American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [25]
Reagan was president. For years, people had believed in believing in things, and when they went as planned the entire nation took credit; when they didn’t, the country blamed someone else. But ever since the Vietnam War some people had started blaming themselves for things that did not go right, and because it was so unlike the national character to do so, an element of self-hatred had crept into the culture. On the streets you saw young people with hairstyles like a crown of fangs. The music blaring from enormous boxes sounded menacing and deranged. A lot of people wore black. It was also a very innocent time. Telephones were heavy and stayed at home. Sometimes they had buttons. Girls waited by the phone, literally. Boys did not dream of owning their own jet. Women who were not even old looked old. There was plenty of drug addiction, but not a lot of rehab. There was no Ecstasy. There were no antidepressants. There was no global village. There was no Internet. On the day that Anna gave birth to her daughter the sun was shining. Out the hospital window the East River flowed past like one long silver muscle, the way it had when Walt Whitman had mused over it in the preceding century, and like it would look to the passengers of a plane flying low over the city in the next century. Anna cried. She was too young and inexperienced to have truly maternal feelings yet, but the emotion she felt for her new baby was an uplifting, cosmic, unbounded passion. Her father, a surgeon, tried to explain to her that her feelings were largely hormonal, a result of chemicals released during pregnancy, labor, and delivery, and that eventually, rather quickly even, they would pass and she might think about the child wistfully from time to time but that she would not regret her decision. She argued, through her tears, that it had not exactly been her decision. Her father gave up and left the room. Her mother, a woman at this point in her life too vain and too horrified by the idea of becoming a grandmother to entertain the thought that her daughter might actually keep the baby, emphasized how much work it was to raise a child, and how much early adulthood of her own Anna had left ahead of her, too much to derail or squander on an infant. She herself had had an abortion before she had gotten married, she reminded Anna, and to this day she rarely thought about it. (This was not entirely accurate: her own parents had wasted no opportunity to make her feel terrible about the scandal, and every subsequent decision in her life had flowed from that experience of profound shame.) She had not made her own daughter feel ashamed about getting pregnant; on the contrary, she felt modern and compassionate for having accepted Anna’s determined stance against having an abortion, although it could be surmised that this was in no small part because it was so late in the pregnancy when Anna had revealed the state of things. Now the sun was setting somewhere on the other side of the city, and the light was fading over the river. This was the time in American history when photographers were discovering new lenses and filters and retouching techniques that gave the glossy images in magazines a burnished, affluent glow. This was the glow that was spreading across the sky right now, a sheen that gave the river a metallic, artificial magic and glimmered bewitchingly on the buildings and highways. Anna’s mother did not leave the room. She sat in the silence. She observed an orange triangle of light reflected from the window onto the blank television screen suspended from the ceiling. Had Anna turned on the television she might have heard about the death earlier that day of Count Basie, the celebrated bandleader whose music had captured the romance and optimism of another era. Or she might have caught a glimpse of a new form of entertainment called a music video, on a new channel known as MTV. But Anna did not turn on the television, and she did not respond to her mother. She was unmoved by her parents’ arguments, unruly in her devotion to her infant daughter, and unhinged