All families have a curated and generally secret list of art that speaks deeply to their collective experience. Sure, this collection of work could be widely termed culture—but what I’m referencing is the micro version of that. If you think hard enough about it, you can begin to identify your family’s canon. And likely you can even identify what you’ve made canon in your adult life: the albums, movies, and books that seem to belong to you and the people you love. If other people were to study your family, certain things would be in the 101 class non-negotiably—the pieces of art that have shaped your life, made you collectively who you are.
And for my family, one of our most important canonical art treasures is the singer Mary Chapin Carpenter.
On day-long road trips we listened to her entire discography, but the albums we hit repeat on were mainly Come on, Come on; Stones in the Road; and State of the Heart. I listened to Mary Chapin Carpenter prolifically at the point in my development when lyrics started to matter. Mary Chapin Carpenter talked about biking down dirt roads, taking chances regardless of doubts, and walking away from unrequited love. In Carpenter’s songs, women took up space. They made their own fate—they bought “a burrito and a Barq’s, and made a beeline for the park”. In these songs, women were soft enough to fall in love but tough enough to walk away when it wasn’t right. Carpenter was so expansive she became a town in one of her songs. And I loved it—I loved every line.
I was convinced that Mary Chapin Carpenter was a lifelong tomboy, and although I never said it, it seemed like I knew her personally. She was on her bike next to mine as we cut through Essex to meet Ronnell after school to find moon rocks at the playground. When I finally made it through the entire set of monkey bars at eight, she was looking up from the wood chips cheering me on the whole time.
Stones in the Road was the album we listened to when we drove pretty much anywhere. To my grandparents’s house, where I sat quietly on their sage leather sofa with a mug of Diet Pepsi and ice. To soccer practice that my dad coached—our team called “The Jellyfish” lost every game but one that season—I still blame the name. I listened to the lyrics as a salve when friendships were complicated or when I felt somehow different from others—apart from a crowd of kids my peers and I began to call the popular girls.
More and more of my friends were shedding overalls for skirts and flannel for spaghetti straps. More and more were wearing eyeshadow and lipstick. I watched, bewildered, as girls around me turned into butterflies.
It wasn’t so much that I was stuck a caterpillar as I’d always wanted to be a caterpillar. I liked climbing trees, catching frogs, and jumping off swings at full tilt. I liked that the neighborhood boys and I had one uniform—jeans and t-shirts—and that most parents mistook us for one another from front porches when calling for us to come home. I liked doing sommersalts into the neighborhood pool and messy cartwheels through the sprinkler with my shirt off when it got hot enough. I liked watching Mrs. Weaver’s snake with Nathan Swanco and racing Ben Osman to the edge of the field at recess. But there was a line being drawn with me down the middle, and I couldn’t undraw it despite my best efforts. Change was in the air, and I was holding my breath as long as I could.
My sister, as the eldest daughter, had already filled the role of teenage girl by the time I was ten. Sam knew things that were mysterious to me like how to put on mascara without taking out an eyeball or how to match a shirt to a skirt so that strangers might raise their eyebrows and call you stylish. I was thankful my sister had cornered this market because none of it was in my repertoire. Sam’s closet was a riot of color and texture—cerulean blue corduroys, maroon dresses from Express with flowers down the sleeves, and bright green platform shoes from a brand called Rocket Dog. Six years older, Sam had just started secretly smoking Parliaments off our back porch when my parents weren’t home and talking for hours on the phone about her first serious boyfriend—a guy with a mop of blonde hair and a quiet voice who lived down the street. Having recently read Harriet the Spy, I listened to these conversations with an ear at her door, hoping to gather some exciting intel.
I was both grateful that Sam was the daughter I didn’t have to be and also drawn to an older sister worship that had me stealing her Rocket Dogs out of her closet and her Rusted Root CD out of her boombox. My sister seemed confident in a way the kids around me wished they were, and I watched her carefully for clues about this metamorphosis—how did one become naturally cool?
While I was at home, I was allowed to be fully me—coming home with endless collections of rocks in my pockets, tearing Barbie heads off their bodies in defiance of dolls, and listening to Jagged Little Pill at top volumes in my room after my dad unintentionally gave me the CD and an obsession with the lyrics to “You Oughta Know” for Christmas when I was in the fourth grade. I wore overalls for eons, read books in trees, and wondered with the rest of my peers at the sudden proliferation of popular girls around me.
Decades later, I now realize that the popular girls may have just been the first female embodiment of capitalism I’d really seen. I knew them more by their brands than anything else—and I think everyone else did, too. If you were popular, you were wealthy, but not everyone who was wealthy was a popular girl. There was some combination in it: wealth and a knowing of that wealth.
Popular girls shopped at Abercrombie and Fitch, but they also knew how to wear the clothes that they chose and knew how they would be seen by others. Popular girls smelled like a Bath and Body Works store but only enough to pique your interest, never dousing it on after soccer practice like most of the girls I knew.
There was a way you did things, a middle school etiquette, and I still can’t figure out if the popular girls were following it or if they created it themselves. Mention a popular girl’s name, and she would laugh coyly into her hand, as if both tickled that you’d mentioned her and also maybe very slightly mocking your interest. Similar to Taylor Swift’s shocked face when fans applaud her. A knowing and planned humility with an intention I wasn’t close to mustering at ten years old. In fifth grade, I was still trying to figure out how to play the game pogs and making forest yogurt in dirt holes. When I first noticed the emergence of popular girls at recess, I can’t remember if I was enamored or terrified. But I have to imagine it was a healthy amount of of both.
And then it was my tenth birthday. My dad got me a cassette of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Stones in the Road, so I could listen to it whenever I wanted. I could not stop listening to this tape, rewinding it in my room and then listening intently while staring at my ceiling or writing in my journal. One song, John Doe No. 24, was one of the best songs I’d ever heard. A song Carpenter wrote after reading a newspaper clipping about an orphaned boy abandoned in New Orleans. My dad and I would stay in the car in the driveway to finish the song, and now I could listen to the whole thing on my own. It was magic. One of the best gifts I had ever received.
That weekend, my parents threw me a birthday party with my friends and other girls from my class. Disturbing all the other customers at Mama Rosa’s, we collectively demolished what seemed like an infinite number of pepperoni pizzas and drank a few gallons of Sprite until we were roaring with sugar. Back at my house, we ran around aimlessly, listening to music on my CD player while licking cupcake frosting from our fingers. I was alight with all of it, and I was struck with the need to share with all of them—the need to show them what I’d been thinking about. So I asked them to all be quiet while I played the Mary Chapin Carpenter tape wound to the exact right spot: John Doe No. 24.
The saxophone came on, and I saw a few of my friends look at one another, eyebrows up. “No, wait, wait. You really have to listen,” I said, turning up the volume. As the intro continued, I saw the shuffling of their feet as a dismissal and became slightly more desperate. Accidentally nudging the CD player with my elbow, the tape skipped and gave a ripped sound. I opened the holder to find the tape broken, and I immediately, to my humiliation, began to cry.
My dad from across the room came over to me as the girls backed away with wide eyes. I was inconsolable. This was so important. If I’d just shown them the right way. If the tape had just held together. They would have understood. Every road trip, every daydream, every lyric—I would have been seen, and I would have belonged. My dad hugged me until I quieted. It was just us, just the two of us there. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and looked up at him: we locked eyes, and he understood.
The party went on but I never forgot that moment: the closeness I had to myself—who I truly was, and the distance I felt from what the world was becoming. With that change, a desperate fear that I’d never be accepted as myself ever again.
And my dad, walking calmly across the room, holding me in his arms, maybe humming a little bit of Stones in the Road into my ear.
Your memory always astounds me. The details and emotions you bring to life with your words really does transport me to those moments with you. Like I'm watching little ten year old Abi try to figure out the tide.
Oh my word. Family canon. POGS. The baffling mystery of what it means to be a cool girl. Can’t wait to listen to some MCC.