Chapter 17 #2
“Do you know this song?” Tanesha said, showing me her phone. It was a thirty-second clip of a teen in her basement, singing Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” into a sneaker and pretending it was a microphone. She was pretty good.
I smiled. “I mean, yeah. That’s a classic. Don’t ask if I can do the dance, though.”
Slapping the table lightly, Tanesha said, “We should do a concert!”
“What?”
“I’ll sing and you can play for me.”
“You can’t ... sing in a public library?” I protested. “You’re supposed to be quiet in a library.”
But she waved aside my concerns. “It’s okay, my grandma will let us. Besides, this is a cool library.”
Before I could stop her, Tanesha hopped up and ran out of the room. I followed her to Linda’s station at the desk, where Tanesha begged with her grandmother to let us put on a show in the middle of the afternoon.
Linda hesitated, then sighed. “I can give you one hour in the conference room.”
“Yes!” Tanesha literally jumped for joy, then ran ahead of her grandmother down the hall to a room marked Conference 1. I didn’t see a Conference 2.
Linda let us into the room while Tanesha started rearranging chairs.
I watched while Linda directed the teenager, who was a tornado of activity.
This was clearly not the first impromptu performance the girl had insisted on putting on.
I smiled watching them, a little surprised not to feel any resentment or jealousy toward the duo, who clearly adored each other.
This was not at all how I expected to spend my afternoon, but I reveled in the warm fuzzies I got from watching Tanesha rush around making the library’s conference room into a miniature Madison Square Garden.
After a harried twenty minutes of intense preparation that included printing a promo poster with the library’s computer and taping copies of it to the front door, reference desk, and water fountain, then heated discussions about a possible set list, Tanesha prepared our entrances.
Since we didn’t have the option for a costume change, she insisted that we do what we could using our attitude and intro songs played on her phone speakers.
Hers was “Juice” by Lizzo, which was an excellent, if somewhat racy, choice. Mine was “Cherry Bomb” by The Runaways.
Tanesha evaluated my entry, and I smirked at her surprise. Yes, I was physically capable of werkin’ it. I’d roomed with enough queens over the years to have learned a few things by osmosis. And while I hadn’t ever played drag shows, I’d attended enough to know how to enter a room.
Our audience consisted of Linda, Janice (who was the lady who’d been browsing the gardening books earlier), a man who wandered in looking for the restroom, and Bernard, the man we’d woken up from his nap.
Linda had provided a microphone for Tanesha and a chair for me.
We warmed up for a few minutes, then launched into our agreed-upon routine.
Tanesha wasn’t a virtuoso, but the girl could sing.
It didn’t take long for me to get into the rhythm of performing with her, though, being a teenager, she had more energy than most of the people I’d played with in the last decade.
I smiled as she put her own spin on top-forty songs by Rihanna, Destiny’s Child, and Alicia Keys.
Improvising with her, playing songs I didn’t really know but could fake, and making things up on the spot was . .. fun.
The rush of joy I felt when she and I shared the microphone during our rendition of “Independent Women Part 1” almost knocked me over.
I genuinely couldn’t remember the last time I had this much fun.
With other musicians, I enjoyed joining them but never felt at home.
To me, it was a job, a stepping stone on the way to something else.
Even during shows with Call Me Kate Kane, there was an undertone of anger.
At the world, at each other for some petty remark said backstage, or even just the bitterness I felt at not being a permanent member of the band.
But here, in a library conference room playing with a teenager in front of four people, I remembered why I loved being on stage in the first place.
We concluded our last song, then I asked if I could play one that we hadn’t agreed on ahead of time.
Tanesha nodded. She was sweating and breathing hard, but she couldn’t stop smiling. The metal braces on her teeth glinted in the fluorescent lighting. “I’ll sing if I know it.”
“You might,” I said. “Have you seen Shrek ?”
Her eyes went wide. “Oh. My. God.”
Launching into Annabelle’s favorite song, I pictured her, sitting in the back of the audience clapping and swaying along with the music.
Tanesha, Linda, and the gardening lady all joined in, and we blew the roof off the public library with a cheesy song about believing in love.
Bernard recorded our performance on Linda’s phone.
“Thank you!” we both said when we finished the song.
Tanesha bowed several times, then gestured at me to stand and take a bow. Our audience stood and clapped enthusiastically while I set my instrument aside and bowed.
While we put the chairs and tables back in their original positions, Tanesha asked, “Why did you start playing the guitar?”
I snorted. “Because my mom wanted me to play the piano.”
Linda laughed at that. “Mmhmm.”
“My mom was an opera singer,” I said. “I learned the basics of a couple of languages from the songs she sang, and my entire house was one big stage.”
Tanesha had gotten distracted on her phone, but she put it away. “No way.”
I nodded. “Way. She wanted me to be a musician like her or an engineer like my dad. But I’m terrible at math, so I studied music.”
“Word,” said Tanesha. Linda shook her head.
“I didn’t want to play the piano,” I continued. “I thought it was too stuffy, too controlled. Just like her. We fought all the time because she wanted me to be ... somebody other than what I was.”
I stole a quick look at Linda, who had taken a break in one of the chairs.
I didn’t know what the history was between Linda, her daughter, and her granddaughter.
The last thing I should do was trauma dump on complete strangers.
But Tanesha had asked, and somehow on this trip, I had gotten used to telling people the truth.
“My parents agreed that I could learn guitar instead of piano, so of course I wanted to play the loudest, most annoying electric guitar I could find.” I smiled, remembering the sheer power I felt when I strummed my fingers down the strings for the first time.
The electric squeal it produced was nothing but a wall of noise and I loved every single second of it.
“That’s rad,” Tanesha said.
“Rad,” the gardening lady agreed. She had stayed behind to help us move the furniture.
“But I guess,” I started, unsure what I was about to say, but feeling like something needed to come out.
“I was so angry at the time, and I poured my emotions into music. But I never really stopped to consider that my mom was doing that, too. She played out her pain through a different instrument, so I couldn’t see it. ”
The car crash that killed my parents happened at the height of her career.
When I was a child, she’d dress me in an elegant gown and sit me on the piano.
Then we’d play duets for an audience of adults that her and my father knew.
I hated those parties, but remembered my mother, sweating through the armpits of her dress while she played.
She was such an accomplished player that I struggled to keep up, to not embarrass her.
Even when she sang directly to me, I was so distracted by other things that I didn’t hear the love that must’ve been behind it.
“We both loved to create music, but we were singing past each other. I couldn’t understand or appreciate what she brought to it,” I said. “She died before I could go back home and try to get her to understand what I was bringing to my own music.”
As I said this, I wondered what I would play her, if given the chance.
My own song was only half finished. And somehow, I couldn’t imagine my uptight, Christian mother would appreciate an acoustic punk song.
But a voice in the back of my head that sounded suspiciously like Annabelle’s said, “ You never know, Gibson, only love outlasts us all .”
There was a moment of silence in the little room, which I broke by scraping a chair leg against the floor. “Whoops.”
When we finished, Linda said, “Did you find your mystery person, Gibson?”
I shook my head. “No luck. Annabelle doesn’t seem to want to be found, I’m afraid.”
Tanesha cocked her head to the side. “Annabelle?”
“Yeah, my friend’s name is—was—Annabelle Williams.”
Tanesha turned to the garden-section lady, who was loading her books into a public radio-themed tote bag. “Hey, Janice, does that name sound familiar?” To me, Tanesha said, “Janice has the best memory of anybody here. She helps me sometimes during the summers, and we digitize the collections.”
Janice pondered for a moment, then said, “I don’t recall an Annabelle. But A.W. might be who you’re looking for.”
“A.W.? Who’s that?” I asked. How likely was it that A.W. stood for Annabelle Williams?
“Oh my gawd, I cannot believe you are looking for A.W.!” Tanesha said, drawing out almost every word she said for emphasis.
Janice nodded. “She’s a favorite around here.”
“Sounds promising?” I smiled. Leave it to Annabelle to be a local favorite. Everyone who knew Annabelle, even only via records in a library, loved her.
Heaving herself off her chair, Linda said, “It’ll take me a minute to find those films. T, you need to work on your homework while I set Miss Gibson up.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
***