#my hand hurts froom drawing

[oneweekoneband]

If you get on folk music's most celebrated highway and drive north along the shore of the biggest freshwater lake on earth, cross Knife River and angle right onto a red-dirt gravel driveway that winds almost a full mile down through tangles of lupine and sumac and quaking aspen, you will find, set back on a sloping lawn, a gray house with a dark red front door. Ten years ago, I lived there. The plot of land where it stands used to hold a different house, white clapboard with blue trim; I watched one morning before fourth grade as a bulldozer ripped open the front wall of that house and something yellow — a forgotten toy, or maybe just a piece of insulation — tumbled from what used to be my bedroom to the grass below. We broke ground on the new gray house just before the leaves fell that year. My mother, an architect, drew the plans. My stepfather, a contractor, worked to frame it and roof it and hang the drywall. By the next summer, the house was complete enough that the three of us were able to move upstairs from the single dusty room we'd been sharing in the half-finished basement, and that fall, Suzanne Vega released Songs in Red and Gray.

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The facts: Songs in Red and Gray is Vega's first album after her divorce from Mitchell Froom, who is the producer of 99.9F and Nine Objects of Desire as well as the father of her only child, Ruby. In the press she remained adamant that the album was not explicitly biographical, that only a handful of songs dealt directly with her emotions and experiences regarding their split, and that in no way should it be considered a concept album about her divorce. Nevertheless, the theme of divorce runs through the songs the way a vein of iron runs through earth, deep and heavy and unyielding. I have no way of knowing if, when I whirled around our new kitchen to "Priscilla" with tattered chiffon scarves from the dress-up basket swirling in my wake, that same vein already lay beneath the smooth tile and fresh paint and slab foundation of the gray house. I do know that, five years later, before we'd even installed the upstairs shower or finished the front porch, my mother and I moved out for good.

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Trying to explain Songs in Red and Gray feels like trying to explain this house to you: the house my mother dreamed, the house my stepfather built. I could sketch a floor plan, spread out paint samples, tighten focus on any number of tiny details and fixtures to illustrate a point, but to me it is not about any small part of the whole. It's about the air inside. How it changed. This album sounds different than any of the work that came before it — there's a different atmosphere, a heaviness and a hugeness, a flung-wide feeling that could be freedom or grief, depending on the light. What must it feel like, spending years of your life laboring over a project with someone only to come to a point when the work is all that's left, and then not even that anymore? How do you learn to move alone through the space you once traversed together? This album starts with "Penitent" — once I stood alone so proud — and despite the name it is not so much a hymn of atonement as it is an exhale of long-held breath, a sigh of relief and frustration and pure honesty addressed to an indifferent god. Or husband. Or father.

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If you're paying attention, you'll notice that the divorce already happened. Before the first house even got torn down, before I ever sang along to "Soap and Water" — daddy's a dark riddle, mama's a headful of bees — I'd learned to live like the little kite, carried away on the wayward breeze. My stepfather built the gray house; my father haunted it. Telephone calls and bad dreams. Twice a month my mother would drive me to see him: six hours one way on a Friday night, six hours back on Sunday. She copied Suzanne Vega's first two albums onto a single cassette tape so we could listen straight through both, and I'd stare out the window, past the ghostly reflection of my own face, the shadowed ditches, the half-moon hanging in my hair, listening. Mostly I was silent but sometimes I'd sing along. My favorite was "The Queen and the Soldier." She closed herself up like a fan.

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I said I did not want to dwell on the small parts of the whole but, actually, it’s the smallest things that snag, burned into the back of my brain like afterimage. The gray pewter vase held the deep red rose / one piece of coral shone white / by the brass candlestick near your red velvet coat / is everything I can recall of one night. Color makes this album what it is, and it’s color that comes back to me most readily in memory. When they were building the gray house they cut down my favorite rowan tree, the one split at the base into three trunks with a cleft just big enough to hold me. I can still see it in my mind’s eye. Whorls of white lichen like lace over the dark silver bark. Vivid red berries. Did you know that there’s a logic to the way languages develop words for color? First comes the differentiation of values: dark and light. Next is always red, because you need a word to call attention to blood.

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The traditional way to trace a family history is by tree, but I find it easier to follow the path not branch to branch but split to split, a maze of rifts and cracks. My family tree reads like twigs scattered on the ground, like fortune-telling. The week I watched the bulldozer tear down the white house, my teacher instructed our class to create timelines of our lives. Include significant events, she said, like when you've moved or your family structure changed. As I began to track backwards through the number of ruptures and relocations, I became increasingly anxious; I could not see how to cram all of my significant life events onto the paper she had provided. Already there had been too much upheaval. At the far right edge of the ruler-straight line she’d drawn for us, I wrote, watched my house get torn down. I don’t remember what I left off the page to make sure everything fit properly, I only know that I must have done so, because never in my life have I managed to tell the full story in any one place.

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What stuns me most about this album, even after all these listens, is its sense of control. Amazon’s reviewer wrote that it is “arranged with the meticulous precision of a butler laying silver on a table,” and although I think that wasn’t meant strictly as a compliment I can’t help but hear it as one. There’s something heavy and rich and ritualistic in it, but no sloppy decadence; more like something Catholic, explicitly — the Virgin Mary on a chain has hit me in the mouth again — and implicitly, echoes of sin and sacrament and guilt and ceremony. Old magics and new. Actions seem spurred not by abandon but by lucid calculation, every sentiment balanced in a cold and practiced hand before being placed — not hurled, not smashed, not brandished — placed, with exquisite care, in exactly the right spot. A long row of silver knives on a red tablecloth.

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Outside the gray house with the red door, walking the windswept shoreline, I collected stones. Smooth and round and dark gray, some washed almost to perfect circles in the tumble of the lake. I’d fill my pockets and bring them home to line the windowsill or bookshelf, dropped them carefully into glass jars. When we were packing to move out, I remember thinking: what the fuck am I going do with all these rocks? It seemed absurd to lay them carefully inside a box and carry them away, but somehow more absurd to bring them back outside, dump them unceremoniously on the beach somewhere and leave. The title track of this album has a line that goes will you please tell me why I remember these things / after all of this time I don’t know, and it was that line that echoed in my head the first time I encountered the much-loved quote from Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” where the mother says, You remember too much. Why hold onto all that? And the narrator replies, Where can I put it down? In the end, I took the stones.

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My mother and I moved into a new house, splintery blue shingles and a rust-smeared white screen door, and the week afterwards, I started high school. We pulled up the stiff shag carpet and painted the walls wearing torn jeans and ate dinner together every night. Like the Gilmore Girls, people said to us; I hadn’t seen the show so I didn’t know whether to confirm or deny. I’ve watched a few episodes now and the comparison seems fair, but what struck me as the greatest difference is the ease with which they draw honest emotional conversation out of each other, how willing they are to speak the names of what haunts them. What hurts them. Then again, once my mother asked me over a plate of eggs Benedict in a diner: how come you were always able to understand when to get out of a relationship? And I said: I think watching you get divorced twice taught me that breaking up was always possible.

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Forgive me all my blindnesses / my weakness and unkindnesses. I have the only child’s predilection towards secrecy and silence, sharing myself only insofar as I reveal nothing that sits too close to the bone. I have, too, the only child’s myopic self-absorption; I tell history by telling the story of myself. It is hard for me to talk about my parents’ marriage because I have no memories of them together, aside from a single hazy impression of my mother at the kitchen sink in my fathers’ house, washing dishes, her dark hair still tumbling halfway down her back. In that memory, she is only a few years older than I am now. So much of this album recalls my past selves, my early private dramas of sorrow and self-creation, but when Suzanne Vega sings soap and water / take the day from my hand / scrub the salt from my stinging skin / slip me loose of this wedding band I’ve never not pictured my mother’s hands under the fauce, her bony knuckles and trimmed nails, and the ring from her second marriage, beaten with an intricate pattern of platinum and rose gold. Our hands look remarkably alike, but they are not the same hands. I am embarrassed to say that I do not know the story of how she left my father, nor the story of how she left my stepfather, from her perspective. I am not sure that I have ever asked her, and if she ever told me, I have failed to remember.

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Whatever happened to the handsome fist? He’s here, of course, he always is — the puppeteer from “Machine Ballerina,” the adulterer from “Song in Red and Gray,” the imperious patriarch of “Penitent.” The last time I saw my former stepfather was when we ran into each other in the grocery store a few years back. He looked the same as I remembered: close-buzzed silver hair, rough suntan, crinkles around the eyes. I almost hid from him at first, nervous and expecting some sort of confrontation, but of course he was perfectly kind to me. Every man is not a fist, as it turns out. Or, I guess — some fists don’t come out swinging. Some fists clench tight because they don’t know how to loosen into a flat palm, allow themselves vulnerability. Some fists clench tight because all fears elide into each other, and there’s no way to know when it’s safe to let go.

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Take what’s wrong and make it go right, you can / weave it like a prayer. This is the part where there should be some kind of revelation. The place where, having been tossed up in the air, the pins come down and I catch them, set them out in sequence so the story makes sense. But the problem is it isn’t a story; I didn’t toss the pins in the first place, and I can’t do anything but scramble to catch them as they come plummeting out of the sky one by one. I’ve never been any good at magic tricks. I can barely even shuffle cards. I tried to learn, bought a book and everything, but my hands wouldn’t do what my mind asked. My father could make coins disappear and reappear at will; it is the only thing I remember him doing that ever delighted me.

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Two years after my mother and I moved out of the gray house, I quit speaking to my father. I did not know that I was going to do it — I just left one weekend and never went back. Two years after that, I graduated from high school; I had a rocky start to college, but in another two years I moved out on my own, for good. My mother started dating someone new — another builder, actually — and they’ve been spending every summer and some winters tearing up the house, redoing bits and pieces to make it more livable without altering the fundamental structure, its good old bones. He re-shingled the outside in raw cedar, which will, over time, weather into a beautiful shade of silver. But they won’t be around for that — the plan is to try to sell it in a couple of years and buy a plot of land somewhere outside of town, build a place of their own from the ground up. Whenever I’m back to visit my mother reminds me that eventually I’ll have to sort through the boxes of my old things and decide what to keep and what to throw away. But, she says, no rush.

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This album ends with a song called "St. Clare." It is, actually, a cover — the original is by Jack Hardy, an old-school New York folk singer and long-time friend of Vega's who passed away in 2011.  Bold little bird / fly away home. Where is home, exactly? Pretty soon every house I’ve lived in before age eighteen will be closed to me forever. A few summers ago I almost made it back to the gray house with the red door — a friend from college came to visit and we drove up the shore together, past Knife River, right onto the gravel road which, as it turns out, is paved now, but I couldn’t bring myself to go all the way down the driveway. What was I afraid of? Seeing something? Or being seen? I couldn’t explain it. We turned around, headed back past the lupines and the sumac and the quaking aspen, back to the famous highway. I think, actually, we listened to that album on the trip — yowling at each other, hoooow does it feeeeeeel! To be on your own. No directioooon home. That was three years ago, and I haven’t been back since. Lately I’ve been fantasizing about driving up the shore again. What I miss more than anything is the landscape: the rock beach, the shadows under the pines, the way the sunlight scatters off the surface of the lake on a calm day. I would like to go back on a clear afternoon and sit next to the water and feel the wind in my hair. When you say home, actually, that’s what I imagine. Not a house at all, not even a person — instead, the atmosphere that holds them, the air that slips in and around and through those precarious human spaces. A place to breathe, a sense of change. Something wild. Something green.

#suzanne vega #songs in red and gray