Jill Malone

I’m a small kid—either 3, or 6, because it had to be right before Germany, or right after—and I’m standing on white tile in a bathroom. A woman has her jeans rolled up to her knees, and is rinsing mud from her calves and feet in a white tub. The light is bright in the corner of the bathroom nearest the window, and dull everywhere else. The woman is young, in her twenties, with long hair that falls below her shoulders. 

The way I remember the story is like this: the woman is my aunt, and her car—a VW bug—has gotten stuck in some mud (again) and my father has had to go and help her get the car moving, and they’ve just returned. My mother and grandmother have been a little snide about the car, telling my aunt it’s irresponsible to drive something that’s always getting her stuck someplace. 

There’s a bottle of Tab on the side of the bathtub, and it’s sweating because this is Arkansas in the summer and everything sweats. She’s wearing a red and white football jersey. Despite the mud, and the jersey, she’s glamorous. I know this. Whether I’m three or I’m six, I know this. I admire her. 

In my twenties, I ask my aunt about this, and she doesn’t remember any of it, claims never to have had a VW bug, or any other car that broke down all the time and left her stranded in the mud. When I ask my parents, neither remembers anything about it. 

Still vivid all these years later: the room striated with light, the mud caked up to her knees, the Tab emptied in deep swallows. Rebellion, wasn’t it? Quiet, and familial, but rebellion all the same. The youngest sister scrubbing her legs in the bathtub while the rest of them sat in the living room with their iced tea and their disapproval. She was on her way out, even if she was the only one who knew it. She was on her way out of that sad, failed town. She was about to be somebody. 

And if I dreamed all that, so did she. 

We caught the movie, Defiance earlier this week, and it has been weighing on me ever since. I didn’t know the story, and I won’t spoil it for you here, but it’s the kind of film that I love: one that leaves you with more questions than answers, one that doesn’t settle comfortably in your belly, one in which the heroes are equal parts villain. The movie punctuated Clive James’s book Cultural Amnesia admirably well: the horrible tug between Stalin and Hitler, the ethical quandary of an appropriate response to devastating totalitarian annihilation, the persuasive compulsion of liberal humanism.

This week, for the first time, I read Catcher in the Rye.  Proof of the story’s success is how frequently I wanted to strangle Holden. But he gets inside you, doesn’t he? Reminds you of the baffling complexity of even the most mundane encounters with other people. Kind of makes me wish I were a better dancer. 

Gavin’s Christmas Concert is tonight. Rotten weather resulted in the cancellation of the original program, and subsequently every other class dropped out, so Gavin’s preschool class will perform on their own. They have three songs, and then we’ll all eat some cookies.

He loves these crazy songs. I’d never heard of any of them before:  Every Little Wish, Little Toy Trains, and There Was a Little Baby. We sing them every night after stories. (Well, sometimes I sing, and other times I’m scolded, and told, “No, not you,” and then he sings solo.)

I dig school concerts. I performed in them all the way through senior year, and then was in a band during college. Our elementary school music teacher—this wicked thin, tall woman with feathered hair (imagine Mary Tyler Moore grimacing)—actually got the elementary kids to sing together, and on key, and ultimately had us enter competitions against other schools. She’d play an autoharp and holler emphatic commands at us. She was a spellbinding conductor. I was a little terrified of her. (And cannot, for the life of me, remember her name.)

I’m looking forward to this. I even feel a little nervous about it. Gavin on stage singing for an audience. Rock on.