An American Tune: A Novel

3 “Unchained Melody”

38 “Unchained Melody” Jane set out for the bus stop every day in the mid-afternoon, the hottest part of the day, carrying a sack lunch and whatever book she was reading. It was a half-hour’s walk, through neatly laid out subdivisions of little square houses like the one she lived in with her family, pasttheswimmingpoolintheparkfullofhappy,screamingchildren, past the public library to which she’d ridden her bike most summer afternoonsofherchildhood.Shelongedtowalkupthesteps,intothe cool of the little stone building and lose herself reading in a quiet corner . But she trudged on, tired, bored nearly to tears, the hot concrete burning up through the thin soles of her loafers. The new trees lining the streets gave little shade, and she was sticky with sweat, nauseous from the heat by the time she climbed on the wheezing bus and sat down next to an open window. She clocked in at her summer job at the bookbindery at three and walked through the factory, past the big machines spitting out pastelmapsthatwouldbeboundintotheatlasesshewouldspendthe next eight hours packing into cardboard boxes. The work was mindnumbingly repetitive, the factory hot, her fellow workers unfriendly. But a year of college had taught her something about irony, and she could appreciate the image of herself, her own world shrunk to this workstation, her shoulders aching from packing an endless supply of atlases, worlds she longed to see. 3 39 “Unchained Melody” At the dinner break, she went to a table in the far corner of the cafeteria and read while she ate the meal her mother had packed for her. She and Bridget had decided to make their way through the list ProfessorFarlowhadhandedoutthelastweekofclass:“SomeNovels Every Serious Reader Should Know.” They’d gone to the bookstore and bought used, battered copies cheap. She was at the D’s. Halfway through Dreiser’s American Tragedy, mesmerized by the unfolding story of the young man who dared to dream. The sounds of the factory around her enhanced the effect of the book, so that when the whistle blew she was momentarily both in the book and in the real, grim world of the factory. Herself and the desperate young man in the book who was willing to do whatever he had to do, anything, not to fall backward into the small, mean life the world intended for him to live. When she emerged from the bookbindery a few minutes after eleven, her father was waiting for her, smoking, listening to big band music on the car radio. She could hear it through the open window as she came across the parking lot–Glenn Miller, the Dorsey Brothers. Themusicofhisyouth,musichehaddancedtowithhermotherwhen they were not much older than she was now. Happier times, when he could not have imagined himself in a dark car at midnight waiting for a resentful daughter’s shift to be over so that he could drive her home, the last place she wanted to be, without a single meaningful word passing between them. There was music that would always make her happy, too. She would never hear James Brown or the Righteous Brothers without thinking of the smoky dance floor at the Sigma Chi house. The Supremes would always make her think of Bridget, who could not hear them without singing along. The Beatles singing “Things We Said Today” would always be on the radio of the car Tom borrowed the night before she left to come home for the summer, the words of the song tangled up with the words he spoke trying to make her feel better . “I love you. It won’t be that long, you’ll see.” Just like certain songs would always pitch her into despair. Wherevershewas ,whoeversheturnedouttobe,sheknewthatTheMamas & the Papas singing “Monday, Monday” would bring back the loneliness , the misery of entrapment she felt at home with her family this 40 An American Tune summer. The long, hot walk to the bus stop every afternoon; the high windows of the factory darkening slowly toward night. The sense that she’d found and lost herself, her own real life, the feel of time stretching out endlessly toward the moment when she could return to Bloomington in September. Itoccurredtoheronenight,quitesuddenly,thatmaybethemusic her father listened to didn’t bring back happy memories at all, but rather wartime memories. The years he and her mother had spent apart. Things that had happened during the war that he’d rather not remember. He’d been in...