First Fictions , continued

Lisa Tucker C’84 G’84 is a self-described music freak. Growing up in Missouri, her family didn’t have many books around, or even magazines, but they had a record player, and through listening to music lyrics, Tucker discovered that she loved words. Since leaving Penn, she has held down many jobs—from waitressing to teaching math at Bryn Mawr—but music has been the constant in her life. While studying psychology about 10 years ago, she started thinking about the songs that run through peoples’ heads, the songs that stick in our minds and whether they tell us anything about ourselves. That was the impetus for The Song Reader (Downtown Press), a novel about Mary Beth Norris, who makes a living by reading people’s “song charts.” Tucker lives in New Mexico with her husband, a jazz pianist, and their 14-year-old son, Miles.

When did you go to Penn?

I graduated with the class of 1984 and then went to the English grad-school program to study representations of youth in 19th-century American literature. I’m an ABD—all but dissertation. I have about 30 pages written, but I started writing the Song Reader around that time, so I stopped writing the dissertation. Maybe someday I’ll finish it.

What was your Penn experience like?

I came to Penn a poor kid from Missouri. They gave me scholarships and financial aid. I also worked full-time the entire time, from four to midnight every day as a waitress, as a key-hole puncher. I tried hard to stay awake in class—I was always pinching myself. But everything I learned, I learned there—the English department was my second home. They made me realize that even as a poor kid from Missouri, I was capable of living in the world of thought.

How did you come up with the idea for The Song Reader?

I started thinking about why people remember certain songs. I was interested in the psychology of it and song reading as a way of discovering what you’re really thinking about the things that are going on in your life. I started reading friends’ “song charts,” but I never made money from it like Mary Beth does in the Song Reader. It started as a short story and that first sentence eventually became the first sentence of my book.

Did you learn to write as an undergrad at Penn?

I never took a creative-writing class in college. It was all literature and literary criticism. But I was inspired to write by reading so much good, beautiful work. Being in grad school forever gives you an idea of what a good narrative is.

How did the book get so long when it was supposed to be a short story?

I let the characters take me where they took me. Their voices led me. It’s like listening to a voice that isn’t me and following them throughout their journey.

How does it feel to be published?

Great. This book sold really fast, but there was a whole middle period of failure before that. For four years I was trying to sell another novel I’d written. On a bold day, I sent a piece of The Song Reader to Nan Talese. She didn’t want it, but she gave it to another agent who did.

What’s next?

My second novel, Shout Down the Moon, is being published by Simon & Schuster in 2004. I’m at work on a third novel now. It’s a love story about a scientist and a spiritualist in the 19th century.

Family Problems a Specialty

They said she was gifted. They swore she could see right into their hearts.

My sister Mary Beth was a song reader. Song reading was her term for it and she invented the art as far as I know. It was kind of like palm reading, she said, but instead of using hands, she used music to read people’s lives. Their music. The songs that were important to them from as far back as they could remember. The ones they turned up loud on their car radios and found themselves driving a little faster to. The ones they sang in the shower and loved the sound of their own voice singing. And of course, the songs that always made them cry on that one line nobody else even thought was sad.

Her customers adored her. They took her advice—to marry, to break it off with the low-life jerk, to take the new job, to confront their supervisor with how unfair he was—and raved about how much better off they were. They said she was gifted. They swore she could see right into their hearts.

From the beginning, my sister took it so seriously. She’d been doing readings less than a month when she had those cards printed up. Each one said in bold black letters:

Mary Beth Norris

Song Reader/Life Healer

Let me help you make sense
of the music in your head.

[Family problems a specialty.]

Leave a message at 372-1891.
Payment negotiable.

She had to work double shifts at the restaurant to pay for the cards and the answering machine, but she said it was just part of her responsibilities now. “I have a calling in life,” she told me, “and I’ve got to act like it.”

I wish I’d saved one of those cards, but I wasn’t there the night she buried them at the bottom of the garbage can. It was after Ben left, and after I discovered she’d lied to me about my father. It was when the trouble with Holly Kramer was just beginning, and I still thought—like most of the town—that her talent was undeniable.

Some people even claimed she had to be psychic. After all, no one else knew that Rose was in trouble except Mary Beth; no one even suspected that Rose would take Clyde’s car on that sun-blind Saturday morning and drive it right over the sidewalk and through the glass wall of his News and Tobacco Mart except my sister, who told Rose two months before that she’d better stop seeing Clyde. From the song chart, Mary Beth knew Clyde had to be bad news. She shook her head when Rose got stuck on “Lucille” for five weeks and warned her a life can’t hold this much sadness for long. When Rose started humming “Hungry Heart,” Mary Beth knew the lid was about to blow off Rose and Clyde’s relationship. But she didn’t tell Rose I told you so when we went with Rose’s mother to bail her out of jail. She wasn’t that way with her advice, not at all.

My sister kept file cards on her customers, “song charts” neatly alphabetized in a large green Rubbermaid box in the corner of our kitchen. On Saturdays she would meet with new customers in the little room downstairs our landlady Agnes had donated to the cause—as long as Mary Beth kept the room clean and didn’t disturb Agnes’s husband’s sketches and charcoal pencils still sitting on the desk exactly as he left them when he died eighteen years before. Sometimes she gave advice at these first meetings, but usually she waited until she’d kept the chart for at least a few weeks before she gave them a reading.

They were instructed to call twice each week, on Sunday and Wednesday, and leave a short message telling her the songs and the particularly important lines they had hummed for the last few days. She had to rewind the cassette on the Phonemate back to the beginning to fit all the messages that would come in. I helped her update the charts. (It was a lot of work, especially when they reported country and western songs, which I hated.) I wrote down the titles and lines exactly as they said, even if they got it wrong, for what’s important, Mary Beth said, is how they hear the words. But if they were off on the lines, we would make a little star on their chart since Mary Beth said they might be hearing them wrong for a reason. We also made an “S” if they’d sung the lines on the machine, and a “C” if they’d sounded like they were crying or struggling not to.

Mary Beth was proud of this organized system. It allowed her to just glance at an entry and know quite a bit. For example, one of the entries on Dorothea Lanigan’s chart was the last two lines of “Yesterday.” Dorothea had changed only a word and a tense, but Mary Beth had nodded when she looked at the chart later that night and said, “Well, that’s that.”

Even I thought this one was obvious. After all, the song was about lost love, wasn’t it? “It’s too bad Dorothea and Wayne are splitting,” I said. “She must be miserable.”

Mary Beth looked up at me from the floor where she was sitting surrounded by charts and burst out in a laugh. “Leeann, they are going to be engaged by the end of the month. You mark my words.” And of course, it turned out to be true. They had their wedding the next summer. Mary Beth was the maid of honor, since Dorothea said it was all thanks to her.

It was a gift, everybody said so. Sometimes I wished I had the gift, too, but I knew I didn’t; I’d tried and failed too many times with my friends to believe otherwise. I asked them about their music and I gave them my theories, but I was always way off, and Mary Beth finally told me I was dangerous. “You can’t mess around with something like this. What if somebody believes you?”

Excerpted with permission from The Song Reader, by Lisa Tucker, a Downtown Press book published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright 2003 by Lisa Tucker.

Caroline Tiger C’96 is a former managing editor of Philadelphia magazine and a current freelance writer in Philadelphia. Her non-fiction book, How to Behave: A Guide to Modern Manners for the Socially Challenged, is out from Quirk Books.

previous page