Colum McCann - Songdogs

I ask and she says that nothing much has changed. The laundry has grown bigger and new employees have been taken on. Other girls doing the scrubbing now. My father is still on the roofs, and the tar docks itself under his fingers. His forty-second birthday was spent above the Bronx — jokes being made about Marilyn Monroe and those who like it hot. Cici has written to her, raving about marijuana, but she hasn’t visited yet. Cici would like it here, out moving in the night, with moths flaring around under lamplights, dancers in a bouquet around a radio, the grind of hips, the swivel of words. It’s her sort of place — except Cici might be aware that there’s even newer music on its way, runnelling along over the continent, newer ideas, newer dances. Mam has a bead of sweat on her brow. Maybe she will wait for it to negotiate its way down her face to where she can tongue it. Or maybe not. Maybe she will wipe it off with a quick flick of the hand. Or maybe it will stay there eternally, a bead of sweat to say: I was dancing once, when I was thirty-three years old, and I didn’t have a care in the world.

Outside the photograph, my father is slickly dressed in a white shirt that smells of barsmoke. His dark tie is open and the long end of it reaches past his waist. Hair is quite thin now, furrows of it across his scalp. He is glad to watch his wife dance. He is afraid that life is becoming staid, he doesn’t like the roofs. There are days when he goes searching for other jobs, something in a press syndicate, or a newspaper, but all he ever gets are a few freelance shifts. He just wants to take his photographs, but there’s not much opportunity for that. The world rotates on an axis of what-ifs? What if we were somewhere else? What if we sauntered off and just didn’t come back?

But, for now, he enjoys the music coming from the radio. The men on the roofs sometimes sing Presley, their favourite being ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’

While he stands to take this particular photograph his foot is tapping, but he has to stop so as not to jolt the camera. A million light cells have just burst from the flash. I walk through them, packets of light swarming around me, and out the other side, back into the nineties, where the sun is going down over the Teton mountains. I cannot help this wandering backwards. It is my own peculiar curse.

Their apartment has a bedroom and a living room — but it is in this bedroom that all the living is done. I feel queasy about stepping into this private domain, a voyeur, a Peeping Tom. The room is painted mauve. It is two years on. Mam is in a white summer dress and she is lying on a chaise-longue that they’ve rescued from the rubbish. The chaise has carved feet that curve and bend and give it elegance, but the material is ripped and tatty, bits of stuffing come out from it. She lies, as if on a throne. The dress is purposefully off the shoulder. It falls down and exposes the top half of a dark nipple. The shot is loaded with more sexuality than almost any of the others — something to do with its casualness. Despite the skinniness, she looks good. Her feet are stretched in front of her and it seems like she is contemplating her toes. She is chewing on the end of a pen and a sheet of paper is propped up on her stomach. I imagine that she is writing to Cici. I step over to see what she is saying on the page: I miss the fires. Don’t you? The last letter that Mam received was very strange — Cici had been exalting marijuana, going into rhapsodies about acid. What does marijuana make you feel like? Mam might be writing. I have heard it makes you sick, true? The end of the pen is so well chewed that it looks as if she simply sinks her teeth into it, but in this photo she is kissing it, lost in thought, thick lips pursed upon it. She wears no jewellery, only her wedding ring. Her body sweeps away from her in the photograph, along the chaise-longue, a sheet of paper flying in the breeze.

He likes the pose, my father, he is enjoying the capture of it. He is up on the balls of his toes, shouting, Perfect! Perfect! Hold it right there! He is fresh from a shower and feels good about the world. This will be one of the best shots. He sweeps his fingers over his balding scalp and shouts, Hold it! Maybe he will put on a gallery exhibition in an avant-garde place, he thinks, show her to the world. Fifteen years of Mam — in Mexico, in Wyoming, in New York. He is very excited about the idea, which will never come to fruition. But for now he is happy with the vision of it.

Her lips are kissing the end of the pen, and she’s glad that her husband isn’t throwing a fit and that there is something quite smooth and secretive to the grey light that is filtering its way through the curtains, the rays seeming to bend as they hit a dusty mirror. She won’t remain in this apartment for ever, she thinks, but at least it isn’t too bad. The cream is still working on her hands. It has given them a certain softness. There is a small amount of money in the bank. Things she had never dreamed of — toasters and televisions — have begun to fill the empty spaces in the apartment. Even some Spanish speakers have come to the street now, from near the Atacama Desert in Chile. She spends time with them, looks after their baby. There are still some days when my father whispers that he will bring her home to Mexico. She is sitting back, relaxed, writing her letter, and I leave her there, in that peculiar peace, my father shouting, Here we go, Juanita! Yeah! Yeah!

I move away from them, out of their bedroom, and into a print given to me by Cici.

It is 1964. The camera must have been held out by Cici at the distance of an outstretched arm, because it is a lopsided close-up. It shows only their faces and the tops of their clothes, their cheeks touching against one another. Cici has hitch-hiked all the way across the country from San Francisco. She looks exhilarated, her pupils set high in the rims of her eyes. The acne crevices have been darkened in from her spell out on the open roads — in the nudist camps, the psychedelic buses, the growing lines of war protests, last year’s march to Washington, the hailing-to-the-sky of Martin Luther King.

The top of a bright t-shirt peeps out from the bottom edge. Mam’s hair is loose on her shoulders. Disembodied, I float in. The kitchen is full of sparkling pans. Some water boiling on the stove. The Rolling Stones on the radio. A familiar smell drifts up from the table where Mam and Cici are sitting. I am amazed to find myself staring at a joint, burning itself down in the ashtray. Cici has been smoking. Maybe my mother has, too, but I doubt it. A tumble of words from them — Cici asking Mam to join her for a while, even just for a holiday, that they’ll caress the road, maybe meet up with some Sonoran gypsies, eat peyote, go down over the border together.

‘Come with me, man,’ she says.

‘Why you call me “man”?’

‘Why not?’

The offer is tempting. This touching of hair, this touching of cheek, this apparition of Cici again in her life.

‘And Michael?’

‘What about him?’

The joint is held between lips and there is an uproar of laughter. Cici’s head is jerked towards the fridge, which up until an hour ago Mam had been proud of. But Cici has quoted a novelist talking about ‘dumb white machinery,’ and the fridge is not quite so magical to her anymore. Cici says that the dope has made her hungry, and again they laugh. There is a hand laid on a hand and the two of them look at the camera.

Cici says, ‘Cheese!’

But there is a secret behind all of this and, afterwards, when I extend the rim of the photograph and follow them into the living room, Mam tells her about it.

‘I am going to have a baby,’ Mam says eventually, smiling, ‘Michael and I are going to have baby.’