Friday I thought I was prepared for anything, but Ms. Lottie threw me a curveball and announced I was playing at the tenth anniversary of a steak house out near the airport with Dolly Parton. Dolly was the version of Ms. Parton from her most popular, glitzy 1970s era. That meant cle**age, and not just for Dolly. For all four of us in her band.
I’d dressed up in costume from age seven to age seventeen, looking more like a pageant toddler than a bluegrass musician. Julie and I had worn matching “country” outfits that nobody out in the country could ever pick beans or herd cows in: custom-made dresses with knee-length skirts standing almost straight out like we were square dancers. When enough sequins sparkled around our necks and our blond curls were sprayed stiff underneath our cowgirl hats, people noticed only how alike we looked, not how different we were. They feigned astonishment that we weren’t twins even though I was two years older. I found this fun at seven, nauseating at seventeen.
But no country costume could have prepared me for dressing up like Dolly Parton’s right-hand girl a few weeks after I’d turned eighteen. I’d been wearing sexy clothes in the past year—provocative clothes, my mom had said with distaste—but to me that had meant choosing a body-hugging minidress for the homecoming dance, or slicing a deeper V in my threadbare White Stripes T-shirt. I’d never shown this much boob in public.
Ms. Lottie acted like it was nothing. Costumes were part of showbiz, after all, even the steak house version of showbiz. She pinned my bouffant brunette wig in place—only Dolly got to wear a platinum wig. Ms. Lottie had already taken in my spangled maxi-dress a few inches before I arrived. All she had to do was pull it, shift it, give up, and make me add some padding to my bra, then pull and shift the gown again and shove my precocious fake cle**age into place. She stood back with her hands on her hips to survey her work, then reached out to coax one of my baby boobs a little higher. “Sorry, hon. That’s the best I can do with what you’ve got. Just stay behind the others.” She gave me an encouraging pat on my sequined ass as I staggered on high heels into the bombed-out Borders to find Dolly.
Ms. Parton was a tolerable musician. So were the other two ladies on guitar and mandolin. Best of all, Ms. Parton had the Dolly act down, with lots of self-deprecating humor about br**sts and plastic surgery. She made some jokes so off-color that even I thought they might be inappropriate for the families from the sticks enjoying a long lunch before they visited Junior at the state prison. I almost enjoyed the afternoon.
But I couldn’t shake the idea that my dress of the day had been designed as some sick parody of my life, a combination of the costume I used to wear with Julie and the costume I’d donned for my wild senior year of high school. I hadn’t wanted to expose my boobs to this crowd going back for seconds and thirds at the chocolate fountain, but that’s what I’d acted like I’d wanted all year. I’d acted like my goal was to get drunk with Hank Williams, or get stoned with Willie Nelson, or have an older man like Elvis imply he wanted to screw me. This job was a catalog of everything my parents had screamed at me about over the past year. Is that what you want? Because that’s what you’re acting like! It was a mythical series of tasks I had to perform to prove myself before I claimed my prize—except there was no prize. Unlike Hercules, I was not worthy.
And on Saturday, I was assigned to wander the mall again, this time in a band with Johnny Cash.
“Plus his son,” Ms. Lottie said. “Such a cutie-pie.”
I’d noticed Mr. Cash sitting on the couch on my way in. I hadn’t noticed his son. Maybe at the time he’d been bent over, fishing something from his instrument case. Maybe he wasn’t much to look at, or he was way older than me, so my brain hadn’t even registered him, and Ms. Lottie was putting me on.
“You will liiiiiiiiiike him,” she insisted, looking at me pointedly in the mirror and raising one carefully penciled eyebrow above her reading glasses. “I hear he’s a heartbreaker, though, so watch out.”
I scowled at my reflection. As on the first day, she was making me up in the style of the 1950s, all traces erased of the blond, angelic version of me from a year ago, and the current evil version, too. I needed my usual heavy mascara and black hair and black T-shirt to make this heartbreaker take me seriously when I scowled at him and told him where to go. He sounded like a replay of Elvis.
“This is ridiculous,” I told Ms. Lottie. “Johnny Cash’s wife didn’t even play fiddle. She played everything but. What kind of authentic Nashville experience is this?”
“You don’t have to be June Carter Cash. You could be a session musician from Studio B. Trust me, you want to be with the Cashes today.” Ms. Lottie nodded toward the lounge area, where Johnny Cash and his heartbreaker son were tuning their guitars. “A couple of mornings ago, weren’t you wishing for boy trouble? You just found it.”
2
“We’ll see about that,” I grumbled. With my circle skirt sweeping behind me, I spun in Ms. Lottie’s chair and stepped out of her hair-and-makeup alcove. I opened my fiddle case on an abandoned bookcase with a “Romance” sign on top. Better that than “Addiction” or “Family Planning,” which was where my parents thought I was parking my fiddle these days. I ran the bow across the strings, making minor adjustments with the tuning pegs. I didn’t need a tuning fork. I could tune my instrument by ear and I was always right. Other people didn’t believe me, though, and I often spent a whole set of songs gritting my teeth and playing A at a fourth of a step up or down from 440 hertz.
Determined not to let that happen this time, I marched across the bookstore with a smile on my face, which seemed a lot more natural while I was in costume. Mr. Cash and his son sat in chairs on opposite ends of the lounge area, playing their guitars. I would charm them into doing things the way I wanted.
I watched them as I walked closer. Johnny Cash was a man about my dad’s age with his dark hair greased and combed into a pompadour. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and a bolo tie, which worked fine for Mr. Cash but also wouldn’t have turned heads anywhere in Nashville. People around here were a little eccentric about bolo ties.
Ms. Lottie had coaxed his son’s hair into the same glossy pompadour, but his clothes could have passed for current, too, part of the Buddy Holly aesthetic so popular right now at Vanderbilt. He wore low-top black Chuck Taylors, black jeans folded up a few turns like greasers wore them in the 1950s, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows. The material stretched tight across his chest and biceps. He was big enough to have played football.