The Screen Door Slams / Mary's Dress Waves

Has there ever been a better 7-word line in the history of song lyrics (or literature/oratory/poetry for that matter) than those found in today's title? Some of you may nominate 7 words from other songs. Like "I want a name when I lose" or "Your uncle was a crooked French Canadian" or "This year Halloween fell on a weekend" or "Never meant to make your daughter cry" or even "They leave suspicious things in the sink." But I choose the first seven words of Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road : "The screen door slams. Mary's dress waves."

First of all, Bruce gets two sentences out of those seven words. Now, I'm no word economist, but in music you often have to get your message out quickly. And if you're telling the history of America in a four-minute chorusless song like Thunder Road, as Bruce is doing, you've got to make your words count. Let's break it down DJ Quik-style, sentence by sentence.

Sentence 1: "The screen door slams." First, the choice of "the" over "a." "A" means distance, watching the door slam from a far-removed perch. "The" indicates "let's get close and watch this scene." We're either in the house or right outside. And it's a screen door. Screen doors mean summer. Or maybe late spring, the time of year when people get out of towns full of losers while they're still young. Screen doors evoke shoddy workmanship (they never last) and invading mosquitos. In this song, above all else, the screen door represents something penetrable (a shaky love, a faded longing, a man with a plan that's not so well thought out). And it slams. It's an odd sound, that of a screen door slamming. A real door, with knobs and locks, shakes foundations and startles children and cats. A screen doors volleys and flails, causing only a flinch of recognition if it's lucky. We don't know (yet) if the real door is open or not, slammed or gently urged to close, propped open by a guitar case with stickers of bands that the narrator thinks represent boundless youth but really there'll be reunion tours he'd never have imagined (and what's wrong with that?). We do, however, know about the screen door. But the most important thing to take from this line is that something big has happened, a change is already in the making. The door is no longer open. We're inside or outside but we don't have the same options. A perfect four-word exposition, and not a forced noirish gesture to be found.

Sentence 2: "Mary's dress waves." Mary. Mother of Christ, yes, but back in 1975, the name Mary was a signifier of an average American woman. Mary on a farm, tending the crops. Mary in the suburbs, trimming the bushes. Mary in the city, working the streets. But even then Mary was a little old-fashioned. If he wanted a youthful name of the moment, Bruce would have chosen Cheryl or Karen or Kathy or Cathy. With Mary, he was going for someone older than the narrator, about 30, maybe a single mother of a child from another man (a foreman perhaps). Or you could think he was setting the whole song in the past, though that notion would disappear by the song's end. And she was wearing a dress. Even in '75, a young carefree New Jersey woman would be expected to wear jeans in late spring or summer. A dress was a prim formal gesture. Mary must have had big plans. Perhaps a trip to the county fair. Or to a roadhouse. Or to a Gary U.S. Bonds concert at the Stone Pony. And the dress waves. From the breeze of the slamming screen door, with a contribution perhaps from an outside wind. A fierce wind, an omen breeze. A foreshadowing wind (images of winds, dresses, gowns, etc. permeate). And taken all together, "Mary's dress waves" is kind of a sexy image, a provocative story told of a woman who, we learn in the next line, dances "like a vision."

So in seven words, Springsteen juxtaposes ineffectual violence (the screen door slamming) and fading innocence (Mary's dress waving), tossing in a reference to time and place (the screen door), ending with a call to action (waves). And the song fulfills the promise of those first seven words, ending with Young Bruce out-harmonica-ing Old Dylan by an east central Jersey mile, perhaps a mile of road on Highway 9, signaling a new generation where the promises of youth don't get broken by the winds of cynicism. No, they just get broken.