“I don’t know,” she said. “But things are going to change soon, I can feel it. Now set me up with a book and then”—she dropped her voice to a whisper—“go and help her before she breaks every dish we’ve got.”
I believed in my mother’s ill-defined optimism. And every day I waited for the happy event that would somehow rescue us. But the days marched on and nothing changed until one night when I was awakened by my mother weakly calling, “Audrey?…Audrey?”
I raced downstairs and saw that my mother’s vent hose had come disconnected from her shell. I reattached it, then looked about for Audrey. I found her sound asleep on the sofa. I had seen caretakers sleep before, even Peacie, and certainly I had, but it was with one ear open to hear my mother. Not so for Audrey. She was lying under a pink flowered sheet I’d never seen, her head on a pillow with a matching case. Her shoes were off. I went to stand before her and called her name. Nothing. I shook her and with some reluctance she opened her eyes. Then she bolted upright. “What’s the matter?” she asked, and I was astounded at her tone. She was indignant; I had disturbed her rest.
“My mother’s vent hose came off,” I said.
Audrey tsked, flung the sheet off herself, and pushed her feet into her shoes. “What did she do?” She walked over to my mother and asked the same question.
“In case it has escaped your attention,” my mother said, “I am paralyzed. I didn’t do anything. You didn’t attach the hose properly. Now if you will step up here and watch, my daughter will show you how to do it correctly.”
“Mom, she was sleeping,” I said as I demonstrated attaching the vent hose. “She was sound asleep!”
“I never was!” Audrey said. “I was resting my eyes. I can hear everything from out there.”
“I had to shake you awake!” I said. “You were snoring!” This was untrue, but I felt the need to say it.
She turned away from me and busied herself straightening my mother’s sheet, no longer the glaring white it was when Peacie was here, no longer wrinkle-free. “I was not sleeping.”
“You’re fired,” I said, and she turned to me, astonished.
“Don’t you talk to me that way, young lady!”
“Diana,” my mother said.
“What! She brings her own pillow! She thinks this job is sleeping!”
“Go to bed,” my mother said.
I couldn’t believe it. “She’s no good!” I said. “Just let me do it!”
My mother looked at me with great love and sorrow. “Go to bed,” she said again, and I climbed back upstairs, where I lay crying quietly in the dark. I heard the low-voiced ministrations of Audrey. Did my mother want a drink? No? Well, then, she should just close her eyes and go to sleep like a good girl. And don’t be fooling with that hose anymore. For heaven’s sake, didn’t she know that hose was keeping her alive?
In the morning, while Mary Jo made breakfast, I begged my mother to call Susan and have the sisters replaced. “They’ll learn,” my mother said. “It takes awhile to get used to the routine.”
“They’re awful!”
“They’re all we have,” she said.
Mary Jo carried in a tray with toast and cereal, juice and coffee. I rose from the bedside chair so that she could sit down. She laid a napkin across my mother’s chest, then said, “Here comes the choo-choo, coming down the track!” She laughed and held up a slice of toast to my mother’s mouth.
“Why don’t you go and have some breakfast, too?” my mother said, and I understood that I was meant to leave the room. I did so, then heard my mother say, “Mary Jo? I am not a toddler. Please don’t speak to me that way again.”
“Oh, don’t be such a poop,” Mary Jo said. “I was just kidding. I was just trying to make it fun for you.”
“It’s not fun when you do that.”
“Not for you,” Mary Jo mumbled.
“Yes,” my mother said. “That’s who I was talking about. Me.”
“All right, then,” Mary Jo said. “We can just do this plain and boring. Now what do you want first, toast or cereal?”
“Cereal,” my mother answered. And then, “A bit less on the spoon might work better.”
From the kitchen, I heard Mary Jo’s huge sigh.
“We’ll work it out, Mary Jo,” my mother said, and her voice was kind.
“Well, you’re about the most demanding patient I’ve ever had,” Mary Jo said. “Diana? I’m going to need you to run to the store.”
As she did every day. It was so she could get rid of me. I made her nervous. It was the best part of my life, at the moment, making her nervous.
Ten days later, both sisters quit. Mary Jo announced at the end of her day that they would give a week’s notice, and then they would be gone. “Why?” my mother asked. I was in my bedroom, having just returned from Suralee’s. Our play, I thought, was our best yet. I came out into the hall and heard Mary Jo say, “We just feel we need to move on. We might could ask around for y’all, see who could help out.”
“There is no one,” my mother said. “I can tell you that right now.”
“Well,” Mary Jo said. “I’m sorry, but that’s not my problem.”
Silence, and then my mother said, “Mary Jo?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Get your sorry ass out of my house and don’t come back. I’m reporting you and your sister for gross incompetence.”
“I am not incompetent! You and your daughter are impossible! Believe me, I will be happy to leave.”
I came downstairs to see Mary Jo walking to her car, and I went into the dining room, where my mother lay weeping in an oddly matter-of-fact way. I wiped her tears away. “Thank you,” she said. “Diana, I’m sorry. We are out of options. I can’t think of anything to do. I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you up. And I’ll have to go to a place where I can be cared for, some sort of institution. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll call Susan,” I said. “We’ll get someone else.”
My mother shook her head, then smiled. “You know what? It might be better. I think I was…Well, I was really stubborn about wanting to raise you myself, wanting you to be with me. But maybe it was wrong. Maybe it was never fair to you. You need—”
“I’m fine!” I said. My voice was thin and high-pitched. I was terrified.
“You need to have more freedom and…more fun,” she said.
“I have fun!”
She smiled.
“I do! I have fun all the time!”
“And you need some nice things that I just can’t give you. Everything has all of a sudden gotten so much worse. Maybe things can work out again so that we can live together. But we’re going to have to talk to Susan about what to do, Diana. We can’t go on like this.”
I stared at her.
“Would you come here?” she asked.
I moved closer to her, and she said, “Lie down with me. Put your head just under my chin, okay?”
I did, willing myself not to cry.
“I want to tell you that I’m sorry for the times I was rough with you. I wanted to raise you right, and all I had was my voice.” She laughed. “And my teeth, right? I guess I thought I needed to make you a little afraid of me, so you’d mind. Because what could I do if you didn’t listen to me?
“Peacie and I wanted you to be strong, so people wouldn’t…We used to talk about how we’d make it so that you would always walk with your head up high. And I so much wanted you to be happy.” I could hear my mother’s smile in her voice, and I smiled, too. “Once, Peacie brought you to visit me when I was in the lung, you were just a few months old, and she held you up and said, ‘Behold the mighty Diana!’ Your hands were clasped together, your feet waving in the air, and you were smiling so hard. You liked being held like that, you laughed out loud and all the patients around you laughed, too. Peacie lowered you down to me, and I kissed the top of your head and I could smell your sweet baby smell…. And then I couldn’t help it, I started tocry, for all I would never be a
ble to do for you. And Peacie said, ‘What you crying about?! You ain’t got the sense of a barnyard chicken. Look at this child!’”
I knew just how Peacie would sound, saying that. I, too, had more than once been compared unfavorably with a barnyard chicken.
“Oh, you were a beautiful baby, Diana. And you were the dryest baby in the state—Peacie never let you stay in a wet diaper more than ten seconds, I swear! But now I wonder if maybe we were wrong, if we didn’t expect too much from you. I wonder if I should have done what everyone told me to and put you in—”
“We’re not going to live apart from each other,” I said, raising my head to look at her.
“Well, we are. Just for now, Diana.”
“I’ll get a job.”
“Diana, you’re thirteen years old. And anyway, it’s not the money. We could get by on the money we get. It’s finding somebody to take care of me. And don’t tell me you’ll do it, you can’t do it.”
“We still have Mrs. Gruder!”
“She’s not enough, and you know that. Now let’s you and I talk about some options.”
I lay back down, then said all right. But what I was thinking was, If they separate us, she’ll die.
In the morning I got my mother ready for Susan’s visit, scheduled for eleven. I worked slowly, every part of me aching. My mother would die, and I would be an unwanted orphan.
“Oh, will you stop with the long face?” my mother said. “I really believe this will be much better for both of us.”
“It won’t,” I said.
“Of course it will! You’ll live with a nice family, but you’ll still be my daughter and we’ll see each other all the time. The only difference will be that we’ll both be better cared for!” The reason my mother had no bedsores—an extraordinary thing for someone in her condition—was because she was so expertly cared for, mostly by Peacie but also by me. No one would care for her with the vigilance we showed.
The doorbell rang, and I looked at my mother’s bedside clock. “She’s early,” I said.
My mother nodded. “Let her in,” she told me, and forced a smile.
From the window, I saw a long red car. “Wow! She got a new car,” I called back to my mother and then opened the door. And saw not Susan Hogart but a strange man. “Is this the residence of Paige Dunn?” he asked.
I nodded. Now what? Were we going to be arrested?
“My name is Ed Winston,” he said. “And out there in the car is Mr. Elvis Presley.”
I swallowed. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I mean I got Elvis Presley out there in the car, come to see a Miss Paige Dunn. Are you her daughter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You wrote him the letter?”
“Diana?” my mother called.
“Just a minute!” I called back.
“Yes, I wrote the letter,” I told the man. What was I wearing? I couldn’t look down at myself. I couldn’t look anywhere but into this man’s face. He was a handsome, blue-eyed blond man, a bit over-weight, fun in his eyes. “Does he…does Elvis remember her? Mr. Presley.”
“Diana?” my mother called again.
“I’ll be right there! Just hold on.”
“Come here right now!” she said.
I looked at the man. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll wait right here. But hurry.”
I went to my mother’s bedside, where I stood wide-eyed before her. “Who’s here?” she asked.
I felt for one brief moment like vomiting. Then I told her that the man on our porch said Elvis Presley was in the car outside, come to see her.
“Well, invite him in,” my mother said. She was absolutely calm. I might have been saying Brooks was here.
I went back to Ed Winston and said, “I’m supposed to invite y’all in.”
He nodded. “Okay, good. But I need you to do something for us, honey. Can you do something for us?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going to get Mr. Presley, but when he’s inside, I need you to make sure nobody else comes over here. Can you do that?”
“Yes, sir. Nobody ever comes here, anyway.” I remembered Susan and said quickly, “Well, our social worker is coming in about an hour.”
“That’s all right, we’ll be gone by then. Now, I’ll go and get him, and then I want you to sit on the porch and watch real good. You call me if anybody starts over here. Y’all have a back door, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay.” He started down the steps, and I said after him, “So he does remember her?”
The man turned around, squinting in the strong morning sunlight. “He never forgot her. She took good care of his mama.”
I watched the man look carefully around at our dead-as-usual street, then open the car door, and there he was. Walking on legs just like a real man, wearing only blue jeans and a blue shirt and those sunglasses, walking up the sidewalk, up the stairs. “Hi, Diana,” he said.
I looked at him. He offered his hand and I shook it. He knew my name. Inside his brain were some cells reserved for me. “Thanks for sending me the song,” he said.
I nodded.
“She in there?”
At last I could speak. “Yes, sir, she’s in the dining room. That’s her bedroom. It’s the dining room but it’s her bedroom and that’s where she is. Right in there.”
I watched the men go into the house, closing the door behind them. But through the open window I heard Elvis say, “Paige Dunn?” and I heard my mother answer, “Yes. Hello, Elvis. Long time no see.” Then I sat ramrod straight at the top of the steps, straining to hear more, watching the street carefully for the few minutes he was there. I saw old Mrs. Harper come out and pretend to shake a rug; and Riley Coombs came out on his front porch and frankly stared. Curtains parted here and there, and I lifted my chin high: That’s right. Then, before anyone had time to manufacture an excuse to come to our house, the door opened and Elvis and Ed came out and walked quickly down the steps, got into the car, and drove off. But not before Elvis touched my shoulder and said, “Thanks, baby.”
“Thanks, baby,” I said back to him, like an idiot. I said it back to him! After the car disappeared around the corner, I ran back inside and flung myself across my mother.
“Oh, my God!” I said. “What’d he do? What’d he say? That was really him, right?”
“That was him,” she said. “Oh, did he smell good! What did he say? Well, he said his mama never forgot me. He said he never did, either. And he said he’d gotten a letter from you.” She raised her eyebrows, smiling.
“Yes!” I said. “I sent him your song!”
“Yes. And he said it was too bad what happened to me but wasn’t it good I could still write songs. He said he wanted to buy ‘Sugar Bee Tree’ and that he’d like to offer me a contract to write more songs for him.”
“You’re going to work for Elvis Presley?” I asked.
She smiled. “Uh-huh.”
“He’s going to pay you?”
“Is he ever,” she said.
Epilogue
Whenever I tell people the story of that summer, it’s Elvis they almost always focus on. But one of the reasons I married my husband is that he understood it wasn’t Elvis who was the extraordinary one.
My mother and I moved the very next day into an apartment complex in Memphis designed to accommodate handicapped people. Brooks drove us there, with the few things we wanted to keep loaded in the back of his truck, covered by a tarp. Suralee helped me pack, vacillating between being thrilled and weeping. I gave her the glass my mother had painted and told her, “I just know you’re going to be famous. I’ll see you in the movies.” And indeed I did; in her late twenties, she had a bit part in an independent film that did not enjoy wide distribution, but I loved watching her in the tape she sent me. We lost touch after that, but I still think of her with great fondness.
My mother was able to hire nurses to care for her around the clock. And though I finally had that fantasy realiz
ed, though the nurses were wonderfully kind and perfectly trained, they did not come close to offering my mother what Peacie had, for all those years she was with us.
We saw Peacie and LaRue infrequently, but not for long. Peacie died from a stroke a couple of years after we moved to Memphis. Unbeknownst to us—and apparently to her—she’d suffered from high blood pressure. LaRue died shortly after that, and my mother and I both believed it was from a broken heart. I took some comfort from the fact that they got to see what happened with my mother, and a lot of comfort from the fact that they died free. After we first moved, my mother had offered Peacie and LaRue a job “supervising the nurses,” but they ended up opening a grocery store, and they very much liked where they lived.
Elvis never came again, but it was because of his initial generosity that my mother finally lived as comfortable a life as she did. She tried writing a few more songs, but her heart wasn’t in it, and she knew that Elvis didn’t really want her music, anyway. What he’d wanted was to repay a kindness, which he did in more than full measure.
My mother went back to school, saying that she wanted to make a living for herself, earning her own money. An attendant took her to classes in a van and set her up to take notes in the classrooms—she became a whiz at writing quickly with her mouth. She was a great favorite among the other students. “I’m their pet,” she told me, but it was more than that. They respected and admired her for her intelligence and appreciated her willingness to listen to their problems in the face of her own. More than once my mother’s phone rang in the middle of the night with a sobbing coed on the other end of the line.
My mother graduated with honors and became a counselor for quads. She lived to practice for several years and to enjoy one of the three children I have. At forty-nine, she succumbed to a respiratory infection, as we had always feared she would. The night before she died, I sat by her hospital bed not talking much, mostly holding her hand. It was a glorious night, the stars sharply clear. She could see only a little bit of the sky from her bed, and at one point she asked me to disconnect her from the vent and take her down to the visitor’s lounge, where there were big plate-glass windows. By that time, she couldn’t breathe for very long without assistance, and I was afraid to disconnect her. But she gave me one of her famous looks, and I did.