Another Song about the King

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My hands are calm. I put in, take out, take my time. I'm standing inside my closet, filling my honeymoon suitcase. Three o'clock in the morning. I can't sleep. Sunglasses. Hat. Lingerie. Bathing suit, jeans, sneakers. Outside my bedroom window, light swallows darkness until, gradually, morning will come, my wedding day. I start humming a Dylan song, "Visions of Johanna," our song, Scottie's—my fiancé's—and mine, and fold a nightgown my mother might have bought me if she were here, for my trousseau.

I slip into one of my mother's favorite songs, "All Shook Up," picking up the pace a little, the Elvis rhythm. Tuck the sunscreen and my sketchbook in the corner of my suitcase until suddenly I'm bent over, unable to move as my mind races back, remembering.

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"You were named for Elvis," my mother says calmly, as if she's telling me we've run out of milk or bread or juice. Theo's not born yet, so I must be four, almost five. It is my first real memory, and we are in the kitchen in our small house in Michigan. It is 1966. When my father is out of town, we spend a lot of time in the kitchen, at the round Formica table—me with my coloring book, my mother heating leftovers. She cuts corners when he's away. And she sews. The tiny square of brown linoleum floor becomes a place where outfits get made and tales get spun. Alone with me, my mother can transform herself from an ordinary wife and mother into someone capable of greatness.

I look up from the house I'm coloring without saying a word. And so she lowers her sewing and repeats, in her pretty southern accent, "Darlin', did you hear me? You werenamed for Elvis Presley. Not even your father knows that. Wouldn't you like to share a secret, just you and me?" My mother and I have never shared a secret before, and I'm flattered and shy and resistant all at once, as if she is taking me somewhere I'm not sure I want to go.

"But my name is Silvie, not Elvis!" I say, thrusting out my lip, looking at her. When I was older, I thought my mother had a stern and noisy beauty, a high forehead and long, oval face that, to me, suggested the nobility she longed for. Her large nose had a bump that only made her more beautiful, along with the thick straight hair the color of warm toast and the lips red with lipstick. But on this day in the kitchen, she frightens me—there is too much to see in her face, and I look down at the house I'm coloring, purse my lips, let my fingers graze over the shiny points of my new box of sixty-four Crayola crayons.
"Silvie backwards spells Elvis," my mother says. "Roughly speaking, of course. The exact backwards is Sivle, but I didn't want to get too carried away." She laughs brightly. I feel somehow ashamed. I thought I had my own name.

"It's an anagram," my mother says, and I hold my sky-blue crayon tightly; I've been coloring the sky above the house and I don't want to stop.

All my pictures are the same: a burnt-sienna house with a chimney, a green tree, green grass with a red tulip, and sky, sky, sky, all around and above. I love the sky, because it takes a long time to color, although, really, it's nothing, just color layered upon color.

"An anagram is letters all scrambled up that make different words. If you take your name, Silvie, and move the letters around, you get Elvis."
"Oh," I say, and concentrate harder on my coloring, hooking
my feet around the legs of my chair.
"You know who Elvis Presley is, don't you?"

"Sure. The guy on the record." I am coloring faster, only now I'm thinking of the dark-haired man with the buttery voice who my mother listens to almost every day, biting her lip and closing her eyes. A net of butterflies unfastens inside my stomach. I don't want to be named after him—after anybody. Where's Daddy?

She smiles. "You know those songs we play? And sometimes we dance?"
"In our pajamas?"
She frowns. "Well, yes. 'Blue Suede Shoes,' 'Hound Dog,' 'Jailhouse Rock?' Those songs are his, and they've made him famous. Do you know what famous means?" Her eyes lift, bright and soft at the same time, like when she straps on the shoes and dances away from me. I don't feel like answering.

"Yes." I stop coloring and stare down at my half-finished sky.
"What?" she asks.
"I don't know."
"Famous," my mother says, "is when everyone knows who you are."
"Everyone in the whole world?" I ask, lifting my eyes from my picture. Sometimes, even when I squint my eyes and look right at her, I have trouble seeing her face. With my father, I can stand right up close and see him; he's just there, himself.

"In the case of Elvis, yes. He's the most famous—and the greatest—singer who ever lived. Some people might say it's Frank Sinatra, but they would be wrong. They don't call Frank Sinatra the King, do they?" She stabs at crumbs on the place mat, bringing her finger to her lips to taste each one. Then she leans close and her voice drops. "Silvie, I went out with Elvis once. We had a date."
I don't say a word. I feel her waiting for me to say something, but I don't like this conversation. I begin to peel the paper off my crayon, so it's smooth, naked.

"Before I was married, when I was a teenager, in Biloxi, Mississippi. m-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i." She smiles. "You know, I wasn't always a suburban nobody driving around in a white station wagon."

A nobody? I didn't understand. She was a mother.
She sweeps the crumbs into a tiny pile, smiles. "We had to sneak into the back booth in the restaurant so no one would bother us or ask for his autograph." She looks at me. "That's when someone famous writes their name and gives it to you."

"I can write my name." I write my name below the picture I'm coloring. Slowly. Carefully. Silvie Page. Silvie Page. My name. When I look up, my mother is lost in memory.

"He had the most beautiful blue eyes always folded up in that squint, as if he didn't trust just anyone with his heart. And his voice, even just talking, was so pretty. Just a caramel-coated drawl that made you feel he had never told anyone even one of the things he was telling you. He wore a gold ring from his mama, and his hands . . . well, his hands were soft as rain. He touched my hand before we ate—a piece of fisherman's wharf pie, that sublime pie that isn't exactly apple but has cinnamon and nutmeg. And we shared a tall glass of milk with a straw. The strangest coincidence was that he liked ice cubes in his milk. Just like me." Her remembering voice is quiet, slow, like a music box winding down. "There's something so romantic about sharing food."



"You didn't have a chocolate soda?"
"No, but the milk was very cold, and they were famous for that pie, so warm and spicy and . . . well, it was delicious."
"I would get a chocolate soda."
Now my mother gazes toward the window above the sink. "Not many girls can say they were named after a king."

I follow her eyes, but it's dark now and there's not much to see out the window, just a vague impression of our small yard in this suburb of Detroit, the last of winter's snow baked on the grass like piecrust, the black expanse of driveway faded into the dark horizon; beyond that, the curb where our station wagon sits, along with the other station wagons parked on this quiet street in this quiet subdivision.

My mother looks at me, suddenly annoyed. "You will be proud of this, Silvie. Someday."
I don't say anything. I bite my lip and look back at my coloring, but that record cover won't leave my mind: Elvis, in a green satin shirt and a nubby sport coat, leaning back into that smile.
"His smile is kind of limp-sided." I squirm a little as I say this. I raise my eyes to hers, then back down.

"Oh! You mean lopsided! A half smile, as if he knows a secret. Enchanting, isn't it?" Her eyes drill holes into me, but I don't look up. Dimly, I know I should, but I can't. Or I won't. The power of her need frightens me, silences me. A minute later, she rises from her chair and, with a sigh, starts poking around inside the refrigerator, and I try to finish but never do finish my sky because, suddenly, she's beside me and music is coming from the record player in the living room, one of the slow songs she loves—"Any Way You Want Me."
"Let's dance," she says, taking my hands in hers, tugging me out of my chair.
I let her pull me up. Her perfume envelops me—magnolia blossoms—a strong flower, she's told me. On her, the scent is more than scent; it's an emotion that wafts out, humid as the Biloxi air, soft yet fierce, like the first breath of a hurricane wind. "Now, remember what I taught you?" she says.

I stand on tippy-toe, put my right hand in hers, the way I've been told. I'm still holding the blue crayon. Now I reach up and place my left hand on her shoulder just the way she showed me. I don't see how I could be a very good dance partner with my head barely reaching her waist, but she seems to be happy.
" 'I'll be as tame as a baby, or wild as the raging sea,' " she sings in a pretty voice, full of vigor. " 'Any way you want me, well, that's how I will be.' " She sings with her mouth wide open, her whole face bright with teeth.
I press my head into her stomach, tighten my grip on her hand. My feet feel heavy as bricks. Her red turtleneck feels scratchy, and the old scuffed flats she wouldn't be caught dead in outside the house make a shuffling noise across the floor.

Her palm heavy on my back, she guides me in circles around the kitchen, singing away as around we go. She leads; I try to follow. " 'In your hands, my heart is clay, to take and hold as you may. I'm what you make me, you've only to take me, and in your arms I will stay-ay-ay. Ooh-ooh.' "

I hear the faint delicate rumblings of her stomach; I hear her gather the air she needs to sing. " '. . . any way you wa-a-a-ant me that's how I will be, I will be-e-e . . .' "

And we dance on into the night, being who we are at that time, my mother and I, she with her head full of dreams, me with my hands full of sky.

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Elvis hung over us, a specter, a ghost of Mimi's glorious past, filling our house with hope. I loved my mother and wanted to believe her; I was drawn again and again to the power of her vision, to the gauzy web of mystery she wove around us. And to the question: Does every story we tell about ourselves contain both the truth and the lie?

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For nine months, I imagine now, my twenty-year-old mother put her hands on the baby growing in the globe of her belly and pressed into me, with her hands and her heart, her hunger to be somebody. I was successful in the womb—obedient and nimble, turning somersaults in those jelly seas of color and sleep. She was so sure I was a boy that she painted the small baby's room blue, and for the whole nine months, a list of robin's-egg names lifted off her lips: Michael, Stephen, David.

The moment I was born, I believe, I began to disappoint her. According to my father, the nurse lay me on my mother's chest and my mother took one look and said, "A girl?" She handed me to my father and went to sleep, and I gripped his pinkie finger and yawned my eyes into the milky slits of a newborn kitten.
My father wanted to name me Elizabeth, for his mother, but he folded his hands quietly over the blue Air Force hat in his lap, his mouth impassive, a sour taste of surprise on his tongue when he heard that his firstborn would be named Silvie. By then, my mother's indomitable spirit had already snagged his gentle one, creating a tiny tear that one day years later would cause the long fabric between them to unravel.

I think about how they must have filled out a form with their new daughter's name, my mother light in her bones for the first time in nine months, wondering how quickly she could get her shape back. Was she excited then, looking down at me, a real baby, flesh and bones in her arms, a being who owed her already? I imagine her picking me up, her hands heavy with the realization that from that moment on, she was a mother, bound to the ordinary things she'd claimed she wanted—a husband, a child, a harvest-gold refrigerator.

I imagine her holding me tighter, thinking, I could be someone, little girl, I could do things, go places, but now I have you. And how that thought could lead to another—that she could hurt me, stick me with a diaper pin, turn her back on me in the bath, forget to test the milk's temperature in the crook of her arm; and there was power in this, that she could be everything to someone, and hurt her. I wonder now how power felt to her, why she needed it so. Did she bite into it and taste blood—not just hers alone but ours, everything together? Maybe she grew ravenous then, gripping me even more tightly, holding me higher, murmuring, "Silvie, eat now; do as I say now," a round, hot, ravenous now. I'm told I howled a lot, red-faced, and rejected her milk. She had to throw the nursing bras away and make soy bottles.

The only way I slept at first, my father says, was on his shoulder, and this surely must have made her want to grab me, hold on to me tighter.
She loves me; she loves me not. For years, I played this game with flowers, revolving doors, sidewalks: Step on a crack, break your mama's back. I love her; I love her not.

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When I was older, in school, what I focused on about my mother, to justify my worries that she wasn't right, were her shoes. She had too many pairs. The shiny, unscuffed heels lay curved together in boxes in her closet, each pair giving her some idea of herself that my father, brother, and I could not give her, as if in each of the narrow size 7 boats she could one day sail away. She came by her affection for shoes naturally: Her father, Leon, whom we called Paw Paw, made his fortune from a shoe store in the small town of Biloxi, Mississippi. He fell in love with my grandmother, Nora, or Granny, the minute he plucked her away from where she stood with her nose pressed to the store window, looking longingly at a pair of pumps she couldn't afford, and gave her a job. In a gesture typical of their odd blend of whimsy and narcissism, they named each of their four children after shoes—Connie; then my mother, who was Simone; then Shelby; and last, Sweet Nina Baby.

My mother's favorites were the blue suede pumps with rounded toes and ankle straps atop chunky three-inch heels. She'd found them in New Orleans, and even though they were expensive, she'd snatched them right up. They were tap shoes without the tap, she said, and that she would supply herself. They were her most glamorous pair, and whenever she put them on, she had to jump up and dance around to Elvis on the stereo.

Even when she was pregnant with my brother, Theo, who was born when I was five, my mother would pinch her swollen feet into those blue suede shoes and play the Elvis ballads, the slow songs, "Love Me Tender" and "Treat Me Like a Fool," swaying in front of the stove in the kitchen while she made dinner, going back to that younger, freer self, the one she might have become. I wanted to ask my father what he thought when he saw those blue suede shoes on her feet night after night, but I said nothing, and he came home and left again in his cycle of days, a husband, a father, a traveling salesman who tucked his feelings inside his briefcase and under his hat.

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When I was nine or ten, it started—my bizarre taste for bland. I plotted makeovers—or, rather, makeunders—ways to make myself disappear. And my mother, too—to drain her of color, tone her down. I drew her with crayons, a silhouette, a faded paper doll.

More than once I wished her gone.
And yet, with another breath, I clung to her—to the good side of Simone: the ripe, boisterous flare of her cheekbones, her manic love, her quick laugh, the high music of her anger, her lies. I needed our shrill, expensive battles, fevers raging in the one skin that held us together.

Queen of weather, my mother—foul weather that stripped leaves off the trees, that whipped your self away and left just your body standing there, a tree shorn, nothing but a few bare branches and a fistful of shaky hope. She erased you until you erased yourself.

And so where I learned to exist was in my art, safe in that silence of color, of light and shadow. I made sure I wasn't very good—not good enough to stand out—but I lived there.

Once, I painted her smiling, in a blue silk jacket, one eye cocked to heaven, a blue kite soaring from her head. In her hands, more kites, stacked one on top of the other, lifting up and away in a powerful gust, but fragile.
"No," Theo said, studying my efforts later, when it was all over. What did he know that I didn't? "You've got her all wrong."

I never could get her right.