smile, dammit

The Gift


The gift ran in the family, I think.

Mom was a musician, and Dad was her manager.

We never talked about music. Whenever I tried to raise the topic, she left the room. She wouldn't let me listen to her songs.

"She doesn't like to be reminded," Dad said. He was gentle and even-handed, everything Mom wasn't. "Be gentle with her, you know how it hurts."

"I just want to know," I told him. "I want to be able to be proud of her, to listen to what she's done."

"When you're older," said Dad. "You'll understand when you're older."


When I was six, I told her: "I want to be like you."

She had just released what we didn't know would be her final album, to critical acclaim. It didn't sell well, but then again, none of her music did, after she quit touring. We lived off of the money that Dad brought home from his job managing a restaurant, a breakfast place by the side of the highway.

"I want to be like you," I told Mom, because I'd seen her face when Dad read her the reviews, the way she looked -- happy, finally, the happiest I'd ever seen her, like she'd just been given everything she wanted.

I wanted to be like her because I wanted to feel that way. I knew, in some vague way, that her money had paid for our house, that my friends' mothers were jealous of her, of the life she'd led before Dad married her. I didn't care about that. I wanted to be happy, too.

By six, I had learned from Dad and his parents that happiness wasn't a guarantee, that the adult world was full of sad, terrible things.

I thought Mom had escaped it.

"No," she said, her voice flat, when I expressed my desire to be like her. "You don't."


I used to sneak into the living room at night, when both of them were asleep, and listen to LPs of her songs, clunky old headphones plugged into the stereo so they wouldn't hear.

She sang about things I didn't recognize, about love and death and betrayal, and told stories through her songs.

I loved them. Listening to them, I'd feel a little shiver, of fear or delight, I never could say, run up my spine, her voice crooning in my ear, low and strange in the darkened living room.

Her music enchanted me. Whenever I put the headphones on, I was pulled inexorably into the world of the song -- her world.

Dad caught me, more than once.

"You shouldn't..." he'd start, every time, and then pause.

"I'm sorry," I told him, and I was, though not for the right thing -- for the minor transgression of being out of bed, out of bounds, and not for the larger sin of listening.

"You're not," he said, seeing through my apology every time. "But it's all right. Just don't let your mother find you."

"I won't," I said.

She never did. She slept through the night, unnaturally deep. I'd tried to wake her, more than once, and been unsuccessful.

Dad was the one who couldn't sleep.


I don't know how old I was when I noticed she was forgetting things. Eight, maybe nine?

Dad was usually the one to pick me up from school, but that day, he had an appointment across town. Something minor -- one of his teeth had been bothering him, and he was seeing the dentist about it. I'd overheard the uncomfortable conversation about whether or not we could afford for him to go, whether or not he could afford a crown, or if they'd have to put it off.

Mom was supposed to get me. He'd left her the keys, taken the bus across town.

I waited for her, standing in the rainy school parking lot, for thirty minutes, until the last bus left, and my teacher came out to ask if perhaps there was someone else we could call?

I phoned my grandmother, Dad's mom, who came and fetched me, all tight-lipped smiles at the teacher until we were at the car, when she sighed and let her face relax.

"Don't worry," she told me. "I'll get you home in one piece."

She didn't say anything else to me the entire way back. She was like that -- she'd say something that was meant to be reassuring, but rarely was, and then focus on something else and never say another word.

She was thinking of what to say to Mom, I could tell. Whether she was going to read her the riot act, or tattle on her to Dad -- I didn't know.

She parked in the driveway, behind our car.

I unbuckled and slid out, ran for the front door before she could say anything, turned the knob and let myself inside.

"Mom?"

"Leigh?" She emerged from the bedroom, still in her robe. "Shit -- was I supposed to...?"

She didn't usually swear in front of me. I waited for her to say something else.

I heard my grandmother step into the house behind me.

"Marianne," she said, her voice cold. "I picked up Leigh from school. Her teacher called me. Apparently someone couldn't be reached."

Mom rubbed the back of her neck. "I'm sorry, I..."

I slunk away before I could hear what the excuse was.

I didn't rely on her, after that.


Dad never made excuses for her, for the way she was.

"She made her choice," he said. "She knew what she was doing. She saw what happened to her parents."

I wasn't sure who he was trying to convince, her or me.


Mom never wanted me to go into music. The few times she was lucid, when she remembered who I was, she warned me against it.

"I didn't have a choice," she said. "But you..."

You do, her words implied. You don't have to do this.

The first time I picked up a guitar, it sparked something, and I knew.

I had as much of a choice as she did.


The gift runs in the family.

There is a power to singing, performing your own music, songs that you wrote yourself, seeing your audience sway to the beat, sing along with you.

There is a power to being loved, wholly and completely, by strangers that have connected with you through your songs.

It's intoxicating. No one tells you that. It's like flying. No one and nothing can touch you, when you're in the middle of playing. During the middle of a good set, the audience melts away, as does the stage, until it's only you and your instrument and the sound of your voice, combining to lift you up, away from everything else.

It's addictive. Nothing can touch it.

So what if you have to give away pieces of yourself, to make it happen?


I didn't realize the cost until after I'd written my first song. I was thinking about something -- some happy memory from childhood, something about when my Mom was still Mom and not the shadow of her former self, before she'd written the last album and begun forgetting everything.

I thought about it, as I sang it for the first time, all together.

When I was done, I'd forgotten what the memory was.


Dad tried to tell me, at one point. "You have a choice," he emphasized. "You can choose to do something else, be someone else. For God's sake, Leigh, pick something safe, something far away from music."

I played him the song I wrote, and he shook his head.

"Isn't it nice?" I asked, my voice acid.

"It's beautiful," he said, "but that's not the point."

I played a few notes. "You don't understand," I said. "You're not a musician."

"Do you know what it's like?" he asked. "Watching Marianne lose herself? Watching the woman I fell in love with disappear by degrees? She put all of her memories of us into that last album, and now she barely knows where she is half the time. She still writes songs, too. She can hardly remember how to play anymore, but she still keeps doing it, giving away little pieces of herself. She'll never tour again, and she's still destroying her mind, her memory. Is that what you want?"

I was seventeen, and I thought I knew better than him.

"Yes," I said.


I put myself into my music.

There's a magic to it, some kind of transference. I am the music, and the music is me.

If I want to be successful, all I have to do is hand myself over, piecemeal. Memories of my mother, my father -- interesting people I've met, places I've visited, all of them transferred into the songs, until there is nothing left. I can visualize the structure in my mind, and then all I have to do is play, and it takes over from there. Compelling songs -- "haunting", the reviews say. "Magical."

They don't know how right they are.


I started with my childhood, and I worked my way outward.

I was discovered at nineteen, and the man who managed me demanded everything I had to give.

I listened and gave, and I never complained.

"Fame is a drug," someone tried to tell me, at some party, once -- or I think they did.

I laughed and told them nothing was about fame.


I forgot who I was, after we produced the sixth album. The studio sessions drained me. Recording was painful. I went in one day, and I had a clear sense of who I was, what it was that I stood for, and when they asked me to give it that "old spin", to make it what they knew it could be, I listened. I said I would do it, that I'd give it my all.

I walked into the studio one day, and I knew who I was. By the time we finished recording that day, I didn't. I'd forgotten my own name. It sounds silly, but it was terrifying, at the time.

"Leigh," said the sound engineer. "We got it. You can stop playing now. Leigh?"

I didn't realize he was talking to me.


The sixth album was the one that charted, that got really big. The one that saw my name become a household one.

Dad called me, when he saw it announced -- he'd been following my career for a while.

"Your mother would be proud of you," he said, "If she could remember who you are."

"Of course," I said. I didn't want to admit that I didn't know what he was talking about.


The seventh album, they demanded I put more of myself into the music.

I did. It won awards, was critically acclaimed, sold well -- that was the last time.

I tried to drive myself home, could barely remember where I lived.

I knew I had to stop, then, but they pushed me anyway, to go on tour, to keep producing music.

I was thirty, going to be thirty-one in a month. I had a girlfriend, someone I couldn't remember meeting or loving, but who assured me that she loved me anyway.

I couldn't remember who my parents were, why it was important that I stop, only that I had to.

I went on tour.

I put myself into every show that I performed.

I forgot who I was, why I was doing it.

That was my youth.

I don't remember it, now.


I don't know who I am anymore.

I get letters in the post sometimes -- pieces of correspondence from fans of mine. "I loved your show when I saw you play at..." and they insert the name of a venue, something I should recognize. "You played..." or "You signed my..."

Nina responds to them. I tell her not to, and she shrugs and cheerfully answers them anyway. She used to hide it from me, but after I caught her, and made no effort to stop her, she quit pretending.

"People want to know," she says. "And if your songs keep getting played..."

She doesn't finish the rest of the sentence. She doesn't need to. If your songs keep getting played, at least that's a bit of money coming in.

A bit of money, so I don't have to go back into the studio, or, God forbid, go on tour again.

So I don't have to sell myself, piece by piece, to keep a roof over our heads.

Nina is clever, and she's all I have left from the old days. I listen to her, and I don't argue.


The gift ran in the family, I think.

Mom forgot who she was. Her parents forgot who they were.

I don't remember who I am. Nina reassures me that it will come back to me, but I don't think it will.

"Stress," say the doctors. "You need to relax, enjoy retirement."

I'm 35. My youth is behind me.

I don't remember any of it.


At night, when I can't sleep, I walk out to the living room, put one of my mother's records on the turn table, and plug in my headphones. They're my own pressings of her songs, something that's gained in popularity again, after all of my music charted.

I listen to her music, and I try to make an emotional connection to it, to remember who she was and where my love of music came from.

There's nothing there.