“Maybe after I have this baby and you get going in the new space, we can work on the holiday recital.”
“For sure. And that sounds great.”
I thought about telling her about the hole dance. But it would sound so stupid. What would I even say?I made up a dance that was maybe about the patriarchy and there was a lot of leaping out of holes?The piece was fading from memory. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember the steps, more that the urgency I’d felt about doing that choreography had faded.
Rory and I had talked lately about her nervousness aboutlabor and delivery, about how women always say you forget the pain of childbirth. “How can you forget the pain of pushing a human out of your vagina?” Rory had exclaimed incredulously.
I thought I understood. The experience of life after childbirth—of keeping a baby alive, of dealing with the rest of your life, whether that meant other kids or jobs or relationships—made the “bigness” of the birth experience shrink.
Time stripped emotion from an experience, and without emotion, you just had plot. Things that happened:I gave birth. I made a dance.
I made a dance once. Not that long ago, even. But from this vantage point, I couldn’t remember why.
17
OVERDUE RECKONING
Teddy
The second session of camp went fast. I missed the hell out of Gretchen, and I wrote a fucking album.
I wondered if the two things were related. I kind of thought they were, if only logistically. I had been spending so much time with Gretchen the last session, and toward the end of that session I’d broken my writing logjam. This session, with the writing flowing and Gretchen gone, what the hell else was I going to do?
I did try to do a more respectable job this time around with the teaching and mentoring and shit. And getting up at the ass crack of dawn for sunrise circle. Still, that wasn’t enough to fill the days.
Or nights.
So I wrote. Way more songs than I’d need for an album.
The other weird thing? I became friends with Marion.
“I was thinking of playing lead guitar myself,” I said one morning over tea in her office after sunrise circle.
The Marion thing had started when I’d taken her up on her previous offer to help, asking her if she’d listen to a song. She’d liked it, and her feedback had struck the right balance ofenthusiastic and constructive. She’d been right: she was a good audience member. That had led to her asking me to tea, and now I was a semiregular at post–sunrise circle teatime.
“Actually,” I added over a sip of Earl Grey, which I’d surprised myself by liking, “I’m thinking of playing all the instruments myself on this record.” Not in a power tripping kind of way, not because I didn’t trust anyone else. More because I wanted to feel my way through the songs as I recorded them.
“It doesn’t seem all that remarkable to me that you’d want to control the process pretty tightly for a record that is going to be your first without your former band—and one that makes a break stylistically from your old work. What’s the downside?”
“I guess if I ever want to tour. But I just came off a year of touring, and honestly I have no desire to do it again anytime soon.”
“You can cross that bridge when you come to it.”
Marion wasn’t telling me anything revolutionary, but she was smart and accomplished, and having her stamp of approval meant something.
When I called Anna—we’d been staying in touch—to see what she thought about my plan to do everything myself on my new album, she was similarly unfazed. She said, “It’s yourSpeak Nowalbum.”
“It’s my what album?”
“Taylor Swift.Speak Now.”
“Right…” I was as much of a fan of Taylor Swift as anyone—the woman couldwrite—but I wasn’t getting it.
“Her third album. Every song was written solely by her. No collaborators, no cowriters. She’d taken some heat about being a hack. You remember the whole Kanye West thing where hecut off her speech? And when she did that duet with Stevie Nicks and everyone criticized her singing?”
“Kind of?”
“Speak Nowwas her eff-you to the public. But also it’s very introspective, reflective.”
