probably forgotten my heartfelt revelation the same way he’d forgotten the name of Tommy’s favorite goldfish.
By the time I found out how wrong I was, I’d let what happened with Ben develop into a full-blown betrayal. Sometimes I even thought he’d tricked me into talking about my parents, just like he’d obviously tricked my sister into believing they had a future together. I hated myself for trusting him, but I hated him more for being someone you couldn’t trust. A typical man, as my sister’s customers would say. Only nice when they need you. Incapable of really caring about you. Always ready to leave you without warning, without even saying good-bye.
chapter
five
T he summer of endless love was long gone. It was 1982, and I called this the summer of tainted love. The song “Tainted Love” wasn’t all that popular with Mary Beth’s customers, but it was very popular with my friends. We played the record constantly; it expressed how we felt now. Ben had been gone for three months; we knew he wasn’t coming back. We no longer believed Luke and Laura would stay together. We didn’t even know if Charles and Diana would last, although Denise claimed they couldn’t get divorced even if they hated each other. It was against the rules for royalty.
Tainted love: the theme of the summer, maybe even of the whole town.
These days, it seemed like everyone who came to my sister was nursing a heartbreak. In the space of only a few months, Mary Beth had discovered affairs between near strangers, and babies born whose daddies didn’t know them, and hatreds so intense friends hadn’t spoken in years. Compared to all this hidden agony, Rose driving Clyde’s truck through the window of his place that Saturday in June was almost a relief.
If there was anyone left in Tainer who hadn’t heard of Mary Beth, Song Reader, they had to hear after what Rose did. For a week, there was police tape around Clyde’s tobacco store, smack in the heart of downtown. And Rose worked afternoons at the Photomat. She loved to lean out the window of her little booth, and tell yet another person her story and the moral: if only she’d listened to Mary Beth, she’d have known that Clyde was no damn good.
When Rose asked Mary Beth for a stack of her song reader cards to hand out with the picture envelopes, my sister complied. It was her calling, she reminded me. She had to make herself available to anyone who needed her.
Mary Beth had reacted to losing Ben by working ten times harder than before. Every week now she took on new customers, sometimes at the astonishing rate of five or six at a time. As soon as she got home from the diner, she snapped on the stereo, and until Tommy went to bed it was turned up loud enough so she could hear it while she made dinner and played with him. After he was asleep, she kept it on but lowered the volume and did whatever she had to do in the living room—sort laundry, pay bills, sew a button back on—pausing every once in a while to make notes on one of her charts. We were never in her car without the radio playing. FM was the one thing she’d insisted on, not power steering, not air-conditioning, even though it was pushing ninety degrees when she traded in her old Buick for a used Ford at the Deals on Wheels over on Twain Boulevard.
She was still working out the details of her theory that music and memory were related. She’d gotten a new idea after she did Nicole Lowrey’s reading last March. Whenever I saw her scribbling thoughts in her notebook, I remembered how excited she’d been about telling Ben the idea—and that she never got the chance. It made me hate him even more.
When Nicole first came to my sister, she was unhappy but she didn’t know why. For the first few weeks, her chart was no help: lots of sixties’ songs, which my sister knew was pretty standard for somebody in their thirties like Nicole. One of Mary Beth’s first observations when she started her readings was that for
By the time I found out how wrong I was, I’d let what happened with Ben develop into a full-blown betrayal. Sometimes I even thought he’d tricked me into talking about my parents, just like he’d obviously tricked my sister into believing they had a future together. I hated myself for trusting him, but I hated him more for being someone you couldn’t trust. A typical man, as my sister’s customers would say. Only nice when they need you. Incapable of really caring about you. Always ready to leave you without warning, without even saying good-bye.
chapter
five
T he summer of endless love was long gone. It was 1982, and I called this the summer of tainted love. The song “Tainted Love” wasn’t all that popular with Mary Beth’s customers, but it was very popular with my friends. We played the record constantly; it expressed how we felt now. Ben had been gone for three months; we knew he wasn’t coming back. We no longer believed Luke and Laura would stay together. We didn’t even know if Charles and Diana would last, although Denise claimed they couldn’t get divorced even if they hated each other. It was against the rules for royalty.
Tainted love: the theme of the summer, maybe even of the whole town.
These days, it seemed like everyone who came to my sister was nursing a heartbreak. In the space of only a few months, Mary Beth had discovered affairs between near strangers, and babies born whose daddies didn’t know them, and hatreds so intense friends hadn’t spoken in years. Compared to all this hidden agony, Rose driving Clyde’s truck through the window of his place that Saturday in June was almost a relief.
If there was anyone left in Tainer who hadn’t heard of Mary Beth, Song Reader, they had to hear after what Rose did. For a week, there was police tape around Clyde’s tobacco store, smack in the heart of downtown. And Rose worked afternoons at the Photomat. She loved to lean out the window of her little booth, and tell yet another person her story and the moral: if only she’d listened to Mary Beth, she’d have known that Clyde was no damn good.
When Rose asked Mary Beth for a stack of her song reader cards to hand out with the picture envelopes, my sister complied. It was her calling, she reminded me. She had to make herself available to anyone who needed her.
Mary Beth had reacted to losing Ben by working ten times harder than before. Every week now she took on new customers, sometimes at the astonishing rate of five or six at a time. As soon as she got home from the diner, she snapped on the stereo, and until Tommy went to bed it was turned up loud enough so she could hear it while she made dinner and played with him. After he was asleep, she kept it on but lowered the volume and did whatever she had to do in the living room—sort laundry, pay bills, sew a button back on—pausing every once in a while to make notes on one of her charts. We were never in her car without the radio playing. FM was the one thing she’d insisted on, not power steering, not air-conditioning, even though it was pushing ninety degrees when she traded in her old Buick for a used Ford at the Deals on Wheels over on Twain Boulevard.
She was still working out the details of her theory that music and memory were related. She’d gotten a new idea after she did Nicole Lowrey’s reading last March. Whenever I saw her scribbling thoughts in her notebook, I remembered how excited she’d been about telling Ben the idea—and that she never got the chance. It made me hate him even more.
When Nicole first came to my sister, she was unhappy but she didn’t know why. For the first few weeks, her chart was no help: lots of sixties’ songs, which my sister knew was pretty standard for somebody in their thirties like Nicole. One of Mary Beth’s first observations when she started her readings was that for
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