The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [131]
The next day she dropped Ava off at Graceland and decided to explore the city on her own. She’d visited there many times when she was growing up, but it was simply her birthplace, the place where her father had grown up, a backdrop for family reunions. As she drove through Midtown she felt like she’d been wearing smudgy glasses that had been removed. The past was visible everywhere: 1920s bungalows, Art Deco buildings from the thirties and forties, neon signs from the fifties and sixties. She drove past a sign in the shape of a smoking cigarette and one that had a white shirt with no body in it, waving an empty sleeve, advertising Happy Day Laundry. Every particular she saw was interesting and worthy of scrutiny, because it was in Memphis.
Memphis was where she’d lost her mother. The whole city seemed poised to reveal something important to her, something about her parents. Their past lives, their youth, their spirits even, seemed to be living on here in an alternate universe. In this part of town she could be back in the fifties, for all the buildings had changed. Was it possible to fall in love with a city?
Downtown she’d parked her car beside the Peabody Hotel and took a walk down Main Street. Trolleys, mostly empty, clacked past her. There was the Chisca Hotel, once the broadcasting home of WHBQ radio and the Red Hot and Blue show hosted by Dewey Phillips, who’d played Elvis Presley’s first single, “That’s All Right,” for the first time on his show in 1954.
One street over, on Mulberry, was the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot, now the National Civil Rights Museum. She passed a building which was once the Alonzo Lott School for Waiters. Sunlight slanted on the brick storefronts and coffee shops, the fire station. She could open up a clothing store in one of these buildings. Caroline’s.
In the distance was the Arcade Restaurant, and across from the Arcade was Earnestine and Hazel’s, which had once been a church and then a pharmacy and a brothel. Now it housed a juke joint called Soul Burger.
The Arcade was a touristy spot because it had been used as a setting in several Hollywood movies. Locals sniffed at the food because the rolls weren’t homemade, but Caroline loved the old brick building, the neon signs in the huge plate glass windows, the Memphis memorabilia on the walls, the soda fountain and the boomerang pattern in the Formica on the tabletops. It was the oldest restaurant in the city, and it was down at the end of South Main.
In the Arcade she’d sat in one of the turquoise and tan booths and ordered coffee and sweet potato pancakes and indulged her fantasy of living there, in one of those buildings on Main Street, working in a quiet and orderly store surrounded by beautiful clothing that she’d chosen herself, talking to people who actually wanted her advice and suggestions, feeling competent in her own life again.
* * *
And now, driving through Memphis, on her way back to Marylou’s house with the tangy smelling white bags of barbecue and sides in the backseat, it felt unnatural being in Memphis without Ava, but it also felt fine. She was starting to understand that she and Ava would probably keep needing each other, coming apart and then back together, for the rest of their lives. It was up to her to make the first real move, to take a short step away. Neither Mom nor Elvis could make everything all right for Ava.
Caroline hadn’t been able to step away, at all, ever, because part of her, deep down, was sure that she was somehow responsible for Ava’s autism—that it was caused by something Caroline ate or drank or did while she was pregnant, or that her genes were bad, or the fact that her labor had gone on for a week and Ava had been yanked out by forceps with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. And those fucking mercury-laced shots.
Like Nance, she