Graceland Read online

  “No, ma’am, unfortunately that doesn’t count.”

  So Madalaine was a wreck when I picked her up to go to Graceland. After the visit to the attorney, she had withdrawn to a place that was desolate and wordless. “Well, she can mourn at Graceland,” Ellie had said to me, “that’s what people do there, you know.”

  We went on over to Mama and Daddy’s. Maddie shook her head in mute refusal of an unspoken question when we pulled up, and waited in the car while I went in for Ellie. Ellie, of course, couldn’t begin to carry everything she couldn’t live without, and had a separate bag packed for Presley.

  “Wait a minute,” I said when I saw her putting on Presley’s leash. “You’re not serious?”

  “Whatever is the matter with you Lydie? You know perfectly well that Presley can’t stay here with them. It’s one thing for them to watch him when I’m at work, but there’s no way he wouldn’t be scared to death if I weren’t with him overnight. I’ve never been away before. He’s only five for heaven’s sake.”

  “We can’t bring the dog into a motel. And what will we do with him in the car anyway?”

  “People bring their children into motels all the time. And Presley likes the car, it doesn’t bother him at all as long as you don’t go around curves too fast. So just be careful for once.” She thrust a bag of dog food into my arms, which I took in a sort of involuntary reflex, and went on to the car, Presley’s leash in one hand and a suitcase in another. Two more bags were packed and set by the kitchen door.

  “You’d be best off in the back,” Ellie said to Maddie when she reached the car with me in tow. Obviously, Ellie saw this as her show. “I’ll throw up if I ride back there, and Presley will cheer you up.” Without a word of protest, Maddie just got out and dragged her body to the back seat.

  “Turn up the air-conditioning,” Ellie demanded.

  “It’s up all the way.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “This is an old car. It can only do so much. It must be over a hundred outside.”

  “Well, it’s certainly over a hundred in here.” Ellie was going to drive me insane, I knew it. “You need to stop,” she said a few minutes later. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Couldn’t you have gone at home? We just left a half hour ago.” I was split between just giving in right away to whatever she said, and trying to hang on to some small memory of how reasonable people act.

  “Gert says that it’s bad for a woman to hold it when she has to go.”

  “Is Gert a hairdresser or a urologist?” I said, coating my annoyance with a small laugh as I drove past a gas station pretending that she hadn’t just asked me to stop.

  “She knows a lot about women’s bodies,” Ellie said, patting the bow on her ponytail. “She’s also a spiritual adviser. She could help you, Maddie.” Ellie swiveled to look at Maddie in the seat behind her. I watched in the rearview mirror.

  “Will she kill someone for me?” Maddie roused herself to speak, but kept her eyes closed.

  “You mean like voodoo? Sticking pins into a statue? She doesn’t do anything like that. She helps you know what your soul needs,” Ellie said.

  “I mean like with a gun.” Maddie’s eyes flamed open for a brief second before she closed up again.

  “Poison might work nicely, too. Let’s play alphabet. Every letter has to stand for a way to kill Bill,” I tossed in, hoping to inspire Maddie to anything but this terrible defeat, but she didn’t bat an eye or answer again.

  Ellie stiffened with disapproval. “That’s not respectful when we’re going to mourn someone who is dead.”

  I would have dropped it, but irritation stirred Maddie for a moment. “Lighten up, Ellie,” she said. “I think it’s a hell of an idea. I’ll start. Arson.”

  “Burning,” I pushed on.

  “That’s not really a different way,” said Maddie.

  “Burning at the stake?”

  “Okay. That’s different.”

  “C…C…hmm.” I didn’t want to waste any momentum when Maddie was even slightly distracted from suffering, but nothing leaped to mind for C.

  “Oh come on, it’s too easy. Combine. Let a combine run over him,” she said. Her voice sounded propped up from the back seat and when I found her in the rearview mirror, she looked slightly bemused. Next to me, Ellie was drawn up in silent, offended judgment, doubtless praying for Elvis to keep her pure.

  “Draw and quarter,” I went on, trying to spread hope like soft butter.

  “Ether, the silent killer.”

  “Fling him from the top of a mountain.” I came up with this after searching a moment.

  “No, no, no! Fuck him to death. Let Melody fuck him to death,” Maddie broke in, a half shout gurgling into a diabolical laugh. I’d never heard Maddie—still as Baptist as the original when he waded into the river—use the word before, but my nearly dead sister was actually laughing. Maybe Ellie’s stupid trip idea wasn’t so stupid. I encouraged Maddie with the most mirthful laughter I could conjure.

  I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t been there: Ellie, congenitally lacking a sense of humor, giggled. “Let her gag him with her G-string while she fucks him to death, and it’ll take care of two letters.” This was even more out of character for Ellie than for Maddie.

  “Pretty good, Ellie. I’m proud of you.” Maddie leaned forward to pat Ellie’s shoulder, chortling with her.

  “Heart attack!” I said, figuring it was my turn. “Let him have a heart attack while he’s gagged with Melody’s G-string and she fucks him right to a heart attack.” Maddie and Ellie gave roars of appreciation.

  “I…okay, we’ll let him live and be both impotent and incontinent for a month before Melody…” Maddie couldn’t even repeat the rest of the sentence for boiling-over laughter, which started me laughing again, at Maddie this time, and Ellie was really warming up; I could see her mentally scanning the J category.

  “I’m torn between jimsen weed and a javelin,” she said. “Of course, it would be awfully nice if Melody publicly jilted him first.”

  “Wow, Ellie. A whole new side of you. I’m impressed,” I said, with utter sincerity.

  “There you go! Ellie can leave Wal-Mart and become the chief designer of Creative Executions, Inc. You can be her driver and I’ll do highly paid hits. Except when some poor woman wants a certified asshole husband knocked off, that will be our pro bono work. It’ll even be tax deductable,” Maddie shrieked.

  “Will you please stop? Now I swear I’m going to pee my pants.” Ellie doubled over.

  “Sure. Oh, wow, if we go back to D, we could drown him in his own pee, that’d be good since we’re making him incontinent,” I said.

  “No good,” Ellie said. “Those letters aren’t next to each other.”

  “Who died and made you rule director?” I said. “This is my invention.”

  “No one…yet…however, I am chief designer, remember? Your idea lacks…um…”

  “Organization,” Maddie put in. “It’s unorganized when the letters aren’t consecutive.” This, and Maddie hasn’t even gone to college.

  “Thank you very much,” Ellie said to Maddie. “That. What she said,” Ellie said to me.

  “I guess I see your point. I’ll do better,” I said.

  “Good. Now let’s get on with it. Get off at the next exit so I can pee and meanwhile, I believe we’re at the Ks. Your turn, Lydie.”

  I was ready. “Kebab. We’ll cut him up, put the pieces on a skewer, do it up on a grill and serve him to Melody with barbecue sauce.”

  “Yes! Very nice, good job, very nice.” My sisters’ voices were a soprano chorus, and we all fell apart again.

  I have never had that much fun or felt that close to them before or since. We went on like that through a bathroom stop for Ellie, and an hour later when we stopped for lunch. After the second stop, we lapsed into a comfortable silence, each of us settled into our own thoughts. Maddie napped a little, which I was glad to see. Traffic on I-75
south wasn’t bad, and we were in the bluegrass region, soft hills comforting as breasts rising around us as we approached the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Well before we reached the Tennessee border, though, Ellie’s mood crossed a line. As the land became more mountainous, she kept her blouse clamped against her throat with only one hand. The other clutched the padded handle of her car door. Her feet, rigid as wooden carvings, pressed on imaginary dual brakes on the floorboard.

  Thinking the heat might be on her nerves, I said, “You know, it may be a little cooler in the mountains. I don’t think there’ll be much hope for Memphis, though.” All of us were cooked by then, the sun pressing relentlessly against the car and into our eyes in the early afternoon, the air an oily heaviness on us when we tried opening windows for the breeze of the moving car.

  “Wonderful,” Ellie said, her voice saturated with sarcasm as though our earlier hilarity had never happened. “Does it occur to you that some people may be frightened? Perhaps you could think of someone else and slow down?”

  “I’m under the limit,” I said.

  “I don’t care what you’re under, or on, for that matter, just slow down,” Ellie said. In the back seat, Maddie stirred and yawned.

  The interstate curved and climbed. It did seem that traffic veered impossibly close to the squat guardrail, which didn’t seem as though it would stop a bicycle from flying over the edge. Trucks groaned and downshifted, slowing. When I dared sneak a glance at her, Ellie looked paralyzed except for her breathing, which was too fast. I went as slowly as I dared, which wasn’t slowly enough.

  “For God’s sake, stop,” Ellie yelled. Presley barked twice and began pacing back and forth on the back seat, climbing over Maddie, who sat up straight then, but didn’t say anything. “Can’t you see you’re terrifying Presley?” Ellie’s voice shrilled toward hysteria.

  A shout rose like a wave in my chest. I clenched my teeth to hold it back and tried to stay focused on the road. “If you’ll open your eyes instead of your mouth, you’ll see that there is no place to stop,” I said, as evenly as I could. Of course, I was telling God’s own truth. The road had narrowed to four lanes crammed into a niche that had been blasted out of a perpendicular mountain-side.

  “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Ellie was screaming then, Presley barking and running back and forth behind us. Maddie began crying, moaning, “Bill, Bill, Bill,” in a strange counterpoint to Ellie’s “Stop, stop, stop.” If I could have, I would have stopped just then, to throw the two of them and the damn dog off the mountain. The car rocked with emotion; my ears were clogging up and about to detonate. A semi bore down into my rearview window and its horn blasted twice. Ellie screamed again. The truck moved into the left lane where he lingered alongside me, holding up traffic behind him but apparently unable to generate the speed to pass.

  There was no exit for another five or six minutes until we were on the other side. When I realized there was a little valley town, it was nearly upon me and at the last minute I signaled to get off to the right and slowed even more to prepare for the ramp. As I did, the truck that had blasted me earlier apparently decided to move to the right again. Maybe the driver miscalculated how much more I’d dare to slow the car before I actually turned off. All I know is that suddenly, just before I reached the turn, the guardrail was to my right and the truck looming from my left. We vibrated from the sheer nearness of the semi. Ellie and Maddie both screamed, lurching forward from the unexpected forward thrust of the car as I frantically accelerated and turned onto the exit ramp simultaneously.

  The din in the car mixed with the semi’s steady horn.

  I brought the car to a stop as soon as we turned off the exit ramp onto a two-lane highway. Ellie’s face was white, her breathing coming in ragged gasps. “You’re trying to kill us,” she got out finally. On the floor of the back seat Presley whined and barked once more. Maddie was crying.

  “God, Ellie, I did not try to kill us. Maddie, are you all right?”

  “Bill. I want Bill.”

  “Are you all right?” She was scaring me, and I reached over the back seat to touch her leg.

  “No she’s not all right. Neither am I and neither is Presley. Come on, Maddie, we’re getting out of here, I have to get out of here, I can’t stand that,” said Ellie, glancing at the mountains and then quickly turning her face away. “They’re going to fall on us. I can’t breathe. My heart, oh God, my heart is going too fast.”

  “What? Where are you going? What are you talking about? Let’s find a restaurant and rest a while, wash our faces in cool water and get a cold drink.

  “No! Not another inch,” Ellie said, drawing her body against the car door in horror.

  “Fine. You drive.”

  “I’m not driving. I can’t drive here, I can’t stay here. They’re falling, it’s going to fall.” Her words came too fast and ran together, and she gestured up.

  “What do you want me to do?” I said, desperation looming like the mountain above us.

  “Maddie, you come with me, we’re going home,” Ellie said, getting out of the car. “Come on, Presley, come to Mommy, sweetheart.”

  Maddie had apparently lapsed back into her robot state. Still crying, she started to obey.

  “Maddie! No!” I said sharply. “This is crazy. Stay here.”

  Maddie just slumped back into the seat then, great tears coursing down her cheeks. “Bill,” she sobbed. “Bill. Take me back to Bill.”

  We ended up spending the night in a motel in that little town. It wasn’t a franchise, predictable and comforting as their sameness can be, but a little roadside place, dingy and poorly lit. Threadbare pink chenille spreads were tucked over a pair of single beds stuck against too-close tan walls. The owner brought in a cot for me and with that addition, there was nowhere to step. The air-conditioning had been installed through the outside wall, and I was almost grateful for its constant wheeze and churning. Maddie had gone on crying—hard, racking sobs from some place she’d not been before—and Ellie refused to speak. She was too afraid, she said, to get Presley’s food and dishes and her three bags from the trunk, panting that she couldn’t breathe. The mountains were going to fall on her; she’d seen Watch for Falling Rocks signs on the freeway. That night she huddled in a fetal position, her back to us, her breathing shallow and too fast, it seemed. At 4:30 in the morning, Presley whined. Ellie lay there stubborn and unmoving as cement, though I waited nearly ten minutes before I got up and took him out.

  The next day, none of us wanted breakfast even though we’d not had dinner the night before. I bought a map at a gas station and used back roads as long as I could before I got on the freeway again. All the way home, no one said a word, necessary or otherwise.

  “You back early?” Wayne said when he came in from work that afternoon. The kitchen door slammed against heat that pressed like weights. In the car, I had had rivulets of sweat running beneath my clothes, and Presley had paced and whined intermittently into the silence my radio could not fill.

  “A little,” I said.

  “Oh. Did you have a good time?”

  “Great.”

  “Good. Are we eating soon?” he asked

  That wasn’t my first, but it was my final attempt to travel with my sisters to the land of grace, so to speak. Since then, I’ve kept a certain distance, not so they can necessarily tell, but leaving enough room to fit a certain shield. I still do more than my part with Mama and Daddy and Charles, taking them to their doctors and the like, even though it’s no easier for me to take off work than for anyone else. The distance is more a matter of hoping for less from Maddie and Ellie than I used to, and that wasn’t a whole lot at its peak. Madalaine is stumbling through this thing with Bill and his paramour, and Ellie goes on complaining about Mama and Daddy and Charles. Certain things Madalaine knows about me I wish she didn’t, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Claire is sweet to Brian, but that’s not something she does for my benefit, it’s just her way. I did suggest
that she and her boyfriend double with Brian and his girlfriend to the prom, since the laminate on Brian’s license is barely dry, but the truth is that the thought had already occurred to Claire. Brian’s a young sixteen, not self-possessed, and I know Maddie would have worried herself to death. Everything I’ve tried to do for my family has pretty much struck back at me like a snake, and I’ve spent too much time trying to suck the poison out of my own heart.

  CHAPTER 6

  Madalaine stands behind Brian, who’s at the bathroom mirror, adjusting the back of his collar and bow tie, as much as he will let her, anyway. It will be much easier and more fun when it’s Jennifer’s turn, yet Maddie looks at her son with an unfamiliar admiration, taking pride in his masculinity and even in the way he makes it difficult for her to know what’s going on inside him.

  Whatever possessed him to agree to a hot pink cummerbund and tie? she wonders. The color is disastrous near his face, where Clearasil has lost the battle against a new, angry flare of acne.

  “Are you sure that’s how this thing goes? It’s killing me,” he says, pulling at the tie.

  “I know, honey. I mean, men always complain about ties, so I guess they must be really uncomfortable, but yes, that’s how it goes,” Madalaine answers, though she steps closer to try again. It’s then, on an intake of breath, that she realizes that Brian is wearing Bill’s cologne. She didn’t think he’d left any here, and then it occurs to her that Bill gave it to Brian, or, less likely, he’d bought it himself. The aroma affects her in a wave and she steps back. “Are you nervous?” she says.

  “No. I guess. I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s see. Remember you don’t just shove the corsage at her and grunt. Tell her, ‘This is for you,’ and that she looks beautiful, and hand the box to her nicely.”

  “I can’t say that in front of her parents.”

  “Of course you can. Believe me, they’ll notice if you don’t. And say something nice to Claire, too. Girls need that, honey.”