Read Online Thank You for the Music by Jane Mccafferty - Free Book Online

perceptions of my own body in the chair, back to Anne’s blue eyes behind her glasses, her bare feet or worn moccasins, the sunlight or gray light in the room. I remember her serving ginger snaps on a red plate one afternoon, and being startled because they were so mundane, unlike her usual offerings. I remember she played the song “Standing in the Shadows of Love” on her record player once, and that I imagined the song made her remember an old love, a man who had died young in Paris. She asked me all sorts of questions about school, and my lost Ohio friend, and I answered them happily in great detail, amazed at how interesting I could sound in the presence of her genuine curiosity.
    It was a little more than a year, this kinship, and my mother hated it, and I didn’t care. I felt that year like my mother was a box I was clawing my way out of. When my mother and Lorine watched Guiding Light on summer afternoons, too alert on percolated coffee, they’d wait for commercials to tease me as I walked through the living room.
    â€œSo what are you doing with the rest of your day? Let me guess. You’re gonna go sit on your ass across the hall for another painting they can hang up in Western Psych!”
    â€œWhatever you say, ladies.”
    â€œAt least get some fresh air once in a while.”
    â€œMaybe I’ll avoid fresh air and normal things for the rest of my life.”
    â€œShe’s gonna turn out like Francie Bartusiak!” Lorine yelped, and the two of them laughed, and I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t ask who Francie Bartusiak was.
    â€œYou two can be so revolting,” I mumbled, but the power of the real disgust I felt alarmed me.
    I had sudden moments when I missed my mother, whoever she had been.
    â€œHon, we’re just jaggin’ you,” my mother assured me.
    But I knew she was angry and hurt that I’d pulled away. I’d always been her girl. My father wasn’t around much—a man of his time, he worked and he went to the bar and he slept, and if he didn’t sleep he read the paper, and you better not disturb. He wasn’t a bad man, just tired, so tired all the time. He had a way of squinting at the mess in our apartment as if he’d never seen it before, as if it were completely baffling to him. “I need to get out of here,” he’d say to the air, and then he would, he’d get out of there.
    So I had been my mother’s confidante, the one who watched late-night movies with her in her bed with bowls of rice pudding, the one who she took shopping downtown with her when she bought a new dress, valuing my opinion over anyone’s, even Lorine’s. I was the one who gave her back rubs at the end of the day, her deepest pleasure, no doubt. And now I wanted nothing to do with her. I would not get near her; I was afraid she was contagious. Sometimes she would come into my bedroom late at night, sit on the edge of my bed, and watch me sleep, though I was only pretending to sleep, and my whole body was clenched in anger, feeling her presence as a terrible invasion of my privacy, my body, while I prayed for her to disappear.
    One day I had taken a bus to the South Side with Albie Rooch, the middle of the blond Rooch brothers. I had admired Albie from afar for years, had entertained all kinds of fantasies about him, and now, here he was, an eighth-grader, walking beside me on train tracks, his usually bare feet in faded black high-top sneakers. Trees made sparkling green walls on either side of us. Albie wore a muscle shirt and cutoff jeans and was talking in his long-winded way about the war mongrels who ran the world, and I was agreeing with everything he said, nodding encouragingly, like a girl.
    That’s when I saw Anne and another woman walking toward us. They seemed so out of place I thought I must be imagining it. The other woman I’d seen twice before, in Anne’s apartment, but I’d forgotten her