My Name Is Lucy Barton(21)

“He was famous.”

“He was. He was so famous, he died from it.”

“He died from drugs, Lucy.”

“But that would be the loneliness thing, Mom. From being so famous. Think about it: He couldn’t go anywhere.”

For a long time my mother said nothing. I had the feeling she was really thinking about this. She said, “I liked his early stuff. Your father thought he was the Devil himself, the foolish things he wore in the end, but if you just heard his voice, Lucy—”

“Mom. I’ve heard his voice. I didn’t know you knew anything about Elvis. Mom, when did you listen to Elvis?”

Again there was a long silence, and then my mother said, “Eh—he was just a Tupelo boy. A poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who loved his mama. He appeals to cheap people. That’s who likes him, cheapies.” She waited, and then she said, her voice for the first time, really, becoming the voice from my childhood, “Your father was right. He’s just a big old piece of trash.”

Trash.

“He’s a dead piece of trash,” I said.

“Well, sure. Drugs.”

I said, finally, “We were trash. That’s exactly what we were.”

In the voice from my childhood, my mother said, “Lucy Damn-dog Barton. I didn’t fly across the country to have you tell me that we are trash. My ancestors and your father’s ancestors, we were some of the first people in this country, Lucy Barton. I did not fly across the country to have you tell me that we’re trash. They were good decent people. They came ashore at Provincetown, Massachusetts, and they were fishermen and they were settlers. We settled this country, and the good brave ones later moved to the Midwest, and that’s who we are, that’s who you are. And don’t you ever forget it.”

It took me a few moments before I said, “I won’t.” And then I said, “No, I’m sorry, Mom. I am.”

She was silent. I felt I could feel her fury, and I sort of felt, too, that her having said this would keep me in the hospital longer; I mean, I felt it in my body. I wanted to say, Go home. Go home and tell people how we weren’t trash, tell people how your ancestors came here and murdered all the Indians, Mom! Go home and tell them all.

Maybe I didn’t want to tell her that. Maybe that’s just what I think now as I write this.

A poor boy from Tupelo who loved his mama. A poor girl from Amgash who loved her mama too.





I have used the word “trash,” as my mother did that day in the hospital as she spoke of Elvis Presley. I used it with a good friend I made not long after I left the hospital—she is the best woman friend I have made in my life—and she told me, after I met her, after my mother came to see me in the hospital, that she and her mother would fight and they hit each other, and I said to her: “That’s so trashy.”

And she, my friend, said, “Well, we were trash.”

In my memory her voice was defensive and angry; why would it not have been? I’ve never told her how I felt, that it was so wrong of me to have said it. My friend is older than I am, she knows more than I do, and perhaps she knows—and she was raised a Congregationalist too—that we won’t speak of it. Perhaps she forgot. I don’t think she has.

—

This too:

Right after I found out about my college admission, I showed my high school English teacher a story I had written. I can remember very little of it, but I remember this: He had circled the word “cheap.” The sentence was something like “The woman wore a cheap dress.” Don’t use that word, he said, it is not nice and it is not accurate. I don’t know if he said that exactly—but he had circled the word and gently told me something about it that was not nice or good, and I have remembered that always.





“Say, Wizzle,” my mother said.

It was early morning. Cookie had been in, taken my temperature, asked if I wanted some juice. I said I would try the juice, and she left. In spite of my anger, I had slept. But my mother looked very tired. She seemed no longer angry, just tired, and more like the person she had been since she’d arrived to see me at the hospital. “Do you remember me talking about Mississippi Mary?”

“No. Yes. Wait. Was she Mary Mumford with all those Mumford girls?”

“Oh yes, you’re right! She married that Mumford fellow. Yes, all those girls. Evelyn in Chatwin’s Cake Shoppe used to talk about her, they were related somehow. Evelyn’s husband was a cousin, I don’t remember. But ‘Mississippi Mary,’ Evelyn called her. Poor as a church mouse. I got to thinking of her after we spoke of Elvis. She was from Tupelo too. But her father moved the family to Illinois—Carlisle—and that’s where she grew up. I don’t know why they moved to Illinois, but her father worked at the gas station there. Not a Southern accent on her. Poor Mary. But she was cute as the dickens, and she was the head cheerleader, and she married the captain of the football team, the Mumford boy, and he had money.”

My mother’s voice was rushed again, compressed.

“Mom—”

She waved a hand at me. “Listen, Wizzle, if you want a good story. Listen. Write this one up. So, Evelyn told me when I was in there talking about—”

“Marilyn Somebody.” We said this together, and my mother paused to smile; oh, I loved her, my mother!