The State We're In: Maine Stories (11 page)

ELVIS IS AHEAD OF US

T
he house at the end of our dead-end street had been for sale almost a year when two girls and a boy broke into it through the back bathroom window. They were kids from the neighborhood: Genevieve, Blake, and Ted. Genevieve and Blake were unlikely friends, Blake tall and lively, with ear piercings and blue fingernails, Genevieve very pulled together, more French than her mother born in Avignon (which her daughter had never seen and Mrs. DuPenn did not remember). Genevieve was always called Genevieve, though Blake was sometimes called Fuzzy. Ted was really Edward.

Barbara Gillicut, the Re/Max agent who had the listing of what the neighborhood kids called “the abandoned house,” posted no photographs online except of the exterior. There was never an open house, and no one from the neighborhood asked for an appointment to view it, and for a while after the owner left, there was no word of its contents. Who knows why kids would get obsessed with something as ordinary as an empty house. But they did. They began to gather there in the evening and to peek in the windows, though they didn’t see much of what was inside until they finally broke in and went into the room at the back, the one without windows.

Jon Enders, the owner, had seemed pleasant enough when he first bought the house—but that means next to nothing nowadays, I suppose. He hadn’t exactly thrown a neighborhood barbecue, but when I dropped by with a paper plate of brownies he invited me in and we sat in the front room, which was beautifully arranged, though very spare: two chairs (two!) facing each other, each upholstered in a slightly different shade of blue velvet, and an enormous coffee table with a few stones on it, along with orchids whose budding stems were staked with chopsticks, and fashion magazines from foreign countries. Not all were fashion magazines. I went home with a borrowed
Paris Review
, which I found most enjoyable. Years ago, I’d worked at Le Pli salon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, coloring hair. Several models from the same agency often came in to get their hair foiled on the same day. One had lived in Paris in her teens and brought me madeleines. Another, an American girl from the South, brought me the best peanuts I’d ever tasted, which changed my mind about that nut. I don’t think the other ever brought me anything, but like her friends, she was nice and tipped big.

If Jon had visitors, they were few, though in the summer months I saw stylish cars go to the end of the street, and once I was curious enough to step out to see if the silver Miata was parked in Jon’s driveway again (it was), but beyond that it wasn’t a socializing sort of neighborhood—which was why I thought the custom in our town of teasing newcomers into having a barbecue, then never reciprocating, was pretty mean. “Trial by fire!” my husband said. “Get it? It’s a pun: the ‘fire’ of the barbecue.” He was always pleased when he made a pun.

The first time the kids broke into the house, Genevieve told her mother about it later, because she told her mother everything. I was visiting Marie when Genevieve made her confession—perhaps thinking I’d be protection of some kind, and that her mother wouldn’t scold her in front of a visitor. She reported that there was a mysterious door locked with a padlock. The dining room didn’t even have a table, just a stand with a vase on it, and upstairs in one of the bedrooms there was a rowing machine and a set of free weights and a stationary bicycle and a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. There was a bed and a bedside table in the other bedroom, nothing else. The bed was covered in what Genevieve described as some “elaborate quilted sort of Indian patterned thing, with little mirrors and all, and knots that looked like raspberries. Mostly silver and gray.” I listened with interest, because Jon had not offered me a tour of the house the time I visited. Genevieve said that there was also a chair in the upstairs hallway that she didn’t see at first because it was a ghost chair—one of those stylish chairs you can see right through. But the strangest thing—and here she became quite excited, in that young-girl way she has that’s going to charm boys forever . . . she said the shower curtain was the worst-looking thing she’d ever seen, printed all over with neon signs in really bright paint, made to look like they were glowing.
VIVA LAS VEGAS!
appeared in green, orange, red—every possible color. When she left the room, Marie DuPenn rolled her eyes and said, “At least we can be thankful there wasn’t some woman chained to the wall who had to give the owner blow jobs or be electrocuted.”

When my husband got back from work I told him what I’d heard, and all he had to say was that in this day and age, he didn’t understand why people didn’t install sliding doors on their bathtubs. Our tubs had been replaced with shower stalls tiled in restful colors, the upstairs one with flooring called River Rocks.

“You have to admit that he was strange,” I said, “hardly furnishing his house and nobody ever seeing him in the yard all the time he lived here.”

My husband lived to refute me: “The guy figured out he’d bought a house in a boring town and he got out.” Also, it was “Mrs. DuPenn’s job to deal with her daughter’s information, not ours.” He tended to speak of people in the neighborhood formally—a habit he’d acquired being a lawyer.

To be honest, I didn’t think the kids would break in a second time, though I was wrong. This had often been the case with our own son—my misguessing. Caleb was now making a fortune in Silicon Valley, driving a Beamer convertible, and engaged to an extremely interesting girl, a biologist who’d graduated from Harvard. One of the things I hadn’t thought Caleb would do, years ago, was act on his intense hatred of the local high school, let alone blow up the toilet in the teachers’ bathroom. Also, I hadn’t expected that when he had a teenage crush on a tourist, he’d hitchhike to Colorado to see her—or that had been his intention until the police picked him up. I could give other examples of him just being a boy, but since his life has worked out fine, best to forget—including what he did to the leftover anatomy lab frogs.

When they broke in the second time, Ted, Genevieve, and Blake tried to be as quiet as possible, but Rollins the dog—who lived in the house next door to Jon Enders’s—saw them and began barking and wouldn’t stop, which drew my attention to what might be happening. Sure enough, when I walked a little way down the road I could see that the door was wide open. There was no light when I entered the house, just Ted shining his flashlight around the walls, and Blake running into the beam of light whenever she could, pretending that Ted was trying to put her in the spotlight. Once I stepped inside, he turned off the flashlight pretty quickly, and that left whatever moonlight seeped though the door and windows. For a split second it was my impulse to turn and run. I thought I’d walked into some Jeffrey Dahmer ghoulishness. Somehow, they’d pried open the padlocked door and heads were everywhere, though the lampshades put them into some perspective. “You came! You came!” Genevieve said, once they’d gotten over their fear that I was the police. Closer inspection (Ted leading the way) revealed what I’d seen to be busts of Elvis, arranged every which way on metal tables—the long kind that people use outside for buffets. Some were chipped, missing a chunk of nose, or a bit of white showing through pink lips. Hardly any depiction seemed exactly right, though as they circled and examined the lamp bases they instantly started a game, as Ted’s flashlight danced over them: Find the Best Elvis. There would be a scratched cornea, just when Blake thought she’d won, or Genevieve would point out a missing black curl behind an ear. The lamp bases were about three feet high, minus their shades: Elvis in sunglasses; Elvis wearing a high white ruffled collar; Elvis with glitter on his cheekbones; Elvis with superlong eyelashes, a mascara fanatic’s dream.

They began snapping pictures with their cell phones. Elvis made his way across the universe in seconds. He went (OMG!) to girls in boarding school and to Blake’s half brother in Austin; he appeared in selfies with Ted, who tousled his own longish hair and did a pretty credible job of imitating Elvis’s expression before relaying it to his basketball coach. The kids mugged and held their fingers up behind Elvis’s head. They grouped some duplicate busts together and took turns crouching behind them, intruding their own faces into the lineup for the photograph. They thought all the Elvises were awesome. What did it mean? Genevieve wanted to know. Genevieve was pictured kissing him on his pink plaster lips. She ran home and got her mother, who was at first really perturbed to know she’d crept out of bed and broken into the house again, but by the time Mr. DuPenn got there, damp from the shower, his wife was walking around the tables with me,
mon dieu
–ing. “You put all these back the way they were,” her husband said to Ted, trying to sound stern.

“What do you think they’re all doing here, was he some big Elvis fan or something, I guess?” Ted said.

“I don’t think they’d be here otherwise,” I said.

“Oh no, this is wrong of us to be here,” Marie DuPenn said. “We must go!”

“Come on, enough of this nonsense. It’s after midnight,” my husband said.

Blake wouldn’t budge. She said it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen, even better than the first field of fireflies she ever saw. She stroked one Elvis’s brow, her fingers lingering on his dark brown curls.

“That guy got really fat out in Vegas,” Ted said to me. “They had to like sew him into his costumes like trussing a turkey, and I think he popped out one time. Yeah.” My husband asserted again that we had to get moving. Already, there were responses to the photos: a smiley face icon made out of a colon and close parenthesis; OMG LOL; xxURnutsxxbandsupercul!:)huuuunh?

Nobody had to walk more than a few blocks home. The kids left by the front door, Blake grudgingly, Ted with a lot of bravado. As he tried to close the front door tightly, the top hinge came out of the doorjamb, and Ted said, “Bummer!”

My husband doubled back to inspect the problem. “Oh, hell, now I feel like it’s my responsibility to fix the door,” my husband said. “Is everybody satisfied now? You’re going to be my assistant tomorrow, Ted, and we’ll get that room padlocked again while we’re at it.”

“Yo, world, the King is back!” Ted hollered, hardly worried about what he’d done, pumping his fist in the air. “Long live the King!”

“Shut up, Ted, you are so rude!” Blake said, kicking some pebbles aside.

“Hey, we could sell them on eBay and make enough money to go see an Elvis impostor in Vegas!” Ted said. He was quite keyed up. “All the food’s free in the casinos. One of them just kicked out Ben Affleck for like forever, because he was memorizing the cards played, or something. He won hundreds of thousands of dollars. I read about it in the doctor’s office.”

“I’m surrounded by morons,” Blake whispered harshly, seeming to be speaking to the moon. She looked over her shoulder at us, then picked up her pace and jogged toward home, head averted, hands clasped in loose fists in front of her.

I was just glad they were basically good kids. And I was glad, too, that there hadn’t been a refrigerator full of decapitated heads. It was so harmless—someone’s collection of Elvis lamps. Who wasn’t eccentric? This was really a modest collection, considering some of the things people amassed: Nazi helmets; pictures of freaks; old dental instruments.

“Mr. Duncan, that guy was gay!” Ted said.

“Well, what if he was?” my husband said.

“Gay!” Ted repeated. “Blake didn’t even get it that he was gay!”

My husband looked at Ted. I could almost hear him thinking, though I couldn’t read his mind. Finally, he said, “It certainly was something to see.”

“I’ve got to take really good photographs with my Nikon, Mr. Duncan,” Ted said. “Also, we didn’t search the cellar. Do you think there might have been real bodies down there?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my husband said. He turned to me, gesturing toward the Magerdons’ side yard. Andrea Magerdon was getting chemo in New York. We’d heard she was doing fine, but she wouldn’t be back until August. “Look at how well that trumpet vine’s growing,” he said. “Mine can’t even find the post.”

The following morning, though my husband left Ted two messages, he went back to the house alone to make the repairs, pretending to be more put out than he was. I walked partway with him, carrying a plastic gallon jug of water. The trumpet vine had been doing okay on its own, but the least I could do was pour some water on it, since the Magerdons obviously couldn’t. A month earlier I’d thought of watering what remained of their garden, but the water had been turned off.

Who should my husband run into, of course (I saw this from afar, and was glad I hadn’t accompanied him), but Barbara Gillicut, just starting up the walkway. “Hey, ho!” he called. “Barbara, please, a word.”

He told me later that she had not been at all amused. Clients were coming in fifteen minutes, and what were they going to see but a busted front door? He assured her that it wasn’t really damaged, and that he could fix it in five minutes. He gave her the usual talk about how kids will be kids, but these were actually pretty good kids. She disputed this, but he did discourage her from phoning Ted’s parents. “Ted and Genevieve and Blake!” he said to her. “What do you bet they all end up successful or famous or both, and we look back on this as their little misadventure, which is absolutely nothing compared to all the kids burning down buildings and beating up street people and torturing rabbits. Barbara, please!”

He fixed the door. He was gone before the people arrived. When my husband returned to the house, he told me that Barbara Gillicut had said that she’d only recently undone the lock herself. Usually she asked people to remove memorabilia when she was showing a house, but the “antique collection” had been so unusual, she thought it sort of broke the ice.

Elvis, an antique? His cars, certainly. But Elvis? With those dreamy eyes and his polite Southern manners? Elvis, who cared so kindly for his mother, Gladys, who did the right thing and joined the Army and went to Germany, where he met the little girl who’d become his bride, with her tower of black hair and her eyes outlined like Gene Simmons’s, a tiny baby in a pink blanket soon to appear in her arms?