My Name Is Lucy Barton

27

“Say, Wizzle,” my mother said.

It was early morning. Cookie had been in, taken my temperature, asked if I wanted some juice. I said I would try the juice, and she left. In spite of my anger, I had slept. But my mother looked very tired. She seemed no longer angry, just tired, and more like the person she had been since she’d arrived to see me at the hospital. “Do you remember me talking about Mississippi Mary?”

“No. Yes. Wait. Was she Mary Mumford with all those Mumford girls?”

“Oh yes, you’re right! She married that Mumford fellow. Yes, all those girls. Evelyn in Chatwin’s Cake Shoppe used to talk about her, they were related somehow. Evelyn’s husband was a cousin, I don’t remember. But ‘Mississippi Mary,’ Evelyn called her. Poor as a church mouse. I got to thinking of her after we spoke of Elvis. She was from Tupelo too. But her father moved the family to Illinois — Carlisle — and that’s where she grew up. I don’t know why they moved to Illinois, but her father worked at the gas station there. Not a Southern accent on her. Poor Mary. But she was cute as the dickens, and she was the head cheerleader, and she married the captain of the football team, the Mumford boy, and he had money.”

My mother’s voice was rushed again, compressed.

“Mom—”

She waved a hand at me. “Listen, Wizzle, if you want a good story. Listen. Write this one up. So, Evelyn told me when I was in there talking about—”

“Marilyn Somebody.” We said this together, and my mother paused to smile; oh, I loved her, my mother!

“Listen. So Mississippi Mary married this rich fellow and had, oh, I don’t know, five or six girls, I think they were all girls, and she was a pleasant person and they lived on a big place where her husband ran his business, I don’t know what business it was— And her husband would take trips for his business, and it turned out that for thirteen years he was having an affair with his secretary, and the secretary was a fat thing, such a fat, fat thing, and Mary finally found out and she had a heart attack.”

“Did she die?”

“Nope. No, don’t think so.” My mother sat back, she looked exhausted.

“Mom. That’s sad.”

“Of course it’s sad!”

We were silent for a while. Then my mother said, “I only remembered her because she — well, all of this according to her cousin Evelyn at Chatwin’s — she loved Elvis, born in that same dump he came from.”

“Mom.”

“What, Lucy?” She turned and looked at me quickly.

I said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

My mother nodded and looked out the window again. “I’ve thought how strange it must be. Both Elvis and Mississippi Mary went from being so poor to being very wealthy — and it didn’t seem to have done either of them a damn bit of good.”

“No, of course not,” I said.