Diary Of A Blues Goddess. Erica Orloff
beautiful and keep on singing,
Love, Your Father,
Dad
He signed each card that way. He was a dreamer who believed we could touch the sky and talk to God. We could speak to heaven and listen for ghosts in the attic. He was everything imaginative. He was the blues. He was the music. He was everything my mother wasn’t.
But after a while, both the postcards and the money stopped.
My mother’s reaction to this wasn’t anger or rage, hurt or tears of abandonment. Instead, she focused all her energies on creating this fantasy of perfection—and making sure I didn’t become a singer. That I didn’t abandon her, too. And my reaction to her reaction was to try my hardest to infuriate her.
My father had left behind his blues record collection, which was enormous and still lines special shelves I had built for them in my room. I played his music over and over and over again. Sometimes the same song tirelessly. I did it to feel close to him. I did it to hurt her for driving him away with her picture-perfect ways. Etta James’s “At Last” was their song. So what else would an angry adolescent do but play that song morning, noon and night. Music has always been my weapon and my refuge.
At first, I was certain Dad was going to come back. When he didn’t, the blues were already part of me. I played them, then, because they reflected how I felt about adolescence—it was like one long, angst-ridden blues song.
I was never quite sure if I succeeded in hurting her. Besides piercing my ears, I wore dark black eyeliner and bleached my hair blond, though it fried to a vague orange. I stayed out past my curfew every weekend night. I was sullen from the moment I woke up, staring through hostile eyes as she cooked me pancakes with raisins set in them to make little happy faces. Yet she never yelled at me, never grounded me. She kept smiling and cooking and cleaning and ironing, refusing to show how much I was breaking her heart—just like he did. As long as I wasn’t hanging out with musicians, she seemed content that it was all “a phase.” She didn’t want to risk pushing me away. She even let Damon sleep over at our house, knowing, I think, he was my only friend. A lot of the time, I convinced myself the only person holding me back from going to New York City and finding my father was Damon. Later, Damon and I had an elaborate fantasy about going to New York together. He’d be a top fashion designer, and I’d sing with my father’s band.
When I was almost seventeen, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was late-stage before they found it because she was too busy tending to me to take care of herself. Suddenly, hating her for her decidedly bad taste in clothes and bedspreads (mine was still Barbie in high school) was pointless.
I read to her while she was sick in bed. She liked romances with happy endings, and that’s what she got, though I was at an age when I didn’t believe in happy endings. I still don’t. “I can see you rolling your eyes, Georgia,” she weakly said one afternoon.
“Mom, happy endings are bullshit.”
“Georgia Ray, the language.”
“Fine. But they’re still bullshit. Happy endings aren’t for people like me.”
“What exactly is a person like you?” she asked, breathless. Everything, every word, took so much effort.
“An outsider. Different.”
“You’re New Orleans born and bred. How does that make you an outsider, Georgia?”
“No father, for one.” As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Now that she was sick, I was trying so hard not to wound her, but sometimes my resentments were right there on the surface.
I tried to explain to her that happy endings were for the popular girls, not for me with my kinky hair that I never quite accepted, and my exotic looks in the southern state of Louisiana, the social scene in high school dominated by Magnolia Queens and blond debutantes with beautiful drawls. Happy endings weren’t for Damon either, with his lust for the homecoming king—not queen. His desire to be the homecoming queen. Yet complaining about my hair seemed selfish, when my mother’s own perfect coiffure fell out in clumps in the shower one day, swirling down the tub and clogging the drain. I dropped the subject and kept reading to her.
Damon used to come over and give her makeovers, drawing on eyebrows and tying up colorful turbans out of silk scarves. One time, he did her eyes and eyebrows like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.
“You look just like Liz, Mrs. Miller,” Damon said, painting on the last of her new eyebrows.
“Hand me a mirror.”
I went to get a hand mirror, knowing she would freak out the second she saw herself.
“Now, you just have to go with it.” Damon stood and surveyed his handiwork.
I handed her the mirror, bracing myself for her reaction. But it wasn’t what I expected. She howled with laughter until tears rolled down her face, all the while Damon was begging her, “Don’t cry, don’t cry. It’ll all run.” Soon, she had black tear stains tracing a path down her now-thin face. Then Damon and I started laughing, too. After that, for the first time, my mother started to relax a little, to laugh with us. Maybe she was trying to leave some good memories for me.
Surrounded by death at home, I tried to be a normal teenager knowing my mother was slipping away and my father had stopped sending postcards when I was in the tenth grade. I tried to eat lunch with Damon and study about the Civil War with Mr. Hoffman, my favorite teacher, and learn about sines, cosines and tangents in math class. I tried to carry my lunch tray without tripping and open my locker without getting crushed by the crowds in the hallway.
We eventually moved in with Nan, selling our two-bedroom house in a parish outside New Orleans and coming into the city to live with my grandmother and her ghost. Nan had always been more like Auntie Mame than a grandmother. Strong, adventurous, feminist, stubborn, she tried to will my mother into getting well. But my mother had always wilted in the face of her mother, just as I wilted in the shade of my own mother’s shadow, and so Nan’s will aside, my mother was gone before winter was out. She died in a hospital, something she never wanted to do. Nan and I were there. It was the first time I ever saw a dead body.
That night, I cried until my stomach ached, and then I cried more but without any tears. I had never been perfect for her, and now I wouldn’t have the chance to lose the adolescent brooding and be nice to her, and maybe get a prom date while she was alive. I wouldn’t be able to prove to her that I wasn’t the rebellious girl she thought I was, with the messy room that drove her crazy. “Georgia, I can’t see the floor in here,” was her mantra. I had been angry for so many years, and she had loved me when I didn’t deserve it, and now she was gone.
Casanova Jones came to the wake. I remember sitting in the front of the muffled and velvet funeral parlor, my mother in her best dress—the one she’d been saving for a “special occasion.” She looked serene, but most definitely not like my mother. She was thin and bony and looked as if she was made of wax. Damon was wailing in the bathroom, unable to even come in to view her body. Nan sat next to me, patting my hand and accepting my used tissues, which she discreetly shoved into her vintage clutch purse.
I looked up, face blotchy and red, and mascara-streaked, my hair an unkempt mass of curls, and saw Casanova Jones heading straight toward me. He even had on a tie. His black curly hair fell past the collar of his white shirt, and his swagger, half man, half boy, was still evident, but as my grandmother whispered to me, “He cleans up good.” Rick, aka Casanova, mumbled an “I’m sorry” in the awkward way of high-school kids unsure of what to say when thrust into an adult situation. I loved him in that moment. Actually, I’d been in love with him all of high school. Something about how he pushed his hands through his luxurious head of curls—curls that behaved, unlike my own—and sort of shook his hair into place, about his pale blue eyes, or how he played with a lock of my hair while flirting with me threw me right over the edge. He was my crush. He was my obsession. And he picked my mother’s funeral to show he really cared and wasn’t just toying with me. I was too numb to care.
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