FICTION : What if Something is Happening Even if We Think It’s Not / Laura Canon
There is so much to say about Laura Canon’s “What if Something is Happening Even if We Think It’s Not?” About the way it creates not only a world, but a movement within this world, rife with living, breathing, growing humanity. About how every line fills your eyes with another peek. How it somehow expresses every afternoon of every season and the outsized role a song or a film or a book could play in defining those moments and how those moments stretched on and on into our lives.
There’s so much to say, but we’ll simply say this: it’s a wonderful piece.
What if Something is Happening Even if We Think It’s Not?
by Laura Canon
1977: small heartland girls create the modern world.
Who were horse girls once. Who loved secret gardens. Who had guinea pigs named Peanuts or Snickers.
Who were in Girl Scouts and youth group. Who learned how to build campfires with one match. Who played guitar and sang songs around them.
Who rode bikes. Who had their braces tightened with pliers every three months.
Whose capacity for joy was unequalled, now or then. Who were positioned at the center of the world.
Who gave it all up.
Who learned about Verlaine and Oscar Wilde. You had to learn. You had to make a list, of books poems movies actresses musicians singers directors painters virgins saints chanteuses glamour girls divas princesses muses martyrs crazy people dead people, most of them. You found them in libraries record store bins tv commercials obituaries Newsweek, in one-paragraph encyclopedia articles, in records your parents no longer listened to, in midnight shows, in arthouse movies, words and names lying dormant for decades until one day you heard them again, you connected everything back.
But maybe you had no list.
That was OK, too. No one was going to say to you: you can’t come in.
Each of them remembering the day it occurred to them to choose, to say, this, not that. An itchy red sweater glimpsed in a junior-high restroom mirror. This, not that, never again that. Let your skirts flutter and drag. Never wear shorts. Always wear shorts. Always bounce, high. Always know, and never listen to anyone who doesn’t know.
So the modern world came into being from their love, and their love alone.
It might be that Philidia ordered a book in 6th grade from the Scholastic Book Club called Eleven Spooky True Stories or Thirteen Unexplained True Mysteries, that she read in it about Billie Holiday recording the cursed song “Gloomy Sunday,” the suicide song that was banned seven different countries, that she went to Heck’s Department Store and bought a Best of Billie Holiday album (which did not actually have “Gloomy Sunday,” it would be some 20 years before she actually heard the song, in a Simpsons episode,) that knowing nothing of jazz, blues, Sundays or dead lovers she lay and listened to it over and over.
Or it may be that Esmeralda was leaning against the wall of the lunchroom singing, “Get Down On It,” a happy song but not a respectable one, that she left it, she ran after them, that she never sang “Get Down On It,” again, never danced again shaking funky hips, lurched thereby into rage, into bathrooms in distant clubs, needles and vomit, pissed on the side of the road like a guy, always, always pouring on through the night, a bus or a van behind a college amphitheater in Bloomington or Athens, onward all the way to the surf, to the Pacific Ocean in the morning, cigarettes tossed into the sand.
It may be that Brünnhilde remembered rising up to the surface of her friend’s above-ground pool with the radio playing “Don’t You Want Me.” It may be that she never thought about her friend in later life without guilt, her friend having told her one day about a man who was taking pictures of her naked, suggesting that he might let her go if someone else posed for him instead, guilt over refusing to help her friend, running away, never speaking of it to anyone and not really believing what her friend had said until much later in life.
It may be that there was a summer they got cable and Lucretia’s mother decided to pay in addition for Cinemax and Lucretia only watched two movies on Cinemax but she watched them over and over. The movies were Oh, What A Lovely War! and Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.
It may be that Ismene saw Marc Almond on MTV and went to bed wondering if he was a man or a woman and wondering why a man would want to be a woman.
It may be that some things were too close to the self for words, that they were buried deep down but continued to exist, a parallel life unimagined, unknown, never told to a single other person, but never put aside, charging the day with energy, giving impetus to life. It may be that they forgot some things on purpose to protect this life. It may be that this was the last part of their heart, the part they could not cut out without suffering a psychic death.
It may be that Perdita married a man of the sort she never would have married, that she listened to his music and he listened to hers, that lonely on a gray day leaving the office she put on a CD with both kinds and sang along with the music all the way home.
It may be that driving through the suburbs of great cities where she lived Eugenie’s children knew all her favorite songs by the time they were two and sang “Roxanne” from the back seat on the way to school, the gym and their father’s house.
It may be that back in rehab again Celestine came to see her past as an aching thing that had never turned out to be what it might have been, something she misread and misunderstood even as it happened, even as she listened to the same mixtape over and over.
It may be that Seraphina heard the important, beautiful, passionate songs of her youth in the freezer aisles of supermarkets, at gas stations and in casinos, during the filler scenes of mediocre movies, on tv in commercials for cars and cruise ships. That when this happened, she sometimes looked around to see if other people realized it, if they knew that the world around them existed as it did because of what she had done.
Yet all of them made peace eventually with house music, with Donna Summer, with Sondheim, sang “I Hope You Dance” at weddings, listened to Pink Floyd and Jackson Browne again, occasionally watched the Grammys, all of them danced to the synchronicity of new songs and old, because it did not matter, they did not need other people (as they once had) to tell them what was meaningful, and because the songs embodied them, the life in the song was always alive, in the only way anything does live, in the mind and body as they danced.
It may be that one day in middle age Lysistrata saw a college student listening to The Smiths and said to her, that’s great, but you should really get your own music, and walked away, free and clear.
