-perfect mother, right down to her hair, which she had washed and set every Friday afternoon at the beauty salon. All she wanted was the perfect daughter. What she got was me.

I pierced my ears five times before I was thirteen, doing them at home with a cork, a needle and Damon’s pep talk to steady my shaking hand. I was hell-bent on being a singer, living my life in rebellion, being like Nan. My father was a jazzman; he played the bass, and from what I remembered of his playing, he was very talented. He was also an alcoholic. Sundays were spent tiptoeing around the house while he slept off his hangovers. Mom pretended he was just “tired.”

I adored him anyway.

Dad taught me how to “phrase” a song by playing endless records, he and I together in the den, the stereo spinning old 45s and 78s and ancient albums with dust all over them. He never seemed happy to me, except when we were playing music—especially Gene Krupa and Jess Stacy, Duke Ellington and Etta James.

He left my mother and me when one of his old musician pals came to New Orleans with a moderately successful jazz quartet, in need of a new bassist. He departed, first for the Chicago blues scene, and then for the Blue Note in New York City, with the Buster Keys Quartet, promising to return home “soon,” and sending money along the way. He wrote me postcards, which I still have in an old shoe box in my room. He was the only person who made me feel beautiful:

Angel, I’m doin’ fine in NYC. When you come visit, we’ll go to the Empire State Building and touch the sky.

Stay beautiful and keep on singing,

Love, Your Father,

Dad

He signed each card that way. He was a dreamer who believed we could touch the sky and talk to God. We could speak to heaven and listen for ghosts in the attic. He was everything imaginative. He was the blues. He was the music. He was everything my mother wasn’t.

But after a while, both the postcards and the money stopped.

My mother’s reaction to this wasn’t anger or rage, hurt or tears of abandonment. Instead, she focused all her energies on creating this fantasy of perfection—and making sure I didn’t become a singer. That I didn’t abandon her, too. And my reaction to her reaction was to try my hardest to infuriate her.

My father had left behind his blues record collection, which was enormous and still lines special shelves I had built for them in my room. I played his music over and over and over again. Sometimes the same song tirelessly. I did it to feel close to him. I did it to hurt her for driving him away with her picture-perfect ways. Etta James’s “At Last” was their song. So what else would an angry adolescent do but play that song morning, noon and night. Music has always been my weapon and my refuge.

At first, I was certain Dad was going to come back. When he didn’t, the blues were already part of me. I played them, then, because they reflected how I felt about adolescence—it was like one long, angst-ridden blues song.

I was never quite sure if I succeeded in hurting her. Besides piercing my ears, I wore dark black eyeliner and bleached my hair blond, though it fried to a vague orange. I stayed out past my curfew every weekend night. I was sullen from the moment I woke up, staring through hostile eyes as she cooked me pancakes with raisins set in them to make little happy faces. Yet she never yelled at me, never grounded me. She kept smiling and cooking and cleaning and ironing, refusing to show how much I was breaking her heart—just like he did. As long as I wasn’t hanging out with musicians, she seemed content that it was all “a phase.” She didn’t want to risk pushing me away. She even let Damon sleep over at our house, knowing, I think, he was my only friend. A lot of the time, I convinced myself the only person holding me back from going to New York City and finding my father was Damon. Later, Damon and I had an elaborate fantasy about going to New York together. He’d be a top fashion designer, and I’d sing with my father’s band.

When I was almost seventeen, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was late-stage before they found it because she was too busy tending to me to take care of herself. Suddenly, hating her for her decidedly bad taste in clothes and bedspreads (mine was still Barbie in high school) was pointless.

I read to her while she was sick in bed. She liked romances with happy endings, and that’s what she got, though I was at an age when I didn’t believe in happy endings. I still don’t. “I can see you rolling your eyes, Georgia,” she weakly said one afternoon.

“Mom, happy endings are bullshit.”

“Georgia Ray, the language.”

“Fine. But they’re still bullshit. Happy endings aren’t for people like me.”

“What exactly is a person like you?” she asked, breathless. Everything, every word, took so much effort.

“An outsider. Different.”

“You’re New Orleans born and bred. How does that make you an outsider, Georgia?”

“No father, for one.” As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Now that she was sick, I was trying so hard not to wound her, but sometimes my resentments were right there on the surface.

I tried to explain to her that happy endings were for the popular girls, not for me with my kinky hair that I never quite accepted, and my exotic looks in the southern state of Louisiana, the social scene in high school dominated by Magnolia Queens and blond debutantes with beautiful drawls. Happy endings weren’t for Damon either, with his lust for the homecoming king—not queen. His desire to be the homecoming queen. Yet complaining about my hair seemed selfish, when my mother’s own perfect coiffure fell out in clumps in the shower one day, swirling down the tub and clogging the drain. I dropped the subject and kept reading to her.

Damon used to come over and give her makeovers, drawing on eyebrows and tying up colorful turbans out of silk scarves. One time, he did her eyes and eyebrows like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.

“You look just like Liz, Mrs. Miller,” Damon said, painting on the last of her new eyebrows.

“Hand me a mirror.”

I went to get a hand mirror, knowing she would freak out the second she saw herself.

“Now, you just have to go with it.” Damon stood and surveyed his handiwork.

I handed her the mirror, bracing myself for her reaction. But it wasn’t what I expected. She howled with laughter until tears rolled down her face, all the while Damon was begging her, “Don’t cry, don’t cry. It’ll all run.” Soon, she had black tear stains tracing a path down her now-thin face. Then Damon and I started laughing, too. After that, for the first time, my mother started to relax a little, to laugh with us. Maybe she was trying to leave some good memories for me.

Surrounded by death at home, I tried to be a normal teenager knowing my mother was slipping away and my father had stopped sending postcards when I was in the tenth grade. I tried to eat lunch with Damon and study about the Civil War with Mr. Hoffman, my favorite teacher, and learn about sines, cosines and tangents in math class. I tried to carry my lunch tray without tripping and open my locker without getting crushed by the crowds in the hallway.

We eventually moved in with Nan, selling our two-bedroom house in a parish outside New Orleans and coming into the city to live with my grandmother and her ghost. Nan had always been more like Auntie Mame than a grandmother. Strong, adventurous, feminist, stubborn, she tried to will my mother into getting well. But my mother had always wilted in the face of her mother, just as I wilted in the shade of my own mother’s shadow, and so Nan’s will aside, my mother was gone before winter was out. She died in a hospital, something she never wanted to do. Nan and I were there. It was the first time I ever saw a dead body.

That night, I cried until my stomach ached, and then I cried more but without any tears. I had never been perfect for her, and now I wouldn’t have the chance to lose the adolescent brooding and be nice to her, and maybe get a prom date while she was alive. I wouldn’t be able to prove to her that I wasn’t the rebellious girl she thought I was, with the messy room that drove her crazy. “Georgia, I can’t see the floor in here,” was her mantra. I had been angry for so many years, and she had loved me when I didn’t deserve it, and now she was gone.

Casanova Jones came to the wake. I remember sitting in the front of the muffled and velvet funeral parlor, my mother in her best dress—the one she’d been saving for a “special occasion.” She looked serene, but most definitely not like my mother. She was thin and bony and looked as if she was made of wax. Damon was wailing in the bathroom, unable to even come in to view her body. Nan sat next to me, patting my hand and accepting my used tissues, which she discreetly shoved into her vintage clutch purse.

I looked up, face blotchy and red, and mascara-streaked, my hair an unkempt mass of curls, and saw Casanova Jones heading straight toward me. He even had on a tie. His black curly hair fell past the collar of his white shirt, and his swagger, half man, half boy, was still evident, but as my grandmother whispered to me, “He cleans up good.” Rick, aka Casanova, mumbled an “I’m sorry” in the awkward way of high-school kids unsure of what to say when thrust into an adult situation. I loved him in that moment. Actually, I’d been in love with him all of high school. Something about how he pushed his hands through his luxurious head of curls—curls that behaved, unlike my own—and sort of shook his hair into place, about his pale blue eyes, or how he played with a lock of my hair while flirting with me threw me right over the edge. He was my crush. He was my obsession. And he picked my mother’s funeral to show he really cared and wasn’t just toying with me. I was too numb to care.

The last few months of high school passed in a blur of grief. I had originally planned to go far away from my mother after I graduated. I wanted to go to college in Manhattan, rooming with Damon, who longed to go to the Fashion Institute of Technology. Instead, I chose to go to the Newcomb Department of Music at Tulane. That way I could live with Nan. She possessed the spirit I wanted. She could bring out the Georgia who was buried beneath wild hair, hateful adolescence, and all that eyeliner. In Nan, I had a kindred spirit. She saw something in me—a spark of life she called it. I don’t think she ever forgave my mother for living an ordinary life, for being a homemaker and not burning her bra and changing the world.

Nan was the first person to encourage me to sing. My mother said I had a pretty voice as a child, before my father left, but she was the kind of person who didn’t believe in showing off or attracting attention. I remember once being invited to a birthday party when I was a little girl. More than anything, I wanted to wear my new pink dress with the ruffles and crinoline—okay, so what did I know about fashion then? What I didn’t realize, until years later, was that the birthday girl was poor. If I wore my new party dress, I would outshine her at her own party. So my mother made me wear something old and, to my eyes, ugly. This was another of a thousand misunderstandings that only made sense after she had died.

With the wisdom of hindsight, now I see that she couldn’t risk me leaving New Orleans to follow my fortunes as a musician or a singer. I needed to do something “steady”; I had to have “something to fall back on” when I failed, as she was certain I would. The odds of succeeding as a jazz singer or musician are a million to one. For every Harry Connick Jr., every Wynton Marsalis, every Diana Krall, there are ten thousand men like my father, broken down and tormented by their music just as much as they desire it. Some blues singers, like Billie Holiday, embodied both success and destruction. Strung out on heroin, she was a poster child for how the music business can destroy you. My mother wasn’t about to let me risk anything. Least of all my life.

Now, Nan is a different story. I’m not sure how the two of them were even related. My mother occasionally used to sigh at her own mother and mutter something about “baby-switching” at the hospital. Nan was a rebel and risk-taker all her life. She was the kind of woman who wore flaming-red lipstick and kept her hair short, in the latest “Parisian” styles, as a young woman. She had a sense of self that stares back at you in the black-and-white photos in her albums, her high cheekbones and dark eyes commanding attention. She rode in a motorcycle sidecar across the United States with one of her boyfriends, and she danced on a bar with Ernest Hemingway in Key West. She ran the brothel until Sadie died, and even after she married my grandfather, a professional gambler and whiskey importer, she threw parties that made the newspapers. She also never let her racial heritage define her, even down here where sometimes you step off the St. Charles streetcar and swear it’s another era.

Nan was the one to sneak me off to R-rated movies before I was even thirteen. She bought me Junior Mints and filled my head with talk of love affairs and Paris, and the way a man loves a woman with a “bosom.” My mother couldn’t even say the word bra to me. She couldn’t look me in the eyes when I told her I got my first period. Everything about womanhood embarrassed my mother, while Nan encouraged me to embrace it all. Nan was velvet and lipstick. Mom was a buttoned-up oxford shirt and Ivory soap.

Nan pushed me into voice lessons in high school, and then in college she was always there behind me nudging me into the spotlight, telling me that’s where I belonged, “Out where people can see and hear you, for God’s sake, Georgie. Anybody can stand in the shadows. It takes courage to shine.”

Yes, Nan is a character all her own. And I knew on the pressing issue of Casanova Jones her advice would be quite simple. Nan believes approaching summer drives all of us in New Orleans mad. It has its roots in Mardi Gras, whose long finger extends madness throughout the year. But deeper than that, it has its roots in the bayou and the mist.

When summer comes, she believes we all need romance, because, as she puts it, “Georgia, there’s nothing to do in the Crescent City heat but drink mint juleps, make passionate love, lay naked afterward underneath the ceiling fan and listen to the blues.”