In Eldorado we watched the full moon rise. It was the moon after harvest. The days and nights had begun their power shift. The equinox had passed, summer was officially over. Gardeners and farmers were taking in the fruits of their labors from the fields as they prepared for the next phase of living until spring. Since ancient times these annual cycles of nature have been observed and honored by humans. Every culture through time celebrated a harvest feast, just as winter solstice festivals have signified the reversal of the march of darkness since time immemorial. While the arrival of spring or summer may have seemed full of good cheer and frolic, the arrival of fall, the equinox, was serious business. Long before Wall Street earnings reports, life was measured in quarters: summer solstice/fall equinox/winter solstice/spring equinox. Payments were due to the gods if you wanted to get through to the next period. My response was an inexplicable urge to make soup, to put on a big kettle to boil and hunker down. I hated the fall, the darkness, the season of death. I would have happily hibernated. As I wondered about the larger cycle of life ahead of us and how we would accommodate to it, I felt the inexorable pull toward the rhythms of the universe.
Listening to the sounds outside, I gathered that coyotes did howl at the full moon. Humans generally have found the howling romantic or crazy-making or both. Perhaps it was the full moon or the changing of the season. Possibly it was a result of staying put in the same spot for one whole week. It felt like time to take stock. It felt like time to worship what sunshine we had left. It felt like time to haul in all our stuff and get ready for the onslaught of darkness and cold. It felt like time to nest. It felt good here, peaceful and light. Was this home, or was I just another lunatic? I wanted to dig in, make food for the coming season. Could this be the place of our future?
Pandora’s Box
Casting a longing look over our shoulders, we got back in the Sue and headed directly east. We needed to keep dates, make time. We promised we’d be in Vermont for our family’s traditional Thanksgiving celebration. Our plan was to be home by early November, an arrangement partly made of necessity since, as we went north, many of the campgrounds would close after the thirty-first of October. It was already the sixteenth. And, too, we had a gnawing sense that we needed to “make plans for the future,” “get real,” “get on with life.” South of Santa Fe the land quickly turned to true desert. By the Texas Panhandle it was parched, dusty, and desolate. Nothing appeared cultivated. We saw no livestock. It looked like an alien land. Not gonna live here, I thought. The wind kicked up, making it difficult to hold the Sue on the road. Big and empty, she was like a road sail. A prairie schooner. The highlight of that day’s drive was a no-fat soft yogurt, vanilla, in a cup, from a lonely Stuckey’s. It was grainy and tasted bitter. We drove some more. It took concentration to hold steady. Without water or trees around, it was impossible to anticipate the wind. Keeping a firm grip on the wheel, we took turns driving. After 430 miles, we stopped at Elk City, Oklahoma. We ate, we slept. In the morning we moved on. We were nearly at sea level. Had we imagined Santa Fe?
In the daylight Oklahoma was quite pretty, radically different from the Texas we’d been through: large deciduous trees, mostly still green, and trimmed fields of red earth that had been harvested and plowed. Gentle hills went off on either side of the highway. The scenery began to have a familiar ring to it. The wind was down, and we were able to relax a little. Our heading was still due east along I-40. Most of this interstate overtook what had been the fabled Route 66. There was still a real romance in this part of the country about that old road. Collectibles were everywhere, including, now, on my husband’s back. At the Santa Fe flea market he’d bought a denim jacket with a brocaded Route 66 design. Whenever we got out of the Sue, at a campground, gas station, rest area, people would ask him where he got it, give him a thumbs up, or just smile as if he were a member of their club. It amazed us. I tried translating this to the Northeast. Would anyone care if I wore an Albany Post Road T-shirt? How about a Mass Pike jacket? Even though it ran from Maine to Florida, I didn’t think there were any Route 1 devotees or I-95 fan clubs. Route 66 had magic.
By lunchtime, we were in need of a little magic. Food magic. Consulting Jane and Michael Stern’s Roadfood, we located Van’s Pig Stand in Shawnee, Oklahoma. This wonderful book tipped us off to places with local color and regional tastes. Van’s served up baskets of smoky ribs, piles of fries, slabs of Texas toast, and giant sodas to shoot it all down the hatch with. It was the perfect prequel, we thought, to spending the night at the home of the woman who had written the cookbook called So Fat, Low Fat, No Fat. Her name is Betty, and I’d met her on the phone a couple of years earlier. A local bookseller had tipped me off to the fact that this woman, as he breathlessly referred to her, had lost all this weight and self-published a low-fat cookbook and was selling it out of the trunk of her car. Every time he had her in his store to do a demonstration and signing, she sold books like, well, like hotcakes. Breathe, breathe. Get hold of her, he implored me, and publish her nationally. I did, we did, and her book sold hundreds of thousands of copies by the time I left my job. I had met her husband, Bob, briefly when they were in New York while Betty appeared on one of the national morning shows. She said she thought she had died and gone to heaven and had only one other goal in life: to be on QVC. Betty and Bob were the only people I knew who, when I told them we were going off to live in an RV for months, said “great” as if they really meant it. I thought Sandy would like them both, though I wondered what we would have for dinner.
Gore, Oklahoma, at the junction of OK-100 and OK-10, is about as far from midtown Manhattan as one can get. When I asked for directions to her house, Betty said it was the big white one on the left. It was that simple. As we drove up, she came out through a side door, still svelte in her shorts, to welcome us. Built ten years earlier but designed with care to look like a Victorian-era farmhouse, the big white house in the middle of the huge green field was a place out of time. Comfortable and comforting, it felt like a place I’d been to in my dreams of Americana. There was a kitchen and a summer kitchen, together supplying her with three ovens and twelve burners on which to test her low-fat compositions. She reminded us that these were the very same appliances that had helped her gain those sixty-six pounds over the years. A tinned ceiling in the living room, a doll collection in the attic, a cellar full of food put by. I had to remind myself that it was nearly the end of the twentieth century. You could feel a pleasant slowness, even in the breeze that puffed up the white gauzy curtains.
After the house tour, Betty said we were going to meet Bob and spend the night up at their summer place at Tenkiller Lake. More driving, I thought. “It’s just up the road,” she assured me. These Oklahomans do not lie—it was about ten miles away. Not only was it close by, their house was adjacent to a beautiful RV campground that faced the water. We situated the Sue and drove up the hill with Betty to her retreat. Her project of the summer had been to build on a huge deck. Though there was still some finish work to be done, the deck ran the fifty-foot length of the house. She called it a “helluva deck,” and it surely was. The four of us spent the afternoon there, overlooking the lake, sipping cool drinks in the autumn sunlight. We talked about work and houses, kids and parents. We laughed at our preconceived notions of each other’s lives. Again we noticed it was nice being with another couple who liked being with each other. Over a fine filet mignon dinner, we talked about life changes—those that had overtaken us and those that we were still shaping. They asked us, smiling as if they knew in advance what the answer would be, if we would consider moving to Gore. We said no, just as we would have six months earlier. Only now I was less sure of why I felt that way. A Pandora’s box of possibilities had been opened and lay at our feet. How long would we chew over the contents before we swallowed? If the world was our oyster, why was I suddenly gagging? I was clearly coming down with a case of high panic. Time to drive, she said.
* * *
What we needed, as my uncle
Howard used to say, was a nice schvitz. Sweat lodge, schvitz, steambath. Egg roll, blintz, manicotti. Same thing. It had been too long since we’d had a hot tub. We headed straight for the mother of all spas, the grand dame of good soaks, the city of steam, Hot Springs, Arkansas. A half-day drive from Gore, the city had the odd distinction of being, in part, in a national park. Rather than the natural redwood or plastic outdoor tubs we were used to, however, this was an indoor affair. The spring side of town was genteel and elegant, a reminiscence of the early part of the century, when ladies and gentlemen had come to “take the cure” for several weeks at a time. There was something soothing in just looking at the time capsule of houses along Bathhouse Row. Designed in distinctly different styles from Federal to art deco, they had once vied for business and offered special baths supposedly good for a particular ailment. Those claims were no longer made. We chose the Buckstaff Baths because they were open. The building looked like a pre-World War I men’s club, substantial but friendly, with striped awnings and wooden rockers on a long porch. It was a reassuring kind of edifice. I felt my life taking shape just by looking at it. Inside, decades of organized pleasure oozed from the walls. Women went to the left, men to the right to change in white-tiled chambers. Wrapped in a sheet, toga style, by an attendant, I proceeded through the circuit. First, a nice long soak in a porcelain tub, then a steam in one of those stainless-steel contraptions that left my head sticking out of a hole. Sweating has never been one of my great strengths, I just turn red. Upon my release, I was led to a table where hot towels would be applied to the area of my choice: I chose my back. Next, retogaed, I was led to what they called a needle shower, which squirted me all around at every level with a fine hard spray. Draped once more, I was left, reclining, to wait for my masseuse. A thirty-minute rub, and I was directed to another room and the cooling tables, the regular showers, and my clothes. My mental particles rearranged by the powers of water and Norma, the masseuse, I found my husband a-rockin’ on the porch. He looked clean, buffed, and happy.
We began to inch our way east and north. This was the last leg. We could have turned around at any point, but we’d said we’d be home by Thanksgiving, and October was almost over. Our visits were coming closer together now—we had four coming up in a row. We were losing something, I wasn’t sure what. I had a feeling something was gaining on us. We continued on through the flat land of eastern Arkansas, making for the mighty Mississippi River.
* * *
It was impossible to drive into Memphis without hearing Paul Simon singing in my head about bouncing into Graceland. Rather than hear me do it a cappella, Sandy popped in the tape and let Paul do it. We were going there to meet up with sister Helen, who was flying down for the weekend from Michigan. High school class of ’56 and every inch a bobby soxer/poodle skirt gal, she wanted to pay homage to the King. And to bring back some appropriate doodads for the Elvis shrine she had created at the elementary school where she was principal. I was sure Thompson Elementary had the highest density of six- and seven-year-olds in the nation who could recite all the lyrics to “Love Me Tender.”
I was not against going to Memphis, but I was not really looking forward to it either. After all our time in nature, I feared it was going to burst the bubble. I was sure I wasn’t ready for a city of one million people. Then I worried that we wouldn’t be able to find enough for Helen to do. Given all the energy she had, I didn’t know if one dead singer’s house could keep her amused for a whole weekend. Next, I was a little skittish about being in the South. Weird things happened in the South. Especially to Yankees. Especially since the recent unpleasantness, if you know what I mean, sugar. Finally, I’ll admit, I always thought Elvis had named the place for his mom, and I thought that was a bit peculiar. I’d heard they’d been very tight. Turned out it was called Graceland after the original owner’s wife’s aunt. Elvis’s mom was Gladys. That’s how bad rumors start. Still, for some combination of those reasons, I was a bit uneasy.
Sure enough, as soon as Helen came through the gate at the airport, she announced she was changing her ticket home to an earlier flight. She’d checked it out from the air and was sure there wasn’t much to fuel her fire in this town. She’d go home early Sunday, get in a session of Jazzercises, and do some yard work. Welcome to Memphis. Our Graceland tour tickets were for the next day. While we waited, we were advised, the main events in Memphis were the following: go downtown to the Peabody Hotel at five P.M. and watch the ducks parade out of the lobby fountain and into the elevator for their nightly ascent. Eat lamb ribs at the Rendezvous. Listen to music on Beale Street. The riblets were the highlight of the evening.
In the middle of an endless strip of car dealerships and Shoney’s restaurants is the former home of the greatest, most successful entertainer of all time. There was an otherworldliness to visiting Graceland (pronounced in one fluid verbal motion as Gracelend). As our ticket time and tour number were called, we were given an audiotape and headset, which was to be our personal guide. What we were about to see and where we would go was all carefully and cheerfully narrated by Priscilla Presley, among others. Of course there was appropriate background music at all times. We pilgrims (many gray-haired and well into their sixties or better) quietly boarded small buses at the main tourist entrance on the south side of Elvis Presley Boulevard—the true boulevard of broken dreams for so many who had obsessed over the King in their youth. The buses slowly and ceremoniously crossed the street, letting us off in front of the mansion.
It’s a simple southern-style home: stone and wood trim, pillared and porticoed, on 13.8 lovely acres. Originally built in the 1930s by a doctor, Elvis had bought it in 1957, when he was twenty-two, for $100,000. Several outbuildings were added to suit his obsession du jour—a racquetball court, a shooting range, and the like. The interior was very 1970s, from a white trash perspective. It didn’t wear well over time. The jungle room with puke green shag carpeting was especially scenic. We toured the home (downstairs only, bedrooms not included), racquetball building, trophy room, and meditation/burial area. All the while each of us was in our own private taped Idaho. Everyone was absorbed in thought and memory: fifteen again and seeing Him for the first time; fortysomething and learning of His death; trying to come to grips with the fact that, had He lived, He’d be in His sixties now. The endless stream of visitors were subdued. On the tape Priscilla insisted repeatedly how much laughing and joking had gone on in this room and that. Every woman listening must have thought the same thing I did: If things were so darn wonderful, why did he always have all those guys, his Memphis Mafia, around him? No wonder the marriage faltered. And yet here was this boy—and he had been a boy when fame found him—making a home for his family and friends. For twenty years he always came back to this place.
One of the outbuildings became an office for his father: a simple affair of desks, phones, and beige metal filing cabinets. An invisible VCR played an endless loop of Elvis on an old TV. We stood and watched as the King sat in that very room, fresh from serving with the U.S. Army in Germany. He was still very handsome, and in conversation (as opposed to while singing or in still photos), his demeanor was naturally sexy and engaging. Out of uniform and relaxed, this southerner who had just given service to his country politely answered the questions of the media, who were also still kind of shy and polite in those days. They asked him, but did not press, about a rumored romance abroad. He actually squirmed in his chair, cast his eyes up and down a few times, and protected the innocence and the privacy of the girl who would one day be his wife. Watching that brief tape, I caught what I’d never noticed before but what millions had gathered at the time, I’m sure—here was a true American naif, his face sliding all over itself and practically blushing on that old black and white screen. It was a painful reminder of an innocence that he, and all of us, would shortly lose forever.
Past the grazing horses and the gravesite, we returned our automated stream of preprogrammed consciousness to one of the guides (who never guided)
and boarded the bus back to the other side of the street. The one-minute ride served as a decompression time between zones. If we had just been to the shrine, to Mecca, the south side was the commercial side of the street. Here we saw the King’s cars, motorcycles, planes, and other less holy objects. It seemed each area was separated from the next by a gift shop. I thought of it as the Shop ’n’ Weep approach. Or the Cry ’n’ Buy. Sob at the pink cadillac, buy a miniature pink cadillac. Weep at his once-young face, take home a poster. Helen bought enough stuff for an entire school full of kids.
I admit I’ve never understood the “Elvis” thing. I grew up a few years too late, and he was not a serious contender for my rock and roll affections. But something caught me by surprise about the simplicity of it all and about the irony of Lisa Marie marrying the anything but simple Michael J. (I felt relieved on his behalf when their divorce was announced.) As I left Graceland, I felt a bit subdued, as if I’d found something and lost it all at once. Perhaps everyone has their own Pandora’s box, and how life turns out depends on what you do with the contents. Elvis’s was full of fame. Ours was filling up with ideas.
First We Quit Our Jobs Page 18