Miss Me When I'm Gone

chapter 62



“I Believe”

Tammy Wynette Highway

Itawamba County, Mississippi

Tammy Wynette never had the money or the mainstream following to build a shrine to herself—a ranch or an amusement park. Dolly’s got Dollywood and Loretta’s got her lower-key ranch and museum outside of Nashville. (And it’s not just a female phenomenon—let’s not forget about Conway’s Twitty City, may it rest in peace.)

If there was a Tammyland, what would it be? I think Tammy would have liked something with a spa and a botanical garden. Something as classy as she always tried to be.

But I don’t think this world was meant to have a Tammyland. A Tammy that could have had the long-term career confidence or financial freedom to set up such a place might have been an entirely different woman.

So Tammyland has to exist only in our minds. It is what we wish for our Tammy. It’s a magical place full of song and sequins and self-love, where we can all eat banana pudding and take a bubble bath with Burt Reynolds.

It’s a place where the potential measures up to the life that is lived. Where the happiness so desperately sought is finally found. It’s not really a place that exists for most of us here on earth. Most of us will not ever have our Dollywood, our Graceland, our Loretta Lynn dude ranch of adoration.

Tammy’s life was such a contradiction between success and sadness, and left behind such bittersweet longing. Like most of our lives will. Like most of the lives of the people we’ve known and lost. There is always so much more that should have been explained, so many longings left unfulfilled.

Tammyland is where we can enjoy her voice without a tear or regret for the tragic parts of her life, or the way it ended too soon—only a feeling of warmth and a simple, loving statement: Yes, that’s who she was. Where Tammy might sing her favorite song, “Till I Can Make It on My Own,” forever, because she never will, not quite. And where that’s actually okay—because it has to be.



—Tammyland





Acknowledgments



Thank you to Laura Langlie and Carrie Feron—and everyone at William Morrow—for your enthusiastic support of this book.

Thanks to Nicole Moore and Cari Strand for early readings.

And, as always, warm thanks to my husband, Ross Grant, for driving with me all the way to Red Bay, Alabama, and back, for midnight cupcakes, for buying me that Tammy Wynette CD back in 2002, and for so much more.

Plus a kiss and a smile to sweet Eliza, who kindly waited till this book was finished to arrive.





P.S.

Insights, Interviews & More . . .





About the author



Meet Emily Arsenault



EMILY ARSENAULT is the author of The Broken Teaglass and In Search of the Rose Notes. She lives in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter.



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About the book



Q&A with Emily Arsenault



Are you a country music fan? How did you research the country artists Gretchen featured in Tammyland?



I am a fan of classic country. That’s not to say I dislike contemporary country music—I just haven’t been exposed to much of it. When I was in my early twenties, I found myself at a Willie Nelson concert rather by accident, and really enjoyed it. After that I started listening to Willie and his contemporaries.

I started my research simply by being a fan—by listening to the music of the classic country stars and watching lots of their old performances. I’ve also read many of their biographies: Coal Miner’s Daughter by Loretta Lynn and George Vecsey, Still Woman Enough by Loretta Lynn and Patsi Bale Cox, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business by Dolly Parton, Stand by Your Man by Tammy Wynette and Joan Dew, Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen by Jimmy McDonough, The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George by Georgette Jones and Patsi Bale Cox, Tammy Wynette: A Daughter Recalls Her Mother’s Tragic Life and Death by Jackie Daly and Tom Carter, Honky Tonk Angel: The Intimate Story of Patsy Cline by Ellis Nassour.

Another great resource on the topic of women in the history of country music is Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music 1800–2000 by Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann.

Once I’d actually started writing this book, I went on a road trip similar to the one Gretchen took in Tammyland—stopping at Nashville; Loretta Lynn’s ranch; Tammy Wynette’s hometown; Patsy Cline’s memorial in Camden, Tennessee; and many other related places.



What made you choose to have Gretchen single out Tammy Wynette as her favorite?



Like Gretchen, I have great admiration for all of the musicians she wrote about in Tammyland. But it made sense to me that Gretchen would be interested in Tammy’s contradictions and complexities.

While Dolly and Loretta are very easy to accept as sassy modern women, Tammy Wynette can be more of a challenge for someone who identifies herself as a feminist. I think, though, if you watch interviews with Tammy or read her story, there is something fascinating and irresistible about her. She is very sincere, and it’s hard not to like her. Her vulnerabilities—as extreme as they sometimes are—make her very relatable, very human.

Gretchen knew, deep down, that she wasn’t as confident in her choices as she liked to let on. And I don’t think someone with a history as complex as hers—and her family’s—would begrudge Tammy her emotional trials.



Why did you choose to make the narrator, Jamie, pregnant?



A few reasons. In general, I wanted Jamie and Gretchen to be in very different places in their lives and relationships. At the time of her death, Gretchen had just gotten a divorce. In contrast, I wanted Jamie to be facing new motherhood. In an earlier, much different draft, she had a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, but I found that didn’t quite work. It didn’t seem realistic to me that Jamie would drag a small daughter around with her as she went talking to Gretchen’s sources—possible murder suspects. Nor did it work for Jamie to keep leaving her daughter with a babysitter. With a pregnancy, I could make her behavior a bit more risky. Even though Jamie’s choices are not always sensible, she doesn’t consider herself a parent yet, so perhaps she feels she has license.

The decision to make Jamie pregnant may have also had something to do with the fact that I was newly pregnant around that time I was revising that aspect of the book. This allowed me to put in some silly things about pregnancy that I could relate to. Jamie does a number of things I’d wanted to do when pregnant but didn’t get around to—like going to a Chinese buffet by herself and eating a pile of sugar doughnuts.



Both your last book (In Search of the Rose Notes) and this one feature old female friendships revisited. Why do you think you’ve returned to that theme?



I didn’t revisit this theme deliberately. The friendships featured in the two books are very different. In Search of the Rose Notes explores childhood and adolescent friendships. The narrator of that story is uncomfortable revisiting an old friendship that reminds her of an old part of herself she’d rather forget.

I think that college-age friendships can be much more idealistic. The friends you choose in your early twenties are often a reflection of who you think you are, of who you want to be.

I attended an all women’s college, and the friendships I formed there were very intense. We had high standards for one another and felt a strange sort of sisterly protectiveness of our friends that I’m not sure we would’ve felt at a regular college. We were always in one another’s business. I felt we had to constantly justify our relationship, academic, and career choices. We always had to prove to ourselves and our friends that we were being strong women. It was a healthy approach to friendship, but sometimes it could get irritating. Sometimes I’d find myself wanting to slack off or take risks that I knew I couldn’t justify to my friends or to myself.

This sort of friendship is closer to the one that Jamie had with Gretchen. Now, years after college, in a transitional stage in her life, Jamie wonders if she is living up to everything she thought she’d be back when she and Gretchen were college friends together.



Is the book autobiographical in any sense? Are Jamie and Gretchen based on anyone you know?



Not really. I share a few qualities with both women, but nothing significant. Like Jamie, I haven’t been the most glowing pregnant woman. I tend to get grumpy if people ask me too many personal questions or make my pregnancy their business. (As I answer these questions, I am less than two weeks from my due date.)

My writing process is, like Gretchen’s, very sloppy at first. I tend to write longhand and buy lots of new notebooks as a strategy for getting a fresh start on a project. I would pity anyone who had to try to make sense of a book project of mine midway through, as Jamie is asked to do for Gretchen.

As with my second book, In Search of the Rose Notes, the nature of Jamie and Gretchen’s friendship is based on my personal experience, but the characters themselves are not really based on anyone I know.





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More from Emily Arsenault



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IN SEARCH OF THE ROSE NOTES



Eleven-year-olds Nora and Charlotte were best friends. When their teenage baby-sitter, Rose, disappeared under mysterious circumstances, the girls decided to “investigate.” But their search—aided by paranormal theories and techniques gleaned from old Time-Life books—went nowhere.

Years later, Nora, now in her late twenties, is drawn back to her old neighborhood—and to her estranged friend—when Rose’s remains are finally discovered. Upset over their earlier failure to solve the possible murder, Charlotte is adamant that they join forces and try again. But Nora was the last known person to see Rose alive, and she’s not ready to revisit her troubled adolescence and the events surrounding the disappearance—or face the disturbing secrets that are already beginning to reemerge.



An Excerpt from In Search of the Rose Notes



Prologue

Chicago.

A man is about to get on a routine flight.

Suddenly, he pauses. He doesn’t know why—but he’s got to walk away.

An hour later the plane goes down in flames.

It’s dismissed as chance. . . .

—Time-Life Books commercial, circa 1987

When I was a kid, I used to stop cold whenever one of those commercials came on. If I was drowsing to my mother’s game shows, I’d jolt awake, sit up straight, and listen. If I was playing with my Spirograph on the floor, I’d stop, stare, and let my colored pen go loose in my hand. If I was getting a snack in the kitchen, I’d run back to the living room to watch. Like the Pied Piper, the spooky synthesizer music drew me in, and the stories told by the priestly sounding narrator gripped me long after the commercial was over—usually past bedtime. I’d lie awake thinking of the woman with the prophetic dream of schoolchildren dying in an avalanche. The matching drawings of aliens produced by abductees who’d never met. The man who points a clover-shaped wire at Stonehenge, feels an inexplicable surge throughout his body, then faints. And I couldn’t dismiss any of it.

There are so many hints of a world more remarkable than we ever imagined, and of abilities that we barely suspect. Send for your first volume on a trial basis and see if you can explain these things away. . . .

It wasn’t until we were eleven that Charlotte and I learned that her older brother, Paul, had had several of the books in his bedroom for years. All this time we’d been passing his room, holding our noses against the smell of dirty shirts and rotting dregs of milk shakes—and this treasure had been buried there. It was like finding a sacred scroll in the Dumpster behind Denny’s. Turns out he’d bought a subscription with some paper-route money but eventually canceled it when he got tired of the books, which weren’t actually that great, he said. And now he was cleaning out his bedroom, making space for a stereo he planned to buy, and was going to chuck the books if Charlotte didn’t want them.

Charlotte kept her fifteen treasured volumes at the bottom of a cardboard box in her closet, covered with a stack of Highlights magazines. The books were beautiful. The textured black covers with the silver lettering made them feel very official and adult, like a high-school yearbook. And the smell of the thick, glossy pages reminded me of new textbooks at school—which confirmed the seriousness of their contents. Besides, it seemed that Paul had barely cracked them. The text was difficult, but Charlotte used her top reading-group skills to decipher a few pages nearly every night. She found the most important and interesting bits for me. Plus, there were lots of pictures. Almost every day after school, we pored over the books, boring Charlotte’s beautiful teenage baby-sitter—Rose, with the dirty-blond hair and even dirtier mouth—practically to death.

But then Rose disappeared in November of our sixth-grade year, making the books even more vital to us—no longer a mere source of entertainment but an investigative guide. By then we knew better than the neighbors who whispered “runaway” and the police who let her trail go cold. We knew better than to stop at what people aren’t willing to talk about. The commercials had explained that there is much that is unknown but promised that the books would tell us at least “what could be known.” And Charlotte and I took them at their word.



Visions and Prophecies: November 1990



After Rose disappeared, Charlotte’s parents never found a replacement baby-sitter. Either they were hoping that Rose would return any day or they’d finally figured out that Charlotte was old enough to take care of herself for a couple of hours each afternoon before Paul arrived home from soccer practice.

“I’m still worried about Rose,” Charlotte told me about a week after the disappearance had hit the news. We were sitting cross-legged on her bed, playing a halfhearted round of Rack-O.

“Everybody is,” I said.

“Her picture was in the paper again this morning.”

“I know,” I replied, a little annoyed. Sometimes Charlotte acted like I lived in a cave.

“I don’t think we should just be sitting here playing games. I think we should be helping them find her.”

I wasn’t surprised when Charlotte went to the corner of the closet where she kept her black books. Sighing, I reshuffled the Rack-O cards. I wasn’t in the mood for the black books just now. And I wasn’t sure I could handle the darkness of their contents without Rose’s sarcasm there to lighten it up.

But the picture Charlotte held out to me was a beautiful one, unlike anything she’d ever shown me in the books before. An African woman was sitting in deep orange sand, her shadow extended behind her. Before her were two long rows of flattened sand, each about three feet wide. Within each row was a symmetrical series of boxes, drawn with raised sand borders. Some of the boxes had sand symbols built in them—small spherical mounds, clusters of craters, finger-drawn horseshoes and crosses. Some boxes were left blank. Little sticks stuck out of a few spots on the grid. It looked like a hopscotch court, except more delicate, more beautiful, and far more important.

“It’s used to predict things. It’s used by a tribe in Africa called the Dogon,” Charlotte explained, pronouncing the tribe name like “doggone.” “They leave it like that at night and wait for a sand fox to come and walk over it. They read the footprints—which boxes he walks in.”

“What if a different animal comes?” I asked, not so much because I cared but because it seemed like something Rose would have said if she were around.

“I’m not sure,” Charlotte admitted. “But the sand fox is sort of magical.”

I nodded and looked back at the photo. I wished they’d also included a picture of a sand fox.

“I thought we should do one for Rose,” Charlotte said. “We should do one to help find out where Rose is.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That sounds good.”

“In the backyard, don’t you think? There’s the spot under the tree where the grass never grows.”

“Sure. Wherever.”

“Or in your yard, maybe?” Charlotte suggested. “There’s lots of patches that don’t have grass.”

“Mrs. Crowe would kill me, and then my mother would kill me again. Mrs. Crowe’s really weird about her yard. She has dreams about dogs in her yard and then wakes up in the morning and goes out to look for the imaginary poops she thinks they left.”

“You’re so weird, Nora.”

“I’m not. It’s her.” Charlotte didn’t understand the politics of living in a two-family house. She knew nothing of grumpy old landladies. “I’m not making that up.”

“We’ll do it in my yard, then.”

“It doesn’t say here what the different symbols mean.”

“We’ll have to think up our own,” Charlotte said. “Ones that say stuff about Rose.”

“And since we don’t have any sand foxes around, what do we do? Wait for a dog to come by?” I asked.

“Funny that our road’s called Fox Hill and there are no foxes around.”

“Probably there used to be foxes,” I said. “Probably they shot them all.”

“Who?” Charlotte asked, taking the book from me.

“I don’t know. The Pilgrims. The pioneers.”

“Oh. Yeah, probably. Well, I was thinking we could try to get Rose’s cat over here to walk on it. Wouldn’t that make more sense than Brownie, or just any old dog or cat? Rose’s cat probably senses things about Rose.”

“I don’t know if Rose was very close with her cat. She never talked about him.”

“Teenagers don’t talk about their pets,” Charlotte snapped at me, as if this were common knowledge. “It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him.”

Charlotte and I bundled up and went outside to the grassless patch we’d discussed. Charlotte had brought a sketch pad for practicing symbols. She sat scribbling beneath the big maple tree while I started digging in the dirt with a garden shovel that Charlotte had found in the garage. I scratched at the ground to loosen it and in some places shoveled scoops of dirt around to even out the area.

“You can make it bigger,” Charlotte said, erasing something on her pad. “There’s hardly any grass on that side, so it doesn’t really matter if you dig into it a little.”

“Okay.”

I cleared a rectangle of about three by five feet and then split it lengthwise with a one-inch ditch. Then I joined Charlotte, sitting on the long root of the maple.

“This is what I have so far,” she said. “I think we should use the top box for ‘Where,’ the bottom one for ‘When.’ Where she is and when she’s coming back.”

“Okay.”

“And here are some of the symbols we can use.” She let me take the sketch pad from her.

I pointed at the first symbol. A rectangle with a small tail on its lower left side.

“Still in Connecticut,” Charlotte explained.

I nodded, recognizing the shape of the state. We’d had to draw it about a hundred times in fourth grade. I moved my finger to a crudely drawn airplane.

“Far away,” Charlotte said. “In a different state.”

A Saturn-like symbol. “Aliens took her. Outer space.”

I looked up. “Aliens? That’s not funny. That’s stupid.”

“The way she talked about it, I just thought we should include it.”

“Fine.”

Four vertical lines: “She’s stuck somewhere, and she’s trying to get back. The lines are like prison.”

I stiffened, trying not to picture Rose in a prison, or worse.

A stick figure with a few lines of hair flying behind, arms out. Smudged on the bottom because Charlotte had erased and redrawn the legs a few times to perfect the angles of legs in a running motion.

“She ran away,” Charlotte said.

I nodded and moved down to the “When” symbols.

A moon and sun: “Tonight.”

A cross: “Before Sunday.”

A Christmas tree: “Before Christmas.”

A small grid of squares: “Not for a long time. That’s a calendar. Many days.”

“That’s it?” I said.

“That’s all I have so far. You can add some if you want.”

I handed the pad back to her. Something was missing. I wasn’t sure if it belonged in “Where” or “When.” It would be a pretty easy symbol to do. A skull and crossbones or the horseshoe hump of a gravestone.

I stared at Charlotte. I felt nauseous, but her face showed only curiosity.

“What is it?” she said.

“But what about . . . ?”

Charlotte cocked her head, waiting. Maybe we just weren’t going to say it. Like when I said something especially gloomy to my mother, about rain on parades or squirrels choking on acorns or whatever it might be, and she’d say, We’re not going to think about that, Nora. So this was something similar. We weren’t going to think about it, and we certainly weren’t going to talk about it.

“Nothing,” I said, kneeling in the first dirt rectangle. I was grateful to have something to do to take my mind off what we weren’t going to think about. I put my hands in the dirt, smoothing it with my fingers, and then set to work. Mashing the soil together with my index fingers, I raised the frames of the first row of boxes.