Addie is afraid of her secret. Not that she gave up her child, which William would forgive, but that she didn’t tell Roland. Who would stay with someone like that?
A woman comes in the store with a grocery bag full of Joni Mitchell CDs. The woman is middle-aged, wearing a dowdy sweater, but there is something young and dimly hopeful in her face, some girlish devotion. Addie pictures her as a teenager, lying across her bed, listening to music on Saturday nights when other girls were out on dates, playing her favorite songs again and again, memorizing the lyrics. Collecting every Joni Mitchell album. Eventually replacing the albums with CDs. Buying every new release, though she liked the music less and less, believing that sooner or later she’d be rewarded, sooner or later there would be another Blue, another Court and Spark, another Hissing of Summer Lawns or Hejira. Now, finally, after so many years, she’s come to understand: there will be no going back, for her or for Joni. You’d think this would make her even more grateful for Joni’s old music, but no, just the opposite. Now she can’t listen to Joni at all without feeling betrayed.
Addie sees this a lot in the store: devoted readers turning on their favorite writers when the writers run out of things to say or interesting ways to say them.
The woman sets her bag on the counter and in a high, round voice that sounds a little Canadian, a little like Joni, asks Peale what he will give her for “the complete discography.”
“We don’t buy music,” he says.
The woman has the grace of someone used to disappointment. “Thanks anyway,” she says, and carries her bag out of the store as hopefully as she entered. The front door ca-chinks behind her. Addie watches her down the sidewalk, her slow, careful stride, the way she cradles her bag in both arms.
That night with William, Addie puts on Blue and they listen to Joni sing about all the people she ever lost or hurt. Joni’s voice is young and pure and sad. She is famous for her sadness.
Before she got famous, everyone now knows, Joni had a baby daughter and gave her up. Recently the daughter found Joni. Their reunion was in the news. Almost every news story mentioned the “clues” Joni had left for the daughter in her music, though really there was just the one song, “Little Green”—never one of Addie’s favorites — and a couple of lines in another. It didn’t matter anyway, because the daughter grew up never hearing any of Joni’s music except for the duet she did with Seal.
Addie has seen pictures of the daughter. She is beautiful, with long blond hair and high cheekbones. She is even more beautiful than Joni. When she and Joni were first reunited, she was gracious. She told reporters she was proud of her mother for making something of her life. Then Joni left her again to go on tour, and the daughter fell apart. She fought with Joni. Their fights were in the news. Addie tried to imagine them: the daughter saying to Joni, Tell me again why you gave me up. Joni saying, I had a gift. I had a responsibility to my gift. And besides, why would you want to be raised by someone who wasn’t cut out to be a mother?
“What?” William says. He is holding Addie’s feet in his lap, moving them to the music.
“Nothing.”
I’m not like Joni, she thinks. I didn’t trade my child for a music career. I gave him up for nothing.
Sometimes she and William hold hands, which makes Addie feel very young or very old instead of middle-aged. The best place for holding hands is the movie theater, where it’s dark and intimate and you can sit for a long time.
They are regulars at the Rialto. They go see whatever is playing there. The current movie is Sliding Doors, with Gwyneth Paltrow. This is Addie’s favorite kind of movie, a what-if, where the main character gets a chance to see how her life might have turned out if fate hadn’t stepped in, if she hadn’t missed her train, hit her head, dropped her earring. If she’d chosen someone else. If she’d wanted a family.
Reno
Nevada is hot, brown, and poisonous, full of rattlesnakes, black widows, scorpions, casinos, whorehouses, nuclear dumps. Water is scarce. People eat their meals off buffets, get brain cancer, have run-ins with aliens, gamble themselves bankrupt. Nevada is the suicide capital of the country. Every summer, at a festival in the desert north of Reno, a big wooden effigy is set on fire and everybody chants Burn the man. The cities sound like slot machines. Nobody sleeps.
Frank Zappa once said, “You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say.”
But for Elle, Nevada is home. And home, or the memory of home, still has a kind of magic. As a young child, she lived with her parents in Reno, in a bungalow with a view of the Truckee River. Every morning her mother would open the curtains and the sun would flash on the river and the ground would come alive with robins and quail. Evenings, if her father got home from work in time, he would take her to Virginia Street to watch the arch light up.
In 1972, when she was not yet twelve years old, her parents were killed in a car crash. It happened on a Saturday in spring. Her parents were on their way home from Pyramid Lake, where they’d been fishing since dawn. They were driving the new Ford Pinto, shiny and brown as a bean. Elle wasn’t with them; she had slept over with her cousins, who lived in a brick house with shag carpet and a console color TV. It was lunchtime. Elle and her cousins were spread out on the living room floor eating pizza and watching Soul Train when, twenty-five miles north of town, the Pinto swerved off the highway. Elle’s father overcorrected, the car flipped, and the gas tank exploded. There were no other cars around, no witnesses, no evidence except tire marks and smoldering remains. The trooper who came to notify the family — a short man with a thick, embarrassed neck — couldn’t say absolutely that Elle’s parents had been killed on impact, but thought it likely, based on his experience. He didn’t know what caused the Pinto to swerve. Elle imagined a gust of wind, or an animal darting in front of the car, a rabbit or dog or coyote. Or maybe it was the shadow of a bird flying over. In the desert, shadows can play tricks.
Elle’s aunt and uncle, who had two sons and a daughter of their own, took her in, and Elle shared a room with her girl cousin. She never stopped missing her parents or feeling the awful mix of guilt and relief that she hadn’t gone with them. But her aunt and uncle were determined to make her happy, or less unhappy. They took her places, bought her things: clothes, makeup, records, posters for her wall. Her cousins treated her like a sister.
In spite of everyone’s kindness, or maybe because of it, Elle left Reno as soon as she was old enough to claim her small inheritance. She moved to L.A. — for good, she thought — telling her aunt and uncle she wanted to be in a place with an ocean. In fact what she wanted was a place where people wouldn’t feel the need to be kind.
Nineteen years later, she’s back, sharing her old room with Dusty until her aunt can redecorate the boys’ room. Everything is the same as before: twin beds, chenille spreads, flowery wallpaper. “Gus roo,” Dusty calls it. Girls’ room.
Elle’s uncle gets her a job as a cocktail waitress in a casino on Virginia Street. She is thirty-seven, old for cocktailing, and jobs aren’t as plentiful since the Indian casinos began cutting into Reno’s business, but Elle’s uncle has connections.
“See?” Elle says to Dusty. “Our luck is changing.”