Then sit at the bottom and wait.
The climb up to sweetness needs more than my love:
darlin’, please just open the gate …
Can someone just open the gate?
“I want to write something, too,” said Murph one evening, and because it was night, and because we’d had two beers apiece, she grabbed my bass and picked awkwardly away at a new song, written right there from scratch, from a four-stringed see-through, each of us making up a line and the other one supplying the next line, and so on.
Why did I let you make off with my head?
Now when I go out I pretend that you’re dead.
But if I glimpse you,
don’t know what I’ll do,
’cause I’ve never been as crazy
’bout someone as crazy as you.
Madness is sadness—
I loved you the most.
Now my future’s the house
for your lunatic ghost.
Why are the leaves still bright green
and the sky so damn blue?
Can’t they see I’m just crazy
’bout someone as crazy as you?
She wanted to rhyme “don’t abhor us, that would bore us, just adore us” with—“Which is it?” she asked. “Is it clitoris or clitoris?”
I didn’t know. Why didn’t I know? “It may depend on which you have,” I said.
To say all this made us laugh our heads off does not begin to express its consolations. Soon every night I’d get out my electric and we’d do every tune we knew how in easy keys of G-minor and E-minor, with riffs that were like climbing the same three stairs over and over. We started making up songs that had no choruses, just one cursed, merciless verse after verse, complaint like a flipping knife wandering around, debating, resting no place at all. In line after line, we tried to compose meaningful phrases with twinned endings: sinister to rhyme with minister, cubic with pubic, flatbread with flatbed, bearable reason with terrible treason, lucky with Kentucky—well, the songs angrily made no sense. We took turns, each of our verses sounding like the rhymes of stalkers bleakly drunk with love, a little hope like dust beneath our nails, from where we clawed, though all was flawed, still, now, our lives were shorn of plot, cuz baby you were all I got, waiting out here in the parking lot, beneath the stars, outside of bars, there I am, baby, there, there, idling in the fescue, waiting for your rescue, but you’re nowhere, why don’t you care that love is rare—my love is rare! — I’m going to drive to see … what you think about me.
We reached a point at which it was a good thing there was no chorus.
One night we got dressed in bag-lady clothes, got a shopping cart filled with beer, and went down by the railroad tracks just to howl like wolves. This was late-stage Sufism, mid to late.
“When we make our CD?” said Murph as we trudged back home, “we’ll put a razor blade right inside each and every one.”
“And those little bottles of gin,” I added. “And a pistol.”
“You’re great,” said Murph, putting her arm around me.
“Yeah, well, I feel like I’m headed for a future where I’m just every guy’s sister,” I bleated. “I think the fact that I read The Rules in Mandarin didn’t help any.”
Murph smiled, but what she said next was unsettling. She put her hands tenderly to my face and said, “Look at you! You’re nobody’s sister.”
Outside in the flowerbeds the yellow irises had unfurled in the sun with their lolling nectarine-pit tongues. There was a kind of ticking, humming all around, as if every living thing were contemplating bursting.
“I’m wondering why Emmie has been singing this particular song,” said Sarah, pointedly, in the kitchen. She had her chef’s hat on, the one that wasn’t a conventional toque but a brimless canvas cap.
“A song?”
“ ‘Prairie Pete, he got cold feet’?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I made that up.”
“That’s OK,” she said, as if I needed forgiving, which I could see I might.
“I’ve also been singing regular standards with her,” I added hopefully.
“Yes,” she said. “ ‘I Been Working on the Railroad.’ I’ve heard her sing that. There’s just two things I’m worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.”
I wasn’t sure I was hearing things correctly. Her sense of humor was still not always explicit or transparent or of a finely honed rhythm, and it sometimes left me not in the same room with it but standing in the hall. The words “You’re serious?” flew out of my mouth.
“Kind of.” She looked right through me. “I’m not sure.” And then she went upstairs, as if to go figure it out. When she came back down she added, “Correct subject-verb agreement is best when children are learning language, so be careful what you sing. It’s an issue when raising kids of color. A simple grammatical matter can hold them back in life. Down the road.”
“Yes,” I said mechanically.
“We are pioneers,” she said to me. “We are doing something important, unprecedented, and unbearably hard.” And then she left again, and I turned away to hide my own teariness behind a door, because I was tired and wasn’t exactly clear what Sarah was talking about.
“Tassa?” came Mary-Emma’s worried voice.
I hauled out all the Scottish airs and mournful Irish drinking songs I knew, full of yonders, e’ers, and lochs, but there were also a lot of bonnies, and when I came to those I feared something terrified entered my face, because Mary-Emma just stared at me, sensing something was up, a rock in the road. I couldn’t tell whether that word resonated with her or not. Still she was always wanting to learn the songs herself. “Bonnie-oh, oh bonnie-hey, nonny-bonnie pretty day.” The phone would ring and I would stop, dead in my tracks. If Sarah were there, she would answer it, and mostly I was relieved to hear her voice. “Quesadilla soup? No, we don’t serve that, that’s our competition … Yes, of course it’s their secret recipe. They have to keep it a secret, since if you knew what was in it you’d never order it again.” But sometimes I would hear her say, “Who is this?” then slam the phone down.
Because Mary-Emma had not only moved from a high chair to a booster seat but had for a month been sleeping in her “big girl bed,” the futon on the floor, I often lay next to her at nap times, reading and singing and sometimes dozing off myself. Sometimes we were awakened by Noel and his vacuum cleaner as he made his way through the house, an iPod lit up in his apron pocket, his headphones blocking all noise. It was the first iPod I’d ever seen, and when the vacuum cleaner wasn’t on I could hear the tinny sound coming out of the earbuds and Noel singing along in a broken and transported way, not hearing his own voice, and so sounding as if he were deaf. Still, I could make out one of the songs he played over and over, a Bonnie Raitt one, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” the words to which I recognized but didn’t really know. If there were a song called “I Can Make You Love Me,” I would have memorized it long ago.
Noel saw me and smiled and turned his vacuum cleaner off. He pulled the earbuds out. I could see his eyes were wet with tears.