I've Reason To Believe We Will Be Received by Mike Stevens

Fingers drumming on the door and my neck bent in the seatbelt like I’m twelve again on another roadtrip, I realize I haven’t ridden passenger side in this car in quite a while. But this isn’t another roadtrip. We’re going to Graceland.

“He finally split with June,” my mother says. “She started talking marriage again and he got cold feet.”

Mom’s just returned home from Anacortes, Washington, a visit with her widowed father. An old man with a beautiful heart—pig valve included—and a belly full of tacos and laughs that erupts (in laughs, not tacos) as he slaps you on the back and tells you a dirty joke while you wait in Puget Sound for the crabs to notice the pots full of chicken guts. He discovered Adult Friend Finder recently.

“You said she was pretty high-maintenance, right?”

“Yeah. According to Dad, she showed up at the house with four suitcases.”

“Geez … that doesn’t sound like Gramma Carroll at all.”

“That’s what Grant and Cynthia said after they met her, too.”

This is small talk and at first I think it’s all I need, all I need to hear. I study Mom’s profile. The black baseball cap with electric squiggles that confess “Bad Hair Day” en français. The wisps beneath, each strand emerging visible from a field of skin. The Nature Conservancy T with an African elephant but also accidental strokes of acrylic here and here. She returned home with sketchbooks full, I know this without asking, and last night I swear I heard Lyle Lovett croon in the studio upstairs.

“How’s the painting?”
“Oh, it’s okay.… I need you to look at it. Ron says he likes it, but you know you’re my only honest critic.”

We’re listening to Paul Simon. We find this funny. We try to sing along. We have the same hapless singing genes but we’re so good the two of us in this car with a CD-player, A/C, and four wheels on the ground, all Mom ever asked for.

…Memphis, Tennessee

Poor boys and pilgrims with families and we are going to Graceland

“I thought we lost this CD,” I say.

“I know! I just found it behind the cabinet on the landing.”

“Hunh. Good…because I think I was the one who lost it there. Like, years

ago.”

“Yeah, thought it’s been a while since I listened to it.”

I remember hearing Mom paint to this album, too. It was one I pilfered to play on my own, and one time it never returned.

Graceland. We find this funny, too. One thing I never hear her play is Elvis himself. But that doesn’t mean the man who looms over the Memphis tourist landscape never touched our lives as well.

She has this fantastic story, my mom. I can’t do it justice. It was ’73, she was a Hughes Airwest flight attendant (stewardess), and the only passengers on her first flight were Elvis Presley, Linda Thompson, and a backing band. When he boarded in all his Vegas glitter and glory and flab he leaned in close and asked, “How long you been flying, sugar?” and exchanged her response for a kiss on the cheek. The star couple invited her and the rest of the crew to a concert that night in Spokane. At the after-party, Linda asked her to come spend a week with them in Tahoe. And so she did, a week of front-row seats and slot machines with Elvis’s money and dinners prepared by chefs Elvis had flown in for the occasion, arriving from his favorite Mexican restaurant in San Diego or his favorite Chinese place in San Fran depending on his fancy for the night. A mild-mannered gentleman, this Elvis, dedicated to Bible-study and the occasional karate demonstration that sent chairs torpedoing into TVs.

This is the Graceland we seek, a legend we believe entire. We’re a car full of legends ourselves, famous if underappreciated artist and her astute son, the one true critic, presently a college student in lands to the north, home from scholarly conquests for respite and watercolor lessons. And we’re doing what we do best: traveling again. Maybe Graceland isn’t the Costa Rica we’ve promised ourselves. Maybe we won’t even leave the county. But it’s part of our story.

“You know, Mom, it was just a second ago we were in Taos.”

She smiles at me as she drives, eyes leaving the road for a moment.

“You’re right.”

This is our line. When we were in Taos, it was Derby, England. When we were in Derby, it was the Galápagos, a place we went to see the boobies and also because it sounded funny. This is the catalogue of our travels. More important, this is the breadtrail of our shared experience, experience of relative time. What is relevant is what we encountered then—in Taos, the heat and cobblestone streets and spices—what feels new and real and whole because we share it here and now. Time marked by laughter and connection and not by the gaps between.

“Which exit did Ron say again?”

I have the map. A MapQuest printout with marginalia in my father’s blue handwriting. We are two travelers terrible at directions.

“You’ll wanna get in the right lane for Airways Boulevard South.”

“Okay.”

A new song now—“I Know What I Know.” We sing its non sequiturs with the passion of the deranged and without the inhibitions I’ve known all my life because this, this here matters, it’s now or never:

She said, Don’t I know you from a cinematographer’s party?

I said, Who am I to blow against the wind?

We dance in our seats and Mom, not a very good driver with both hands on the

wheel anyway, takes one off and waves it in the air in rhythm, “Whup, whup, whup, whup” to my “I know what I know, I know what I know.”

I know all the times we weren’t dancing together in a car down city streets. Sixth grade, the Galápagos, one night in our room in the bottom of a boat for thirty—a boat in which we woke every morning at seven to “Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun on the intercom—one night she told me she thought I was having such a good time with everyone on the ship except her. This was sixth grade, remember. In eighth grade I shouted, I shouted a lot, this time I was screaming because I felt like my rights as a fourteen-year-old were being ignored (I don’t recall the issue) and she reminded me that her own mother was dying and she couldn’t deal with this right now. Two hours later she’d boarded her flight for Seattle. But this was eighth grade, remember, and you can’t make the same exceptions for eighth grade that you can for sixth.

But mostly I think about art lessons and drinking Coke out of plastic cups while chatting with adults at art shows. I think about coming home every day after school to hear her commiserating with survivors on the phone. I think about going to church back when I still had a tinge of belief in divine spirit or energy or something and I could still feel a sense of community there, and only later did I learn the community I felt had been in the car with me going and coming. I think about smoothies. I think about disagreements and maybe what you’d call fights. I think about picking blackberries.

Then I think about moments when I felt something was slipping away, when myth and reality intertwined beyond clarification. At times, others’ statements became painful insults in her mind, leaving her in tears and me forced to decide whether I’d lost my mother to delusion or people near to both of us were insensitive and liars. These moments in time I try to ignore, squeeze out, and focus on the seconds worth remembering, try to forget the increasing lapses in memory and seeing doubt in someone so strong, a woman who’d replaced wigs with a hat whenever possible and even thrown that off at her parent’s fiftieth anniversary, a smile on her face.

“Remember, Mom—it was just a second ago we were in Taos,” I say.

We said this in Colorado. We said this in Tennessee. We said this in the San Juan Islands. I said this as I watched her dying in a hospital bed in our living room my first year of high school. She couldn’t respond then. She couldn’t even smile. We said this every time we wanted to recall a smile, our running gag, a story. Each other’s story.

I pull into a gas station on Elvis Presley Boulevard, gravel compressing under the tires. After two minutes idling in drive I turn off the music and park. Not in a parking space, just parallel to the road. I turn off the car and open the door. I don’t get out. I sit. It’s hot. I miss this humidity. You don’t get weather like this where I am now. Here it’s awful and I love it. I take off my seat belt. I get out.

A few years ago I asked my dad if he believed the story Mom’d repeated to anyone willing to believe, the Elvis story. He said he didn’t know. She believed it. He wasn’t sure.

As I stand here crushing someone else’s cigarette with my left shoe, I’m not really thinking about Graceland, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee. I’m thinking a $30 admission fee to look at ceilings with shag carpets. I’m thinking old women with blue hair and people who came from further than the suburbs. I’m thinking five years now and I’m driving alone to a dead man’s mansion, empty mansion.

I look at the sky. I take off my glasses and wipe my forehead. I get back in the car, close the door, turn it on, turn on the album I downloaded last night. Paul Simon sings to me about a woman with diamonds on the soles of her shoes. I cut him off, go back to the title track. I put the car in drive and I head the way I came, back to the freeway. Pilgrims with families and we are going to Graceland.