Veronica Read Online Free PDF

about absence and death for boys who were about to die and kill. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeingyou. In the moonlight of this song, the known things, the tender things, “the carousel, the wishing well,” appear oudined against the gentle twilight of familiarity and comfort. In the song, that twilight is a gauze veil of music, and Stafford’s voice subdy deepens, and gives off a slight shudder as she touches against it. The song does not go any further than this touch because beyond the veil is killing and dying, and the song honors killing and dying. It also honors the little carousel. It knows the wishing well is a passageway to memory and feeling—maybe too much memory and feeling, ghosts and delusion. Jo Stafford’s eyes on the album cover say that she knew that. She knew the dark was huge and she had humility before it.
    The new songs had no humility. They pushed past the veil and opened a window into the darkness and climbed through it with a knife in their teeth. The songs could be about rape and murder, killing your dad and fucking your mom, and then sailing off on a crystal ship to a thousand girls and thrills, or going for a moonlight drive. They were beautiful songs, full of places and textures—flesh, velvet, concrete, city towers, desert sand, snakes, violence, wet glands, childhood, the pure wings of night insects. Anything you could think of was there, and you could move through it as if it were an endless series of rooms and passages full of visions and adventures. And even if it was about killing and dying—that was just another place to go.
    When I still lived at home, I had to share a room with my sisters, Daphne and Sara. Two of us would share a huge bed with a
    giant headboard, and the third had one-half a bunk bed to herself on the other side of the room. We rotated to be fair. The good thing about the single bed was that it felt more mature, and that the wall above it had special cardboard cutouts our mom had made of huge-eyed dancing teens in short skirts and boots. Plus, you could masturbate privately, without having to carefully lift the blankets off your working arm and stiffen up to keep the mattress from shaking—and still wonder if your sister knew what you were doing. But if you shared the big bed, there was the fun of shutting out the third, giggling and whispering secrets under the blankets while the loner hissed, “Shut up!” Sometimes it felt better not to have to touch legs and butts together. Other times it was good to have your back right against your sister’s back, especially if she was asleep and you could feel her presence without her feeling yours.
    We also had to take turns sharing the record player. Daphne and Sara didn’t like the music I liked—they still liked I the old kind recorded on 45s. They’d pretend to be go-go dancers, dancing on the tiny green chairs we’d sat in as little kids to eat peanut butter from teacups. Sometimes when they danced, I’d roll my eyes and hunch up over a book or storm out. But sometimes I’d jump up on a green chair and yell, “I’m Roxanne!” after the most beautiful dancer on Hullabaho. Daphne would yell, “I’m Linda!” and Sara would yell, “I’m Sherry!” even though whenever Sherry came on the TV, my father said, “There’s that big fat girl again.” Then we’d go wild dancing for as long as the record lasted.
    My music was more private, and I didn’t play it loudly. I crouched down by it, sucking it into my ears, tunneling into it at the same time. Daphne sprawled on her bed, reading, and Sara maybe played one of her strange games with miniature animals, talking to herself sofdy in different animal voices. Downstairs, my father watched TV or listened to his music while my mother did housework or drew paper clothes for the cardboard paper dolls she still made for us, even though we no longer played with them. I loved them like you love your hand or your liver, without thinking about it or