Jack the Giant Killer by Nerissa Nields

My four-year-old is obsessed with my ex-husband. 

“That is David Nields,” says Johnny pointing at a circle with dots for eyes, a big U for a smile, and two stick legs coming down from the circle’s bottom. He draws two more sticks coming out from the sides and attaches one to a smaller but similarly drawn figure to the right. This circle gets a tuft of Ernie-and-Burt hair. “That’s you, Mama. You are holding David Nields’ hand because he likes you.”

Johnny says, “DavidNields” as one word, like “Madonna” or “Bono.” He doesn’t seem to recognize the last name as the hyphenated part of his own. For that matter, he does not know that before I met his father––Tom––I was once married to this stick figure. He only knows that David Nields was one of the three Daves in my band in the 90s: The Nields, a folk-rock family band. For ten years, we toured the continent in a fifteen-passenger van, pulling a small trailer full of our gear, our bodies packed alongside our guitars, duffel bags, notebooks and used paperbacks. Loading in and out of rock clubs around the country was like moving into and out of a small apartment twice a day, 340 days a year. 

We have the CDs to prove it. Recently, Johnny’s dragged these dust magnets down from the shelf, where they’d been filed under “N” between Nirvana and Oasis. He plays them incessantly, jamming along with his collection of cardboard guitars or his teal ukulele. All the accoutrements of my old indie-folk-rock band have become props and characters in the world of his imaginative play.
It’s a shock to hear these CDs again. My sister Katryna and I still perform as a duo in less-rock-more-folk guise. But certain songs went silent after David left both me and the band. These include the songs David wrote as well as the ones he and I co-wrote. Partly out of writerly narcissism, partly from not wanting to give him the airtime, it’s my songs we continue to play. So some of our best songs have been shut in those square plastic boxes out of earshot for decades. 

Johnny pulled down our 1994 CD Bob on the Ceiling, and when he shunned “James” (a co-write) in favor of “Be Nice To Me” (all mine) I had a sweet moment of schadenfreude, quickly dashed when he turned the repeat knob to play David’s opening guitar solo, running from the music room to the kitchen to stand under the Bose speakers and hear it reverberate off the chrome fixtures, a look of pure wonder in his eyes. 

Tom and I exchange a look. “Do you know,” he says, “I’ve had to think more about David Nields this month than I ever did when we were dating?”

Tom and I talk a lot about second chances, the miracle of finding each other, getting to start over. I still don’t understand what I did to be rewarded by his love and the subsequent and miraculous births of our two healthy, beautiful, hilarious children. Both of us were married before, each for about a decade. Neither of us had kids. We’d considered ourselves lucky. When a marriage ends, one’s ex takes with them an entire library’s worth of shared life experiences and memories. Children might hold some of these, but without witnesses, only the couple remains the repository for those ten years, and if they never communicate, a lot is conveniently forgotten. 

In some ways, forgetting can be a good thing: sometimes I’m glad Tom didn’t know my twenty-something self, bulimic and obsessed with success. He in turn is glad he had some years to learn how to stand on his own, outgrow his need for his lover to share his every interest, move through the world together in lock step. “You like biking? Wow! I like biking! Let’s get married!” is his quip about his proposal to his first wife. But at other times, when I run into a couple who saw each other across the rougher terrains of late-adolescence and early adulthood––those early mid-life crises and crucibles from which we emerge, if we’re lucky, a bit sadder, wiser and more grateful––I wish Tom and I had something tangible from those tender years, something inchoate we could find in a small box and play on the stereo.

Today, Johnny’s discovered “Jack the Giant Killer,” another co-write. My 30-year-old voice meets me in the kitchen on a tidal wave of jangly millennial guitars:

Don’t laugh at me, do you see me?
Yesterday I was afraid but that’s over.

The song is triumphant––the ascendency of youth over age––and Johnny sits at the kitchen island transfixed, gazing into the middle distance as he listens. I join him, remembering the day in the studio where Moxy Früvous––a Canadian band of similar vintage––added their dissonant “la la’s” and four-part slides under the choruses. In the summer of 1999, David and I drove home from the studio every night listening to the cassette playbacks, the track getting fatter and fatter with each element we added. If I hadn’t been so competitive, wanting the songs I’d written alone to be the first cut, the single–– if I’d obeyed the first rule of the rock and roll band (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts)––we might have had a hit with this song.

When David told me he couldn’t stay in the marriage I felt like I’d been slammed with a rogue fastball I hadn’t seen coming. Our marriage was a mosaic of shared interests: music, literature, theater, but most of all, the band. There’s an image of us (Johnny recently showed me) on the inside of one of our CDs, backs turned to the camera, leaving the stage, arms around each other’s waists. We look more like teammates than lovers. It’s hard to say which caused what: the band’s failure dissolving us, or our breakup killing the band. 

Thirty years of fighting tears are over.
Yeah, they’re over
Cause I’m Jack the Giant Killer.

But the band plays on, in our living room, and in the life of our family, and even still onstage, though less frequently. Johnny’s uncle is Dave Chalfant our bass player-turned-guitar player and producer––married to Katryna, the band’s lead singer. When we come over to their house for dinner, Dave pulls out his guitars and basses to satisfy Johnny’s curiosity about exactly which model played on which song. Johnny regularly calls Dave to double-check. He also calls our drummer Dave Hower just to chat. He’s been asking to call the third Dave, and I’ve sidestepped. Today, heart in my throat, I relent. 

“What are you going to say to him?” I ask, tapping the name into my iPhone.

“That I wuv him,” says Johnny, as if to say, What else?

We let it ring and ring. He knows my number. “Hello?” says a familiar voice, cracking on the second syllable. Johnny deftly touches the speakerphone icon. 

“How many guitars do you have?” he calls into the phone, a tiny Facebook icon of an aging David in the upper right corner.

“You might want to say who you are,” I suggest in a low voice.

“This is Johnny.”

“Oh,” says David, as if he were somehow expecting the call, and I am impressed at his quick shift to composure, his ease in speaking with a pre-kindergartener. “Four. A Martin, a big orange Yamaha that looks like a Gretch, a Dan Electro and an Epiphone bass. Why do you ask?” 

“You have a fan,” I say. And Johnny proceeds to list the songs he loves. “Love and China” (my song about our breakup), “Alfred Hitchcock,” “Jack the Giant Killer.” 

“Yeah,” says David. “That’s a good one.” His disembodied voice deepens, sounds more like his old self. “I remember singing through the telephone into my amp to get that crazy sound at the beginning. Cool effect.”

“We should’ve started the record with it,” I blurt, taking the phone. And then, I immediately think: But should have why? So radio would have played this disc, we would have continued playing in legendary but tiny rock clubs for a few more years, maybe gotten a Grammy nod and then broken up? Or—best-case scenario—we had the kind of career we dreamed of when we were honeymooning at Niagara. Let’s say we sang for President Obama, toured Europe, lived half the year in a tour bus, had sneakers and ice cream flavors named for us, made enough money to never have to worry about health insurance and retirement. What then?

I wouldn’t have this four-year-old drumming with pencils on the counter. 

“Nah,” says David. “I don’t remember anyone arguing for that. I think we all agreed on the sequence of the record.”

“Let me talk to DavidNields!” shouts Johnny, reaching for the phone. I hand it back to him and he holds the iPhone like a mic. “What guitar do you play on all the songs?” 

After David finishes cataloguing his equipment for Johnny, I take the phone back to tell him about the stick figures and the replaying of his opening guitar solos. I wish him well.

Later Johnny asks if he can bring DavidNields to school for “N” week, which is coming up soon. I say he can bring a picture of DavidNields. So he draws a picture of Jack the Giant Killer—a little head with a frown and extremely long sticks for legs––and I realize he thinks, as one would, that Jack is a gigantic killer. 

“Actually,” I say, bringing him in to my chest. “Jack is a little boy just like you. And he is very brave, so brave that he doesn’t let big scary monsters stop him from doing what he needs to do.”

Johnny puts his head on my shoulder. Then he bounds off. I sit at the kitchen table, fingering the frayed cover of Gotta Get Over Greta, artwork by Stefan Sagmeister, now a celebrated genius we were lucky enough to have worked with on his way up. This cover, this repository, is precious to me for so many reasons, and I don’t have a spare. The booklet is about to come apart at the staples from Johnny’s curious perusals. Should I hide it from him, or let him slowly and lovingly destroy it?

The beginning of “Jack” comes back on the speakers. I get up and creep around the corner. Johnny is standing on a chair in order to reach the knobs, holding his teal ukulele and a Beatles pick. He’s singing along, softly, completely lost in his rock and roll fantasy. He catches me watching him. 

“Mama,” he says, his eyes pleading, halfway between pride and shame. “Go.” 

So I do. It’s not really my song anymore, if it ever was.

Nerissa Nields is a writer, musician/songwriter, and founding member of indie-folk-rock band The Nields. Her short fiction, non-fiction and criticism have appeared in J Journal, Brevity, The Maine Review, American Songwriter and many others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA (English) from Yale University. She lives in western Massachusetts and is currently working on a novel about a family band.

18 April 2024