“I lied. There isn’t any good news,” Ollie said.
“We also missed the Wild Potato buffet,” G-Ray added. “That was a total bummer.”
Claire looked at him.
G-Ray shrugged. “I love potatoes, man. They’re like nature’s superfood. And to combine that with a buffet. A potato buffet is, like, my idea of heaven. All the potatoes you can eat any way you can imagine. With sour cream. Butter. Bacon bits. Ranch dressing. Vinegar. Cheese. Man, just the cheese alone is enough to make a grown man cry. Then there’s the weird stuff. Like olives and onions and broccoli and…”
“She gets the picture, G-Ray,” Ollie said. “You love potatoes.”
“Yeah, man, total bummer,” he said.
Claire said, “Did you know that the buffet is an Oklahoma invention? People talk about Henry Ford being the creator of the assembly line, but the history books never mention Everett P. Bolger. He took the idea of the assembly line and applied it to food. The very first buffet was in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”
“Really?” G-Ray said.
Claire laughed. “No. I just made that up. Pretty good, though, huh?”
G-Ray laughed. “Yeah, man, you really had me going. Did you know sandwiches were named after the Earl of Sandwich?”
“I thought they were first made in the town of Sandwich, Maine,” Claire said.
“Nope. The Earl invented them. He was playing cards and didn’t want sticky fingers when he snacked. So he took two pieces of bread and put his ham in between and Voila! No mess on the cards and the sandwich was created.”
“Hmmm… that’s a good story. Do you know how the ice cream cone was invented?” Claire didn’t wait for a reply, “At the Chicago World’s Fair. The ice cream man ran out of paper cups to dip the ice cream into. So he got together with the guy selling waffles. They rolled up the waffles in a cone, stuck in the ice cream, and the rest is history.”
Ollie couldn’t stand the food chitchat any longer. “Do you two mind? We were discussing some serious stuff before you all went off on the food tangent.”
Claire popped another hard candy into her mouth. “Candy?” she asked, offering one to Ollie. “They’re quite tasty.”
“No,” Ollie said, waving it away.
“Sorry, Ollie,” G-Ray said, peering at her in the rear view mirror. “Go ahead and discuss the serious stuff.”
Ollie said, “Claire, you need to call Scarlet. She’s madder than a wet hen.”
“All this food talk has made me hungry,” Claire said, ignoring Ollie.
“Me, too,” G-Ray agreed.
Claire pointed to a building on the right side of the road. “Look, a Waffle House! Let’s stop there!”
“Good call,” G-Ray said. He turned on the blinker.
“We can’t stop now,” Ollie said. “We’ve only just begun.”
“Hey, isn’t that a Karen Carpenter song?” Claire said, giggling. Then she sang a few bars to test it out.
“We are not stopping!” Ollie exploded.
Claire turned in her seat and smiled at Ollie. “We have to stop, Ollie. It’s like divine intervention. I was talking about waffles, then there’s a Waffle House.”
“Yeah, it’s like our destiny, man,” G-Ray said.
Ollie knew when she was outnumbered. And to tell the truth, she was a little hungry herself. “Will you at least call Scarlet back before she skins me alive?”
“Of course,” Claire said so sweetly that Ollie knew she was lying.
Ollie didn’t know what the hell was happening to Claire, but she wasn’t sure she liked it. “Far be it from me to interfere with destiny. Let’s go to the Waffle House.”
“Yay!” Claire shouted, bouncing up and down in her seat and clapping her hands like a kid.
Wilma Speaks
Wilma and Wanda stood on a street corner. It was night and the only light came from the passing cars’ headlights. Wilma adjusted her breasts and looked squarely at the camera. “Claire was a sugar-pie. You know most people don’t treat us whores like real womens. Most white womens thinks we’re below them. Like they be thinking I wanted to grow up to be a ho’. Mmmhmm… when I was a li’l girl, I say to my mama, ‘Mama, you know what I wants to be when I grows up? I wants to be ho’.’ Uhhuh, right. My story is the oldest in the book. I got pregnant and dropped out of seventh grade. Had to go to work to support my baby. Couldn’t make enough to pay for daycare so I fell into the life and that’s all she wrote. Claire was so sweet. When I asted her to sneak that medical mary jay wana candy outta the jail… I had it hid on my person --”
Wanda interrupted, “You mean up your person, don’cha?”
Wilma laughed. “Yeah, I had it hid up my hootchie, but Claire don’t be knowin’ none of that. Anyway it was in wrappers. I gave Claire the candy and told her to sneak it out of the jail for me. I told her to just get rid of it. I don’t know why I be sellin’ drugs anyways. Sellin’ pussy is dangerous enough without gettin’ into no drugs. I hope she got her shit straightened out. If you ast me, I don’t think Claire be wantin’ to get no divorce.” Wilma crossed her arms. “I think she still be in love.”
A car pulled up alongside Wilma. The passenger window powered down. “’Scuse me, I gots some bidness to take care of,” she said. She sauntered over to car with an exaggerated swing of her hips. She leaned over and peered inside the car. “How ya doin’, Sugar?”
The camera turned off.
Waffle House
If you’ve seen one Waffle House, you’ve seen them all. But that’s what Claire liked about them. You go into a Waffle House, you know what to expect. No surprises. As much as people liked to think they wanted adventure and surprises, what they really craved was knowing what to expect.
Claire sat across the table from Ollie and G-Ray. Oscar was stuffed into the backpack between Ollie’s feet. He seemed content with an occasional scratch between the ears and nibble of waffle. Claire ate her way through the front half of the menu. She had a stack of licked-clean dishes a foot high sitting next to her. She had never eaten so much or been so hungry in her life.
Claire saw Ollie staring at her wide-eyed. Claire explained, “Jail makes a person hungry, I guess.” She belched and wished she had some those elastic-waisted pants. Maybe they could stop at a Target and get some. That was another place that was the same across America. A Target was a Target was a Target… Who said that? Wasn’t it that lesbian who looked like Caesar? What was her name, Gertrude something?
Claire’s phone beeped for the 578th time. She didn’t bother to look at the text. It was from Scarlet. And the last thing she wanted to do was talk to Scarlet. She was just going to yell at her. She could practically feel Scarlet’s uvula vibrating from 500 miles away.
Her butt began to itch. That was weird. Her butt hadn’t broken out in hives since she’d been away from Scarlet. And now that Scarlet was texting her approximately three times per minute her butt was back to its old tricks. Could it be that she was allergic to Scarlet? How could she be allergic to a person? As a child she’d had a dog who was allergic to dog hair. That was kind of the same thing. She wondered if there was such a thing as cats who were allergic to cats. She even knew a woman once who was allergic to semen. That wouldn’t have been so bad except she was straight.
“Did you hear me, Claire?” G-Ray asked.
“No, what?”
“According to my calculations, we could get to Memphis by late afternoon.”
“We are not going to Memphis,” Ollie said.
Claire ignored Ollie. “What’s in Memphis?”
G-Ray leaned forward and talked excitedly. “The home of the King. My tocks have spoken. They want to go to Graceland.”
“Graceland? Elvis?” Claire asked.
“We are not going to Memphis,” Ollie said more forcefully.
G-Ray nodded, saying, “The King is commanding an audience with my tocks, man. I can feel them twitch every time they face east.”
Claire’s phone beeped again.
“Scarlet would have a shit-fit if she found out we went to Memphis after the Tulsa fiasco,” Ollie said.
Claire popped another hard candy into her mouth. She handed her phone to G-Ray, saying, “Hold onto this while I go to the ladies’ room.” She stood and headed for the bathroom.
“We are not going to Memphis!” Ollie called after her.
Claire used the facilities and washed her hands slowly. She took several deep breaths and squared her shoulders. She calculated how many texts she’d have when she returned to the table. She’d been gone for five minutes, if Scarlet texted every thirty seconds that would be a minimum of ten texts but if Scarlet was thwarted in her desire to obtain an immediate answer she’d double that number.
Ollie was right. Scarlet would have a cow if she knew Claire was asserting her free will. The thought made her smile.
Claire was still grinning as she rejoined the others. “How many texts while I was gone?”
“Twenty six,” G-Ray said. “That’s 5.2 texts a minute.”
“I see.”
“Are you going to text her back?” G-Ray asked.
Claire shook her head. “Please delete all of them for me. Text back that we’re going to Graceland and I’ll call her when we get there.”
G-Ray whooped. “The tocks are rejoicing.”
“Two against one. We are going to Memphis,” Claire said to Ollie.
Oscar yipped his pleasure. Ollie frowned at her dog. “Traitor,” she muttered under breath.
Graceland
Claire slept through Arkansas and all the way over the Mighty Mississippi and she didn’t wake up until the van was rolling though the gates of Graceland. And she only woke up then because Ollie and G-Ray began to sing “Love Me Tender” at the top of their lungs.
Claire sat up and looked at her hands. They were orange and sticky. The front of her shirt was covered with some kind of orange powder. “What is this?” she asked. “What’s this orange stuff all over me?”
Ollie said, “That’s Cheetoh dust. You ate a whole bag of Cheetohs. I tried to take them away from you and you growled at me.”
Claire couldn’t believe it. She’d been sleep-eating. What the hell was wrong with her? Why was she so hungry all the time? She popped another candy in her mouth and considered the possibilities. Maybe she was stress eating. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe it was PMS. Maybe she needed to go buy some sweat pants because the jeans she was wearing were way too tight. She popped open the top button and licked the Cheetoh residue off her fingers.
“Here we are,” Ollie said, throwing the van into park.
“My tocks thank you,” G-Ray said. “Let’s go see where the King lives.”
“Lived,” Ollie said. “He died, remember?”
“So some believe,” G-Ray retorted. He hopped out of the van and did some elaborate stretches designed to loosen up his tocks.
Claire remembered her dream where Elvis came and talked to her. “Maybe he’s still alive,” she said. “A lot of people have seen him, you know.”
Ollie snorted. “Yeah, a lot of people claim to see Santa Claus, too.”
“They say the same thing about aliens,” G-Ray said. He was bent over at the waist and looking between his legs at Claire. “But I’m here to tell you, aliens are real, man. R.E.A.L.”
“It’s hard to take you seriously when you’re bent over like that, G-ray,” Ollie said.
G-Ray straightened up, reached behind himself, grabbed a butt cheek in each hand and squeezed them together as if they were a mouth talking. He said in a high-pitched voice, “We are alien entities. Take us to your leader.”
“The aliens are speaking through your butthole?” Claire said.
“Stranger things have happened,” G-Ray said.
Claire burst into loud guffaws. Which turned out to be a big mistake. The sudden expulsion of air sent a gust of Cheetoh dust out her nostrils coating the back of the front seat and Ollie’s face with neon orange powder.
Ollie’s orange covered face, which now resembled one of the Oompa Loompa’s from the chocolate factory, sent Claire into fresh hysterics. She held her belly and rolled around on the floor of the van and made sounds like a barking seal.
Ollie grabbed a handful of tissues and mopped at her face. Oscar whined and jumped out of the van. Ollie and G-Ray exchanged concerned looks.
Finally, Claire sat up and wiped the tears from her face. “Sorry,” she said to Ollie. “I’ve just never seen you orange before.”
Ollie got out of the van and tucked Oscar into her backpack. Claire moved to the front seat and looked at her reflection in the rear view mirror. She wiped the orange off her mouth and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. She looked presentable except that her eyes were red and bloodshot. Nothing more sleep wouldn’t cure.
*
Ollie was becoming more and more concerned about Claire. All she did was eat and sleep, sleep and eat. Ollie couldn’t help but take it personally. Maybe she was bad for Claire. Maybe being around Ollie for any length of time was detrimental to Claire’s sanity. When she picked Claire up in Houston, she was a well-groomed, successful woman with a job, making six figures a year. Two days on the road with Ollie and Claire was packing on the pounds, snoozing deliriously and blowing orange stuff out her nose.
“Candy anybody?” Claire asked.
Both Ollie and G-Ray shook their heads. “Okey dokey,” Claire said, popping it into her mouth. “Too bad, ‘cause that’s the last one.”
Ollie strapped the backpack with Oscar in it over her shoulders and shut the van door.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Claire asked.
Ollie patted her pockets. “No, I don’t think so.”
“What about EZ?”
“She’s sleeping,” Ollie said.
“You’re going to leave her in the van?”
Ollie shrugged. “If she were awake she could go with us.”
“You’re really going to just leave EZ in the van while we tour Graceland? Do you know how hot it can get in a locked car?”
“I cracked the windows.”
“Let me get this straight,” Claire said, “you take the dog inside in your backpack, but it’s okay to leave a human locked up in the car?”
“You have a better idea?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Claire said.
Ten minutes later EZ was ensconced in a wheelchair, wearing dark sunglasses and being pushed by G-Ray. EZ’s head bobbed up and down and every few minutes a loud snore bubbled out of her open mouth.
Ollie said to the ticket taker, “Three adults, please.”
The ticket taker, who looked alarmingly like a very old, very rumpled, very obese Ann-Margret, said, “I count four of you.”
Ollie pointed to EZ, “She doesn’t count. She’s asleep.”
“Wake her up,” Ann-Margret said.
“I can’t,” Ollie said, throwing a dirty look at Claire.
“Not my problem. That will be four adults. One hundred and forty-eight dollars, please,” Ann-Margret said.
Ollie almost shit her pants. “One hundred and forty-eight dollars!”
Ann-Margret rolled her eyes and held out her hand. Ollie sighed and handed over the money. She wasn’t going to bitch about the price of admission. She bit her tongue. She wasn’t going to bitch about the price of admission. She clenched her jaw. She wasn’t going to bitch about the price of admission.
Ollie Speaks
The camera focused in on a close-up of Ollie.
“There’s lots of things about myself that I’ve never told Claire. She thinks my mom died when I was fourteen. I didn’t tell her that, but she assumed it and I didn’t bother to correct her. Dad and I never talk about Mom anyway. I never see her or talk to her. And it’s kinda hard to tell somebody that your mom went crazy, you know?”
Ollie sighed and continued, “I freaked out about the price of admission to Graceland. That much is true. But, hey, who wouldn’t freak about prices that high? The part
that upset me the most, though, was recognizing my mother in me. That ever happen to you? You open your mouth and hear your mother’s voice coming out?
I didn’t let on to G-Ray or Claire but I was kinda excited to tour Graceland. Not that I’m an Elvis fan-girl or anything, but when I was a kid I never got to see any famous attractions or theme parks. I grew up poor. Not the kind of poor where I didn’t have enough to eat, but poor enough that making ends meet was hard on my dad. My parents fought about money a lot.
Mom would take me places, but wouldn’t ever pay for the ticket to go inside. This one time we went to visit the Alamo. I was about eight or nine. Mom refused to buy the ticket to get inside. She said that charging to learn about history was a rip-off. Instead, we stood across the street and she read to me from a pamphlet about the Alamo while I looked at the outside of it.
Another time she made me hide in the trunk of a car to go to the drive-in movie so she wouldn’t have to pay for an extra person. I’m pretty sure she was into self-medicating at the time… anyway, she forgot I was back there until she drove back home and I yelled so loud the neighbor heard me and she let me out.
The last time she took me somewhere was Six Flags. She made me sit in the car all day in the parking lot and visualize riding the roller coasters. I told Dad about that episode and even he had to admit that something was wrong. Not long after that Mom went away for good. He committed her and that was the last time I saw her. So when the ticket lady told me, “That’ll be one hundred and forty-eight dollars,” I had this moment of wanting to walk away. We could always do that video tour on the net or something. But then I remembered the roller coaster and that made me fork over the money. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go crazy like Mom did.
I even bought everybody a T-shirt that said I’ve Been to Graceland.”
The camera shut off.
The Jungle Room
The bright colors of the peacock windows that opened into the music room mesmerized Claire. The white couch looked so comfy it made her want to take a nap, and she would’ve, too, if the area hadn’t been roped off. She thought the billiard room had interesting wallpaper. She could stare at it for hours. That’s how she got separated from the group. Ollie found her staring through the doorway into the Jungle Room.
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