Blowin' My Mind Like a Summer Breeze, page 2
Without missing a beat, my dad says, “No, but we get that all the time. We must really look like them. Thanks for the help.”
It’s a quarter to four when we get going. Two sweaty hours by the side of the highway, and our only reward is more highway. I’m so tired of being on four wheels I could scream.
I get a travel wipe out of my duffel bag and scrub my face until it stings, and the wipe is caked with brown. I put on some deodorant but can still smell engine fumes and sweat on my T-shirt. I’d kill for a shower, for a bed that doesn’t squeak with every bump in the road.
I gaze out the window at a charcoal sky dotted with occasional stars. I breathe. I settle. My mind wanders. Somewhere, a girl in her bed, sound asleep. She’s dreaming. Tomorrow she’ll go to her part-time summer job at the local pharmacy. She’s polite with the customers, friendly with her boss. Every paycheck goes into her college fund. After work, she changes into a cute dress, then meets her best friend for pizza at their favorite spot. They share a pepperoni with extra cheese and talk about how crazy it is that their lives are going by so fast. They giggle at inside jokes, pretend not to look at a table of boys across the restaurant. They go outside and hug goodnight and look up at a charcoal sky dotted with occasional stars, having no idea there’s another girl out there, a girl who plays a hundred and thirty shows a year and lives out of a duffel bag. A girl with a million stories and no one to tell them to.
The highway hums, and I hum softly back, up a third, so that we’re harmonizing.
I’m waiting for something. I just wish I knew what it was.
Track Three
A Girl with Black Hair Walks By
Press the fast forward button. Right there. Stop.
Three shows later. Three cities later. Louisville. Indianapolis. Chicago. By in a blur of piano chords beneath my fingers and applause from anonymous crowds. In a montage of solitaire and rest areas and Chicken McNuggets. Rinse, wash, repeat.
It’s noon on Saturday when we drive through the gates of Cascade Family Resort, which sits high and mighty on a hill overlooking the glimmering shores of Lake Michigan. This is it. The last stop. We’ve been on the road since early June, thirty shows in the rearview, and now we’re ending our summer tour here with a week-long gig. Then the long ride home and a few weeks off.
Beneath Cascade Family Resort, there’s a smaller sign that reads: Where families go to be families again.
We unload our gear through the back door of Evergreen Ballroom where we’re playing all week. In the ballroom’s front windows, yellow and red posters with our picture on them announce The Cobb Family Band featuring “the legendary” Luce and Tracy Cobb. Two sets! Only $5 for resort guests! $15 for general public. Be there!
Our first show here isn’t until Monday. And after playing nearly every night for the past six weeks straight, two days off without having to touch a piano or sing a note sounds like a dream. Even better, Walden and I have our own rooms for the week. I can’t wait to be in a quiet room, all by myself, blissfully alone.
Bleary eyed, worn to the bone with road fatigue, we take a walk around.
To me, the Cascade Family Resort looks like some place out of a summer camp movie. Fresh cut lawns. White lifeguard towers with tanned boys twirling whistles on strings. Relaxed-looking people in sunglasses doing relaxed-looking people things. Groups of giggling teenagers playing volleyball. Shirtless guys and girls in tiny bikinis.
Unfortunately, the bubble on the individual room thing bursts pretty fast. There was a mix-up. Walden and I are sharing after all. Fabulous. On my tombstone they’re going to write: Here Lies Rainey Cobb, She Died from an Extreme Lack of Privacy.
“We thought both kids were girls, and that they’d want to room together,” the receptionist explained, sounding apologetic. “We were sure Walden was a girl’s name. Wal-den. It sounds girlish, doesn’t it?”
“Well, it’s not a girl’s name, as you can see,” said Mom, gesturing to my six-foot-tall brother. “There’s really no available rooms?”
“Sorry, but no. It’s the busy season.”
Mom gave us one of her patented Tracy Cobb tough love looks, the one that roughly translated to suck it up, nobody said any of this was going to be easy.
Ten minutes later, Walden surveys our shared room with a shake of his head.
“Just once I’d like to have a room all to myself,” he says.
“Oh, and I wouldn’t? Your cologne is reaching radioactive levels.”
“Chicks dig cologne, Rainey. It’s a proven fact.”
“What chicks?”
“Just…chicks. Not to mention a man needs space to think so he can contemplate the nature of existence and his place in the world.”
“How would you know?” I ask.
There are jets in the bathtub, which seems promising. Otherwise, it’s a copy of a copy of every other hotel room.
Walden plops down on the bed closer to the window, takes his drawing pad and Walkman out of his backpack, then slips his fuzzy orange headphones over his ears. The second I hear Bob Dylan’s stupid voice for the millionth time this summer, I grab my backpack and find my way down to the beach to have a look around and do my homework.
There I am nestled in a seat of sugary white sand, stuck on an algebra problem with a lot of Xs and Ys, when a girl with black hair walks by using one of those claw grabber things to put beach trash into a white bucket. She’s wearing baggy camo cargo shorts, a black T-shirt, massive aviator sunglasses, and a black trucker hat with a skull on it. Add in her nose ring and purple lipstick, and she looks like a movie villain or a member of the X-Men.
When she stops right in front of me, I realize I’ve been staring at her for a while.
“A little light reading?” she says.
With my algebra textbook open in my lap, notebook and pencil in hand, I look like I’m ready to show the Pythagorean Theorem who’s boss.
Before I can respond, she’s already walking away, weaving through sunbathers and boom boxes and freshly made sandcastles. Instead of leaving the beach, though, she puts her bucket and claw thing up near the rocks far from shore, strips off her shorts and T-shirt to reveal a black one-piece bathing suit, straps on a pair of goggles that appear from I don’t even know where, then bounds into the water and starts slicing through Lake Michigan like she’s suddenly grown fins. I’ve never seen anybody swim so fast or gracefully.
After doing laps back and forth, she climbs onto the dock and dives off in a perfect arc, barely raising a splash. Then, coiled at the dock’s edge, she launches herself as fast as she can into the water, over and over, like simulating the start of a race.
When she comes back onto the beach, I do that thing where you try to watch someone without them knowing it, looking down but actually staring at them out of the corner of your eye. She’s impossible not to look at. Even the way she gets dressed has swagger, as if life is a performance and she doesn’t care who’s watching. Still, I’m disappointed when she slips a cigarette into her mouth and starts patting her pockets. She walks over to me.
“You got a light?”
“Uh. No.”
But then she finds her lighter, a silver Zippo like the one my dad has, and lights up.
“You want one?”
“No, thank you. Smoking’s really bad for you.” It just slips out. But smoking really is bad for you! My grandpa died of emphysema. And sometimes my dad has these coughing fits so bad it sounds like his insides are being cut apart by a chainsaw. I can’t get him to quit, so I’ve promised myself I’ll never start.
A long beat goes by where neither of us says anything. Seeming unfazed by my comment, she takes a big puff. I take a deep breath. The sun pings off her Aviators. It’s probably no more than a few seconds, but that moment pulls apart like silly putty and keeps going and going. Almost like she’s decided not to speak again until I do. My heart is pounding. Why am I so nervous? Some words slip out.
“Do you work here?” I gesture over toward her trash bucket.
“Kind of. I live here. My parents own this place. They make me do odd jobs in the summer. Trash duty. Maid service. Making omelets in the Sunday buffet. They say it builds character, but I don’t think it’s working.”
“Are you in training or something? Your swimming, I mean.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I want to get a scholarship in a couple years. Anything to get me out of having to run this place. You’re one of the Cobb kids, aren’t you?”
How does she know that?
“My mom said you and your brother are homeschooled. Who else would be doing homework on the beach in July? She said if I ran into you, I should try to make you feel welcome. How am I doing?”
“Good. I guess.”
“You got a name?”
This girl is so confident. Like she’s not afraid of anything.
“Rainey.”
“That’s a cool name.”
“Really?” No one has ever described my name as cool. Not once. Not ever.
“I’ve never met anyone named Rainey before. Have you? Besides you, I mean?”
“No.”
“See. That makes it cool. You’re one of a kind.”
I notice the way her wet bathing suit has made a dark imprint of itself on her dry T-shirt.
For some reason I tell her that I’m named after Ma Rainey, one of my mom’s favorite blues singers, which I’ve never really told anyone, because honestly, who gives a crap? I even add that Ma Rainey’s real name was Gertrude, so it could have been worse.
“I’m named after a Shakespeare character,” she says.
“Which one?”
“Juliet,” she says, “of the house of…”
“Capulet,” I say.
“You like Shakespeare?”
“Yeah. But not Romeo and Juliet.”
“Why?”
“It’s kind of immature,” I say. “I’m just not sure love is worth killing yourself over.”
She laughs. “Have you ever been in love?”
She sits down only a few inches away and we sort of fall into a conversation, spending the next half hour talking like this. While she talks, her fingers make aimless trails through the warm, soft sand. I find myself focusing really hard on everything she’s saying. The voices around us, all the laughing kids and instructing mothers, seem to fade away.
Sometimes conversation feels like a test, but talking to Juliet is easy. Like a test I’ve been studying for my whole life. She asks about my smoking comment, and I tell her about my grandfather and the coughing fits my dad has.
"That sucks,” she says.
She gushes about music and all the bands she loves. Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Bjork, The Breeders. Her favorite band is Nirvana, but when I tell her that the only Nirvana song I’ve ever really heard is that one they always play on the radio, Juliet looks at me like I just claimed the Earth is flat.
“This madness cannot stand!” she says in a booming God voice that dissolves both of us into hysterics. I’m not even sure what’s so funny but I can’t stop laughing.
“What are you doing right now?” she asks.
“Um,” I say, “algebra.”
“Screw that. Come listen to some music. I have every Nirvana album in my room. I’ll pop your Nirvana cherry. Sorry, that was gross. But you know what I mean.”
I have no idea what she means.
She reaches out and actually takes my hand in hers. I shake people’s hands every day—firm grip, two pumps—but this feels different. Tender and purposeful. Her hand is dappled with tiny grains of sand that lightly scrape against my skin. Her fingernails are slick with shiny black polish.
Our eyes meet.
“Are you ready?”
“I guess so,” I say, having no idea what I’m supposed to be ready for.
Only that I’m prepared to follow Juliet anywhere.
Track Four
Like Lightning That Doesn’t Stop
Confession #1: I’m kind of a snob when it comes to music. But it’s not really my fault. I blame my parents, who have surrounded me my whole life with music whose greatness has already passed the ultimate test. Time.
Confession #2: Because of the logic explained in Confession #1, I don’t really like Nirvana. Sorry.
I’m sitting on the edge of Juliet’s bed while she subjects me to their “masterpiece,” Nevermind, with the sonic fury of her massive stereo. This is the album that’s such a big deal? With so much distortion, how can you appreciate the melodies or understand the lyrics? I’m holding the CD case in my hand, and yep, that’s a naked baby. In a pool. With a dollar bill attached to a fishhook in front of him.
“Can you turn it down a little bit?”
Jesus, I sound like my mother.
“You’re a musician!” she shouts over the noise. “How is it you’ve never heard the best album of the last ten years?”
I know it’s her enthusiasm talking, but there’s something a little weird about how teenagers are so obsessed with what’s happening right now, as if it’s automatically better than what came before. It’s a pretty reductive view of art. Especially since all new music is influenced by the music that came before it. How many people under eighteen even know who Bessie Smith is? Or Fats Waller? Or Erik Satie? Or even Black Sabbath, who obviously influenced Nirvana? You’re telling me those musicians are less exciting just because most people who have big screen TVs and wear Reeboks don’t know who they are? Pardon me, but that’s bullshit.
Okay, now I really sound like my mother.
What I do love without question, though, is Juliet’s bedroom. Scratch that. Her suite. The Overlander Suite. As in, her freaking bedroom is actually a hotel suite that has its own name. The room I share with my brother at home is half the size of this. Maybe less. But Juliet has her own small kitchen. Her own living room, bedroom, and bathroom. She has her own toilet! Her own posters of musicians and athletes. Her own trophy case packed with shiny medals and gleaming trophies of golden figures frozen into swimming poses. Her own bookshelf stuffed with paperbacks and battered, heavily read copies of Spin magazine. I notice none of her books have used stickers on them like most of mine do. The bookshelf is within reach of the bed, and I lean forward and slide a book called The Color Purple off the shelf.
“You should read that,” Juliet says. “It’s so good. But kind of intense. There’s girl sex.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Most of all, I can’t fathom having this much personal space to disappear into. It feels like an unimaginable luxury I’ll never get to enjoy. Juliet’s three sisters all have their own suites as well, and the oldest, Ardelia, only uses hers when she comes home from med school. It just sits there empty most of the time. Juliet’s older sister Cordelia, who’s seventeen, lives next door, and her next oldest sister Ophelia, who’s nineteen and decided to skip college to help run the family business, lives in the suite next to that.
“My mother wrote her master’s thesis on Shakespeare,” Juliet explained when I asked about her sisters’ names. “That is, before she married a guy whose family owned a hotel. I think she wanted to be a writer when she was younger, but she never talks about it.”
Juliet gets me a grape soda from her small fridge and, feeling thirsty from the sun, I suck down half the can in a single swig. Licking my lips clean, I drum my fingertips against the can’s aluminum belly.
I start to feel funny being in Juliet’s room, like I’m somewhere I’m not supposed to be. It felt so exciting racing across the bright green grass with Juliet, dodging guests and golf carts and dogs on leashes, laughing at our own excitement, then stepping through the door of the Overlander Suite, watching her pull a CD from a massive tower and slide it into the stereo. But as the music plays and the minutes pass, the reality sets in that my parents and Walden have no idea where I am. That I met Juliet not even an hour ago. I’m sure it’s totally normal for teenagers to hang out in each other’s bedrooms and waste entire afternoons together doing nothing, but my life isn’t like that. And with clothes and underwear all over the floor, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a girl’s bras that aren’t mine or my mom’s.
I slip into the bathroom to calm down. My palms are sweating. Nirvana rages on.
The bathroom smells like flowers on steroids, the female opposite of Walden’s cologne. Make-up tubes and containers are scattered messily across the counter. There’s a deodorant stick. A hairbrush bursting with swirling strands of Juliet’s black locks. Some stray tampons. A hairdryer. Black hair dye. Some bottles of lotion, one of which, Bath and Body Works Freesia, turns out to be the smelly culprit. Some pictures taped to the left-hand corner of the mirror in an L-shaped gallery of Juliet’s life. Juliet and her perfect family all wearing matching polo shirts. Palm trees on a beach at sunset. Juliet with her swim team. Juliet beside a wrinkled, smiling, old woman wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. Juliet with her arm around a pale boy with curly hair and bright blue eyes.
Her black bathing suit is draped over the shower curtain. I reach out and touch it, rubbing the stretchy elastic material, still damp from the cool water. A shudder runs through me, knowing it was against her skin.
Coming out of the bathroom, a song catches my ear. A soft beginning, like an afterthought. A lightly distorted electric guitar playing arpeggiated chords. D to F# minor to G.
“What song is this?” I ask.
“Lithium,” Juliet says. “My favorite. This is the song I would take to the moon.”
This doesn’t make much sense, and yet, I know exactly what she means.
I sit back down, and we listen to “Lithium” all the way through without talking. It’s good. Actually, it’s really good. The first song I’ve liked. The distortion I could still live without, but underneath all that, it’s a Beatles song at heart. And the way Kurt Cobain keeps repeating himself at the end feels like someone’s most desperate inner thoughts that come tumbling out.
