Alice Fulton

The Real Eleanor Rigby

Edna Livingston was the loneliest girl in North America. She was the only Catholic High student who subscribed to Zen Teen: The Journal of Juvenile Macrobiotics published by the Youth in Asia Foundation (Euthanasia! Someone should point out the unhappy homonym), the only member of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin who’d read Tropic of Cancer. Once when she mentioned Henry Miller, the entire group thought she was referring to the amiable, goateed host of the popular TV show, Sing Along with Mitch.
    Arthur Miller maybe, but Mitch!
    In a weak moment Edna had joined her school’s chapter of Up with People, the
moral rearmament choral group. She’d performed with them once or twice, but she was asked to leave after taking liberties with the windshield-wiper waves. Now she spent her weekends immured in her room, cataloging items in BeatleLuv Unlimited magazine and IshMail, the Melville Society newsletter.
    “John, Paul, George, and Herman!” her mother said. “If you ask me, Moby Dick is one dull book. Where’s the romance, the love interest? If you ask me, Herman was a fink.”
    Edna felt deeply misunderstood. Like Melville, she wanted to ship out to Liverpool.
    No one shared her obsessions except Sunny Metzger, a Lutheran who attended
Troy High. The two girls were desperate virgins, isolated by their attraction to the
non-Troy and exotic. Edna had heard all about Sunny’s brief fling with an Estonian
boy who wanted her to eat borscht while he snapped Polaroids. She heard how one famished night, Sunny agreed, and afterwards during the sad, postculinary intimacy, the boy drove her to Albany Airport to watch the planes take off. They had sat in the car outside the runway’s chain-link till Sunny’s hair smelled like jet fuel, a musky residue of adventure that Edna envied, though the Estonian boy never called again.

Every night Edna fell asleep with her transistor radio under her head like a renunciate’s stone pillow. The local station was always holding contests. Their call
letters, WTRY, stood for Troy, but in their elastic ID jingles, she heard the command to strive. Third caller, try again, fifth caller, try again, the deejay would say. One lucky midnight she became the ninth caller and won a pen touched by the Beatles. It arrived by mail a week later.
    “It’s a second-class relic,” Edna said, placing the sealed envelope in the middle
of the kitchen table. Her mother was ironing nearby. Sunny was sipping a Diet Rite.
    “Well, I call it pretty chintzy. At least they could give you a first-class prize,” Mrs. Livingston said.
    “C’mon, Ma. First-class relics are rare.” First-class relics were taken from the body or any of its integrant parts, such as limbs, ashes, and bones. How many times had she explained? But her mother was an Easter-duty Catholic. What could you expect.
    “Well, I still say it’s pretty darn cheap.”
    “A third-class relic, now that would be cheap,” Sunny offered. “A third-class relic is anything that’s touched a first- or second-class relic. You can’t take a relic like that theriously.” Sunny lisped when she got excited. Sometimes she stuttered. “Hey, Ed. Now we can make our own third-clath welicths,” she said. “We could thell them.”
    They had learned about relics during a special weekend retreat taught by a foreign priest full of discouraged Catholic lore. Sunny had sat in the back, and the visiting cleric did not recognize her as an interloper. His presentation was part show-and-tell, part autopsy. He explained how a particle extracted from a saint had been placed in a locket, covered by crystal, bound by red thread, and sealed with the insignia of office. Then he opened the back cover of the locket and showed them a swatch of red wax that looked like a hundred-year-old heart, wizened and dripping with antiquity.
    Sunny raised her hand. “Father, I know a second-class welic is an object that has come in contact with a living saint, like the instruments wherewith a martyr has been tortured, the chains by which he was bound, the clothes he wore, or objects he used. But what about Saint Peter’s shadow or a saint’s bray-bray-braces? I mean, it’s just a high-high—”A couple of boys snickered, and Brew Thudlinsky, the school bully, belched derisively—“hypothesis, Father, but what class would a saint’s con-con- contact lenses be?”
    And though the priest spoke perfect English, he had sighed in Spanish. “For the sake of simplicity, let’s stick with the bones,” he said.
    The pen the Beatles touched was enrobed in a red plastic pencil case. Edna eased the zipper back. As the tiny metal fangs gave way, a faint gas, a perfume of petroleum products, essence of black vinyl and steel strings, escaped, and there it was: an instrument of monastic plainness nestled in the scarlet darkness. A cheap black ballpoint. A new warmth possessed her. Hope, the thing with feathers, was perching in her soul.
    “Are you sure it’s not the albatross like in that other poem?” Sunny asked.
    A relic might be coronse spinse D.N.J.C., taken from the crown of thorns, or de velo, from the veil. It might be ex parecordi, from the stomach or intestines; ex pelle from the skin; ex capillus, from the hair; ex carne, from the flesh. It could be ex stipite affixionis, from the whipping post, or ex tela serica quae tetigit cor, from the silk cloth that touched the heart.
    “Or maybe it’s the liver. That extinct bird Liverpool was named for.”
    “This is Hope,” Edna said. “You’ll know it when you feel it.” Hope felt like a summer clearance when the worn merchandise was offered up and whisked away.
    Her mother hung up a blouse with a vehemence that made the hangers shriek. “It doesn’t take much to make you girls happy, does it?” she said.

“Knock, knock!” Mrs. Livingston had yelled on the day Herman Melville entered Edna’s life. She was sequestered in her bedroom, which resembled a clipping service run by a poltergeist. The floor was a brittle strudel of back issues and loose paper. Narrow paths had been cleared between the door, bed, and stereo.
    “What a booby trap,” her mother said, walking the plank of carpet. “It kind of makes you glad paper has only two sides.” She placed two books on the bed next to Edna. “Old junk from the Phoenix.” The Phoenix, an old residential hotel, had belonged to Edna’s father. He had died a year ago.
    Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville, Edna read. New York, Wiley and Putnam, 1846. Volume I popped like an arthritic knuckle when she opened it, and a dank, riverish smell rose from the pages.
    “Typee is a cookbook and a sex manual,” she told Sunny during their nightly phone call. “It’s a hunger novel.”
    Melville’s book told the story of two starving pals, Tommo and Toby, on their
perilous journey into the heart of the Marquesas. The infinite care with which these deserters parceled out their sea biscuits, the division of a little sustenance into less, worked upon Edna’s imagination. Every night she gave Sunny a synopsis. Tommo and Toby have been captured by natives! Toby has escaped, but Tommo is being treated well! Today the island girls gathered a thimbleful of salt. They spread a big leaf on the ground, dropped a few grains on it, and invited Tommo to taste them as a sign of their esteem. “From the extravagant value placed upon the article,” Edna read, “I verily believed that with a bushel of common Liverpool salt, all the real estate in Typee might have been purchased.”
    “I verily believe it, too,” Sunny said.
    The girls passed Typee back and forth, reading and rereading. They went to the Troy Public Library and checked out everything on Herman Melville. One night Edna called with a major discovery. “Herman wrote Typee in Lansingburgh. He was living on 114th Street, near the Phoenix Hotel.” The next day, she called the Lansingburgh Historical Society, and they gave her the phone number of a ninety-year-old man named Tim Brunswick, whose father was rumored to have actually known Herman Melville.
    “I’d like to meet him,” she told her mother.
    “I wish you could find someone your own age.”
    “Don’t you mean from my own age?” Edna said.

When Mrs. Livingston realized the girls were determined to visit the ancient Melville expert, she offered them a ride. Tim Brunswick lived in a trailer on the banks of the Hudson River. He met them at the door with a quivery little dog in his arms. A toy poodle? Sunny asked.
    “A Maltese,” said Tim Brunswick. “Name of Blimey.” He led them into a tiny parlor lined with gray file cabinets. A picture window showed a dismal river view, and a saxophone gleamed dully in one corner like the esophagus of a golden beast. The room shivered when the wind blew, as if it might lunge into the Hudson at any minute. Edna felt a little seasick.
    “Did your father really know Herman Melville, Mr. Brunswick?” Sunny asked.
    “Everybody in the ’burgh knew him. Dad went to school with his kid brother, Tom. Those boys worshipped Melville.” Blimey buried his tiny nose in his master’s shirt, and Tim Brunswick peered at Mrs. Livingston over his bifocals. His eyes were a vibrant baby blue. “I also knew your husband, Sammy Livingston. He was a serious person. Quiet, but accommodating.”
    “That’s why he needed me.” Mrs. Livingston crossed her legs and started swinging the top one with aggressive abandon. “I was fun-loving as all get-out.”
    “Lansingburgh was quite a place in his day. It has quite a history.” And Tim Brunswick told them how the first Dutch settlers had named the village Steen Arabia and how in Melville’s time, the 1840s, peach trees and willows had grown along the Hudson, which was then a busy shipyard. “Melville and a local girl, Mary Parmalee, used to stroll on the riverbank, reading Tennyson to each other. ‘Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met—’ ”
     “Mary Parmalee!” Edna’s mother interrupted. “What a pretty name! How did I
wind up being plain old Annie Livingston?”
    “What was Herman like?” Sunny asked eagerly.
    “Like a real sailor, Dad said. Suntanned. And he walked with this racy kind of swagger, what they called the sailor’s roll. It was considered very suggestive in his day.”
    “Yeah?” Sunny smiled encouragingly.
    “Yeah. Melville walked like he was on a rocking boat, kind of bowlegged like—”
And Tim Brunswick set the dog down on his chair and lurched around the table,
demonstrating. Then he came to a halt and swayed tipsily above the little Maltese.
    “Blimey!” exclaimed Sunny.
    “You betcha!” said Tim Brunswick. “The ladies love a sailor. All the belles of
Lansingburgh were after Herman Melville. Ladies led sheltered lives in those days,
and he was a man of the world, swashbuckling, like Errol Flynn. He was what we’d call a sex symbol today.”
    “I don’t understand symbolism, do you?” Mrs. Livingston appealed. “That’s why I don’t understand Moby Dick.” She shifted restlessly on the narrow love seat. “It’s full of symbolism.”
    “Some books you have to read twice to understand,” Edna said.
    “And some you’d never understand if you read till time immortal. Gone with the Wind! Now there was a book.”
    Edna handed Tim Brunswick her copy of Typee. “This was in my father’s safe at the Phoenix Hotel.”
    He opened volume one and examined it. “You’d better take good care of this, young lady. This is a first edition. It might even be an association copy.”
    “Wow!” Sunny said. “What’s that?”
    “A book Melville owned himself. He might have given it to the innkeeper in payment for his drinking tab.”
    “You mean Herman touched Typee? That makes it a thecond-clath welic.”
    “Say again?”
    “An object rich with spiritual electricity,” Edna translated. “An object made luminous by contact with a radiant being.”
    As they walked to the car, she looked for evidence of peach trees by the Hudson. She felt the past must exist behind, beside, inside, or under the present. The problem was time. Time came between things, shutting them off in loneliness and ignorance. And time had dimension. It wasn’t flat like paper. Time had substance, yet it was invisible, like all important things.
     “All the lonely people!” Sunny exclaimed.
    Edna had long believed she had the power to pull things toward her with her mind. Now she sensed something desirable approaching, and she urged it on, envisioning a limo with dark windows, a single-masted schooner. A yellow submarine.

A week later Mrs. Livingston came running upstairs in a state of high emergency. “The Beatle Buggy’s outside!” she said. “It looks like a Ford Fairlane. Hurry!”
    WTRY was giving away tickets to see the group at Shea Stadium. The winners also would attend the junior press conference in New York. Edna and Sunny had sent in a hundred entries with “Jay Blue is sexy!” scrawled all over them. They’d found the deejay’s name in the phone book under Blue, Jay and called to say they admired his jingles. Now he sat in her mother’s living room, a palpable absence of sound taking shape around him. His quietude felt lifeless, as if uttering inanities at the speed of light for a living drained him of élan vital. Maybe he’s a mild-mannered mortician by day and a swinging deejay by night, Edna thought. “It’ll be a gas,” Jay Blue said in the forced baritone that was his air voice. He scratched his head and his mod-style toupee, said to be made of genuine mink, slipped down and touched the top of his sunglasses. Then he stood up and handed Edna the tickets, and Mrs. Livingston burst into applause. “Since her father died, she’s hardly left her room. Maybe this will get her out of the house.”
    “Say, that’s a good idea,” said Jay Blue.

Edna held the receiver at arm’s length after telling Sunny. “We have to stop screaming and think,” she yelled into the mouthpiece.
    “Thop threaming and think!”
    “We need a way to get close to them. We need the perfect gift.”
    The usual offerings—gum wrappers woven into an eighteen-foot strip, a life-size
portrait of Ringo made entirely of uncooked elbow macaroni—would not do. All that chewing and plaiting and dying and gluing did not reflect well upon the giver. They’d have to come up with something unique. Something the Beatles might actually want. The perfect gift could open doors. It must be something that would not melt or die on the bus to New York, something that could be carried while sprinting in a miniskirt.
    “For the man who has everything,” Edna continued, “a relic would make a very special present.”
    “Why would the Beatles want a pen they touched?”
    “Not that, Hairspray Brains! Typee.”
    Sunny squealed in shock. “If we give them Typee, what are we going to re-reread?”
    “There are other books in the world, you know.” Edna affected a supercilious tone. “We could read Billy Budd. Or Moby Dick.” In fact, she was tired of second-class relics. If she could get close to the Beatles, she might achieve the hands-on, naked knowledge that came from touching a primary source.
    “Why not give them uth,” Sunny suggested.
    “Give them us?”
    “Remember Regina.” This cousin of Sunny’s had lost her virginity at Jose’s Deli, and her description—the really amazing pain, the counter boy’s commands to open wider—made sex sound like a terrible trip to the dentist. Now Sunny said she thought they could do better. Since Herman was unavailable, she thought the Beatles might be equal to the task. Try the best, then try the rest, she said, and the concept appealed to Edna’s perfectionism.
    And so over the next few weeks, they set about starving their bodies into bodies
the Beatles could want: model bodies, twiggish and ravishingly thin. Sometimes at
the end of a meal, Sunny would pick up her plate and lick it clean. She was so hungry!

“Zen cookery uses four yangizing factors to achieve change,” Edna said. She and Sunny were eating their usual dinner of brown rice with brown rice. “Heat, time,pressure, and/or salt.”
    “You girls need more variety in your diet,” her mother remarked. “You need more color. ‘A bright color on a brown gruel is like a song in the heart.’ I made that up myself.”
    “Was Jay Blue anything like his image, Mrs. Livingston?” Sunny asked.
    “No. In real life he’s dead timber. Not my type.” She took another bite of Irish stew.
    “Who’s your type, Ma?”
    “Tyrone Power. He had bedroom eyes. And Sam, your father, liked Kay Francis.” Her mother set dishes of pink pudding before them.
    “I don’t want any,” Edna said.
    “Sam was the only one who thought I was swell.” Her mother sighed. “He was the only one who liked my cooking. Though when I was a visiting nurse, I had admirers. I once had a patient change her name to mine, you know.”
     Edna rolled her eyes. “This patient changed her first name and her last name,” she told Sunny.
     “I know it!” crowed her mother. “She became Annie Monahan. That was before I became Annie Livingston, of course.”
    “Did she change her name to Livingston when you did?” Edna asked.
    “Huh?” her mother’s mind was back in the 1930s. “We’d lost touch by then. Who knows, she might have. She thought very highly of me, that’s for dang sure.”
    “Well, I like your cooking, Mrs. L.,” Sunny said.
    Mrs. Livingston gave another martyred sigh. “I eat to live, I don’t live to eat.”
    “The body is water, but the mind is sea,” said Edna. “The body—”
    “The body is water, but the mind is at sea! What’s that supposed to mean?” Mrs. Livingston interrupted.
    Since earliest childhood, whenever Edna tried to speak, her mother’s voice had drowned her out. Rather than compete for conversational space, she had become a seriously silent person. Her father had mistaken her reticence for arrogance. He’d accused her of caring more for John Lennon than her parents. And what could she say? The Beatles are my Polynesia?

“The ripe raw breadfruit can be stored away in large underground receptacles for years on end,” Edna quoted from Typee. “It only improves with age.” They were sitting at a card table in the cellar of her house. The cellar, fusty with oilcloth and light-absorbing knotty pine, reminded them of the Cavern, where the Fab Four had begun. Now that school had ended for the summer, they spent much of their time there, playing the one folk song they knew over and over on their warped guitars. “Danger water’s coming, baby, hold me tight,” they sang in loud, flat voices.
    “Were it not that the breadfruit is thus capable of being preserved for a length of time, the natives might be reduced to a state of starvation.”
    “If I could get my hands on a breadfruit, I’d know what to do with it,” Sunny said. But breadfruit was not available at the local supermarkets, and when they asked after it, the produce managers became churlish and depressed.
    “What was Jay Blue like?” Sunny asked.
    “He was like—nothing He seemed kind of lonely.”
    “Troy must be the loneliest place on Earth. I bet we’re one of the only places on Earth without a sister city.”
    “One of the only! That’s a redundancy,” Edna said.
    “Wow!” Sunny dropped her guitar with a metallic boom. “Herman’s first voyage was to Liverpool, right? And he was living in Lansingburgh then, right? Well, it’s obvious. We’ll start a petition to make Lansingburgh and Liverpool sister cities, and we’ll ask the Beatles to sigh-sigh-”—her voice sounded as if she’d been breathing helium—“sign it!”
    “We can’t do that! It’ll ruin our image. They’ll think we’re fans.” Edna fluffed her hair near the crown to give it more height. “Anyway, it’s so—municipal.”
    “Your mother can do the embarrassing part, asking for their autographs.” Since the girls were only fourteen, Mrs. Livingston insisted on accompanying them to New York. “We need more than one idea,” Sunny said. “We shouldn’t put all our begs in one ask-it.”
    “Wouldn’t we have to get somebody’s approval, like the lord mayor of Liverpool or at least the mayor of Lansingburgh?”
    “If the Beatles sign, do you think those guys will say no? They’re politicians! They know which side their butt is breaded on!”
    And Edna didn’t argue. Do I dare to eat a peach? she often asked herself. Lately, more often than not, the answer was yes.

On August 22, Edna, Sunny, and Mrs. Livingston took the bus to New York City.
The girls were using years of baby-sitting savings to pay for a room at the Warwick, where the Beatles were staying. They spent the hours before the junior press conference donning their Beatle girlfriend costumes: hip-hugger skirts, net stockings, paisley shirts with white cuffs and collars, ghillie shoes of golden suede. Do I look like a fan? No, do I? they asked each other.
    The press conference was held on the second floor. Girls waited outside, trying to insinuate themselves to the front of the pack, and at last the doors swung open. As the crowd trampled past, Edna was stabbed in the clavicle by someone’s JOHN IS GOD button. She hugged her copy of Typee, which she planned to present at a suitable moment. An aide appeared and said, “The Beatles are about to enter. Would those in front please kneel?” All the girls sank like barn animals on Christmas Eve. “I mean,” he amended, “so those in back can get their picture. Make room.” Edna and Sunny were pressed against an emergency exit when suddenly it opened, hurtling them back into the hall. A long, navy blue arm reached over their heads and slammed the door, stranding them outside.
    “We won passes!” Edna wailed.
    “Win some, lose some,” the policeman said.
    “You’re supposed to be a community helper,” Sunny scolded.
    “I’m helping those rich fairies stay alive.” He patted his gun holster. “If you ask me, those guys are a little light in their loafers.”
    “Nobody asked you,” Sunny snapped. Muffled munchkin squeals erupted from within the room, followed by deeper, foreign inflections that flipped up at the ends. Edna and Sunny pulled their hair and groaned in frustration. When the doors opened they rushed in, but the Beatles had been whisked away. We’ve been cheated! they told each other through disbelieving tears.
    “Yes, they do that to your mother, too,” Mrs. Livingston remarked, when they returned to the room. “But I don’t let them get away with it.”
    The girls were prostrated in shock on the bed. “They’re above us right now,” Edna said. “Just one floor up.” And they listened to the footsteps on high, trying to guess their identities.
    “C’mon,” her mother said, putting on her pumps. “Let’s meet the Beatles and get it over with. Then we can go out and have some fun.”
    As soon as the girls had repaired their eyeliner, Mrs. Livingston hustled them onto the elevator. When the doors opened at the eighth floor, a guard blocked their exit. Edna peered into the corridor and spied the Beatles’ road manager. “Neil As-As—” Sunny called, as the elevator door slammed into her side. “—Aspinall!” The road manager paused, and Edna told him how they’d missed the press conference. He asked her age. Eighteen, she lied, and for once her mother didn’t contradict her. Follow me, Neil said. When he saw Mrs. Livingston was with the girls, he hesitated. Then he unlocked a door, and with a sweeping gesture, bade them enter.
    Four dove-gray suits with plum-red stripes lay draped across the bed, gleaming in the lunar light of the TV. Edna reacted like a Geiger counter sensing uranium nearby. Her teeth began to chatter, and she had to suppress high-pitched trills of impending revelation. “If you wouldn’t mind doing us a favor,” Neil said. “These have to be ironed before the show tomorrow.” He pointed to an ironing board in the corner. “I’ll be back,” he promised.
    “Always leave the door ajar when you’re in a strange man’s hotel room,” Mrs.
Livingston instructed, propping it with the telephone book. She examined the suits. “What elegant tailoring! You have to take everything out of the pockets, or they won’t lie flat. Oh, name tags.”
    The girls exchanged thrilled looks. “Which one do you want?” Edna asked.
    “Paul, of course,” Sunny said. “Paul is All!”
    “Is he the single one?” Mrs. Livingston inquired.
    “He’s the Cute One,” Edna said dismissively. “I want John, the Sexy One.”
    “Paul’s had a very hard life, you know,” Sunny told them. “His mother died when he was fourteen.”
    “John’s mother died, too,” said Edna. “And his father deserted him. He’s an orphan.”
    Mrs. Livingston sighed. She’d been born near an orphanage, and as a student nurse she’d worked in the New York Foundling Hospital. “Poor motherless boys! At least they’re young and healthy.”
    “Oh no,” Edna informed her. “Ringo had peritonitis as a child, and George had nephritis. They’re actually kind of sickly.” She knew her mother had sympathy for physical ills, though disturbances of the mind only made her irritable. Mrs. Livingston respected reality and those who kept in touch with its firm facts. Now she sat on the bed, watching TV, while Edna and Sunny took turns ironing. John Lennon came on the screen, apologizing for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. The report that followed said the group had been nearly crushed to death in Cleveland, picketed by the Ku Klux Klan in Washington, D.C., and almost electrocuted in St. Louis. They’d received death threats in Memphis, where someone tossed a bomb on stage, and today two fans had promised to leap from the ledge of a New York hotel unless they met the Beatles.
    “Silly girls!” Mrs. Livingston frowned. Edna and Sunny were caressing the suits as if they were alive. They ran the zippers up and down, unbuttoned the waistbands, rubbed their faces against the lapels. “Don’t be getting lipstick on their outfits. And there’s another thing I won’t stand for.”
    Edna held her breath.
    “I won’t have you throwing things at those boys while they’re trying to play their music. They have enough trouble.”
    “The only thing I want to throw at them is myself,” Edna said. She ironed lasciviously, stopping to inhale the faint scents—shaving crème and sweat, patchouli
and dry cleaning fluid—liberated by steam and heat. She felt delirious. “How many pleats go in each leg?” she asked.
    “Give me that iron,” her mother said, pushing her aside. “I can’t believe we came to New York for this. This is just like home.”
    At last the suits were finished, but there still was no sign of Neil Aspinall. “That dress manager of theirs. He has what are called ‘craggy good looks.’ Do you girls know what that means?”
    “Like Frankenstein might have looked if Frankenstein had been good-looking?”
Sunny suggested.
    Suddenly fragments of song—“Summer in the City”—burst from a room at the end of the hall, a door slammed, and voices came lilting along the corridor. Edna, Sunny, and Mrs. Livingston rushed to the threshold in time to see a fantasia of flowers and paisley, polka dots and stripes, mossy velvets and sun-bright satins levitate down the hall. Then the mirage vanished in a Beatle-scented breeze. Edna and Sunny grabbed each other. Did you see them? Did you see them?
    “Had a glimpse of the gardens of Paradise been revealed to me, I could scarcely have been more ravished with the sight,” Sunny quoted from Typee. “Didn’t they look—mythical?”
    “Mystical, yes,” Edna said. She had expected the Beatles to sense their intimate bond with her and stop. How could they have mistaken her for a stranger?
    “If you knew that was them, why didn’t you speak up? You missed your chance,” her mother said. “Here comes their handsome valet.” Mrs. Livingston showed Neil the ironed suits. She pointed to a little heap of Beatle detritus on the dresser. “That was in their pockets.”
    “Oh, you can keep those things.” The road manager’s eyes looked dreamy and glazed. “As souvenirs.”
    “When do we meet the Beatles?” Mrs. Livingston asked.
    “The boys are tired. They’ve had a hard week.”
    “Listen, we kept our part of the bargain.” Mrs. Livingston folded her arms across her chest, preparing for battle. “These girls have come a long way. They’ve waited a long time.”
    “Okay,” Neil said reluctantly. “All right.” He extracted three red press passes from his wallet and handed them out. “Come by the suite tomorrow around four, and you’ll meet the Beatles.”

At the appointed hour the next day, they showed their passes and joined the line extending from the Beatles’ suite. Edna spotted Jay Blue just ahead of them, talking into a cassette recorder and punching the air for emphasis. She clutched Typee with clammy fingers. On this day of days, her bangs were wrinkled, her hair full of flyaway, her Beatle girlfriend ensemble disheveled from dress rehearsals. And how could she meet the Beatles with her mother tagging along? She wanted to be back in her room, copying their song lyrics with the patience of a scrivener. Last year she’d ordered some bromeliads from Florida, and when she opened the carton, the pots were swarming with centipedes. She had shrieked and thrown the shipment away before her mother, always disgusted by forays into the strange, could find out. Now she felt the same hysterical alarm. “You go, I’ll wait here,” she said.
    “The heck you will,” her mother said, pulling her through the door.
     The Beatles’ suite was crawling with gifts. It’s like Christmas morning in here, Edna thought. Your riches taught me poverty. What she had to over seemed shabby in comparison. By the time they’d edged near enough to see the group, everyone else had been ushered out except Jay Blue. The Beatles were holding court from the sofa. There was a gritty orb before them on the cocktail table, and they were staring at it as if it might hatch.
    “Is that egg really one hundred years old?” Jay Blue asked.
    “No,” John Lennon said. “The Chinese only call it that so ignorant Westerners will think they’ll eat anything.”
    “Say, that’s a good idea!” said Jay Blue.
    The Beatles seemed disgruntled, almost crotchety behind their granny glasses. Apathy poured off them, and joyless waterfalls of worry. Edna yearned to make them happy, if only for an instant. Five minutes, their press agent called. “There’s no time like the present,” her mother hissed, nudging the girls forward. Edna knew Sunny would not speak for fear of stuttering. She wanted to be introduced as a mute painter who spoke only in watercolors of a halcyon refinement.
    “Hi,” Edna whispered.
    The Beatles went on talking all at once and only with each other above the insect whir of the recorder. They seemed to be discussing the hundred-year-old egg. “Looks like snot I suppose you could wear a blindfold whilst eating it my son please don’t use the word snot in my hearing snot nice I deplore having used it smells disgusting take it to the loo if you must burn incense,” they said.
    “Hey, fellas!” Mrs. Livingston interrupted. “These girls have brought you a special present.”
    The Beatles nodded and mumbled sleepily. George Harrison yawned. Edna and Sunny had decided they must return everything they’d taken from the suits except one relic too precious to relinquish. Now they stepped forward and emptied their purses onto the table before the group. Out tumbled guitar picks, chewing gum, half a cigarette, a little box of perfumed incense papers, a ballpoint pen, and a sticker that said “I Still Love the Beatles.”
    “It’s from your pockets,” Edna said.
    “Are you thieves or magicians?” George Harrison asked. He lit one of the incense papers, and they began talking about the explosion during their Memphis show.
    “You know how George is the Quiet One, I’m the Bigmouthed One, etc.,” John
Lennon told Jay Blue. “We were looking around to see who was going to be the Dead One.” And Jay Blue told them about a friend of his in the music business who’d been shot in the heart. Doctors had removed half the bullet and left the other half in his chest, and now he was fine. He just had some tear duct problems.
    “Perhaps we shouldn’t have called our album Revolver,” George said, twiddling his thumbs.
    “You know the old saying. Those who live by the song, die by the song,” Mrs. Livingston put in.
    John Lennon looked up, aware of her for the first time.
    “My husband was musically inclined,” Mrs. Livingston continued. “He was shot in the arm during Prohibition.”
    “Has Prohibition ended?” John asked.
    Mrs. Livingston chose that moment to produce the Sister City petition. The quartet picked up pens, and John was about to sign when the TV began to report on anti-Beatle demonstrations in the South. “They’re burning my book,” he said.
    “Shame on them!” Mrs. Livingston seized the “I Still Love The Beatles” sticker, licked it, and pressed it onto the petition folder. “There! That’ll show them!”
    John blinked slowly. Edna thought it might have been the first time he’d blinked in several years. He said something to the others in a dialect that even she, with her scholarly knowledge of the Scouse language, could not translate. Then Paul McCartney hit the stop button on Jay Blue’s recorder, and they all started to speak in a rich mishmash of code that seemed to be their native tongue. Their press agent, sensing a change in atmosphere, came charging over. “Get Brian,” John told him. And the Beatles fell silent.
    “Well, a lot of people still love you,” Mrs. Livingston assured them. “It’s not just us.”
    George, Paul, and Ringo lowered their eyes demurely. John gnawed delicately at his index finger. At last Ringo spoke. “We’re very fond of you, too,” he said, and with his words some hidden signal seemed to pass between the four, a vibration more enigmatic than a glance. Yes, we loove you too, they insisted. We loove you too!
    “That’s good,” Mrs. Livingston said, grabbing the petition. “It was nice meeting you fellas, but we don’t want to wear out our welcome—”
    “No!” the Beatles shouted, and the force of their voices almost knocked Edna’s contacts off her eyes.
    “What’s your name?” Paul McCartney inquired gently of her mother. Yes, which one are you? John Lennon added.
    “Annie. I’m the sensible one, and these two—” she nodded toward Edna and Sunny—“are the dreamy ones.”
    “And what can the Beatles do for Annie and the Dreamers?” John asked, with a pleasant smile. Yes, what can we do, would you like a cup of tea? the others echoed. And it was as if they’d morphed from petulant pop stars into solicitous male nurses, custodians of perfect love.
    “Well, if we’re staying, could somebody make these girls a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” Mrs. Livingston said. “They haven’t had a thing to eat all day.” Edna tried to kick her mother discreetly.
    “Would you care for some macadamia nuts?” Paul McCartney said, tearing the cellophane from a gift basket piled high with exotic produce. Their manager, Brian Epstein, arrived then, looking impeccable yet flustered. He asked them to wait in the vestibule while he conferred with the boys.
    “Gosh, Mrs. L., you’ve got the Beatles wrapped around your little finger,” Sunny gasped as soon as they were alone.
    “Listen to this,” Edna said, opening Typee. “ ‘The natives, actuated by some mysterious impulse ... redoubled their attentions to us. Their manner towards us was unaccountable.... Why this excess of deferential kindness, or what equivalent can they imagine us capable of rendering them for it?’ ” She gave them an astonished glance.
    “I was kind of surprised myself,” her mother admitted, “by how grateful they were that we still love them. I guess everyone needs a kind word. Then they all started speaking in Gaelic or Liverpuddle or something—”
    Brian Epstein returned. His eyebrows met in a furrowed point. He cleared his throat and said there had been a slight mishap. Apparently some medicine of John’s had been affixed to the back of the “I Still Love The Beatles” sticker that Mrs. Livingston had licked. This medicine, lysergic acid diethylamide, was used to enhance creativity. Thus it could have disquieting effects. One could expect to feel rather odd. One could expect visions, hallucinations—
    “You mean it’s like someone put a Mickey in my drink?” Mrs. Livingston interrupted.
    “Rather.”
    Nothing scared Edna’s mother more than an unquiet mind. “Listen, I’m not the creative type,” she said. “I’ve never had a vision in my life! I don’t believe in visions.” Then all her bluster faded. She clutched her throat with a trembling hand. “I’m a registered nurse, and I never heard of any medicine being administered on a stamp.”
    “But you haven’t practiced in thirty years,” said Edna. “Times change.”
    “Quite,” said Brian Epstein. “This drug makes one highly suggestible. Whatever your companions suggest becomes your reality. But you musn’t fret. You are amongst friends. The boys and I would like you to join our entourage tonight so that you might be in the safest, indeed the happiest, indeed the most—” he searched for the ideal hyperbole—“fabulous place on earth.”
    “Where is that, Mist-Mist-Mr. Epstein?” Sunny wondered.
    “The Beatles’ dressing room.” And his eyes fluttered briefly, involuntarily, heavenwards. “Please.” He adjusted his cravat. “I implore you. Do not share this with reporters.”
    “Don’t be a snitch, that’s my motto,” Edna’s mother said. “Nobody likes a tattletale.”
    “Quite.”
    “Is this drug habit forming?” she asked.
    “On the contrary.” And Brian Epstein smiled benignly, glad to be the bearer of good news at last. “You might wish never to take it again.”
    And so they had been driven by limo to Shea Stadium, escorted to the locker room, and abandoned in that windowless bunker. The lockers were painted gunmetal gray; a few benches and folding metal chairs were the only furnishings. “Are we buried alive?” Mrs. Livingston asked.
    Edna was distraught. The Beatles had terrified her. Their godlike confidence brought out her awkwardness. She’d been crushed by their surliness, confused by their kindness. Worst of all, they’d been too busy doting on her mother to notice her existence. She missed the cell-like safety of her room. Yet she could not quit until she had given them her gift. This might be her only chance to achieve the metaphysical-physical contact of her dreams.
    “Are you all right?” she asked her mother. Mrs. Livingston looked a little wild eyed.
    “This must be the dreariest place on earth,” her mother said.
    Edna browsed through Typee in search of a soothing passage. “‘When I looked around the verdant recess in which I was buried, and gazed up to the summits of the lofty eminence that hemmed me in, I was well disposed to think that I was in the ‘Happy Valley,’ and that beyond those heights there was nought but a world of care and anxiety.’” Footsteps. Her pulse quickened. Her contacts were dirty. She was seeing everything through the oily shimmer her optometrist called spectacle blur. When the Beatles came sprinting in—day of daze!—each was haloed by his own greasy rainbow.
    “How are you feeling, all right?” Paul asked her mother.
    “I’m feeling kind of—” The Beatles leaned forward, attentive. “Creative. I want to hold your—” She paused, distracted by their raised eyebrows.
    “Hand?” Paul said hopefully.
    “Guitar,” her mother said, and he obligingly extended his Hofner bass. “No, not that little one. I want to hold that big one,” she said, pointing to a sunburst Epiphone Casino in the corner. George brought it over and began trying to teach her a chord. “Are you the Orphaned One?” she asked. No, I’m the Lonely One, he told her. His guitar made an empty thunking sound when she strummed it. “Gee, this is harder than I thought. Don’t you fellas have to practice?”
    “All we have to practice is smiling,” John said. He took a long drag on a hand-rolled cigarette.
    “Are those roofers you’re smoking?” The air was thick with rank, weedy fumes. Before he could answer she said, “Do you know these girls are your biggest fans?” Edna froze, her shame revealed.
    “No, but hum a few bars and I’ll fake it,” said John.
    “That’s an old one.”
    “We’re old at heart.” He rubbed his sideburn reflectively.
    “You do seem kind of tired for young fellas.”
    “We had to perform twice on Sunday,” Paul explained. “In Cincinnati and St. Louis. We had a contract.” And he squinched his face into a frown.
    “Well, don’t be making any more contractions,” Mrs. Livingston commanded. “Take a rest.”
    “Say, that’s a good idea!” Paul said in a fine imitation of Jay Blue. Once again some unspoken agreement buzzed between the four, and they fell into a pensive silence.
    “Cheer up, boys!” Mrs. Livingston said, springing to her feet. Then, to Edna’s horror, her mother began to do the dance they called her routine: a high-spirited cancan with kicking Rockette variations performed to her own sung accompaniment.
Edna knew it well.
    “Mom, stop,” she pleaded. But the Beatles were yielding little ironic smiles. Ringo started clapping, and George began to play along. “Julia,” Paul said. Julia was John’s mother who’d died when he was a teenager. Every fan knew that. Edna felt sullen with envy. She wanted to rise into the Beatles’ consciousness, if only for a minute, but even in close proximity it seemed impossible. Her mother kept getting in her way.
    At last Mrs. Livingston stopped prancing, out of breath. “Now why don’t you sing to us?” she asked.
     “They can’t,” Edna said quickly. “They can’t sing now.”
    “Course we can sing,” said Paul. “Don’t believe everything you read.”
    John wearily picked up an acoustic guitar. He strummed the first chords of “Anna,” an oldie about a girl who’d come and asked him to set her free. He changed the name to Annie, in honor of Mrs. Livingston, and sang that all his life he’d been searching for a girl to love him, but every girl he ever had broke his heart and left him sad, what was he supposed to do? And the other Beatles chorused “like his mum,” “I deplore,” and “drink my sweat.” After a verse or two, John forgot the words, and the song broke down.
    “It’s now or never,” Sunny whispered. “Typee.” George was closest, so Edna thrust the book at him. “It’s about sailors held captive by a group of man-eating cannibals,” she said.
    “The fans would devour us if they could.” He nibbled on his guitar pick. “It’s because they love us. And it’s the thought that counts.”
    “This is a first edition. It belonged to Herman Melville.” She paused for effect. “You can have it.”
    “I don’t want it,” he said, handing it back. “It’ll only get lost or left behind. It’ll only get ruined.” The room whirled. Her fears were realized, her gift rejected. “Try John,” George added quickly. “His father was a sailor.”
    The walk across the room to John Lennon seemed long and fraught with obstacles. This book is set on a remote island where there’s no religion or possessions, no greed or hunger, she began. He listened to her ragged exegesis with half-closed eyes, impassive as a Buddha. Then he opened Typee and read aloud. “ ‘Her manner convinced me that she deeply compassionated my situation, as being removed from my country and friends, and placed beyond the reach of all relief.’ ” He stopped and stared off into space.
    “Can I ask you something?” Edna said. Everyone else was across the room, admiring her mother’s earrings.
    “Sure,” he said. “Shoot.”
    “What would you do if you were in love with someone who didn’t know you were alive?”
    “Love really tears us up, doesn’t it?” He paused. The pause was delicious, eloquent. “But we always get another chance.”
    The other Beatles were taking their stage suits out of the lockers. They called John over, then George spoke up. “We have to turn off the lights so we can change,” he said. For a second Edna imagined them assuming another identity, like Gregor Samsa becoming a bug. “You won’t be upset now, will you? We won’t be long. Just stay put.” He asked her to work the lights, and she nodded, feeling a new sense of power.
    The Beatles hummed and whistled like a human meadow as they dressed, and the darkness amplified their chirping and rustling. They shouted reassurances—we still loove you, Annie!—and in no time at all, they called for the lights. But Edna must have lost her bearings because she could not find the switch. She stroked the cinder blocks and shuffled to the left, groping blindly. Then she tripped over a guitar cord and crashed against a texture she knew well. A suit of summer wool, now sculpted into three dimensions. Her previous experience of the Beatles had been so flat, so limited to pictures and screens, that the depth and breadth of this actual body felt almost wrong. She clung like a barnacle nonetheless. Now that she had him, she would not let him go. And instead of pulling away, he stood patiently, perhaps resignedly, in an attitude of forbearance, emitting an aura of—was it possible?—understanding. His face felt gritty as a beach, and through his shirt she heard the rock-solid four/four of his heart and an ambient hum like damaged nerves. “Let there be light!” her mother called. “Quick, before I have a vision!” His hair sifted through her fingers then like salt dissolving, silky with escape. And she let him go.
    She found the switch, and by the time her eyes adjusted, the Beatles looked perfectly composed. John, Paul, and George had assumed their guitars like shields. Only Ringo had nothing to hide behind. “How do we look?” he asked.
    “Like stars,” Mrs. Livingston said with satisfaction. “Like brothers. Like you should.”
    John, meanwhile, was searching his pockets. Now he held up an “I Still Love The Beatles” sticker for all to see.
    “Mine is missing,” Paul said. “And there was nothing funny about mine.”
    “You mean—she didn’t take that drug?” said Edna.
    “Looks like your trip is over before it’s begun,” George told her mother.
    Then Neil flung the door open, and a noise like a force of nature rushed in. John gave Typee to the road manager for safekeeping. The PA system boomed “Now ... The Beatles!” And they were gone. Edna, Sunny, and Mrs. Livingston hurried out onto the field to watch them play. Flashbulbs splashed the night as John launched into “Twist and Shout,” his legs braced like a sailor’s on a tossing ship. Brian Epstein stood near second base, nervously chewing gum on the downbeat. Edna was struck by how solitary the Beatles looked on stage, on their private island of fame. If a string broke or an amp exploded, if they needed a drink or felt unwell, there was no one to help them. They were at the mercy of the fans and police. For thirty minutes the Beatles were the loneliest people on earth.
    One of Mrs. Livingston’s earrings fell off, and she pitched it at the stage. Sunny, meanwhile, was screaming Be-Be-Be-Beatles! Rah-Rah-Rah-Ringo! Edna had kept one item from their pockets, a scrap from a cigarette pack. Now she dug this second-class relic from the depths of her purse. “Rich Choice” was printed on one side, a set list of songs handwritten on the other. She crushed it and tossed it toward the stage like an offering, a flower over a burial at sea.

“Those Beatles work a short shift, don’t they?” Mrs. Livingston said. The parking lot was covered with tickets like fallen leaves. Sunny spotted a taxi with a model of a yellow submarine secured to its roof, and the driver said he’d take them to the city as soon as he had a full cab. He had one other passenger already, an older girl with a Beatle haircut, wearing a dress made from the Union Jack. A pin identified her as PaulMichelle, a stringer for Teenbeat. Enjoy yourselves, ladies? the cabbie asked.
    “We had the time of our lives,” Mrs. Livingston said. “The Beatles autographed our petition.”
    “No,” Edna corrected. “John never signed.”
    “Well, you gave him your book,” her mother said proudly.
    The driver checked the moorings of the yellow sub on his roof. “I want to shake the hand that shook the hand of John Lennon,” he said to Edna.
    “Gosh, Ed, your hand’s become a second-class relic,” said Sunny.
    “We didn’t shake hands.”
    “But he sang to us. And George let me play his guitar,” her mother boasted.
    The Teenbeat stringer looked skeptical.
    “It’s true, PaulMichelle,” Sunny said. “The Beatles really liked her. They thought she was—”
    “Swell,” Mrs. Livingston interrupted. “The Beatles thought I was swell. And they were nice, too. I felt like I’d known them forever.”
    “So what are those guys really like?” the driver asked.
    “Not what you’d expect,” Edna’s mother said. “They seemed old as the hills. Believe me, those boys are century plants. Those boys were born old.”
    “But what were they like?” PaulMichelle persisted.
    “Real regular and down-to-earth. They were so ordinary! That’s what I loved about them.”
    “Ordinary!” Edna scoffed. “Little do you know.” Was it possible to love someone, with the love the Beatles sang in their close harmonies, without ever knowing that person?
    “Well, I know one thing,” her mother asserted. “Paul explained the hidden symbolism of that Eleanor song to me.”
    “‘Eleanor Rigby!’ What is it?” Sunny asked.
    “I—uh—I can’t remember. It was very hidden. But he told me, he explained it all.”
    “C’mon, Ma. Try to remember. It’s important.”
    “It was something about lonely people. Where they come from, where they belong. There’s a priest in it, a loner who never connects with Eleanor. They never get to know each other, then she dies, and it’s too late. They’re like two ships that pass in the night.”
    “That’s not hidden,” said Edna. “That’s really obvious.”
    Then PaulMichelle started talking about a relative of hers who had emigrated to Liverpool many moons ago and met the real Eleanor Rigby. This relative had revealed the secret meaning of the song to her. In fact, PaulMichelle considered herself an expert on the boys, for she had traveled with the tour since Boston, almost a week, and Neil had given her two of John’s guitar picks, which she’d had made into earrings, see? And she shook her head to make them swing.
    “Who was your favorite, Mrs. L.?” Sunny asked.
    Edna felt her mother weighing her answer. “George,” she said finally. “I liked George Harrison best.”
    “But George is the Spiritual One,” Edna argued. “He’s not your type at all. What about the two motherless boys? What about John and Paul?”
    “George has a mind of his own. He calls a spade a spade, and I admire that. George was my favorite Beatle. But my favorite guy is Neil. Neil has dreamboat eyes.”
    “John, Paul, George, and Neil!” Edna exclaimed in disgust.
    “Who did you like the best, Hon?” Mrs. Livingston asked Sunny.
    “Paul’s her favorite,” Edna said quickly.
    “Paul is All,” agreed PaulMichelle.
    But Sunny twirled a strand of her long dark hair. “There was something about Ringo.”
    “Paul,” Edna said firmly.
    “Remember when the others put on their guitars, and Ringo had nothing but his drumsticks? He looked so unprotected. I guess that’s when I fell for him. And now that I’ve met him,” Sunny continued, “I think Jay Blue is kind of cute.”
    “I don’t get you,” Edna said. Stars were easier to understand, celebrities on elevated stages illuminated by giant lights, who could be resurrected anytime at will within your head.
    “Who was your favorite, Ed?” Sunny asked.
    Headlights from buses pierced the warm August darkness. Edna saw Jay Blue standing alone by the WTRY Beatle Buggy, dabbing at his eyes under his sunglasses.
    “I’m not sure,” she said. Her favorite was the one who’d understood her wish for contact in the dark. But if she lived to be a hundred, she’d never know for certain who that was.
    She felt her mother scrutinizing her. “Those fuzzy blonde hairs under your chin,” Mrs. Livingston said. “I never noticed them before. I have those, too. My own!”
    And she seized Edna in a bone-crushing hug. It was the first maternal embrace Edna could remember, and she endured it stoically, amazed to be touched by this stranger, her mother.

ALICE FULTON has published fiction in The Best American Short Stories, as well as in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly. Her latest book of poems, Felt (W. W. Norton, 2001), received the 2002 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. A collection of her stries is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.

“The Real Eleanor Rigby” appears in our Winter 2003 issue.

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