Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“This isn’t a gadget, Mom. It’s a calculating device.”

“Did he or did he not move back in with her?”

Kyle looked into his mother’s angry eyes. There was hurt there as well. The hurt was taking the place of the hope. Hope for a reconciliation. Hope that Darva and Kyle’s father would remarry and things would go back to the way they were before Darva’s world fell apart.

“Everybody turn back around,” said Camelia. “She sees us all looking at her.”

But Darva wasn’t looking at the woman in the Mustang. Her eyes were focused on her son. “He told me that the marriage wasn’t working. He took me to Lexington Market. We had Faidley’s crab cakes and he told me it was over. He was going to divorce her. This is what he told me. Did your father lie to me?”

Kyle nodded.

“That son of a bitch,” Darva muttered. She settled her head on the steering wheel, then a moment later jerked it back up. “I don’t blame her. She’s just looking out for herself. I blame him . He lied to me.” Then louder, the next words directed to her son: “Your son-of-a-bitch father lied to me.”

“He didn’t really lie, Mom. He wanted to leave her. Honest. But he couldn’t.”

“Why? Why? ”

“Because she’s going to have a baby.”

Camelia pointed. A new space had just opened up in front of Darva’s car. Darva needed to pull up. “You need to pull up, Darva.”

“I’m not going to pull up,” said Darva, her jaw clenched, her teeth locked. “I’m tired of moving forward by inches. I’m tired of topping off. I’m tired of being the only casualty in this family. Give me that goddamned calculator.”

Kyle shook his head.

“You need to pull up, Darva,” said Camelia. “People will start honking.”

Darva twisted around in her seat. She yanked the calculator out of Kyle’s hand. She rolled down her window and tossed it out of the car. Kyle stared at his mother in horror.

Then Darva turned the key in the ignition. She put the car in gear. A new gear. Reverse. She gunned the accelerator and slammed the Electra into the front of her husband’s ketchup-red Mustang convertible with the second wife — the pregnant second wife — inside. Darva put the car in drive, jumped it forward and then immediately back into reverse so she could ram her husband’s car again.

The new wife screamed, the sound muffled by the closed windows. She pounded the horn futilely. Camelia’s hands flailed at her friend with equal uselessness. People began to jump out of their parked or idling vehicles to intercede — to stop this madwoman from further destruction.

Darva was brought to her senses.

That night, Darva Johnson made the local news. “It just got to be too much for her and she snapped,” said her sympathetic and helpfully misinformative friend Camelia Holley, when the news reporter shoved the microphone in her face. “The waiting and the waiting. She just lost it.”

There was no mention of the identity of the woman in the deeply dented Mustang. The true story of Darva’s descent into temporary madness remained, at least for the present, a well-kept secret.

To borrow from the Bard (with sincere apologies): “Some are born fans of Elvis, some achieve an appreciation of Elvis, and some have Elvis thrust upon them.” I fall into the last camp.

I grew up in the mid-century suburban Memphis neighborhood of Hickory Hills in a community called Whitehaven. It was called Whitehaven not because of the fact that it was originally a “whites only” residential suburb (and years later became a largely African American community, making the name more than a little ironic), but because a man by the name of Colonel Francis White owned most of the original property out of which Whitehaven was created.

Graceland was there. Upon that 13.8-acre estate in the year 1939 was built the most recognizable white-columned mansion since Tara. (Given the year of the house’s construction, its original owners, the Moores, could very well have been influenced by the movie adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s classic.) Elvis bought the house in the late fifties. Shortly thereafter, my parents built their own far-smaller domicile in the subdivision that sprang up around the house. All of our neighbors across the street used the stone and brick walls encompassing Elvis’s impressive demesne for their own rear fencing.

To put it in medieval terms, ours were the serf cottages that looked up at the castle of the King. (Of Rock and Roll.)

I attended elementary school with Elvis’s stepbrothers. They had reputations for being rowdy boys, and my mother made me decline their invitations to come swim in Elvis’s pool. The closest I ever came to entering the hallowed grounds of Graceland was climbing the wall in a friend’s backyard and peering over. I remember scaling this wall in a different spot shortly after Elvis’s death. I watched the pageant of mourners snaking up the driveway to view the body. It was an assemblage fit for a head of state. Film-history buff that I was, I couldn’t help comparing the turnout to the ridiculously overattended viewing of the body of Rudolph Valentino.

There were great tears and much fainting.

No, I never got to swim in Elvis’s pool, though he often rode his motorcycle up and down our street and gave the neighborhood kids — the progeny of the serfs, if you will — a noblesse-neighborly wave.

And on July 12, 1974, I spent an evening with Elvis. I shared the experience with my twin brother Clay.

Coincidentally, it was our birthday.

My sharp recollection of that summer is marked by three enduring memories, all having to do with the movie theatre where Clay and I worked as ushers and general factotums.

1) I ate popcorn. All summer. I never tired of it, because I made it just the way I liked it. I was forever chastised by the manager of the multiplex, Mr. Humphries, for not oversalting it. Oversalted popcorn sold at movie theatres is good for business; it’s supposed to make the customers thirsty so they’ll want to buy sodas. (Or “cokes,” as we called pop and soda in Memphis, regardless of whether it was actually a Coca-Cola or some entirely different brand of soft drink.) I didn’t care. Like the koala bear and his eucalypt leaves, popcorn was my mainstay throughout the summer of 1974. And I popped it to suit my own tastebuds.

2) President Nixon’s resignation speech. A political junkie at a young age, I was unhappy to discover that Nixon’s televised speech announcing that he would resign the presidency the next day was scheduled to be delivered while I was working the evening shift. Mr. Humphries took pity on me and allowed me to take my break at 8:00 and watch the address upstairs alongside the projectionist on his portable black-and-white TV. I have forgotten the name of the man with whom I shared this historic moment, but not his political affiliation. He was no fan of the thirty-seventh U.S. president and hurled frequent animadversions at the televised image of that “goddamned son-of-a-bitch” who would soon be departing, and “none too soon, the lousy crook bastard.”

3) Then there was the night of earlier mention that I spent with Elvis, my brother Clay, and all the other monkey-suited male ushers and teenaged candy-counter girls who agreed to stay on after public operating hours ended so that we could help host Elvis’s wee-hour private movie party. Elvis liked to do this every now and then: arrange with this particular suburban multiplex to rent out the whole shebang for the balance of the night, and bring along a few friends and family members for company.

Clay and I called home: “Hi, Mama. Elvis is coming to the theatre tonight. See you at breakfast.”