Radio Belly
out of her.
    After the Grateful Dead came out of their one-year hiatus in ’75, when so many people were convinced the band’s days were numbered, Laureen’s mom and a bunch of college friends pooled their money and bought a decommissioned school bus. It was beet-red and rusted so badly they could see highway passing through holes in the floor, but it ran well. They took out the benches, covered the holes with plywood, put in hot plates, beds, hammocks, curtains, and every year, May to August, they hit the road. All through their childhoods, Laureen and a handful of other kids spent their summers chasing the Grateful Dead across America, concert to concert, camping at lakes and rivers in between.
    At concerts, the moms would go with the girls from the bus to the mud pit in front of the stage, where they’d spin in their sundresses for hours: wild-haired, sandals stomping, daisy chains flying. Laureen knew all the words to all the songs, and she swears that sometimes she knew, just knew, which song was coming up next. She was so good that, in those loose moments between songs when the band pulled close to Jerry, people in the pit pulled close to Laureen—kids, moms and strangers, too—asking what was next, and let’s just say Laureen was right more often than she was wrong.
    â€œI don’t know what the big deal was,” Laureen explained. “I spent half my childhood looking up Jerry’s nose. You’d think I’d know the guy.”
    But she didn’t have me fooled. The Dead were the greatest jam band in history. Nobody knew what they were going to play next; that was the whole point.
    ON THE MORNING of August 9, 1995, I woke up to the sound of whimpering. It was early, still dark. I found her leaning over the kitchen sink, where the knife was lying in a mess of blood and dishes. It was the middle finger on her right hand, cut to the bone. She had been loading the sink, she said, and hadn’t even known she was hurt until she saw the blood.
    In my hasty search for a towel, I remember glancing at the oven clock: 4:23 a.m. By the time I had her hand wrapped, it had already happened: “Jerry’s dead,” she said, and she was so shaken, so small, I didn’t even think to ask how she knew.
    She refused to go to the hospital, so I bandaged her up and put her to bed. I told her a story: of two minds joining over a bowl of peanuts, of a woman who paints all the women of the world a truer colour. “They’re all starlets now, baby,” I whispered, “Tahitian starlets,” but she was inconsolable.
    She kept muttering that she had done this, turned her back on him, and some other things too, about devouring the things she loves, about people’s eggshell edges and sucking the yolk out through the cracks.
    It didn’t reach the news until much later that morning: Jerry Garcia, dead of a heart attack at exactly 4:23 a.m. Out of respect, I cancelled the trivia segment. I used the extra time to do some research. I found out he played the piano before the guitar, that at his heaviest he weighed over three hundred pounds, that indeed it was the middle finger of his right hand he’d accidentally severed while chopping wood as a kid—but all the while I was wondering, what kind of a person wakes up to do dishes at four in the morning?
    LAUREEN STOPPED LEAVING the house, stopped running the business, stopped dressing. She kept me busy though. There were things she needed from the outside world: nail polish and hair dye, waxes and creams, smoothers and straighteners. She wanted loofahs and exfoliants, tweezers and extractors, shavers and strange glues. She wanted food, too: biryani and bulgogi, bibimbap and tabbouleh, donburi and dal, vindaloo, kulcha, edamame and udon. Every day she grew more demanding. She wanted something more exotic, harder to find. She wanted it hotter or colder or saltier or faster. And more, she always wanted more. When she
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