How to Build a House Read online

  Graceland is all about the inside, about Elvis’s over-the-top decor. Stained-glass peacock windows, a fifteen-foot-long sofa, a television room with three screens and blue and gold lightning bolts on the wall, the poolroom covered in tapestry, the jungle room with a green shag-carpeted ceiling.

  When you walk out of the house at the end of the tour and you look back at it, you’d swear it’s an optical illusion.

  It feels much larger than it looks, but that’s because he filled the place up with his gigantic personality.

  Graceland is a cartoon. A bad joke. At least that’s how it feels to me after weeks of contemplating the simplest things a house needs: a room for cooking, a room for sitting, some rooms for sleeping. A tornado-safe room to run to. A place to live that’s rooted to the ground and won’t get hauled away when your FEMA grant runs out.

  We share one of Elvis’s favorite fried-banana and peanut-butter sandwiches before getting back in the truck and heading into the city.

  We park downtown and take a long, lazy late-afternoon walk. We pass the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

  We walk up a pedestrian street with a trolley that runs down its center. Beautiful old brick buildings crowd next to each other, many with empty storefronts.

  There aren’t any people around. Maybe it’s the heat. Or maybe they’ve all gone somewhere else. Moved on. Used up all this city had to offer.

  We walk down to the banks of the Mississippi River and sit. The grass is tall. Bugs are circling us.

  I remember learning to spell Mississippi.

  Mi-ssi-ssi-ppi.

  “A kid died jumping in right here on a dare last August,” Teddy says, and shakes his head. “It doesn’t look like it, but there can be a mean undercurrent.”

  The Mississippi River.

  It never sounded real. I couldn’t imagine something dividing this gigantic country in two. But here it is, muddy and brown. It isn’t even all that wide. I can see the edges of Arkansas. If we drove up and over the bridge, we’d be there in a matter of minutes. It’s a Saturday and there’s no traffic.

  Somewhere beyond those edges of Arkansas is my home. If I could see forever, I’d be able to see its white trim and red door. I could see Dad sitting in the kitchen. Cole’s toys on the floor. Tess’s empty bed.

  But it feels like I could never cross this river, even if I had an entire lifetime in which to do it. In some ways I’m farther away from home than I’ve ever been. An imaginary divider has gone up, splitting this country and my life in two, bigger and wider and stronger than the Mississippi.

  And I can’t get back to the other side because I can’t climb something that can’t be climbed or swim across something that can’t be survived on a dare.

  Now I understand where all the people went: Beale Street.

  Teddy takes my hand. It’s the first time I’ve ever walked down a street holding the hand of someone who is not my parent.

  It’s only a little past four in the afternoon, but already people are stumbling around drunk, spilling neon-colored frozen alcoholic sludge from their forty-two-ounce plastic cups. The clubs are packed. Blues music falls out one door, country out another. From a courtyard I hear a really bad reggae version of “Piece of My Heart” by Janis Joplin.

  Teddy leans over and shouts in my ear, “So whaddya think?”

  What am I supposed to say? I hate it here. It’s loud and bright and hot, and it feels totally phony, like we’re at the Disneyland version of Memphis. The people here could vomit at any minute, and the cops on horseback look really mean.

  “Isn’t it awful?” he shouts.

  I look around and suddenly everything’s perfect. I want to find a postcard, a T-shirt, some memento of this spot and this moment.

  We walk off the main strip and wind our way along a few tree-lined blocks until we come to a little restaurant on a corner. He holds open the door for me.

  We slide into a booth of blue and white vinyl.

  It’s dark and cool. The walls are wood paneled and covered with old black-and-white photographs. Sawdust lines the floor. There’s a small stage with a piano, a stand-up bass and a drum kit at the far end of the restaurant.

  A large black woman with dangling gold earrings and an apron comes over to greet us.

  “Welcome to Alicia’s. Y’all hungry?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says Teddy.

  “All right then,” she says with a smile, and walks off.

  “Um,” I say, “are we going to order?”

  “We just did,” he says. “She’ll bring us whatever she’s cooking today, and trust me, it’s going to knock your socks off.” He rubs his hands together.

  “Even better than the Burrito Barn?”

  “Even better than the Burrito Barn.” He smiles. He gestures to the stage. “The music’ll start around six-thirty or so, and until then, we’re going to sit here and eat some killer food, and you’re going to tell me everything I need to know about you.”

  “Okay, well, for starters, I hate talking about myself.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  It’s quiet in here. Hushed conversations. It feels like secrets are hanging from the coatrack.

  Before I stop to think I blurt out, “I’m not a virgin.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I guess that’s getting right to the heart of things.”

  “I’m not sure why I just told you that.”

  “Because it’s important. I’m glad you did. For the record, I’m not either.”

  “Amber?” I ask.

  “How’d you know that?”

  I give him a look that says, How do you think I know?

  “Ahhh,” he says. “Alice.”

  I nod.

  “And you? Gabriel, right?”

  How does he know? I certainly never said anything about Gabriel to bigmouth Alice.

  “Captain,” he says. “I had to do a little background research before getting up the courage to put the moves on you.”

  I smile.

  “Is everything over with him?” he asks. “Or is he wasting his summer on one of those famous California beaches waiting for you to come home?”

  “I don’t even think he knows I’m here.”

  “So then it’s over.”

  “It never really began.”

  “What happened?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “We’ve got until six-thirty,” he says. “Then the band comes in and musicians don’t like it much when people talk through their set.”

  Alicia brings us two glasses of water and a basket of corn muffins.

  “How ’bout a shot of Jack Daniel’s?” Teddy asks her.

  She laughs. “How ’bout you grow up a few good years,” she says, and walks away.

  He smiles at me. “Can’t hurt to try.” He takes a sip of his water. “So tell me about this Gabriel person.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about Amber first.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She was okay. I don’t think her daddy liked me much, so we didn’t spend time around her place. We were together at school. And we went to parties. She introduced me to Jack Daniel’s.” He smiles and nods toward the bar. “I guess it seemed fine to be with her when all that high school stuff mattered to me. After the tornado, things changed. I didn’t care about parties. Or the prom. And she didn’t like that I didn’t care. Not that I really blame her. She’s entitled to her last months of high school being carefree and fun. I just wasn’t the fun kind of boyfriend anymore.”

  I reach across the table and take his hand. I notice for the first time that he bites his fingernails.

  “She’s going to school next year in Alabama, where she can’t wait to pledge a sorority. Her birthday is in February and she’s allergic to shellfish. Okay. That’s enough about her. Tell me about Gabriel.”

  “I don’t really know where to start. We’re friends. Or we were. But we were also more
. It never quite felt right between us. And then it just felt plain miserable when Tess entered the picture.”

  “Your sister?”

  “Well, she’s kind of my sister. Or she was. See? I told you it’s a long story.”

  “So get talking.”

  I tell him everything. I go back to what I told him that day by the pool, when he brought me the pie, but this time I don’t leave anything out. I tell him about how my real mother died when I was two. I tell him about Jane and the June Gloom picnic at the beach when we first met and how Tess and I grew up sharing a room and sharing clothes and how now we barely speak. I tell him about the hand-to-breast incident of eighth grade and the teary back rub Gabriel gave me after Tess moved out and how that turned into more. I tell him about my dad and what Tess finally told me about him and why she wouldn’t go near our house anymore.

  HOME

  I ran away.

  I ran from the tennis courts, back past the pool house, up the lawn, through Sabrina Christiansen’s mansion and down the winding streets sardined with fancy cars.

  I climbed in my front seat and sat. I had my hands on the steering wheel, but I didn’t put the key into the ignition.

  There was a knock at the passenger window.

  Tess’s face looked lovelier than ever. Her cheeks were flushed. (Were they flushed from chasing me down or from whatever it was she had been doing with Gabriel?) Her hair was in a loose ponytail. Her shirt was Indian print, billowing, with open buttons at the top through which you could see her freckled chest.

  She climbed into the car.

  “You look really pissed off.”

  “How … how … how could you?”

  “I thought things were just casual with you and Gabriel. And anyway, I thought they were over. I mean, he was going out with Sarah Denton and you didn’t seem to care.”

  “Well, things weren’t over. And they weren’t casual.”

  “Shit, Harper. How am I supposed to know that? Really? How am I supposed to know about what’s happening in your life when you never tell me anything?”

  “And that’s my fault?”

  “It sort of is, yes.”

  “You’re a bitch.”

  I’d never talked to Tess like that before. At that moment in my car, with me behind the steering wheel and Tess with her mouth hanging open, something occurred to me for the very first time.

  Things were never equal with Tess.

  Despite my being only a few weeks younger, she dominated me like an older sister. I always let her take the lead, or maybe it was that she always took it without ever giving me a chance to get there first.

  When we played cards as children she’d make up new rules and I’d let her, and it didn’t even bother me that the rules always tipped in her favor.

  That was just what she was doing now. She’d been doing it since October.

  Making up new rules.

  Creating a game in which her home was safe and mine dangerous. Her mother was good and my father bad. And as usual, I’d accepted everything like the timid younger sister.

  And tonight in my car, she was constructing yet another set of the Rules According to Tess. In this game there was nothing wrong with what Tess was doing by the tennis court with Gabriel, and I was overreacting by calling her a bitch.

  “Get out of my car.”

  “Get over yourself. So I made out with Gabriel. So what? It’s stupid. I’m not committing any cardinal sin here. I’m not violating any laws or breaking any vows, which is more than I can say for your father.”

  “What? What exactly are you trying to say?”

  “Exactly what I’m trying to say, no, what I’m saying, is that your dad is a sleaze, and after everything he did, Mom still wants me to protect him by keeping my mouth shut around you. But now I don’t care because you’re sitting there with that look on your face like I’m the one who did something terrible, but all I did was kiss some guy at a party who isn’t even your boyfriend, while your dad fucked one of his patients’ mother while he was married to mine.”

  She got out and slammed the door.

  I thought the window might shatter, but it didn’t. The full moon slipped behind a cloud. The only thing left was the sound of glass not breaking.

  HERE

  I don’t ride the bus to the work site anymore. Teddy picks me up in the mornings and he brings me a real cup of coffee in my travel mug. Yesterday he came early and we went back for breakfast to his trailer, where Diane made us egg and sausage sandwiches on biscuits and Coach Wes asked us questions about To Kill a Mockingbird, which he was in the middle of reteaching to his summer-school class.

  “Your parents are the best. You’re so lucky,” I said to Teddy as we walked up the hill to the site.

  “You just say that ’cause you don’t have to live with them,” he said. “They can be just as annoying as anyone’s parents.”

  “Like how?”

  “Well, my mom’s a mom. You know. She can be a nag. She babies my sisters. She thinks hip-hop is the work of the devil. Really. She does. But I just tell her that she’ll never understand black music. That really infuriates her. And Dad’s obsessed with football season. You should be here in the fall. He becomes a totally different person. He can’t talk about anything else. We have football players over all the time and Mom has to cook these huge meals, after a full day’s work at the clinic, and I don’t think she really likes it and Dad doesn’t seem to notice or care one way or the other.” He stopped in his tracks and looked at me. “Is this too much information?”

  I took his hand. “When it comes to you and your family, there’s no such thing as too much information.”

  This morning we’re eating with the others in the conference room of the motel: Raisin Bran out of a plastic bowl, and a too-ripe banana.

  Frances is mad at Captain because he got a letter from his ex-girlfriend that borders on X-rated, with visuals included in the form of a Polaroid.

  Captain seems to be loving every minute of Frances’s tantrum. Usually she keeps things pretty close to the vest. Captain tends to be the one who shows all the emotion and Frances, with her too-cool New York attitude, acts like she barely tolerates him. But this morning her sulkiness reveals everything.

  “C’mon, baby,” he pleads with a troublemaker’s grin. He takes the picture out of his back pocket and holds it out toward Frances. “Look. She’s not even that hot. I mean, those tan lines are too damn much. I’m so over the Florida look. I like my girl to be all pasty-fleshed, like you.” He reaches for her but she pulls away.

  “Dude,” says Teddy. “You should really shut up. I think you’re kind of blowing this.”

  Captain tosses the picture onto the table.

  Teddy scoops it up and stares at it for a long time. Then he peers over the top of it at me. “She’s nothing special.”

  That’s a lie. I’ve seen the picture. If I could cut and paste my own body from an assortment of perfect physical features, it would look exactly like hers. And now that Teddy is staring at it, and comparing it to what I’m stuck with, I feel slightly ill.

  “I’m about to do you a big favor,” Teddy says to Captain, and he gets up and flings the Polaroid into the trash can.

  Captain shoots Frances a smile as he brushes his shaggy hair off his forehead. “See, baby? See what I do for you?”

  She stands up and pushes in her chair. “You didn’t do shit, Captain. Teddy did it.” And she storms out of the room.

  Captain shrugs at Teddy and then gets up and goes off after her. “But, baby …”

  “Well, I’m going back to finish packing,” Marisol says.

  It’s her father’s sixtieth birthday this weekend, and there’s some kind of family reunion. Her parents made special arrangements to fly her home. She’s thrilled. Not so much about the family reunion. It’s all about seeing Pierre.

  She’ll be gone for three nights. We talked about what might happen with Teddy and me when I have the room to myself.

&
nbsp; “Is this when you guys start having sex? Help me here, I don’t know how this works.”

  “You mean, you and Pierre …”

  “Nope.” She shook her head. “Whenever I think about it—and believe me, the thought crosses my mind, like, a lot—I picture Sister Jean.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She’s this stern and rather unattractive nun at my school. She’s got a butt as wide as a Buick. I plan to keep this image handy till I’m married.”

  “And Pierre is cool with this?”

  “I’m not sure he gets Sister Jean’s role in everything, but he’s okay with waiting. He’s the rare breed of guy equipped with preternatural patience.”

  We never got any further on the topic of what would happen with Teddy. Topic avoided. Score one for me.

  Now Marisol gets up from the table and gives us each a hug.

  “So, I’ll see you two in a few days. I’ll be gone. You’ll have the room to yourselves.” She gives me a final pat on the shoulder. “Good luck with that.”

  Teddy and I are alone. An awkward silence takes over as the things we haven’t talked about pile up between us on the table.

  He’s seen Captain’s ex-girlfriend’s naked body, but he hasn’t seen mine. We haven’t done more than kiss. I share a room with Marisol and he lives in a tiny trailer with his parents and his twin sisters, one of whom is the nosiest child on earth.

  You do the math.

  And honestly, I’m afraid. All I know so far is that having sex does nothing to further a relationship. It only complicates things.

  But with Marisol leaving for three nights, I’m thinking there’s no avoiding it, so maybe I should bring it up.

  But I don’t know how.

  Gabriel and I never talked about having sex. Ever. It just happened, I never knew why it would one night and why it wouldn’t the next. After that first time it seemed always to be up to him, and when it was over, he’d act like nothing had happened, and so sometimes it felt like, well, nothing.

  And other times it felt like everything.

  Teddy moves his chair closer to mine. “I’ve been thinking about something.”