Don't Blame the Music (12 page)

“It's bad for you to hang around,” said my father sternly. “Idleness breeds trouble, always has, always will.”

But Ashley never left other people space to reach her. She never looked to any of us for a response, and there was never a way to fit one in. It came to me that she was a remarkably isolated person: All the normal responses—waiting for other people to speak, or smile, or frown in sympathy—all of them were nonexistent in Ashley.

“Productive!” yelled Ashley, slamming her fist on the table. My soup sloshed onto the cloth and the candles trembled in their silver bases. “Listen!” she screamed. “If you'd given me more lessons in—”

My father slammed
his
fist on the table. The salt and pepper jumped. “We gave you everything, Ashley! You have to blame your failure on everything else, don't you? Bad weather kept away your fans. A bad president ruined the economy and contributed to the bad weather that kept away the fans. The fans are stupid. The record stores don't stock the right things. The disc jockeys only play the people who are already established, huh, Ashley? But never never never once did you consider that you were offering a product that wasn't right, did you?”

My mother was shaking. She hates confrontations.

For once Ashley was stung. She looked away and said almost quietly, “I considered that a lot. That's why I changed so often. Trying to hit it right. It's harder than it looks. Getting the combination people seem to want.” Her voice broke. For a moment she was vulnerable. Young and scared and terribly terribly sad.

My father said softly, “Sweetheart, you'd feel so much better if you were doing something all day instead of hanging around.”

The screams came back full force. “What do you want me to do?” she shrieked, her voice high and bitter and raging. “Sell hamburgers at Burger King? Type invoices at Bloomingdales?” She was gesturing with the bread knife now.

My mother drew back from the table, mesmerized by the swings of that knife. Her fingers knotted around each other like crochet of the flesh.

Ashley spat out, “I am not common! I will not do common things!”

“Oh, come off it, Ashley,” I snapped. “You're not a peacock on acid, strutting in front of your fans. We're your mother and your father and your sister and we're not impressed.”

The knife flew in front of my face.

There was time to think of being scarred.

Of having my face ruined.

I jerked back, my hand going to my cheek to feel for blood.

But there was no pain.

A lock of my hair, a tiny sliver of brown curl, drifted through a sunbeam, and fell casually to the table.

It was Ashley who retreated to the bedroom.

And that meant I could not go there. I was stranded in the kitchen.

Mom and I did the dishes by hand. We have a dishwasher, but by tacit consent, we accepted hand-washing as a way to work off the pain of that last fight. We actually stood there talking about lemon-scented detergents. “I didn't know real people talked like this,” I said to my mother.

“When the alternative is talking about Ashley, real people will seize on anything,” she said wryly. “Even lemon-scented detergents.”

I waited for her to say, “Susan, you've had enough. A sister who actually uses a knife on you, as opposed to using it on the fan belt, that's too much. She goes. Whether it means the gutter, the police, or what, Ash goes.”

But she didn't say that.

My father didn't either.

Mother cleared the table, sweeping that lock of my hair into the garbage along with the used napkins and the spilled food.

We washed. We dried. We put away.

Dishes clinked. Glasses sparkled.

This must have been what it was like in Germany in the 1930s, I thought. Evil all around you, but you don't admit it. You tell yourself you're exaggerating. You put it aside. You tell yourself things will be better in the morning. You do dishes. When you should be running like hell.

Mother vanished into the dining room. When she came back she was dusty and oddly happy-looking. I could not imagine what she could have done in those few seconds to make herself happy.

She brought out the old photograph albums.

The ones from before I was even born.

Ashley, age four, dressed for Sunday school. Little white gloves and little shiny black shoes.

Ashley, age five, playing with a new dollhouse.

Ashley, age six, decorating Valentines.

The present was so dreadful we weren't going to have it around. We were going to reintroduce the past instead. I looked at my mother and thought, Next time you go to the doctor it's probably going to be a psychiatrist.

“She was a lovely little girl,” said my mother.

Nobody said anything.

“Wasn't she, Warren?” insisted my mother.

“Yes, Janey,” he said, sighing. “A lovely little girl.”

On that page, Ashley was making the Valentines and she had gotten sparkle and glue all over her face instead of on the red construction paper. It was one of the most charming photographs I had ever seen.

But that was twenty years ago, I thought. She isn't charming. She's crazy. She took a knife and—

I stopped thinking about it too. It
was
too terrible to think about. I accepted the decision. We would live with Ashley hour by hour, day by day, struggling to make things better, and maybe things really would get better. She was their daughter, she was my sister, and we were not going to give up this time.

I had a rush of love for my parents: for their survival, their sense of humor, their loyalty against all odds. Once again I had to write in my journal. A love song. Not for Whit, not for Anthony, but for families. For solidarity against pain.

I set down the last dish and went into the hall to rummage through my schoolbooks for the journal. I didn't have any words yet, just emotions. Usually the words came first. This would be a different kind of writing: first the thought, then the—

The journal was not there.

At first I couldn't believe it. I must have slipped it into a textbook or between the pages of another notebook. But I flipped pages, and lifted each book, and did it again, and triple-checked.

And it was not there.

I sat weakly on the hall chair: a purely decorative fragile little thing with no function except to fill the corner. In my whole life I had never sat on it.

Where was the journal?

Where had I lost it?

In Carmine's car? Would he read from it; read it aloud to Whit when he phoned with the news of what scum I really was? Would they have a good laugh over it?

Was it on the floor of the music room? In the halls? In the girls' lav on the second floor? In Miss Margolis' room?

Who had it? Who was reading it?

I could not bear it if somebody read my journal. I kept shutting my mind down. I could see Carmine or Whit or Jeffrey or Emily or Shepherd finding it—but I could not bring myself to think of them reading it.

It contained the agony of Ashley. The crush on Whit. The adoration for Anthony. The jealousy toward and from Shepherd.

The trespass.

But it was my own fault.

I had written it down. Nothing should ever be written down. Because then it's trapped, and other people can grab it, and use it, and hurt you with it.

I cried myself to sleep.

Ashley didn't pay any attention.

She was crying herself to sleep too.

S
ATURDAY WAS A BIG
football game.

Our town is best in swimming, gymnastics, lacrosse and other preppy things. Basketball we haven't won in three years—but then, basketball isn't preppy. You sweat too much in basketball. It's a blue-collar-type game. Football now, that's halfway between. Your preps can sit in the bleachers wrapped in their plaid blankets and have picnics on the tailgates of their cars. So we hang in there in football.

Dad is not our coach. He coaches in New Canaan, one of our big rivals. Today we played New Canaan.

Normally Mom and I won't go to those games, because it's too tough rooting. If we root for us, we're against Dad. If we root for Dad, we're against my classmates. So we don't go.

Today we went. Staying at home with Ashley was more than we could bear.

Just as we had the sit-upons in the car, the sandwiches in the carrier, and the extra blankets folded, Ashley appeared. “I'm coming,” she said, which was hardly good news. She was wearing my mother's oldest coat, a huge tweed cloth thing nobody had worn in years. It smelled of a decade of mothballs.

We were unable to restrain our sighs. Was there no rest from Ash?

“You can frisk me for weapons,” she said sarcastically.

“Nah. I've brought a gag. That's all we need,” I told her.

I thought, Somebody at this game has my journal. Somebody there has read my soul, and they're going to walk up to me and there's going to be this knowing glint in their eyes, and I'm going to hate them and myself forever.

And Whit? Would he be there? Would Carmine have said to him,
she's a snobby princess just like Shepherd?
Would he look at me in scorn and contempt?

But no, he would not be there. Weekends he worked with his father. Construction. Masonry: foundations and walls and chimneys. It was hard heavy work and something I would want to do only on sunny breezy blue-skied days. Forget winters, rain, and August.

But that was probably the least of my worries. The real one was: How would Ashley behave? She had not been in public with us before. There was no telling what she might do. Just looking at her secretive face made me cringe. What did she have planned? What terrible revenge would she take on us? She, who had no shame, no pride, no nothing but the desire to shock.

Don't do something hideous, I thought at her.

I even considered begging her to behave. But that would be like inciting a riot. Of course if we had to ask her not to, it would be a matter of honor for Ashley to do something particularly awful.

It was quite cold. The wind was brisk and the bleachers unpleasantly exposed. There was no sun. The sky had the heavy grayness that felt like snow, although it was too early in the year and not cold enough. I told myself at least Ashley, huddled in my mother's coat, would not be stripping and doing some dance in the nude, because she was too cold.

Perhaps she really did want to see the football game.

Perhaps she was actually thinking about some of the things my father had said to her, and planning job interviews and—

Yeah, and Shepherd wanted Anthony to go steady with me, too.

I was just thinking of Anthony when he appeared. It was so dramatic it was like summoning him with ESP. I stared at him. He climbed up the bleachers and sat in the space Ashley had carefully left between herself and me. “Hi, there,” he said happily.

“Hi, Anthony. How are you?”

“Fine. Hi, Mrs. Hall.”

“Hello, Anthony dear.”

My mother adores Anthony. All mothers adore Anthony. No matter what they say about not wanting their little girls to date, or grow up, or go steady or any of that—all mothers want their daughter to go out with Anthony.

Anthony turned expectantly toward the girl sitting on his left. What was I supposed to do? Pretend we weren't related? Pretend she was just a hallucination on Anthony's part? “This is my sister,” I said drearily. “Ashley.”

“Oh, I'm really glad to meet you,” said Anthony, giving her his right hand. “I've heard a lot about you and of course I saw your show when you came to town a few years ago. You were fantastic.”

Pride and pleasure crossed her face. I had known Anthony had a way with girls, but I had not known it bordered on the godlike. To win my sister over? Wow.

For the first time we heard anecdotes from Ashley. She sat happily with Anthony, chatting away about this concert and that, this partner and that singer. People she had known, places she had been.

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.