Diary of a Blues Goddess (7 page)

He shook his head.

"The blues and jazz are just a part of you. When you come to believe that, your life will change, Georgia."

He offered me a glass of water. "So how's your nana?"

"Fine, Red. You should come by and pay her a visit. It's Sunday. Why don't you come to dinner tonight? She's been asking after you."

We played this game every Sunday. He was, of course, always invited to Sunday supper. I had introduced him to my grandmother shortly after I started singing with Red. Tony and I dragged Nan to a club to hear Red play with a trio. Nan loved the music, and I think she's grown pretty fond of the man, too. Red played along, looking pleased at the invite. "I'd like that very much, sugar. What time shall I call on your nan?"

"You know we eat at eight o'clock. Don't play too hard to get with me." I winked and set my glass down. He walked me to the door, and I spontaneously kissed him goodbye on the cheek. I started down the little path to the sidewalk. He called out to me.

"Georgia?"

"Yes, Red?" I turned around.

"I think today your mama and my grandma were sittin' up in heaven together clappin' their hands."

"Thanks, Red," I whispered, and started toward the Heartbreak Hotel, the New Orleans humidity pressing in on me and making me feel claustrophobic.

Walking home from Red's, I thought back to high school, when I was the helpless victim of a mother who believed fashion can be bought at places with bright fluorescent lights, wide aisles and endless rows of sales racks—much of it polyester-laden. While the princesses and prom queens of my high school wore designer jeans and carried purses with labels on the outside tipping off others to their two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar price tag, I was relegated to wearing no-name jeans and no-name sneakers, and slinging my shiny pink lip gloss in a worn-out denim purse. My mother refused to believe this mattered in the social feeding frenzy that is high school. "Georgia, who cares what you wear? It's what's inside that counts," she'd tell me, while she calmly folded socks or cooked her tuna casserole. Easy for her to say. Mom lived in a Carol Brady bubble. She didn't have to sit in lunchroom no-man's-land, with only Damon for company. My mother didn't have to face down Casanova Jones in social studies as he undressed me with his eyes and flirted shamelessly, while I felt hopelessly clumsy, embarrassed by a chest that had unexpectedly grown out of control, as far as I was concerned. Damon and I did our stupid "We must, we must, we must improve our busts" exercises. But I guess my body took that mantra too much to heart. As a woman's body replaced my baby one, as I developed into this curvaceous 1960s
Playboy
ideal when the rage was waiflike, I felt even more like an outsider.

My mother, on the other hand, lived her life like a television show. She bought the perfect laundry detergent for the whitest whites and the brightest colors. She whipped up meals she meticulously cut from the back of Campbell's soup can labels and mounted on recipe cards. She knew one hundred and one ways to prepare Jell-O. She entered bake-offs. She ironed my
underwear
. She made every one of my childhood Halloween costumes, including a lobster complete with giant claws the year I was obsessed with crustaceans. In short, she was the picture-perfect mother, right down to her hair, which she had washed and set every Friday afternoon at the beauty salon. All she wanted was the perfect daughter. What she got was me.

I pierced my ears five times before I was thirteen, doing them at home with a cork, a needle and Damon's pep talk to steady my shaking hand. I was hell-bent on being a singer, living my life in rebellion, being like Nan. My father was a jazzman; he played the bass, and from what I remembered of his playing, he was very talented. He was also an alcoholic. Sundays were spent tiptoeing around the house while he slept off his hangovers. Mom pretended he was just "tired."

I adored him anyway.

Dad taught me how to "phrase" a song by playing endless records, he and I together in the den, the stereo spinning old 45s and 78s and ancient albums with dust all over them. He never seemed happy to me, except when we were playing music—especially Gene Krupa and Jess Stacy, Duke Ellington and Etta James.

He left my mother and me when one of his old musician pals came to New Orleans with a moderately successful jazz quartet, in need of a new bassist. He departed, first for the Chicago blues scene, and then for the Blue Note in New York City, with the Buster Keys Quartet, promising to return home "soon," and sending money along the way. He wrote me postcards, which I still have in an old shoe box in my room. He was the only person who made me feel beautiful:

Angel, I'm doin' fine in NYC. When you come visit, we'll go to the Empire State Building and touch the sky.

Stay beautiful and keep on singing,

Love, Your Father,

                                 Dad

He signed each card that way. He was a dreamer who believed we could touch the sky and talk to God. We could speak to heaven and listen for ghosts in the attic. He was everything imaginative. He was the blues. He was the music. He was everything my mother wasn't.

But after a while, both the postcards and the money stopped.

My mother's reaction to this wasn't anger or rage, hurt or tears of abandonment. Instead, she focused all her energies on creating this fantasy of perfection—and making sure I didn't become a singer. That I didn't abandon her, too. And my reaction to her reaction was to try my hardest to infuriate her.

My father had left behind his blues record collection, which was enormous and still lines special shelves I had built for them in my room. I played his music over and over and over again. Sometimes the same song tirelessly. I did it to feel close to him. I did it to hurt her for driving him away with her picture-perfect ways. Etta James's "At Last" was their song. So what else would an angry adolescent do but play that song morning, noon and night. Music has always been my weapon and my refuge.

At first, I was certain Dad was going to come back. When he didn't, the blues were already part of me. I played them, then, because they reflected how I felt about adolescence—it was like one long, angst-ridden blues song.

I was never quite sure if I succeeded in hurting her. Besides piercing my ears, I wore dark black eyeliner and bleached my hair blond, though it fried to a vague orange. I stayed out past my curfew every weekend night.

I was sullen from the moment I woke up, staring through hostile eyes as she cooked me pancakes with raisins set in them to make little happy faces. Yet she never yelled at me, never grounded me. She kept smiling and cooking and cleaning and ironing, refusing to show how much I was breaking her heart—just like he did. As long as I wasn't hanging out with musicians, she seemed content that it was all "a phase." She didn't want to risk pushing me away. She even let Damon sleep over at our house, knowing, I think, he was my only friend. A lot of the time, I convinced myself the only person holding me back from going to New York City and finding my father was Damon. Later, Damon and I had an elaborate fantasy about going to New York together. He'd be a top fashion designer, and I'd sing with my father's band.

When I was almost seventeen, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was late-stage before they found it because she was too busy tending to me to take care of herself. Suddenly, hating her for her decidedly bad taste in clothes and bedspreads (mine was still Barbie in high school) was pointless.

I read to her while she was sick in bed. She liked romances with happy endings, and that's what she got, though I was at an age when I didn't believe in happy endings. I still don't. "I can see you rolling your eyes, Georgia," she weakly said one afternoon.

"Mom, happy endings are bullshit."

"Georgia Ray, the language."

"Fine. But they're still bullshit. Happy endings aren't for people like me."

"What exactly is a person like you?" she asked, breathless. Everything, every word, took so much effort.

"An outsider. Different."

"You're New Orleans born and bred. How does that make you an outsider, Georgia?"

"No father, for one." As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Now that she was sick, I was trying so hard not to wound her, but sometimes my resentments were right there on the surface.

I tried to explain to her that happy endings were for the popular girls, not for me with my kinky hair that I never quite accepted, and my exotic looks in the southern state of Louisiana, the social scene in high school dominated by Magnolia Queens and blond debutantes with beautiful drawls. Happy endings weren't for Damon either, with his lust for the homecoming
king
—not queen. His desire to
be
the homecoming queen. Yet complaining about my hair seemed selfish, when my mother's own perfect coiffure fell out in clumps in the shower one day, swirling down the tub and clogging the drain. I dropped the subject and kept reading to her.

Damon used to come over and give her makeovers, drawing on eyebrows and tying up colorful turbans out of silk scarves. One time, he did her eyes and eyebrows like Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra
.

"You look just like Liz, Mrs. Miller," Damon said, painting on the last of her new eyebrows.

"Hand me a mirror."

I went to get a hand mirror, knowing she would freak out the second she saw herself.

"Now, you just have to go with it." Damon stood and surveyed his handiwork.

I handed her the mirror, bracing myself for her reaction. But it wasn't what I expected. She howled with laughter until tears rolled down her face, all the while Damon was begging her, "Don't cry, don't cry. It'll all run." Soon, she had black tear stains tracing a path down her now-thin face. Then we started laughing, too. After that, for the first time, my mother started to relax a little, to laugh with us. Maybe she was trying to leave some good memories for me.

Surrounded by death at home, I tried to be a normal teenager knowing my mother was slipping away and my father had stopped sending postcards when I was in the tenth grade. I tried to eat lunch with Damon and study about the Civil War with Mr. Hoffman, my favorite teacher, and learn about sines, cosines and tangents in math class. I tried to carry my lunch tray without tripping and open my locker without getting crushed by the crowds in the hallway.