Girls in the Moon by Janet McNally

Author:Janet McNally
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-09-30T04:00:00+00:00

twenty-seven

MY FATHER HAS COME OUT with one album in the three years since I’ve seen him, and I bought it myself on vinyl six months ago. Rolling Stone did a piece about it, even put a small headline on the cover. I saw my mother looking at it at the grocery store, squinting, and when she walked away to put orange juice in our cart I pulled a copy off the stand and crouched down on the floor to read it. Gimme Shelter, it said. Kieran Goes Back to the Studio with Promise. Considering that my father owns a studio, I’m not sure how he went “back” to it, but I figured it wasn’t really worth writing a letter to the editorial department.

I picked it up at Spiral Scratch, an indie record store in our neighborhood. When I brought it up to the counter I expected there to be some fanfare involved in the checkout, but of course the clerk didn’t know who I was.

“We’ve been listening to this one in the store,” he said. He pushed his dark-framed glasses up on his nose. “Finally this dude did something right.”

I smiled and might have shrugged, then walked home clutching the record in its paper shopping bag. I didn’t listen to it while my mother was home, and I didn’t put it in the cabinet with the rest of the albums in the dining room. I guess I had given up on trying to get her to talk to me about my father. I kept it in the narrow strip of space between my dresser and my bookcase, resting on the hardwood floor, and sometimes at night I’d slide it out and disassemble it as if I were diffusing a bomb. The cardboard sleeve, the envelope, the lyrics, which came printed on a paper thin and transparent as onion skin. The black vinyl record itself, its concentric rings like the inside of an old tree. The album came with a digital download, of course, and I had it on my iPod. I’d listen before I went to bed, trying to figure him out from his lyrics, his voice. What was this “promise,” and who was he making it to? There was a song about a breakup and one about a girl named Laura. I didn’t know anyone named Laura. There was a lyric about a girl with blue-green eyes, and I wondered if it was about my mother. But my father had been touring without her for fifteen years, and he might have picked up a hundred blue-green-eyed girls since.

There was only one picture of him on the album, a small one on the back where the recording information was, and the credits for the other musicians. He stood in profile, shadowed, black-and-white. He was smiling widely, his mouth open. This was my father in gray scale, compacted. And even in photographic form, I couldn’t get him to look at me.

Now, in Archer’s room, I find myself looking at the photograph of my father again.

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