Jump A Little Lighter: Chapter 7

Read from the beginning here

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“I mean, I can keep playing all night if y’all…”

The studio audience cheer, and Rosie’s mouth curls up at the corner, her eyes turn sideways. She catches the eye of the guitarist in the band, and when he shrugs she jumps up, swaps guitars with him. Turns her attention to the instrument.

“G major?”

The nameless musician – session guy – assents, and Rosalita retunes the instrument quickly. The Host calls from out of frame, “Is this something you do for yourself on tour?” The laugh in his voice is shakey.

The camera remains squarely on Rosie, and her eyes remain on the guitar neck.

“Yeah… I mean, not really. We do it before the show to match the songs we’ll be playing. Soundcheck, you know?”

She stops plucking lightly at the strings. The experimental lick she pulls out as a test sounds a pitch-perfect imitation of something you’d her on a dad-rock station. I couldn’t tell you what.

“Hey Jake can you hold a simple beat for me? 4/4 in about 90 BPM?”

The bassist nods, and Rosalita turns around. “Paulie I want more flourish on the drums. 6th bar especially. Fellas we’re in D major, let’s go.”

The bassist plays a single bar and Rosalita starts with an arpeggio, until the bassist mutters, “Got it.” She hums in tune with the bassist, then lets go, tipping the neck of her guitar up so that the drummer can follow her. She plays through the whole first verse, her head tipped back, then pulls in close to the mic for the chorus. It’s Taylor Swift, years old by now, but the audience join in. Somewhere in the back a sound guy scrabbles and part-way through her voice gets louder in the mix, making her crack up laughing and lose her place for a couple of lines. The drummer hits the end of each phrase in perfect time with her note: Rosalita is watching her bass player, and the band is watching her. She’s dancing around the stage, in her element, barely picked up by the microphone as she sings the verses, altogether focussed on keeping it tight. By this time the pianist has picked up – he’s got sheet music open on an ipad in front of him and is playing what I think might be a fiddle in the original mix. She stops abruptly before the end of the song, and the band stop with her. She’s red-cheeked and sweaty but some kind of hair and makeup wizardry has stopped her hair being too unruly or her makeup being less than perfect, and she glows with showbiz magic. The audience cannot stop cheering.

The Host steps in. It is his show, after all; she may have just won him an Emmy, but his over-the-top gesticulation and exaggerated facial expressions can’t hide the slight tinge of something in his eyes as he scrambles for how he might regain control. Ad break.

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Chapter 7: September 2017

Now that Bobby’s back at college Mrs Jacobs isn’t baking as much, but she does always leave us snacks still. I yearn for fresh cookies, but I’m not above the graham crackers on the counter, and I’ve been in and around this kitchen long enough to know that the produce in the fruitbowl is for things to look nice before they get turned into cobbler or coffee cake. Mrs Jacobs keeps her good fruit in the fridge. I yell my thank you with the crackers in one hand and two red delicious in the crook of my arm as Rosie taps out a rhythm she’s developing on the counter.

Today especially I was hoping for home baking: I wrote a first draft of a personal essay on the topic of my personal icon (Molly Ringwald) which Ms Janofsky said was derivative and that she thinks I can do better. She says that she’s not going to tell me what to write about, but the subtext hanging heavy in the air around us like factory smog was that she’s telling me to write about my dad’s death for a space in college, and that she knows I feel uncomfortable about it or I’d have done that in the first place. I could only force out a clipped ‘thank you’ and try to keep the challenge out of my voice. I’ve never been the kind of student who would push back on authority or adult wisdom, but some things are just sacred, and also painful, and I want my college admission to be based on my transcripts and my potential and my SAT scores, not on the sympathy some admissions counsellor has. This happened last lesson and I’m still in my head about it, still scrambling to prove to myself I can be original without mining trauma.

This is what a classic evening for us looks like: I’m doing my homework, Rosalita is in study mode learning a new song off YouTube and writing the notes down in a notepad. Her phone rings and she gestures wildly at me, whispering emphatically, “I need you to sing along to something, my parents can’t hear this call.”

I roll my eyes but I grab the mouse and put on a pop hit whilst Rosie speaks to somebody from the venue about how many amplifiers she needs and what kind of cable her and the boys have to bring. By the chorus I’m dancing along, even if I can only vaguely mumble half of each line in the verses. Rosalita scrawls what she needs in the back of her music notebook, where she hasn’t made stave paper or guitar tab diagrams, and finishes her call quicker than the 3:37 my singing gave her, letting her dance to the last bit with me before the video finishes, our pens in the air and our faces close.

She’s laughing and pink-cheeked as she says “why’d you choose a song you don’t know the words to?”

“Because you gave me about 3 seconds notice, you goofball, and I don’t study the hot 100 like you do.” For some reason I’m close to shoving her away, and the question we’ve all been avoiding bubbles up out of me like I’m a shaken-up soda bottle.

“Rosie it’s going to be in the dang paper, can’t you accept that your parents are going to find out?”

She’s serene in response, or blasé. “It’ll be too late by then.”

This fight is probably transference of my feelings about the essay, I don’t think I’m really mad with Rosie. I’ve had all summer to stew in my feelings and I don’t see why my anger would start right now, in the cold, clear blue evening.

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PLAYLIST OF SONGS

• [Taylor Swift, Our Song]
• [Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road (Live at the Roxy, ‘75)]
• [Camila Cabello, Havana]
• [Kate Bush, Symphony in Blue]
• [Queen, Tie Your Mother Down]