Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 38



“Till I Get It Right”

Perhaps more than any of her songs, this was Tammy’s real anthem. Certainly more than “Stand by Your Man,” which made her famous, but, as everyone knows, did not reflect her real approach to relationships.

In “Till I Get It Right,” Tammy declares that she’ll “keep on fallin’ in love” till she gets it right. This summary makes her sound plucky, but anyone who’s heard it knows it’s more of a sad song. Tammy describes herself as “a wounded bird,” and it’s essentially a breakup song. The narrator has been hurt again, but knows she’ll give love another try, again and again.

When I listen to it, tiny, embarrassing tears form at the very corners of my eyes. Not so much because I can relate—but because the song is so Tammy, and, really, so Shelly, too—although I’m fairly certain that Shelly would’ve found it cheesy and old-fashioned.

Like it or not, she and Tammy had a few things in common. In particular, the habit of jumping naively from man to man in hopes that one of them would magically make everything better. This habit can be pretty frustrating to those close to such women—surely it was for Tammy’s family, as it certainly was for my mom and Shelly’s friends. Even for me, remembering what I do and trying to understand.

But this song brings me closer to understanding. It doesn’t explain anything, of course. It simply makes me feel the sadness of it, and along with it, the hopefulness of it. The words hint at what it feels like to want romantic love with the same kind of compulsion that some of us have for our next promotion, our next mixed drink, our next piece of chocolate.

No one knows exactly why Tammy was that way about men. Some theorize that it had to do with the death of her father when she was a baby. She never had a father, and perhaps she was always looking for the perfect masculine prince and protector.

I think this explanation is too simplistic. For one thing, Tammy’s grandfather played an important and protective role in her life through high school. What’s more, there are plenty of women who grow up without fathers but don’t become man-crazy, and in any case, I prefer not to reduce most behaviors to a direct cause-and-effect relationship. If you can simplify Tammy’s behavior that way, you can simplify Shelly’s in almost the same way: She lost her father when she was twelve. I never knew her father, but I knew her, and I know nothing of hers could ever be that easy to explain.

I believe a lot of Tammy fans think they know who was the best man for Tammy: George Jones. He was her true love, they say, but he threw it all away with his alcoholism. Personally, I like to point to Burt Reynolds as the true love. Sure, it didn’t last long and wasn’t likely to, but accounts of their time together make me think it was the most fun and uncomplicated relationship she ever had—something she certainly could’ve used more of. Her daughters and others close to her, however, claim that neither of these men—nor any of the men she was ever with—was her true love. She never really got it right.

And of course, I wonder about Shelly, and if any of those guys she was with was ever the right one. And if she found something she was looking for in any one of those relationships. Or if what she wanted was fixed but unattainable, or simply kept changing.

The guys I’ve picked out as her possible real loves are Bruce and Roland. Bruce because he was an atypical choice for her. From what I’ve heard, he was a kinder, gentler, more thoughtful kind of guy than she usually went for. Why she dated him I don’t know—but there must have been something different there that kept her with him for all of those months. They say that the two of them remained friends long after high school—after he went to college and she stuck around here. And I remember meeting him once, when I was six or seven. We ran into him at Kmart in Plantsville, where she’d always take me to buy cheap candy before a movie. He was in the candy aisle, too, with a package of black Twizzlers in his hand: this gangly, suntanned man with poufy dark hair. He was doing the same thing we were—buying candy ahead to avoid the theater’s prices—although he was going to a different movie than us. I remember Shelly laughing at the coincidence, and telling me, “Honey, this is my friend Bruce. We’re old friends.”

The other is Roland. One of those cool guys who went exclusively by his last name. He was with my mother when I was around four or five, and apparently I even met him a couple of times on visits, though I don’t remember it. The thing about Roland is that he helped Shelly get off drugs. Brought her to meetings and even helped her pay for a short clinic stay, at one point. My mom has told me this about Roland more than once. And I remember her telling it with a wistfulness in her voice, as if she wished Shelly had stayed with him. Whether or not this was a great match, Roland must have cared a great deal about Shelly. And Shelly must have, on some level, trusted him.

Did she ever get it right? I like to think she did. Maybe not with her last romance, if you can call it that—but maybe with a couple of the others along the way.





“Jolene”

Route 2, southern New Hampshire

Winter 1985

It was actually Shelly who introduced me to country music. She did so unwittingly, while she was driving me back to Connecticut from Emerson one Sunday night in the winter. In those days I visited her about two weekends a month—whole-weekend visits that had started less than a year before.

I remember it as the last drive we had together, but I know that can’t be true. She was killed in March, and I know we must’ve seen each other in between.

Shelly wasn’t even a country fan, but she was flipping around on the radio that night, and stopped at the song. She may have been distracted by the road, just wanting to settle on one station for a moment—but I remember her singing along softly with it.

I remember the click-click click-click of Shelly turning her high beams off and on again when other cars came along. With the road winding in front of us as we glided through the dark, the song felt almost scary to me—with that low guitar and the lady I didn’t yet know was Dolly sounding so sad as she repeated that name: “Jolene.”

“I like that name, ‘Jolene,’ ” I said, after it was over.

“Do you?” Shelly said. “It’s not a name you hear much around here.”

“I like the name ‘Stacey’ even better, though.”

All the girls in my first-grade class loved the name “Stacey,” I explained. We all wanted to change our name to “Stacey.”

“Well, you can’t all be Stacey,” Shelly said. “That would be weird if you were all Stacey.”

Still, I wanted to know how a person changes her name. A girl in my class had said her mother was going to let her change her name to Stacey, but I suspected she was lying. And I wondered, if it were really true, how they were going to do that. Would they change her birth certificate?

Shelly said yes, that girl was probably lying. Little girls aren’t allowed to change their names. If I still loved “Stacey” when I was much, much older, I could change my name.

“But it doesn’t suit you, though,” she said. “You don’t seem like a Stacey.”

I remember being a little sad because it was surely better to seem like a Stacey than almost anything else. And did Shelly think I seemed like a Gretchen? I wondered. And what did it mean to seem like a Gretchen? Was it a little like being Gretel in the fairy tale? (Did she even pick that name for me? I wondered years later. Or did someone else? It was everything my aunt Nantie—later, Mom—wanted me to be: buttoned up and classy, but gentle, like her.)

Shelly was none of those things. From everything people have told me about her since, she could’ve been a Jolene. She could have any man she wanted, and she did. Since high school. She was woman enough to take just about any man. Which is how I came into the world, with ambiguous paternity.

She could’ve been a Jolene, but she was Shelly. I always called her Shelly. Not Mommy. Not Mom.

My aunt raised me from the beginning, but no one ever kept it from me that Shelly was my mother. My dear aunt didn’t want to upset Shelly, I suspect, by forcing the issue. She had me call her Nantie. When I was nine I switched to Mom because I was getting older now and Nantie was weird and that’s what everyone else had: a mom.

I suspect that during the period when I was five to seven, when I was visiting Shelly more, it was a sort of “trial run” for her. She’d been getting her life together. She was thinking of asking for me back, and my aunt knew it. Everyone probably knew it but me.

But then she died. She died before I could know it for sure.

That “last drive”—I remember it so well. I remember Shelly telling me about the pet-food factory where she used to work. She never told me about the actual job. Instead, she’d make up stories about the dogs and cats who’d write letters of appreciation, letters of complaint. The snooty white longhair cat who was always complaining that the kibble wasn’t quite crunchy enough. The cheap little wiener dog who typed his letters on an old-fashioned typewriter, always trying to get free samples.

I remember the bittersweet promise of school the next day. I loved first grade. I loved bringing home to Nantie dittos with 100s and star stickers on top of them, putting them on the refrigerator. I never showed these things to Shelly when I saw her—it didn’t seem the sort of thing that would interest her.

And I remember Jolene. I remember that guitar haunting me like Halloween. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.

I’ve only heard the song again a handful of times. It’s not the kind of song that just pops up on the radio in New England—or maybe anywhere—these days. And I’ve only begun to listen to it deliberately lately—this song that first made a conflicted country fan of me all those years ago, before I knew that there were different types of music for different types of people. This song that will always remind me so painfully of the only woman who I would ever really think of as my mother.