Forty years ago this month, the great Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” was the number one song in the United States.
If I tend to look dazed, I’ve read it someplace that it’s been forty years since that song hit number one. Four decades! Hard to believe. We’re Sheryl and Roger. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Seventeenth Street. Our apartment was great. We had several Nagel prints and a waterbed—because, of course, we did. We lived above a pizza place that made an excellent thin-crust pie but burned its garlic knots with alarming frequency. The smoke from those charred knots was a part of our daily life, seeping through the floorboards and making everything smell like burned garlic knots. The smoke inhalation often made my pulse react. Which is why we often had to go outside to quarrel. I realize now those garlic knots are a metaphor for our relationship. The shiny brushed-egg-white sheen on the surface—but perpetually charred underneath.
