Track 17
Delilah
[excerpt from “Still Singing: Lilac+Crow’s Delilah Cohen on Mental Illness, Love Songs, and Writing on the Road,” Pitchfork]
You have a reputation for writing a lot about impermanence. How much of that comes from your experiences with your mental health, versus a more artistic exploration?
Cohen: I think it’s a combination of the two.
The feeling of impending loss is something that can be so universal.
I think everyone knows what it feels like to have a moment of perfect happiness interrupted by that sense of, you know, “Oh God, I can’t keep this forever.
” It’s that bittersweetness. I’m a dessert person, but I always like something kind of sharp.
Citrus or lemon curd or cream cheese, something that takes away the sweetness but also makes those sweet elements—well, sweeter, you know?
It’s the contrast, that bitterness, that tartness.
You need that, in order to enjoy the rest of it.
I don’t know if that answered the question.
Cohen: Didn’t it?
They set out for Colorado after breakfast, getting back on the highway with Emmett at the wheel and Delilah once again curled up in the passenger seat with her notebook propped on her knees, where she scribbles absentmindedly as they start off across the Midwest.
Part of her is still reeling over how much Emmett told her this morning, despite the probably invasive questions she’d thrown at them over breakfast. They’d been utterly good-natured the entire time, and open in a way she hadn’t known to expect, taking her seriously and responding with a care that felt thoughtful, rather than calculated.
They’d only thrown a napkin at her when she’d asked what they really thought about her music. “Now you’re just taking advantage and fishing for compliments.”
“You said you’d answer questions!”
“About myself,” Emmett had said, but they were grinning, and Delilah knew that was as good as a compliment anyway.
And then there had been that kiss, Emmett’s cheeks cool under her fingertips, their lips parting in surprise under hers. The look of shy pleasure on their face when she’d stepped back, so unguarded that Delilah had almost drawn them down again.
Who says I’m not having a honeymoon, Delilah thinks wryly, pen rolling across her notebook almost without intention or thought.
She scribbles a few overwrought metaphors about clay and ceramics and porcelain and kintsugi pottery and stone butches and sapphic poetry, then scratches half of them out.
Too self-indulgent, even for her. This is not a honeymoon.
If anything, it’s a rebound, and everyone knows you don’t get attached to your rebound—it only ends in problems.
Still.
Her phone buzzes in her seat pocket. She picks it up, makes a face, and answers the call. “Hi, Mommy!”
“Hi yourself,” her mom says. She’s calling from her office, where the wall behind her is covered in bookshelves and framed protest posters and the hanging pothos plant she’s been lovingly cultivating for years. “Can’t help noticing I didn’t get my proof of life phone call last night, baby doll.”
“I sent you a picture!”
Her mother sniffs. “Ted Bundy could have sent that.”
Delilah flips her camera around so that Emmett is in the frame instead of her. “Say hi, serial killer!”
“Hi,” Emmett says, waving without taking their eyes off the road.
“Hi, honey,” Delilah’s mother says, with unexpected warmth. “How’s my daughter treating you?”
“She’s wonderful.” Emmett’s response could have sounded like a platitude, except that now Delilah knows they can’t lie. “I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s an adventure.”
There’s a suspiciously long pause on the other end of the line, and Delilah watches the tiny thumbnail of her mother give her camera a puzzled look, like she’s trying to figure Emmett out.
Or maybe like she’s trying to figure Delilah out—it’s a familiar look after all these years.
“I see,” she says finally. “She’s not getting you into too much trouble, then? ”
“How dare you,” Delilah says. “I’ve never done anything wrong, ever, in my life.”
Emmett snorts. Her mother scoffs. Delilah changes the subject before the two of them can start ganging up on her. “Any new headlines I should be worrying about, Mom?”
“You haven’t been looking?” Her mom sounds almost surprised. “That’s not like you.”
“I,” Delilah says, with a perfectly straight face she can maintain only because the camera’s still pointing at Emmett, “am the picture of mentally sound decision-making.”
“Oh,” her mom says. “So Alex blocked all the gossip sites.”
“Maybe.” Yes.
“Well, there’s not much. Someone asked Jada about it in an interview the other day, and she said she was ‘absolutely heartbroken’—have you heard anything from her?”
Jada, Sam’s bombshell ex-pop-star of a mother.
She was perfectly polite to Delilah throughout her relationship with Sam, even warm once they got engaged, but Delilah always got the feeling that Jada never really approved, that she was still holding out a sliver of hope that Sam might end up bisexual after all and settle down with one of their friends’ gorgeous, chart-topping sons and have two-point-five beautiful blond babies to continue the family dynasty.
Unfortunately for them, Sam is as gay as a maypole and could barely take care of a cactus, let alone a baby. Diversity win! Delilah thinks, a little wildly. Your toxic, cheating ex is a lesbian!
“No,” Delilah says. “I haven’t heard from her.”
Her mother makes a disgusted sound. “I don’t know what I expected.”
“It’s fine, Mom.” She rubs her eyes, feeling suddenly tired. “She’s probably just relieved, honestly. She never liked me.”
“She’ll like you even less if the tabloids figure out that Sam was cheating on you and they start dragging her name through the mud in your defense.”
Delilah snorts. “Not likely,” she says. “I’m sure Benny’s already putting the spin on something.”
“I never liked him,” her mom says sourly, which also sums up most of Delilah’s feelings about Sam’s manager, a sharp-eyed industry veteran who seemed to see people as potential dollar signs rather than actual individuals.
“I know, Mama.”
This is going to start getting into dangerous territory; she can tell from the glint in her mother’s eye.
Delilah waves a hand just out of the camera frame, trying to catch Emmett’s attention.
They’re still mostly looking at the road, but they glance at her, seem to read the please help on her face, and clear their throat.
“Delilah, do you mind checking the map for the next exit?”
“Sure,” she says. “Mom—”
“No, that’s fine, I’ll let you go. Emmett, you keep an eye on her, please.”
“I will,” Emmett says.
Probably with perfect truth, the traitor. “Wow,” Delilah says. “How the tables turn.”
“Very funny,” her mother says. “I love you.”
Delilah softens. “Love you too.” She waits for her mom to hang up, then drops her phone back into the door pocket. “I thought you couldn’t lie?”
Emmett cocks an eyebrow without looking away from the highway. “I can’t.”
“ ‘Delilah, do you mind checking the map for me?’ ” she mimics.
“That wasn’t a lie, that was a question.”
Delilah picks up her journal again. “That has to be cheating,” she says. “Isn’t there like—a letter of the law, spirit of the law kind of thing?”
Emmett laughs. “I wouldn’t know,” they say. “I just know what I can do and what I can’t.”
Delilah twists in her seat to look at them.
They have one hand on the wheel, their temple resting in the other, elbow propped against the closed window.
Their dark hair is tousled against their brow, tamed only where it’s pinned under their kippah.
They’re wearing Delilah’s extra sunglasses again, but looking at Emmett in profile, Delilah still finds herself briefly arrested by the long, sweeping curl of their eyelashes.
“Question,” she says. They incline their head in invitation, and she says, “You can do some amount of like, shape-shifting, right?”
They glance at her, clearly taken aback. “How did you—”
“Ha,” Delilah crows. “I’m right?”
“Yes,” they admit. “Not—huge things. But to an extent. Yes. But I thought I’d been careful.”
Delilah pauses, her pen halfway back to her journal for a line about metamorphosis. “You don’t do it on purpose?”
“I try not to. It got me into trouble once, and I don’t really want to repeat the experience.
” At Delilah’s questioning look, they say, “It was a few weeks after we came to New York, before Jacob met his wife. He’d just found the synagogue he wanted us to be part of, and there were so many people he wanted me to meet, and they all had so many questions about what we’d been doing before we got there, and it was just… ”
“A lot?”
“I just wanted to be…invisible for a little while. So I made myself…unremarkable. Easy to look past. Jacob still knew it was me, and he was…” Emmett hesitates. “Upset. I didn’t try it again.”
Delilah has her suspicions about what upset might have looked like, and once again wonders how immoral it is to want to kick a dead guy in the face. “Got it.”
Emmett chews their bottom lip, not looking at her. “What did you notice?” They sound genuinely anxious, as if what they mean to ask is, Where did I slip up around you?
“Honestly, I don’t think I’d have noticed it if it wasn’t that I was watching you so closely,” Delilah says, tucking her pen between the pages and closing the notebook.
“It was little things you probably weren’t even doing consciously, and it was subtle.
Your jawline. How typically masc or femme your facial structure was.
” She pauses. “I was going to say your eyelashes, but now I’m wondering if they’re actually just like that, and I don’t know what would be worse. ”
“What’s wrong with my eyelashes?”
“Just drive the car, you menace,” Delilah says tartly, and if she punctuates the next line she writes with an exclamation point firm enough to nearly poke a hole through the paper, Emmett is kind enough to hide their obvious smile.