“Should we play a record while we finish cleaning?” I asked.
“Yes.” Izzy put her fist below her chin as if it were a microphone and began singing a song that was vaguely familiar. Maybe I’d heard it on the radio at the twins’ house?
“You pick.” I held up the Running Water records. Izzy pointed to the one with naked Jimmy.
“While I’m setting this up, you pick up all your art projects and divide them into two piles, one pile we can keep in the TV room and one pile can go in storage in the basement.” I wouldn’t dare suggest that some of Izzy’s art projects be thrown away, but that was what I was thinking. It seemed like one or two samples from each category would be fine. Did we really need five ceramic pinch pots, each one looking like the crumpled glazed shell of a spiny tide pool animal?
Izzy climbed onto a ladder-backed dining room chair and reached around for her paintings, drawings, tinfoil and macaroni art, and the pinch pots. I put the record player on the floor and went into the TV room, where I had seen two unplugged speakers, each the size of a cash register. I brought the speakers into the dining room and plugged them into both the wall and the record player. Between the speakers, I stacked the records, like books between bookends. I had seen other records around the house. Maybe tomorrow Izzy and I would do a scavenger hunt for the house’s record collection.
I threaded the record hole onto the silver prong, lowered it, and turned the knob to 331/3. I lifted the needle and blew on it only because I’d seen someone do that once in a movie and then I set the needle down on the outer edge of the record. The music startled me when it started—I hadn’t realized the volume was so high. I didn’t turn it down, but instead backed away from it and took Izzy’s hand as if to steady myself. After the twangy guitar sounds, the song erupted with Jimmy first shouting and then singing in a voice that reminded me of walnuts mixed in maple syrup: both crunchy and sweet. Izzy sang along. She knew all the words.
Jimmy grumbled out, “Thundering shudders from my head to my—oooh baby, yeah—to my head. . . .”
I loved the thumping of the music, like a heartbeat on the surface of my skin. And I loved that raspy-sugar sound of Jimmy’s voice. It was like the way he spoke but more forceful, more alert, like he had woken up from a death nightmare and just realized he was actually alive.
I figured out the melodies pretty quickly, and started humming harmony to every song. I nudged Izzy and we continued singing as we appraised and then put away her art. Next we sorted through the remaining things: Sears and JCPenney catalogs, Chinese food takeout menus, instructions to assemble a shoe shelf I’d never seen, and costume jewelry that I assumed belonged to Mrs. Cone.
Once the table was completely bare, Izzy and I stood facing the turntable as Izzy belted out the last song on the A side of the album. She sang directly into her fisted gloved hand, her tiny hips jerking around. I moved my body a little, following the music, pretending I was someone who danced.
When the song ended, I lifted the needle, flipped the record, and started the B side. The first song was slow and quiet. Izzy wasn’t singing along. “Izzy, below the sink in the kitchen is lemon Pledge. Bring me that with those dusting rags we made.”
“Lemonplige?”
“Lemon Pledge. It’s a yellow spray can. I bought it at Eddie’s last week, remember?”
“Yes. You said we were going to clean wood.”
“Exactly. But first we had to find the wood to clean it. And look.” I stood and pointed to the dusty and dull wooden table. It was big enough to seat ten or twelve.
“Got it.” Izzy ran out of the room and returned seconds later with the Pledge and a stack of cleaning rags I had made from an old ripped Brooks Brothers shirt Dr. Cone had thrown in the trash.
“You’re going to love this.” I handed Izzy one of the rags. “I spray, and then you rub the rag in circles on the spot where I’ve sprayed. The table will shine and it will smell so good, you’ll want to lick it.”
“Can I?”
“What?”
“Lick it. Can I lick the table after I wipe it?”
“No. It’s probably poisonous.”
Izzy’s eyes popped wide. “Do you think the witch wants to poison us?”
“No. I bought the Pledge, not the witch. And I think the witch is good. She put the cherries in the fridge.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Izzy squinted, then started growl-yelling the chorus of the slow song.
I waited for the chorus to end and then sprayed. Izzy climbed onto a chair, leaned over the table, and wiped. I sprayed a new spot. Izzy lifted her knee high, as if she were crossing a stream rock to rock, and stepped onto the next chair. She wiped. I sprayed; she moved down to another chair and wiped again. In this way, we circled the table, with Izzy singing and me humming the whole way. We were just at the end of the table, or at the beginning—we were where we’d begun—when Jimmy and Dr. Cone walked in.