LaVyrle Spencer: Small Town Girl

Once in the water she lay back, studying the pinkish-colored plastic tiles with swirls of gray running through them like the lines in Strawberry Revel ice cream. Right below the shoulder-high top tier of tiles, a one-inch strip of black belted the room. It was absolutely hideous, so she closed her eyes and thought about the album in progress.

She had eight solid songs on tape but ten were requisite. Her producer, Jack, always liked to record eleven, so they could scuttle one if they wanted to. She needed three more songs for this album. Finding good material-that was the key to success in this business. Nashville had fantastically talented musicians, but they had to have the song before they could do their work, and there were a lot of successful singers waiting to snatch up songs by the best songwriters.

So Tess had gotten into music publishing and hired a stable of twelve songwriters. She wasn't stupid, she knew that a performer's life is limited, and when her voice started to go the royalties from the publishing company would continue to bring in a magnificent income that would assure her a lifestyle of wealth and ease, no matter how old she lived to be.

But that still left the problem of which three songs she'd find to complete the album. Ivy Britt wrote good ones, but she was so slow. Sometimes it took her months to complete a song. Tess planned to spend some time at the piano writing while she was here. It was the perfect time, when business distractions were held at bay and her duties caring for Mary would leave her ample time to compose.

Maybe she'd write about coming back home and what it was like.

An opening line came into her head, and she hummed it.

One-way traffic crawlin' 'round a small town square

She hummed the melody four times, then sang the words softly to the rhythm of the faucet dripping into her bathwater. It entered the world in 4/4 time, in major chords, as an upbeat ballad.

She thought of a second line.

Eighteen years've passed since she's been there … And a third.

Been around the world, now she's coining back…

What rhymed with back? Clack, flack, hack, attack, cognac . Wrong syllable accented on cognac. Track, attack, bric-a-brac …

Tess opened her eyes and sat up to soap her washcloth, humming the verse and trying to come up with a last line. She tried a couple.

Feeling like she's somehow gotten off the track…

Trying to fit in here but she's lost the knack…

Neither of them pleased her, so she went on trying others. And so it went, the birth of a song. Some of them happened this way, an extension of what Tess was living, taking her experiences to a subliminal plane of creativity that spoke to her as if she had no part in the creating.

By the time she dried and powdered and put on her silk pajamas, she had the first three lines pegged and was impatient to get upstairs and write them down.

In her bedroom, she sat at her old dressing table and got the words on paper, wishing she could go down to the piano and pick out the chords she heard in her head. Unlike most country singers she had never played guitar. Piano was the instrument on which all three McPhail girls had been given lessons. She had tried guitar, but her fingers were too short and it ruined her fingernails, so she'd given it up. But often Tess envied the band members who could pick up their instruments on a bus or in a motel room and play, sing, or compose wherever they were.

At eleven o'clock she crawled into her old bed and turned out the light. At midnight she was still awake, energized by the song, kept awake further by the strange mattress that was far from comfortable.

The last time she looked at her clock it was 1:38 and she knew it would be hell rolling out at 4:30.

Tess slept through her alarm and awakened with a start when her mother called up the stairs, "Tess? Time to get up, dear. It's five after five already."

Five after five… Lord o' mercy, did people actually get up at such a reprehensible hour?

"Okay, Mom, I'm awake," she croaked, and sat up unsteadily. A faint peachiness had begun tinting the east window shade. She scratched her head while peering at it with one eye squinted. Pulling herself to the edge of the bed by her heels, she tried to fix in her mind the fact that she really had to rise and get dressed. No time for a shower-oh, shoot, that's right, there was no shower, only a tub.

Her head felt like the surf was up at the base of her skull. "Hey, Momma?" she called, shuffling to the railing and calling down. "Where we going again?"

"To Poplar Bluff." Wintergreen was too small to have a hospital of its own.

"Thirty minutes?"

"Thirty minutes, same as always."

Heading for the stairs, Tess passed the east window and pulled up the shade to verify that it really was the sun coming up. It was. In about twenty minutes or so it would splat up right over the top of Kenny Kronek's house. Grimacing, she jerked the shade back into place and grunted off in search of her toothbrush.

With little time for morning ablutions, she managed with only a quick splash and a smear of lipstick before dragging on jeans, cowboy boots, and a polo shirt over which she pulled a white sweatshirt with the word Boss plastered across the front in huge black letters. She spared time to hook on her earrings-she felt naked without earrings, no matter what kind of clothing she had on-then clattered back downstairs to see what she could do with her hair. While she was in the bathroom realizing the hair was hopeless on such short notice, Mary called from outside the door, "You just about set, Tess? We should be leaving."

"Yeah, just a sec."

In the end she finally rubber-banded it into a frowsy tail and pulled the tail through the hole of a bill cap that said Azalea Trail 10K Run across the top. Boy, did she look bad. But surgery schedules wouldn't wait, and her mother was hovering outside the bathroom door with her purse handle over her wrist.

Tess told her, "I'll take your suitcase out and put it in the car, then I'll come back to help you down the back steps. Now, you wait for me, okay?"

She returned to the house to find Mary in the kitchen with her hand on the light switch, surveying the room as if afraid she might never see it again. Her eyes moved in an affectionate sweep over her aged possessions: the stove on which she'd cooked for decades, the glass canisters shaped like vegetables with chips on the edges of their covers, the worn countertops, the garish wallpaper, the table with that ugly plastic doily getting uglier by the day.

On the doily sat the potted ivy. Mary's eyes stopped on it. "I watered my houseplants yesterday, so they should be okay."

"Everything will be just fine back here. I'll take care of everything."

"Judy brought milk and bread for you, and some ham-burger she put in the freezer. Oh, and eggs! The eggs are fresh."

"Don't worry about me."

Still Mary hesitated, looking back at the room. Tess waited while her mother searched for other excuses to delay. A single word, uttered last night by Kenny Kronek, came back to Tess. "Scared?" he'd asked, hunkered down beside Mary's chair. At the time Tess had so much resented his presence and his familiarity with her mother that she'd disregarded the conversation. Now, watching Mary's hesitation, she realized she herself hadn't bothered wondering if her mother was scared to face this second surgery. It appeared she was.

"Come on, Mom," she urged gently. "We'd better go. I'll take care of everything, don't worry."

They left the house with the sun bending their long shadows against the back steps and up the wall beside the door. Watching her mother cling to the sturdy iron railing while painfully negotiating the three steps, Tess felt pity, and the greatest wave of love since she'd arrived home. She'd given little consideration to what her mother had been going through with the cartilage in her hips deteriorating. Principally, she'd thought, It's a common surgery today. A lot of people have it. She'll pull through just fine like she did the first time . Watching Mary's painful struggle from the house-the first time she'd observed her on steps-brought her condition into sharper focus. Tess took her momma's arm and helped her along the narrow back sidewalk toward the alley.