Graceland

by Lynne Hugo

  But evening falls. When I go in, the thoughts begin again. John calls, and I do see him many nights when I don’t have class. I even love him. I can’t recapture the thrall, but I do love him, in spite of myself, in spite of whether or not he deserves it. I park my six-year-old Ford in the street and he pulls his swanky late model into our one-car garage to keep the neighbors from having me for breakfast when they go out to fetch their morning paper. It’s his idea. I care less and less what anyone says. When he comes over, sometimes we sit out on the porch to watch the stars, like risen fireflies moving in swirling patterns around the sweetness of a lemon-sherbet moon for an hour before the welcome drowning of sex.

  But always the past rubs into the present until the present is threadbare. I remember the end of our trip to Graceland and I hear Ellie’s prophecy again. When I brought her home, she jerked Presley’s and her luggage out of the trunk, and I said something like, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Maybe we can try to get to Graceland another time.” Kindness is what I intended, in spite of how she’d acted. I knew how much stock she put in the trip, the Death Week pilgrimage, the candlelight vigil. Before they melted all over the inside of her suitcase, she must have had twenty-five white votive candles ready for the watch.

  “You’ll get yours, Lydia. When you’re least expecting it, you’ll get yours.” I want to know how she could see around those blind curves when I couldn’t. The look in Ellie’s eyes was venomous, the look of a body possessed if you believe in such a thing, which I never have. I’ve never forgotten it, although things soon enough smoothed over on the surface the way sometimes a wind will brush the surface of water smooth while turbulence goes on churning below the surface. I’ve learned this much from John and my sisters: what is fractured may heal and the scar may be invisible, but it is never the same again. I’ve heard that business about a bone being stronger for having been broken, but you couldn’t prove it by me.

  Today I was home at three because Dr. Hays was called to Maysfield General for a delivery that proved complicated. He’s one of the last general practitioners around here who will still pull out a baby, as he puts it. Donna and I called the rest of the afternoon patients to tell them he’d see them tomorrow unless they felt it couldn’t wait and then they’d need to go on into the emergency room, then she and I closed up shop. It’s more than just as well because I certainly wasn’t concentrating on the insurance claims. Ellie’s not a match, Dr. Douglas said. When she called me at work yesterday, I was certain it was with good news. I was actually lighthearted when Donna whispered, “Sarah Douglas on line two for you,” convinced that good news was overdue. Ellie saying she’d donate was such a miracle that it seemed a sign from God: Be faithful, believe, it will be all right now. How could such hope be given and then taken away? When I heard, Just a two-point, we’ll wait for better, I might as well have been a boxer who’d taken too many blows to the head and can’t process what he hears anymore.

  I didn’t go to class last night, and, though I’d first thought I couldn’t bear to be in anyone else’s presence, when John called I said, Yes, okay, come. He wears a gold chain around his neck and the clasp tangled in my hair while he held me as if I were made of handblown glass, that carefully, and let me rant and cry. “Shh,” he said, not extricating the chain but lying next to me in the dark on Claire’s narrow bed and holding my head so my hair wouldn’t be pulled. “Shh. Sleep. Tomorrow we’ll figure out what to try next.”

  But we didn’t, we haven’t, and neither has the I of that breakable we. Instead, my mind is dredging in the distant past. While I cultivated around the miniature roses today, a remote, strange memory from my childhood, one that makes me squirm with shame, involving some elderly neighbors back when our house had no other neighbors because the sprawl of the town had not begun. I had had rose fever, Mama called it, all summer, sneezing sometimes twenty or thirty times in a row while my eyes sank in perpetually streaming pools. Mama finally made Daddy tear out the red climbing roses that had trellised themselves right up the house like an accidental amazement after Aggie and Zeke, the neighbors, gave Mama the bush for some reason I can’t recall.

  I loved those roses. They were the only flowers in our yard and I loved them as only a six-or seven-year-old who spends too much time watching out for an older brother who’s not right in the head and two younger sisters can irrationally take a shine to something and claim it. When Daddy put on extra-heavy gloves and set to work pulling up every root of my rosebush, I cried and begged and promised not to sneeze anymore, but of course, it did no good at all. Mama was never one to have a soft spot for flowers or feelings. “They just makes you wheeze,” she said. “I never gave ’em much account anyways. We only planted the thing so’s Aggie wouldn’t be put out.”

  The crude extraction of the rosebush and my misery about it must have been linked to what came next, because I remember it all together. Perhaps to distract me, Mama gave me the leftover from a roll of white crinoline material, a stiff and gauzy fabric she used when she made my school dresses, to make the skirt puff out around me the way it was supposed to. She told me I could make myself a fairy princess costume, and cut out a crown from heavy paper Daddy could “borrow” from the plant. By the next day, my outfit was constructed: a baffling drape job held together with many silver safety pins, and a taped-together crown with points so jagged and staggering it must have looked like it came from the jaw of a prehistoric creature. I crayoned the crown heavily with the still-pristine silver from my Christmas box of sixty-four Crayolas.

  I wish I’d stopped there, while I was beautiful and magical and never discovered the secret self who will go too far to get what she wants. “Can I go show Aggie and Zeke?” I asked Mama.

  “Don’t make yourself a pest,” Mama said. “Come right back. Take Maddie and Ellie with you.”

  I liked to walk across the unused field dotted with saplings to Aggie and Zeke’s. They were old and they fussed over me, and often gave me a dime or at least a handful of cookies. “I don’t want to take them,” I shrieked, wanting the limelight to myself, especially since Aggie and Zeke were scrupulous about fairness.

  The late-afternoon light poured an anointing gleam over the crown, straight up on my head, and my last inspiration, a scepter, fashioned out of the cardboard tube around which the crinoline had been wound and a large five-point star I’d made by superimposing right-side-up and upside-down triangles as I’d learned in first grade. The star was the same waxy silver as my crown. I must have cut a majestic figure, four feet tall with a headful of black curls emerging above and below the crown, as my sneakers tripped over dragging gauze. No matter. I have never again felt as beautiful.

  Zeke and Aggie were home and provided the audience I wanted. They praised my beauty and ingenuity at such length it may have occurred to me to wonder about their sincerity, but it was completely gratifying all the same. What’s next is the part that bothers me. I wanted more, something I hadn’t been given freely. I don’t remember consciously calculating, but I obviously did and more to the point, there wasn’t an iota of truth in what I said.

  “Mama said you might like my costume so much that you’d give me some change, maybe a quarter.”

  “She did? You bet, little missy. You come see us again, now, hear?” Zeke said digging into his pants pocket and handing me thirty-five cents, by far the most he’d ever given me at once. I know perfectly well that I thanked him, and that the whole exchange most likely meant nothing to him or Aggie. Even then, I doubt thirty-five cents was enough to trouble their slim, pension-controlled budget.

  But the magic was sullied. Stumbling my way back home with the coins buried in my fist, I felt hot, clumsy and unlovely, much as I feel now, flashing back as I am to the moment when I—without the words for it, of course—knew that I’d gotten what I wanted by manipulating someone else. “Be careful what you want, because you’ll get it,” someone at the office laughingly quoted an anonymous pundit to me once regarding something as unimportant
as what sandwich I’d ordered. What I’ve really wanted and gotten in my life has turned around to bring suffering to us all. That first time I lied, I spent away my innocence and more, the ability to see myself as innocent. Maybe the river of my life as it has flowed over Wayne, John, Claire, my sisters, all came from that small spring. For all I’ve escaped, it’s been by swimming in that same water.

  CHAPTER 40

  Three beers and no help from them. Bill is to pick up Jennifer any time now, and Madalaine can’t bear the sight of him, especially since he’s told Jennifer yes, he’ll bring the baby in the car with him, the new son he’s had the unspeakable temerity to name Brian William. Whether or not they call him Will, as Jenny says, the blood spills on from the fresh wound in Madalaine. How could he? Jenny says that the baby looks like her own baby pictures. Even a ten-year-old knew enough not to say he looks just like Brian, which amounted to the same description, but wasn’t so much an assault on her heart.

  She is trying. Trying not to cry, trying not to hate, not so much anyway, trying not to mention Brian all the time around Jenny, trying to get to sleep at night, trying to put one foot in front of the other and drag herself through the days. Madalaine pops a fourth beer and pours this one into a tall green plastic glass. She gets three ice cubes from the freezer, plops them in and settles herself back on the couch to wait. In the family room, the television is blaring the Oprah Winfrey Show. Jennifer has taken to watching the talk shows lately. Maybe it makes her feel less like a freak, seeing other families try to kill each other off. At least hers wasn’t on national television, although who knows? Maybe Melody is negotiating this very minute to do a show on Women Who Seduce and Reproduce. Better yet, Second Wives Who Steal Dead Boys’ Names. Melody would be the lead-off story for that one. Let’s have a big round of applause for our first guest…

  During the commercial, Jennifer comes into the living room to check out the front window. “He’s late,” she complains. Madalaine sees her daughter has changed into the new denim-shorts outfit she bought her the day before yesterday. Red gingham borders the pockets to match the short-sleeved shirt that Jenny left unbuttoned so she could tie the tails across her waist to make a modified halter. A narrow band of skin, one to give Madalaine a fresh headache, shows itself between the blouse and shorts: pale, unspeakably vulnerable.

  “He usually is.” Madalaine tries too late to correct her tone. “He’ll be here, honey.”

  Jennifer looks at her appraisingly. “Mom, you’re not?”

  “Ginger ale,” Madalaine says and holds up the glass in such a way as to make the ice clink.

  “Good. I’m sorry, I thought… Call me when you hear the car, okay?” Jennifer’s overnight bag is already positioned by the front door. It’s been there since this morning. She takes less and less with her; now she’s accumulated basics like a toothbrush, hairbrush, some spare underwear and socks at her father’s, and a T-shirt or two. Madalaine has resisted, but Jennifer leaves them “on accident,” or Melody buys extras for her to keep there.

  “Yup, will do.”

  When Jennifer goes back to Oprah, Madalaine fishes the ice out of her glass and lays it beneath the leaves of the nearest plant to melt in peace, something she’d not mind doing herself. Not at all.

  It’s not another five minutes until she hears the car door. “Jenny! Jennifer! Hurry up, he’s here,” she shouts. Madalaine dreads that Bill may ring the doorbell.

  Jenny does scurry in. She plants a kiss on Madalaine’s cheek and squeezes her. “Bye, Mommy. I’ll see you Sunday.” She hoists the small bag to her shoulder by its red strap.

  “Okay, honey. Have fun. Better run.”

  However quick it was, though, it was too slow. Bill is halfway up the sidewalk, though he’s left the motor running and the driver’s-side door wide open. Madalaine can see him out the picture window. She steps to the side so a drape will obscure her view of Bill, and vice versa.

  “Daddy!” Jenny’s out the door. Madalaine closes it quickly behind her and leans against it with a ragged sigh. She stands there letting the door bear her weight.

  A minute later, Madalaine is thrown off balance by the door abruptly pushing open. “Mom!” Jenny bursts into the room. “Mom!”

  The door bangs her hip as Madalaine tries to correct her balance using the wall. “Ow,” she says, pushing back. “For heaven’s sake, what’s the matter?”

  “What’re you doing back there?” Jenny says, but rushes on without waiting. “Will spit up all over the place. It’s all over his car seat and everything. Daddy needs a towel.”

  “A kamikaze pilot needs a helmet, too,” Madalaine says. Of course, Jennifer doesn’t get it, just looks confused and waits for her mother to say it in English.

  “Oh, go get him one. Get one of the old ones, hear? Those green ones on the linen closet floor.” She calls the last part to Jennifer as the girl runs down the hall.

  But Jenny only makes it back as far as the steps between the front door and walk, after smacking Madalaine loudly on the cheek again and, so excited she shouts, a breathless, “Thanks, Mom.” Bill emerges butt first from the back seat of the car with a sodden, squalling infant in his hands. He jostles awkwardly, trying to keep from holding the baby against his shirt, but can’t figure out how to support the flopping head without using his own chest. He gives up, presses the baby to him and looks helplessly toward the house.

  Jennifer looks at each of her parents in turn, the dilemma written on her face. “Mommy. Please.” It’s not much above a whisper.

  “Jenny, I…” I can’t do this. How dare you even ask me? Responses of this sort race, wild horses beating their way through her mind at once. She simply can’t hold on to the shield of her anger with her daughter’s face—anxious and pleading—trained to hers. Madalaine sighs. A hot wind whips her hair across her face and into her mouth just as she opens it, calling, “You look like you need some help,” to Bill.

  “Here Daddy, I can help.” Jennifer is skittering back down the sidewalk. “We can clean him in the house. I’ll get his stuff.” She disappears into Bill’s blue Mazda and reappears with a diaper bag.

  Bill hesitates, looking at Madalaine with a question on his face.

  “Come on,” she says with resignation, and turns back into her house. Bill follows, the baby screeching himself cherry with rage.

  Madalaine stops in the living room. Her room…their old bedroom? No. Brian’s room? Out of the question. Jenny’s…possible—bring a basin in. The kitchen, maybe. She sidesteps to the linen closet in the hallway and grabs another old towel and runs smack into Bill and the baby, who followed her. “No, the kitchen. Put him on this towel folded up, next to the sink. You’ve got a change of clothes?”

  “I dunno,” he stammers. “…Melody…I didn’t pack the bag, I mean.”

  He steps back against the wall to let Madalaine lead.

  In the kitchen, Madalaine folds the oversize towel three times to make a soft pad. Bill lays the his son down and fumbles with the gooey snaps on his suit. Madalaine sees his hands are shaking a little. Jennifer is doing a little dance to the side of him, trying to help and getting in the way. The baby’s screams reverberate against Madalaine’s eardrums, and mix into the throb that had started before Bill came. The odor of vomit is strong.

  “Come on, Will, come on now, it’s okay,” Bill says. The baby, arms and legs flailing, seems to quiet for a couple of seconds, but begins coughing and another round of curdled milk shoots out of his mouth. The smell is strong, nauseating. A gurgled scream comes from the baby and then a fit of choking. Madalaine shoves Bill aside with her hip as she puts her hands into the mess.

  “He’ll choke to death, for God’s sake,” she says sharply. “Get him on his side, at least. Jenny, go get a washcloth.” Jenny runs toward the hall. “Here, let’s get this off,” Madalaine says in the general direction of the baby, who gasps for air between coughs and screams. She pulls on the top snap of the light blue terry-cloth sleeper, and all of them pop ap
art in succession as if by magic. “You never were much for undressing them, were you?” she says to Bill. “Or dressing. Or anything else, for that matter… What do you call a man with half a brain?”

  “I don’t know,” Bill says, confused as to where she’s headed.

  “Gifted.” Madalaine chuckles a little. “You pretty much stink, Bill.” Jennifer looks horrified and Madalaine laughs at her. “Why don’t you take that yucky shirt off? Roll it up with the throw-up on the inside.”

  Bill blushes and pulls the shirt over his head, leaving a milky wet trail on his face, which he hastily swipes with his hand. Then he grimaces and sticks his hand under the faucet. It’s as easy to embarrass him as ever.

  “Gross, Dad,” Jennifer says.

  The infant is still crying, but it is a quieter cry, as Madalaine gets the suit and diaper off. “Here,” she says giving Bill the suit. “Roll that up inside your shirt.” She braces the baby with one hand while she turns on the water, sticks an elbow under the stream to test it and then wets the washcloth in tepid water. She sponges Will gently, beginning with his head and lifting it expertly to clean the vomit out of the folds of his neck. His head is downy in her hand, his hair so pale and fine that it looks as if he doesn’t have any. “Has he been sick?” she asks Bill, working her way to the baby’s chest and down the rest of his body. “Have you got a pacifier?”