“I want to hear The Beatles, please,” Donny told Mary from the other side of the screen door, rain coming down around him. When he looked at her with watery blue eyes, Mary Hooks knew she was going to cross a line that was about more than maintaining small favors and finding a new Featherweight sewing machine in the mail.
“I’m supposed to be getting my hair cut, and my dad gets back tonight,” Donny added before stepping up into Mary’s two-bedroom bungalow, as if with this information she might reconsider letting him inside. “He’s going to kill me if I don’t do what he asked,” Donny said, still inside the doorway.
Mary wondered herself what Don might do. Over the course of their love affair, now six months deep, she had endured endless complaints about his son. She wondered why such little things like a haircut and electric guitar music were worth souring a relationship with your only son.
“I’m sure he’ll come around. He’s just... I mean, I’m sure he’s just old-fashioned, that’s all. Give him time.” She held out her hand. “You’re soaked. Let me get you a towel.”
“Thanks. You want a cherry sour?” Donny offered her the bag.
“Aren’t you sweet,” Mary said, taking the bag from him, a few of the candies spilling to the kitchen floor.
“Now, that towel. You want something to drink? Iced tea, milk? I got chocolate syrup.”
“No, I mean... no, thank you. I just want to hear The Beatles, please. You said I could hear The Beatles.” Donny shuffled from foot to foot, nearly dancing before the music had been played.
Mary brought Donny a towel that smelled of jasmine. “You want to sit down?”
Donny ran the towel over his head and arms, and sat down on Mary’s Chippendale sofa, faded rose damask more at home in her aunt’s house. But as soon as she had put the needle down on the A-side of The Beatles’ new single, “Paperback Writer,” Donny stood to dance. He moved with an abandon she had rarely seen from folks in Lake Claire. She marveled at the freedom the boy, so nervous in her doorway with his bag of cherry sours, displayed in her living room, hardly aware, it seemed to her, he was in a stranger’s house. Donny’s arms, legs, and feet moved wildly, his head bounced as if it might fly off at any minute, and his eyes remained shut. His face revealed an easy joy Mary recognized as the same she had seen from Don when she kissed him. The stereo needle lifted automatically from the record, and Donny beamed at Mary, sweat glistening on his smooth, hairless face.
“Play it again.”
Mary obliged, replacing the arm of her Magnavox stereo console, a present from Don three months earlier. She returned to the sofa and watched Donny dance again, his long blond hair whipping in the air, his eyes closed as he absorbed the music. When the song had finished again, Mary put on the B-side, “Rain,” and moved with the rhythm of the otherworldly song, enjoying the sense of a previously unimagined place far from Lake Claire, the jangle and thump of guitar and drum, the drone of ghostly voices in harmony like she had never ever heard. With thoughts of otherworldly rain, so unlike the dismal steady soaking that came down around them, Mary reached carefully for the boy, finding behind girlish bangs the same hunger she had seen in his father’s eyes, the same hunger that drew her to them all.
Can you hear me? John Lennon sang in a voice of vapor and mystery.
Driving southwest along Interstate 85 from Atlanta, Don Senior’s thoughts were on Mary Hooks as he hummed Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” and indulged in thoughts of her rosy skin, her dark hair, the curve of her lips, the way her pants fit her narrow hips, and the false eyelashes she had begun to wear that reminded Don of Brigitte Bardot. He had picked up the Sinatra single for Mary in Atlanta; he planned to play it for her when he stopped by as a surprise before going home. A steady drizzle kept the summer dusk gray, but Don had the car window down. He enjoyed the cool, wet breeze, one Tareyton after another, and a bottle of Old Crow he had planned to open with Mary but, in a good mood, opened early, taking long drinks from the quart bottle. Don wasn’t a drinker, but he knew Mary liked a taste now and then, and, like his father, he believed the occasional nip good for the body. By the time he turned off of I-85 onto a two-lane state road, however, Don had finished a third of the Old Crow and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. With the easy rhythms of the Sinatra song in his head, the warmth of bourbon in his belly, and the idea of Mary waiting for him, Don smiled, right hand on the wheel, his left holding a cigarette out the window as a cool mist fell across his arm.
In her bed again, the smell of jasmine would stir him, the sight of her often more than he could take without his throat tightening so he could hardly breathe. For this he would lie to Dale and probably later have to cover for that lie and the one before it too, his list of fictions long enough that most wives would have already stumbled upon the obvious. Not Dale. Before returning home, Don would have to smoke at least another half-dozen cigarettes to hide Mary’s perfume. And he managed their checking account, not that Dale ever looked, to hide the money he spent somewhat recklessly on Mary: from bottles of peach brandy to the chiffon housecoats and the latest appliances from General Electric and Zenith she pined for. All of this for the love of a short-haired supply clerk named Mary Hooks.
When they had listened to “Rain” three more times, dancing slowly to the last two, Mary pulled a record from a stack on top of the stereo cabinet and placed it on the turntable. She took Donny by the hand and pulled him towards her bedroom as the first strains of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” came through the console speakers. Mary was no fool; she knew where this evening led, and she knew it was wrong. Yet the desire she saw in the boy’s face, whether for the simple pleasure of dancing in her living room, away from the repressive air of his father’s house, or some more fundamental yearning, driven by curiosity and nature, was irresistible. Mary could satisfy that hunger, which filled a hole that always threatened to tear her in two. In quieter moments, when she surrendered to a head-hanging shame for the things she had done, she wondered what devils her parents had been, what sins they had committed and left for her to bear. It was then she wanted most to drown in her troubled waters, to put an end to her own longing, to fill the hole up with red clay and silence.
Donny stopped and smiled in recognition, his blue eyes wide with gratitude and a flicker of hesitation. “Rubber Soul,” he said. “My mother gave me this record last Christmas, just like I asked. Made my father madder than hell.”
“Your mother sounds like a very nice lady.” Mary smiled at him again. Outside, the rain came down harder; thunder growled overhead.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Donny said, his stomach knotting at the thought of his mother at home. Donny looked beyond Mary to her bedroom and back to her, a question on his lips he could not ask. He guessed what might happen in there, but his feet seemed fixed to the pineboard floors. Dancing with Mary, Donny felt swaddled in the scent of her, a scent he couldn’t name, though it felt as familiar and calming to him as the smell of his mother’s dressing room. With the curl of her hair on his neck, her breath in his ear, and the sound of rain outside and in, Donny felt at home and wondered how he would ever return to his parents’ house.
Mary held out her hand to him. “Don’t worry, honey. I won’t burn your records.”
Outside Mary Hooks’ kitchen door, Don Palmer, Senior, stood in the rain with the bottle of Old Crow and a bag of caramels in one hand and the Sinatra record in the other, listening to the heavy beat of rock-’n’-roll music and grinding his top canines into his bottom ones. When he tried the door, he found it locked. Peering in through the kitchen window, Don saw no one. But hearing the sound of rock-’n’-roll music drained the pleasure he had nurtured on the drive home right out of him. He had cautioned Mary about listening to such garbage, this hoax on the ears, this foreign fashion — for wasn’t that all it was, a fad — but here she was, behind his back, doing just that. He held his finger on the doorbell for nearly a minute so she might hear it over the music. When Mary finally answered the door, the music had stopped and she stood there as if he might be a traveling salesman trying to unload a vacuum cleaner.