sing me anything
by Bobbie Jean Huff
A slightly different version of this story won first prize in a cross-Canada fiction competition and was published in the Queen’s Alumni Review
Ted, died, finally. I wish they didn’t always tell you when it was going to happen. All night I kept waking up, knowing he was awake, wondering what he was feeling. Putting myself in his position. Every slight noise, every little rustle through the cellblock…
I woke at 7:15, noted the time, and thought, with relief: It’s over. And fell into a deep sleep for 10 minutes more. Then I put on the blue robe Lewis gave me for my birthday and went downstairs. Turned on the TV.
He died at 7:16. Just when I was looking at the clock, rolling over in relief, they were administering the big jolt.
Back upstairs, my husband was still curled in on himself, but I had no mercy. It’s a Bundyless morning, I said.
What’s that? Another word you made up?
Bundyless. You know—Ted Bundy.
Lewis flattened out. Oh, he said. Was he zapped, then?
I put on the coffee. Then I went outside. It was gray and dripping. A January thaw. I slid up the driveway in my robe and boots, put some crumbs on the birdfeeder. Walked over to the larch and held out my hands. In a moment four chickadees, one more than usual, had lighted on my palms and pecked up the crumbs.
Inside I poured coffee and juice. My seven-year old said, Did he die, Ann? And Ooooh, do you think it hurt?
When Lewis came downstairs he was singing, Oh what a bundyles morning! And I wondered about evil. And how a mere current of electricity could obliterate it.
Muffins for breakfast, and more Bundy. When did I know him, what was he like?
Let’s get this straight, I said. I didn’t really know him. I barely talked to him. It was at a party in Denver, someone introduced him to me. As I recall, we talked about Bach’s cello suites. He was nice.
Nice! Ha, ha.
And cute, I added.
My fifteen-year old came in from the TV room. He said, It says he had to be carried into the death chamber.
Well, said Lewis. He pulled a muscle in his leg. I remember reading about it last week. His doctor advised him to stay off it for a while.
For eternity, my twelve-year old shrieked.
***
I cleaned up and went to ballet class. In the green room with eight other women I stood beside the barre, raised my left leg, pointed my toe. The mirror said I looked ridiculous, a middle-aged woman attempting the most contrived, the most unnatural exercise in the world. But the pink ballet slippers, they were so elegant. And my legs didn’t look a day past forty.
The teacher said, Stomach in, shoulders back, keep breathing. Point those toes, ladies. A moment later a scratch, then Chopin’s Valse Brillante.
Lena, my neighbour from when we lived in the country, passed by the window. I was glad she didn’t look in. She was on her way, I knew, to do something serious and important, like buying animal feed, going to the Co-op, ordering some sewing supplies.
Her views on evil were compelling and simple: You could do whatever rotten thing you wanted in your life, but if you were saved just before you died, you would go to heaven.
And being saved was easy, the easiest thing in the world. All you had to do was say: I accept you, Lord Jesus, into my heart.
Maybe Ted did that, I thought, and was in heaven right now. And I, and my trying-to-be-a-good-person-all-the-time, which didn’t count for zip, would go to hell. Talk about a fair God.
Once Lena invited us to their church picnic. Lewis stayed home, he’s not susceptible, anyhow. But I took the children and we met Lena and her husband and their teenaged girls in front of the small red-brick church. We walked through to the kitchen, where ladies in aprons and kerchiefs wrapped around their heads were unwrapping pies and salads and cold cuts, and stirring things in pots over the stove. It was a hot day, and everyone was flushed with heat and Jesus.
When everything was ready, someone gave me a kerchief and we went into the church part for a short service. The women sat together toward the back; the men ran the show. There was a lot of singing, people would raise their hands for their favourite hymns, which were sung in such a high key—there was no piano or organ—that it reminded me of the keening of Gaelic women after a death.
A man in a red sports jacket stood up and spoke about when he was saved. He had been working on a roof and a storm came up, there was no time to get off. A bolt of lightning hit the roof. He said, Jesus save me, and the hair on his body stood out, away from his skin. Jesus save me. A tree crashed onto the roof, it landed just inches from where he was standing. He stood through the whole storm, a hammer in his hands, tears running down his face. Thank you, Jesus, thank you.
After this another man went to the blackboard and covered it over with an elaborate diagram—arrows pointing this way and that, symbols, numbers, words—all proving, scientifically, the existence of Jesus and Satan, heaven and hell. I looked over at Lena and she smiled. There, I told you it was true. Welcome aboard!
Then we went outside and played games. Once I got paired with Lena’s sister Renate, a woman of about sixty. The scarf on her head was printed with the map of Montana. We had a big blue balloon caught between us, our hands were tied behind our backs, and our task was to walk the balloon over to a pine tree without dropping it. As we pushed together to keep the balloon from blowing out from behind us, her left breast kept knocking into my right one. We won the contest; the prize was a tin apiece of Del Monte peach halves.
Finally we could eat. The women sat together again with the children, close to the kitchen door so they could run in and out when the bowls needed replenishing. The men lounged against trees, laughing uneasily amongst themselves.
I got up to fill a bowl of pickles, but the women shooed me back into my chair. Not today, they said without words. Today is for your precious soul. Sit. Next time you can work. They winked at me and smiled, as if I were a bride on my wedding night.
My youngest son, then two, dropped his plate of food onto the grass, and I picked him up, wiped his tears and gave him some cake. We sat together under a tree, wasps buzzed lazily by on their way to the dessert table, and I caught the fragment of a conversation between two older ladies. About how Jews turn yellow at the moment of death. Yes, yes, one nodded at the other. That’s what I’ve heard, you remember Benny Seligman, young man helped out over the Reineke place? He was gored by a bull, my John found him hanging over the fence, yellow as a winter pear.
Jeté, jeté, jeté, the teacher barked out, and the rest of the class left me momentarily behind. Chopin cut off, a truck rumbled past, rattling the window frames. I tipped forward into an arabesque, my left leg extended behind me, my toe perfectly pointed. And imagined the truck driver, a brawny young man, no doubt, catching sight of us through the window as he drove by. Chuckling. All us middle-aged ladies in our tutus creaking across the room.
***
That night the choir director and I were in the church nursery. We were lying on the mattress we’d pulled from a crib onto the floor. We had made love, as we do every Thursday evening after practice, but although it took an hour, it seemed quicker this time. More mechanical. I knew something was up.
We might have to stop this, he said.
What? Why?
It’s my wife. I came home early last night and she was up in her bedroom singing. She never sings.
What was it, the song? I asked.
And the choir director sang, in his clear true tenor’s voice:
I got a man
He long, he tall
He move his body like a cannonball.
Fare thee well, my honey,
Fare thee well.
I walked across the room to the window, which overlooked the priest’s house. The sky was clear now, the moon a day or two off full. The lights in the vicarage were going off downstairs, one by one, first in the living room, then the dining room, then the kitchen. I had sat with the priest in that same kitchen last summer, eating Stilton and crackers and drinking white wine.
We had been debating the merits of high church Anglicanism vs. the simpler faiths: Quaker, Unitarian, Congregational. Father Tom had pointed out, cracker crumbs dropping from his mouth, that ceremony is a celebration of life, and to praise God properly you have to celebrate.
Whatever happened, I’d said, to “Where two or three are gathered in My name,” etc. Isn’t that all that’s required?
There’s no ceremony without two or three people, Ann, Father Tom had replied.
It seemed to me to be a circular argument, and the messiness got to me. I held somewhere, in a corner of my mind, a small wooden meeting house in a leafy glade, with no music (okay, maybe a simple flute piece), no robes, no candles or crucifixes. Natural light pouring in through the window. Just silence, a celebration in itself.
Of course, Father Tom’s life was simple, he had taken a vow of celibacy the year before, even though he hadn’t had to. Celibacy, celebration. He could afford to chant and fling around incense every Sunday morning. He had no wife, no children.
As I stood watching the vicarage, a light came on in the upstairs window. A moment later Father Tom appeared, and as I watched, he took off his yellow shirt, his gray slacks, and then his underpants. For a moment he stood fumbling with his watch, and seeing the beauty of him naked, his celibate body white in the moonlight, I wondered if he minded going to bed by himself, wondered if he had any boogeymen and if so, whether his God, his invisible God, was strong enough to transport him to a safe shore. Now I lay me…
The light went out and I turned back to the choir director. He was pulling his sweater over his head. I squatted down beside him, and putting an arm around his shoulder, stroked his hair, thick still and curly, to smooth it back away from his face.
It was his feeling for music that had attracted me to him in the first place. Two years before, the choir was working on a long, difficult cantata for Easter; I was getting over laryngitis and could barely sing.
Can you turn for me, then, Ann? he’d asked, as everyone was getting into their coats. I went up to the organ and sat with him on the bench, turning pages. As he played his feet up and down the pedals, our knees touched. I was squeezing him, I knew, but I didn’t move.
I hadn’t sat so close to another man in the fifteen years of my marriage. I could smell peppermint on his breath. Every part of him was involved with the organ: fingers, feet, all his senses, and I wondered if he made love to his wife as fluidly, as passionately, as he made love to that instrument.
***
It was getting late. The choir director stood up and threw me my bra and underpants.
I was reading today about entropy, I said. It does seem to be a rather large adversary, but I think we could have a go at it.
He zipped up his jacket, reached for his leather music holder. Then he said, Entropy? What are you talking about, Ann?
The messiness of the universe, that’s what. It’s my personal opinion that all that’s called for here is a small adjustment. Like your car when something’s wrong and it pulls to one side. Just a minor adjustment, they always say, even though if they didn’t fix it you could get yourself killed. Stupidly, I was starting to cry.
Are you talking about my wife?
I nodded.
Wait a minute, the choir director said. My wife doesn’t know about our...affair. That’s not what I meant. It was just that she was singing about me.
Oh, I said, buttoning my blouse. Wiping my eyes. Well, that certainly changes the picture.
***
How was choir tonight, Ann? My husband asked. He was lying in bed, wearing the nightshirt I gave him for Christmas. It was white, with green and white stripes. Papa in his kerchief.
Too long, I said, fitting myself around him like a spoon, resting my hand on his bony hip.
The kids were wild. They always get that way on your choir night.
Are you saying I shouldn’t go?
He turned over. The moon fell on his face. I don’t know, he said, looking at me carefully. What do you think?
Ted Bundy’s as dead as George Washington now, I said. He’s as dead as Adam and Eve. He’s no less dead, even though they had a head start. Isn’t that weird?
Lewis said, Tonight Gabriel said he hoped Bundy was in hell. But Noel thought that wouldn’t be fair. Said Bundy should be in heaven, so all those girls could have a go at him.
I fluttered my fingers over Lewis’ back, the way he likes. Give me your butterflies, he always says.
He’d probably sweep them off their feet, I said. But I imagined Ted, a surly grin on his face, disbelieving, then panicking as forty or fifty dark-haired teenaged angels flew towards him scowling, their wings flapping furiously.
What did you sing tonight? Lewis asked.
Oh, we worked on that piece for Sarah’s wedding next Saturday. It was created for Charles and Diana. Can you imagine, someone making up a piece just for you? Art on demand. Also a Healey Willan I liked a lot. And hymns. The usual.
Sing me something.
We didn’t really sing anything that lends itself to—
That’s okay. Sing me anything.
The kids, I said, but I got up and walked to the other side of the room. I stood beside the bureau in my blue nightgown, put one foot on the cushion of the armchair, and, my hips swiveling, belted out in true cabaret fashion,
I got a man
He long, he tall
He moves his body
Like a cannonball
Fare thee well, my honey
Fare thee well
The seven-year old came into the room, followed by his twelve-year old brother.
What are you doing, Ann? said Gabriel, rubbing his eyes.
Singing to your father, I said. Go back to bed. I’m done now.
Noel said, Do you know that if you put half oil, half water in a jar and drop an egg in, the egg will sink only halfway down. It’ll look like it’s floating on air. Lewis showed us tonight.
Tell me in the morning, I said, hustling him out the door. I’m busy.