Into the Woods

7 Girls, Girls, Girls

7

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

Teddy

My idea for Laurie was this kid called Tristan Barnes. He was sixteen, and he was a little shit.

On Tuesday afternoon, I dropped in on the music kids during a group meeting. They and the counselors were settling on the order of operations for their recital or whatever. I hung back until it was over and intercepted him. “Hey, Tristan, want to do me a favor?”

I didn’t wait for his answer, just started walking, trusting he would follow. Which he did. “Sure, yeah.”

I was shamelessly exploiting the fact that some of the kids, Tristan among them, were visibly in awe of me. It was funny how there was an inverse relationship between how starstruck the kids were and how much I liked them. I wondered if that said something about the kids or about me.

“Where’re we going?” Tristan asked.

“I need you to help the dancers with something.”

He stopped in his tracks. “What?”

“They need a guy for their show.”

“To play guitar?”

“Not sure,” I said vaguely, and I kept up a brisk pace until we reached the dance studio. The doors were propped open on account of the heat, so we could hear the music before we could see them. It was Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls).”

We peeked in. Girls in leotards were dancing. Most of them were paired up, doing an old-fashioned-looking dance, a waltz maybe, but two of them were doing a modern solo thing—except they were doing it side by side, so was that a duet?—in the middle. It was striking, these two girls doing contemporary moves in the middle of these stylized waltzes, all set to Beyoncé. I mean, I didn’t get it, but it was cool looking.

Gretchen shouted some encouragement, and I swung my attention to her at the edge of the dance floor. She was wearing a leotard, too, and it stopped me in my tracks. Which was dumb because I’d seen her in a swimsuit. I’d seen her in two different swimsuits.

The leotard was light blue, and she was wearing a pair of ratty shorts over it. It was, theoretically, nothing special. But damn, there was something about it. Or maybe it was the way she was moving in it. She was following along with the girls in the center, doing the moves they did but in a smaller, more restrained way. From my vantage point, she was in profile, and she was nodding and whispering to herself. When the girls leaped, she made a leaping motion with her arms but stayed on the ground. When they turned, she stayed where she was but made a looping motion with one hand. She looked a bit like a classical conductor.

If classical conductors perspired. She was sweating . Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but it was wet along the hairline. Her face was shiny, and there were blooms of sweat under her arms and down the gentle valley made by her breasts.

There was something oddly compelling about all that sweat. And about the intensity of her concentration.

One of the girls stumbled over a move, a sort of leap-twist hybrid, and Gretchen went over to her and said, “You have to lift with the leading hand. Like this.” I was, frankly, astounded at the version of it she performed. I could not believe how she could just be standing there one moment and the next be propelling herself up and around so high and so thoroughly. And she did it casually, like it was no big deal.

She caught sight of us as she spun, and I worried for a moment that we would distract her, make her trip on her landing, but no. She merely completed her spin, landed much more lightly on her feet than should have been possible given the height she’d achieved, and came toward us smiling. “Is this our Laurie?”

Tristan said, “Huh?” at the same time I said, “Yep.”

“Thanks so much for helping us out.” She held her hand out to Tristan. “I’m Gretchen.”

Tristan shook her hand but didn’t say anything—fair enough, maybe he was struck dumb. I understood. “This is Tristan,” I said.

“Aka Laurie,” Gretchen said.

“I thought you needed a boy,” Tristan said.

“We do.”

“What’s with the Lori thing, then?”

“Oh, it’s Laurie.” She spelled the name. “It’s short for the character’s last name, Laurence.”

He made a face of displeasure, which was my cue to leave. I was halfway out when she called me back. “Actually, Teddy, hang on. We have a question, if you don’t mind.”

I probably should have minded. I had shit to do. Or shit to not do, if I was going to take my sister’s advice.

The point was, I’d signed up to deliver a Laurie, and I had delivered a Laurie. But my body turned, and my mouth said, “Sure.”

“We’re not sure about the music for this piece. We want to set it to a song that has the word girl or woman in it. We came up with a list, and we’re thinking that we want a song that’s emblematic of the female gaze.” My face must have conveyed my confusion, because she said, “Brianna can explain. I didn’t know what it was, either.”

One of the counselors stepped forward. “There’s this thing called the male gaze. It’s a theory, I guess, like a philosophical thing. It’s about how a lot of depictions of women in art or movies or music are through the male gaze. They represent women as seen through men’s eyes—so mostly that means women are depicted as objects of sexual or romantic desire and not fully realized characters in their own right.”

Huh? My first instinct was to get the hell out of there—this was above my pay grade—but I didn’t want to be rude.

Wait. I didn’t want to be rude? Had I met me? What was happening here?

“You know,” Gretchen said. “Like ‘California Girls.’ Everyone loves that song, but it’s about girls as seen by boys, right? Versus, say, this Beyoncé song?”

I ran through the lyrics to both songs in my head, and I could kind of see what they meant, but those were only two songs. “I guess I’d have to think about that.”

“Yeah, sure,” Gretchen said. “We were just chatting about it, and I thought I’d get a musician’s take on things.”

Gretchen led Tristan over to the girls, and everyone—except Tristan—was talking a mile a minute. They formed a circle around him, and I chuckled to myself. I didn’t know whether to pity him or envy him.

After Anna and I finished our session that afternoon, I asked her about the dance girls’ “male gaze” theory. She was my go-to person here to bounce ideas off. I realized that what Gretchen had said on day one was true—thinking of Anna as a peer was working. Not only in terms of Anna’s development, but also in terms of mine. I was learning to play banjo. From a teenager. It was wild. She had ended up writing a song about the rich but shitty stepfather who’d upended her life, and it was amazing—catchy and vicious. Now she was working on one she said was inspired by Peter, Paul and Mary. She didn’t have lyrics yet—she was a melody-first writer—but it was sounding great so far. I was helping a bit, or trying to—it could be tricky to know how interventionist to be. I was aware of the fact that we were in a student-teacher role. This wasn’t cowriting, like I would do with Scott.

“I think they’re onto something,” she said, after enduring my rambling recounting of what the dancers had said about the so-called male gaze. “All the famous ‘girl’ songs from, say, the 1960s to the 1980s are songs about girls by men. The Beach Boys’ ‘California Girls,’ like you said. Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl.’”

“Foreigner’s ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You.’”

“Don’t know that one, but yeah, probably.”

“Motley Crüe’s ‘Girls, Girls, Girls.’”

“Gross. Exactly.”

“‘The Girl Is Mine’!” I was on a roll now.

“I don’t know that one, either.”

“A Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson duet. Surely you know who they are.”

“I do, but the idea of them doing a duet is not computing.”

“Well, it’s basically about them fighting over a girl—they take turns calling dibs.”

“Gross,” she said again, and I had to think about what it must be like to be a young woman as talented as Anna and to be surrounded by this all the time.

“So that one’s gross,” I said, “but are they all gross?” The idea was alarming. “What about Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’? There’s nothing wrong with that, right?” I suddenly felt invested in finding a not-gross song from the old days, though I had no idea why.

“I don’t think it’s that there’s anything wrong with that, or with most of these songs, per se.” I could see that she was thinking though this stuff as she talked. “In some sense, a love song is always going to objectify the other person.”

“And a lot of songs are love songs,” I said, thinking about my own catalogue. But also about how delightful I found it that Anna seemed to be developing a “hate song” niche.

“Yeah. It’s just that when men write about women, that’s pretty much all it is. It’s like there’s a spectrum from romantic to creepy, but everything to do with women is somewhere on that spectrum, you know?”

I did know. When she said it like that, I got it. The male gaze. Damn.

“Men aren’t writing about women, I don’t know, starting companies,” she added. “Helming empires.”

“Like Beyoncé is.”

“Like Beyoncé is,” she confirmed. “I think it’s only more recently that you get women writing and producing their own stuff in a meaningful way, so you get, like, the more defiant ‘girl’ songs. ‘Hollaback Girl.’ ‘Girl on Fire.’”

I thought about Anna’s “Take It Easy” cover.

“I have an idea,” I said. “Hear me out. I know you’re only… what? Seventeen?”

“I’m flattered, but fifteen—sixteen next month, though.”

That gave me pause. The closest thing I had to a peer at this camp was too young to drive.

Hell, the closest thing I’d had to a peer in a long time.

I told myself to get over it. She was a prodigy, OK?

“You could do a whole album of cover songs like you did with ‘Take It Easy.’ You’re making me see that if you change the pronouns in a lot of songs and sing them today—like, in the modern era—it changes everything. Can you imagine a whole album of those songs?”

She laughed but sobered when I didn’t. “Oh, you’re serious.”

“I don’t want you to get a big head, but you’re very talented.”

“But I’m fifteen.”

“Sixteen next month!” She laughed. “Anyway, wasn’t Taylor Swift around that age when she started?”

“How am I supposed to make an album?” she asked incredulously.

I wanted to say that I would help her. But the truth was, I had the same question. How was I supposed to make an album?

“Anyway,” Anna said, “If I ever get to make an album, I wouldn’t want it to be all covers. I hear what you’re saying, and clearly you got what I was going for with that ‘Take It Easy’ cover, but a whole album of that would be repetitive, don’t you think? I think one song makes the point as well as ten would. I don’t want to be a one-trick pony.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“But…”

“Yeah?”

“I do hope I get to make an album someday,” she said quietly, almost sheepishly, as if it were presumptuous to voice such an ambition. I thought about Tristan, wondered how he was getting on with the dance girls.

“You will.” I had no doubt.

“But I need a record deal for that. And, what? A manager? Agent? I don’t even know.”

“Manager first, probably. They manage your overall career and are more engaged on the creative side of things. Agents do the actual booking of tours and negotiating record deals.”

“How do you find a manager? Do you have one?”

We hadn’t spoken about the Hilton Garden Inn debacle, but I had to assume she knew about it. “You know what? I don’t know. I might be between managers.”

Back at my cabin, I decided to call him to find out.

I was half-surprised when he picked up. “Hey, Brady,” I said. “Are you still my manager?”

“And a good evening to you, too, Teddy.”

“Yeah, yeah. Are you still my manager?”

“Do you want me to be?”

“I want to make an album.” That was true. I didn’t have any songs to put on said album, but I did want to make one. Eventually. To my surprise, the project no longer seemed so urgent. Probably because, also to my surprise, the notion of revenge was no longer gnawing at me. It had receded, like a wave on the lake outside my door. It had left a scar, mind you, but dealing with scars was better than being actively eaten alive. “And… I want to produce an album.”

“For who?”

“An up-and-comer.”

“A nobody.”

“I guess technically, but when she is somebody, which is absolutely going to happen, do we want to be the ones who helped or the ones who said no?”

He chuckled, and I thought for sure that was it, he was going to fire me, but he said, “I always liked you.”

“You did ?”

“Yeah.”

“Even though I smashed a TV at the Hilton Garden Inn in Chicago?”

“Not your finest moment, but yeah.” He added, snarkily, “You want me to line up some anger management classes?”

He was needling me, but I took the question seriously. I was still unsettled by my own behavior that day. “I think being here is kind of its own anger management course.”

“Where is ‘here’?”

“I’m at this arts summer camp thing.” I explained the setup.

“You should have had me look at the contract.”

I should have. Then maybe I’d’ve realized what I was getting myself into. But I was glad I hadn’t, because then I wouldn’t have come. And I was, despite the mosquitoes and the heat, settling into a certain groove, even if I wasn’t writing anything. “Does this mean you’re still my manager?”

“Yeah, sure, if you want me to be.”

“What about Scott?”

“What about him?”

“Are you managing him, too?” Because I wasn’t sure if I could do that. It would feel too much like Scott was my stepbrother or something, like Brady had custody of us on alternating weekends.

“Scott’s decided to go in a different direction,” Brady said.

“Wow, you got the same line I did.” He chuckled. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because you destroyed a TV at the Hilton Garden Inn in Chicago?”

Fair enough. “You should know that when I do make a record, I think it’s possible it will be quite different from Concrete Temple.”

“OK,” he said mildly. “You got any songs?”

“Nope,” I said, almost cheerfully. “But I’m going to write some.” Eventually.

“Well, you want to send me a tape of this up-and-comer of yours, and any songs you manage to write for yourself, and we’ll talk when you’re done communing with nature?”

“Yes.” That was exactly what I wanted to do.

This felt, in a real, profound way, like the right next move. It wasn’t reactive, to use my sister’s term. It was just about making some great music. It wouldn’t look the same as making great music in a band, in a songwriting partnership with Scott. But I was feeling, for the first time, like maybe that was OK.

Some of the artists had taken to having campfires on our little beach. Not every night, but maybe twice a week. I hadn’t joined them. I guess I was still sticking to my image of myself as a cranky-ass loner. The only person I actively hung out with at Wild Arts was Jack, and that was because we didn’t talk very much. We just sat and drank. But when I heard them out there on Friday night, the crackling of the fire and the sounds of their laughter carrying into my cabin, I grabbed my guitar and walked out to join them. I had no idea what had come over me, just that my head was… full. Of songs, mostly. Not the ones I was supposed to be writing, but others: “girl” songs and Anna’s songs. But also Tristan’s simplistic guitar god wannabe songs, which, when I was being generous in my thinking, were probably perfectly appropriate for a teenage boy to be into. I couldn’t expect everyone to be a prodigy like Anna. And I was thinking about my drummers, and what songs I could give each of them that would provide the right amount of challenge.

Honestly, if this was what teachers felt like all the time, it was exhausting. I needed to discharge some of this frenetic energy.

“Yeah, but who am I going to choreograph?” Gretchen was saying as I approached the fire. “You can’t just anoint yourself a choreographer. I need dancers.”

“Don’t you have a whole school of them?” Danny asked.

I hovered outside the circle, eavesdropping.

“Sure, but you know that’s not what I mean. I used to do some choreographing at local high schools, for their musicals. I’d come in and teach the Von Trapp Family Singers or the Munchkins in Oz to do their dances. I stopped when the studio really started to take off, but maybe I should get back into that.”

“But is that any different from what you do at the studio?” Maiv asked gently.

“No. It’s less, in a way. At least at the studio, I pick the music, and the theme.” Gretchen, who apparently had supersonic hearing, or eyes in the back of her head or something, turned toward me. “That you, Knight?”

Busted. I stepped into the light, sheepish, conscious of disturbing their cozy circle, of derailing the conversation. If I wanted to be in the circle, I should have been less standoffish earlier. I should have said yes to a swimming invitation when they were still being issued. I should have gone to a sunrise circle.

To my shock, though, Gretchen slid over on the log she was sitting on to make room for me. The circle absorbed me without comment, and the conversation continued.

“What if we did something together?” Caleb asked Gretchen.

“What do you mean?” Gretchen asked.

“A theatrical piece, but one where the movement is the theater, or at least part of it. Where the movement is integral to the story.”

“But who writes the story?” Gretchen asked.

“We do.”

“Well, that’s terrifying.”

“That’s probably a sign that you should do it,” Maiv said, and Danny murmured his agreement.

Gretchen sighed, and Maiv turned to me. “What do you think, Teddy? Don’t you find that when you’re terrified of something artistically, it usually means you should do that thing? Run toward the fear?”

I immediately thought of that G note. Of “Lemon Tree.” “Jeez, I don’t know, I just thought we could sing some campfire songs. This shit is too deep for me. But you guys carry on.”

“No, no, let’s sing!” Gretchen said. “What’s a good campfire song? ‘Kumbaya’?”

I started strumming it even as I said, “No way.” Everyone laughed. I was startled by how easy it had been to summon collegial laughter from the group.

“I heard you playing some Dylan the other day,” Caleb said.

“Yeah, I guess I’ve been revisiting the music of my youth.” I switched to strumming “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”

“Your youth?” Caleb exclaimed. “Dude, how old are you?”

“Revisiting the music of my mother’s youth. She was really into 1960s folk music, and, I don’t know, it’s been front of mind lately.”

“That’s weird,” Caleb said. “Weird in a good way.” I must have made a face that contradicted his assessment, because he added, “Or not.”

Everyone was looking at me. This was my cue to explain. I wasn’t sure I knew how to, even to myself. But I’d just been wishing I’d taken opportunities when they were presented. “I grew up in this unofficial artists’ colony in a falling-down warehouse in Brooklyn.”

“Sounds cool,” Danny said.

Gretchen stiffened beside me. Yeah, she already knew about the ways in which my childhood had been very much not cool. “In some ways, I guess. It definitely made me into who I am as a musician.” I left out that I didn’t actually know who I was as a musician. Not anymore, anyway. “But in other ways, it sucked. It wasn’t the starving artist, Bohemian paradise you’re probably imagining.” The starving part, yes, but I wasn’t going to say that. I didn’t mind Gretchen knowing that part, but I didn’t see the need to trot out my childhood junk for everyone. I summarized: “It was actually pretty miserable. But my mom…” I thought about how to make sense of it—to myself, even as I was trying to explain it to them. “We never had money for rent. Or utilities or any of that. But instead of getting a job, she threw herself into organizing the tenants. She made the fact that most of them were artists into this big moral statement. We shouldn’t have to pay rent because we made art. So she’d get these rent strikes going, get companies to donate generators for when the power was cut off. She was a pretty good amateur musician, and my sister and I were both musically inclined, so she taught us all these 1960s protest songs. And she’d organize the neighbors for these… well, rallies, I guess, and everyone would sing those songs.”

“It was her theme music,” Gretchen said. “The way she defined herself.”

That was exactly right. How had I ever thought of Gretchen as annoying? I swiveled to look at her. The fire was making her face glow like some kind of Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary—if the Virgin Mary had pink-tipped hair.

“Let’s hear one of her theme songs,” Danny said.

“Unless it brings back bad memories,” Maiv said.

“No,” I said, though it was a lie. These songs did bring back bad memories, some more than others. One more than others. “They’re great songs. Perfect for singing around a campfire.” I was still amazed that they’d let me into their conclave with such ease. I wasn’t used to ease.

We ran through a bunch of them. I’d start a song, and they’d pick it up. Many of these songs had simple verses that swapped in one thing for another—the hammer in “If I Had a Hammer” became a bell in the second verse—so they were easy to get the hang of. Then Maiv asked if I knew any Beatles. Soon I was taking requests from everyone. Maiv was a Beatlemaniac, Danny was into Pearl Jam, and Caleb favored show tunes.

“Is there anything you don’t know?” Gretchen laughingly asked after I’d played the Go-Go’s “Vacation” at her request, except I’d slowed it way down and made it into a ballad.

“I’m embarrassingly ignorant about country and bluegrass. I know some of the classics, but nothing new.” Though Anna had turned me on to a couple artists I planned to learn more about.

“I was kidding, but I love how you answered that earnestly,” Gretchen said.

Before I knew it, the fire was down to embers and it was almost midnight. “That was awesome, thanks, Teddy,” Maiv said as she stood and fished her flashlight out of her pocket. Everyone concurred, and I had to agree. I felt recharged. I’d come to the fire thinking I needed to dis charge all my jumpy energy, but instead it felt like I’d redirected it. Amazing that sitting around aimlessly singing could do that.

But that was the power of music, wasn’t it? That was what I loved about it. That was probably what my mother had loved about it, too. Music could change you.

When was the last time I’d sat around singing for no reason? I used to love writing with Scott, but those sessions had always been about creating something new. Making something out of nothing. Tonight reminded me of all the singing with my family when I was a kid. There had been, back in that dark apartment, a kind of purity to sitting together and singing for the joy of it. I’d forgotten about that, that there had been some good in and among all the shit.

“You coming on the big hike tomorrow?” Caleb asked as he smothered the embers with sand. “If you are, you should bring your guitar.”

I was about to ask What big hike? when Maiv said, “It’s only a day trip, though, so when would we sing? We’re not going to be building a fire. It’s just in and out.”

The fact that I had no idea what they were talking about probably didn’t reflect well on me. I was embarrassed when Gretchen, who clearly realized I was confused, had to say, “Day trip to a nearby state park tomorrow. Hiking in to a waterfall, lunch, swimming—there’s apparently a pristine swimming hole there—hiking back out. Optional for the kids, but a lot of them are going. And obviously optional for us, too.”

As we ambled back to our cabins, I heard myself say, “A waterfall might be fun.” When I could feel Gretchen raising a skeptical eyebrow—it was too dark to actually see it, but somehow I knew it was there—I said, “What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You thought it.”

“You, Teddy Knight, have no idea what I think.”