Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [44]
At first, Dixie pretended she didn’t know he was there, waiting to see if he would approach her. But after he huddled by the rail for too long, it dawned on her that he couldn’t skate! She felt sorry for him now and went over and said, “Hi, I’m Dixie, from church.” He got shy on her, said, “Yeah, I know,” and looked down for a minute and then tossed his hair back a little. It was the first time they had spoken, but then they almost didn’t stop. They got a Coke and talked nearly the night away, telling each other their life stories.
Already they were moony over each other, and when it came time to go home, they extended their date at K’s Drive-In for a late night snack. Afterward, Dixie kissed him in the parking lot, and he drove her home—very late now, her father would kill her—in his ’41 Lincoln. The next night, and the next, they went to the movies. But she still didn’t want her parents to see him. Not yet.
“I had tried to tell my mom and dad about him, that he was a little different from the other guys.” But when he arrived at the house the next Saturday night, only a week since they first talked at the roller skating rink, she was not prepared for the reaction.
“My parents were so shocked at the way he looked and dressed that they wouldn’t let us leave together.” They spent the evening sitting on the front porch with her three sisters and her mom and dad. In time, her family “adored him. He was a perfect gentleman.” But one of her sisters kept raising her eyebrows so Dixie could see what she really thought of the guy, and her uncle offered Elvis two dollars to go get a crew cut.
Dark-haired, intelligent, and earnest, Dixie was everything Elvis wanted in a girlfriend. Even her age was right. A sophomore at South Side High, Dixie was fourteen years old. Almost immediately, Elvis gave her his ring and taught her the language (“almost a baby talk”) he had with his mother, reverting to a pouty, little boy voice when he used their special words.
When Dixie first saw him at church, “We knew almost immediately he was not one of us. There was a restlessness about him, an air of anticipation, as if he knew he was on the threshold of something wonderful and exciting.”
Part of it was his nervousness at what might come of his visits to the Memphis Recording Service, if anything. He hadn’t even told Dixie about making the record, and he was glad, because he hadn’t heard back from Marion or Sam. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t, did it? He had so much unfocused energy. When he sat, he drummed his fingers on the table, and his foot was just going all the time, shaking, tapping, as if he hadn’t a second to waste. His leg, too, just bounced, even when he was just sitting in the movie theater. If anyone commented on it, he’d stammer and say, “Oh, I just do that, I-I-I-just do that.”
He was settling into the church now. Partly to be closer to Dixie, he participated in many of the activities, and he hoped to impress her with his singing. Though Dixie found him a shy boy, when he sang, he threw himself into it completely, so much so that she thought he “kind of lost himself . . . And he had this feeling if he could just meet James Blackwood, it would be worth every feeling of insecurity.”
He was much more relaxed when they went for walks. He could be playful, too. He’d grab her from behind, his hands around her waist, and hug her up close, snuggling into her back. Dixie would let out a delighted squeal, her dimples showing, and then smile so big folks could probably see it all the way over in Nashville. Soon the young couple was nearly inseparable. Elvis and Dixie were falling in love. “It was serious right away,” she says. In fact, they considered marriage. “We knew that that was what was supposed to be. We talked about it from the very beginning.”
Elvis, too, would always remember how close the two came to marriage. “I got out of school and was driving a truck,” he