Three
In the darkness of my room the fireflies hover like small green spaceships. I’ve put the screen on the window up so that they can come in. I like watching them float through the air, blinking their messages to one another. Occasionally one of them settles on something—the dresser, a lamp, the footboard of my bed—and winks on and off for a moment before taking flight again.
It’s keep-awake hot, even at a few minutes past midnight, and I’m lying on top of the quilt with just my boxer shorts on. Even so, I’m still slightly sweaty, and the occasional breeze that blows across my skin is not quite enough to cool me off. It’s like the house is holding its breath.
I have headphones on, the big, puffy kind that cover your whole ear and block out everything but the music. They’re plugged into the receiver beside my bed. On top of that is an old record player, on which is spinning an original vinyl pressing of Wanda Jackson’s 1961 album There’s a Party Goin’ On. The fifth song of side 1 is playing.
“I got the feelin’ I’m a fallin,’ like a star up in the blue,” Wanda sings in her raw, gritty voice. “Like I was fallin’ off Niagara, in a paddle-boat canoe.”
This is my favorite song on the album. I love the way Wanda yips at the end of some of the lines. I love the rockabilly guitars. I love the occasional pop and hiss in the sound as the needle travels around the groove. It sounds real.
There’s a Party Goin’ On is number two on the list of the 21 Most Perfect Albums of All Time, at least as compiled by my mother, Ilona Weyward. (Actually, she’s not a Weyward, as she didn’t take the name. But last names are a whole other story in my family, and I don’t know hers.) It’s what she left me when she, well, left me. A cardboard box with twenty-one albums in it. Plus her record player.
The albums were arranged in chronological order in the box, and that’s how I first listened to them. It’s how I still listen to them. I work through them from one to twenty-one, then start over. Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Gospel Train, from 1956, is the first one. Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is the last one.
Inside each album is a note. Some of them are written right on the liner sleeves, some are on slips of paper when there’s no clear space on the sleeve. Mostly they explain why my mother thinks the album is perfect, or almost perfect. Sometimes they say other things.
The note inside the Wanda Jackson album, written in my mother’s sloppy handwriting, says:
Some people call Wanda Jackson the “female Elvis,” or say that she was the first woman to sing rock and roll. This isn’t true. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was probably the first. But Wanda did it better than almost anybody. Her best song is “Funnel of Love,” but that wasn’t on any of her albums, so you’ll have to find that and listen to it somewhere else. But this is her best album. It’s only 29 minutes long, and every second of it is great.
She’s right. There’s not a bad song on the album. When “Hard Headed Woman” ends, I lift the needle, flip the record over, and start side 2.
I’ve played the twenty-one albums so often that I know every note and every word. Some of them I can even play on the guitar my father got me for Christmas a few years ago. But mostly I just listen to them, looking for whatever it is that made my mother fall in love with them. I figure that if I can understand what she liked, I can understand her, and maybe what she did.
Wanda sings about falling in and out of love. As the first notes of “Tweedle Dee” begin, I find myself thinking about Tom Swift and what happened this afternoon. I can’t forget the look on his face as he turned away, like someone had just told his biggest secret to the world. Which I suspect is exactly what happened.
I think about calling him. But it’s late, so instead I listen to the rest of There’s a Party Goin’ On. Then I turn the stereo off and pick up the telephone. My fingers search out ten numbers at random. After seven rings, someone answers.
“Hello?”
It’s a girl’s voice.
“Tell me a story.”
There’s a long pause, and at first I think she’s hung up on me. But then there’s a sigh, and I know she’s still there. One of the rules is that I don’t talk again until they do, so I don’t say anything.
“Once upon a time, there was a girl,” she says after a minute. “She had brown hair and brown eyes. She was the average height and weight for her age. She looked like a million other girls. She had the same name as a million other girls, and listened to the same music that they did, and read the same books that they did, and ate the same food that they did. And when she slept, she had the same dreams that a million other girls had. She was perfectly ordinary.
“But she didn’t want to be ordinary. She wanted to be special. She hoped that one day a fairy godmother would show up and tell her that she was really the daughter of the king and queen of Elfland, or that on her thirteenth birthday she would discover that she had magic powers. Sometimes she wished on falling stars, and didn’t tell anyone that what she wished was that one day everyone would see how different she really was from the million other girls who had her name.
“On the day of her thirteenth birthday, as she was walking home from school, an old woman suddenly appeared in front of her. The old woman was dressed all in black, and the girl knew right away that the woman was a witch, because her hair was tangled and she was wearing a button that said ‘My Other Ride Is a Broom.’ To be sure, though, she asked her, ‘Are you a witch?’
“‘Of course I am,’ the witch said.
“‘Have you come to tell me that I’m a witch too?’ the girl asked her.
“The witch rolled her eyes and said, ‘No. I’m just on my way to the store for some milk, and you happen to be in my way.’
“‘So I’m not a witch?’ the girl said.
“The witch shrugged. ‘Probably not,’ she said. ‘You seem perfectly ordinary to me. But give it a try if you want to. It can’t hurt.’ Then she walked away.
“So the girl went home and tried to be a witch. But none of her spells worked, the black dress she put on looked ridiculous, and it turned out she was allergic to cats. So she gave up and went back to being perfectly ordinary, because in the end she really was just like the million other girls with the same name.
“The end.”
“What was the girl’s name?” I ask her.
“Linda,” she tells me. “Plain old Linda with an ‘i.’ No ‘y’ or anything like that. Just Linda.”
“It’s not a very happy story,” I say.
“You didn’t ask for a happy one,” the girl says. “Besides, it’s better than a happy one, because it tells the truth.”
“But most people would probably want the girl to find out she really is special,” I tell her.
“Of course they would,” she says. “Because they want to be special. But that’s not the truth, is it? I mean, not usually. Most people really are ordinary. They might not want to be, but they are. I hate those stories where someone finds out she’s the Chosen One or whatever. That’s false hope.”
“So there should only be stories about people being like everyone else?” I ask.