Music summons memories. A few bars of a song are enough to make us remember where we were and how it felt, physically and emotionally, to be in a particular place and time. Lulu singing To Sir With Love commands my full attention the same way it did when I was 12. Play Yellow Submarine, and I am in high school, sitting at the back of the bus serenading the aging driver with the girls from St. Mary’s Home: “We all ride in a yellow bus with John, a yellow bus with John, a yellow bus with John.”

There is one song that is embedded with some of the darker memories of what I call my past life. The first time I heard it was at the beginning of the summer in 1980. I was standing in the kitchen of our apartment on the second floor of an old stone house. The rising sun appeared like a flat orange disk suspended in a white sky that foretold a day that would be thick with heat. Up before dawn and dressed for the beach, I stared into the leafy shadows of the tall oaks in a neighbor’s yard and drank a mug of tea while I waited for my husband to wake up. His parents had been expecting us the day before. We had promised to be there for Sunday breakfast but it was peaceful while he slept.

The radio on the windowsill was tuned to Michael Tozzi’s early morning show with the volume on low. A familiar voice singing a song I’d never heard drew my attention. Guitar chords hummed like tires on a lonesome highway. I didn’t know the name of the song, but the moody lyrics caught my heart up in my throat. Rickie Lee Jones made wily use of oil company names like Standard and Mobil and sang of  “living in the world, rather than a shell.” A current of emotional yearning surged through me. I should have grabbed the car keys right then and gone wherever the road took me, maybe all the way back to the Pacific Northwest, where at least I had been happy. Instead, I turned off the radio and gazed out the window.

 

I was 24 and stunned by how far off course my life had gone. Marriage was a painful mistake. The year before, I had left my husband and made a mess of things. A brief affair solved nothing, and gave my spouse the ammunition he needed to justify the mistreatment that had sent me out the door in the first place.

During that first separation, my mother and my husband had exerted relentless pressure to keep me in the marriage. I went home and left my job to finish college. I took courses during the day and typed patents and medical textbooks at night. For most of the intervening year, I had seen very little of my husband, my mother, or the young man who seemed at the time to be the only person who found any good in me. In May, when the academic year ended, I returned to day work. The pay was better and I needed some sleep. Being on the old schedule carried a steep downside. I saw more of my husband and my old flame. Time had not improved my relationship with one or diminished my attraction to the other.

Now it was June, and I was stalled, behaving badly, staying out all night, acting like I was already gone. Rickie Lee’s voice on the airwaves was a sign warning me this could be my last chance to leave, but I couldn’t make a decision. Instead, I put on my game face and spent the day at the shore with my husband’s family and friends.

 

The rest of the day is a blank space in my memory, but the evening is indelible. We were on our way home and had been on the highway for only a few minutes when our frustrations boiled over again. My husband swung at me, side-armed. His closed fist thumped my collar bone. When I tried to move away from him, he yanked the strap of my tank top until it stretched and began to tear. Somehow I convinced him to let me out of the car. He rolled to a stop, shoved me out onto the shoulder of the Garden State Parkway and drove off.

I backed away from traffic into the lengthening shadow of the trees. Shock and weariness slowed my thinking. Before I could plan my next step, he had sped back down the shoulder, leaned over and pushed open the passenger door. We rode home in sullen silence. He left the next day. He came back once, drunk and angry. Later, when our positions were reversed, I would better understand the other side of betrayal. That night, my own anguish and fear were all that mattered. I shouted at him to leave until he did, but only after backhanding me across the face hard enough to knock me to the floor. He stayed away for the rest of the summer, until I bowed again to familial pressure and tried for the next six years to stay married.

 

That unnamed song came back to me in the summer of 1986. By then, I’d left my husband for the last time. On a peaceful Sunday afternoon spent with new friends in a house across the river from New York, someone put a Rickie Lee Jones record on the turntable. I described the song I’d heard on that other summer Sunday and one of the women told me the name. A few weeks later, while rummaging through a table of remaindered cassette tapes on my lunch hour, I found Rickie Lee Jones’ first, self-titled album, and there was the lost song: Last Chance Texaco.

I listened to her music for the rest of the summer. Whenever I had second thoughts about leaving, Rickie Lee’s voice, rising and stretching out “the l-a-s-t chance,” evoked the troubling memories that strengthened my resolve to forge ahead with a new life. I was lucky to recognize the last chance when it came around again.

 

Photo source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:IvoShandor/Illinois/Livingston_County/Dwight,_Illinois/Ambler%27s_Texaco_Gas_Station