And Life is Like a Song

by Lucy S. (This is a nonfiction short story I wrote in the last months of 2010.)

January-May 1989.  My seventy-three-year-old gramma takes her first and last college class with me, a class called “History of Music In America..” When I mentioned I'd registered for this semester's classes, she surprised me by asking me what I was taking, and then surprised me even more by saying, about this class, “Now that's one I wouldn't mind taking.”

“Really, Gramma?!”  For three other semesters, I tried so hard to talk somebody I know into taking a class with me.  Why did I never think to ask my gramma?  But this one is made for her.  My gramma loves music.

The three credit class costs us each $15 at Antelope Valley community college. One night a week, we sit with two other students at a small round table among many tables, while our teacher begins to talk us through the musical decades.  He comes from L.A. out to our Mojave desert town of Lancaster to teach this class; the rest of the time, he works in 'the industry.'  He tells us that he's arranged the music for the Country Music Awards that year.  Music accompanies his lectures each week, and my gramma sways and lightly bops her head and taps to it.  But during the last hour, she usually starts dozing off, especially when he gets more technical.  Mainly, she just wants to hear good music, and hear the stories about that music.   I nudge her under the table and whisper, “Gramma! Gramma!” before or sometimes after she starts snoring.

As the weeks march forward, music eras begin to coincide with periods of her life. She tells me stories she never told me before.  Little stories...  Her dad's special weekend breakfasts....scrapple, eggs, and biscuits... mixed, rolled, fried, and baked after his week gone from their New Jersey home, dredging canals.  Scrapple is some kind of back east sausage I've heard about my whole life and never tasted.  “My dad always was the better cook,” she claims. Our teacher plays Fanny Brice singing “My Man,” recorded in 1921, the year six-year-old Marion Collison (who would later be my gramma) started school. Fanny was married to gambler Nicky Arnstein. The song was a huge hit, and my gramma said she liked it from the time she can remember.  Fanny sang (and Marion later sang along), “Oh my God, I love him so.  He'll never know.  All my life is just despair, but I don't care.  When he takes me in his arms, the world is bright, alright.  What's the difference if I say, I'll go away, when I know I'll come back on my knees someday, for whatever my man is, I am his.  Forever more.”

 

But the Twenties were also jazz in its glorious, umpteen incarnations and evolutions... There was the Harlem Renaissance, which Marion knew nothing about as she began her teens in New Jersey, even as she danced the Charleston, which came out of Harlem.  There's a picture of her at 13, dressed like a young flapper. 

That year, 1929, two years after Fanny Brice's husband left her and their two children, Fanny recorded, “I'd Rather Be Blue Over You.”  “I'd rather be blue thinking of you, I'd rather be blue over you, than be happy with somebody else...” 

           

I go early on Thursday evenings so my gramma and I can hang out, eat dinner together, play a few hands of Rummy.  Still an easterner at heart (or at least at taste bud), she likes me to pick up fish for her to cook us for dinner.  While she cooks, I go through a section of her jam-packed refrigerator, pulling out jars and bottles with creepily old looking contents.  “Gramma, I'm throwing this away.  It's been expired for three years.”  I'm making progress, week by week.

Ana usually comes to my gramma's apartment to watch my almost five-year-old, Justin, and my twin babies, Jonathan and Kevin, while my gramma and I go to class.  Now in her twenties, Ana's been one of my closest friends since our early teens.  I tell Ana to come over early enough to eat with us, but she usually doesn't.  Her husband doesn't like it.   Less than two years since their wedding, he's begun making bizarre accusations: “Why do you keep unbuttoning the top buttons of your blouse when you're washing dishes so the guy across the street can see you through the window?!”  Ana doesn't pleadingly try to convince him.  She says, as any of us might, “What?  What are you talking about?  Why would you even think something like that?”

 

I'm haunted by a picture of Ana from the previous year.  April, 1988.  She's holding her baby girl, Crystal, born when Ana was only twenty weeks pregnant.  Crystal is so small. Ana cups her in her hands.  Her daughter only lived for a few hours; the hospital said she was too premature to be saved.  Ana, who never goes anywhere without her hair styled and makeup on, has no makeup; her hair hangs limply.  She looks so young, and so still and bleak.  Of course, everyone is still in photos, but this photo holds the hush that accompanies sorrow, that sense that everything has stopped, or whatever has not stopped seems foolish anyway. 

Our teacher ushers in the Great Depression, kicked off by the October, 1929, stock market crash, and our class moves into the 1930s.  Singers of tunes like “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” mournfully crooned the woes of poverty sweeping the country, while other songs such as “We're In the Money” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” (FDR's campaign theme in 1932) jauntily bounced out buoyant melodies with optimistic lyrics. Do we get more relief from telling the truth about pain, or from staring it down, chasing it away by having a good time – or at least pretending to do so? My gramma says her family was fortunate; her dad kept his job, though his pay dropped way down.  They already owned their small home in Oaklyn; thirty year mortgages only began during the Depression.  

By her late teens and early twenties, Big Band music was the rage – songs like “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller, and “Sing, Sing, Sing,” by Benny Goodman.  When we hear these songs in class, I'm amazed at how young they feel.  These aren't slow, romantic songs; they make you feel daring and elated, and most of all, they make you want to move. No wonder my gramma, back when she was just Marion, loved these songs, and went out dancing every weekend. 

When we get back to her apartment, she tells me and Ana that she used to finagle two dates in one night sometimes, an early one and a late one.

“Did you do that with Grampa?” I ask, and she gives me a nonchalant nod.

 

“Which one was he, the early one or the late one?” Ana wants to know.

She answers without a trace of irony, like a kind schoolteacher explaining to children who don't understand something.  “Well, he was the early one, because he liked to go out to eat, and he didn't like to dance.”

“Gramma, that should have told you right there!  Where did you meet Grampa, anyway?”

“Well, I met him out dancing.”

I wish I could play those Swing songs for Ana; they'd make her feel good. Sometimes I think happiness is as easy as being immersed in an amazing song.  But my gramma says she hasn't had any of those records in decades. I ask her what happened to them, and she says most of them got broken over the years.  Ana loves to dance. Even though these aren't her era or usual style of music, I bet she'd start moving to them.  Ana holds conversations while standing and casually dancing.  Funk, soul, club music, her family's Colombian music, old Motown stuff, old 50s music, New Wave – she'll dance to just about anything that's danceable.  Unless there's a wedding, she just dances in her home now, or in my place or my gramma's or her sister's.  I was with Ana when she met the guy she would marry at the main club in our town.   He said he loved to dance, but they don't go out dancing anymore.  

When I lived 'Down Below' (as people in Lancaster and its environs refer to the megalopolis of greater L.A. and its adjacent counties), the idea of the town dance place would have been impossible.  But Lancaster and her sister towns remain an island, separated from Down Below by miles of Joshua trees, flat and then hilly terrain, and blue skies, and so we still have places like the one club in town which is a blown-up version of somebody's weekly house party.  People we know will be there – those we want to see – those we hope not to see, or at least be seen by.  When we meet new people there, the odds are, we'll run into them regularly after that. This 'one club in town' quality is one of the reasons I felt so good when I moved back home to Lancaster.  Counter-intuitively, I always felt like what happened in Lancaster mattered more than what happened in L.A.,

My gramma tells me her parents and two older brothers gave her a mostly happy-go-lucky life. She had one paid job during those years singing soprano for a New Jersey radio station.  Most of her friends still lived with their parents, and one guy had frequent parties in the basement rec room.  They ate potato chips out of big cylindrical tins, drank soda, and danced.  Sometimes she went to Atlantic City, and enjoyed a sandwich and a beer for a quarter. “A quarter,” she always emphasizes, shaking her head.  “So then, was that a good deal for those days?” I ask.  “How much did people make?”  She shrugs, unsure. I feel like the Great Depression hardly happened for Marion Collison.  She remembers people lined up for bread or apples, and says her family tried to help out others they knew who were struggling, but it seems to have barely touched her own life.

My grandfather didn't have the same bright, carefree life Marion Collison was having.  He  came over from Northern England on “a boat,” as he always put it, at sixteen; his family was poor.  By the time they met, he was in his mid-twenties and had lost all trace of his English accent.  The first time they were engaged, she broke it off, still having too much fun at twenty-two to settle down.  He sold the ring she gave back.  The second time, he bought her a very basic ring, not trusting her frivolous nature.  They married at sensible, respectable ages; she was a month shy of twenty-four; he was twenty-eight. But I know all this already.  I try to get from her instead some sense of why they married, some glimpse of them as a young couple.  I sympathize with my grandfather because of certain defining characteristics of his life, but he was just such a drag sometimes – never wanted to go anywhere, often in a bad mood.  My best memories of him are when he'd bang out improvised songs on the kitchen table, slapping his hands down in concert with rhymes featuring  “Jed, Ed, head, lead...”  But what did that happy, vibrant Marion see in him?

“Well, he was a good husband, never ran around, not the jealous type.” 

“Gramma, come on, that's not why you got together with him.  You didn't even know any of that when you guys got together.” An idea. “Did you guys have a song?”

“No... Not really a song.  There were songs I loved, but I don't think your grandfather cared a whole heck of a lot about 'em.  If you mean romantic songs.  I always loved the Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers ones.  I loved “They Can't Take That Away From Me,” the Gershwin song.  Seems to me, most of the time it's the women who love those songs and the guys they're with don't care about 'em at all.”

“That's for dang sure,” Ana says, and the three of us laugh.  “There's all these good songs, and these guys mess them up!  I think we're more in love with the songs than the guys!”

Our teacher tells us about Marian Anderson, one of the most amazing American singers ever.  She sang opera, spirituals, traditional American songs.  During some of the 1930s, she toured Europe, singing with some of the most important orchestras there, winning over fans by the thousands in several countries.  Anderson was black, and back in the U.S., in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution prevented her from singing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall; the D.C. Board of Education also refused the request to use a high school.  The nation's capital was still segregated.  Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in, quitting the DAR and helping set up an outside concert for Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  Millions of people, including my gramma, listened on the radio to Anderson perform that day, and more than 75,000 were there in person.  She began with, “My Country 'Tis of Thee.”

Driving home from class that night, my gramma can't stop raving about Marian Anderson.  “Oh, she had a beautiful voice.  Mmm!  Just outa this world.”  Anderson sang some of the songs my grandmother herself loved to sing.  I think that magnified her appreciation of the combined strength, range, and beauty of Anderson's contralto voice.  Sometimes I think my gramma's absence of at least any racism she's aware of came more from her love of music than anything else.  She might have changed later as the times changed, but my dad says even as a kid, he can't remember her voicing or displaying prejudice.  Considering how many white people her age I've met who were prejudiced if you delved enough – or some who displayed their racism with no prodding at all – I can't help wondering what gave her this liberality.  Maybe that's why those racist DAR women didn't want Marian Anderson singing there.  Maybe they were afraid too many white people's racism would erode if they fell in love with the music she made.

So my gramma married my grampa, and I know this part.  They had my dad and my uncle eleven months later.  But she tells me my grandfather actually changed diapers and cared for his baby boys for one week, while she rested.  My gramma has some of the weirdest sayings, stuff I've never heard from anyone but her. “It's like my mother always said: you loved him so much you coulda ate him, and after you married him, you wished to hell you hadda ate him.”

  

One evening, Ana joins us, and my grandmother reports that one of her daughters might be pregnant with her fifth child.  My gramma, who had six kids herself, says, “I don't understand what good these birth control pills are, when women still wind up getting pregnant.” 

I say, “Well, they're better than nothing.”

  

Then my gramma, who never talks about sex and uses only the mildest curse words sporadically, says, “There were things you could do back then.  It's like my mother always used to say, 'Chew the cigar and spit out the juice.'”

Ana and I say, “What?!  Your mother said that?!”

 

My gramma turns red, and we start laughing.  

I ask, “Gramma, what the heck did she mean by that?”  But she won't answer me.

When our class gets to World War Two music, my gramma relives for me how she used to take my dad and my uncle as toddlers or preschoolers to stay with her aunt and uncle in Maryland for a month every summer.  By then, she and my grandfather had bought a small home in Ashland, New Jersey, where raspberries ran wild in the woody areas near their home.  For a Southern Californian like me, this represents an idyllic life both familiar, from family stories and books and movies, and utterly separate from my own experience.  My gramma never learned to drive, but the train went by their home; she could catch it right nearby, and ride it all the way to Philadelphia, or to her aunt's and uncle's place in Mayo, on the Bay. Driving across our desert town at night to and from the college, these stories of the Chesapeake Bay and leisurely visits with relatives and a young gramma I've never known make me both happy and sad for her, because I know what's coming after those years.  

I try to see inside her stories. She is not a silent kind of person; my gramma likes to talk, but there is so often the sense that she cannot begin to express what she remembers. Maybe the plain quality of the words available to her hurts, and she shrugs off the pain of being unable to convey that past with a determined nonchalance. But I can’t help pushing her. What did it look like?  What did the air feel like? 

“Pretty, “ she says.  “A lot greener, and I always loved the ocean.  But it was sticky humid in the summer.”

My grandfather was thirty with twin babies by the time the U.S. entered the war, which made him low on the draft list.  He never got called up.  Glen Miller, my gramma's favorite Big Band artist, disappeared in a plane over the English Channel in the end of 1944 while he was going to perform for the troops in France.  My gramma's favorite song in those years was “Stormy Weather” by Lena Horne.  “Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky, stormy weather since my man and I ain't together, keeps raining all the time....”

Post-World War Two music, and I know what story goes with this. My grandfather  decided they were moving to California to follow his English mother, who was after his English father, who was chasing “some American woman.”  His mother had two younger sons with her, and supported them by “scrubbing floors in big buildings,” is the way I always hear it.  She didn't win her husband back; neither did he get the American woman.  Meantime, my gramma headed off to California with her husband, twin six-year-olds, and a new baby girl.  With the car all loaded up, they said goodbye to her mom and dad in her parents' driveway. Her mother cried and her dad made her promise to bring the boys back to see him.  

Against my own future existence, I still want to stop her.  “Gramma, why did you go?  Why didn't you tell him no?” 

My gramma in her mild, slightly ironic, sort of resigned voice, answers, “Honey, that's what you did.  You went where your husband went.”

 

My gramma let her six-year-old sons hold onto their fantasy on the drive across the country.  They had cowboy boots, and thought they were going to ride horses and live on a ranch out west.  Their baby sister, Marian, thankfully slept for most of the trip.  When they arrived at their new home on 95th Street in L.A., my grandfather's mom guided them to the middle house they'd already arranged to rent for $18 a month – cheap even for those days, says my gramma.  Her mother-in-law lived in the front house with my grandfather's two younger brothers.  My father has told me things about that house that my gramma doesn't talk about, unless he brings them up first.

“The walls would sweat.  Moisture would pour down on the covers on the bed, and they'd be all wet.  That house was so small, and so ugly.  We lived there for four years. I think my mother's spirit just broke after we left New Jersey.  I don't think she was the same after that.”

Of course, my dad was only six when they left New Jersey, so it's hard to know how accurate his perceptions are of their life back east and anything connected to their uprooting.  He idealizes that life back there himself.

My gramma wrote to and received a letter from her mother in New Jersey every single week.  She sang to herself, to her kids, with the radio and her records.  And she danced at home.

My grandparents bought a two-bedroom house in 1950, across the street and four houses down from the one they'd been renting.  One of my grandfather's first home improvement acts was to tear out both the front and back steps, envisioning something which he couldn't quite communicate or bring to fruition.  He make-shifted some block steps for the front, but the back had nothing but a three foot drop out of the back door for years.  Early on, my dad's friend, Wally, went out the back door, and they forgot to warn him as he stepped down without looking.

Our teacher weaves the music into the larger social and political realities of each era.  Not long after my gramma and grampa moved into their house, one of my gramma's favorite's, Lena Horne, didn't get the role in the movie they were making of Showboat.  The industry's own censoring board didn't allow romantic relationships between blacks and whites to be depicted in films. Lena Horne is black, and would have played Julie, who 'passes' as white and is with a white man in the story. 

Our music class moves further into the 1950s.  By then, the songs in my gramma's life were partly her own, partly her two sons' music.  She loved Gogi Grant singing, “The Wayward Wind.” My dad and his brother listened to Hunter Hancock, the first white DJ to play rhythm and blues, and rock and roll.  By then, the twins were sleeping up in the attic. My grampa had cut a hole over the refrigerator so that the boys could jump onto the counter, then onto the top of the refrigerator, then "walk the plank," as my father always jokingly describes the walk on the narrow lumber my grandfather had laid down for them to follow to their beds, situated on larger boards, to keep them from falling through the drywall into the home below. My gramma finally took a train home to see her folks in New Jersey, eight years after she left. She took the younger kids; they were too young to leave behind.  Unable to afford tickets for all of them, she left her two oldest boys behind.  In some strange gap in communication, her parents thought she was bringing all the kids.  Her dad asked sadly, “Why didn't you bring the boys?”  A year later, he died, and my gramma has carried her guilt and regret ever since that they didn't “somehow” scrape the money together. 

My gramma tells me she bought herself some roller skates when she was forty, and skated for a week on their L.A. concrete driveway and inside the adjoining open-doored garage in back.

“You did?!”  I love this image.  “What did grampa say?”

 

“He said I better knock it off before I broke my neck.  I told him to mind his own business.”

 

I laugh my support. “But why did you stop?”

She shrugs. “Well, I found out I was pregnant.”

As the Fifties continue and glide on into the Sixties, my gramma's music is hers in a different way than the earlier music is hers.  It's the music she lived with her kids.  Though my grandfather didn't like R&B and rock and roll, my gramma became more and more attached to it.  Hearing it far away from those years takes her back through my dad's and uncle's teens to a Marion who now feels young to her, though she didn't feel so young at the time.  She loves The Drifters, especially “Save the Last Dance for Me.”  And she loves Etta James and her classic, “At Last.”  That song brings it all together; it's slow and romantic, but it's got attitude.

When we get to the folk music of Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, or the later rock of the Beatles, and so much that comes after, my gramma still loves the music, but she's not as deeply enthralled as she was with the earlier stuff. 

The last night of the semester.  I've been frantically working on my ten page folk music paper and finishing up work for the other two classes.  I arrive early at my gramma's with kids, fish, and a typewriter.  She hands me a stack of handwritten tablet papers on the marching band music of John Phillip Sousa.  I'm surprised she chose him of all people to do her paper on.  Why not Lena Horne or Glenn Miller or one of her other favorites?  She never seemed all that psyched up on Sousa and his marching band music. 

“What made you pick him, Gramma?”

“Mmm, I don't know.  I just liked him.”

Ana joins us.  As I type, I see some paragraphs end abruptly; I read them to her and say, “Gramma, hurry, tell me something to connect these!  What else?”

 

She wracks her brain and comes up with a bit more information or at least some word-bridges. Justin and Jonathan play with the blocks and toy animals I've taken along.  Kevin wants me to hold him, so I bounce him on one knee, take bites of food and keep typing, finishing a few minutes before we have to leave.      

While my gramma's changing, Ana says she doesn't know what to do, that her husband's getting worse.  “He kicked the dog really hard, and I told him, 'Don't be kicking her like that,' and he goes, 'So now you're screwing the dog.'”  She starts to cry.

By now, it's clear to me that something is wrong with her husband's mind, and whatever it is manifests in cruel ways. I'm scared for her, and I can't help feeling surges of hatred toward him. I want to urge her to leave him, but I know from past experience that if I say that and she's not ready to do it, she’ll just stop talking to me about it, and then she'll have nobody.  I sigh.  I sit by her, listen, and agree, saying things like, “That's ridiculous,” and “Yeah, that's so weird.”

My gramma comes out with a new blouse on and lipstick.  Ana smiles at her and says, “Wow, you look nice.”

On the way home from class that night, we're quiet for a change.  Then, when we get near her street, my gramma says, “You know, your grandfather played the trumpet.”

My gramma and I get our papers back.  We both get A's on the papers and A's in the class. I keep saying to her, “Man, Gramma, pretty good!”

 

She keeps blushing and smiling and shrugging and saying, “Well...”

  

We celebrate with a long hang out at her apartment.  She makes her homemade macaroni and cheese, the only mac and cheese I've ever been willing to eat.  My kids dig in.  Justin plays Rummy with us.  Her refrigerator shelves are clean and organized now.   Who will keep them this way after I'm gone? 

September 1989.  I'm getting ready to fly to Germany with my kids. The Air Force won't approve travel or medical care or housing allowance for dependents in Germany until the military member has shown proof of procured housing.  My husband has been there for two months. He has found a rental in the little village of Rhaunen.  I don't want to go.

My parents, sister, brother-in-law, and an aunt and uncle go with me and my three kids to LAX.  We bring two full size car seats and several heavy bags with us – the things we've been living with which must now travel with us to Germany.  We get through the lines, in that weird emotional mix of drained exhaustion and hyper-tearful-awareness that this is it – I'm leaving my home for three years.  At check-in, they tell me that the dates we have from the Air Force are wrong.  Come back tomorrow.  We do it all again the next day.  When we reach the point in which the kids and I must proceed without my family, I say goodbye again and push the two car seats forward on the floor with my babies in them, carry-on bags on each shoulder, Justin at my side.  A line of people are behind me.  The employee at the gate asks why I'm taking so long.  I say, “I was told I'd have help!”

November 1989.    We live in the Hunsrück region, a half hour's drive to the Moselle river, where they grow grapes for wine.  I can't get warm.  The cold here is so wet; it seeps through everything, no matter how many layers we put on. I put thick sleeper pajamas on my kids and crank up their radiators at night, but the radiators in our house provide such little heat.  The sky looks like it rests on the roof of our house, melancholy gray.  Now I know what people mean about Seasonal Affective Disorder.  I hurry into bed early and try to read, holding book pages through flannel sheets.  My spouse stays every other night at the fire station, so I usually let Justin sleep with me on those nights, and we play My First Uno until he falls asleep.  Sometimes I let all three kids sleep with me.  It's chaotic with all of us.  Someone's likely to accidentally kick somebody and set off ricochets of crying.  Still, it always starts off so nice.

I'm always working on a letter home to someone.  I mail out letters every week.

A few of the fire fighters my husband works with ask if I'm going to join any of the wives' organizations.  I don't want to hurt their feelings, but... no!  I can't stand this celebration of the domestic arts right now!  I've made a few friends, but why do I always have to adapt myself to others – why doesn't it ever work the other way?  I don't want to learn anymore about cross-stitching or canvas art or any other craft.  I've crocheted since I was a kid, but I just want to do it without making a big event out of it.  Talk, listen to some good music, and – yeah, I'm crocheting.  And I don't want to have long discussions about recipes, either!  I miss my gramma, my mom and dad, my best friends, my uncles and aunts, and all my people back home. I miss college so much that it's begun to reach epic, mythological proportions in my mind already. I've become so sentimental and nostalgic about it. College.  My college.

 

I'd rather be in my house dancing with my babies than in those social groups where I don't fit in... at home listening to my anti-war music or the music that makes me feel like all my people are there with me at all their different ages at once.  How will I ever get through three years here?  When my spouse is at work, I put on old songs that he doesn't like.  Songs that I love, my gramma loves, my mom and dad love, Ana loves, and for now at least, my kids love.  They take turns having me hold them to dance and sing along with Sam Cooke's music.  Or Etta James, singing, “At last, my love has come along... My lonely days are over... And life is like a song...”