Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Memphis. That was where I’d been headed before my arrest, wasn’t it? City of Elvis, of B. B. King. Yet all I wanted to do now was get the hell out of Tennessee. Certainly, the last thing I wanted to do was drive in it anymore.

  Isaiah seemed to intuit this; squinting off in the distance, he scratched the back of his neck. “Or, I’m on my way to my mother-in-law’s. If you want to ride all the way with me to Jackson, it has a direct bus.”

  A bus. A bus sounded infinitely better. Safety in numbers. But Jackson was so far.

  “Mississippi? You’d take me all the way there?”

  “Oh, nah. Nah. I meant Jackson, Tennessee. ‘The other Jackson,’ as we like to say. It’s a couple of hours west. As long as you don’t mind books on tape.” Isaiah aimed his key at his car. It clicked open with a hiccupy beep.

  “You don’t mind riding with a hardened criminal?” I was attempting levity—some little joke to mask my desperation—though my voice came out sounding broken and sad.

  “Heh. Listen. You’re not the first defendant I’ve given a ride to. Out-of-state plates get pulled over all the time here.”

  He heaved open the trunk, and we loaded in my belongings. All my Privileged Kitchen inventory and boxes of shoes had been impounded inside the Subaru; I knew I should be outraged, though I was secretly relieved not to have to deal with them anymore. What got me, though, was my iPhone. I kept thinking about it sitting in the cup holder by the emergency brake. It would be a miracle if it was still there in three months. I suspected it was already tucked into some officer’s pocket. They’d returned to me only the things that were essentially worthless.

  “Yes, ma’am. We do have problems here with opioids and meth,” Isaiah was saying. “No doubt about that. Some members of our Twenty-Third Judicial Task Force, I know for a fact, they have family members themselves who are addicts. So they really want to stop traffickers. But others?” He shook his head bitterly.

  As he shut the trunk, I noticed a teddy bear with a plaid bow tie and a pale blue bunny smiling goofily out the Camry’s back window. A yellow BABY ON BOARD sign was suction-cupped to the glass; on the passenger’s side, a car seat for a toddler was strapped into the back.

  “Oooh. You have children?”

  “Nah.” He laughed. “My wife and I, we only got married in June. She’s still finishing up her nursing degree.” He noticed me still eyeing the kiddie seat. “Oh. Those are just helpful,” he said, “for whenever I get pulled over.”

  Swinging down behind the wheel, he hummed lightly to himself as he fiddled with the ignition key, his countenance relaxing into that of a man now off duty, with a win under his belt and the prospect of a long weekend ahead of him with his new bride and her family. I could picture, suddenly, a barbecue grill and a ball game and friends in a backyard—all the good things now gone from my own life.

  Clearing his throat, he started the Camry. “Your children, they’re in Michigan?”

  “One is. The other’s abroad.” I kept glancing back; seeing the little bear and plushy bunny. All those children, I realized, just stopped in the street. Trayvon Martin. That kid in Ferguson. I didn’t even know all their names. “Well, the cops are in a really vulnerable position,” Heather Mickleberg had said at book club. “I mean, how do they know if those people have guns or not?”

  I’d just spent eight hours in a rural county jail. That alone almost undid me. I couldn’t imagine being a teenager—or getting stuck behind bars for years. Whole communities swept up, hauled in for nothing—or for piddly shit, like I was. I thought about Ashley’s outrage and tweets, #BlackLivesMatter. Brenda, raising her son. All the headlines I’d just sort of let slide by me.

  My own foolishness was astounding.

  “My daughter’s studying in London right now, as part of her college,” I told Isaiah, shaking my head. “She’s so much more worldly than I was at her age.”

  “Heh.” He turned his steering wheel sharply. “Well, let’s hope so. Brianna and I, when we have kids, I’ve already told her, they better be smarter than I am. When I was a teenager?” He searched for the appropriate words. “I was a real knucklehead.”

  I gave a weak smile. “I had pink hair and a fake ID so I could sing in a punk band in scuzzy bars in Michigan.”

  Isaiah Nickels glanced at me. “Yeah? You had pink hair? Well, that makes sense, I guess. Since you’re a musician.”

  I looked at him with confusion.

  “Oh.” I nodded back toward the trunk. “That. Yeah. Well.”

  I was so drained suddenly. Isaiah Nickels cleared his throat. He reached over and turned on the car stereo. A narrator’s voice came on in bright, declarative waves describing an unmanned expedition on a planet. “You ever read The Martian?”

  I shook my head.

  “Brianna, she thinks I should read more.”

  Reaching over, he turned up the volume. “Naturally, they didn’t send us to Mars until they’d confirmed that all their supplies had hit the surface,” said the voice. Isaiah Nickels drove on, nodding slightly as he listened, while I stared out the window and watched as the world slid away from me.

  My father had always wanted to see Memphis; next summer, next summer. “We’ll pack up the car and go,” he’d kept saying to Toby and me, though, like so many promises, this never came to fruition. Specifically, he’d wanted to visit Graceland—not only because he was a huge Elvis fan, but also “to investigate.” For my father was secretly convinced that Elvis Presley was Jewish. In one of the alternative periodicals that he kept stacked in our basement, my father had read an article claiming that Elvis’s maternal great-great-grandmother had been a Jew.

  How anyone had divined this was beyond me—we couldn’t even locate the whereabouts of my great-aunt Bessie, born in 1923—but if it was indeed true, it meant that by matrilineal bloodline and thus by Jewish law—if not in actual practice—Elvis Presley was Jewish as well. “And his middle name was Aaron!” my father said with the same insistent fervor he usually reserved for his theories about JFK and the Trilateral Commission. “You can’t get more Jewie than that!”

  One spring evening, while I was doing my math homework, my father came into the kitchen and slapped a magazine down on the table. “Tah-dah. Told you.” It was a photograph of Elvis in his infamous white satin jumpsuit with the deep, rhinestone-encrusted V-neck. There, nestled unmistakably in the dark slice of the King’s chest hair, was a gold necklace with a big Star of David on it. “Plain as day, man. And, Donna, you see this?” Excitedly, he showed me another photo of a low, wide gravestone. The words “Sunshine of Our Home” were flanked by a Jewish star on one side and a Christian cross on the right. Beneath it, the name GLADYS LOVE PRESLEY. “That’s Elvis’s mother’s original headstone that the King designed himself. Look at it! It was only after Elvis died, and they reinterred her at Graceland, that they removed all the evidence! But c’mon, man, who puts a Star of David on a headstone for someone who isn’t Jewish?”

  My long-haired Leftie father had only contempt for organized religion. As a teenager, he’d read Marx and Saul Alinsky on the sly and become besotted with the idea of himself as a revolutionary. Eager to piss off his dutiful, synagogue-going parents—and contemptuous of the sit-ins staged by middle-class college students—he concluded that the only bona fide way to unite the world’s proletariat class was to become a proletarian himself. And so, instead of college, he’d headed off to the Dodge plant. I can only imagine his shock when he arrived on the assembly line—a nice Jewish boy of eighteen—and found that his comrades in the United Auto Workers union were far more interested in duck hunting and ogling Ann-Margret than they were in Howard Zinn.

  Adding injury to insult, he was soon classified 1-A. Without any student deferment or bourgeois loopholes to save him, he landed in Saigon on the morning of his nineteenth birthday—catapulted into battle against the very Communists he’d once lionized.

  This made it even odder to me that he was obsessed with Elvis’s potential roots.
(He was almost equally fixated on the fact that both Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor had converted to Judaism. “See, see?” he would say, as if some great hypothesis were being proved.)

  Now, as I climbed off the bus in Memphis, I thought about my father as I hadn’t in years. Elvis’s picture was right there in the Greyhound Station on a big welcome banner amid a montage of tourist highlights. (No Star of David, however, was visible in the King’s chest hair.) Staring at the photo, I felt an unexpected shudder of wonder, of grief. I alone had made it to Memphis, my father’s reluctant emissary. And it occurred to me, suddenly, that I was actually older than Elvis now. He’d only lived to forty-two. How was that possible? He’d always been so monumental, so larger-than-life and grown-up. Yet I’d already outlived him by three years.

  And when my father wandered off into madness, he’d been younger than I was now, too. Had he ever thought of me over the years, missed me in his fugues? I missed my own children now with a deep, primordial ache. I’d have to reach them. And I knew I’d have to figure out some way to deal with Joey, too—though I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how. How had everything accelerated into this? Spinning so far out of control? I elbowed my way among the bank of pay phones and grabbed a receiver and placed a collect call to Michigan. But there was no answer. Austin was still at school.

  My plan was to book the first possible flight back to Detroit. But first I had to get cleaned up somehow. What’s more, I needed to sleep, if only for a few hours. I got light-headed just sitting down to pee in the restroom. I fell back onto the toilet seat with my panties looped in a crazy-eight around my ankles, and I had to press my cheek against the cold metal of the stall for a few minutes. When I finally stepped out into the fluorescent scrutiny of the bathroom again, I saw in the mirror that I seemed to have developed a hunchback.

  It was actually just the hood of my ANTHRAX sweatshirt stuck inside the collar between my shoulder blades. But oh. As I confronted my image in the mirror, I saw that the wreckage was even worse than I’d thought. My hair was partially matted on one side of my head, the other spiky and stiff with day-old hairspray like one of Tina Turner’s late-career wigs. Since I hadn’t put any ice on it, my cheek where Janine had punched me was now the size of a robin’s egg, its bruise a rainbow of chartreuse and violet. My upper lip was cracked and swollen, too. My eyes were ringed with exhaustion. Beneath my leopard-print miniskirt, runs zippered my pantyhose.

  Most appalling, however, was that an unmistakable whiff of tequila and Zack’s cologne and vomit and industrial ammonia from the Dickson County Jail still clung to me, overlaid by the tweedy, chemical mustiness of the Greyhound bus. It was a wonder—and a true testament to his charity—that Isaiah Nickels had permitted me to ride inside his car with him at all (though a flacon of air freshener snapped into the air vent had continually fumigated the interior of his Camry with artificial vanilla. Now I knew why. Clearly, he had experience in giving rides to his clients).

  Quickly, I washed my face and armpits as best I could in the sink, combed out my hair, dabbed off my flaked mascara with toilet paper. I would find a room, then a phone, then a flight.

  Outside the bus terminal were taxis.

  “Ma’am, you have an address? A particular hotel that you’re going to?”

  I drew a blank. Finally, I said the only street name in Memphis I knew. “Beale Street. Hotel.”

  “I’m sorry. The Westin on Beale Street, ma’am?” The driver glanced skeptically in his rearview.

  “Yuh. Sure. The Westin.”

  “Usually, we’re all sold out on Columbus Day weekend. But you’re lucky. We just had a last-minute cancellation,” the clerk said, staring at his computer screen, “provided you don’t mind a room that’s wheelchair accessible?”

  The rate of $359 sounded obscene, but I’d just spent a night in a jail, so: Fuck it.

  A moment later, however, the clerk frowned. My Visa card had been declined. Either I’d already maxed it out—or, possibly, Joey had put a block on it.

  My “emergencies only” Mastercard was declined too. “But how? Why?” I barked over its 1-800 security number. “I haven’t even touched it.”

  “Well, there appears to have been a flurry of recent activity on foreign websites—one in Denmark? Another in Croatia. Something called Easyjet.com? And we’ve just flagged a whole bunch of charges coming out of Greece. Do you have any idea what these might be?”

  I didn’t. “My daughter’s studying in London. We put one card in her name, but she’s in England. We don’t know anyone in those places you’ve mentioned.”

  “Well, that’s probably why it’s blocked. It’s been flagged as either lost or stolen.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Shit, shit, shit.” I was making the call from the landline at the reception desk, and the hotel clerk was getting impatient. I knew there was no way he’d let me telephone Ashley overseas to find out what had happened. All sorts of scenarios unspooled in my head, but the most likely one, I tried to reason, was that she’d left the card in a pub or a restaurant somewhere and hadn’t even realized it was missing.

  “I’ll have to pay cash,” I told the clerk. “I just need a bank machine.” He directed me to one just around the corner.

  When I tried to withdraw money, though, the only thing the ATM spit out was a paper tongue reading “Insufficent Funds.” At first I thought it was a mistake or a joke—or Joey, being vindictive again. But as I dug through my purse for my bank receipts, it became clear that over the past few days, I’d unwittingly depleted the rest of my account. The $80 back in Charlotte had actually been the very last of my money.

  Good God. Before I even dared to look at the contents of my wallet, I quickly did the math. The bus from Jackson had cost $29. Before boarding, I’d purchased a turkey sandwich, a Snickers bar, and a bottle of water from the vending machines: another $8.95. The taxi to Beale Street had been $28 and generously, stupidly, unthinkingly, I’d given the driver a $5 tip.

  Frantically, I rummaged around my pockets for spare change, for any bit of cash the cops might have overlooked. But as I stood there alone on the sidewalk in the approaching autumnal twilight of Memphis, it was obvious. All I had left to my name now was $9.05. Nothing more.

  Chapter 16

  Beale Street looked like an aging, ravaged party girl without her makeup. The neon signs for juke joints and blues bars burned anemically, leached of color in the ebbing light. Without the night’s electric glamour, you could see just how low some of the pressed-tin ceilings were and all the extension cords that had been jury-rigged to the speakers and secured haphazardly with duct tape. You could see lusterless floorboards and the patched, beat-up banquettes. On a single table by the service station, arrays of ketchup bottles were turned upside down to drain into other ketchup bottles, weeping tomatoey tears. The sadness of it all made me ache.

  A few places had a happy hour going, with music blasting and an insistent, touristic joviality. Outside on the sidewalk, some buskers were playing professional-grade blues with full-piece bands and amplifiers to a small, appreciative crowd: the Beale Street equivalent of an early bird special.

  The strip only extended a couple of blocks—I’d expected it to be bigger, somehow.

  An older couple strolled, blinking dumbly at the street signs. A bicyclist maneuvered around me over the brick paving. I stood there with my suitcase and Aggie, not knowing what the hell to do. Nine dollars and five cents. Nine dollars and five cents. I kept halting every few steps and double-checking to make sure this was really true, that I’d counted right, my stomach twisting, hoping against hope that somehow, the dollar bills in my wallet would’ve taken it upon themselves to begin spontaneously reproducing like—what were those single-celled organisms that cleaved themselves into two—amoebas? Paramecia?

  Then it came to me. I was in Memphis. With no money. Schlepping around a Rogue Dreadnought acoustic guitar. I could pawn it, couldn’t I? If I could find someplace—though I’d likely only get twenty
-five bucks for it—I knew how these things worked—at least back in Dry Lake with Zack’s saxophone they paid a quarter of what anything was worth—I doubt that the business of hocking things had changed much—unless with eBay—but that, of course, was not an option…I looked down at Aggie. My last fucking friend in the world, really. Then I remembered what Brenda had said, seemingly so offhandedly: You weren’t thinking of getting back into music by any chance, were you?

  Of course. It was so obvious, it was absurd. The answer was literally right there in my hand. Could this have been what she’d meant all along by “an old love in a new face”?

  Quickly, I staked out a corner across the street from an Irish pub that seemed to have a fair amount of foot traffic. Opening my guitar case like a clamshell by my feet, I looped Aggie’s strap over my head. The weight of it suspended from my shoulders was surprising—a boxy albatross—it had been so long—it took a few minutes to adjust it and tune it after everything we’d been through in just the last day and a half. My fingers were still tender.

  My mother had taught me the very first song I’d ever learned to play: “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” A simple Peter, Paul and Mary folk tune I’d quickly come to despise for its sentimentality and echo of abandonment. But now, that’s where my fingers went. As I began, I thought of her, sitting behind me on a rubber stepladder in our kitchen back in Dry Lake, her arms looped under mine, arranging my tiny fingers into position on the fretboard. The lemony tang of her Jean Naté cologne filled my nostrils; her dark hair tickled my cheek as she leaned over.

  “Jet Plane” was good because it required so little concentration, and as my voice rose an octave into the refrain, “I’m leavin’, on a jet plane/Don’t know when I’ll be back again,” I was taken aback by how emotional I felt.