1.<\/p>\n
My mother loved crooners\u2014Andy Williams, Perry Como, Jerry Vale. Especially Jerry Vale. His voice has a curvature, a rounding of the Rs that made him sound more Midwestern than like a guy from the Bronx, and a higher pitch than the others that added yearning, and maybe hope.<\/p>\n
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I know she liked his looks. Short, with lustrous black hair and sparkling brown eyes, Jerry had a smile that covered the bottom half of his face, his teeth gleaming and strong. He looked nothing like my tall, stooped, blond, green-eyed father, whose dentures came out the minute he stepped inside the front door, who sang \u201cWaltzing Matilda\u201d when he sang at all.<\/p>\n
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My mother listened to Jerry Vale as she did housework\u2014\u201cThe Impossible Dream\u201d while scrubbing the bathroom, \u201cTwo Purple Shadows\u201d as she washed windows, and always, she sang along, a clear, trilling soprano, trained in the church choir. She even accompanied Jerry in Italian\u2014\u201cAmore, Scusami,\u201d \u201cAl Di La\u201d\u2014note for note. She pronounced pasta as \u201cpaste-uh,\u201d but Jerry guided her effortlessly through the language of romance.<\/p>\n
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His calm tenor confessed love of the most resonant, enduring kind, and enunciated it so slowly and clearly, his sincerity couldn\u2019t be doubted. My mother, with her faraway blue eyes, wiped a rag slowly over the bathroom mirror as she and Jerry admonished their hearts to \u201cPretend You Don\u2019t See Her,\u201d to instead smile and pretend to be gay<\/em>. When I mocked the songs\u2014there were so many good lines to ridicule\u2014my mother looked hurt, and usually said something on the order of, \u201cJust wait, honey. Someday, you\u2019ll see how true these songs are.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That idea brought me up short later, when I was alone in my room. When had my mother picked the April rose that only grows in the early spring<\/em>? Whose fingers had touched her silent heart and taught it how to sing<\/em>? My father? His fingers were yellow with nicotine, and the rose bushes he planted in holes in our lawn all died before eking out a bloom.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With their absolutes and abstractions, Jerry\u2019s songs glorified relationships I deemed unhealthy, songs in which the beloved was the singer\u2019s reason to be living<\/em>. While my mother swooned at the implied subservience\u2014If they made me a king, I\u2019d be but a slave to you. Your kiss is all I need to seal my fate. You\u2019re my everything. Love me with every beat of your heart<\/em>\u2014I worried about the all-encompassing nature of this love, which seemed like a beast ready to swallow one\u2019s life whole. In the songs Jerry sang, even a chance encounter ended with the lovers at first sight being in love\u2014and staying together\u2014forever.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The songs I listened to created more troubling particulars\u2014romantics hiding behind bottles in dark cafes, or solitaries driving the snowy turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston as they bade goodbye to the moonlight ladies. Nobody\u2019s love was undying or encompassing. Even the most buoyant tune conveyed love\u2019s trepidation\u2014The dizzy dancing way you feel<\/em> gave way to love being just another show<\/em>, from which your final responsibility was to leave \u2019em laughing when you go, and if you care, don\u2019t let them know<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And gosh almighty, baby, yes indeed<\/em>\u2014sometimes the terms were laid out right up front: You and me will only see tonight<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 2.<\/p>\n The flat truths and bleakness of the songs I loved, my mother found depressing. \u201cWhat about the moonlight and roses?\u201d she asked once, near tears, as we argued our conflicting soundtracks. I was, at most, sixteen, and if not completely inexperienced, then close enough\u2014a fact I tried to hide with a knowing smirk.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n She said my ideas about love were all wrong. Someone brought you the roses, arranged with ferns and baby\u2019s breath in a crystal vase. You admired them in the moonlight streaming through the tall windows of your hotel room, in Paris maybe, listening to a tinkling piano from the next apartment, while you sipped champagne\u2014with someone. Someone was the key to your happiness. Moonlight and roses simply set the stage.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I probably turned sarcastic, asked when she\u2019d ever been to Paris, had roses delivered, sipped champagne in a hotel room? Maybe she said, Well, not Paris, but Stuttgart, that time your daddy and I went to a banquet there, and stayed overnight. And I would have snapped back, Oh, that time you fell on the stairs and broke your ankle? Was that because of champagne? I was under the impression that you were drinking bourbon that night.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Her \u201csomeone\u201d picked his nose at the dinner table, walked around the house in his boxer shorts, left his dirty socks balled up on the floor for her to pick up and throw in the hamper. He kept stacks of Penthouse<\/em> and Playboy<\/em> magazines on his bedside table, beside an ashtray filled with cigarette butts that she\u2019d empty the next morning when she made their bed. He got angry with her over trifles, called her stupid when she did something wrong. Sometimes he introduced her as \u201cmy first wife.\u201d When the other person looked puzzled, he\u2019d explain, \u201cIt keeps her on her toes.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I don\u2019t know why I couldn\u2019t let her have her fantasies. I\u2019m not sure what I got out of making her feel sad, unless it was a tightening of my own precarious grip on a world that I\u2019d barely tested\u2014and that had barely tested me. She knew I laughed at her plastic flower arrangements, her treacly music, her bedside copies of The Daily Word<\/em>, the musicals she watched open-mouthed on TV, weeping as couples sang their devotion. I laughed when she periodically broke into song, sometimes just a single line\u2014Starlight looks well on us!<\/em> Moonlight becomes you!<\/em> Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars<\/em>!<\/em> So much moonlight you\u2019d think my mother carried a beast inside her that yearned for lunar liberation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 3.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a warm June evening, a full moon hanging above the blue spruce\u2014the strawberry moon in this hemisphere, but the cold moon down below. Trees and bushes encircle our small backyard so that at night, it feels almost like a room with a wide door at either end, the occasional breaks in the foliage like windows onto the alley. I like just to sit out here and feel the night weighing in around me with all its mystery and substance, all its scents and secrets. Sometimes I hear small disturbances in the underbrush\u2014rabbits, the neighborhood possum, an elusive groundhog the size of a small dog that\u2019s lived around here for years. Sometimes I hear an occasional, abbreviated birdcall, as if some parent bird\u2019s reassuring a nestling. Sometimes people walk down the alley, quietly talking, and I watch them, motionless and invisible in the shade of my neighbor\u2019s hemlock hedge. The moon casts shadows that seem clearer cut than those in the day\u2014a literal black and white demarcation on the grass.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But this night, my husband and I are dancing under the full moon. Blood on the Tracks<\/em> plays from my iPhone\u2014the same phone I used minutes earlier, to call him down from his study, to lure him into the backyard to see the moon. Damp grass cool against my bare feet, long cotton skirt swaying against my ankles, I\u2019ve had way too much wine and my husband is cold sober. I\u2019m not sure how one is supposed to dance to \u201cTangled Up in Blue,\u201d but we give it a shot, holding hands and jouncing around the yard, laughing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I like to think that whatever illusions we had about one another vanished years ago, victim of daily familiarity and perceptiveness. We\u2019ve been together nearly forty years, married for most of it. Marriage is not a straight line, it\u2019s a wheel. During one declension, my husband told me that if he had to make a choice between his work and me, he\u2019d choose his work. He knows if the boat was sinking and I could only save one person, it would be our son. We have hurt one another deeply. We have helped one another vastly. He brings home champagne for special occasions. We\u2019re the best of friends.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Only four of the twenty-nine rose bushes in our yard were here when we bought this house. As we twirl around the yard, I point out how the white and pink roses shimmer, almost phosphorescent in the moonlight. Their scent hangs lightly in the summer air.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The song ends and my husband says, \u201cLet\u2019s hear it again before I go back upstairs.\u201d He\u2019s working on a poem. Having hammered all day on a story that won\u2019t give, I\u2019m letting off a little steam. This time we slow dance, moving with awkward familiarity. \u201cStop trying to lead,\u201d my husband says, as he does each time we dance. Of this song, Dylan remarked, \u201cYou’ve got yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little you can’t imagine not happening.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Summer and the phosphorescence of music, flowers, and long-term love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":484,"template":"","categories":[9,49,142],"tags":[213,214,215,216],"class_list":["post-483","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-literary-features","category-nonfiction","tag-marriage","tag-mother-daughter-relationship","tag-romance","tag-summer"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n