Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

60 REBECCA July 7, 1990

This diner has velvet Elvises on the walls. Two waitresses are sharing a cigarette and talking about Elvis. The place is empty.

“Vera saw him,” the fat waitress says. “A party in Blue Dome.”

“Well Glory Be for Vera. He’s dead, I tell you. D-E-A-D. Dead.” The waitress turns to us. She has a nose ring. “Can I help you?”

“We can seat ourselves,” my mother offers. The waitresses are already ignoring her.

My mother and I don’t bother to read the menu. We’ve memorized it. We’re listening to these waitresses, and taking in the seventeen pictures of Elvis. They are the kind you buy on highways and they hang over each booth. In the one above our heads, Elvis wears a white jumpsuit and a belt whose buckle spells LOVE. He is gyrating, even on velvet.

“Elvis died when you were three,” my mother says, and both waitresses stare at us. “Well, theoretically .”

We order three sandwiches between us: chicken cutlet, meatballparmigiana, and tuna with swiss. We order Cokes and onion rings, potato skins. While this is all being cooked we go to the restrooms and wash up. Then while we eat our food, we plot the route from Idaho to Fishtrap, Montana, with spoons and forks and sugar packets. “It won’t take us more than a few hours,” I say, and my mother agrees.

“I figure we’ll be in Massachusetts in a week,” she says. “We’ll probably celebrate your birthday in Minnesota, at this rate.”

Minnesota. My birthday. I forgot about that. As the fat waitress brings us our food, I think about what my birthday might have been like. A big surprise party, maybe, out in our backyard. Maybe even a night cruise on one of my father’s Whale Watch boats from the Institute. With a DJ and a parquet dance floor laid down. Or maybe there’d be a huge wrapped package waiting at the foot of my bed when I woke up. Inside, a red dress with spaghetti straps and sequins, the kind I always want but my mother says makes me look like a child prostitute. And my father would promenade my mother into my bedroom-she’d be wearing a taffeta gown and he’d have on his fancy tuxedo with the pinstriped bow tie. We’d walk down to the limo, and we’d be off to the fanciest restaurant for steamed lobster. And at the table, the waiter would be young and blond and gorgeous, and he’d hold out my chair for me and unfold my napkin and bring me a drink without questioning my age.

It won’t happen in Minnesota. But it probably wouldn’t have happened in San Diego, either. My father wouldn’t have been around for my birthday, or we wouldn’t be here in the first place. He wasn’t home when I tried to call last night from the motel. I tried when my mother was in the bathroom, but she probably knew. I can’t hide those things from her, no matter what.

It’s not so much that I miss him. I think if he’d picked up the phone I would have hung up anyway. Still, it would have been nice to hear his voice. To hear him say he missed me, even. I would like to think he wasn’t home because he’s on his way to find us. I have these Hollywood visions of him begging on his knees for my mom to come home, and then sweeping her up in his arms for a long moviestyle kiss. I have these visions, but I know better.

My mother, who has been rummaging through her wallet, starts to empty her entire pocketbook on the crummy table. “What’s the matter?”

She looks up at me. “We can’t pay. Simple as that.”

She’s got to be kidding. We have plenty of money. We would have noticed before now. My mother leans across the table and whispers to me. “Ask if they take checks.”

So I sidle up to the fat waitress and in the most precious sugarcoated voice I can summon, I ask if a check is okay. “We’re just trying to ration our cash,” I say. The fat waitress says it’s okay, but a voice from the grill in the back yells out it isn’t, not one bit. Too many travelers come through. Too many checks bounce.

I walk back to the booth. Will they make us scrub the floors with a toothbrush? Wait tables? I tell my mother we are out of luck. “Wait,” she says. “There’s five dollars in the glove compartment.”

This gets me all excited-can you imagine, going crazy over five bucks? Then I realize I’ve been using that money for tolls. My mother glares at me and counts the change in her purse. We have one dollar and thirty-seven cents.

My mother closes her eyes and wrinkles up her nose, the way she does when she is creating A Big Plan. “I’ll go out first, and then you make an act out of coming to get me. That’ll look natural.”

Sure it will, I think. What kind of mother are you, to leave your kid behind when you are stupid enough to run out of cash? I scowl at her as she stands and peers into a compact mirror. “I’ve left my lipstick in the car,” she says in this bird-chirpy voice to all seventeen Elvises. “Diana?” She stomps on my right foot, just in case I haven’t picked up my cue.

“Yes, Aunt Lucille?”

“Wait here.” I’ll be right back.”

She smiles at the waitresses on the way out. I drum my fingers on the formica. I slurp my empty Coke. I count the rows of glasses behind the counter (twenty-seven) and try to invent names for the waitresses. Irma and Florence. Delia and Babs. Eleanore, Winifred, Thelma.

Finally I sigh. “I don’t know what she’s doing but we’re going to be late for ballet class,” I say loudly, wondering if Idaho girls take ballet lessons. I approach the waitresses. “Could you just watch our stuff for a minute? I think my aunt’s gone and gotten lost!” I smirk a stupid teenage smirk and put my hands palms up, What can you do?

“Sure honey. No problem.” I walk out the door, blood pounding-behind my knees. I wonder how you get a criminal record. I wait until I think I am out of sight from the diner door and then I run like hell.

My mom has the car pulled up and I jump in. She screeches out of the parking lot. For a few miles I lean forward in my seat, my eyes wide. Then I relax. My mother is still paralyzed with fear, panic, I don’t know what. I touch her hand where it rests on the radio dial, and all the air goes out of her like a deflating tire. “That was close,” she says.

My mother wipes her upper lip with the collar of her shirt. I don’t know if she’s laughing or crying. I unroll the window, wondering what comes next. I smile, but only because this keeps the wind from hurting my eyes.