Final Vinyl Days (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

My friend Mary Edna goes out every night of the week. She has a few drinks and then dances until they close the door of Roy's Holiday Lounge. It's on I-95, so she's forever meeting folks passing through town. One day she dances with somebody from Dixon, Illinois, and then it's Richmond, Virginia, and of course she has a steady batch from the army base just an hour away. Once she met somebody from Saudi Arabia (she said Saudia Arabia), and she talked about that for weeks, as if touching his dark hairy hands (her description) had linked her to lands and histories unknown, like he might be an oil sheik and come a calling again. Lord. She wears their towns like badges, remembers them better by the sorts of details that a tourist might remember than she does hair or eye color (she does always provide that information as well, though it's clear after years of this that she is not a choosy woman). I suggested once, in a moment of sarcasm, that she get one of those big maps and start sticking pins in it, like all tho
se richer-than-thou folks who have in mind seeing every square inch of the planet. I said, "You can get different colored pin heads--fast dancer, slow dancer, smoker, joker, poker, toker, and any of the above." She claims that the only time she ever slept with one of her late-night acquaintances was with the one with cancer who had never had oral sex. It was on his list of things to do on earth--it was right under "see the Grand Canyon" and right above "eat snails and frogs in a French diner." She sure can pick them.

I have tried on many occasions to adopt Mary Edna's children; I feel I might as well, since all those nights their mama is out playing around, they are here at my house taking bubble baths and doing their homework. They stare at me with round brown eyes while we sit around my kitchen table, all three of us in footie pajamas. I rent movies like Thomasina and The Parent Trap and Old Yeller, and we eat big bowls of ice cream with Hershey's syrup, just like I did when I was a kid--like I did with Mary Edna beside me in the house on Fourth Street, my grandmama's house. I thought the two of us would grow up to catch the world by its tail like a comet, and now I look at us and wonder what on earth happened. I told her just the other day that this was what I was wondering, and she asked, who did I think we were, those idiots who committed suicide in hopes of riding a comet? I realized right then that we did not have the same memories and never would. We were two girls with so much in common, and yet we had walked awa
y with such different messages; hers was find a man, any man, and mine was find a decent man--a kind, smart, hard-working, loving man, with something on the brain other than what is edible, and if you don't find him, stay by yourself and get a few friends at the SPCA.


What did Mary Edna and I have in common all those years? We were the two girls at school who were not in what the teacher called "a traditional home." Every time that phrase was spoken people turned around in their seats and stared at us. Mary Edna grinned and waved at everybody like she might have been the homecoming queen, but I hated those moments. I kept saying to Mary Edna, "That kind of attention is not good," but she didn't hear a word I said. She believed then (as she still does) that any attention is better than nothing. And she got plenty of attention with botched-up marriages and unwanted pregnancies, one drug bust and one shoplifting scene (two padded bras and a lime green dickey from J.C. Penney). I told her I would have given her the money, maybe not for that ugly dickey, but for practical underwear items that she needed, yes, I'd've bought those. I told her that while she was out getting herself all the attention that she missed as a child because her parents were do-nothing alcoholics, her own
children were suffering. But again, she did not seem to hear.

Mary Edna lived with her mother's various relatives and whoever from the church invited her home, and I lived with my grandma because my mother was too young to be a mother; my mother wanted a chance in life, and Grandma felt like she deserved that. I think of it as the chain reaction of mamas. Everybody is guilty; everybody is trying so hard to make up for her mama's failures. We all learn from one another. For example, my grandma used to always say "work like a nigger," and I had to preach long and hard for years to convince her that it did not sound nice. She said it wasn't racist because they did work hard, and I gave up explaining the point. Still, she has come around enough that now she'll get that n sound coming through her nose and then catch herself. Now she says things like "He works like a n-n-nun" or "She works like a noogie."

"A noogie?" I asked, and she waved her hand and said I knew what she meant. Grandma and I aren't where we should be but we keep on moving. She is all I have.

And come to think of it, I guess that's where my life differs from Mary Edna's. At her house everything was coarser, shakier. She claims her mother's first cousin never touched her but that she was always scared he might, that his face haunted her, and she discovered early that the more men she was with, the further she could get from that feeling. He is doing time by now, anyway. Her third ex-husband is probably the only person other than me and my grandma who ever really loved her, but he finally gave up and married a quiet, nearly homely woman from a neighboring town. I think he got as far from Mary Edna and her need to make somebody hurt her as he could--both of them running like rabbits, leaving the girls to stare out at the world with their round-eyed fear. They are four and five, dark-eyed beauties who deserve a hell of a lot better. I have thought of stealing them and driving to the west coast, except that would be one more example of running, and I think more than anything they need a spine of steel;
they need to stand tall until they can safely walk forward. These days more kids are not in "a traditional home" than are--and those that are will one day go into a therapy office and say how very lucky they were, or they will say how the facade of a traditional family does not a traditional family make. There is no human with the answers.

Speaking of dysfunction and mama failures, I only met my mama once, and she was an absolute mess. My grandma said, "This is what I gave up my life for you to do?" My mama sat there like a big overstuffed chair, her toenails looking like she'd been digging potatoes. Mary Edna has always said that that's why she's big on painted toenails in the summer; you can hide the dirt. I told her that soap and water is another fine way to deal with the dirt--you can get rid of that dirt if you desire. That's what I wanted to tell my mama. I wanted to say, "Liberate yourself--shed that filth and pestilence." I wanted to tell her that mothers don't come with a warranty; that she could at least try to make it up to me. I was, after all, trying so hard to forgive her, especially if she bathed and did something with her hair. Her name is Ashley Amelia, and I had spent much of my childhood mooning over that name and creating wonderful romantic adventures for my mother in my head. The one picture my grandma had of her was from a
high school yearbook where she looked no different from the other girls lined up there in the home ec class. My grandma could almost always kill a fantasy with warnings like "Things ain't always as they look, sound, or smell."


I recently read that all of these foreign people were given a list of English words and asked to select which one sounded most lovely. Nine out of ten people chose "diarrhea." This certainly seemed to fit my life. I hope...