Secret Anniversaries by Scott Spencer

Author:Scott Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

The violin filled in while Bessie Smith waited for the count of four. Betty bowed an imaginary violin, in perfect time.

Ticket agent, ease your window down.

This time, the piano filled in and Betty stretched out her long graceful fingers and played keys made of air.

Oh, my man’s done quit me and tried to leave this town.

The record player spun around at approximately seventy-eight revolutions per minute, the steel stylus on the Victrola’s brass tone arm rode the grooves of the record, and Bessie Smith’s voice filled the apartment. When the song was over, Betty played it again, and when it was done a second time she played it a third. And when that was over she found her copy of “Empty Bed Blues,” and she played it so many times that before the night was out even Caitlin knew it by heart. She liked the verse that went, “Oh, he’s got that sweet something and I told my gal friend Lou,” because somehow their three voices, Bessie Smith’s, Betty’s, and Caitlin’s, braided in an eerily perfect harmony on the word Lou, and when they sang it twice and then sang the last line, the capper, the line that held both the joke and the rhyme—“By the way she’s raving she must have gone and tried it, too”—they had their arms around each other’s waist and they were shaking their hips and jerking their knees in one of those approximations of Negro dancing only possible among people who have never known a black person.

Time passed. Ten o’clock retired without being noticed and then eleven slipped out unseen. The imprisoned wooden bird within the cuckoo clock banged its maple beak against the door, but who could have heard it above the slide trombone, the muted trumpet, or the thrilling clarinet that every time it played made Caitlin picture a schoolmarm trying to hold her skirts down in the wind?

And then it was nearly midnight. The rain had stopped and begun again and this time the storm was fierce, no longer falling straight down but at a windy angle, pelting the windows, rushing past the street lamps. When the lightning flashed and illuminated the nighttime street, with its black cars and swaying black trees, it seemed as if heaven and earth were joined by a moving membrane of water. Caitlin and Betty stood at the bay window and watched the rain, and when Betty told Caitlin that she would have to spend the night her words were drowned out by an explosion of thunder that sounded like a sledgehammer against a tin roof.

And when she said it again Caitlin turned to face her and was quiet for a moment, though this was far too solemn, and so she smiled, but this made her feel exposed, a little silly, as if she were making too much of it, or taking it somehow in the wrong way.

“It’s nice of you to offer,” Caitlin said, in a formal, almost stiff tone of voice.

Betty furrowed her brow; her smile was puzzled.

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