I slipped into the restroom to scrub off my makeup, plus the fine sawdust that had stuck to it during my morning of helping my granddad build guitars. Then I returned to the wardrobe area set up at the front of the store, near the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the mall, now covered in brown paper to protect us from the curious stares of shoppers. I plopped into Ms. Lottie’s chair.
“You know, hon,” she said, peering at me over the tops of her rhinestone reading glasses, “you could come in without makeup. Then we wouldn’t have to go through so many steps.”
“I never leave the house without makeup,” I told her. “I’d feel naked.” All of which had become true in the past year. I’d been hiding behind inky black mascara and a scowl since I cut off my long hair. Nobody messed with a tough-looking chick like me. I’d felt like I was surrounded by a force field when I’d passed Elvis in the lounge area just now. I got in trouble only when I washed my makeup off and Ms. Lottie made me up nicely to look like the high school portrait of my now-dead grandma.
“Um,” I said as Ms. Lottie fitted a wig of long, straight blond locks over my head. With my hair color back to natural and no makeup, in the mirror I looked more like myself than I had in a year, which made me uncomfortable. “Does this hair go with Elvis?”
“You’re not with Elvis today, hon,” she said, wrapping the wig with a bandanna printed like the American flag. “You’re with Willie Nelson.”
“Why?” I asked her reflection. Even without mascara, my blue eyes looked huge. I tried not to seem so obviously panicked. Elvis must have complained to the management about me already. I’d been transferred but not fired. Not yet.
“Elvis only works a few days a week,” Ms. Lottie explained. “He bartends the rest. We couldn’t put you with him all the time. Everybody’s schedule is real irregular because nobody can make a living doing this. And then, of course, sometimes we have people out sick. Or they lay out of work, more likely.” She placed her hands firmly on either side of the flag bandanna and gave the wig a hard jerk to straighten my fake scalp. “Even if you were all here every day of the week, we’d switch up the bands so you didn’t kill each other. You musicians are impossible, and Elvis is the absolute worst. Didn’t he come on to you?”
I was so surprised that another “Um” was all I could manage.
“Didn’t he ask what was under your circle skirt?” Ms. Lottie insisted, leaning forward to find the foundation she used on me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Sounds like Dolly is telling him off, though,” Ms. Lottie pointed out as the noise of their argument rose over the empty bookshelves.
She came in close to work on my face and coaxed me to relax my jaw. I couldn’t let go. My mind whirled with the speech I’d rehearsed for the last twenty hours. Now I didn’t need it. I should have been relieved. Elvis wasn’t going to tell on me. He’d insulted me and then had an argument with me because he did that to everybody. I could still tell on him if I wanted. Other employees and Ms. Lottie would probably back me up.
Instead of relief, though, I felt let down and exhausted. All my hours of scheming and plotting were a big departure from my usual routine of boredom and apathy. I was left with that buzz of adrenaline, and now I had nowhere to put it.
I was even a little disappointed to hear that Elvis came on to anything in a circle skirt, not just me. When I’d thought I was something special to him, at least I’d felt adult and sexy. Now I pined for this pervert to have eyes only for me. There was something seriously wrong with me.
“Hon, we can’t have tears. I’ve already done your eyeliner.” Ms. Lottie dabbed the corner of a tissue at my lash line, then stood back to look at me. “What’s the matter? Boy trouble?”
“I wish.” How delicious it would be to get this upset about a hot guy who cared about me instead of any of the hot guys I’d hung with that year, who would throw me to the piranhas rather than get their feet wet.
“I don’t know about that,” Ms. Lottie said, feathering mascara through my lashes to replace the thick mascara I’d just taken off. “Be careful what you wish for.”
After all the drama of Elvis Tuesday, Willie Nelson Wednesday was laid-back. Ms. Lottie costumed me in a tight tank top and a denim miniskirt with a frayed hem. I passed for a member of Willie’s bedraggled 1970s entourage, I guessed. Either that or a girl from the boonies dressed in her finest for a tourist trip to Nashville.
Our quartet moseyed down the loading ramp to pile into a van, which drove us to the state capitol building. After the governor signed a tax bill into law on the marble steps, we entertained the lawmakers and lobbyists sipping punch with “Always on My Mind,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” and “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” each song in the key of D. I’d never noticed that everything was in the same key.
Yeah, maybe Willie Wednesday was a little too laid-back. I should have loved this field trip because it got us away from the mall, outside in the sunshine. The huge capitol building was a fake Greek temple set on a grassy hill at the edge of downtown, with skyscrapers in front of us, and hints of country music wafting to us on the breeze from the tourist district on Broadway. But whenever I got close to Willie to confer about the next few tunes, he reeked of pot. So did the guitarist and the mandolin player in similar hippie garb. I thought about asking them for a toke, joking that it went with the outfit. But if I could smell it on them, my granddad would be able to smell it on me when I returned to his house that night. Which meant no toking up behind the bushes on the grounds of the state capitol.
On Thursday, because God did not love me anymore, I played in a band with Hank Williams at a ribbon cutting for the city’s new sewage treatment plant. At least it didn’t smell yet. And to their credit, unlike Willie’s band, these guys hadn’t imbibed Hank’s poison of choice. The bass guitarist was a talented musician who looked—and smelled—sober. Hank played guitar reasonably well and sounded fine when he sang in his normal range, but the yodeling. Oh, the yodeling. For a musician like me burdened with perfect pitch, being deposited in a band with a pitchy Hank Williams singing “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” was torture, pure and simple. I’d thought I needed to concentrate to play in D-sharp when Elvis was playing in D, but that was nothing compared with the Zen-like place I retreated to in my mind and the deep, measured breaths I took to keep the look of distaste off my face while Hank yodeled.