I Have Cat Stevens

When the song comes on, the women in my kitchen are sharing a clubby laugh. I’m with my daughter and her friends, cooking for an engagement party, marrying one of them off. There is the scent of chocolate, and there are piles of flour. There is spilt sugar and these women. They fall into space they’ve held for each other over time and geography. I take my place too, and we’re all moving around the room, pulling close this tie that binds.

I feel a rightness, and I’m happy for them, especially for my daughter, that a nice house, good schools, and exuberant parenting have all led to this. And when one of her friends asks for help with a measurement, I notice her once soft angles are sharp, her eyes now mellowed like the moon. She’s grown.

I haven’t glimpsed this time lapse with my daughter, probably because she’s been right before my eyes, and time is sneaky like that. But in the years they’ve all shed their skins, I didn’t see it coming or going. Considering it now, from my perch of age, I realize this is the only way time is bearable.

But with the women, and the dirty bowls, and the music playing, I remember time is seeded; settled, from where it may burst forth, fed by a particular light, a familiar aroma or sound. And for a moment, I see my daughter and her friends fresh as they were when they were only girls in my kitchen.

Then I hear Cat Stevens’ “Wild World,” streaming from my favorite L.A. radio station, and I hear it like my mother calling out to me, like my first love saying my name.

“Oh, God, turn it up!”

“Ha! My mom has Cat Stevens, and we have Nelly.”

***

In a room small and narrow, I walk to the console and pull the album from its sleeve. I place it on the turntable and set the dial to auto. I go to the sofa, gold and velvet, and lie flat out, bell-bottoms, crop-top, long hair splayed. I listen, in anticipation, for the drop of the needle, the crack of the vinyl. I pick up the cover and open it to the liner notes. My mother is out there waiting tables on the Strip, where the world in this desert town burns. I am alone on the velvet. I lie like clothes on a hanger, waiting to be filled.

The trailer in Las Vegas is not that far from the bungalow we left in Los Angeles. But it sits by a highway instead of a park, and the heat and wind is nothing like that perfect breeze. It feels forsaken, same as me. They moved me along with the furniture. All these adults.

In 1970, Tea for the Tillerman is new. The album cover not marred or frayed, the record not yet etched with the days of my life. In the rise and fall of his voice, in the treble and bass of the notes, Stevens tells me of a world I’ve yet to know. But at fifteen, it’s a promise and not a warning.

***

Hearing my daughter mention Nelly, I think of all the hip-hop she and her friends used to listen to, still do I’m sure. Even I like Kendrick, and in my Latin, Fusion, Cardio class, I dance to Usher. I’m free now to admit I love the beat. But back when these women were deceptively still girls, I tried to censor some of it. Then I gave up and turned to preaching little sermons. “This is demeaning! You need to know that.” I can still see their barely perceptible smirks, as if they knew so much already.

***

Months before the trailer, my sister drove me through a bleak Mojave, drove me from an ocean to an endless sea of dirt. I don’t know why I was with her instead of my mother. Maybe because every inch of our Dodge was crammed with our belongings. I only remember it was my sister who drove me away from California.

“What are you so upset about?” she asked.

I was much younger than she, but I heard it as a ridiculous question. She, living with her young family in a flat-roofed ranch-style on a patch of suburban sand where she thought all her dreams would come true. If only her mother were close by, life would be perfect. My mother, who could use some help from anyone, even her grown children. They all seemed to have forgotten. Forgotten that no matter how shaky that L.A. ground was for them, it was the solid I desperately needed. They should have known that in leaving it, everything would not be perfect for me.

My mother met my father on a perpetually gleaming corner of our modest neighborhood, in a diner where she worked. She poured his coffee and took his tips, but had little time for him. Men, she’d learned, could take you and leave you. Then you leave them. And you are left with two children and a failed marriage. My father was younger, though, with an innocent look of love. After a while, she thought he might be right, and in a moment of unchained emotion, they married. Then, like a miracle, she liked to say, I came. It was late for her, and it was so hopeful until it wasn’t. She learned what Stevens foretold in his lyrics. She learned, yet again, how a lot of nice things turn bad out there.

In the trailer by the highway, we lived alone, and although there was little room for secrets, especially for a teenager who needs them, I watched my mother wander a space of her own. I saw her apply her powder and coral red lipstick, how she tried to be a cover girl. I felt her love in all its earnest imperfections, kind and caring, but gasping for air, underwater in the murk of her life.

***

For me, it would be different. It would be one house, one city, one husband, and when the time came, we neighborhood parents formed a posse. Every few weeks we met with our barely teenage daughters. We hauled them in and forced compliance. We spoke of drugs and sex and every danger we could imagine or remember. Oh, the vigilance we brought to our jobs! The girls did their jobs too, and sat zipped, as if sworn to deflect indoctrination.

One night, over slices of homemade apple pie, one of the mothers said something about sex and what boys thought of when they looked at girls.

“That is what goes on in their heads.”

It was always the mothers who did the most talking. The fathers—devoted, loyal, present—were not the kind to speak these cautions out loud to their daughters. Their instincts were to protect, their versions straightforward. Still, as long as they’d lived, they hadn’t forgotten their youth and how women remained a mystery. They squirmed in their seats as much as the girls. They were dogs in a roomful of cats.

“No it’s not,”one of the girls replied.

Then a father, my husband, a grown boy, to everyone’s surprise in the moment, spoke.

“Yes it is.”

***

I watched them all, my mother and older brother and sister. I, waiting in the wings, saw them in the consequences of their choices made and unmade, in the glaring truths and unrosy outlooks of their failed marriages and teen pregnancies, their young love and mid-life misfortune. In my family, I was added on, and from that spot, I watched the rest of them scurry and stumble, and I didn’t feel so neglected as much as simply not tended to.

At the new school, I walked the hallways and caught the sideways glances. I heard unknown voices shout in the local dialect. I walked without the protection of my own tribe, without a familiar face, and missing, most of all, a glimpse of him. When I packed my things and left, it was still so new. Our classmates said we were a bitchin’ couple. And as time passed, whatever I later learned of love was measured against that lucent light exposing my deepest parts, that billowing sense of home. All of it buoying me over a precipice. Now all I held was a gauzy flashback of me on the sand and him paddling out, the sun christening us in our rightness. Now all I had were his letters strewn on my bed, written as if the space between us hastened the end of the world. And this complete injustice I felt, they’d all forgotten that too.

One day, a popular girl spied me and invited me to a party. She took me under her wing, and, with little else to cling to, I went with her to a house in a sprawl of rock-filled yards. I heard the music and saw the children—because that’s what we were—home alone. Baby boys in crude, garage band licks attempted The Beatles’ Birthday Song for another popular girl, and I remember thinking it was everything you would ever want. Later I found this common, always a house empty of parents working odd hours in that strange town. My mother or sister didn’t inquire about this when they’d drop me off. They had some kind of faith in me, which is silly to have in any teenager. But they were so wound up in their own worlds.

At the party, kids spilled out everywhere, and in front of the house, an older boy sat in a paneled van at the curb. He waved me over and invited me in. And because I was clothes on a hanger, I went. He sat in the driver’s seat like a host, as if his dank reeking car were a salon. Smoke trailed from his pipe as he took a hit, then offered it to me.

“No, thanks,” I said. The only thing I’d smoked at that point was a stumpy Marlboro on a summer night in the park auditorium in Los Angeles, my first concert. Linda Ronstadt had sung Different Drum so much better than on the record. Under the park lights, I stood with my friends and took my first drag, the nicotine slapping my lungs in the only high I’d ever known.

In the car, I felt the older boy’s eyes on me.

“Do you ball?” he said after a deep draw from the pipe.

“What?”

“Do you get it on?”

I don’t remember what I said to him, only the looping sensation in my gut and the need to get away. Sitting there, looking out into the inky night, and the nothingness of the terrain, I longed to be away from all of it. It was barren, everywhere I looked.

I left the car and went into the house. I found my way past bottles of Ripple and Rhine Garten wine, past couples making out in the corner, and found a phone.

“Come pick me up,” I told my sister as my mother was working.

“Why?”

“Because.”

On the way home, silence passed between us. My sister had to have known, in the space she allowed for someone else’s life, of my unhappiness. But neither she nor my mother asked about the party. Past their decision to move me there, they were letting me make my own choices. They were desperate, though, to find a place for me, like finding the right spot for the corner cabinet from your old house. They had to do it to get on with their own lives.

***

What made me think there would never be a call from a party?

On the car ride home, my daughter said, “I wasn’t drinking.”

“So everyone was drinking, but you weren’t?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, even if that’s true, you now have a ticket.”

“I know that, Mom.”

When it came to my daughter and her friends, I thought surely those Minor In Possession citations would sober them up. After all, there were all those college applications to think of.

***

Days passed slow in the trailer by the highway, and some of them I feigned illness—hard as it was in our close quarters—to skip school. But again, my mother always believed me. Looking back, I see how, at the end of each day, she’d done all she could.

Eventually, I smoked pot and hash with those popular kids, and even called some of them friends, although many nights I spent alone, pulling albums from their sleeves, collapsing into the music as if it were a cuddle toy. In those days, it was not one song but five or six in succession, maybe the whole album. And whatever else I didn’t have, I had this small luxury of time and reverence to the music.

In “The Wind,” Stevens’ voice floats like puffs of white wishes. I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul….I sat upon the setting sun, but..…never wanted water once….

So Stevens knew of the howl that blew through me, as if my soul were a vacant house. I wondered if he was telling me to let go, and if I did, I could inhale a breath of my imagining that was not of that trailer and that desert. Now, more than anything, when I think of those nights and hear the music after so long, I feel, as if touching a scar left from it, my wanting. Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and others, were oracles, singing me their parables. And even as I held onto the notes and words and the bits of childhood that were left, I was drawn to what might come.

Oh baby, baby, it’s a wild world. Yes, Cat, I see that. I want it anyway.

I’ve read different accounts of what Stevens meant in the lyrics of that song. In an interview years after its release, he said it was a reminder to himself about the world and the need to be cautious, a reference in his case to fame and losing touch with reality. In 1970, I only knew what his words meant to me. I’d already seen a lot of what the world could do, and because I couldn’t change what others had done, I thought all would be right once I gained full power. Because as a teenager, that’s what you want more than anything.

***

A few weeks before my daughter leaves for college, leaves the tight, tender budding of who she is under our roof, I’m rummaging through her room, looking for photographs to add to a montage I’m making for graduation. God, they love to take pictures. I don’t have this many in all my years. So many of her and her crew, of slumber parties, birthday parties, school dances. There is even one (why am I surprised?) of her caught in wild laughter, clutching a Keystone Light. But in the back of her closet, beneath the photos, I come across a pile of envelopes. I see the return address and know they are from her first boyfriend— her first love—while he was away at camp. I pick one up and feel it thick to the touch. In the dark stealth of my invasion, I open it. What am I thinking? I’ve crossed a line I haven’t fully grasped. I read the first raw professions and am stunned at my own violation more than anything. Jolted, I put the pages back where I found them. As I do, I think back to my own letters, also fat in my hands with ink and emotion. And there in my daughter’s closet, all that unrestrained passion, that unconsidered risk, rushes over me, and I realize. This is it. This force that moves us, just as it lights the phosphorescence of the ocean, to where only God really knows.

***

In the kitchen, the song has ended. I look at my daughter and her friends, and oh hello, it’s time come again. I see them as girls in the pulsing purple walls of my daughter’s room as the thick bass of Usher, Nelly and J’Kwon powers their downy wings. All of them with so much. Yet they catch their reflections in the mirror, and in their flush effervescence, they are ready. They hear the words and melodies and tightly gauged, they are ready. The world is what they want. And a voice that is not the music tells them to hold on, it’s coming. I know this not because I’m the mother. But because I can feel the heat of the desert, and see my long hair splayed.

Gina Harlow is a writer who lives in Austin Texas, and who longs for many places. She has co-authored a food column for Hearst King Features and her essays have appeared in Narratively, Brave Voices Magazine, Austin American Statesman, Medium and others. She is currently working on a memoir, the story of a middle-aged woman and a young wild horse.