Graceland

by Lynne Hugo

  “Why there?”

  “He was airlifted. They’ve got a better neurology department than we do, and, you know, Joan insisted.”

  “I can imagine,” Kathy said, with a knowing nod. “I’ll hope for the best. He hasn’t been in here for weeks. I wonder if he hadn’t been feeling well….”

  “Excuse me,” said the man sitting on my left. “I couldn’t help overhearing. Did you say Dick Bradshaw had a stroke?”

  The man had dark brown hair, curly and close-cropped except in the front where it dipped purposely over a broad forehead. Straight nose and straighter teeth, the completely perfect ones that say my parents had the money for braces. Brown eyes, the kind women call pretty eyes, beneath groomed heavy brows. He was near enough that I smelled his cologne, definitely not Wayne’s Old Spice (which he practically showers in when he wants to have sex, after all these years still not remembering that it nearly makes me gag). This man was altogether too good-looking, in a pinstripe suit and subtle maroon tie, not the common Maysfield man in a baseball cap, coveralls and work boots. I was immediately put off. I shouldn’t have mentioned a patient’s name. I usually told Kathy, but she knew not to spread it around. This was different.

  “I’m really not supposed to discuss it. I’m sorry….” I trailed off and looked at my tea.

  “It’s just that I’m a lawyer, too, and he’s a friend, well, not a close friend, but I know him and I’d be sorry if anything happened to him.”

  I relented a little. “Well…” I began, a beginning indeed. We talked all through lunch. He had a third cup of coffee and Kathy brought me a new pot of hot water, and by the time I left to go back to work, it was way too late to take the long way back.

  CHAPTER 4

  Madalaine lowers herself into a chair like a much older woman, to put her feet up on the glass coffee table for a few minutes before making dinner. Evening is overtaking the living room from the carpeting up, and she wishes she could just darken into sleep with the furniture. She looks around and allows herself a moment of comfort. This room has always been her favorite because of the brick fireplace and carved wood mantel, where framed pictures of the children are precisely arranged with brass candlesticks holding dusty rose tapers. A wreath of dried roses, eucalyptus and baby’s breath hangs above the mantel and it still pleases Madalaine to see how it picks up the soft green and rose and cream of the room, even now, when everything has come down on her at once. She sighs when the back door slams. It takes Brian only seconds to drop his backpack on the kitchen floor and spot his mother through the dining L, in the semidarkness of the next room. He bounds toward her.

  “Mom!” Brian is loud, as if she weren’t three feet away.

  “Brian!” she mimics and then pointedly lowers her voice. “I can hear you and so can the neighbors. What is it?”

  He flops on the couch dramatically. “Do you know what a corsage costs?”

  “I can’t say as I’ve purchased one of those lately.”

  “Those little rose things are fourteen dollars and gardenias are sixteen-fifty. Christy wants gardenias.”

  “Well Christy may have to settle for carnations.”

  “Mom. No way. Nobody is getting carnations. Christy says they’re tacky.”

  “Maybe Christy should just buy her own corsage. Or maybe you should get a job so you can get her gardenias and rent your own tuxedo and buy your own tickets.” The words are serrated, and she begins thumbing through the TV guide, carefully saved from the Sunday paper, to calm her irritation.

  Brian explodes, thrusting a hand forward in accusation. “You’re the one who said prom should be special. And you’re the one who told me it was okay if I ran track again. I don’t even have time to get a job and save enough money. That’s not fair.”

  “Life’s—”

  “God, Mom. Life’s not fair. God. Don’t you ever get sick of yourself saying that?” Brian hoists himself to his feet, his neck reddening. “I’ll ask Dad for money, okay? Will that satisfy you?” The boy lopes from the room without looking back, his arms and legs too long, out of scale with his body.

  Madalaine begins to call his name sharply, but sinks back into the upholstery before the second syllable. Brian doesn’t hold grudges, one of the qualities that has saved Madalaine too many times lately. Of course his girlfriend wants gardenias for the prom. Hadn’t Madalaine herself? And hadn’t Bill given them to her? She’ll call Claire to ask whether she should order a wrist corsage or a pin-on one. Claire can be relied on in ways Brian can’t, to know what will be exactly right.

  There are times that Madalaine envies Lydia for having Claire. How can one girl be so nearly perfect—prettier than anyone in the family, no Sams-woman nose, smart, mature, dependable as daylight? Of course, Jennifer may turn into that sort, though at ten Claire already shone in ways Jennifer doesn’t. But Brian is just your basic teenage boy, a passable-but-not-excellent student, sports obsessed, who bumbles across his own emotions, tries, and tries to hide his own trying. He will be huge, like Bill, in another couple of years when he finishes growing. Meanwhile, he nearly trips on himself unless he has a ball in his hands, when he turns oddly graceful, a dancing buffalo, she thinks. Not that Madalaine would trade either of her children for anything or anyone in the world. Not at all. They are her life. It’s her habit of minute examination and observation of them that leads her to compare them to other children their ages, wanting her own to be perfect enough that the world will not hurt them. When she sees their flaws, she knows they’re vulnerable, and doesn’t know how she’ll protect them.

  “You can’t protect them,” Bill used to say when Madalaine argued with Brian about whether his fall jacket would keep him warm if it rained that day, or whether Jennifer had memorized her spelling words.

  “That’s my job. I’m supposed to protect them. I’m their mother, in case you hadn’t noticed,” she would snap back, incensed at his nonchalance.

  “They have to learn,” he’d say, angling his shoulders so that his enormous body would not face her head-on. His face and ears would redden, making him look foolish, a rough patchwork of pink and white. “Let them take their lumps.”

  “I’m teaching them how to manage their lives. Kids don’t just absorb that from the wallpaper, and they’re certainly not going to learn it by imitating you.”

  That, or a similar retort from Madalaine, usually ended the argument. Bill would withdraw from the room, disgusted and defeated at once, and she would attend to one child or the other or both. She had concluded that Bill didn’t, couldn’t, understand the fierce, visceral connection she had to the children. Madalaine attributed that inability to his being male, until he told her he was leaving the efficiency apartment he’d been in for only a few months to move in with Melody.

  “I have an obligation to the baby…and to Melody,” he said, looking her in the face righteously, and at that moment Madalaine’s fury detonated like a land mine in the terrain between them. He’d lost weight and begun to grow a beard that glowed faintly pink beneath the high ruddiness of his cheeks and his still-blond hair. Both of her children looked like him. He was wearing a sapphire-blue striped shirt Madalaine had never seen, one that brought out the blue of his eyes. They’d always been more gray than hers, but the shirt made them startling, noticeable.

  “You can talk about obligation? You can talk about obligation? What about your obligation to your legitimate children? You can do this to them?” Her voice rasped hoarsely, emphatic on certain syllables. She gesticulated wildly, her hair bobbing out of place across her forehead and cheeks.

  “I haven’t left the children,” he said pointedly, with a calm that infuriated Madalaine even more as he turned and extended his long reach toward the front door. “Tell them…”

  “I’ll tell them the truth,” she said, and intended it as a threat.

  “I guess in time they’ll figure out the truth for themselves,” he said, and left, the door clicking quietly as a period when he closed it.

 
It made no sense to Madalaine then, and still doesn’t. Even in the moments when she is composed, she cannot follow the white thread that should lead from the intentions of her heart to what has become of them. She was a good wife; she is a good wife. She had married Bill, and been a good wife. She has hardly spoken to another man in seventeen years. She does not deserve this. Lydia, maybe. She could see this happening to Lydie. There might be a modicum of fairness in that.

  Madalaine sets a plate piled with four pieces of chicken, mashed potatoes, broccoli with cheese sauce and four carrot sticks down with deliberate gentleness on the kitchen table. Across from and next to it, on green place mats neatly set with paper napkins and utensils, she sets two plates with much less food on them. “Brian! Jen! Come on to dinner.”

  A shuffle of feet sounds in the hall a moment later. Brian and Jennifer are bickering about the television when they reach the kitchen. They pull out chairs noisily and sit, continuing to fuss at each other without real animosity in their tones. Madalaine looks at them without listening as she puts some bread and butter on the table, seeing their sheer, fair coloring, the too-fine, milkweed texture of their hair, their matching blue eyes. Brian has just started to shave, not that he really needs to, and a couple of days’ worth of errant hair juts from his chin. Light falls over them in an indistinct circle, and Madalaine feels tears behind her eyes.

  “Hey, you two. Let’s have a nice dinner, okay? Brian, please get yourself and Jen some milk, and let’s talk about exactly what you need for the prom.” Madalaine speaks engagingly as she turns off burners on the stove and adjusts the rheostat to lower the intensity of the light from the fixture that hangs by a chain over the kitchen table.

  As she knew he would, Brian has forgiven her. “Okay. I need my tux, and Christy wants my tie and cumberbund to match her dress. Hot-pink.”

  “Gross,” Jennifer says. “You’ll look like a total dork.”

  “That’s cummerbund, honey,” Madalaine puts in.

  “Whatever. And I’ve got to buy the tickets and pay for dinner. Claire and Kevin want to go to Miada’s, and Christy says that’s cool. I don’t care where we go.”

  “Wow. This is an expensive proposition. And the gardenias, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Well, I called Claire, and she says a wrist corsage is best.”

  “Oh. What’s that?”

  Madalaine smiles warmly and launches into an explanation. There is no way Bill would have thought to check on what kind of corsage the girls were wearing, and Christy doesn’t know about the difference or she would have told Brian. They’re still children, but this is Madalaine’s watch and she’ll see that they are cared for.

  Ellie is doing the supper dishes again, something she gets stuck with sooner or later every day. They had Maddie’s stinking meat loaf two nights in a row, and even though the pan sat in the sink soaking for two more days, blackened residue is bonded to the metal like dried gum to Charles’s damn pockets. Leave it to Maddie to bring something that Ellie would have to clean up. Daddy, Mama and Charles are watching Hard Copy in the living room with the volume so high that the neighbors must be going deaf. Ellie has a Walkman, not a real Walkman, but a little cassette player with headphones that she asked Claire for when Claire got a new, actual Sony Walkman for Christmas. It’s not that she couldn’t afford to buy one, but why spend the money? Claire didn’t care. Now Ellie can listen to one of her Elvis’s Greatest Hits tapes when she wants to shut out her family. Which is a lot of the time. Tonight, for example.

  Maddie and Lydie both called today. It would mean something if one of them would do something, not just leave her with taking care of Mama and Daddy and Charles. It’s ridiculous, like one of Charles’s notions, the way Lydie says, “Go ahead, get your own place. All of us can help Mama and Daddy when they need help, you know, you don’t have to live there. We’ll work it out.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. Who would stay with Presley during the day? Not that anyone here really cares, but Presley is terrified of being alone.

  Such a fuss all the time about the prom. Of course, Lydie and Maddie both went to their proms, so it doesn’t wring them out every time the subject pops up like a dandelion. Ellie didn’t get to go to a prom, no, of course not. Lydie and Maddie had already moved out by the time Ellie’s senior prom rolled around and word had obviously gotten around school that Ellie had to take care of her mama and daddy and pathetic brother. Why can’t her sisters think about how she might feel when they talk about Claire’s shoes, or Brian getting some gardenia wrist corsage for his girlfriend?

  At night, she sees herself with a man like Elvis on the screen behind her eyes. To “Love Me Tender,” Ellie touches herself like the petals of a flower, where a man would. Sometimes, she readies herself first, undressing and releasing her dark hair from its bow slowly, shaking it to fall lushly around her shoulders. She looks at her body in the full-length mirror in her room and sees that her hips are only a little wider than her shoulders, her thighs not so dimpled as either Maddie’s or Lydie’s. Her breasts are fuller than her sisters’, too, though they aren’t like Mama’s misshapen watermelons, thank God. Sometimes she imagines Elvis watching from behind her mirror. She lifts a breast in each hand and creates a sensuous cleavage, coyly pretending she doesn’t know he’s there….

  She lies down on her double bed in a pink negligee, one strap slipped down to lie against her shoulder and reveal a rich curve of flesh. She closes her eyes to watch herself move through the rooms of Graceland before catching up with herself here, in their bedroom, where she has gradually spread her legs. If he hadn’t died, she would have been at a concert somehow, somewhere, and he would have picked her out. He would have known her anywhere. Neither of them would be lonesome tonight.

  CHAPTER 5

  “I’m so sick of you all going on about the prom. Don’t you have anything else to talk about?” That’s what I got from Ellie when I told her that the shoe store could dye Claire’s blue fabric shoes black after all. When it’s not the prom, it’s some other avenue that runs to and circles the personal Arc de Triomphe she’s erected to prove I’m at fault for her life. I have tried to talk to her, but she is like a reinforced steel door, slammed and locked against any other way of looking at it.

  When I agreed to take her and Maddie to Graceland, it was hope that moved my mouth, not reason. I should have known— I did know—that it would be a disaster. First of all, there was the whole Death Week nonsense. Ellie packed more white candles than clothes in her suitcase. How much foresight would it have taken to realize that putting that suitcase in the trunk of the car during an August that was melting sidewalks and making the air a choking, wavy yellow color was not a good idea? But that isn’t even what went wrong, not at first anyway.

  What first went wrong was that Maddie was still moving like a robot and hardly speaking at all. She needed a psychiatrist, maybe electroshock therapy, not to climb in the back seat of my green Ford that couldn’t have air-conditioned Alaska in the winter, let alone Death Week. After that trip, I developed a theory that what actually killed Elvis was that he inadvertently opened a window and the Memphis heat overcame and drowned him in his own sweat. We decided to go south to Knoxville and detour through the Great Smoky Mountains. Gatlinburg, a little tourist town there, was a common vacation destination among Ellie’s friends at Wal-Mart.

  “I’ve never been anyplace in my life,” Ellie complained. “This way I can see the Smokies on the way to Graceland, and the people at work can stop lording it over me.”

  The driving fell to me. Ellie refused to help because she’s convinced that every freeway trucker who gazes down from his cab with a broken-toothed grin is trying to look down her blouse. This forces her to ride with both hands pressing the cloth to her upper chest. I used to explain that if she’d consider driving over thirty-eight miles an hour on the freeway, every truck wouldn’t find it necessary to pass her, but I’ve given up. And Maddie was in no condition to drive. She slumped back right away,
her head against the seat, staring at the roof of the car while tears used their familiar stream beds down her face after they squeezed out from beneath her closed eyes. Presley ran back and forth across the back seat over Maddie’s lap. Sometimes he’d catch one of his feet between her thighs and struggle a moment to get it free. Even that she didn’t notice.

  I’d taken three of my ten vacation and/or sick days to tack onto the weekend, loaded my own stuff in the car and gone over to pick up Maddie first, then Ellie. Maddie walked out with just her purse, so I had to go in and pack some underwear, clothes and a toothbrush for her myself. Bill was keeping Brian and Jennifer because Maddie had to let him see them, but Maddie was convinced he would take them over to Melody’s. Her attorney had warned her that she had to let Bill see the children even if he was an adulterous dickhead, which was how Maddie put it to him in a rare flash fire. Unless she could show that Bill or Melody had somehow abused the children, well, then, Bill had the right to see them, the lawyer told her.

  “Running around with a slut barely out of her teens who’s obviously got the intelligence and morals of an alley cat? Are you telling me that the court says that’s just fine?”

  “No ma’am,” he responded with weary gentility. I’d gone with her, and could see in the furrows puckering his eyes and the liver spots on his hands that too many other outraged women shouted those words. “And no doubt he’s everything you say he is, including the children’s father, and that’s the part that gives him the right to see them. Unless you believe he has…molested them? Perhaps, well, your little girl?” The last two sentences were a glittering nugget in the pan of gravel.

  I watched Maddie and a shiver passed between us on a frequency only a Sams woman could hear. “Maddie, no,” I said.

  “Damn,” she said to me. “Damn.” And huge tears gathered in the wells of her eyes and hovered on the edges. “No,” she said to the attorney in his three-piece suit behind his mahogany desk, and the tears tracked a path through her makeup. “But he’s certainly screwed me. I take it that doesn’t count.”