i haven't slept a single night in over a month and not even once did you start to make sense to me
but you're waiting at the door
where everybody's hanging out just like they hung out before
you didn't have to do it but you did it to say
The song reminds her of a boy she used to fuck.
Boys she used to fuck, plural.
God damn it.
Maria turns the volume up. Mostly, the song reminds her of soaring down Route 6 last summer just like she's doing now, sun at their backs, summer straight on ahead, the volume straining her eardrums as the boys in the car strained her heart, the way the afternoon gold played with their hair, their eyes.
Frankie sang as if an audience two hundred-strong were singing the words back to him, palms beating the steering wheel in 4/4 time. Maria had lost stamina two verses ago. Doug in the rearview mirror looked quietly out the window, his book temporarily forgotten on his lap. It was 5 PM and the air was gilded as they drove across the Sagamore Bridge, just like she's doing now, smoking Turkish Silvers, like now. The river she never learned the name for glitters beneath her, and she wishes for a moment she weren't alone in the car for the reasons that she is.
In her mind, Maria had assigned Track 2 to Doug and Track 6 to Frankie. She didn't know the title of Track 6 but was hesitant to ask, just in case somehow he could see, could somehow sense that if he bothered to look past the minor chords and between the lines, there would be her heart, slightly cracked and obviously trembling.
So she listens to the CD all through the Lower Cape -- Sandwich, Barnstable, Hyannis, South Yarmouth, over and over again until she had gone through half a pack of cigarettes and learned most of the lyrics to the first couple of songs. Maria left this morning with only a backpack, a blanket, and this CD. She has no place to stay once she gets there but that's okay -- she'll sleep in the car. It'll be part of her penance. All she wants, all she needs, is the beach, the sand working itself into her hair as she curls up and stares into space. She needs to walk out into the water at low tide, out as far as she can go and further still, and pretend she can cross the Atlantic and arrive on the other coast unscathed. She needs to write love letters in sand addressed to the past to be taken by the sea to that place where, if deserving, wishes are dissolved back into the deep blue from where it came. She's going to do all this listening to this CD and singing every word until she purges the songs of the memories they carry: Frankie's smile, and Doug's level breathing as he held her and slept, and.
And.
They have become the leitmotif in the held breath between verses, the promise of a chorus that builds.
Sometimes when Maria reaches the end of Track 6 she plays it back from the beginning, and sometimes after Track 2 she stops the CD and just thinks for the next couple of miles, just remembers, and imagines, and it's quiet in the car.
The signs say she's got twenty miles, fifteen miles, ten.
She lights another cigarette.
where everybody's hanging out just like they hung out before
you didn't have to do it but you did it to say
The song reminds her of a boy she used to fuck.
Boys she used to fuck, plural.
God damn it.
Maria turns the volume up. Mostly, the song reminds her of soaring down Route 6 last summer just like she's doing now, sun at their backs, summer straight on ahead, the volume straining her eardrums as the boys in the car strained her heart, the way the afternoon gold played with their hair, their eyes.
Frankie sang as if an audience two hundred-strong were singing the words back to him, palms beating the steering wheel in 4/4 time. Maria had lost stamina two verses ago. Doug in the rearview mirror looked quietly out the window, his book temporarily forgotten on his lap. It was 5 PM and the air was gilded as they drove across the Sagamore Bridge, just like she's doing now, smoking Turkish Silvers, like now. The river she never learned the name for glitters beneath her, and she wishes for a moment she weren't alone in the car for the reasons that she is.
In her mind, Maria had assigned Track 2 to Doug and Track 6 to Frankie. She didn't know the title of Track 6 but was hesitant to ask, just in case somehow he could see, could somehow sense that if he bothered to look past the minor chords and between the lines, there would be her heart, slightly cracked and obviously trembling.
So she listens to the CD all through the Lower Cape -- Sandwich, Barnstable, Hyannis, South Yarmouth, over and over again until she had gone through half a pack of cigarettes and learned most of the lyrics to the first couple of songs. Maria left this morning with only a backpack, a blanket, and this CD. She has no place to stay once she gets there but that's okay -- she'll sleep in the car. It'll be part of her penance. All she wants, all she needs, is the beach, the sand working itself into her hair as she curls up and stares into space. She needs to walk out into the water at low tide, out as far as she can go and further still, and pretend she can cross the Atlantic and arrive on the other coast unscathed. She needs to write love letters in sand addressed to the past to be taken by the sea to that place where, if deserving, wishes are dissolved back into the deep blue from where it came. She's going to do all this listening to this CD and singing every word until she purges the songs of the memories they carry: Frankie's smile, and Doug's level breathing as he held her and slept, and.
And.
They have become the leitmotif in the held breath between verses, the promise of a chorus that builds.
Sometimes when Maria reaches the end of Track 6 she plays it back from the beginning, and sometimes after Track 2 she stops the CD and just thinks for the next couple of miles, just remembers, and imagines, and it's quiet in the car.
The signs say she's got twenty miles, fifteen miles, ten.
She lights another cigarette.