Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 5



Gretchen grew up in Connecticut, and her parents still lived there. On my way down 91 for the memorial service, I bought a new copy of Tammyland at the mall. The one Gretchen had signed for me now seemed too precious to take out of the house, but I knew I might want to read it at the hotel. I probably could have made it back home that night, but Gretchen’s mother had asked me if I could come for breakfast the morning after the service. She had something she wanted to discuss with me, she said—something about reading Gretchen’s new manuscript, possibly editing it.

When I checked out with Tammyland, the shaggy-haired cashier said, “Didn’t this lady die recently? Isn’t this the one who fell on some library steps, or something?”

This lady. It had been ten days since Gretchen died, and I certainly wasn’t ready for small talk about it.

“I think so,” I murmured as I handed him my credit card.

“Kind of ironic,” the young man continued with a grim scoff. “Author dying in front of a library.”

I shrugged and signed the receipt, then tore out of the store. I hadn’t expected this—although Gretchen’s death had made some New England papers and was picked up by the AP as a minor story. Gretchen was by no means a famous author, but the combination of the popularity of Tammyland and the unusual nature of her death somehow translated into media kindling.

I checked into the Best Western outside of Gretchen’s hometown with a couple of hours to spare before the service. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, I took the book out of its plastic bag and examined the glossy cover. It pictured the back of a young woman—smartly dressed in a khaki miniskirt, knee-high boots with thick heels, a snug black sweater, and an olive-green messenger bag slung over her shoulder. She is on tippy toes, with her hands cupped as she peers into the window of what looks like a run-down nightclub. Against the black of the window is a pink neon sign that reads TAMMYLAND. Skillful Photoshopping, but they’d gone a bit overboard in making the girl look tweedy, I’d always thought—but I guess that was the point: Northeast intellectual type finds herself in old-time country music. Still, it had always been odd for me to see Gretchen’s words packaged this way. And she’d never dressed anything like that.

I looked around the hotel room. The heavy maroon curtain over the window kept all of the daylight out, the lighting was low and yellow, and the room was chilly. I went to the wall unit and turned up the heat, then switched on CNN. I usually love hotels, but I’d never had occasion to stay in one alone, or for such a tragic reason as a friend’s funeral. I wondered if this would be the last time I’d be in a hotel for a very long time. Once the little guy arrived, I wouldn’t be going anywhere by myself.

Sitting on the bed again, I remembered that Gretchen had written a scene or two about staying in motels by herself. I picked up the book, found the first one, and muted the TV.

The passage was about Tammy Wynette. Of all the women Gretchen wrote about, she seemed most enamored of Tammy. Even after reading the book, I hadn’t quite understood the attraction. But I was still willing to try.





“Crying Steel Guitar”

Motel 6

Crossville, Tennessee

I’d hoped to get to Nashville by dark, but I’m too tired to drive the last couple of hours. One forgets, being married, what long road trips are like without someone along to share the driving. There was a construction project near Knoxville that tied me up for longer than I expected. I’m too exhausted to plow through the last hundred miles.

I’ve checked into a Motel 6 in a town called Crossville. The room doesn’t have any obvious flaws—mouse poop or sour smell or a frayed noose hanging from the shower-curtain rod—so I toss my bags inside and drive a couple of blocks back toward the highway, where I’d seen a Popeye’s on the way in. I’m too tired to eat a salad or something healthy. Too cold, too much crunching of lettuce, too much self-respect, which takes energy. Fried chicken is one of my many food vices. It was one of Jeremy’s very few. So we used to eat it together, trading white pieces for dark, fingers slippery, groaning with a mutually grossed-out pleasure at the end. And when we’d share a meal, he’d always let me have the buttery biscuit.

I sit cross-legged on the bed’s brown quilt and polish off a breast, a thigh, a wing, a biscuit, a tub of coleslaw, and mashed potatoes. It’s more than I’ve ever eaten with Jeremy. I think of Tammy as I gnaw the last bits of breaded goodness off the poor chicken’s ribs. Contrary to her fancy diva style and her ladylike public persona, her favorite food was anything deep-fried county-fair style. She supposedly would order her tour bus miles out of the way to get to a Cracker Barrel. “If there was a corn dog within fifty miles,” one of her backup singers said of her, “the woman had to have it.”

The chicken fat comforts me, and the pile of bones left in the greasy Popeye’s box by my side makes me feel raw and rank, like a cave woman. I drink the last of my Coke and belch so loudly I’m certain the guy next door can hear it over the endless baseball game droning out of his TV.

I reach for my iPod and play one Tammy tune after another, repeating my favorites as the night rolls on and the television next door falls silent. “Crying Steel Guitar” and “Apartment #9” are perfect for this evening. “Apartment #9,” in particular, is exactly what a newly divorced woman should listen to on a Tennessee highway, in a seedy hotel room. Tammy sings of a lonely room, a dark apartment, of the raw pain of being left, and of allowing yourself to hope that he’ll come back. Loved-and-left songs are a dime a dozen in any genre, but no one embodies them better than Tammy Wynette.

Tammy was a woman who knew the dim light of a room like this. By the time she recorded “Apartment #9,” she already knew it well. She was twenty-three, but she had been married and divorced by then, had three kids in a run-down shack in Alabama, had been to beauty school, and had suffered serious health problems as well as depression and electroshock treatments. She was living intermittently in a cheap motel in Nashville (with the man who would be her next husband), trying to get someone to give her a recording contract. This was the first song she ever recorded, and it was her big break after being turned down by just about every other producer in Nashville. So part of the experience of this song for me is not just the sadness in her voice, but the promise of her career. With each sob in her delivery, part of me cheers through the pathos, “Go, Wynette, go!” Because I know that when she was finished, the producer was blown away. After that song was recorded, she had a career.

So I’m torn between the sadness the song wants me to feel and the thrill of knowing what that song did for her. I know this isn’t how I’m supposed to feel listening to Tammy Wynette. I know I’m generally supposed to weep and feel pathetic. Many of her later songs do that to me. But this one makes this room seem more cheerful than this icky orange light, this worn carpet, and this crusty brown quilt.

This song is an anthem of someone who felt as desperate and lonely as I’ve felt in recent weeks, and turned it into something she’d always wanted. There was certainly pain before and even more after it, but here is the beginning of what she was meant to do—to sing for the brokenhearted, to put a little humanity and sympathy into thousands of lonely rooms, a little bit of comfort into thousands of dim-lit worlds.

I turn out the light. I get into bed. I press repeat.