You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down Read Free Page B

compared to yours, but I had one. It would have been worth my life to try to sing ’em somebody else’s stuff that I didn’t know nothing about.
    He must have pressed a buzzer under the table. One of his flunkies zombies up.
    Git Johnny Carson, he says.
    On the phone? asks the zombie.
    On the phone, says Traynor, what you think I mean, git him offa the front porch? Move your ass.
    So two weeks later we’s on the Johnny Carson show.
    Traynor is all corseted down nice and looks a little bit fat but mostly good. And all the women that grew up on him and my song squeal and squeal. Traynor says: The lady who wrote my first hit record is here with us tonight, and she’s agreed to sing it for all of us, just like she sung it forty-five years ago. Ladies and Gentlemen, the great Gracie Mae Still!
    Well, I had tried to lose a couple of pounds my own self, but failing that I had me a very big dress made. So I sort of rolls over next to Traynor, who is dwarfted by me, so that when he puts his arm around back of me to try to hug me it looks funny to the audience and they laugh.
    I can see this pisses him off. But I smile out there at ’em. Imagine squealing for twenty years and not knowing why you’re squealing? No more sense of endings and beginnings than hogs.
    It don’t matter, Son, I say. Don’t fret none over me.
    I commence to sing. And I sound ——— wonderful. Being able to sing good ain’t all about having a good singing voice a’tall. A good singing voice helps. But when you come up in the Hard Shell Baptist church like I did you understand early that the fellow that sings is the singer. Them that waits for programs and arrangements and letters from home is just good voices occupying body space.
    So there I am singing my own song, my own way. And I give it all I got and enjoy every minute of it. When I finish Traynor is standing up clapping and clapping and beaming at first me and then the audience like I’m his mama for true. The audience claps politely for about two seconds.
    Traynor looks disgusted.
    He comes over and tries to hug me again. The audience laughs.
    Johnny Carson looks at us like we both weird.
    Traynor is mad as hell. He’s supposed to sing something called a love ballad. But instead he takes the mike, turns to me and says: Now see if my imitation still holds up. He goes into the same song, our song, I think, looking out at his flaky audience. And he sings it just the way he always did. My voice, my tone, my inflection, everything. But he forgets a couple of lines. Even before he’s finished the matronly squeals begin.
    He sits down next to me looking whipped.
    It don’t matter, Son, I say, patting his hand. You don’t even know those people. Try to make the people you know happy.
    Is that in the song? he asks.
    Maybe. I say.
    1977
    For a few years I hear from him, then nothing. But trying to lose weight takes all the attention I got to spare. I finally faced up to the fact that my fat is the hurt I don’t admit, not even to myself, and that I been trying to bury it from the day I was born. But also when you git real old, to tell the truth, it ain’t as pleasant. It gits lumpy and slack. Yuck. So one day I said to Horace, I’ma git this shit offa me.
    And he fell in with the program like he always try to do and Lord such a procession of salads and cottage cheese and fruit juice!
    One night I dreamed Traynor had split up with his fifteenth wife. He said: You meet ’em for no reason. You date ’em for no reason. You marry ’em for no reason. I do it all but I swear it’s just like somebody else doing it. I feel like I can’t remember Life.
    The boy’s in trouble, I said to Horace.
    You’ve always said that, he said.
    I have?
    Yeah. You always said he looked asleep. You can’t sleep through life if you wants to live it.
    You not such a fool after all, I said, pushing myself up with my cane and hobbling over to where he was. Let me sit down on your lap, I said, while this salad I ate