Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Read online

  There is no hat in the box, only a bundle of clippings from newspapers. In the seamless space between past and present, I regret the hat, which I could have tried on and pretended I was my mother, although in that same seamless space I know that if there ever was a hat, it was long lost detritus along my mother’s wandering byways.

  Oh, well, I can always look at the clippings. They have softened over time and gone limp, and when I lift them out of the box, I tell myself they are probably very old. At eight I can read well enough to make out most of what is written there. A voice like a bell. And there is a picture of her holding her guitar, so beautiful, with her lush dark hair hanging down her back.

  But she had come back to Versailles, Montana.

  *

  The next time I wake, I know by the light falling through the window that it is early morning. My head feels thick with dreams I can’t remember, but I see the room around me clearly enough. White walls, white curtains. A white-painted dresser, the door with the mirror. Except for what the mirror might reflect, there’s an order in this room, a serenity. Surely Mrs. Pence hasn’t given me her own bedroom?

  At the thought I sit up and look around for clues. The bed I fell into last night has plenty of pillows and beside it a table with a small lamp for late-night reading. Above the bed is a picture of the English countryside, showing a big church with a steeple framed by huge trees and a stream in the foreground where cattle drink. The view seems peaceful and unchanging until I look more closely at the sky and see that it is pierced by the church steeple, which points toward an ominous dark blue overtaking the sunlit clouds of summer.

  No. It does not seem to be a room that is used regularly. The sheets on the bed are freshly laundered, and the small white rug has been shaken out, but the paint on the iron bed frame is chipped, and dust has filtered over the surfaces of the table and dresser. When I lick a finger and draw it along the windowsill, it comes away gray, and when I pull out a drawer from the dresser, it’s empty and stale smelling.

  At the window I look past the porch shingles to Mrs. Pence’s gate, where, last night, my mother screamed her rage. All seems calm this morning. The big cottonwoods droop their load of dust over Mrs. Pence’s front yard and shade the old gingerbread houses on the other side of the graveled street. At the far end of the block, mailboxes wait in a row, some with flags raised for the post office truck. A couple of boys with bicycles loiter there, probably trying to think of ways to liven up their summer.

  Then I turn from the window and catch my other self in the full-length mirror.

  She’s not as wild-eyed as she was last night, although her hair is a dark disheveled mess. Her face shows the Alaskan pallor, and she’s naked except for the white cotton underpants that are torn at the elastic—how did that happen? Well, yes, I do remember how. In the bedroom with the elk wallpaper.

  She’s so thin that her ribs show. So thin she hardly needs a bra.

  Does she look dangerous? Well, maybe.

  I take a second look, though, and notice a narrow cream-colored edge between the mirror and the white-painted door. It takes me a minute or two with a fingernail to slide the old Polaroid out from behind the mirror.

  A dark-haired young man, posed in front of a much smaller blue spruce in what clearly is Mrs. Pence’s backyard. It’s Ray Pence, is my first thought. But no, this is a sullen young man in blue jeans and a white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled in his sleeve above a muscled arm, and he looks to me as though he’s likelier looking for trouble than expecting goodness.

  Not Mrs. Pence’s bedroom. But somebody’s, once upon a time, who hid this Polaroid snapshot of trouble behind the mirror.

  I use the toilet in the bathroom across the hall, and I smell my own reek before I pull the old-fashioned chain flush, so my senses must be returning. When I dig my comb from the bottom of my backpack and set to work on my hair, starting with the ends and working out snarls with my fingers and the comb, I can feel the tingles.

  A little mound of dark combings has accumulated on the white coverlet by the time I’ve braided my hair back and tied it with a raveling, but at least my other self in the mirror no longer looks feral.

  What next. Shirt and blue jeans. My de-mudded boots.

  I can’t stay here forever. And what next, I don’t know, but as soon as my incision heals and my legs aren’t so tottery, I suppose I could hitchhike over to Boise, see if any of the musicians Gall and Brazos used to know are still around, and try to pick up a keyboard gig or two or at least snag a couch for a few nights.

  Music draws me downstairs.

  In the piano room Mrs. Pence sits at the old Steinway grand with her back to the door. She’s playing the Brahms F Minor Sonata that I was learning just before I left Versailles with Gall and Brazos. As I listen to the familiar notes, my fingers play a ghost version of the sonata along my thigh while the white plaster bust of Beethoven looks down from his niche. Mrs. Pence’s framed diploma from the Royal Academy of Music hangs above Beethoven, where it always has. Her touch sounds as strong and nuanced as ever, and I wonder again how old she is. If she was in her seventies when I had my last piano lesson with her, she will be well past eighty now.

  Her hearing seems fine because she turns briefly on the piano stool, aware of my presence in the doorway, then plays to the end of the sonata.

  “Would you like to play?”

  In front of her, after all these years? “No—no.”

  “Well, then.”

  She folds her music book, pushes back the piano stool, and opens the door to the kitchen, and I follow.

  “Coffee?”

  She doesn’t wait for an answer but pours from the ready pot. From under the table Jonathan wakes, thumps his greeting, licks my ankle, and goes back to sleep, while I wonder all over again why he’s glad to see me and why Mrs. Pence is being so good to me.

  5

  Bill the Drummer once asked me, How’d you happen to learn to play the piano, Ruby? To be classically trained and all?

  Long story, Bill.

  *

  My mother never really looked like Janis Joplin, although I love the picture of Janis on the album cover, and I like to pretend that she does. Actually, my mother is prettier than Janis ever was. My mother’s hair is dark, like mine, but finer, and it lifts off her shoulders in a silvery nimbus as the streetlight at the end of the block begins to glow in the twilight. The odor of river mud rises from the Milk River, although the air has gone still with the end of the day. On the far side of the river will be nothing but empty prairie reaching into Canada, but I’m six years old, and emptiness is what I know.

  My mother wears blue jeans and a soft cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. She leans back against the porch rail of the rented house on the north side of the Milk River and smokes a cigarette. From behind the screen door I watch the tiny red tip of the cigarette drift down from her lips until her hand rests on her thigh. I would like to open the screen door and sidle down the steps to her, but I know she would wave me away.

  During the day I absorb the sounds and smells of summer in this seedy northern neighborhood. Somebody down the street uses an old-fashioned lawn mower that eats the grass with a gravelly whir that starts at one side of his lawn and pauses at the other side for him to turn around and start back. Farther down the street, somebody else is working on his motorcycle, which stinks of heated oil and barks when he tromps on the starter.

  The neighbors directly across the street leave their windows open to catch a draft and relieve the heat, and music from the country station pours out of their radio. I catch my mother tapping her foot on the porch steps. She turns and sees that I’m watching her and asks what I want.

  Are you hungry? Again?

  No.

  A car rumbles down the unpaved street. From the screen door I hear a throb of guitars through a rolled-down window and smell the dust rising from tires. The outline of my mother’s back grows more and more indistinct in the gathering dusk
. Does she raise her head, does she look for the twin red flash of brake lights as the car slows at the end of the block? The car turns at the corner and is gone, and my mother stubs out her cigarette on the porch steps, extinguishing the red spark.

  At some point she must have arranged for my piano lessons.

  Myself at six years old or eight or ten or twelve. Always tall for my age and way too thin. My hair in long dark braids. Arriving at Mrs. Pence’s front door with my backpack of music. Sitting at the upright practice piano. Learning the major and minor scales.

  *

  What do I remember about the day the woman from Child Protection Services came for me?

  My screams.

  I knew the CPS woman. Or should have. Or so she told me. She had talked to me, and she had listened while the counselor questioned me about the bruising on my private parts and how the bruising happened. I said that the big boys did it, in the alley behind our house. At least that’s what I was told I said because I didn’t remember. And I didn’t remember the boys. Maybe I remembered when I said it, maybe I didn’t. Didn’t matter because nobody believed me.

  It’s a goddamn lie! It’s a goddamn lie!

  That was my mother, screaming at the CPS woman. I didn’t remember her face, only the pitch of her voice over my head. Years later I realized her rage was over the accusation that her man at the time had hurt me, not the boys in the alley. At the time I only knew something terrible had happened, and it was my fault, and I fought and grabbed at the legs of chairs and then the doorknob to keep from being taken away.

  *

  That first foster family. Did the Mister really belt me one? I think I remember it. What I know I remember is the Mister’s voice: I never touched her! Never laid a finger on the little liar!

  People believed strange things in those days. What happened? What didn’t happen? What could I, what could anyone, know was true?

  That first foster family lived in one of the old frame houses on the north side of the Milk River, on a street a couple of blocks from the gypsum plant. I remember trivial things, like the high ceilings and the dun-colored cabinets in the kitchen and the doorways to the bedrooms, which had curtains instead of doors, but I can’t remember the people’s names. She was slab-sided and freckled and smelled of stale sweat that permeated the polyester pants and shirts she bought at yard sales. He had retired from the gypsum plant with a bad cough and spent a lot of time on the couch, staring at the television. I used to hear him at night, hack, hack, through my bedroom curtain. She called him “the Mister.” They must have badly needed the pittance the state paid them for fostering children because the first Tuesday I stayed with them, I threw an awful fit.

  “It’s my piano lesson day! It’s my piano lesson day!”

  “Whoever heard of a kid crying to take a piano lesson?” asked the Mister. Then, fed up when I wouldn’t stop screaming, “Cool it, kid! Or I’ll give you something to howl about!”

  “No! No! They’ll take her away,” she shouted, and he shouted something back.

  The next Tuesday, instead of walking home from school, I hiked up to the Orchards for my piano lesson. I remember Mrs. Pence’s surprise when she came to the door and saw me standing there, but she let me in and gave me my lesson. But either she made a phone call or the freckled foster mother did, because the CPS woman paid a visit after dinner that evening. I eavesdropped from behind the curtain in my bedroom doorway, hating them all.

  “Maybe the easiest would be to let her keep taking lessons.”

  “Where’s the money coming from?” the Mister wanted to know.

  “I’ll talk to Mrs. Pence, see what we can work out.”

  What was worked out or how long it took, I don’t know, but every Tuesday after school I climbed up the grade to Mrs. Pence’s house for my piano lesson, and I lived and breathed for an hour within an elegant web of musical tones and progressions, and every Tuesday after the lesson I went back to another fracas at my foster home. They threatened, and I threw wingding fits, screaming and beating my head on the floor and scratching long welts up and down my arms and legs. Finally, the Mister, as he promised, gave me something to howl about by belting me one, and the CPS woman took me away that very night.

  *

  And that, Bill, was how I came to be fostered with the policeman, Brad Gilcannon, while still taking classical piano lessons from Mrs. Pence.

  6

  I look around a kitchen where I’ve never been and yet I seem to know: the trellised wallpaper, the elderly gas stove, the sink that wears a curtain like a skirt to hide the dish detergent and scouring powder. The plumbing may not be as old as the house, but it’s old enough.

  Mrs. Pence sets coffee and a bowl of cold cereal and milk in front of me. She’s wearing a gray corduroy skirt and a gray cotton sweater this morning, and yes, even in the rising heat of summer, stockings and shoes with low heels. Of course! She’s dressed for a day of piano lessons.

  “How are you feeling this morning?”

  I shrug; I don’t know how to explain that I’m defenseless without the physical pain or that I have blank spaces of memory. In the morning light that falls through the kitchen windows, her hawk’s eyes are as sharp as I remember, but her face wears a new web of wrinkles. Her fragility frightens me. She doesn’t know me. I’m a stranger now. I might be up to anything. Why doesn’t she seem to be afraid of me?

  “You may be feeling the anesthetic leaving your body,” she suggests, and I nod. Her coffee tastes thin. Typical English slop, a voice sneers. Whose voice? My mother’s? I can’t remember Mrs. Pence and my mother ever speaking to each other. My mother screaming at her, yes.

  “Do you have plans, Ruth?”

  Plans. Something other people have, as Gall would say when Brazos or Bill the Drummer tried to nail him down for a gig. The husky texture of Gall’s voice as clear as if he’s sitting next to me at Mrs. Pence’s kitchen table. I don’t know what has happened to Gall, I didn’t leave so much as a note for Brazos and Bill after I stole Gall’s money, and here I am, in this town where everybody who remembers me hates me, in my old piano teacher’s house. Eating her cereal in her kitchen. I feel a burn of tears and then anger. Out of the snarl I’ve made of my life, how could I have a plan?

  Hitchhiking to Boise.

  “No. No plans.”

  Her hawk’s eyes search my face. I know that if she ever hears a false note, she won’t rest until it’s corrected.

  “Well.” She uses one hand to help herself rise from the table. She sweeps my cup and bowl into the sink and adds, with her back turned, “Of course you’ll need to heal.”

  The doorbell rings.

  Mrs. Pence goes to answer it, and I glimpse a little girl in blue jeans with a backpack hitched to her shoulders. She gives me a shy, curious look as Mrs. Pence leads her into the piano room and I escape out the kitchen’s back door.

  Bright sunlight illuminates the signs of a property run down. The sagging steps, the flaking paint on the picket fence behind the big spruce, where I’d somehow known to hide. The backyard lawn already has gone brown from unseasonable heat, although it’s been mowed and trimmed. I smell grass clippings and coffee grounds on a neat compost heap, and I think I remember a neighbor boy who once mowed Mrs. Pence’s lawns. Maybe he also kept up the flowerbeds, because I don’t remember Mrs. Pence ever gardening.

  But somebody is gardening back here now. Where the hollyhocks used to grow along the garage is a narrow spaded bed with a couple rows of something with fluffy tops, carrots maybe, and some green spikes that might grow into onions and something else green that might be leaf lettuce. Somebody has started a salad garden. With the sun warm on my shoulders, I follow the rows of carrot tops and onion sprouts around the corner of the garage and find, flourishing where they would be found only by accident, by someone wandering like me, several green plants with the familiar fivefold serrated leaves.

  I pause for a time by the garage in the warm afternoon shade. Somewhere nearby a lawn is b
eing watered. I can hear the swish-swish of the automatic sprinkler. It’s the wrong time of day to be watering a lawn; the droplets will evaporate in the heat almost before they hit the grass. Also it’s illegal. Mrs. Pence remarked that it has not rained in the Orchards for weeks and that there are watering restrictions. Somebody’s going to be in trouble. Otherwise, all is unremarkable: a car passing slowly on the gravel street and fading into distance, the air permeated with the scent of spruce needles, the scent of honeysuckle growing over a neighbor’s porch. A child shouts in a high-pitched treble, No! Not yet! I’m still playing! And someone answers, farther away and indistinct.

  A patch of bud behind Mrs. Pence’s garage. Who is the gardener?

  *

  “Are you thinking of rejoining your band? Are they still in Alaska?”

  This evening, after her day of piano lessons, Mrs. Pence has set the table in her dining room for two. Like an emblem of past affluence, the table is a carved dark wood with a matching breakfront that holds china, and the room is dim behind drawn shades. Dinner is a gray meatloaf, lukewarm. Mrs. Pence watches until I try a little salt to see if it helps and take a second bite of meatloaf. How had she known I’d been in Alaska? Had I talked while I was under the anesthesia, or had she found my passenger receipt in my backpack when she took out my clothes to wash?

  “No. I won’t go back to Alaska.”

  Compared with going back to Anchorage, hitchhiking to Boise is a great option.

  “They won’t be missing you? What will they do for keyboard and vocals?”

  At my look of surprise, she explains, “We used to see posters for Ruby Red and the Idaho Rivermen.”