Free Dorothy on the Rocks by Barbara Suter

the song,” he said when he finished. “Your voice is just another instrument that serves it. You have to be part of the music and not try to upstage it.”
    I’d spent most of my life trying to upstage whatever seemed threatening to me. I laughed too loud, drank too much, stayed out too late, all in an attempt to keep “feelings” at bay. Like the pioneers traveling west in wagon trains, I lit bonfires to keep thescary things away from my campgrounds. I didn’t like feelings, or maybe more to the point, I didn’t know what to do with them. I learned to sing from my mother who sang hymns at the kitchen sink. I can still hear her singing “The Old Rugged Cross” as she carefully dried the cups and plates and knives and forks and put them neatly away. The music seemed to put her in a different place, a place that had nothing to do with two kids and a dog and a mortgage and a Pontiac station wagon, and all the feelings she couldn’t deal with—a place where she could be happy with no thought of us and our scrapes and bruises. So I also learned to let the music take me away from my feelings. I wrapped my talent in a flurry of style and attitude and pizzazz and not much else. Until I met Goodie.
    I stand looking at the scraps of my life that are wedged into the five wide shelves of my grandmother’s cherry wood cupboard. An old eight-by-ten photo lands on the floor as I rummage through the piles of
things:
a coffee tin of miscellaneous buttons, a back-gammon set, a Norman Rockwell one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle unopened (who has the time?), a flashlight without batteries, three yellow legal pads still in the cellophane, a Xeroxed script of
Little Red Riding Hood,
sides from an under-five on
All My Children,
a half-empty bag of rubber bands. Toward the back on the third shelf I locate the accordion file marked
Goodie/Charts
. I pull it out, place it in my lap, and untie the string that holds it closed.
    Goodie wrote his charts by hand, music calligraphy, beautiful to look at, on ivory medium-stock composing sheets. He wrote in pencil, soft no. 1 lead, sharpened to a fine point in the Panasonic electric pencil sharpener that sat to the left of his piano. Sometimes I stood beside him and consulted. We discussed ideas for the arrangementsand agreed on the key and tempo, but really I just watched. I’m a voyeur in that way. I love watching people do things they do well. I love watching painters paint and potters pot and ballplayers play ball. And I loved watching Goodie write music.
    â€œDid you?” Goodie is hovering near the window, decked out today in a long black cocktail dress with gold lamé elbow-length gloves. “Did you love watching me write?”
    â€œJesus, you scared me,” I say. “Goodie, are you real? Or am I hallucinating? Not enough blood to the brain?”
    â€œI’m a figment of your imagination, enjoy it,” he replies. “Did you really love watching me write?”
    â€œYes, I did.”
    â€œWell, I loved listening to you sing.” Goodie circles the room, then perches on the windowsill. “And it’s time now to get out of the Dorothy drag and back on the big-girl stage, Miss Maggie Magnolia.”
    â€œFunny, Charles said the same thing,” I say.
    â€œCharles and I were often of the same mind,” Goodie says. “Especially in matters concerning costumes and cabaret.”
    â€œWell, I like that outfit.”
    â€œYes, very Audrey Hepburn don’t you think?”
    â€œIt’s the first scene from
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
” I say.
    â€œIt is, isn’t it?” Goodie giggles and struts back and forth. Then he stops. “Okay, enough about fashion. Now stop looking at that music and start singing it.”
    â€œI’ll try. It’s just that . . .”
    â€œNo excuses, love. I won’t let you have excuses anymore. Don’t you get it, Maggie? It’s on loan.