Page 25 of Night Songs

After the success of our performance, Darlene gave us a regular spot at the Indigo Lounge, and we started to hone our show into something less slapdash.

I’d heard someone ask when the country girl with the sweet voice was playing, and I didn’t want that to be my only identity. I saw other acts pretending to be big, clowny hillbillies. Some called it pride, but I didn’t see how jumping around, acting like a poor, ignorant idiot showed pride. To me, being a hillbilly was a refusal to let anyone tell me who I was.

And I wanted a new look.

But it was more than that, of course. Every time we went onstage, I worried someone would recognize me and turn me in. I didn’t just need a stage costume—I needed adisguise.

Hess and I stood in our underwear in front of the floor-length mirror in Phoebe’s room, watching each other in the glass as Phoebe ran a tape measure down the lengths of us. We’d seen each other in bathing suits plenty of times that spring, but there was something more intimate in the thin, pale nylons against our skin. My nipples were little pricks against my bra, and I hoped Phoebe would chalk it up to the breeze running through the room.

“So. Tell me what’s in your head.”

I took out a few pictures from magazines, of Hollywood starlets with their big, smooth platinum hair. Phoebe studied the photos, then dove into the artful garbage dump of her room and pulled out a periwinkle box. She took off the lid and reverently lifted a large blonde wig up by its roots and held it in front of me.

It glowed like a holy artifact.

When I nodded, she gave me a snipped foot of pantyhose, and I stuffed my unruly hair into it. She carefully placed the wig on my head and pulled it left and right. Then she turned me around to face the mirror.

The effect was arresting. I have such a tiny body, and the largesse of the hair and its polished metal color—well, it was imposing. Like a weapon fresh out of the military lab. It inspired awe, and maybe a little fear. It was exactly what I was looking for.

For the makeup, I asked for the full Pauline—a woman who used to sell herself around the logging camps near the holler. She painted her makeup so thick you couldn’t see what was under it. Like a beautiful mask. That’s what I wanted.

Phoebe had her own vision for the clothes. She could spin the most unexpected whimsy; she was the one responsible for Tima’s enchanting silver suit. She’d watched her sing one night on the porch under a full moon, and a vision had come to her, of Tima dipped in moonlight.

For us, she’d taken inspiration from an afternoon we’d spent together in a wildflower meadow. She’d constructed a butterfly wing pattern out of strips of iridescent cloth in different colors, so that each dress looked like a psychedelic quilt, the colors shifting and coming alive as they transformed across the surface of the fabric.

I trailed my fingers over the skirt, and I couldn’t believe it was made for me. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

When we walked onstage that night, it felt like we were emerging as something new. I’d morphed inside my hillbilly chrysalis, and in that moment under the spotlight, I burst through it with two feet of blonde hair and a riot of color.

I stepped up to the mic and for the first time, introduced us as the Walker Sisters. It was my idea—it added an extra layer of protection to my identity, and if people thought we were sisters, they wouldn’t wonder at our closeness.

We’d learned our lesson that first show—the audience wanted to hear songs they already knew, even if we changed them up a bit. Our specialty was taking familiar ballads and speeding them up so you could shake to them like the Monkees or the Beatles.

But that night our sound was different. Like it’d been dipped in nectar and rolled in butterfly shimmer. Since Hess and I had started fooling around, our voices had changed—I could hear it in the harmony when we sang. The touching and retreating, touching and retreating, the space between us charged with a palpable force.

The audience could feel it, too.

The heat.

It was late when I emerged in my cotton dress to close up for the night. A cool, composed man in a cream suit stood out among the red-faced cowboys and sweat-slick girls. While I emptied glasses and scrubbed the bar, he leaned against it and asked me where else we played and other probing questions. I thought he was hitting on me, and I answered with a polite distance.

Hess and I never talked openly about what we were doing or how we felt about each other, but there was an understanding that we would be true to one another. I didn’t want anyone but her.

After I’d finished closing and was ready to strip off my apron and tell everyone to go home to their mamas, the man got down to business.

“Miss Lulabelle, my name is Randy Kane, and I work at ACM Records. I’d like to record you and your sister singing a few songs, maybe put together enough for an album. Y’all got something real special here.”

I thought he was blowing rainbows up my skirt. “Bullshit.”

He choked on his whiskey. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes, ma’am. This is a real offer. What do you say?”

I called Hess over, and he repeated everything to her. Hess, ever the cool operator, asked him how much he was going to pay us. That hadn’t even crossed my mind. I’d have done it for free.

After a bit of negotiating, he gave us an address and a time for the next day. We waited until he’d left the bar before screeching up at the ceiling like cats. Hess took me by the waist and we started dancing around the room to our own tired voices singing Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Darlene came out to see what the racket was, and I told her what had happened. She smiled, but she also looked a little worried, and she told us to be careful.