Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (9 page)

Fighting:
As with most couples, probably, most of our fights were not
about
anything, but rather about fighting itself. We negotiated the rules, slowly, stupidly, over time. The word “sulk” got banned early on, in the summer of 1990. “Pout” was soon to follow. “Don’t start” was banned in the fall of 1992. “What is that supposed to mean?” got banned, reinstated, and banned again. “Not that again” took a few years to go on the index. “What are you thinking?” never did get banned, despite my intense lobbying efforts.

Whenever we had a fight,
I could never get to sleep, so after it was over I got up, moved to the couch, fixed a sandwich, and watched TV with the sound down. One night I watched this intense Bette Davis movie,
A Stolen Life
. Even without sound, I could still follow the basic gist. There are twin Bette Davises, a good twin and an evil twin. Both are in love with Glenn Ford. They’re in a boat; it’s stormy; the boat capsizes. The good twin sinks under the waves and desperately reaches out her hand. The evil twin reaches down, but instead of grasping the hand, she just slides the wedding ring right off her sister’s finger. Damn. That’s cold-blooded, Bette Davis. Back in town, she pretends to be the good twin and gets to have post-shipwreck sex with Glenn Ford. I fell asleep, so I never found out if she got caught. After Renée died, I kept meaning to go back and watch it with the sound on, but I never did.

One night, after some fight I’d thought we’d both forgotten, Renée woke up trembling and cold. She gave me very detailed instructions about what she needed. I was to get up, go into the kitchen, open up her stash of pizza dough, and make her a pizza. This would take half an hour or so. I asked if she’d be okay by herself for that long and she promised she would call me if she couldn’t make it. She was shaking. I got up and went to the kitchen.

When the pizza was done, I carried it back to bed and we ate it. Renée told me the whole time she was alone in bed, she sang a song over and over to comfort herself. She sang: “The only one who could ever reach me, was the Makin’-the-Pizza Man.”

dancing with myself

AUGUST 1993

O
ne day we were at the
Barracks Road Shopping Center when Renée called me over to the cosmetics aisle. We stared at a brightly colored plastic tube dangling from a hook. It was our first encounter with Grunge Gunk or, as it proclaimed itself on the label, “The Alternative Hair Styling Mud!” Of course we took it home ($1.75) and Renée nailed it up on the bathroom door.

It was a Grunge Gunk kind of summer.

As Lionel Richie once warned us, there comes a time when we heed a certain call. For us, that time was the summer of 1993. Our first redhead summer smelled like hair dye and nail polish. Renée had only been a redhead for a few months, but she was already burying her brunette past, and the apartment filled up with cosmetic fumes. Renée had a new job at the Fashion Square Mall, working as the Clarins girl at the Leggett makeup counter. At work, she became instant best friends with the Clinique girl, Susan, a Waynesboro muscle-car aficionado. She was fond of dispensing wisdom along the lines of: “The bullshit stops when the green light pops!” I’d go to the mall to pick up Renée, take them both a couple of coffees, and hang out while they chattered in their hot white coats. Susan would take Renée to hot-rod shows and run-what-ya-brung drag races. She brought out sides of Renée I’d never gotten to see before, and it was a sight to behold. After a night out with Susan, Renée would always come back saying things like, “If it’s got tits or tires, it’s gonna cost you money.”

That year, the music we loved had blown up nationwide. It was a little ridiculous how formerly underground guitar rock was crashing through the boundaries. More guitar bands than ever were making noise, and more of them than ever were worth hearing. The first sign of the apocalypse had come during the Winter Olympics when Kristi Yamaguchi, America’s gold-medal ice queen, was doing her free-form routine to Edith Piaf’s “Milord,” and TV announcer Dick Buttons said that Kristi psyched herself up backstage by listening to her favorite band, Nirvana, on her Walkman. Renée and I just stared at each other. For her, it was an epiphanic moment—punk rock was now music that even figure-skater girls could listen to. The door was open. Our turn had arrived. Here we are now. Entertain us.

Now we lived in a world of Grunge Gunk, where the bands we loved had a chance to get popular, or half-popular, or at least popular enough to get to keep making music, which is all most of them asked for. One night, before a special Seattle episode of
Cops
, the announcer said, “Tonight . . . in the city that gave us Pearl Jam . . . the cops are taking out the grunge!” Pathetic? Depressing? No. Awesome, we decided. Why not? We were easily amused. Maybe it was all the nail-polish fumes, but we were buzzing with energy. Our apartment flooded, so we just moved to the couch. For dinner, we cut across the train tracks to Wayside’s Fried Chicken. On weekends, Renée and I drove out to the Fork Union drive-in to see cinematic masterpieces like
The Crush
and
Sliver
. MTV spent the whole summer blasting the video where Snoop Doggy Dogg wore his “LBC” baseball hat. Renée asked, “Snoop went to Liberty Baptist College?”

We both had raging crushes, which we loved to dish about together. Our big summer crushes were a couple of rookie grad students in the English department, named River and Sherilyn after the movie stars they reminded us of. Thank God neither of us was the jealous type, or the insecure type, or for that matter the cheatin’ type, since sharing our crushes was one of the major perks of being married. Renée would catalogue my crushes. There was Bassist Cleavage Girl (from the Luscious Jackson videos), Tremble-Mouth Girl (Winona Ryder), Mick Jagger Elastica Girl (Angelina Jolie in
Hackers
), Painted on a World War II Bomber Girl (Jennifer Connelly), My Eyes Are So Big You Could Fuck Them Girl (Susanna Hoffs), and Madonna (Madonna). She introduced me to her own seraglio, from the Braves’ Javy Lopez (“He sure is put together nice”) to Evan Dando (“He must get more cookie than the Keebler elves”).

At first, being married made me feel older, but that summer it made me feel younger, just because I had a wife I could count on to make friends for me. Her girlfriends became my girlfriends. I didn’t have to do the work of scrounging my own social life because Renée pimped me out. She took me to parties and sent me to circulate among her crushes and pump them for information. At every party we went to, we’d split up at the door and work separate sides of the room. We had the system down: I was to check on her every forty minutes or so, touch her arm, ask if she needed a drink, and then she’d go back to work. On the way home, we’d ask each other, “What did he/she say about me?” River and Sherilyn came to our Fourth of July party, and it turned out Sherilyn was kind of a pyro, so she brought fireworks to set off in the citronella torches. We made mint juleps and had a blast. Renée got a wax burn while blowing out the torches and kept the scar the rest of the summer.

Every party that summer ended the same way: One of the girls would put on Liz Phair’s
Exile in Guyville
and all the girls would gather on the back porch and sing along with the whole album, word for word, while the boys stood around in the kitchen and listened. It was scary, like the summer after sixth grade, when the girls back home would gather on the stoop and do the same thing, except they were singing along to the
Grease
soundtrack. Same girls, same summer nights, just different songs. Liz Phair was asking, “Whatever happened to a boyfriend?” and I would think, Well, some of us turn into husbands, and then nobody writes songs about us except Carly Simon.

Renée played this particular mix tape one night when she was sewing. Sewing was her most private activity, or at least the most private one I was allowed to sit in on. For a long time, she needed me to vacate the house whenever it was time to sew. After a while, it was okay if I stayed around, as long as I read a book and kept quiet. I was glad she was sewing because it was good for her. I was more glad when I got to hang out and watch. Her brow would furrow and her eyes would concentrate. Her mind would wander places I’d never seen her go before.

By the night she popped in this tape to sew, she was so comfortable she let me hang out and listen while she worked. I’d never heard this one before. She made private tapes so she could sew or work out to them. (Working out never got to be the kind of thing she could do while I was around.) Of course, the private tapes probably had all the same songs she put on all her other tapes. One side of this mix is uptempo, so I assume she used it for dancing and jumping around; the other side is quiet, so I assume it was for meditating or bead-stringing or sewing or other solitary pursuits.

Renée got seriously into sewing that year. She basically stopped wearing any clothes she didn’t make herself, except for her Clarins work uniform. None of her store-bought clothes looked good on her. She was getting bigger and wider—broader hips, fleshier thighs—and she couldn’t find any clothes in stores that would come close to fitting her. She used to cry when she had to buy ugly clothes from stores like Fashion Beetle or Aunt Pretty Poodle’s, which were her only choices in Charlottesville. So she just started making her own. Her sewing-machine corner of the living room filled up with piles and piles of fabric and patterns. She made a dress form of her body so she could design patterns that would fit her. She would go to the fabric store, sort through the boxes of patterns, and buy them so she could copy them into something that would fit her. She basically had one mod minidress that she made over and over. She couldn’t do zippers yet, but that summer she finally learned to do buttons and buttonholes, so she started making all her own foxy shirts. She sewed bike shorts to wear under her dresses so her thighs wouldn’t chafe when they rubbed together. And she would come home with the strangest, sorriest fabric: pea pods, seashells, eggs, Queen Elizabeth smiling, anything. The more pathetic and helpless the fabric looked on the rack, the more it would sucker her into trying to make it into a mod minidress.

The more she sewed, the easier it got for her to move and breathe, since she now had clothes she could move and breathe in, and feel totally hot while she did so. It was really intense to see how much control over her body she could have by taking control over her clothes. It took a lot of time to make them all, but she could sew for hours. While she worked she would lose all her nervous energy and glow like a conquering goddess.

She took me to the fabric store whenever she could. She said she liked to get my opinion about what looked cool and what didn’t, but that was a total lie. She just liked having a boy to tote around the fabric store, and I knew it. I was always the only boy there, and she brandished me around the room like my grandmother used to whenever she took me to St. Andrew’s with her. Or, for that matter, the way I did when I had Renée with me in a mildewy used-record store. I was a trophy, and I liked it. While she would pore over the giant books of patterns, I would ask the stupidest questions I could think of in a big, loud voice so she could show off how interested her boy was in sewing.

“Um, is that an empire waist?”

“Yes, Rob. Very good. That’s an empire waist.”

“I see. Why do they call it an empire waist?”

“It was invented during the Napoleonic empire.” (I have no idea if this is true.)

“But Renée, explain this to me. Why is the waistline so high? Is that like a fitted boudoir?”

“I believe you mean a fitted bodice.”

And so on. I would ask, she would explain. Boring. But I loved it and I knew she did, too, and I loved to pump up her vanity. Renée’s vanity was a beautiful thing. I loved being her prop at the fabric store. In time, I started to love hanging around the store and exploring all the weird stuff they had there. To my fashion-illiterate mind, it was another planet. The signs they had up for fabric were a dizzying barrage of perfect names for new wave bands: Silk Shantung! Corduroy Remnants! Dalmatian-Print Fun Fur! That last one became the title of a mix tape. It also became a pair of pants.

Renée’s sewing was a way for her to follow the changes in her body. She felt her hips growing more and more Appalachian, marking her as one of her people. She was starting to look like pictures of her late, beloved Mamaw back in West Virginia; sometimes this would make her uncles misty-eyed. Uncle Troy once gave her a hug and almost cried because the hug reminded him of Mamaw’s body. Goldie Hughart Crist died when Renée was sixteen, but Renée felt like she was getting to know her grandmother better than ever now. There was a lot of history in the hips, and Renée was learning her history. With that sewing machine, she was making history of her own.

Around that time we went to Dublin (the one in Ireland, not the one in Pulaski County) to visit cousins of mine. As we walked down the street, she said, “You know, I’m starting to understand this whole Irish boy/southern girl thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I have the only ass on this entire street. Look around.”

“I’ve seen your ass before.”

“Look at the men. The men are walking into walls.”

“That’s true. I thought they were staring at me.”

“I have the only pair of hips as far as the eye can see. They have never seen a girl before. Holy shit!”

“I thought it was my new Suede T-shirt.”

“None of these women have any ass at all. This is fucking awesome.”

“It’s a really cool Suede T-shirt.”

“That last guy turned around three times.”

And so on. It wasn’t my Suede T-shirt, believe me.

The sewing built up her strength, that was for sure. She started writing down reminders to herself on an index card and kept it in her pocket all the time. The first line was, “Lots of people like me.” She crossed out “Lots of” and wrote “Enough.”

I’m very expressive.

I deserve to feel pretty.

I kissed the Blarney Stone.

I am strong. I am brave.

I’m a good friend. I am a good sister. I’m a good wife. I am a good in-law. I’m a good daughter. I am a good niece. I’m a good beagle mother. I am a good granddaughter.

I work hard for it, honey.

I’m Superfly TNT Motherfucker.

I’m pilot of the airwaves.

I’m a better third baseman than Brooks Robinson.

I B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E.

I have exceptionally beautiful feet, eyes, ears, hips, hair, teeth, breasts, and shoulders. And fingernails. In a different pen, she added, And eyelashes and eyebrows, plus in yet another pen, And nose. And chin.

I never learned any sewing from Renée at all. That was totally her thing. But the intensity of her presence while she bent over the machine and made it hum—that stayed with me. So did all the pattern lingo and fabric jargon. Just more of that endless, useless knowledge you absorb when you’re in a relationship, with no meaning or relevance outside of that relationship. When the relationship’s gone, you’re stuck knowing all this garbage. A couple of years after Renée died, I was in a room full of friends watching the BBC production of
Pride and Prejudice
. Everybody commented on those funny dresses Jennifer Ehle wears. “Mmmm, yes, the empire waist,” I said. “Authentic to the period, but a daring choice, since it usually looks silly on somebody who isn’t very tall. But she wears it well. Nicole Kidman wore one to the Oscars in 1996.” All the heads in the room slowly turned and stared at me. I had no idea how any of this was stuck in my head. My friends waited in silence for some kind of explanation. Nobody was more curious than I was.