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By Root 391 0

a rotten year. My marriage of many years was transferred suddenly from intensive care to the autopsy table. I had long since come to terms with loneliness, but now I was also going to be single—something I hadn’t been since age twenty-two. The death of my family’s hopes weighed down my limbs and spirit like a narcotic. Frightening legal demands—which even questioned my ownership of my own writings, in a community property state—left me reeling. And if I wanted to feel sorry for myself on either account, I’d have to work it in between the tasks of being mother of a preschooler, full-time author with impending deadlines, carpool driver, domestic engineer, good citizen, sole breadwinner, and fixer of all broken things around the house. Every single appliance under my roof that involved water—the washing machine, hot-water heater, bathtub, sink, shower, washing machine again—chose to blow out and cause a flood on its own special day of that long winter. (“This” I announced to my friends, “is a broken home.”) Worried sick about cash flow, I tried to fix things myself—with only modest success. The bathtub spigot that I reattached still points skyward, to this day, as though waiting for Mary Poppins to come along and draw a whimsical bath on the ceiling. But Poppins never showed.

I had always watched single working moms with awe, wondering how on earth they did this with no one on standby to help or even cheer them on. Now I was learning. The key is something called “multitasking.” You figure out how to combine compatible chores: phone consultations with your editor and washing the breakfast dishes. Writing a novel in the pediatrician’s waiting room. Grocery shopping and teaching your child to read. Balancing the budget in the hardware store. Sleeping and worrying. Sobbing and driving.

The notion of a little bus jaunt down the East Coast pretending to be a rock star seemed not so compatible with the other tasks on my list. No way could I do it.

My fellow band members felt otherwise. Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry (bass and lead guitar, respectively), Kathi Goldmark, Tad Bartimus and Amy Tan (vocalists and clotheshorses par excellence) all called up to advise me I needed to have some fun. Steve King (rhythm guitar) sent so many mailgrams I became a cult figure at my post office. Roy Blount (band member whose exact contribution remains a mystery) offered to write my novel for me. Throughout that very dreary winter and spring I felt a steady tide of peer pressure and moral support from the Rock Bottom Remainders. In April, when I came home from a long hike on my birthday, my message blinker was having a seizure: every member of the band, I think, had called up to sing “Happy Birthday” into my answering machine. Al Kooper, our musical director and bona fide God of Rock, sang it to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: “Happy Birth-day to You, from A-al Koo-per…” When he ran low on lyrics, he worked in “and our flag was still there…” Believe me, I have this tape in a safe place.

Just as a mental exercise, I started working out which friends I would ask to cover the bases at home, if I should ever need to leave for two whole weeks.

In May, I showed up in Boston for the tour.

I’m never nervous at author appearances, I don’t care how big the crowd is. I always say, What’s the worst that could happen, you’re going to forget how to read? Fellow author Richard Nelson once replied in a fierce falsetto, just before we both walked out on stage: “No, you could wet your pants!”

I apologize for my hubris, for I’ve now known stage fright. The first day I rehearsed with the band in Anaheim I was a case of loose nerve endings in a roomful of people who seemed laced up tight with confidence. In Boston my insecurities were back again with interest. I wanted to play well. Or at least in the right key.

So did everyone else; and it turns out writers are rarely so confident as they seem. Never mind that we created a band persona out of self-ridicule, identifying ourselves publicly as “rhythmically challenged.” The truth is, in rehearsal we