Diary of a Blues Goddess by Erica Orloff Read Free Book Online

When we were done—determined by some indefinable moment when we both sensed we were finished—Red stopped playing and came over to me. I was sweating and spent. Where had that voice come from?
    "Sweetheart… you are gettin' it. You sing from that same spot each time, and you will be a blues goddess like her." He nodded toward a poster of Bessie Smith.
    I looked away. "I'm not sure where that came from. I can't find it every time, Red. That's what made her great and me… me." I still mentally pictured me rolling off a baby grand piano.
    He shook his head.
    "The blues and jazz are just a part of you. When you come to believe that, your life will change, Georgia."
    He offered me a glass of water. "So how's your nana?"
    "Fine, Red. You should come by and pay her a visit. It's Sunday. Why don't you come to dinner tonight? She's been asking after you."
    We played this game every Sunday. He was, of course, always invited to Sunday supper. I had introduced him to my grandmother shortly after I started singing with Red. Tony and I dragged Nan to a club to hear Red play with a trio. Nan loved the music, and I think she's grown pretty fond of the man, too. Red played along, looking pleased at the invite. "I'd like that very much, sugar. What time shall I call on your nan?"
    "You know we eat at eight o'clock. Don't play too hard to get with me." I winked and set my glass down. He walked me to the door, and I spontaneously kissed him goodbye on the cheek. I started down the little path to the sidewalk. He called out to me.
    "Georgia?"
    "Yes, Red?" I turned around.
    "I think today your mama and my grandma were sittin' up in heaven together clappin' their hands."
    "Thanks, Red," I whispered, and started toward the Heartbreak Hotel, the New Orleans humidity pressing in on me and making me feel claustrophobic.
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Chapter 6

     
    Walking home from Red's, I thought back to high school, when I was the helpless victim of a mother who believed fashion can be bought at places with bright fluorescent lights, wide aisles and endless rows of sales racks—much of it polyester-laden. While the princesses and prom queens of my high school wore designer jeans and carried purses with labels on the outside tipping off others to their two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar price tag, I was relegated to wearing no-name jeans and no-name sneakers, and slinging my shiny pink lip gloss in a worn-out denim purse. My mother refused to believe this mattered in the social feeding frenzy that is high school. "Georgia, who cares what you wear? It's what's inside that counts," she'd tell me, while she calmly folded socks or cooked her tuna casserole. Easy for her to say. Mom lived in a Carol Brady bubble. She didn't have to sit in lunchroom no-man's-land, with only Damon for company. My mother didn't have to face down Casanova Jones in social studies as he undressed me with his eyes and flirted shamelessly, while I felt hopelessly clumsy, embarrassed by a chest that had unexpectedly grown out of control, as far as I was concerned. Damon and I did our stupid "We must, we must, we must improve our busts" exercises. But I guess my body took that mantra too much to heart. As a woman's body replaced my baby one, as I developed into this curvaceous 1960s
Playboy
ideal when the rage was waiflike, I felt even more like an outsider.
    My mother, on the other hand, lived her life like a television show. She bought the perfect laundry detergent for the whitest whites and the brightest colors. She whipped up meals she meticulously cut from the back of Campbell's soup can labels and mounted on recipe cards. She knew one hundred and one ways to prepare Jell-O. She entered bake-offs. She ironed my
underwear
. She made every one of my childhood Halloween costumes, including a lobster complete with giant claws the year I was obsessed with crustaceans. In short, she was the picture-perfect mother, right down to her hair, which she had washed and set every Friday afternoon at the beauty