The Music of Your Life (3 page)

It's September, you're a fifth grader now, and—good news—you got into Miss Kenan's class. She is the youngest and prettiest of the three fifth-grade teachers at Linden Hills Elementary, and, to top that off, last year a rumor went around the school that Miss Kenan had once worked as a trapeze artist with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus before turning to elementary teaching. You try to imagine Miss Kenan in white tights, busty and big-haired, with huge swipes of stagey blue eye shadow painted across her eyelids, swinging upside down over a net, dangling, then upright again, right arm high above her head: sexy, confident, and full of herself, while below her, a lusty, common crowd cheers in unanimous Big Top delight, greedy and hungry for all that she has to give them.

But now Miss Kenan is just pert and pretty in a simple white blouse and navy skirt, instructing you and your classmates to open up your tablets and, with your metallic red, tubey Number 2 pencils, write in big, blocky letters: “My name is _____; Today is_____; Our president is_____; Our principal is_____.” This disappoints you; you resent the act of writing reduced to a mere exercise in penmanship. After all, this summer you authored a full-length play about your family, written in a week with ballpoint pen on yellow legal pads. You have never been one for pencils, preferring the look, smell, and feel of ink. It occurs to you that writing instruments, specifically pen versus pencil, are not something the other children in your class concern themselves with. Neither are they concerned with forging a special, secret understanding with Miss Kenan. But you are, and why not? You're a playwriting, champagne-loving ten-year-old, and she is a Teacher With A Past: loose-living, canapé-eating, martini-swilling,
all woman
. Miss Kenan is the type of dame—lyes, dame-that you've read about in quick, secret perusals of
True Detective
down at the drugstore. You know, as the writers of
True Detective
would know if they laid eyes on her, what Miss Kenan really is: a shadow-dwelling refugee from the circus, a game-playing, lusty, busty babe, a juicy tomato, a hard-hearted
mantrap
. How many fifth graders are fortunate enough to have
this
for a new teacher? Miss Kenan may be outfitted conservatively in a plain blouse and skirt set, but you, and only you among the collective fifth grades, can see that that's really a disguise. You know this is not the true costume of swinging high-wire trapeze artists whose lives have been kissed by scandal …

You are so lucky. You and Miss Kenan will be a clandestine team. And if she doesn't comply with your request to be allowed to write in ink, you might even blackmail her with the secret information that you—and you alone—possess about her.

You develop a friendship with another boy, a new kid in your class named Eric Tuthill, who has moved to North Carolina from upstate New York. You suspect Eric would rather have been taken in by the popular, jocky boys, but they are selective and don't readily exhibit the gracious and welcoming ambassadorial skills that you extend to new schoolchildren. You figure Eric is probably glad anybody picked him to hang out with; plus you will talk to him about the state of North Carolina and reveal secrets of your town and clue him in on various shadowy intrigues of Linden Hills Elementary. He will feel, in turn, that he has been let in on something, guided, eased into his new situation by an unusually generous and giving host, and in gracious response, he will offer his loyal, lifelong friendship. What piqued your interest most specifically about Eric was his origin, upstate New York, which makes him something of an exotic in your area. It occurs to you that Eric's being from New York State perhaps means that he has had occasion to go to Manhattan, which, along with Hollywood, California, is one of your two favorite places in the world, despite the fact that you've never been to either.

“New York City is OK, I guess,” Eric tells you in the lunchroom one day, over fish sticks and chocolate milk. “It's big, that's for sure.”

“Did you go see Broadway shows?” you ask between bites. “Or the Rainbow Room, have you been to the Rainbow Room?”

“Nah, I never heard of the Rainbow Room,” he says, which immediately disappoints you. “But we did go see a show once, for my sister's birthday.”

“What show?”

“Uh … I don't remember. It was … something with a lot of kids in it. It was OK, I guess.”

Your mind races. “
The Sound of Music?
” you offer. “Or
Oliver!?
”

“Maybe. I don't really remember. My dad used to take us to Yankee games, though. Those are really cool.” This finally lights him up.

“Wow,” you lie. “I wish I could have done that.”

And Eric launches into a breathless description of a Yankee game he recalls in vivid detail, and you give him your undivided attention, ever the accommodating host and gracious ambassador.

The feelings you have for Miss Kenan probably amount to a crush of some sort; most days, she reminds you of movie magazine starlets, like Sandra Dee or Annette Funicello. Plus, it's obvious she likes you as much as you like her. You stay after school and help her with classroom maintenance, you dust the erasers against the sidewalk or on the sides of the Dempster Dumpster. You water the plant, you feed the turtle. And Miss Kenan seems to have intuited that you prefer indoor activities to outside ones; she probably realizes how much you dislike the playground. Late one morning, as the other boys are gearing up to play football, she asks you if you would mind staying in from recess to help her put up a new bulletin board.

“I think we'll do an orange background, with a black crepe paper border, for Halloween,” she muses aloud. It's just the two of you—alone together in the classroom—which has suddenly become hushed and quiet now that all the other children have gone outside. It is warm too, with the heat from the radiators, turned on now because of the newly brisk fall days.

“Yes, ma'am,” you say, and then you add something you heard a Hollywood guest say on
The Mike Douglas Show:
“I think that will look divine.”

She smiles at you uncertainly; she holds her gaze for longer than a moment, then looks away again. You offer to cut out jack-o'-lanterns and back-arching, torpedo-tailed cats from orange and black construction paper. While scissoring ever so precisely, your heart begins to beat, and you start to breathe in quick breaths. Is now the time to bombard Miss Kenan with questions about her past? To finally find out all the things you've longed to know about? Her rumored days with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey? You want to ask aloud if she wore tight white leotards and smoked and drank with the other circus people in the off-hours, if she dated handsome, but possibly slippery, carny types. You want to know if she ever had her heart broken. But you're too afraid to ask anything, especially if it might mean finding out that none of it was true at all. You don't really want to hear the possible cold hard facts about Miss Kenan, about Miss Rosemary Kenan. What if she is nothing more than a nice North Carolina girl from a good middle-income home, raised Methodist, an A student in home economics, an elementary education major at Saint Mary's College in Raleigh?

You keep scissoring, pasting, taping, and watching Miss Kenan out of the corner of your eye, wondering …

But you don't speak. You decide it's better to keep pondering the rumors.

After Halloween, Miss Kenan and the music teacher, Mrs. Curtis, choose you to do a solo song in the December assembly program. You are thrilled and hope that they will ask you to perform “Misty” or “Winchester Cathedral” or “Melancholy Baby,” one of the standards you've heard on the
Lawrence Welk
program. This is it, you decide, your big break, and on the Linden Hills Elementary cafetorium stage you will perform and the children and parents and teachers will whoop and cheer and you will become an Overnight Sensation. You are certain Miss Kenan, with her show business past, probably knows an agent or two, and will arrange for them to be there for your performance.

The song Miss Kenan and Mrs. Curtis eventually give you to sing is called “Long John,” and it's a children's folk tune about a legendary, Paul Bunyan-ish explorer and hunter in the Pacific Northwest. This is a little disappointing; you can't quite imagine that “Long John” would be a selection on the
Welk
show, or that this would be the type of number you would be asked to do at celebrity-drenched parties in Beverly Hills or at the Rainbow Room. Still, you accept the task with gratitude, and it does genuinely excite you to think about performing a solo in front of an audience.

But already you hear some of the boys in the class start to snicker and jeer about your being selected to sing a solo—even Eric—and you realize, or should have realized, that it was only a matter of time before he would move on, what with his firsthand accounts of big-league baseball games and his burgeoning athletic ability. But it doesn't matter, you tell yourself; he couldn't remember the names of Broadway shows anyway.

Your grandmother, whose name is Agnes but whom everyone calls Perky, spends more time visiting your house now that she and Grandpa Joe have split up for good, but she doesn't seem sad or moody, as you expected her to be. Instead, she seems her typically happy, upbeat, good-time-gal self, living up to her nickname, bedecked, as always, in diamond rings and rhinestone bracelets, with upswept, beehivey blond-gray hair and jewel-encrusted cat-eye glasses, as though she is always on her way from the beauty parlor or the country club. Often, she is.

“Hello, dah'lin,” she rasps, kissing you on the lips (something Connie will never do), and blowing big smoky puffs of her Virginia Slim, bracelets jangling and sliding up and down her arms. This fall, Perky has indulged wholeheartedly in the current fashion trend of paper dresses. She features many different styles: a big white one with a red geranium pattern, a purple short one with yellow polka dots, a hot orange above-the-knee number. Connie has said be careful when you hug Perky that you don't tear her dress or go near her with a Popsicle because paper won't hold up in the washing machine. (Ray: “Connie, if you ever start wearing paper dresses, I'm leaving out the back door. I swear. Stupidest damn thing I ever heard of.”)

One evening, as you and Perky sit side by side on the love seat in the family room, she tells you: “Dah'lin, the Capitol Department Store wants me to model my paper dresses for a photo spread in the newspapah. Isn't that wuunduhfulll? At my age?”

You agree with her that it is wonderful, wunnerful, wunnerful, and you're thrilled that your classmates, and especially Miss Kenan, will see what a mod, trendsetting grandmother you have. You and Perky sit together and thumb through new issues of her movie magazines, which she has brought over just for you to see, since Ray won't allow Connie to buy them for you directly.

“Which movie star hairdo do you think I should get for myself, dah'lin?” she asks, as you flip the pages.

“Like Elizabeth Taylor,” you say, fixating on a page with the headline:
Liz and Dick: The Jig Is Finally Up.
“Or like this,” you say, pointing to a raven-haired Natalie Wood, posing coquettishly in a “Toni Girl” flip, a publicity still from one of her old movies,
Sex and the Single Girl.

“
Sex and the Single Girl
, oh my goodness,” says Perky. “Well, dah'lin, that's what I am now, a single gal.”

“Hey, Mother, why don't you take him out to the yard and throw baseballs with him?” Ray bellows from his tilt-back relaxation chair. “That's what he needs.”

You look down quickly, pretending not to hear him. You know he's right; you probably should be trying to get the hang of throwing and catching instead of feeding eagerly on tales of Hollywood. You pretend to be engrossed in an article about how Doris Day's last husband has squandered all her money and left her penniless. The caption reads:
America's Sweetheart Turns Beggar Woman Overnight!

Perky pulls a Virginia Slim from her ruby lips with carefully manicured, orange-lacquered nails, and narrows her false-eyelashed eyes at Ray.

“Now Ray-Boy …” she says. “He's just being a good little Grandma's helpah to give me his opinions. Don't say nothin' bad about my grandbaby.” Ray eyes you both and goes back to reading his own magazine, the alumni journal
Tar Heel Pride
, smoking his newly acquired pipe, formed in the shape of a ram's head, the mascot of the North Carolina Tar Heels. This was a recent gift from the alumni organization as a thank-you to Ray for successfully chairing a local fund-raiser. Connie has confided to you proudly that Ray is moving up, “way, way up,” with the alumni group.

“Honey, tell Perky what Miss Kenan has asked you to do in the assembly program,” says Connie from the kitchen, cleaning off the dinner table and noticeably troubleshooting through Ray's mood.

“I'm gonna sing a solo,” you tell her proudly. “‘Long John.'”

“Oh, dah'lin, that's wuunduhfulll,” Perky says, blowing smoke. “When is that?”

“In two weeks. On a Friday.”

“Well, you can give me a special private performance, in case I can't make it,” she says. You know that Perky goes to the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings every day, trying to be very involved, though you've overheard Ray say that he suspects she still has a nip or two late at night before going to bed, and that she's just going to AA for the social aspect.