I turned to her, but she was already in the living room. She picked up her cigarettes from the table beside the couch and lit one. At my gentle urgings she had been trying to cut down (at least around me), and this seemed somehow more ominous than her raised voice.
I went into the living room. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”
“Everything. What was that song?”
Her face was pale and set. She held the cigarette in front of her mouth like a shield. I began to realize that I had slipped up, but I didn’t know how or when, and that was scary. “I don’t know what you m-”
“The song you were singing in the car when we were coming home. The one you were bellowing at the top of your lungs.”
I tried to remember and couldn’t. All I could remember was thinking I’d always have to dress like a slightly down-on-his-luck workman on Mercedes Street, so I’d fit in. Sure I’d been singing, but I often did when I was thinking about other things-doesn’t everybody?
“Just some pop thing I heard on KLIF, I guess. Something that got into my head. You know how songs do that. I don’t understand what’s got you so upset.”
“Something you heard on K-Life. With lyrics like ‘I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis, she tried to take me upstairs for a ride’?”
It wasn’t just my heart that sank; everything below my neck seemed to drop five inches. “Honky Tonk Women.” That’s what I’d been singing. A song that wouldn’t be recorded for another seven or eight years, by a group that wouldn’t even have an American hit for another three. My mind had been on other things, but still-how could I have been so dumb?
“‘She blew my nose and then she blew my mind’? On the radio? The FCC would shut down a station that played something like that!”
I started to get angry then. Mostly at myself… but not entirely at myself. I was walking a goddam tightrope, and she was shouting at me over a Rolling Stones tune.
“Chill, Sadie. It’s just a song. I don’t know where I heard it.”
“That’s a lie, and we both know it.”
“You’re freaking out. I think maybe I better take my groceries and head home.” I tried to keep my voice calm. The sound of it was very familiar. It was the way I’d always tried to speak to Christy when she came home with a snootful. Skirt on crooked, blouse half-untucked, hair all crazy. Not to mention the smeared lipstick. From the rim of a glass, or from some fellow barfly’s lips?
Just thinking about it made me angrier. Wrong again, I thought. I didn’t know if I meant Sadie or Christy or me, and at that moment I didn’t care. We never get so mad as when we get caught, do we?
“I think maybe you better tell me where you heard that song, if you ever want to come back here. And where you heard what you said to the kid at the checkout when he said he’d double-bag your chicken so it wouldn’t leak.”
“I don’t have any idea what-”
“‘Excellent, dude,’ that’s what you said. I think maybe you better tell me where you heard that. And kick out the jams. And boogie shoes. And shake your bootie. Chill and freaking out, I want to know where you heard those, too. Why you say them and no one else does. I want to know why you were so scared of that stupid Jimla chant that you talked about it in your sleep. I want to know where Derry is and why it’s like Dallas. I want to know when you were married, and to who, and for how long. I want to know where you were before you were in Florida, because Ellie Dockerty says she doesn’t know, that some of your references are fake. ‘Appear to be fanciful’ is how she put it.”
I was sure Ellen hadn’t found out from Deke… but she had found out. I actually wasn’t too surprised, but I was infuriated that she had blabbed to Sadie. “She had no right to tell you that!”
She smashed out her cigarette, then shook her hand as bits of live coal jumped up and stung it. “Sometimes it’s like you’re from… I don’t know… some other universe! One where they sing about screwing drunk women from M-Memphis! I tried to-to tell myself all that doesn’t matter, that l-l-love conquers all, except it doesn’t. It doesn’t conquer lies.” Her voice wavered, but she didn’t cry. And her eyes stayed fixed on mine. If there had only been anger in them, it would have been a little easier. But there was pleading, too.
“Sadie, if you’d only-”
“I won’t. Not anymore. So don’t start up with the stuff about how you’re not doing anything you’re ashamed of and I wouldn’t be, either. Those are things I need to decide for myself. It comes down to this: either the broom goes, or you’ll have to.”
“If you knew, you wouldn’t-”
“Then tell me!”
“I can’t. ” The anger popped like a pricked balloon, leaving an emotional dullness behind. I dropped my eyes from her set face, and they happened to fall on her desk. What I saw there stopped my breath.
It was a little pile of job applications for her time in Reno this coming summer. The top one was from Harrah’s Hotel and Casino. On the first line she had printed her name in neat block letters. Her full name, including the middle one I’d never thought to ask her about.
