“Um,” I said as Ms. Lottie fitted a wig of long, straight blond locks over my head. With my hair color back to natural and no makeup, in the mirror I looked more like myself than I had in a year, which made me uncomfortable. “Does this hair go with Elvis?”
“You’re not with Elvis today, hon,” she said, wrapping the wig with a bandanna printed like the American flag. “You’re with Willie Nelson.”
“Why?” I asked her reflection. Even without mascara, my blue eyes looked huge. I tried not to seem so obviously panicked. Elvis must have complained to the management about me already. I’d been transferred but not fired. Not yet.
“Elvis only works a few days a week,” Ms. Lottie explained. “He bartends the rest. We couldn’t put you with him all the time. Everybody’s schedule is real irregular because nobody can make a living doing this. And then, of course, sometimes we have people out sick. Or they lay out of work, more likely.” She placed her hands firmly on either side of the flag bandanna and gave the wig a hard jerk to straighten my fake scalp. “Even if you were all here every day of the week, we’d switch up the bands so you didn’t kill each other. You musicians are impossible, and Elvis is the absolute worst. Didn’t he come on to you?”
I was so surprised that another “Um” was all I could manage.
“Didn’t he ask what was under your circle skirt?” Ms. Lottie insisted, leaning forward to find the foundation she used on me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Sounds like Dolly is telling him off, though,” Ms. Lottie pointed out as the noise of their argument rose over the empty bookshelves.
She came in close to work on my face and coaxed me to relax my jaw. I couldn’t let go. My mind whirled with the speech I’d rehearsed for the last twenty hours. Now I didn’t need it. I should have been relieved. Elvis wasn’t going to tell on me. He’d insulted me and then had an argument with me because he did that to everybody. I could still tell on him if I wanted. Other employees and Ms. Lottie would probably back me up.
Instead of relief, though, I felt let down and exhausted. All my hours of scheming and plotting were a big departure from my usual routine of boredom and apathy. I was left with that buzz of adrenaline, and now I had nowhere to put it.
I was even a little disappointed to hear that Elvis came on to anything in a circle skirt, not just me. When I’d thought I was something special to him, at least I’d felt adult and sexy. Now I pined for this pervert to have eyes only for me. There was something seriously wrong with me.
“Hon, we can’t have tears. I’ve already done your eyeliner.” Ms. Lottie dabbed the corner of a tissue at my lash line, then stood back to look at me. “What’s the matter? Boy trouble?”
“I wish.” How delicious it would be to get this upset about a hot guy who cared about me instead of any of the hot guys I’d hung with that year, who would throw me to the piranhas rather than get their feet wet.
“I don’t know about that,” Ms. Lottie said, feathering mascara through my lashes to replace the thick mascara I’d just taken off. “Be careful what you wish for.”
After all the drama of Elvis Tuesday, Willie Nelson Wednesday was laid-back. Ms. Lottie costumed me in a tight tank top and a denim miniskirt with a frayed hem. I passed for a member of Willie’s bedraggled 1970s entourage, I guessed. Either that or a girl from the boonies dressed in her finest for a tourist trip to Nashville.
Our quartet moseyed down the loading ramp to pile into a van, which drove us to the state capitol building. After the governor signed a tax bill into law on the marble steps, we entertained the lawmakers and lobbyists sipping punch with “Always on My Mind,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” each song in the key of D. I’d never noticed that everything was in the same key.
Yeah, maybe Willie Wednesday was a little too laid-back. I should have loved this field trip because it got us away from the mall, outside in the sunshine. The huge capitol building was a fake Greek temple set on a grassy hill at the edge of downtown, with skyscrapers in front of us, and hints of country music wafting to us on the breeze from the tourist district on Broadway. But whenever I got close to Willie to confer about the next few tunes, he reeked of pot. So did the guitarist and the mandolin player in similar hippie garb. I thought about asking them for a toke, joking that it went with the outfit. But if I could smell it on them, my granddad would be able to smell it on me when I returned to his house that night. Which meant no toking up behind the bushes on the grounds of the state capitol.
On Thursday, because God did not love me anymore, I played in a band with Hank Williams at a ribbon cutting for the city’s new sewage treatment plant. At least it didn’t smell yet. And to their credit, unlike Willie’s band, these guys hadn’t imbibed Hank’s poison of choice. The bass guitarist was a talented musician who looked—and smelled—sober. Hank played guitar reasonably well and sounded fine when he sang in his normal range, but the yodeling. Oh, the yodeling. For a musician like me burdened with perfect pitch, being deposited in a band with a pitchy Hank Williams singing “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” was torture, pure and simple. I’d thought I needed to concentrate to play in D-sharp when Elvis was playing in D, but that was nothing compared with the Zen-like place I retreated to in my mind and the deep, measured breaths I took to keep the look of distaste off my face while Hank yodeled.
Friday I thought I was prepared for anything, but Ms. Lottie threw me a curveball and announced I was playing at the tenth anniversary of a steak house out near the airport with Dolly Parton. Dolly was the version of Ms. Parton from her most popular, glitzy 1970s era. That meant cleavage, and not just for Dolly. For all four of us in her band.
I’d dressed up in costume from age seven to age seventeen, looking more like a pageant toddler than a bluegrass musician. Julie and I had worn matching “country” outfits that nobody out in the country could ever pick beans or herd cows in: custom-made dresses with knee-length skirts standing almost straight out like we were square dancers. When enough sequins sparkled around our necks and our blond curls were sprayed stiff underneath our cowgirl hats, people noticed only how alike we looked, not how different we were. They feigned astonishment that we weren’t twins even though I was two years older. I found this fun at seven, nauseating at seventeen.
But no country costume could have prepared me for dressing up like Dolly Parton’s right-hand girl a few weeks after I’d turned eighteen. I’d been wearing sexy clothes in the past year—provocative clothes, my mom had said with distaste—but to me that had meant choosing a body-hugging minidress for the homecoming dance, or slicing a deeper V in my threadbare White Stripes T-shirt. I’d never shown this much boob in public.
Ms. Lottie acted like it was nothing. Costumes were part of showbiz, after all, even the steak house version of showbiz. She pinned my bouffant brunette wig in place—only Dolly got to wear a platinum wig. Ms. Lottie had already taken in my spangled maxi-dress a few inches before I arrived. All she had to do was pull it, shift it, give up, and make me add some padding to my bra, then pull and shift the gown again and shove my precocious fake cl**vage into place. She stood back with her hands on her h*ps to survey her work, then reached out to coax one of my baby boobs a little higher. “Sorry, hon. That’s the best I can do with what you’ve got. Just stay behind the others.” She gave me an encouraging pat on my sequined ass as I staggered on high heels into the bombed-out Borders to find Dolly.
Ms. Parton was a tolerable musician. So were the other two ladies on guitar and mandolin. Best of all, Ms. Parton had the Dolly act down, with lots of self-deprecating humor about br**sts and plastic surgery. She made some jokes so off-color that even I thought they might be inappropriate for the families from the sticks enjoying a long lunch before they visited Junior at the state prison. I almost enjoyed the afternoon.
But I couldn’t shake the idea that my dress of the day had been designed as some sick parody of my life, a combination of the costume I used to wear with Julie and the costume I’d donned for my wild senior year of high school. I hadn’t wanted to expose my boobs to this crowd going back for seconds and thirds at the chocolate fountain, but that’s what I’d acted like I’d wanted all year. I’d acted like my goal was to get drunk with Hank Williams, or get stoned with Willie Nelson, or have an older man like Elvis imply he wanted to screw me. This job was a catalog of everything my parents had screamed at me about over the past year. Is that what you want? Because that’s what you’re acting like! It was a mythical series of tasks I had to perform to prove myself before I claimed my prize—except there was no prize. Unlike Hercules, I was not worthy.
And on Saturday, I was assigned to wander the mall again, this time in a band with Johnny Cash.
“Plus his son,” Ms. Lottie said. “Such a cutie-pie.”
I’d noticed Mr. Cash sitting on the couch on my way in. I hadn’t noticed his son. Maybe at the time he’d been bent over, fishing something from his instrument case. Maybe he wasn’t much to look at, or he was way older than me, so my brain hadn’t even registered him, and Ms. Lottie was putting me on.
“You will liiiiiiiiiike him,” she insisted, looking at me pointedly in the mirror and raising one carefully penciled eyebrow above her reading glasses. “I hear he’s a heartbreaker, though, so watch out.”
I scowled at my reflection. As on the first day, she was making me up in the style of the 1950s, all traces erased of the blond, angelic version of me from a year ago, and the current evil version, too. I needed my usual heavy mascara and black hair and black T-shirt to make this heartbreaker take me seriously when I scowled at him and told him where to go. He sounded like a replay of Elvis.
“This is ridiculous,” I told Ms. Lottie. “Johnny Cash’s wife didn’t even play fiddle. She played everything but. What kind of authentic Nashville experience is this?”
“You don’t have to be June Carter Cash. You could be a session musician from Studio B. Trust me, you want to be with the Cashes today.” Ms. Lottie nodded toward the lounge area, where Johnny Cash and his heartbreaker son were tuning their guitars. “A couple of mornings ago, weren’t you wishing for boy trouble? You just found it.”
2
“We’ll see about that,” I grumbled. With my circle skirt sweeping behind me, I spun in Ms. Lottie’s chair and stepped out of her hair-and-makeup alcove. I opened my fiddle case on an abandoned bookcase with a “Romance” sign on top. Better that than “Addiction” or “Family Planning,” which was where my parents thought I was parking my fiddle these days. I ran the bow across the strings, making minor adjustments with the tuning pegs. I didn’t need a tuning fork. I could tune my instrument by ear and I was always right. Other people didn’t believe me, though, and I often spent a whole set of songs gritting my teeth and playing A at a fourth of a step up or down from 440 hertz.
Determined not to let that happen this time, I marched across the bookstore with a smile on my face, which seemed a lot more natural while I was in costume. Mr. Cash and his son sat in chairs on opposite ends of the lounge area, playing their guitars. I would charm them into doing things the way I wanted.
I watched them as I walked closer. Johnny Cash was a man about my dad’s age with his dark hair greased and combed into a pompadour. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and a bolo tie, which worked fine for Mr. Cash but also wouldn’t have turned heads anywhere in Nashville. People around here were a little eccentric about bolo ties.
Ms. Lottie had coaxed his son’s hair into the same glossy pompadour, but his clothes could have passed for current, too, part of the Buddy Holly aesthetic so popular right now at Vanderbilt. He wore low-top black Chuck Taylors, black jeans folded up a few turns like greasers wore them in the 1950s, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. The material stretched tight across his chest and biceps. He was big enough to have played football.
As I approached, Mr. Cash never looked up. There was no reason for him to. The lounge area was always busy at this time of the afternoon with musicians milling back and forth between the couches and Ms. Lottie’s area. A 1950s fiddle player coming closer shouldn’t have been an unusual sight.
But his son looked up. I was watching them, listening to the cacophony as they played two different songs in two different keys. I saw the exact moment when Cash Jr. realized someone was making a beeline for him. His dark eyes widened at me, his stare so unabashed and his expression so intent, as if reading my face, that I felt myself blushing in response.
And then he grinned at me. His eyes sparkled. The corners of his mouth lifted through a day’s worth of dark stubble, which didn’t quite jibe with the pompadour. He definitely was only a few years older than me, and so handsome that I wished for the millionth time I’d never cut my blond hair off and dyed it black. Then I remembered I was wearing my red ponytail wig, which was even worse.
Now I knew what Ms. Lottie had meant when she said he was a heartbreaker. And he hadn’t spoken one word to me yet.
I hadn’t bothered to impress anyone in a full year, but I found myself doing it now. I stopped in front of the sofa and called above Mr. Cash’s continuing guitar notes, “Hello, I’m June Carter Cash,” in imitation of the way the real deal used to say, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” at the beginning of his television variety show in the early 1970s. My parents had the complete set of DVDs.
“She didn’t play fiddle,” the son said, never taking his eyes off me as he stood. “You’re definitely not her.” His words were innocent enough, but his knowing tone of voice told me he got the joke that I was married to his father, and he himself was my son. And he didn’t like it.