by Lee Smith
“Why couldn’t Daddy have been like that?” I used to ask Mama, but she’d smile and look off down the road. Her mouth turned down when she smiled.
“Your daddy had his good points,” was all she’d say.
Maybe so, but I was too young when he died to remember many of them, or even to remember him very well, since he was a traveling man and mostly always gone. We lived in eleven different towns before Mama and I moved to Welch, and I went to eight different schools all over West Virginia. According to Daddy there was a sure thing right around the corner every time. Mama never said a word. She’d haul out the cardboard boxes which she never threw away and sometimes never even had time to unpack, and we’d put them in the car and off we’d go. We traveled light. You can’t get much of anything together with a life like that. Still, Daddy was sweet. He was slight, could not have weighed more than 135, and even though he slicked his hair down careful as he could, one piece never would stay and fell forward over his eyes. He could really whistle, is the main thing I remember—he could whistle anything. He used to whistle “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” the year it was big, and then he’d bark. He still looked like a boy when he died, so that’s how he has stayed in my mind, as a boy getting out of a car and whistling.
Anyway, Daddy’s car ran off the mountain while he was working for the Jewel Tea Company door to door, and then we moved to Welch, where we stayed put and Lucie was my best friend in the world. I think the piano recital in sixth grade was the first time I caught on to any difference between us.
Now Aunt Adele’s piano recitals were always a very big deal. She’d rent the banquet room of the Draper Hotel and borrow folding chairs from the funeral home. Then she’d have yellow roses in big containers standing on either side of the piano, and colored spotlights rigged up by Uncle Earl. You had to wear a semiformal and gloves. Mama always made my dress and Uncle Earl paid for the material, and of course I got the piano lessons for free too. But I didn’t know that then. Ever since I found out, though, it has made a difference. That’s one reason I have tried to make something of myself and Lonnie, since I realized how hard Aunt Adele and Uncle Earl tried to expose me to culture. I wanted to let them and Mama and everybody else in town know that it took.
I had piano lessons for the longest time and practiced a half an hour a day over at Lucie’s house before I found out I was tone-deaf. But Lucie played like an angel. She wouldn’t practice, either—she’d lie to her mother and say she had, but she hadn’t. Still she had talent running out of her little finger—later this made me jealous. On the night of the recital when we were in fifth grade, Lucie played ahead of me, “Rustle of Spring,” a flowery, runny piece, and she was so good that all the parents in the folding chairs sat absolutely still for a second before they burst into applause. Lucie curtsied, cool as a cucumber, like it was nothing at all. Aunt Adele had taught us all to curtsy.
Then it was my turn. I’ll never forget it. I wore a pale blue dress with spaghetti straps and a ruffle around the bottom, and new white shoes with Cuban heels. Those were my first heels. My piece was the “Trish-Trash Polka.” I could see my mama in the audience, and Uncle Earl and Aunt Adele, and everybody who was anybody in town. I started my piece. Now this was a piece with a refrain between each section and a great big finale at the end. Only, when I was almost through I realized I couldn’t remember how to begin the ending. So I played the refrain again, and when that didn’t work I played the part before the refrain, and then I played the refrain again. I could feel the spot-light shining hotter and hotter on my face, I could see Aunt Adele in her blue sequined evening dress lean forward in her chair. I played the refrain again. I heard somebody clear their throat and Susie Milligan, who I hated, start to giggle. I played the refrain again. I played it four more times and then I just stood up and said, “I’m sorry, I forgot my piece.” Everybody clapped and clapped but they didn’t fool me, I locked myself in the bathroom for the rest of the recital and wouldn’t go over to Lucie’s for two whole days.
We grew apart a little, after that. I quit taking piano. Lucie got interested in boys. But we still went to the movies every weekend, same as always, and sat together in church and in school, and read Teen magazine swinging in the swing on her front porch. The big break didn’t come until 1956, I can tell you exactly because of Elvis Presley. That was the year when “Heartbreak Hotel” hit so big.
Now I had never heard of Elvis Presley until Lucie called me on the phone one day after school—it was winter—and said I had better come over there right away. “I’m busy,” I said, which I was, doing I think it was math. “Come on over here anyway,” Lucie said. “It’s real important.” So I did, and when I got there she was jumping all around the record player in the living room, saying, “June, you’ve just got to listen to this.” Nobody else seemed to be at home right then, I remember wondering where her little brothers were. So I sat down in Uncle Earl’s chair and she put one of those little red plastic rings on the record, it was a forty-five, to make it work on their record player. “Just wait,” Lucie said. She held on to the edge of the record player so hard that her fingers were white and her eyes shone out from her white face in a dark liquid way I had never seen before, a way which seemed to me somehow scary. It was starting to get dark outside. She pushed a button, the forty-five dropped. Elvis came on.
I had never heard anything like it, the way his voice went way down and trembly on “I’m so lonely, baby, I’m just so lonely I could die.” Elvis’s voice seemed to fill up Lucie’s whole darkening living room with something hot and crazy and full of pain. It made me think about things I didn’t want to, such as Uncle Earl sending Aunt Adele all those roses and my own mama carrying cardboard boxes around after Daddy or just standing on the back porch and staring at nothing, which I had found her doing only a couple of days before Lucie played Elvis for me, standing on the back porch staring at an old photograph of her and Daddy they had made one time at a fair, dressed up in sailor suits. She said they rented the sailor suits from the photographer. When I came out on the porch, she put the picture in her apron pocket but I saw. “It’s down at the end of Lonely Street,” Elvis sang. I thought I was coming down with a virus, I stood up to go. Lucie’s face shone out white in the darkness of her living room. “Don’t you just love it,” she said. I didn’t say a thing.
I left, followed by the shaking, wanting voice of Elvis across the freezing grass. So this is how I remember it—the end of Lucie and me. Of course it wasn’t truly the end, I know that, just like I know it must not have been longer than a half-hour after that when Aunt Adele came in from wherever she was, probably the grocery store, rustling her paper bags, and Uncle Earl came in from the Rexall puffing on his cigar, and the boys came back from wherever they were and started kidding Lucie about Elvis. Which they did for the next two years. I know Lucie didn’t sit there in the rocking dark forever, nobody does that, the same way I know I didn’t play the refrain of the “Trish-Trash Polka” over and over forever either, but still it seems like it.
Lucie got her hair cut in a pixie, painted her fingernails purple, started smoking Winston cigarettes and cutting school, and ran off in our senior year with a disc jockey named Horace Bean. She broke Uncle Earl’s heart and gave Aunt Adele migraine headaches. I stayed home working part-time at the dime store and taking care of Mama, who got worse and worse. I was Miss Welch High School as I said. In the fall of my senior year I got engaged to Lonnie Russell, the quarterback.
* * *
Whole years went by after that when I didn’t see Lucie although I kept up with her through Aunt Adele and Uncle Earl. Horace Bean didn’t last long—Uncle Earl had him annulled right away. Then Lucie went to college, then she taught school in Richmond and led the life of a gay divorcée. I didn’t care much one way or the other. I was working two jobs to put Lonnie through school at the community college, trying to keep a decent house and take care of Mama who was living with us then. Tw
ice while Lonnie was working for Grassy Creek Coal—this was his first job after college—they tried to send him off to other places. One time to Texas and one time to north Alabama. “Count me out!” I said. I didn’t want to try to move Mama and besides I think you ought to stay in a place where people know you, and know who you are. I just couldn’t see Texas, all that wind and sand, or north Alabama, or even Bluefield where Lonnie wanted to buy into a mine explosives company and would have made a lot of money I admit as it turned out, if he had. But I just couldn’t see it. We stayed in Welch, and eventually Lonnie started his own mine explosives company which has done so well and I always kept the books for him. We were renting Mrs. Bradshaw’s house in town and I was pregnant the summer Lucie came back and ran into Doug Young.
Ran into is exactly right! But actually he ran into us. Lucie and I were sitting out in my front yard on the lawn chairs getting some sun and trying to talk which was hard to do, our lives were so different by then, when here came a VISTA jogging up the road, sweat pouring down all over him. This was during the Poverty Program, we had VISTAs all over the place then. And you knew it would have to be a foreigner, to run in the sun that way.
He ran right up to the gate and stopped dead in his tracks, looking at Lucie. Lucie was twenty-two or twenty-three by then, I guess, and so was I, but I had been married for years. I was as big as a house, I still have these stretch marks I got from Richie. Lucie stood up and went over to the gate to say hello and that was it. You couldn’t have pried them apart with a crowbar the rest of that summer long. Aunt Adele and Uncle Earl were just beside themselves too—at last Lucie was going with somebody worth his salt, Uncle Earl said. Lonnie and I thought he was weird, though, which he was. In addition to the jogging, he used to climb the mountains for fun, which nobody around here has ever done. Or maybe he was just ahead of his time. Now we have all this ecology and physical fitness but nobody had it then. Lucie climbed with him. He used to spend hours testing children’s eyes away up in the hollers, things like that. That stuff was part of his job. Lucie helped him. In fact she never went back to Richmond at all, just moved into his trailer on Guesses’ Fork, and Uncle Earl and Aunt Adele never said a word because he had gone to Princeton.
I tried to steer clear of Lucie, she made me nervous as I said. She had this way of squinting her eyes when she looked at things, you never could tell what she thought or what she might take it into her head to do next. Such as live in a trailer with a VISTA when everyone knew it. I was so embarrassed. But Lonnie surprised me too, he said it was none of my business. I couldn’t get over it—there was none of that between us, you can be sure, until we got married. Lonnie said I drove him crazy and especially my breasts, but I said no handling the merchandise! So it made me uneasy that summer the way they carried on.
And then the night of the Moon Landing they asked to come over to watch it on our TV, Doug naturally not having one in that trailer. It was so hot. It must have been ninety that day, and the heat never slacked off at all as night came on. I had fixed a big dinner for everybody—fried chicken and potato salad, even Lonnie would have to tell you I’m a good cook—but then after all that I got so hot I had to lay in the bathtub in the cold water for a while I felt so tired. My stomach stuck up round and white above the water where I lay, I could see the baby moving around in there. I could hear them all in the living room—Lucie and Doug and Lonnie—talking and laughing, I could hear the TV. I felt like I was miles and miles away. By the time I got out there I could see they had all had several drinks of bourbon, which Doug had brought over. Lonnie fixed me one too and I sipped along to be sociable, but it was ten o’clock before we ate and eleven o’clock before the astronauts reached the moon. Right before that, when I was in the kitchen straightening up, Lucie came in and splashed cold water all over her face. I had noticed she didn’t eat much, so I asked her how she felt.
“Well,” she said, “June, I might as well tell you.” Lucie’s eyes were dark and shining even with all the makeup washed off.
“Tell me what?” I was not so sure I wanted to know.
“I’m pregnant,” Lucie said. “Me too.” She looked absolutely delighted.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Did you take a rabbit test yet?”
“No, but I’m sure,” Lucie said. “I can just tell. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Well”—I had to sit down in a chair—“I guess it is, if you’re going to get married, I mean.”
Lucie looked fifteen years old with her dark hair curling around her face.
“I haven’t decided,” she said.
She didn’t get married either, as it turned out, at least not to Doug Young. She had Tommy all by herself in Washington, then sent him home for a year for Aunt Adele to raise while she got some other degree, and then she sent for him and after a while she married the professor she’s still married to now. Aunt Adele kept on teaching piano that year and hired a high school girl to look after Tommy. Aunt Adele was just fine except for the occasional migraine.
But you could have knocked me over with a feather the night of the Moon Landing when Lucie said that. I didn’t even have time to answer because here was Lonnie at the kitchen door saying, “Come on, girls, they made it!” and grabbing me up with a big kiss so we had to go watch. One small step for man, one large step for mankind. It reminded me of that game Lucie and I used to play, Giant Step. It didn’t seem any realer than that, them in their space suits like snowmen, walking around on the moon.
And then of course the next morning you found out that Teddy Kennedy was driving around with Mary Jo Kopechne at exactly the same time, but it was the day after that before it really hit the news. Now I wonder, did Mary Jo Kopechne think she was in love too? Anyway it seems so strange to me now that it happened that night, all of it, and all of us sitting there burning up in that rented house drinking bourbon and watching the TV news. Lonnie put a lampshade on his head and started walking around stiff-legged like a moon man, I got to giggling and Lucie did too. I laughed so hard I thought I would go into labor right then and there but I did not. We all laughed some more, and drank some more bourbon, and I can’t even remember when they left.
I remember being in the bed with Lonnie though later, him and me with no sheet and the light over Dawson’s Store shining in the window where I’d forgotten to pull the drapes. I got up to do it then but Lonnie said, “Leave it, I like to look at you,” even as big as I was. We couldn’t do anything then of course because I was too far along but I remember we went to sleep like that, me lying on my side and Lonnie’s arms tight around me, him breathing through my hair into my ear, the streetlight shining white across the bed.
* * *
Lucie and I stood there looking at the Lunar Module which was a whole lot bigger than I had thought, maybe because we had watched it on that little old black-and-white TV so long ago. “Don’t you remember?” Lucie said, and I said yes.
But the Lunar Module itself was so pretty in a weird kind of way—all shiny, like a combination of lace and tinfoil, like Cinderella’s coach on its spidery legs. It looked magic to me right then, and I could feel my face floating up again over the crowd.
Lucie was giving advice. “You know, June,” she said, “even if Lonnie is giving you plenty of money”—which he was, he’s always been so generous to a fault—“the first thing you need to do now is get a job.” I have always thought a woman should stay at home if humanly possible, so this went against my grain. “You need to get out, get a job,” Lucie went on.
“What would I do?” I asked from my face which was floating way up there above us all.
“Well,” Lucie said, looking at my needlepoint purse, “what about a craft shop or something? You always were creative.”
“A craft shop!” my voice said, and then it said, “Creative! I guess I am. I guess I’m real creative, as a matter of fact. I think I made it all up, Lucie, all of it, my marriage and Lonnie too. You r
emember Lonnie? Well let me tell you, I just made him up.”
As soon as I said this, I knew it was true.
Lucie looked real surprised. But then she laughed, a tinkling laugh as silver as the silver on the Lunar Module before us, or maybe I mixed it all up in my head, I was mixing up the way things looked with how they sounded because my head was so far away.
“It was finished a long time ago,” I said. “We were just dragging it out and Lonnie was so unhappy and I wouldn’t listen or even let on that I noticed. I thought if he didn’t say it, then maybe it would all go away. But it was my fault too, Lucie”—I could see this for the first time, being in Outer Space—“I tell you, I made Lonnie up.”
“That’s all right,” Lucie said. “People do that,” and then all of a sudden I forgave her being so wild and leaving Tommy that year with Aunt Adele and playing “Rustle of Spring” so well. But Lucie didn’t even need it, my forgiveness. All of a sudden I knew that too.
“You’ll be okay,” Lucie said. “Hey!” She reached out to grab Tommy and Richie, who came running past like the wind. “Listen,” she told them, “when this thing landed on the moon, your mom and I were right together in the same room watching it. We saw it land together, and we were both pregnant, so that means you were both in our stomachs right then, that long ago, and we were together watching. And now you’re twelve years old. Isn’t that amazing?” I could tell by Lucie’s voice that she really did think it was amazing, just like I did.