Tempo Change (7 page)

“Well, let me just take a look,” Ed said.

I pulled the guitar out from under my bed and he studied it. He twirled it around in his big hands, looked inside the sound hole, looked at the back of the neck, and held it
up to eye level, never losing his grin. What was he grinning at? What was just randomly and consistently pleasing to him?

“My dad was kind of famous,” I said.

“I know who he is. The crack’s not too bad.”

“Ed and I have talked about that,” my mother said, narrowing her eyes at me.

“I’d leave it alone unless it bugs you,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The crack. I wouldn’t bother trying to do anything with it. Replacing the top would change the guitar. I don’t think you want to do that.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I could give it a setup,” he said. “Get rid of the buzz on the low E. I’d do it for free, no problem.”

“Maybe,” I said. I didn’t want to admit the low E string had a buzz but it did.

They stood there for a long uncomfortable minute and then it was Ed who said to my mother, “Let’s go to the Urth Café and get a coffee or something. Blanche looks busy.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“You in the program, Ed?”

“What?”

“AA. That how you guys met?”

“No, we met at my store. Your mom came by to check it out.”

“Awesome.”

Mom touched his arm and said, “Ed, go on and I’ll meet you at Urth.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at me.

“Nice to meet you,” he said and went out.

“What’s that accent of his? He sounds like the movie
Fargo.
”

“He’s from the Midwest. Blanche, really, did I raise you to be rude or is this something you picked up on your own?”

“I thought brutal honesty was the policy of the program.”

“You’re not in the program. You’re a teenager who’s expected to be courteous to people in our house.”

“He’s a guitar salesman. Ed the Guitar Guy.”

“What’s your point?”

“It’s a little far to fall, Mom. Rock star to guitar salesman.”

She stared hard at me and I wasn’t at all sure what she was going to do because I couldn’t remember ever having talked to her that way. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it now.

“Your father,” she said, “is not here. You may have noticed.”

“So that’s Ed’s big selling point? He’s here?”

She ran her fingers through her hair and took a breath and stared at the wall. I could imagine she was following some AA rhyming rule like “When in doubt, leave it out.”

She said, “Ed and I are going to Urth. I want you to apologize the next time you see him.”

“Fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it anymore because something on my computer screen had caught my eye.

His name had jumped up in my in-box.

She went out and I waited until I heard the front door close and then I clicked on my dad’s screen name: Ineffablel. The title box said “Keep Me Informed.”

I read the e-mail over and over:

I read the e-mail over and over until I memorized it.

Then I got out his cracked guitar and started putting some chords together for a song I would later call “Looks Like Faith.”

The next day I told the band about Ed the Guitar Guy. I told them about “Keep Me Informed.” I found I was telling them everything. I had to because everything that happened to me now had a place to land. Every funny story, strange
character or strong emotion worked its way toward a song that I had a reason to write.

It was a little uncomfortable, letting people into my life that way. I hadn’t told anyone that I still talked to my father because I was afraid he’d stop contacting me. I kept my promise about not telling anyone where he was, but for a long time, I never breathed a word about even knowing he was alive.

The great thing about Gigi and Viv and Ella was that other than a rudimentary understanding of their instruments, they didn’t know the first thing about music so they didn’t care about my father. Other than he was my father.

Viv said it was strange, she couldn’t imagine her father the physicist doing anything cool. He was one step away from taping his glasses together. Her mother had to lay his clothes out for him because his head was always so preoccupied he couldn’t bother to tell what matched.

Ella said her father owned a trucking company and all he did was work and when he came home from work he drank beer. Her mother kept herself busy scrapbooking and driving her five brothers around. Ella was the youngest and a mistake. Her mother was so worn out by then that she didn’t have the energy to figure out how to raise a daughter differently so Ella was raised as a son and that was why she was the way she was.

“I’m not gay, though,” she said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay but everyone thinks I am and I’m not.”

“Grow your hair,” Gigi suggested.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“I’ll show you. I’m good at it. We’ll do a makeover.”

“You’d have to come over every day. It’s easier like this.”

I told her not to change it; the look was good for the band and besides, she’d find someone who liked her because she was different. I had some success with that.

“You mean like Jeff?” she asked.

“Jeff’s a friend.”

“You don’t like him?”

“He’s a geek and he works in a pizza shop.”

“You’re holding out for the rock star?” Viv asked.

“Who isn’t?”

They both said they weren’t but I thought they were lying.

I complained some more about Ed the Guitar Guy and how my mother was settling for him. And that’s how we started talking about guitar stores. Viv remembered that Guitar Center was just right down the street from school and suggested we go there.

“I can’t stand it there,” Gigi said. “My father likes to go in there and look around. It’s loud and there are all these pimply adolescent boys playing bad guitar and the salespeople are jerks and they all look like rejects from some Depeche Mode tribute band.”

“Sounds great,” Ella said. “Let’s go during lunch.”

So we did.

I didn’t think it was my imagination that we all moved a little differently walking down the street to Guitar Center. I could have sworn we were swaggering. Before we were just Laurel Hall kids and we were aware of people looking at us
as if something were fundamentally wrong with us because we went to such a joke of a school. (People were probably never thinking that; we were thinking that.) But now we moved like a rock band.

We went into Guitar Center and it was exactly the way Gigi described. We walked around all the guitars and touched them and played them. We went through the keyboards and banged on them, and Viv sang into one of the mikes and then we went to the drums and Ella played a little, which caused all the guys to look at us, even the salesmen who’d been ignoring us because, since we were girls, they thought we weren’t going to buy anything. But once Ella played, people paid attention and she felt it and blushed.

I left that scene because it was a good opportunity to slip away and try out a pink Telecaster I had my eye on. I had never imagined myself playing an electric guitar but because this one was pink I felt I was allowed to touch it. It was already plugged in so I picked it up and strummed it and it sounded great, like a chime with some muscle to it, and everything I did on it sounded like a legitimate noise, not like an accident the way the acoustic guitar sometimes sounded. A guy with long hair and a nose ring came over and asked if he could answer any questions and I couldn’t think of any except “How much is it?” And he said it was whatever it was and I didn’t really listen because I knew it wasn’t forty-seven dollars which was how much money I had in my checking account after I’d paid for books and uniforms. I thanked him and he walked away but said over his shoulder, “It looks good on you.”

I thought about being offended because he should have
said something about my playing, which was more than most girls knew. Then I thought it wasn’t such a bad thing to say a guitar looked good on a person and I was still thinking about that when the others returned and said we should get back to school.

If we had left a second earlier. If Ella hadn’t played the drums, if I hadn’t picked up the Telecaster, if we hadn’t gone there at all but used the time instead to study as we usually did. That’s the kind of bargaining you do when you look back at a twist of fate, lying in the path like something that accidentally flew out the window. We were walking down Sunset Boulevard three blocks from where we’d turn to go safely back to LaHa when I think it was Gigi who said, “Hey, we’ve never been in here, either. Let’s go in.”

It was your typical New Agey incense store with crystals and Buddhas and selections of tea. It was called Sanctuary Tide, which seemed like two words that didn’t belong together, but it conjured images of all your dreams coming true and stuff so we went in.

There were wind chimes and candles and everything smelled like church and there was some distant flute playing. Buddhas were everywhere, side by side with African masks and some Shiva the destroyers, and that Hindu elephant god with extra arms. I felt nervous. My mother was always dragging me into stores like that when I was little, on her search for whatever was going to save her, and she changed religions or spiritual disciplines the way most people changed their hairstyles.

This was in the beginning of the program when she felt she needed some kind of concrete image of God in order to
surrender to Him. She went through every imaginable icon on her altar before giving up and deciding He was the Energy that picked up where hers ran out. He was, she said, doing all the things we only thought we were doing. She said things like “It’s not your will that makes everything work, Blanche. It just isn’t.”

But in Sanctuary Tide, the other girls were poking around and laughing and smelling things while the woman behind the counter with dreadlocks and nineteen piercings and tattoos on her neck glared at them in a way that wasn’t very bodhisattva. I was ready to leave.

“Come on, you guys,” I said.

They didn’t hear me. They were intrigued with something over in the corner.

I could feel the eyes of Dreds bearing down on us.

“Guys, we’re going to be late,” I insisted.

The others were lifting the top off an ornate wooden and brass canister. It had wire mesh at the top with a little piggy-bank type slit and you could look through and see little pieces of paper piling up at the bottom.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Fancy trash can, I guess,” Gigi said.

It had some kind of hieroglyphic writing on it, which meant it was especially holy. God spoke Chinese or Egyptian or Latin, never English.

From across the room, Dreds said, “It’s a prayer box.”

“What’s that?” Viv asked.

“It’s a thing you put prayers in, genius,” Ella said.

“Why would you put prayers in something?” Gigi asked.

By now Dreds had flip-flopped her way over to us.

“It’s my favorite thing in the store,” she said in a serious tone. She reeked of clove cigarettes and she had Chinese symbols tattooed across both hands to match the ones on her neck. “What you do is you offer your most sacred prayer and the box contains it for you.”

“Why would you want a prayer to be contained?” Ella asked. “Wouldn’t you want it to go to heaven?”

“Why would you need to write it down?” said Gigi. “God can’t hear?”

“Writing something down impresses the unconscious,” Dreds said a little impatiently, “and the unconscious communicates directly with Spirit. So it’s a faster process.”

“So it’s like the FedEx of praying,” Viv said.

I laughed. “Good one. You are coming along, grasshopper. You’re getting the hang of relentless sarcasm.”

“Mocking the Spirit doesn’t make it less real,” said Dreds in a serious tone.

“A prayer box doesn’t make it more real,” Viv said with a degree of haughtiness. “My father’s a physicist and my mother’s a biologist and they say there’s no empirical evidence of anything but a random and indifferent universe.” (She said this like it was something she memorized because she didn’t understand what it meant but it carried a lot of weight at her house. The way, ironically, some people memorize prayers.)

“Here’s what you do,” Dreds said, deciding that Viv wasn’t worth arguing with. “You take a piece of paper, you write your prayer on it, you put it in the prayer box. You don’t think about the prayer again. If you think about it again, it takes the power away from it because it exhibits a
lack of faith. The universe, see, is very literal and if you offer something to it, it will provide what you want but it can’t connect as powerfully if you keep doubting it. It interferes with the energetic communion.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want to do that,” Ella said.

“It’s the way you don’t talk about a wish that you make.” Dreds powered on. “Everything leaks energy when you transfer it or translate it.”

“Does it cost anything to give it a shot?” Gigi asked.

“No.”

“Then I’m game.”

Gigi took the pad of paper and pencil that were sitting by the prayer box. She scribbled on a piece of the paper and dropped it in the canister.

“Do I have to chant or anything now?” she asked Dreds.

“No.”

“Awesome.”

To my surprise, Ella followed suit and dropped in a prayer. Viv scoffed and then said she was going to do it just to prove it didn’t work. That left me as the holdout and I had to go for it because I didn’t feel we had time for an argument. I scribbled something quickly and dropped it in and then, at last, we could leave.