Ronnie is a tape-head. She considers her condition a benign affliction. She purchases blank cassettes, through the mail and in bulk quantities. Then she scans the band wave and records hundreds of diverse noises, music, talk shows, news reports, station jingles, EBS tests. Before she moves out of a city, she spends a week sorting through her latest collection. She keeps what she judges to be the top ten percent, though she doesn’t have a system for qualitative judgment. It’s more of an instinctual, instantaneous choice. Then she simply throws the rest of the tapes in trash bags and leaves them in a closet of the vacated apartment. Disposable sound-crap, she calls it. She puts the keepers in the steamer trunk and brings them with her to the next job. She thinks of the cassettes as her version of a photo album, a coded record of all her journeys, an audio cipher of all the highway crisscrossing she’s done for a decade now.
Ronnie never tapes her own show and it amuses her a little that she’s already forgotten a couple of her titles. There was Sensual Sessions in Cleveland and The Carnal Response in Santa Fe, but for some reason Toronto is a blur. She can remember how boxy the broadcast booth was and she still has an occasional fantasy about Yves, her engineer that season. But the name of the show itself has escaped her.
Ronnie has already stayed in Quinsigamond longer than any of her other stops. That fact both bothers and consoles her. Back in June, she’d thought that by Christmas she’d give Vinnie her notice and start sorting her tapes. On Labor Day — a muggy, bad-air holiday that found the city looking as if it had evacuated for the nuclear strike of her childhood daydreams — Ronnie shocked herself by deciding, out on the balcony, about 4 A.M., to work on until spring.
She knows she should have been getting the itch by now, the signals that begin warning of an oncoming move. But it hasn’t happened. She’s migratorily “late,” and this should be causing worry and frustration. This time around, something’s different. It could be her age or a change in body chemistry, but this time she’s got an odd, instinctual hunch that what’s delaying her departure is the city itself. It’s almost as if she clicked with this dying mill town in a way that’s never happened before. And of course it’s pathetically ironic that the one place where she’s starting to feel she could actually remain is on its way out, decaying into a harsh powder of warring people and evaporating industries. If she can see these signs, then why isn’t she making the normal moves, setting the process in motion again? Why isn’t she checking the trades and sorting her cassettes? Why isn’t she phoning the modeling agencies?
In the past, before she’d leave each city, Ronnie would drop some money on an expensive quirk. She’d begin by visiting a local modeling agency, paging through their layout books until she spotted a woman of approximately her own age who gave off a subtle leer. It was always something in the face, something about the positioning of the eyes and the lips. And it would have to be mildly hidden, visible only peripherally beneath a layer of disinterest, a lingerie catalogue model as opposed to a Playboy centerfold.
When she’d find the right look, Ronnie would pay for some photographs, black-and-white portraits, soft-focus head shots, the hair and lipstick perfect, the skin smooth and often translucent. Finally, before packing up the Jeep and moving on, she’d have the photographer print up a hundred eight-bytens. Then, once she was established in her new city, plugging into the repressed community psyche and starting to make some waves, invariably the letters would start to roll in, a new batch of fans requesting a photo of Ronnie Wilcox. She’d dig out her stack of head shots, sign her name across the bottom with a red felt marker, and send back a glossy of some anonymous model from a thousand miles away. And as long as Ronnie stayed in that particular city, this coolly seductive visage, this countenance radiating airbrushed carnality, would always be her image.
Ronnie pulls a plastic spoon from the pocket of her robe and starts in on the ice cream. She knows she’ll be freezing in about three minutes, but it’s a price she’s willing to pay. While she eats she starts to wonder about what Flynn would think of her fake publicity stills and this leads her to wonder: if she put a photo of herself next to a photo of the faux Ronnie, which one would Flynn choose? The subliminal nymph or the real road-woman? To be scientific, she should insert a control in the experiment, maybe some perfect suburban homemaker drawn from cooking or station wagon ads. Maybe that’s what would really hammer his button. He’s what, thirty-five, thirty-six, ripe for that settling-down mode, primed to marry the hardworking dream woman, ten years his junior, bored with her career now and ready to start pumping out a couple offspring for the breadwinner.
Suddenly, she can picture Flynn in some too-green field, pitching a whiffle ball, underhand, to a six-year-old version of himself.
She puts the pint of Haagen-Dazs down and uncaps the mescal. Get a grip, girl, she thinks, you just met this bastard.
* * *
Ronnie never knew her father. Classic abandonment story. All her mother would say was he was “in sales” and was “too handsome to be trusted.” He left one weekend, supposedly to put a deposit on a vacation rental. Instead, he cashed out the checking account, gassed up the Chevy Impala, and never came home. Ronnie was born five weeks later.
Her mother went to work as a skittish waitress willing to date the first generous tip she saw and Ronnie grew up watching the woman slide from being badly disappointed in a series of stupid and abusive men to being genuinely unbalanced. In between there were a lot of moves and two quick, horror-story marriages.
At one point between these marriages, for a short time when Ronnie was about twelve, she and her mother ended up living in a trailer park outside of Gainesville, Florida. It was here that Mother got into the habit of leaving the radio on all night. At first it drove Ronnie crazy, all these Bible Belt preachers yelling about repenting before the fires of eternal damnation consumed your evil flesh. She wanted to hear the Top Forty, pop music for the young. They reached a compromise when they found a strange AM station that was broad-casting old-fashioned radio plays. They’d lie in the dark, in the mini bunk beds, Ronnie on top, and listen to intriguing voice productions like The Invisible Man or The Tell-Tale Heart. Over the course of several weeks there were romances and detective dramas, love stories, and O. Henry adaptations.
Then one night, the narrator’s voice announced the station’s final production. He said there’d been a format change. From the top bunk in the trailer, Ronnie thought she heard her mother start to weep. She asked if everything was all right, but her mother didn’t answer. So she closed her eyes and began to listen to The Diary of Anne Frank.
In the twenty years that have passed since that night, Ronnie knows she has never been so moved and torn up and generally affected by any book or movie or song or painting or relationship. Over the course of two hours, in a pitch-black trailer, in stifling Florida, it was as if this young victim, this girl called Anne, with her intelligent voice and perfect words, had stood next to the bunk and whispered her story into Ronnie’s ear. Ronnie could see every aspect of it, the family, the movement into the attic, the others — Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan and young Peter, Miep bringing supplies to the hiding place. Ronnie balled the ends of the worn sheet that covered her legs and felt everything alongside Anne. Terror, frustration, anger, infatuation. But mostly terror, agonizing fear when a noise sounded below the attic floor, crippling worry when the food rations shrank with each merciful delivery from Miep. That night in Florida, Ronnie’s trailer became Anne Frank’s attic.