Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (6 page)

But I loved that house, because Mama had said we would stay there. And I loved the mountains too—they rose all around our holler, straight up and rocky and too rough for roads or settling, closing us in. Lucie hated them. But she had a nice brick house in the bottom about a mile from where we were, with a grass yard and a patio, as well as everything else I wanted in the world—a fat father with glasses who ran the Rexall drugstore and wore a red bow tie, two cute little baby brothers to play with, a cocker spaniel, air-conditioning, patent-leather shoes for Easter, a transistor radio when they first came out. Still, we were best friends. We spent all day together every day and saw every movie that came to town at least five or six times. Some of those scenes are burned forever in my mind, like the funeral in
Imitation of Life
. Lord, how we cried. We were so close in those days that sometimes I'd be thinking something and Lucie would say it out loud. I don't know what it was that turned her different unless maybe it was the heredity from her mother, my Aunt Adele.

Aunt Adele was as different from Mama as night and day. Aunt Adele taught piano and had pretensions, Lord knows where she got them. When we ate over at my house, for instance, you knew what you'd have—meat and potatoes, green beans in summer, and big red slices of the tomatoes that Mama grew in her garden right by the back door. But when we ate at Lucie's house it was no telling. You might get chicken cacciatore, for instance, or even pizza, which Lucie's family found out about when they took the trip to Myrtle Beach, or
rare
meat. The first time Aunt Adele served it to me it was a Sunday dinner and the preacher was there, I remember I felt my face go hot I was so embarrassed for her to serve something to the preacher not halfway cooked. But Uncle Earl beamed. “Darling,” he said, “that's lovely,” and all of us ate it like that and I never said a word. Lucie's daddy sent Aunt Adele a dozen yellow roses for her anniversary, her birthday, Christmas and Valentine's Day, any excuse you can think of. He was just crazy about Aunt Adele.

“Why couldn't Daddy have been like that?” I used to ask Mama, but she'd smile and look off down the road. Her mouth turned down when she smiled.

“Your daddy had his good points,” was all she'd say.

Maybe so, but I was too young when he died to remember many of them, or even to remember him very well, since he was a traveling man and mostly always gone. We lived in eleven different towns before Mama and I moved to Welch, and I went to eight different schools all over West Virginia. According to Daddy there was a sure thing right around the corner every time. Mama never said a word. She'd haul out the cardboard boxes which she never threw away and sometimes never even had time to unpack, and we'd put them in the car and off we'd go. We traveled light. You can't get much of anything together with a life like that. Still, Daddy was sweet. He was slight, could not have weighed more than 135, and even though he slicked his hair down careful as he could, one piece never would stay and fell forward over his eyes. He could really whistle, is the main thing I remember—he could whistle anything. He used to whistle “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” the year it was big, and then he'd bark. He still looked like a boy when he died, so that's how he has stayed in my mind, as a boy getting out of a car and whistling.

Anyway, Daddy's car ran off the mountain while he was working for the Jewel Tea Company door to door, and then we moved to Welch, where we stayed put and Lucie was my best friend in the world. I think the piano recital in sixth grade was the first time I caught on to any difference between us.

Now Aunt Adele's piano recitals were always a very big deal. She'd rent the banquet room of the Draper Hotel and borrow folding chairs from the funeral home. Then she'd have yellow roses in big containers standing on either side of the piano, and colored spotlights rigged up by Uncle Earl. You had to wear a semiformal and gloves. Mama always made my dress and Uncle Earl paid for the material, and of course I got the piano lessons for free too. But I didn't know that then. Ever since I found out, though, it has made a difference. That's one reason I have tried to make something of myself and Lonnie, since I realized how hard Aunt Adele and Uncle Earl tried to expose me to culture. I wanted to let them and Mama and everybody else in town know that it
took
.

I had piano lessons for the longest time and practiced a half an hour a day over at Lucie's house before I found out I was tone-deaf. But Lucie played like an angel. She wouldn't practice, either—she'd lie to her mother and say she had, but she hadn't. Still she had talent running out of her little finger—later this made me jealous. On the night of the recital when we were in fifth grade, Lucie played ahead of me, “Rustle of Spring,” a flowery, runny piece, and she was so good that all the parents in the folding chairs sat absolutely still for a second before they burst into applause. Lucie curtsied, cool as a cucumber, like it was nothing at all. Aunt Adele had taught us all to curtsy.

Then it was my turn. I'll never forget it. I wore a pale blue dress with spaghetti straps and a ruffle around the bottom, and new white shoes with Cuban heels. Those were my first heels. My piece was the “Trish-Trash Polka.” I could see my mama in the audience, and Uncle Earl and Aunt Adele, and everybody who was anybody in town. I started my piece. Now this was a piece with a refrain between each section and a great big finale at the end. Only, when I was almost through I realized I couldn't remember how to begin the ending. So I played the refrain again, and when that didn't work I played the part before the refrain, and then I played the refrain again. I could feel the spot-light shining hotter and hotter on my face, I could see Aunt Adele in her blue sequined evening dress lean forward in her chair. I played the refrain again. I heard somebody clear their throat and Susie Milligan, who I hated, start to giggle. I played the refrain again. I played it four more times and then I just stood up and said, “I'm sorry, I forgot my piece.” Everybody clapped and clapped but they didn't fool me, I locked myself in the bathroom for the rest of the recital and wouldn't go over to Lucie's for two whole days.

We grew apart a little, after that. I quit taking piano. Lucie got interested in boys. But we still went to the movies every weekend, same as always, and sat together in church and in school, and read
Teen
magazine swinging in the swing on her front porch. The big break didn't come until 1956, I can tell you exactly because of Elvis Presley. That was the year when “Heartbreak Hotel” hit so big.

Now I had never heard of Elvis Presley until Lucie called me on the phone one day after school—it was winter—and said I had better come over there right away. “I'm busy,” I said, which I was, doing I think it was math. “Come on over here anyway,” Lucie said. “It's real important.” So I did, and when I got there she was jumping all around the record player in the living room, saying, “June, you've just got to listen to this.” Nobody else seemed to be at home right then, I remember wondering where her little brothers were. So I sat down in Uncle Earl's chair and she put one of those little red plastic rings on the record, it was a forty-five, to make it work on their record player. “Just wait,” Lucie said. She held on to the edge of the record player so hard that her fingers were white and her eyes shone out from her white face in a dark liquid way I had never seen before, a way which seemed to me somehow scary. It was starting to get dark outside. She pushed a button, the forty-five dropped. Elvis came on.

I had never heard anything like it, the way his voice went way down and trembly on “I'm so lonely, baby, I'm just so lonely I could die.” Elvis's voice seemed to fill up Lucie's whole darkening living room with something hot and crazy and full of pain. It made me think about things I didn't want to, such as Uncle Earl sending Aunt Adele all those roses and my own mama carrying cardboard boxes around after Daddy or just standing on the back porch and staring at nothing, which I had found her doing only a couple of days before Lucie played Elvis for me, standing on the back porch staring at an old photograph of her and Daddy they had made one time at a fair, dressed up in sailor suits. She said they rented the sailor suits from the photographer. When I came out on the porch, she put the picture in her apron pocket but I saw. “It's down at the end of Lonely Street,” Elvis sang. I thought I was coming down with a virus, I stood up to go. Lucie's face shone out white in the darkness of her living room. “Don't you just love it,” she said. I didn't say a thing.

I left, followed by the shaking, wanting voice of Elvis across the freezing grass. So this is how I remember it—the end of Lucie and me. Of course it wasn't truly the end, I know that, just like I know it must not have been longer than a half-hour after that when Aunt Adele came in from wherever she was, probably the grocery store, rustling her paper bags, and Uncle Earl came in from the Rexall puffing on his cigar, and the boys came back from wherever they were and started kidding Lucie about Elvis. Which they did for the next two years. I know Lucie didn't sit there in the rocking dark forever, nobody does that, the same way I know I didn't play the refrain of the “Trish-Trash Polka” over and over forever either, but still it seems like it.

Lucie got her hair cut in a pixie, painted her fingernails purple, started smoking Winston cigarettes and cutting school, and ran off in our senior year with a disc jockey named Horace Bean. She broke Uncle Earl's heart and gave Aunt Adele migraine headaches. I stayed home working part-time at the dime store and taking care of Mama, who got worse and worse. I was Miss Welch High School as I said. In the fall of my senior year I got engaged to Lonnie Russell, the quarterback.

*   *   *

W
hole years went by after that when I didn't see Lucie although I kept up with her through Aunt Adele and Uncle Earl. Horace Bean didn't last long—Uncle Earl had him annulled right away. Then Lucie went to college, then she taught school in Richmond and led the life of a gay divorcée. I didn't care much one way or the other. I was working two jobs to put Lonnie through school at the community college, trying to keep a decent house and take care of Mama who was living with us then. Twice while Lonnie was working for Grassy Creek Coal—this was his first job after college—they tried to send him off to other places. One time to Texas and one time to north Alabama. “Count me out!” I said. I didn't want to try to move Mama and besides I think you ought to stay in a place where people know you, and know who you are. I just couldn't see Texas, all that wind and sand, or north Alabama, or even Bluefield where Lonnie wanted to buy into a mine explosives company and would have made a lot of money I admit as it turned out, if he had. But I just couldn't see it. We stayed in Welch, and eventually Lonnie started his own mine explosives company which has done so well and I always kept the books for him. We were renting Mrs. Bradshaw's house in town and I was pregnant the summer Lucie came back and ran into Doug Young.

Ran into is exactly right! But actually he ran into us. Lucie and I were sitting out in my front yard on the lawn chairs getting some sun and trying to talk which was hard to do, our lives were so different by then, when here came a VISTA jogging up the road, sweat pouring down all over him. This was during the Poverty Program, we had VISTAs all over the place then. And you knew it would have to be a foreigner, to run in the sun that way.

He ran right up to the gate and stopped dead in his tracks, looking at Lucie. Lucie was twenty-two or twenty-three by then, I guess, and so was I, but I had been married for years. I was as big as a house, I still have these stretch marks I got from Richie. Lucie stood up and went over to the gate to say hello and that was it. You couldn't have pried them apart with a crowbar the rest of that summer long. Aunt Adele and Uncle Earl were just beside themselves too—at last Lucie was going with somebody worth his salt, Uncle Earl said. Lonnie and I thought he was weird, though, which he was. In addition to the jogging, he used to climb the mountains
for fun,
which nobody around here has ever done. Or maybe he was just ahead of his time. Now we have all this ecology and physical fitness but nobody had it then. Lucie climbed with him. He used to spend hours testing children's eyes away up in the hollers, things like that. That stuff was part of his job. Lucie helped him. In fact she never went back to Richmond at all, just moved into his trailer on Guesses' Fork, and Uncle Earl and Aunt Adele never said a word because he had gone to Princeton.

I tried to steer clear of Lucie, she made me nervous as I said. She had this way of squinting her eyes when she looked at things, you never could tell what she thought or what she might take it into her head to do next. Such as live in a trailer with a VISTA when everyone knew it. I was so embarrassed. But Lonnie surprised me too, he said it was none of my business. I couldn't get over it—there was none of that between
us,
you can be sure, until we got married. Lonnie said I drove him crazy and especially my breasts, but I said no handling the merchandise! So it made me uneasy that summer the way they carried on.

And then the night of the Moon Landing they asked to come over to watch it on our TV, Doug naturally not having one in that trailer. It was so hot. It must have been ninety that day, and the heat never slacked off at all as night came on. I had fixed a big dinner for everybody—fried chicken and potato salad, even Lonnie would have to tell you I'm a good cook—but then after all that I got so hot I had to lay in the bathtub in the cold water for a while I felt so tired. My stomach stuck up round and white above the water where I lay, I could see the baby moving around in there. I could hear them all in the living room—Lucie and Doug and Lonnie—talking and laughing, I could hear the TV. I felt like I was miles and miles away. By the time I got out there I could see they had all had several drinks of bourbon, which Doug had brought over. Lonnie fixed me one too and I sipped along to be sociable, but it was ten o'clock before we ate and eleven o'clock before the astronauts reached the moon. Right before that, when I was in the kitchen straightening up, Lucie came in and splashed cold water all over her face. I had noticed she didn't eat much, so I asked her how she felt.