The Year We Gave Up the Music

by Francine Witte

After Popsy left, what really could we do? He had taken the only cassette player we had. He left behind piles of tapes, CCR and ELO and Janis Joplin and such. All of them thrown into an apple crate in the corner of the living room. Early autumn and my mother’s belly swelling with my unborn brother.

My first older sister said let’s burn the tapes. Let’s get Popsy the hell out of our lives. Let’s make him a smoke snake slithering up the chimney and out into the world. She never did like Popsy. Said he was always sneaking into her purse and stealing back her allowance.

My mother said that’s no way to treat your father’s memory. He is half of you, after all. My mother still set a place for him at the dinner table every night. Just in case, she always said.

My second older sister found an old broken cassette player in the basement in an even older apple crate. Let’s try this, she said and set it on the table in the place where Popsy would have sat. She pulled a tape out of the apple crate. Not one of hers, of course. She was Popsy’s favorite. We all knew that, and nothing of hers could risk getting ruined. Of course, she chose one of mine, Cheap Thrills, which to tell the truth I never liked that much because that little cassette case was not anywhere as cool as the album cover, but still it was mine, and when the tape got all mangled and stuck, I hated her more than a little.

My third older sister said, why don’t we buy a CD player? No one really uses cassettes anymore anyway. She was always wanting new things, being sick of all the hand-me-downs from my older older sisters. She was tired of getting their used outfits and the boyfriends they didn’t want anymore. Still, my mother didn’t like the idea of replacing anything. “Your father will be home any day now, and he will bring back the cassette player,” she said. And that was that.

Late winter, and still no Popsy. By now, no more music either. My mother’s dresses were getting bigger and bigger, almost as if they were swallowing her. You’ll see, she said, your father will be back when the baby finally gets here. He always wanted a boy.

My sisters and I started listening to the radio. Catching our favorite songs when we could. We had a few old albums, but they were all scratched and the needle on our old hi-fi was broken. My mother told us this was a good thing, that we would appreciate the music more if we didn't own it. “Music,” she said, “is a bird, like love.”

Late spring and I wanted love to be a bird, for Popsy to fly back home to us. Maybe he wasn’t happy with his girls and maybe that’s why he left, but we all still missed him. Missed the shaving lotion smell of him, the cotton-candy-rides-to-the-circus of him. Most of all, if he came back, he’d give us back our mother, who was silent and sulky and lost to us now.

By early summer, my little brother, and each night before supper, my mother was standing by the window and holding the baby in her arms. Sometimes, I could almost see her wishing how things could either go back to how they were, or how they would someday be, but to get the right now out of the way.

One day, a year after Popsy left, my mother up and bought a CD Player. She also put my little brother’s high chair in the space she had been leaving for Popsy. She asked me to bring the apple crate of cassettes down to the basement with the other things we would have to stop loving if we were to survive. A baby, she said, needs room to grow, and we need room to breathe.

We sat around the table, my mother wearing a dress that fit her, the silence around her gone, and she got up and slipped a scratchless CD into the brand-new player. It was Sinatra or the Beatles or Bon Jovi, something that shook up the air around us, and for the first time in forever we were not waiting for anything to happen.

Francine Witte is the author of ten books of poetry and flash fiction. Her flash fiction collection RADIO WATER was recently published by Roadside Press. Her poetry collection is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press in summer, 2024. She is flash fiction editor of FLASH BOULEVARD and South Florida Poetry Journal. Visit her website at www.francinewitte.com