Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)--Emily Thomas

My shopping basket is too heavy to hold onto so I put it down by my feet. Through the big glass window, I watch a couple fight and make up. The girl wears a long black coat. The boy wears faded tan Wallabees and a tie. The boy gives the girl a long kiss on the mouth, steps off the curb, and looks both ways. Someone pokes me in the back. The line has moved. I push my basket forward with my foot. I don’t want gum. I don’t want to read the tabloids. The woman in front of me pays with food stamps.

I make it home and my pregnant mother digs into the shopping bag and grabs the carrots and the mustard. She eats this every day and in a month my sister is born. Her hair grows in curly and blonde. After her first haircut the curls go away. She tries swimming and hates it. She tries ballet. Still no curls. I drive her to second grade and we talk about our dad’s new puppy whose name is Bernie. She gets her first pair of pointe shoes and I teach her how to sew on the ribbons. She dances in the Nutcracker. When she puts up her hair, a couple of curls fall out on the sides. I drive her to sixth grade and we talk about our dad’s new apartment in a different state. We like it. It’s bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside.

For a few months all I wanted to listen to while my mother and I drove in the car was country music. If a song I didn’t like was on Continuous Country, my mother would sigh with relief, but I would switch over to The Nashville Way All Night and Day.

“Why?” my mother would ask. “Please, why?” And I would say, “Because it makes me feel good.”

On the first of February, we drove to her favorite restaurant. There had just been a blizzard, and the wind sent tree branches pirouetting into the road. Since it was her birthday, I let my mother pick the music. The station she picked was playing the song “Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)” by Bruce Springsteen. “What is this, mom?” I said. “Ugh.”
My mother cracked the window and threw out a piece of gum she had wrapped up earlier in a napkin.

“I wish I was listening to Tim McGraw,” I said.

“Let me tell you a story about this song,” my mother said. She brought a hand to her hair and poufed it into shape. The whole coif shifted to the side when she touched it.
“When I was a teenager, I would listen to the radio through my pillow when I was supposed to be asleep. And once I heard this song, and—“ she put her chin on the steering wheel. The car was filling with cold air.

“And what?”

“I just thought it was the best song I had ever heard.”

“Can you close the window?” I said. “That’s not even a story.”


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