[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
The road is wet with rain, and I am on it,gripping the steering wheel, heading to hear James Taylor sing the songs my mama played as she drove me to school, the ones she sang to me on those fevered nights with her head bowed over mine, her hand on my forehead, checking, worrying. That I love James Taylor now, that his voice plays on inside my head, keeping me up at night, is her fault, and I have told her this many times, but more now that Leroy’s gone, now that he’s left me for someone else, and I am mostly sad, and sometimes angry, and always afraid. Will my house fall down? Will my car give up? Will my hair go gray overnight?
I think that it will.
The ticket that was Leroy’s I carry with me and sell quickly, like a drug deal, outside the arena in Little Rock, pocketing the eighty dollars, turning up the collar on my coat, looking nervously left and right, up and down the busy street. The rain has stopped, leaving pools in all the low places. Inside, people are finding their seats and I locate my row, scoot past the gray-hairs that have been here since the doors opened, my butt scraping shoulders, my feet kicking purses.
When James Taylor comes on stage, the guy in front of me, fifty-something, balding, whistling, holds JT’s Walking Man vinyl album in his hands and lifts it over his head like a trophy.
James Taylor is skinny, his jeans baggy, his sports coat wrinkled. When he reaches the mike he stops for a moment, puts his hands together, bows from the waist. He looks serene the way I imagine a Buddhist monk looks, although I don’t know any Buddhists. If I could get him alone, tell him my story, he could write it down. He could make my sorrow rhyme if I told him all the ways I’ve been hurt.
The woman who bought Leroy’s ticket is working her way down my row. She’s a big gal, twice my age, with crazy eyes and a bald spot on the back of her head where her dyed black hair kind of fizzles out right on the back of her skull. She wheezes when she breathes and smells of cigarettes. When she sits down her thigh touches mine, her arm touches mine. She is damp as a camp dog and loud when she talks.
“Heard JT seventeen times,” she says. “First time when I was twenty. In Tulsa. Fell in love. ‘Sweet Baby James’ did it for me. A cowboy song,” she says, and shakes her head, laughs. “Still have a thing for cowboys.”
If Leroy was here, he’d be quiet. Last time I saw him he was standing on the boat dock behind his cabin, hands in his pockets, the fog of morning making a ghost of him.
The woman pulls a can of Coca-Cola from her purse, uncaps a prescription bottle and drops a blue pill inside the can. I’m so close to the stage, James Taylor could look right into my eyes if he tried. Leroy told me once that I never really saw him. That no one ever saw him. I think about how he held me in the beginning, how he wrapped the ends of my blond curls around his slender fingers, as if curls were miraculous things, as if I was a miraculous thing.
The woman next to me shakes another pill from her bottle, holds out her palm. “Xanax?” she asks, and I say ‘no,’ and scoot as far away from her as I can. I have Valium in my purse. I have Ambien. I have the number of my therapist who tells me to write down my goals every morning and celebrate what I’ve accomplished every night.
When intermission hits, I go to the lobby, get a hot dog, a Dr Pepper, and head out into the cold night. I call Leroy, get his voicemail, listen. He says his name this way: La-Roy. He told me that was the French pronunciation, that his name meant ‘king.’ Leave a message, he says. Surprise me, he says. I open my mouth to speak and nothing comes out.
Back inside, JT retakes the stage. He picks up his guitar, bends his tall body toward the microphone, starts to sing “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.” The woman beside me sits holding her purse in her lap. She is glossy eyed since the Coca-Cola and the pill, still as an oak. She might as well be home in her housecoat, watching cable. I raise my hand, I wave it back and forth, a metronome for James Taylor to follow. I stand up, lean forward, try to get even an inch closer. His hands are fine things, beautiful, and his body moves as if it too is part of the song.
What I love about my own body is its lankiness, the speakeasy way it moves. I’m wearing over-the-knee boots, skinny jeans, a silky top that doesn’t quite cover my mid-section. My coat is on the back of my seat, folded double, ready to cover me up if I want it to. I don’t believe I do.
JT’s song is about letting someone lie to us if that’s what it takes to get them to stay a little longer, until the sun rises again, until the morning light climbs over the mountain and shines on the valley where our small lives eat us up. My mama used to sing this song to me, back when I was young enough to like being sung to. My best friend’s mama sang “You Are My Sunshine” to her and she turned out to be a happy adult, or at least she seems happy. I’m not sure you can tell the difference now that there’s Facebook to mask your troubles, now that there’s a virtual stage where we all live, trying to trick the rest of the world into believing the better version of ourselves.
All around me cameras are flashing, people trying to capture this night. I keep standing, even when the lady behind me tells me to sit down. Near the end, when JT’s singing “Shower the People” I finally see him see me. We lock eyes and I feel his gaze softening all the tight places that hurt when I breathe, when I think. It lasts all of five seconds, but it’s enough. I don’t wait for the encore that I know will come. I head back down the row, bumping people again, scraping past fans who hate me for breaking the reverie. I pass the merchandise table, grab a T-shirt, keep walking.
In my car, I shimmy off my coat. I slip the too big T-shirt over my head, over my silky shirt. I hit Leroy’s name on my phone and the dialing begins. When his voicemail message starts I lay my head against the steering wheel. What was it I was not able to see in him? If I’d called him La-Roy instead of Lee-Roy would it have made a difference?
My therapist lets me talk about Leroy for only fifteen minutes of our forty-five minute sessions. After that, we have to talk about the future, what I’m going to do, how I’m going to “move forward in a positive, actionable way.” Sometimes I tell her I’m taking online classes to learn how to be a medical transcriptionist. It’s not true. During our last visit, she said, “Why do you lie so much, Sara?”
I told her lies were just the truth dressed in better clothes, and then I asked her where she shopped. She didn’t answer me. She frowns a lot, takes notes. My file is growing fat with notes. I call Leroy when I get close to the Clarksville exit. I listen to his message again, wait for the beep. “I stole a T-shirt,” I say. “I locked eyes with James Taylor. I’m going to be a medical transcriptionist.”
I pull off the interstate, head for the nearest convenience store, park under the lights where the gas pumps sit. I call my mama, who’s all the way in Florida. When she answers I can’t talk, and the tears start and she understands and only says “baby, baby, baby,” until I can breathe again.
“Was James Taylor as good as his records?” she says, finally.
“He was better. So good he tore my heart in two.”
“Better him than that skunk, Leroy.”
“I couldn’t see Leroy right,” I say. “That’s what did us in.”
“Is that therapy talk?”
“No, that’s Leroy talk.”
“You saw everything there was to see. A man with a string of chicken houses who thought he was a king, who thought he was better than you were.”
“I stole a T-shirt at the concert.”
My mama sighs. “Did it make you feel any better?”
“For a second, and then it hurt.”
“Write a check, send it to James Taylor, tell him a man not worth washing your feet made you crazy. He’ll understand. He’s had his own troubles.”
“How do I quit calling Leroy?” I ask, and Mama says, “Delete his number, get a job, start volunteering somewhere.”
A semi pulls in, stops, leaves its motor purring. The trucker gets out, stretches, shows his white belly when he raises his arms. The rain is starting again, a fine mist, and I tell my mama I’ll do all those things. It is not the truth, not right now, but not exactly a lie, either.
I pull Leroy’s number up as the lone trucker walks into the harsh light of the Stop & Shop. I want to call Leroy so bad my hand shakes, but I don’t. I can’t erase him yet, but I’m closer now than I’ve ever been, and that’s enough of something to matter.
My mama calls back. She says, “I forgot to tell you I love you.” When I get home I will write a letter, not to JT but to Mama. I’ll tell her what it was like to be a kid and sit in the car next to her, the windows open, the cassette player loud with James Taylor’s voice, the way her dark hair whipped across her face, and how when she sang “Fire and Rain” I was as content as a person can be this side of glory. On those days I saw her as clearly as I saw my own self, and it made the world spin the way it should. I got off track somewhere down the line, I’ll tell her, but not so far that I ever forgot how it felt to be the center of everything, how it felt to be somebody’s best true love.
Marla was awarded the Arkansas Arts Council 2014 Individual Fellowship for her work in short fiction, an honor given to Arkansas artists who are recognized for their artistic abilities.
