Sing with Me Somehow by Alison Slusarczyk

"Sing with Me Somehow" by Alison Slusarczyk (2007 McCrimmon Award Winner)

 

I am opening my eyes. My big sister Rachel’s face is in front of me. When her chest moves, I move with her. I am lying on top of her. She is pointing up to the ceiling; there are white patterns on it.

“Do you see the horse, Rosie? See, it’s going to meet its friend,” she’s telling me. I can feel her voice on my head making it shake a little. She is looking at me with her big blue eyes while she tells me about the horses. They aren’t what horses really look like. But she says they are and I believe her.

I can hear mommy’s voice outside and now Rachel’s smiling at me. I can feel her singing, “Rosie was a wee little girl, and wee little girl was she. She climbed up in a sycamore tree for the mom she wanted to see. And as the mommy passed that way she looked up in the tree. And she said ‘Alison Rose, you come down, for I’m coming to your house today, for I’m coming to your house today.’”

* * *

If you ask my parents why their “song” is a Dire Straights song, they’ll tell you that they don’t know. ‘“Goodnight, now it’s time to go home,” And he makes it fast with one more thing, “We are the Sultans, the Sultans of Swing.”’They both liked it; it has nothing to do with romance. And that’s us, their girls, different just because it sounds good. There are four of us, all invincible, all insane. Rachel used to overthrow the living room in order to do a six foot painting, while Mary took dads archaic camera to shoot photos in the backyard of the trees, and Anna locked herself into her room and hid her paintings in a drawer, and I spent forever in my bedroom writing. They’d buy me notebooks for every birthday, every holiday. They encouraged all of us to write and we all wrote about each other, and still do.

I’m the baby and I know my sisters love me the most. It’s such a bold statement but we are bold people, girls who know their worth, or at least pretend to. We weren’t raised to be stuck-up but we always played with each other instead of the other kids. We always liked each other best, not just as sisters but as friends.

* * *

“I wanna hold the hand inside you. I wanna take the breath that’s true.”

“What the fuck is this? We’re not hippies, mom,” Rachel complained.

My mother smiled at her from the couch, “It’s Mazzy Star. Close your eyes and listen.” Raising four children and a large house to clean made her tired in the evening.

Rachel huffed, pivoted and stomped out of the family room, her blue, thread-bare Chuck Taylor’s made a funny clicking noise from the thumb tacks in the bottom of them when she walked that fit in well with the sweeping music, “I look to you to see the truth.”

She was mad because dad was in Mexico. Everything was different when he was gone and he was gone most of the time. I was six, she was fourteen. Mary and Anna were twelve and ten. Mom had moments when she needed Mazzy Star, Neil Young Live, or Nirvana Unplugged to feel better. Rachel went to art school two hours from home and dressed like everyone did in 1994: cut up corduroys, a beat up R.E.M. t-shirt that was three sizes too big and holly, and Converse. She was pale and thin, small. She drank coffee and stayed up till three in the morning doing homework. I wanted to be just like her.

Mom hugged me tight and hummed along with the music. She fell asleep on the couch and Mary pulled me away to the living room and we sat down beside the piano. Rachel played softly Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor and I watched her graceful white hands with no nails as they skated over keys. Mary put her arm around me and I fell asleep against her warm chest.

* * *

I can see Mary through the heads of the people in front of me. She is standing on the altar at the Christmas service. I am eight, she is fourteen. She’s wearing a hopeless navy blue and black plaid dress with black lace at the top and a white cardigan because mom would die before letting her daughters have bare shoulders in church. She looks so beautiful standing there, a stained glass Jesus spreading His arms out above her. She’s readjusting herself so that she’s standing directly in the middle of the altar and when she does, her hip length hair moves, like a graceful horse shaking its’ mane. She has tan skin and brown eyes. My grandmother calls her the Milk Man’s baby. Her ancient beauty makes her look almost Native American and not the slightest bit Polish. But she has mom’s long, thin hands and we all envy her for it.

Her hands are shaking a little, causing the microphone she’s holding to move too. She’s nervous. Not because of the five hundred people filling up the church but because of the five sitting at the back. Will it be enough for mom and dad? What will Rachel, with her elegant voice, say? Are little Anna and Ali even paying attention?

I am. In this moment, there is nothing on earth but Mary and me. My mother is beginning to cry and Mary opens her mouth and sings, “What child is this…who lay to rest…on Mary’s lap is sleeping?”

I have heard about this baby in school but I have no idea who he is. But I do know that she’s right. The baby will find comfort with Mary, just as I always do.

* * *

It was February and cold. I’d been awake for an hour, waiting for Anna to take me to school. From my room, I could hear mom screaming at her, “Wake up!”

There was silence and I knew all Anna had done was pulled the pink blanket over her head.

“Anna Louise Slusarczyk! Take your little sister to school!”
Nothing.
“Fine! Fuck up your life! See if I fucking care!”

The door slammed and I could hear moms’ low heels clicking on the white wooden staircase. I could hear her downstairs, talking to dad.

“That’s the third time this week!”

I couldn’t hear dad talking but mom continued at the same volume, “Paul, it’s
Wednesday!”

He spoke softly to her. This was new and different. Mom never lost her temper but she was getting fed up with Anna. I knew what dad was telling her, to kick Anna out, to get her away from the baby because it was unfair to me. But she didn’t get it. She didn’t understand the problem.

In December Mary had said to her, “Don’t bother. She won’t listen. It’s not you. She’s doing drugs.”

Mom didn’t believe her. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Because mom, she wanted to give me some. I saw it with my own eyes.”

And now, two months later, Anna’s body was rapidly deteriorating. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep, she was angry all the time. According to her, everything I ever did was wrong. Mom wasn’t the only one that tried to ignore the problems Anna was having. I loved her too much to ever think of her as being anything but my big sister. She got up seven minutes before I needed to be in class. We drove fast and Thom Yorke talked to us on the way to school, “I want to, I want to be someone else so I’ll explode.” I felt for him, quoted him often in my writing. My house was going crazy from the things Anna was doing and Rachel and Mary being in college. I hadn’t eaten in a week and drank NyQuil like it was water. Everything was in disarray and I was certain I wasn’t going to be allowed to be a sophomore next year because I had a B in one of my classes.

When I got out of the car, I told her I hoped she’d go to school today, that I’d look for her at lunch. She said she’d go in, promised me she would. But I knew she was going to stay in the parking lot and get high.

* * *

“Please no! Please don’t take Anna away!” I am pleading with the cop in my front yard. He listens and Anna stays home tonight. She is seventeen, I am fourteen and this is the sixth time she’s run away this year. She locks herself in her pink room. Mom had painted it red a year ago. The second time she ran away, dad decided the color was making her go crazy so he tried to paint it white but the red bled through.

I am on the porch with nothing but the stars. “The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forebear to shine, but God who called me here below, shall be forever mine.” “Amazing Grace” floats out of my mouth and across the front porch. I can hear mom calling to me from inside but I have collapsed right where I was standing when Anna had walked in the house. The wet grass is making me shiver and I want Rachel and Mary home from college. I need them with me; they are the only thing that can make this all better.

* * *

“Mitch is dead,” Christie told me over the phone and everything inside of me stopped.

“What?” I managed.

“He died in a car accident last night.” I couldn’t believe her. I had just seen him last night.

“Are you serious?” I didn’t know what to say. “Okay, thank you.”

When I hung up the phone, I fell apart right there on the couch. Inside, I was hollow; I was just a shell.

I made my way to my piano, empty; unable to even cry. And all I could do was play. Chopin’s Prelude in E minor flooded out of me. The keys were the only things that were honest anymore, the only thing that could never go away. He was my best friend Heide’s big brother. We all loved him but despite it, he was fading. He had been driving drunk and hit a tree. He was doing drugs and losing it quickly. Heide and I used to talk about Anna and him; we didn’t think either would make it much more than a year if they didn’t clean up. And I wanted to find her, to run to her, to hold her, to make it all better, but I couldn’t leave my piano; amidst the flood of notes I could not stop crying. “If this is all there is to life, if nothing ever remains, then what am I and what will I ever be?”

* * *

I sat outside with my mother as she smoked a cigarette. She smiled at me, exasperated from a full day of work, her wavy brown hair falling over her shoulders, wet pieces sticking to her neck in the heat. Her fingernail and toe nail polish shined in the light coming out from in the house. They were a glossy pinkish brown. “Ladies always paint their toes,” her mother used to say to her and she always told that to us. She wore a tan, paisley Ralph Lauren button down shirt. Her pants were white and her feet were bare. Her lips were pale and her aged, beautiful hands shook a little as she took the Marlboro out of her mouth.

“It’ll get better someday,” she said. “Things won’t always be like this.”

“Sunrise doesn’t last all morning,” I told her.

“All things must pass,” she said.

“All things must pass away,” I replied.

* * *

When we got home, all we could hear was Neil Young singing, the piano lamenting underneath him, “Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise. Big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes. Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless.” The back door was open and the music was loud because mom was sitting outside smoking. She looked sad, her eyes were red from crying but they got bright when her laughing daughters walked out together and told her the stories of our evening together.

* * *

“Sing to me, angel,” he said.

“But, baby, don’t leave me.”

“I won’t be gone forever, princess. It’s just basic training. Just sing for me.”

“Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time. And time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much. Are you still mine?”

“I’m yours forever, Alison Rose Slusarczyk.”

“And I’m yours just the same, John James Russell”

“If you let him hurt you, he’s won you over,” Anna stood in the doorway and told me but I kept crying.

“Johnny, I just can’t do this anymore. This just isn’t right,” I told him over the phone. England is far and absence makes the heart to wander.

“Is there someone else?”

I thought of kissing Alex in the car, of him making me sing Jewel songs, of him holding my hand and staring straight into me. “No, John. I just need a break.”

I smiled up at Alex from his bed, the white and blue wedding ring quilt pulled up to my collar bone because it was December but he wanted the window open. The cold reminded him of home, of Iceland, of his childhood. He smiled back at me, his blonde hair unkempt and his beautiful blue eyes disrupted by red. His eye was bleeding from throwing up too much two weeks before because it’s generally a bad idea to drink a twelve pack and then a bottle of Rum. It looked like an entire train wreck had taken place within his eye socket. He picked up his guitar and sat on the bed next to me. I closed my eyes and he played, building chord progressions. He paused and I opened my eyes.

He looked down at me, touched my neck, moved the blanket, and spoke to me in Leonard Cohen’s words, “You can spend the night beside her. You know that she’s half crazy but that’s why you want to be there. And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her, then she gets you on her wavelength and she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover.”

“Boy,” I called him; he hated the name Alex because that’s what his mother called him, “I love you,” I said.

His eyes got dark and he shivered a little at the word love and kept playing. “I don’t believe in it,” he had told me a month ago before this all began, “I think love’s a bunch of fucking bullshit.” But he played for me, and no one else. And I knew what that meant.

* * *

“Come here, Rosie,” Rachel said to me, standing in the doorway of the dining room. I was sitting on top of the dining room table doing a watercolor painting of dead trees, the fourteenth in a series. I looked up from the painting and Rachel was smiling at me, her shoulder length black hair framing her pale white face. Her lips were red and her eyes were a striking, wolf-like blue.

“Come into the living room with me. I want to teach you a song,” she said.

Immediately my hands began to shake. Rachel was a skilled musician with a voice like sweet candy. She’d been writing music for five years and never once had any of us sing with her. I blushed and sat next to her on the piano bench.

“I wrote this little piece and it’s meant to be sung in a round; I think you might like it,” she told me and touched her fingers to the keys. When she came home the piano was no longer mine; it was hers and I bowed to her playing.

“My little roses spread over the roads that all go on down to you like rivers to the sea.” She played for me and we sang together in rich dissonance and warm resolution.

* * *

I sat on my piano’s bench and tried to play but, how dare I disgrace such sacred sounds? My body was wet; my sheets were in the washing machine. But in the living room, there was silence. All I could hear was me, sobbing. Afraid of what I would do alone, I picked up the phone and dialed Alex. No answer. So I called Kenzie and she answered.

“Hello. Hello? Rose, hello?”

I couldn’t do anything but cry. There were no words.

“Rose, what happened? What’s wrong?”

I whispered a boy’s name that she didn’t know and when I touched the pianos keys, my skin burned.

It took her a minute, but then she understood.

“Oh God, Rose, I’ll be right there.” And when she came in the house, I was passed out on the floor of my living room in a gray towel. She brought me a blue glass of water, “We need to call the cops,” she told me.

But I screamed at her. “No! It’s not his fault!”

She looked at me as if I was insane.

I swallowed hard and hung my head, “If I’d been him, I would have kept going too. I never said no,” I told her as I collapsed on her and I searched for a song to sing my heart but there was nothing but death: everything that had once been good inside of me was gone. My Self stared at me from the corner, its eyes full of fear, as if I’d just betrayed it to its downfall. I wanted my sisters. I wanted the music of their laughter but, they had places to be and work to do and I didn’t know how to tell them why I needed them so badly.

* * *

I drove down A1A alone in a tiny white car. The wind off the ocean blew softly though my window. Palm tree after palm tree passed by and the mansions on the Intercostal stared down at me in my small Chevy Malibu. The sun was bright today and I had nowhere that I wanted to be so I just drove.

I had written to my youth director the evening before, “I don’t know if I have a soul anymore. I think it’s in there somewhere but, I can’t really tell. I bet if you dropped something inside of me, you could hear it echo. Christ died for my sins, yeah I know. But how can you believe something when you don’t have a heart to believe it in?”

“Perhaps it’d be better to not think,” I thought and turned the music up loud and the singer screamed, “God put down your gun, can’t you see we’re dead? God put down your hand we’re not listening!”

* * *

The Smokey Mountains were right outside my window. I drove with my youth director and six other kids down the road in Tennessee to our work site. Day four of mission work left us all feeling a sleep deprived kind of ridiculous. The week before leaving for Tennessee, I caught a cold from standing in the rain and savored spending the day on the couch in the family room with my sisters beside me, fawning over me, and the hollowness that goes with taking NyQuil. I was scared of senior year, scared of the pending doom of college applications. I wanted Rachel with me all the time.

But Tennessee was different. On the way up, we drove into North Carolina and James Taylor told us about how he was goin’ to Carolina in [his] mind and I cried because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The mountains stood glorious in front of us all; their green trees covering us in beauty, in nature, in truth. Out from the valley, we came into the chilled sunshine and felt God smiling down on us.

* * *

“So, Rosie,” Rachel said over the phone, “is it as hard as you’d thought it was going to be?”

“Is what as hard? College?”

“Yeah, is it bad?”

“No. Weird things about it are difficult. I’m loving every minute of it, but I feel like I don’t know the right way to act.”

“Because you don’t have your sisters around?” She asked.

“Yes! I’m glad you understand that.”

“I felt the same way when I was in Tallahassee. We are so much a part of each other…”

“That when we’re away, we aren’t really a whole person anymore.”

“It’ll get better,” she tried.

“I hope it never does.”

And she laughed a little and sang to me the way my mom used to sing to all of us. “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you. Let me hear you whisper that you love me too. Put your arms around me for the whole night through. Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you.”

 

Sing with me Somehow - Draft 1

“Please no! Please don’t take my Anna away! Please, let me keep her with me; please don’t take her!” I pleaded with the cop in my front yard. He listened and Anna stayed home that night. She was seventeen, I was fourteen and it was the sixth time she’d run away that year. She locked herself in her pink room and I sat out on the roof with nothing but the stars.

“The Lord has promised good to me. His Word my hope secures. He will my shield and portion be as long as life endures.” Hauntingly “Amazing Grace” floated off the back deck into nothing. My heart went with it. Anna was my everything.

To begin at the beginning, I suppose. Because that’s where it all began.‘“Goodnight, now it’s time to go home,” And he makes it fast with one more thing, “We are the Sultans, the Sultans of Swing.”’ If you ask my parents why their “song” is a Dire Straights song, they’ll tell you that they don’t know. They both liked it; it has nothing to do with romance. And that’s us, their girls, ridiculously different just because it sounds good. There are four of us. Invincible, insane. My sisters are the three most beautiful women that God ever created, no questions asked. We grew up in a house where, creatively, anything goes. Rachel used to overthrow the living room in order to do a six foot painting while Mary took dads archaic camera to shoot photos in the backyard of the trees and Anna locked herself into her room and hid her paintings in a drawer and I spent forever in my bedroom writing. They’d buy me notebooks for every birthday, every holiday. They encouraged all of us to write and we all wrote about each other, and still do.

I’m the baby and I know they all love me the most. It’s such a vain statement but we are vain people, girls that know their worth. Or at least pretend to. We weren’t raised to be stuck-up but we always played with each other instead of the other kids. We always liked each other best, not as sisters but as friends, as a tight, undying circle.

“Sing to me, angel,” he said.

“But, baby, don’t leave me.”

“I won’t be gone forever, princess. It’s just basic training. Just sing for me.”

“Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time. And time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much. Are you still mine?”

“I’m yours forever, Alison Rose Slusarczyk.”

“And I’m yours just the same, John James Russell”

“If you let him hurt you, he’s won you over,” Anna told me but I kept crying.

“Johnny, I just can’t do this anymore. This just isn’t right,” I told him.

“Is there someone else?”

I thought of Alex, in the car, making me sing Jewel songs to him, holding my hand and staring straight into me. “No, John. I just need a break.”

“Mitch is dead,” Christie told me over the phone.

“What?”

“He died in a car accident last night.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I guess Sherry called the church this morning and the church told the school so my mom called me.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

And I fell apart, right there on the couch when I hung up the phone.

My mom got in the shower and I made my way to my piano. And all I could do was play. Chopin’s Prelude in E minor flooded out of me. The keys were the only thing that was honest anymore, the only thing that could never go away. He was indestructible, giant Mitch. And he was my Heide’s sweetest love, her big brother. And I wanted to run to her, to hold her, to make it all better, but I couldn’t leave my piano and I couldn’t stop crying. “If this is all there is to life, if even the greatest can fall, then what am I and what will I ever be?” I thought.

I stood on the stage, in my boring black Chorus dress and tried to find Anna through the lights. She hated coming to anything school related but mom made her because I needed her there.

“When I first started working on this piece a few months ago, I didn’t know how much it was going to end up meaning to me. It talks about crossing over the deep river Jordan, into a world of peace, love, and harmony. We are all faced with rivers that we must cross everyday, obstacles that we must overcome…

There was a still around us a few days after the hurricane. My parents were in Orlando for my moms job. I was the only one of my friends to have power and being alone in my house scared me. Sherry was in another state so Heide stayed with me. She talked about her life, plainly, honestly and I listened. It had been months since we talked and I wanted to tell her everything about everything. But when it came words, I had nothing. Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm” solemnly came out of my fingers on the piano, in my own way. To me it was enough; the words said it all.

It felt “safe and warm” to be near my Heide again, my unrelated sister. And she laughed at herself and smiled but I kept playing. There was so much I didn’t know and I wanted so much to break apart our walls but, it had been a year, almost and despite our relationship, the only thing we’d done was drifted.

We walked in the pouring rain to Circuit City. Anna let me walk under the overhang so that I wouldn’t get wet. We picked out the stereo together, the speakers, the whole system.

“Just out of curiosity, why do you want to do this?” the attendant asked.

“To piss my father off,” Anna earnestly replied.

He laughed, “You’re kidding right? She’s kidding, isn’t she?” he asked me.

“She couldn’t be more serious if she tried.”

They gave us the car back and she got excited. Anna and I hadn’t done things together since I was ten or so. We were always around each other but, never how we used to be. She tried hard to be the good sister but there was always something else. And I understood. She loved me best. I knew it. She slid in the CD and “MmmBop” played. The first song in her knew speakers. How funny to see two little white girls blasting Hanson in a beat up Lincoln Town Car but it felt good. At the most ridiculous point in my life, I knew home. I could feel it deep my heart.

“You guys have to open mine last!” I said. “I totally win with the best present this year.”

We have a tradition in my family that on Christmas, we open the presents in age order. Dad instituted it so that the baby could go first. We all waited patiently and admired the others gift. Anna sometimes had a hard time with this process because she needed the presents to be opened NOW. And I liked to save the paper, fold it neatly. But when it came to the presents we got each other, we opened them at the same time, excluding the one giving presents. Rachel always made something. Mary gave jewelry. Anna’s were definitely eclectic. And mine varied every year. I had no source of income but, this year I made something. Beautiful boxes, varying with each sister. Rachel’s was blue to match her new home, her new life in Chicago. The outside said “If the future looks dark, we must be the ones to shine” and inside was a picture of us four girls: Rachel and her children. It said on the inside, “The stars have all gone away, This is my favorite time of day, When Rachel comes out to play, Rachel please don’t go away.” Mary’s was the darkest green you ever saw and covered with white ghost orchids. The top said “Get your head out of the mud baby. Put flowers in the mud, baby.” And inside was sweetest picture of a baby; lovable Mary in her all beautiful innocence. In the true words of Jimi Hendrix, the inside said “Will the wind ever remember the names it has blown in the past. And with its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom, it whispers no, this will be the last. And the wind cried Mary.” Anna’s was pink and sparkly and covered in Peter Pan because she loved him and refused to grow up. Outside of it, Robert Plant talked, “Peace and trust can win the day, despite all of your losing.” And most honestly, inside it read, “Little Anna, little star, that is what you really are. Cross my heart and hope to die: you’re the apple of my eye.”

“I want you to do something for me, Quinn,” I said, driving Quinn’s car down the road.

“What’s that?”

“Close your eyes and listen to this song and tell me if doesn’t make things better.”

I tried to drive smoothly and played for her a song my father had shown me years ago.

“Sunrise doesn’t last all morning. A cloud burst doesn’t last all day. It seems my love is up and has left me with no warning, it’s always going to be this way. All things must pass, all things must pass away.”

I sat outside with my mother as she smoked a cigarette. Money was tight and my fathers partner ended up being a crook. He ran bad deals under my fathers license, using my mother license as a title agent, too. If things didn’t get reported soon, my parents would be arrested for something they didn’t do. It seems unjust and wrong but, that’s what happens when people lie, and criminals always lie.

“It’ll get better someday,” she said. “Things won’t always be like this.”

“Sunrise doesn’t last all morning,” I told her.

“All things must pass,” she said.

“All things must pass away,” I replied.

Rachel was home and everything felt beautiful despite what was going on at my parents office. Anna drove us to go get ice cream leaving mom and dad home alone. We sat outside the T.C.B.Y. that we hadn’t been to since Rachel left and ate ice cream and laughed ridiculously while Rachel told us about how she’d yelled at a lady with Anna yesterday and told her, “Seriously, get with it. It’s not rocket surgery!” It felt good to be with my sisters, to be home in my soul. We get to a point where we don’t make sense anymore to anyone but each other. We laugh, silently, and all the same, our almond eyes nearly closing, and perfectly well know what three unconnected words are supposed to remind each other of.

We listened to Dr. Dre in the car and laughed about the time that mom left us all home alone and Mary almost got in trouble because Rachel drank a Snapple brand drink called Rain that tasted like burning and made her feel like it was absolutely necessary to go out and buy the Chronic 2001 album. When mom found out that Mary had taken the car (and all of us) to the mall without asking in the middle of the night, she was not happy. But then Rachel played the album for her and she understood.

When we got home, all we could hear was Neil Young acousticly singing “Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise. Big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes. Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless.” The back door was open and the music was loud because mom was sitting outside smoking. She looked sad but her eyes got bright when her happy daughters walked out and told her stories.

I could hear mom screaming at Anna to wake up, take her little sister to school. I was fourteen, a freshman in high school. It was February and cold. Anna always refused to wake up. I don’t think she ever went to her first hour and couldn’t’ve cared less if I was late. Mary had told mom, “don’t bother. She won’t listen; it’s not you. She’s smoking crack.”

Mom didn’t believe her. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Because, mom, she offered me some. I saw it with my own eyes.”

That was at Christmas time and it was two months later. Anna’s body was rapidly deteriorating. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep, she was angry all the time. Everything I ever did was wrong. Mom wasn’t the only one that was closed minded about it. I loved Anna too much to ever think of her as being anything but my perfect sister. She got up seven minutes before I needed to be in class. We drove fast and Thom Yorke talked to us on the way to school,“I want to, I want to be someone else so I’ll explode.” I felt for him, quoted him often in my writing. My house was going crazy from the things Anna was doing and Rachel and Mary being in college. I hadn’t eaten in a week and drank NyQuil like it was water from the cold I’d caught from sitting in the rain. Everything was in disarray and I was certain I wasn’t going to be allowed to be a sophomore next year because I had a B in one of my classes.

When I got out of the car, I told her I hoped she’d go to school today, that I’d look for her at lunch. She said she’d go in, promised me she would. But I knew she was going to stay in the parking lot and get high.

I drove down 441 alone in a tiny white car. I tried to be rational, to think of things clearly, calmly. I didn’t want to be attached to Alex anymore. But everywhere I turned, there he was. I could taste him in my mouth. I could smell him, like cigarettes and clean clothes. I could feel his hands on me. Not loving me but making me feel cheap, used, dishonest.

I wrote to my youth director the evening before, “I don’t know if I have a soul anymore. I think it’s in there somewhere but, I can’t really tell. I bet if you dropped something inside of me, you could hear it echo. Christ died for my sins, yeah I know. But how can you believe something when you don’t have a heart to believe it in?”

“Perhaps it’d be better to not think,” I thought and turned the music loud,“God put down your gun, can’t you see we’re dead? God put down your hand we’re not listening!”

He was tearing apart my insides, or I was letting him. He manipulated me in every way possible and I kept crawling back for more. And now he’d taken my voice, my heart, my honest passion and I’d come to my senses. I knew what he was doing. But I let him keep me anyway.

“So, Rosie,” Rachel said over the phone, “is it as hard as you’d thought it was going to be?”

“Is what as hard? College?”

“Yeah, is it bad?”

“No. Weird things about it are difficult. I’m loving every minute of it but, I feel like I don’t know the right way to act.”

“Because you don’t have your sisters around?”

“Yes! I’m glad you understand that.”

“I felt the same way when I was in Tallahassee. We are so much apart of each other…”

“That when we’re away, we aren’t really a whole person anymore.”

“It’ll get better,” she tried.

“I hope it never does.”

And she laughed a little and sang to me the way my mom used to sing to all of us. “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you. Let me hear you whisper that you love me too. Put your arms around me for the whole night through. Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you.”

“I wanna hold the hand inside you. I wanna take the breath that’s true.”

“What the fuck is this? We’re not hippies, mom,” Rachel complained.

My mother smiled at her from the couch, “It’s Mazzy Star. Close your eyes and listen.”

Rachel huffed, pivoted and stomped out of the family room, her blue, thread-bare Chuck Taylor’s made a funny clicking noise when she walked that fit in well with the sweeping music, “I look to you to see the truth.”

She was mad because dad was in Mexico. Everything was different when he was gone and he was gone most of the time. I was six, she was fourteen. Mary and Anna were twelve and ten. Mom had moments when she needed Mazzy Star, Neil Young Live, or Nirvana Unplugged to feel better. Rachel went to art school two hours from home and dressed like everyone did in 1994: cut up corduroys, a beat up R.E.M. t-shirt that was three sizes too big, and holy, and Converse. She was pale and thin and small. She drank coffee and stayed up till three in the morning doing homework. I wanted to be just like her.

Mom hugged me tight and hummed along with the music. Mary pulled me away from her and mom fell asleep on the couch. She brought me in the living room and we sat down beside the piano. Rachel played softly Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor and I watched her graceful white hands with no nails as they skated over keys. Mary put her arm around me and I fell asleep against her warm chest.

“Fuck man, it’s new years,” Lisa said, painting her face with make up.

“How quickly time moves. I was just in Tennessee,” I thought.

There were four of us, Lisa, Quinn, Amanda (affectionately called Shoe), and myself. We dressed fancy for no real reason. New Years Eve of senior year. We should be out partying.

We drove from Quinn’s large beach house to the trailer park, to Mary’s boyfriends house. I waited and watched the fish in the fish take while they smoked three bowls. They offered me hits and pointed to the cross around my neck. I was different. I was clean. I lacked men in my life for a reason and it leveled everything out.

We piled into to Quinn’s car after they consumed a box of Oreos and I got in the drivers seat. It was dark and the roads were nearing empty. We had a house on the inter-coastal to get to by midnight but I kept my speed down. The sounds of a fast car made Lisa nervous when she was stoned so I played Modest Mouse nice and loud for her, “alright, already we’ll all float on even if things get heavy, we’ll all float on.”

I smiled to myself as demons pushed their way out of my brain. Everything felt level. Everything was going to be okay. Life moves at its own pace and I knew then that I didn’t need to speed it up with coffee or slow it down with pot, complicated it with boys or obsess over school. “This is it. This is life,” I said to myself.

The ocean breathed salty through my window and my heart was at peace.

The Smokey Mountains were right outside my window. I drove with my youth director and six other kids down the road in Tennessee to our work site. Day four of mission work left us all feeling a sleep deprived kind of ridiculous. The week before leaving for Tennessee, Alex and I tried again. I spent an evening with him, the rain on us and Bob Dylan on the stage behind us. We said we missed being together, missed the warmth of seriousness but when he got home, it was all different. When he got home, it was always all different.

I caught a cold from standing in the rain and relished in spending the day on the couch in the family room with my sisters beside me, fawning over me, and the absence of feeling that goes with sickness. If I couldn’t feel, he couldn’t hurt me anymore. I was scared of senior year, scared of the pending doom of college applications. I wanted Rachel with me all the time. But Tennessee was different. The mountains stood glorious in front of us all. On the way up, we drove into North Carolina and James Taylor told us about how he was goin’ to Carolina in [his] mind and I cried because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

And there we were, driving to a church to do construction work that we didn’t know how to do. We spent our evenings in worship services and group studies and I cried to my youth director about how everything was crazy and I didn’t get anything anymore.

Despite my protest, he was playing country and the words hit me hard. He turned it up on the middle verse, “Here you are, Slu. This is you.” This golden roads been long, sometimes I’ve lost my way. Been down some darkened detours, leanin’ heavy on my faith. With the devil at my chain, Lord, your love done set me free. Hallelujah, God’s been good to me!

And he could not have been more right.

 

Sing with me Somehow - Draft 3

If you ask my parents why their “song” is a Dire Straights song, they’ll tell you that they don’t know. ‘“Goodnight, now it’s time to go home,” And he makes it fast with one more thing, “We are the Sultans, the Sultans of Swing.”’They both liked it; it has nothing to do with romance. And that’s us, their girls, ridiculously different just because it sounds good. There are four of us, all invincible, all insane. Rachel used to overthrow the living room in order to do a six foot painting while Mary took dads archaic camera to shoot photos in the backyard of the trees and Anna locked herself into her room and hid her paintings in a drawer and I spent forever in my bedroom writing. They’d buy me notebooks for every birthday, every holiday. They encouraged all of us to write and we all wrote about each other, and still do.

I’m the baby and I know they all love me the most. It’s such a vain statement but we are vain people, girls that know their worth, or at least pretend to. We weren’t raised to be stuck-up but we always played with each other instead of the other kids. We always liked each other best, not as sisters but as friends.

“I wanna hold the hand inside you. I wanna take the breath that’s true.”

“What the fuck is this? We’re not hippies, mom,” Rachel complained.

My mother smiled at her from the couch, “It’s Mazzy Star. Close your eyes and listen.” Raising four children and a large house to clean made her tired in the evening.

Rachel huffed, pivoted and stomped out of the family room, her blue, thread-bare Chuck Taylor’s made a funny clicking noise when she walked that fit in well with the sweeping music, “I look to you to see the truth.”

She was mad because dad was in Mexico. Everything was different when he was gone and he was gone most of the time. I was six, she was fourteen. Mary and Anna were twelve and ten. Mom had moments when she needed Mazzy Star, Neil Young Live, or Nirvana Unplugged to feel better. Rachel went to art school two hours from home and dressed like everyone did in 1994: cut up corduroys, a beat up R.E.M. t-shirt that was three sizes too big and wholly, and Converse. She was pale and thin and small. She drank coffee and stayed up till three in the morning doing homework. I wanted to be just like her.

Mom hugged me tight and hummed along with the music. Mom fell asleep on the couch and Mary pulled me away to the living room and we sat down beside the piano. Rachel played softly Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor and I watched her graceful white hands with no nails as they skated over keys. Mary put her arm around me and I fell asleep against her warm chest.

* * *

It was February and cold. I’d been awake for an hour, waiting for Anna to take me to school. From my room, I could hear mom screaming at her, “Wake up!”

There was silence and I knew all Anna had done was pulled the pink blanket over her head.
“Anna Louise Slusarczyk! Take your little sister to school!”
Nothing.
“Fine! Fuck up your life! See if I fucking care!”
The door slammed and I could hear moms’ low heels clicking on the white wooden staircase. I could hear her downstairs, talking to dad.
“That’s the third time this week!”
I couldn’t hear dad talking but mom continued at the same volume, “Paul. It’s
Wednesday!”

He spoke softly to her. This was new and different. Mom never lost her temper but she was getting fed up with Anna. I knew what dad was telling her, to kick Anna out, to get her away from the baby because it was unfair to me. But she didn’t get it. She didn’t understand the problem.

In December Mary had said to her, “Don’t bother. She won’t listen. It’s not you.
She’s doing drugs.”

Mom didn’t believe her. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Because mom, she wanted to give me some. I saw it with my own eyes.”

And now, two months later, Anna’s body was rapidly deteriorating. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep, she was angry all the time. Everything I ever did was wrong. Mom wasn’t the only one that was closed minded about it. I loved Anna too much to ever think of her as being anything but my beautiful sister. She got up seven minutes before I needed to be in class. We drove fast and Thom Yorke talked to us on the way to school, “I want to, I want to be someone else so I’ll explode.” I felt for him, quoted him often in my writing. My house was going crazy from the things Anna was doing and Rachel and Mary being in college. I hadn’t eaten in a week and drank NyQuil like it was water. Everything was in disarray and I was certain I wasn’t going to be allowed to be a sophomore next year because I had a B in one of my classes.

When I got out of the car, I told her I hoped she’d go to school today, that I’d look for her at lunch. She said she’d go in, promised me she would. But I knew she was going to stay in the parking lot and get high.

“Please no! Please don’t take Anna away!” I pleaded with the cop in my front yard. He listened and Anna stayed home that night. She was seventeen, I was fourteen and it was the sixth time she’d run away that year. She locked herself in her pink room and I was on the porch with nothing but the stars.

“The Lord has promised good to me. His Word my hope secures. He will my shield and portion be, as long as life endures.” “Amazing Grace” floated out of my mouth and across the front porch. I could hear mom calling to me from inside but I had collapsed right where I had been standing when Anna walked in the house. The wet grass made me shiver and I wanted Rachel and Mary home from college. I needed them with me; they were the only thing that could make this all better.

When I closed my eyes, I could see Mary, standing on the altar at church six years ago at Christmas. She wore a hopeless navy blue and black plaid dress with black lace at the top and a white cardigan because mom would die before letting her daughters have bare shoulders in church. She looked so beautiful standing there, a stained glass Jesus spreading His arms out above her. She readjusted herself so that she stood directly in the middle of the altar and when she did, her hip length hair moved, like a graceful horse shaking its’ mane. She had tan skin and brown eyes. My grandmother called her the Milk mans’ baby. Her ancient beauty made her look almost Native America and not the slightest bit Polish. But she had moms’ hands and we all hated her for it.

They shook a little causing the microphone she was holding to move too. She was nervous. Not because of the five hundred people filling up the church but because of the five sitting at the back. Would it be enough for mom and dad? What would Rachel with her graceful voice have to say? Were little Anna and Ali even paying attention?

I was. In that moment, there was nothing on earth but Mary and me. My mother began to cry and Mary opened her mouth and sang, “What child is this who lay to rest on Marys’ lap is sleeping. Whom angels greet with anthems sweet while shepherds watch are keeping. This, this is Christ the King whom shepherds guard and angels sing. Joy, joy for Christ is born, the Babe, the Son of Mary.”

I had heard about this baby in school but I had no idea who he was. But I did know that she was right. The baby would find comfort with her; he would know security in her arms.

“Mitch is dead,” Christie told me over the phone and everything inside of me stopped.

“What?” I managed.

“He died in a car accident last night.” I couldn’t believe her. I had just seen him last night.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, I guess Sherry called the church this morning and the church told the school so my mom called me.”

“Okay,” I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you.”

When I hung up the phone, I fell apart right there on the couch.

I made my way to my piano, empty; unable to even cry. And all I could do was play. Chopin’s Prelude in E minor flooded out of me. The keys were the only thing that was honest anymore, the only thing that could never go away. He was my best friend Heides’ sweetest love, her big brother. We all loved him but despite it, he was fading. He had been driving drunk and hit a tree. He was doing drugs and losing it quickly. Heide and I used to talk about Anna and him; we didn’t think either would make it much more than a year if they didn’t clean up. And I wanted to find her, to run to her, to hold her, to make it all better, but I couldn’t leave my piano and I couldn’t stop crying. “If this is all there is to life, if nothing ever remains, then what am I and what will I ever be?” I thought.

* * *

I sat outside with my mother outside as she smoked a cigarette. She smiled at me, exasperated from a full day of work, her curly brown hair falling over her shoulders. Her fingernail and toe nail polish shined in the light coming out from in the house. They were a glossy pinkish brown that blended well. “Ladies always paint their toes,” her mother used to say to her and she always told that to us. She wore Ralph Lauren in neutral tones. Her lips were pale and her aged, beautiful hands shook a little as she took the Marlboro out of her mouth. Money was tight and my fathers Real Estate partner ended up being a crook. He ran bad deals under my fathers license, using my mother license as a title agent, too. If things didn’t get reported soon, my parents would be arrested for something they didn’t do.

“It’ll get better someday,” she said. “Things won’t always be like this.”

“Sunrise doesn’t last all morning,” I told her.

“All things must pass,” she said.

“All things must pass away,” I replied.

Rachel was home and everything felt beautiful despite what was going on at my parents’ office. Anna drove us to go get ice cream leaving mom and dad home alone. We sat outside the T.C.B.Y. that we hadn’t been to since Rachel left and ate ice cream in the warm summer air and laughed ridiculously while Rachel told us about how she’d yelled at a lady with Anna yesterday and told her, “Seriously, get with it. It’s not rocket surgery!” It felt good to be with my sisters, to be home in my soul. We get to a point where we don’t make sense anymore to anyone but each other. We laugh, silently, and all the same, our almond eyes nearly closing. Disjointed sentences mixed with laughter made perfect sense to us.

We listened to Dr. Dre in the car and laughed about the night that mom left us all home alone and Rachel drank a Snapple brand drink called Rain that tasted like burning and made her feel like it was absolutely necessary to go out and buy the Chronic 2001 album. When mom found out that Mary had taken the car (and all of us) to the mall without asking, she was not happy. But then Rachel played the album for her and she understood.

When we got home, all we could hear was Neil Young singing, the piano lamenting underneath him, “Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise. Big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes. Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless.” The back door was open and the music was loud because mom was sitting outside smoking. She looked sad, her eyes were red from crying but they got bright when her happy daughters walked out together and told her stories.

* * *

“Sing to me, angel,” he said.

“But, baby, don’t leave me.”

“I won’t be gone forever, princess. It’s just basic training. Just sing for me.”

“Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time. And time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much. Are you still mine?”

“I’m yours forever, Alison Rose Slusarczyk.”

“And I’m yours just the same, John James Russell”

“If you let him hurt you, he’s won you over,” Anna told me but I kept crying.

“Johnny, I just can’t do this anymore. This just isn’t right,” I told him over the phone. England is far and absence makes the heart to wander.

“Is there someone else?”

I thought of Alex, in the car, making me sing Jewel songs to him, holding my hand and staring straight into me. “No, John. I just need a break.”

I smiled up at Alex from his bed, the white and blue wedding ring quilt pulled up to my collar bone because it was December but he wanted the window open. The cold reminded him of home, of Iceland, of his childhood. He smiled back at me, his blonde hair unkempt and his beautiful blue eyes disrupted by red. His eye was bleeding from throwing up too much two weeks before because you should never drink a twelve pack and then a bottle of Rum. It was almost as if an entire train wreck had taken place within his eye socket. He picked up his guitar and sat on the bed next to me. I closed my eyes and he played for me, fabricating chord progressions for me. He paused and I opened my eyes.

He looked down at me, touched my neck, moved the blanket, and spoke to me in Leonard Cohen’s words, “You can spend the night beside her. You know that she’s half crazy but that’s why you want to be there. And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her, then she gets you on her wavelength and she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover.”

“Boy,” I called him. He hated Alex because that’s what his mother called him. I gave him an honest confession, “I love you,” I said.

He cringed a little inside at the word love and kept playing. “I don’t believe in it,” he had told me a month ago before this all began, “I think it’s a bunch of fucking bullshit.” But he played for me, and no one else. And I knew what that meant.

Kenzie and Amanda disappeared inside to get us some beers. I lifted the bottle of Vodka to my mouth and swallowed with complete disregard for the shot glasses sitting on the outside counter. The breeze blew and I could smell Kenzies’ moms’ bougainvillea’s blooming magenta across the pool, mixing with the salty summer air from off the ocean a block away. My conscience whispered at me, called me a whore for sleeping with Alex. “Didn’t you say you were better than that?” it said. “There you were, thinking he loved you and when he doesn’t answer the call, this is your solution?” I drank some more and when they came back out, I downed the beer faster than I ever had. Kenzie played some Led Zeppelin and I loudly sang along, “Seems like the wrath of the gods got a punch in the nose and it started to flow, I think I might be sinking!”

“Save your voice, Rose,” she told me and Amanda handed me the rest of her beer. I slurred a lecture at her, “Never sleepwitha man, he’ll just useyou and toss you aside whenhe’sdone.” I nearly fell into the pool and Kenzie brought me inside and made me throw up.

I sat on my piano’s bench and tried to play but, how dare I disgrace such sacred sounds? My body was wet; my sheets were in the washing machine. But in the living room, there was silence. All I could hear was me, sobbing. Afraid of what I would do alone, I picked up the phone and dialed Alex. No answer. So I called Kenzie and she answered.

“Hello. Hello? Rose, hello?”

I couldn’t do anything but cry. There were no words.

“Rose, what happened? What’s wrong?”

I whispered a boy’s name that she didn’t know and when I touched the pianos keys, my skin burned.

It took her a minute, but then she understood.

“Oh God, Rose, I’ll be right there.” And when she came in the house, I was passed out on the floor of my living room by the piano in a grey towel splotched with blood. She brought me water and aided to the wound on my arm, “We need to call the cops,” she told me.

But I screamed at her. “No! It’s not his fault!”

She looked at me as if I was insane.

I swallowed hard and hung my head, “If I’d been him, I would have kept going too. I never said no,” I told her as I collapsed on her and I searched for a song to sing my heart but there was nothing but death: everything that had once been good inside of me was gone. My Self stared at me from the corner, like an abused dog licking its wounds, as if I’d just brought it to its demise.

She had to go and left me on the couch watching Little Woman, the story of my family: four brilliant girls with truly loving parents, even though what I really wanted was the Vodka from three nights ago.

My father took me out to dinner that night. It felt good to feel safe with him. I wanted my sisters, though, I wanted the music of their laughter but, they had places to be and work to do and I didn’t know how to tell them why I needed them so badly.

The Smokey Mountains were right outside my window. I drove with my youth director and six other kids down the road in Tennessee to our work site. Day four of mission work left us all feeling a sleep deprived kind of ridiculous. The week before leaving for Tennessee, Alex and I tried again. I spent an evening with him, the rain on us and Bob Dylan on the stage behind us. We said we missed being together, missed the warmth of seriousness but when he got home, it was all different. When he got home, it was always all different.

I caught a cold from standing in the rain and relished in spending the day on the couch in the family room with my sisters beside me, fawning over me, and the absence of feeling that goes with sickness. If I couldn’t feel, he couldn’t hurt me anymore. I was scared of senior year, scared of the pending doom of college applications. I wanted Rachel with me all the time. But Tennessee was different. The mountains stood glorious in front of us all. On the way up, we drove into North Carolina and James Taylor told us about how he was goin’ to Carolina in [his] mind and I cried because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

And there we were, driving to a church to do construction work that we didn’t know how to do. We spent our evenings in worship services and group studies and I cried to my youth director about how everything was crazy and I didn’t get anything anymore.

Despite my protest, he was playing country and the words hit me hard. He turned it up on the middle verse, “Here you are, Slu. This is you.” This golden roads been long, sometimes I’ve lost my way. Been down some darkened detours, leanin’ heavy on my faith. With the devil at my chain, Lord, your love done set me free. Hallelujah, God’s been good to me!

And he could not have been more right.

We walked in the pouring rain to Circuit City. Anna let me walk under the overhang so that I wouldn’t get wet. We picked out the stereo together, the speakers, the whole system.

“Just out of curiosity, why do you want to do this?” the attendant asked.

“To piss my father off,” Anna earnestly replied.

He laughed, “You’re kidding right? She’s kidding, isn’t she?” he asked me.

“She couldn’t be more serious if she tried.”

“What’d he do?”

“He made me mad,” she said and left us to go pay.

I shook my head, “He didn’t do anything,” I told the man. “She’s just nuts.”

They gave us the car back and she got excited. Anna and I hadn’t done things together since I was ten or so. We were always around each other but, never how we used to be. She tried hard to be the good sister but there was always something else. And I understood. She loved me best. I knew it. She slid in the CD and “MmmBop” played. The first song in her new speakers. How funny to see two little white girls blasting Hanson in a beat up Lincoln Town Car but it felt good. At the most ridiculous point in my life, I knew home. I could feel it deep my heart.

I stood on the stage, in my boring black Chorus dress and tried to find Anna through the lights. She hated coming to anything school related but mom made her because I needed her there.

I cleared my throat and the sound resonated through the whole theatre, “When I first started working on this piece a few months ago, I didn’t know how much it was going to end up meaning to me. It talks about crossing over the deep river Jordan, into a world of peace, love, and harmony. We are all faced with rivers that we must cross everyday, obstacles that we must overcome…

I drove down A1A alone in a tiny white car. The wind off the ocean blew softly though my window. Palm tree after palm tree passed by me and the mansions on the intercostals stared down at me in my small Chevy Malibu. The sun was bright today and I had nowhere that I wanted to be so I just drove.

I had written to my youth director the evening before, “I don’t know if I have a soul anymore. I think it’s in there somewhere but, I can’t really tell. I bet if you dropped something inside of me, you could hear it echo. Christ died for my sins, yeah I know. But how can you believe something when you don’t have a heart to believe it in?”

“Perhaps it’d be better to not think,” I thought and turned the music loud,“God put down your gun, can’t you see we’re dead? God put down your hand we’re not listening!”

There were four of us, Lisa, Quinn, Amanda, and myself. We dressed fancy for no real reason. New Years Eve of senior year. We should be out partying.

We drove from Quinn’s large beach house to the trailer park, to Marys’ boyfriends’ house. I waited and watched the fish in the fish tank while they smoked three bowls. They offered me hits and pointed to the cross around my neck. I was different. I was clean. I lacked men in my life for a reason and it leveled everything out.

After they consumed a box of Oreos, we piled into Quinn’s car and I got in the drivers seat. It was dark and the roads were nearing empty. We had a house on the inter-coastal to get to by midnight but I kept my speed down. The sounds of a fast car made Lisa nervous when she was stoned so I played Modest Mouse nice and loud for her, “alright, already we’ll all float on even if things get heavy, we’ll all float on,” as the ocean breathed salty through my window.

“So, Rosie,” Rachel said over the phone, “is it as hard as you’d thought it was going to be?”

“Is what as hard? College?”

“Yeah, is it bad?”

“No. Weird things about it are difficult. I’m loving every minute of it but, I feel like I don’t know the right way to act.”

“Because you don’t have your sisters around?”

“Yes! I’m glad you understand that.”

“I felt the same way when I was in Tallahassee. We are so much apart of each other…”

“That when we’re away, we aren’t really a whole person anymore.”

“It’ll get better,” she tried.

“I hope it never does.”

And she laughed a little and sang to me the way my mom used to sing to all of us. “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you. Let me hear you whisper that you love me too. Put your arms around me for the whole night through. Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you.”

 

Sing with me Somehow - Draft 7

I am opening my eyes. My big sister Rachel’s face is in front of me. When her chest moves, I move with her. I am lying on top of her. She is pointing up to the ceiling, there are white patterns on it.

“Do you see the horse, Rosie? See, it’s going to meet its friend,” she’s telling me. I can feel her voice on my head making it shake a little. She is looking at me with her big blue eyes while she tells me about the horses. They aren’t what horses really look like. But she says they are and I believe her.

I can hear mommy’s voice outside and now Rachel’s smiling at me. I can feel her singing, “Rosie was a wee little girl, and wee little girl was she. She climbed up in a sycamore tree for the mom she wanted to see. And as the mommy passed that way she looked up in the tree. And she said ‘Alison Rose, you come down, for I’m coming to your house today, for I’m coming to your house today.’”

* * *

If you ask my parents why their “song” is a Dire Straights song, they’ll tell you that they don’t know. ‘“Goodnight, now it’s time to go home,” And he makes it fast with one more thing, “We are the Sultans, the Sultans of Swing.”’They both liked it; it has nothing to do with romance. And that’s us, their girls, different just because it sounds good. There are four of us, all invincible, all insane. Rachel used to overthrow the living room in order to do a six foot painting, while Mary took dads archaic camera to shoot photos in the backyard of the trees, and Anna locked herself into her room and hid her paintings in a drawer, and I spent forever in my bedroom writing. They’d buy me notebooks for every birthday, every holiday. They encouraged all of us to write and we all wrote about each other, and still do.

I’m the baby and I know they all love me the most. It’s such a bold statement but we are bold people, girls who know their worth, or at least pretend to. We weren’t raised to be stuck-up but we always played with each other instead of the other kids. We always liked each other best, not just as sisters but as friends.

* * *

“I wanna hold the hand inside you. I wanna take the breath that’s true.”

“What the fuck is this? We’re not hippies, mom,” Rachel complained.

My mother smiled at her from the couch, “It’s Mazzy Star. Close your eyes and listen.” Raising four children and a large house to clean made her tired in the evening.

Rachel huffed, pivoted and stomped out of the family room, her blue, thread-bare Chuck Taylor’s made a funny clicking noise from the thumb tacks in the bottom of them when she walked that fit in well with the sweeping music, “I look to you to see the truth.”

She was mad because dad was in Mexico. Everything was different when he was gone and he was gone most of the time. I was six, she was fourteen. Mary and Anna were twelve and ten. Mom had moments when she needed Mazzy Star, Neil Young Live, or Nirvana Unplugged to feel better. Rachel went to art school two hours from home and dressed like everyone did in 1994: cut up corduroys, a beat up R.E.M. t-shirt that was three sizes too big and holly, and Converse. She was pale and thin, small. She drank coffee and stayed up till three in the morning doing homework. I wanted to be just like her.

Mom hugged me tight and hummed along with the music. She fell asleep on the couch and Mary pulled me away to the living room and we sat down beside the piano. Rachel played softly Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor and I watched her graceful white hands with no nails as they skated over keys. Mary put her arm around me and I fell asleep against her warm chest.

* * *

I can see Mary through the heads of the people in front of me. She is standing on the altar at the Christmas service. I am eight, she is fourteen. She’s wearing a hopeless navy blue and black plaid dress with black lace at the top and a white cardigan because mom would die before letting her daughters have bare shoulders in church. She looks so beautiful standing there, a stained glass Jesus spreading His arms out above her. She’s readjusting herself so that she’s standing directly in the middle of the altar and when she does, her hip length hair moves, like a graceful horse shaking its’ mane. She has tan skin and brown eyes. My grandmother calls her the Milk Man’s baby. Her ancient beauty makes her look almost Native American and not the slightest bit Polish. But she has mom’s long, thin hands and we all envy her for it.

Her hands are shaking a little, causing the microphone she’s holding to move too. She’s nervous. Not because of the five hundred people filling up the church but because of the five sitting at the back. Will it be enough for mom and dad? What will Rachel, with her elegant voice, say? Are little Anna and Ali even paying attention?

I am. In this moment, there is nothing on earth by Mary and me. My mother is beginning to cry and Mary opens her mouth and sings, “What child is this…who lay to rest…on Mary’s lap is sleeping?”

I have heard about this baby in school but I have no idea who he is. But I do know that she’s right. The baby will find comfort with Mary, just as I always do.

* * *

It was February and cold. I’d been awake for an hour, waiting for Anna to take me to school. From my room, I could hear mom screaming at her, “Wake up!”

There was silence and I knew all Anna had done was pulled the pink blanket over her head.
“Anna Louise Slusarczyk! Take your little sister to school!”
Nothing.
“Fine! Fuck up your life! See if I fucking care!”

The door slammed and I could hear moms’ low heels clicking on the white wooden staircase. I could hear her downstairs, talking to dad.
“That’s the third time this week!”
I couldn’t hear dad talking but mom continued at the same volume, “Paul, it’s
Wednesday!”

He spoke softly to her. This was new and different. Mom never lost her temper but she was getting fed up with Anna. I knew what dad was telling her, to kick Anna out, to get her away from the baby because it was unfair to me. But she didn’t get it. She didn’t understand the problem.

In December Mary had said to her, “Don’t bother. She won’t listen. It’s not you.
She’s doing drugs.”

Mom didn’t believe her. “How could you possibly know that?”

“Because mom, she wanted to give me some. I saw it with my own eyes.”

And now, two months later, Anna’s body was rapidly deteriorating. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep, she was angry all the time. According to her, everything I ever did was wrong. Mom wasn’t the only one that tried to ignore the problems Anna was having. I loved her too much to ever think of her as being anything but my big sister. She got up seven minutes before I needed to be in class. We drove fast and Thom Yorke talked to us on the way to school, “I want to, I want to be someone else so I’ll explode.” I felt for him, quoted him often in my writing. My house was going crazy from the things Anna was doing and Rachel and Mary being in college. I hadn’t eaten in a week and drank NyQuil like it was water. Everything was in disarray and I was certain I wasn’t going to be allowed to be a sophomore next year because I had a B in one of my classes.

When I got out of the car, I told her I hoped she’d go to school today, that I’d look for her at lunch. She said she’d go in, promised me she would. But I knew she was going to stay in the parking lot and get high.

* * *

“Please no! Please don’t take Anna away!” I am pleading with the cop in my front yard. He listens and Anna stays home tonight. She is seventeen, I am fourteen and this is the sixth time she’s run away this year. She locks herself in her pink room. Mom had painted it red a year ago. The second time she ran away, dad decided the color was making her go crazy so he tried to paint it white but the red bled through.

I am on the porch with nothing but the stars. “The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forebear to shine, but God who called me here below, shall be forever mine.” “Amazing Grace” floats out of my mouth and across the front porch. I can hear mom calling to me from inside but I have collapsed right where I was standing when Anna had walked in the house. The wet grass is making me shiver and I want Rachel and Mary home from college. I need them with me; they are the only thing that can make this all better.

* * *

“Mitch is dead,” Christie told me over the phone and everything inside of me stopped.

“What?” I managed.

“He died in a car accident last night.” I couldn’t believe her. I had just seen him last night.

“Are you serious?” I didn’t know what to say. “Okay, thank you.”

When I hung up the phone, I fell apart right there on the couch.

I made my way to my piano, empty; unable to even cry. And all I could do was play. Chopin’s Prelude in E minor flooded out of me. The keys were the only thing that were honest anymore, the only thing that could never go away. He was my best friend Heide’s big brother. We all loved him but despite it, he was fading. He had been driving drunk and hit a tree. He was doing drugs and losing it quickly. Heide and I used to talk about Anna and him; we didn’t think either would make it much more than a year if they didn’t clean up. And I wanted to find her, to run to her, to hold her, to make it all better, but I couldn’t leave my piano and I couldn’t stop crying. “If this is all there is to life, if nothing ever remains, then what am I and what will I ever be?”

* * *

I sat outside with my mother as she smoked a cigarette. She smiled at me, exasperated from a full day of work, her wavy brown hair falling over her shoulders, wet pieces sticking to her neck in the heat. Her fingernail and toe nail polish shined in the light coming out from in the house. They were a glossy pinkish brown. “Ladies always paint their toes,” her mother used to say to her and she always told that to us. She wore Ralph Lauren in neutral tones. Her lips were pale and her aged, beautiful hands shook a little as she took the Marlboro out of her mouth.

“It’ll get better someday,” she said. “Things won’t always be like this.”

“Sunrise doesn’t last all morning,” I told her.

“All things must pass,” she said.

“All things must pass away,” I replied.

* * *

When we got home, all we could hear was Neil Young singing, the piano lamenting underneath him, “Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise. Big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes. Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless.” The back door was open and the music was loud because mom was sitting outside smoking. She looked sad, her eyes were red from crying but they got bright when her happy daughters walked out together and told her stories.

* * *

“Sing to me, angel,” he said.

“But, baby, don’t leave me.”

“I won’t be gone forever, princess. It’s just basic training. Just sing for me.”

“Oh, my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch a long lonely time. And time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much. Are you still mine?”

“I’m yours forever, Alison Rose Slusarczyk.”

“And I’m yours just the same, John James Russell”

“If you let him hurt you, he’s won you over,” Anna told me but I kept crying.

“Johnny, I just can’t do this anymore. This just isn’t right,” I told him over the phone. England is far and absence makes the heart to wander.

“Is there someone else?”

I thought of Alex, in the car, making me sing Jewel songs to him, holding my hand and staring straight into me. “No, John. I just need a break.”

I smiled up at Alex from his bed, the white and blue wedding ring quilt pulled up to my collar bone because it was December but he wanted the window open. The cold reminded him of home, of Iceland, of his childhood. He smiled back at me, his blonde hair unkempt and his beautiful blue eyes disrupted by red. His eye was bleeding from throwing up too much two weeks before because it’s generally a bad idea to drink a twelve pack and then a bottle of Rum. It looked like an entire train wreck had taken place within his eye socket. He picked up his guitar and sat on the bed next to me. I closed my eyes and he played, fabricating chord progressions. He paused and I opened my eyes.

He looked down at me, touched my neck, moved the blanket, and spoke to me in Leonard Cohen’s words, “You can spend the night beside her. You know that she’s half crazy but that’s why you want to be there. And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China. And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her, then she gets you on her wavelength and she lets the river answer that you've always been her lover.”

“Boy,” I called him because he hated the name Alex because that’s what his mother called him, “I love you,” I said.

His eyes got dark and he shivered a little at the word love and kept playing. “I don’t believe in it,” he had told me a month ago before this all began, “I think love’s a bunch of fucking bullshit.” But he played for me, and no one else. And I knew what that meant.

* * *

“Come here, Rosie,” Rachel said to me, standing in the doorway of the dining room. I was sitting on top of the dining room table doing a watercolor painting of dead trees, the fourteenth in a series. I looked up from the painting and Rachel was smiling at me, her shoulder length black hair framing her pale white face. Her lips were red and her eyes were a striking, wolf-like blue.

“Come into the living room with me. I want to teach you a song,” she said.

Immediately my hands began to shake. Rachel was a recognized musician with a voice like sweet candy. She’d been writing music for five years and never once had any of us sing with her. I blushed and sat next to her on the piano bench.

“I wrote this little piece and it’s meant to be sung in a round; I think you might like it,” she told me and touched her fingers to the keys. When she came home the piano was no longer mine; it was hers and I bowed to her playing.

“My little roses spread over the roads that all go on down to you like rivers to the sea.” She played for me and we sang together in rich dissonance and warm resolution.

* * *

I sat on my piano’s bench and tried to play but, how dare I disgrace such sacred sounds? My body was wet; my sheets were in the washing machine. But in the living room, there was silence. All I could hear was me, sobbing. Afraid of what I would do alone, I picked up the phone and dialed Alex. No answer. So I called Kenzie and she answered.

“Hello. Hello? Rose, hello?”

I couldn’t do anything but cry. There were no words.

“Rose, what happened? What’s wrong?”

I whispered a boy’s name that she didn’t know and when I touched the pianos keys, my skin burned.

It took her a minute, but then she understood.

“Oh God, Rose, I’ll be right there.” And when she came in the house, I was passed out on the floor of my living room by the piano in a grey towel splotched with blood. She brought me water and tended to the gash in my arm, “We need to call the cops,” she told me.

But I screamed at her. “No! It’s not his fault!”

She looked at me as if I was insane.

I swallowed hard and hung my head, “If I’d been him, I would have kept going too. I never said no,” I told her as I collapsed on her and I searched for a song to sing my heart but there was nothing but death: everything that had once been good inside of me was gone. My Self stared at me from the corner, its eyes full of fear, as if I’d just betrayed it to its downfall. I wanted my sisters. I wanted the music of their laughter but, they had places to be and work to do and I didn’t know how to tell them why I needed them so badly.

* * *

I drove down A1A alone in a tiny white car. The wind off the ocean blew softly though my window. Palm tree after palm tree passed by and the mansions on the Intercostal stared down at me in my small Chevy Malibu. The sun was bright today and I had nowhere that I wanted to be so I just drove.

I had written to my youth director the evening before, “I don’t know if I have a soul anymore. I think it’s in there somewhere but, I can’t really tell. I bet if you dropped something inside of me, you could hear it echo. Christ died for my sins, yeah I know. But how can you believe something when you don’t have a heart to believe it in?”

“Perhaps it’d be better to not think,” I thought and turned the music up loud and the musicians screamed, “God put down your gun, can’t you see we’re dead? God put down your hand we’re not listening!”

* * *

The Smokey Mountains were right outside my window. I drove with my youth director and six other kids down the road in Tennessee to our work site. Day four of mission work left us all feeling a sleep deprived kind of ridiculous. The week before leaving for Tennessee, Alex and I said we’d try again. I spent an evening with him, the rain on us and Bob Dylan on the stage behind us. We said we missed being together, missed the warmth of obsession but when he got home, it was all different. When he got home, it was always all different.

I caught a cold from standing in the rain and savored spending the day on the couch in the family room with my sisters beside me, fawning over me, and the hollowness that goes with taking NyQuil. If I couldn’t feel, he couldn’t hurt me anymore. I was scared of senior year, scared of the pending doom of college applications. I wanted Rachel with me all the time. But Tennessee was different. On the way up, we drove into North Carolina and James Taylor told us about how he was goin’ to Carolina in [his] mind and I cried because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The mountains stood glorious in front of us all; their green trees covering us in beauty, in nature, in truth. Out from the valley, we came into the chilled sunshine and felt God smiling down on us.

* * *

“So, Rosie,” Rachel said over the phone, “is it as hard as you’d thought it was going to be?”

“Is what as hard? College?”

“Yeah, is it bad?”

“No. Weird things about it are difficult. I’m loving every minute of it, but I feel like I don’t know the right way to act.”

“Because you don’t have your sisters around?” She asked.

“Yes! I’m glad you understand that.”

“I felt the same way when I was in Tallahassee. We are so much apart of each other…”

“That when we’re away, we aren’t really a whole person anymore.”

“It’ll get better,” she tried.

“I hope it never does.”

And she laughed a little and sang to me the way my mom used to sing to all of us. “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you. Let me hear you whisper that you love me too. Put your arms around me for the whole night through. Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you.”