Twang (14 page)

“But then, I remind myself she’s a bear to live with every February because it’s one of those wishy-washy times when it comes to gardening and she’s chompin’ at the bit for the weather to warm up so she can get outside and dig in her dirt.” Tonilynn shook her head. “But what’s sad is that this year she keeps forgetting it’s too cold to garden yet, and I’ll find her out there in twenty-degree weather, barefoot in her housedress, scratching around with the hoe. I’ll say to her, ‘Aunt Gomer, winter’s not done yet. Tim the weatherman says we won’t have the last killing frost until around April fifteenth. You absolutely cannot
force
something like gardening. Please come on back in the house.’ ” Tonilynn sighed. “I swan, Jennifer, sometimes it’s like having two ornery young’uns I’m in charge of. Except one’s eighty-six years old.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “I don’t know what’s ailing Bobby Lee. Guess he wants the spring to get here, too, so he can get to fishing.”

I detected a little bit of wistfulness in Tonilynn’s voice and I glanced at her ring finger. There was no wedding band. “You
don’t mind driving in the dark? Mike told me you live pretty far away.”

“Hon, I am what you call an in-dee-pen-dent woman. Had to be ever since I was sixteen. In fact, I realized last week when I turned forty-eight that I’ve been taking care of myself twice as long as I’ve had somebody lookin’ out for me. Sixteen times three equals forty-eight, right?” She pushed up her sleeve to glance at her wristwatch and I could see several colorful tattoos peeking out—one that looked like a double bracelet of barbed-wire and the other the red, vulgar lips of the Rolling Stones logo.

“Anyway,” she said, “it’s only a couple hours drive from here to Cagle Mountain. You’ll have to come up to the homeplace sometime.”

Images of Blue Ridge, Georgia, came to me when she said the word
mountain
, and I broke out in an instant little sweat. I reached down for the floppy denim tote bag under my chair that held a spiral notebook of songs I was working on.

“Don’t go hurrying off on account of me, darlin’,” Tonilynn’s eyes caught mine in the mirror and held me in my seat. “I’m enjoying getting to know you. Won’t you please stay in my Hair Chair just a bit longer?” She gave my shoulder a squeeze.

I took a deep breath and settled back obediently.

“One story I just love hearing from all my famous clients is how they got started. You know, how their gift was cultivated by different folks along life’s pathway? Maybe Mama encouraged them to take piano lessons or to sing in the church choir? Or Uncle Bill gave them a guitar when they were ten. Maybe daddy signed ’em up for music lessons when they were teeny, after he noticed that the voice coming out of his child was not your ordinary one? Sometimes they tell me they were singing duets with Cousin Sue out on the
back porch when they weren’t but five years old.” Tonilynn paused for a breath and a swallow of a Diet Coke.

“I just find it so fascinating to hear the stories of stars as they were growing up, and I keep telling myself that someday I’m going to write a book and call it,
The Stars: Inspiration and Cultivation
. What do you think, hon?”

My initial reflex was to shut down. But Tonilynn’s voice was soothing, in that way adults use with hurt children. Now her back was to me as she was rinsing out Diet Coke cans she’d gathered from all over the trailer, setting them upside down in the sink to drain. In addition to her hair being a big blonde work of art, she had what folks referred to as “a big back porch” encased in stretch denim. This was comforting to me in a way I couldn’t explain. “Um,” I ventured, “my family didn’t really encourage, cultivate, whatever you want to call it, my singing or my songwriting.”

Tonilynn turned to me, her mouth open. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Well, I bet they’re proud of you now.”

I shifted my eyes to the mirror, startled at the contrast of our reflections. Tonilynn’s hair spun like golden cotton candy and mine long and stick-straight, so dark it was almost navy. Good versus evil flashed through my mind. Immediately my finger took a notion of its own and grabbed a strand of hair at the base of my skull to twirl. Around and around it spun until it hurt and calmed me a tiny bit so I was able to contemplate my response. “Nope,” I released the word finally, and the way it sounded made it seem like it was wearing boxing gloves, punching Tonilynn’s last comment in the gut.

Her eyebrows flew up. “You’re pulling my leg! Oh . . . wait a minute. I am so sorry, hon.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “I bet your folks have passed away, haven’t they?”

“They’re alive.”

Tonilynn breathed a sigh of relief. “Whew, that’s good,” she said in a bright voice, popping the pull-tab on another can of Diet Coke with her frosted pink fingernail. “Care for one?” She held it toward me.

I shook my head and for a moment I had the oddest feeling of disappointment when I thought she wasn’t going to pursue the cultivation question. But after several sips, she looked over at me with a softness in her eyes. “So your family wasn’t supportive. But you managed to get yourself here somehow, now didn’t you?”

I shrugged.

“Talk to Tonilynn about the parent issue.”

Was I dreaming?
“What?!”

“That’s what the Hair Chair’s for. Talking through issues with Tonilynn. And speaking of the Hair Chair, what’s said here, stays here. You have my word on it.” Tonilynn leaned her backside against the wall, crossed her ankles. “You say mama and daddy ain’t proud of their baby? Well, what do they say when you call up and say, ‘I’ve got me another hit song!’ ”

“We don’t have that kind of relationship,” I said, shocked at the words spilling out of my mouth.

“You don’t call your mama every time you get a new hit song?”

“Nope.”

“Well, why not?”

It took a few seconds, but I said, “I only opened up to my mother one time about wanting to come to Nashville.”

“Tell me, darlin’.”

“All right. It was the summer I turned twelve, and we were in the kitchen canning tomatoes. I said, ‘When I get bigger, I want to go to Nashville and be a country music star.’ ”

Tonilynn flexed one foot in its pink boot. “Did she say ‘No, you can’t go?’ ”

“She . . . didn’t say anything for a long time. Then finally she looked at me and said, ‘You do sing pretty. I could ’bout listen to you all day and all night.’ ”

“Oh! Now that was sweet!” Tonilynn chirped.

“Then she told me I was forbidden to mention my dream of being a country music star again, that I needed to accept who and where I was. She said, ‘Chasing big dreams like that only leads to misery.’ ”

“No!” breathed Tonilynn, leaning forward to touch my hand. “Oh, hon, that hurts my heart. I bet she was just scared, trying to protect you in her own way. She didn’t want her precious little girl to get hurt.”

I shook my head. “She was scared all right. She was absolutely, 100 percent terrified. But it wasn’t because she was trying to protect me.”

“What on earth was she so scared of?” Tonilynn had grabbed a broom and was sweeping in little meaningless circles on the floor all around the Hair Chair.

“My father . . .” I could barely get those words out of my throat.

Tonilynn nodded. “And why was your mother so scared of your father?”

My mouth went dry. My heartrate accelerated. I wasn’t ready for the mental land mines hiding beneath that question. “You . . . you really don’t want to know. He’s not a very nice man. He’s pretty . . .” I blinked.
Sleazy
was the word I’d started to say. But I tossed my hair behind my shoulder, stood and smiled brightly. “I better be getting on home. The cat’s probably starving.” I wondered if Tonilynn’s heavenly intuition could detect my lie.

She just smiled and said in the nicest way, “Sure don’t want kitty to expire. We’ll have lots of opportunities to get to know each other better. I’ll tell you one thing: I am just itching to
hear about what finally got you here to Nashville. I bet that’s some story!” She plunged a cool flatiron into her wheeled suitcase bulging with cosmetics. “We’ll see you next Tuesday, and remember about the Holt Cantrell thing: this too shall pass.”

I knew I could never tell Tonilynn about that magical day with Mac at McNair Orchards without all the horrible, unmentionable stuff that led up to me working there. I also knew from looking at her face that she really believed what she said. Clearly the woman needed a dose of reality. Events do pass, yes, but they change a person before they do, and things you don’t want to remember can exert tremendous power. They can metabolize themselves in the lyrics of a song.

The last Friday in March, I slept late and woke to a blissfully empty schedule. The weather was sunny, warm enough to go barefoot, and I stepped out the back door at Harmony Hill, still in my nightgown. I didn’t get ten yards until I realized I had tender winter feet, but it felt so good to have nothing between me and the ground I walked along anyway, listening to the birds and admiring the scattered daffodils. I followed a winding trail to a bench and sat down to soak up sun for a while but then started feeling restless and got up to hike along randomly, picking a handful of daffodils. It hadn’t rained in weeks and even with the Bermuda grass, dust coated my feet and ankles so it looked like I had brown slippers sticking out below my nightgown. When I felt my stomach growling, I carried my flowers into the house and put them in a glass of water before I poured a bowl of cereal.

Sitting on the couch, my breakfast balanced on my thighs, my knees went watery. A memory from when I was nine years old moved in. I was running fast, barefoot, along a rutted dirt road in my pajamas, my feet coated with dust. Images from a confusing scene at home circled in my head as I ran.

How could that day be coming back in such bold brushstrokes?
I hopped up, sloshing milk onto the rug, determined to stop the memory in its tracks when the title zipped into my head like a bolt of lightning: “Dirt Roads and Sequin Gowns.”

Somehow I found myself back on the couch with my Washburn, playing some changes to this rhythm going around in my head as I started spewing out the lyrics. The first line, “In the house where I was raised, teardrops fell like rain,” was simply taking dictation, and the rest came together as easily, especially the chorus: “And I was running down those dirt roads, carrying some heavy loads and dreaming of sequin gowns. ’Cause I was dreaming of leaving, and I was believing, that nothing could keep me down.”

The verses wrote themselves, and the structure of the song laid itself down perfectly. I did have to work a little bit to refine the verse melody, but the melody for the chorus came to me with hardly any effort. It was one of those songwriting experiences you long for. The kind tht makes you feel absolutely blessed.

Unless, of course, it’s a memory you’d rather not visit. I stared down at those pages I’d written, now lying scattered on the floor beside the couch, feeling like a defenseless little girl and a furious grown woman, trapped in an endless tug-of-war.

I knew I could just ball it up, throw it away. But I didn’t. I didn’t seal myself up while I still had a snowball’s chance. I was trembling as I called Mike and sang “Dirt Roads and Sequin Gowns” over the phone to him. He was so excited; he drove out to Harmony Hill right away.

Monday came and I trudged around the house, exhausted from two nights of short, fragmented sleep, an undertow of anxiety about my new song tugging at my thoughts. Not to mention that on Saturday, I’d overheard part of a celebrity
gossip’s show where the host talked about Holt Cantrell and his accusations. I started to worry that I really might be a neurotic, overreactive crazy woman who’d thrown away her only chance at love and happiness.

I guzzled a cup of strong coffee and went outside to lie on my back and look at the clouds in hopes it would get my mind off things. But as it happened, I’d hardly warmed up the patch of grass when I heard a car’s engine. Lifting my head I saw Tonilynn’s ancient Pontiac Grand Am. You couldn’t miss her duotoned automobile if you tried—the white hood with orangish streaks of rust in sharp contrast to the pine-green body. It dawned on me that I’d totally forgotten my appointment in the Hair Chair. I flopped back into the grass, feeling like a selfish, inconsiderate heel.

Tonilynn spotted me right off, waved, and came striding across the stretch of lawn, waving a Panera Bread bag. She wore giant tortoiseshell sunglasses that made me think of movie stars from the 1970s.

“Howdy, hon,” she said, peering down at me with an amused expression. “I bet you wish you’d never given me your gate code!”

When I didn’t answer, Tonilynn pushed her glasses up on top of her confection of hair. “You okay, Jennifer?”

I didn’t want to get weepy, so I made myself concentrate on Tonilynn’s pink cowgirl boots, on the intricate curlicued pattern sewn with silver thread around the ankles. “I’m fine.”

She wasn’t fooled. “It’s such a pretty day we can just sit out here in the grass and talk.” Tonilynn plopped down on one hip, arranging her legs to the side, knee to knee like a movie star in an old photograph. “So what’s going on?” she asked, handing me the Panera bag.