The air smelled like fire smoke and fall leaves. It smelled a way that makes you feel how the world is right up close, rubbing against you. My head was starting to really hurt. It was late, and I didn’t know what to do, so I went back to Natalie’s. She and Hannah were asleep on the trampoline. I crawled underneath and slept on the ground.
The next day when we woke up with dew on our clothes, Natalie’s mom was making pancakes and bacon and called us in for breakfast. It smelled in the kitchen the way you want home to be. She said we were silly girls for sleeping outside. She was being nice, I think, because of her date. Natalie’s mom doesn’t look like other moms. Natalie said she works as a secretary in a law office, but for the weekend morning, she was wearing a shirt knotted above her belly button with cutoffs, and her dark hair up in a high ponytail. We all ate and were pretty quiet, just answering her mom’s questions, which were too cheerful. When she asked Natalie, “What happened to your tooth?” Natalie looked nervous for a minute. I knew it was my chance to show her I would keep their secret, so I said, “We got burgers from McDonald’s, and hers had a bone in it!” Hannah started laughing and said, “Sick, huh?!” I think since her mom felt guilty about sleeping over at her date’s house, she didn’t notice that we were guilty, too. Hannah picked a leaf out of my hair and handed it to me. Its veins threaded in tiny patterns through the yellow skin.
We never talked about the kissing, and at school on Monday, we acted normal. I made sure to have enough money for Nutter Butters at lunch, and I shared them with my friends. I looked at Sky and laughed when Hannah said he was undressing me in his mind. It was like nothing had happened. I tried not to, but I noticed the tiny piece of one of Natalie’s perfect teeth missing.
Kurt, I have this feeling like you know May, and Hannah and Natalie, and me, too. Like you can see into us. You sang the fear, and the anger, and all of the feelings that people are afraid to admit to. Even me. But I know you didn’t want to be our hero. You didn’t want to be an idol. You just wanted to be yourself. You just wanted us to hear the music.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Judy Garland,
When parents talk about their pasts, the stories start to stick in your head. But the memories that you inherit look different from the now-world, and different from your own memories, too. Like they have a color all their own. I don’t mean sepia-toned or something. My parents aren’t even that old. I just mean that there is something particular about their glow.
When I think of the stories that I know about your childhood and your family, I see them in almost the same color that I see my parents’ stories. I’m not sure why, but maybe it has to do with the happy-sad of it all. Or maybe it’s because of how my mom used to say that your movies gave her hope when she was younger.
She loved to watch them with us, so I don’t only know you from The Wizard Of Oz. We saw you in everything—Easter Parade, Babes on Broadway, Meet Me in St. Louis. On movie nights, May and I used to get up from the couch and sing along with you—“Zing zing zing went my heartstrings,” May would belt out as she pranced through the living room.
Mom said that when she was a little girl, she wanted to be like you. My dad came from a pretty perfect family, but Mom didn’t, and maybe that was the biggest difference between them. Mom grew up here, in Albuquerque. She never told us specifics, but her own mom (who died when I was little) was more or less an alcoholic, and I think her dad was pretty hard on her and Aunt Amy before he got cancer. He died when she was eighteen and Aunt Amy was twenty-one. Afterward, Mom’s mom kept drinking too much, Aunt Amy found God and got a job as a waitress, and Mom moved into a studio apartment and got a bartending job so she could start saving up money to go to California to follow her dream of becoming an actress.
In the meantime, she took acting classes and starred in shows at the local theater. Her best part came right after her twentieth birthday. She played Cosette in Les Mis, and the papers gave her rave reviews. She saved them in a scrapbook that she used to show to us when we were kids.
One night, Dad stopped into the bar where Mom worked. He was passing through town, back in what he called his “wild days,” when he rode his motorcycle across the country. Based on the old pictures, May and I thought he was quite a stud. Mom must have thought he was, too, because when he came into the bar, she asked him to come and see her in Les Mis the next night.
Dad said it only took the length of the performance for him to fall in love. When it was over, he was waiting outside of Mom’s dressing room with a bouquet of daisies. She invited him over to her apartment, and they stayed up late, stargazing on the roof of the building and talking. After that, Dad found a job in town working on a construction crew for a new hotel, and he saw Mom as much as he could. They rode the tramway to the top of the mountains, watched the watermelon-colored sunsets, and danced in Mom’s little studio to Beatles songs. Four months later, Mom found out she was pregnant with May, and they decided to get married.
When Mom told the story, she said that she’d always wanted a home, but it wasn’t until she had us that she knew what that meant. Now that I’m writing it down to tell you, it seems like a tragedy. But when we were growing up, we thought it was romantic. May would ask to hear the story over and over, and Mom loved to tell May how she was the spark that started it all. “You were ready to come into the world, and so you did. We have you to thank for us, baby girl.”
When we were little, Mom still used to go to auditions sometimes for theater productions or local commercials. Once she got a part in a commercial for the Rio Grande Credit Union. They shot her waking up on the steps of a new house in her pajamas, saying, “Am I dreaming?” Then a lady dressed as the credit union fairy drops keys into her hand. We’d squeal when the ad came on TV, saying, “Look, it’s you, Mommy!”
But mostly the auditions didn’t work out, and she’d come home like a balloon whose air had been let out. Eventually, she said that she’d missed her window, and that if you want to be a real actress, you have to live in California. She took up painting instead and got a job filing papers in a doctor’s office. She said that she thought being a mom was her real job. She said that we were her greatest accomplishment.
Mom would say all the time how she wanted us to have happy childhoods, happier than her own. Sometimes she’d ask us if we were happy, and we’d always say yes. Still, she said that she wished she could give us more. She liked to talk about somedays. Someday we’ll have a house with a pool. Someday we’ll learn to ride horses. Someday we’ll have beautiful dresses with sequins head to toe, like the ones on TV. Someday we’ll go to California. We’ll see the ocean together.