I packed only a few loose-fitting garments. Everything else had to be left in my closet for Carmen to wear.
We’d fine-tuned the “switch” down to the last instant. Ironically, Claudia was taking a plane to New York, then on to London, the same day Mama and I were leaving: Saturday, March 30, just as I was going into my seventeenth week. The plan was for Carmen to stay with our father until Sunday evening, when Mama got back home from depositing me. Mama wouldn’t allow her to stay alone in the house.
Carmen, Claudia, Mama, and I met one last time to go over all possible details to keep our deception a secret.
“Just don’t flub the dub and say something to Scott or your grandparents that Julie wouldn’t say,” Claudia admonished Carmen.
“He was so happy, he went ape when I told him I was coming over and would spend the night,” Carmen said. “Thinking I was Julie, don’t you see, you know. I don’t like the idea of fooling him. Why can’t I just be me until I move in here?”
“Use your horse sense,” Claudia said, tweaking Carmen’s nose. “I’ll be gone. Then how would you explain that you hadn’t gone with me? Besides, you’re going to have to fool a whole lot of people. This will be good practice.”
Carmen deflated. “At least trying to fool them. I’d feel better about this whole deal if I had a few days practice with Julie here to keep me on the right track. Why don’t I go ahead and move in here now? That way I’ll have a chance to watch her doing stuff, like putting on makeup, and listening to how she talks. You know, study her up close. And I’ll be here to pack some of her clothes to take with me for the two days I’m at Dad’s.”
“That’s right,” I said. “She has to wear my clothes at our father’s house. We didn’t think of that.”
“He hasn’t seen either one of you often enough to recognize your clothes,” Mama said.
Carmen glared at her. “You just don’t want me here any sooner than I have to be.”
Mama slapped her thigh. “Bingo!”
I stepped in. “Mama, she’s doing us a huge favor. Don’t treat her like that.”
Mama shook her head. “I don’t know. This whole business stinks to high heaven. I feel in my bones that something is not right.”
“Because something isn’t right,” Claudia said. “It’s a total lie, but I have no doubt you’ll warm up to it quicker than you can sling a bull by the tail when you consider the alternative. That’ll make it smell a helluva lot better—to high heaven.”
Those two will always despise each other, I thought. And I understood why as Maylene flitted through my mind.
“What if someone comes to visit while both girls are here?” Mama mused, more to herself than to the rest of us.
“We’ll just say she’s spending the night with me,” I said. “After all, she is my sister.” I punctuated that with a squeal of delight. “I’m going to have a real sister for the first time in my life!”
Carmen and I grabbed hands and jumped up and down, screaming and laughing like girls without a care in the world.
“Don’t do that! You’ll jar the baby and bring on a miscarriage,” Mama said.
I winked at her. “That would solve all our problems.”
Mama gave me a dark look.
“Not by a long shot,” Claudia said. “Word that you’d been treated at the hospital for losing a baby would go through town quick as that wink you just gave your mother.”
“The secret of Frances’s abortion seems to have been kept pretty tight,” I said to Claudia. “The carpool girls are suspicious about why no one else has caught the flu, but they haven’t suggested any other possible reason for her death.”
“It gives a body hope this secret’ll keep as easy,” Claudia said.
“The carpool!” Carmen shrieked. “I forgot about your carpool. I’ve got to stay here a few days earlier so Julie can fill me in on stuff like that. I don’t even know where all those girls live. How am I going to pick them up? This is like a spy movie. I need some training, like I’d get from the CIA, before I parade around in another person’s skin. And that reminds me of something else. You’re going to have to leave your driver’s license with me, Julie.”
“Why?”
“So I can drive, silly. What if, when I’m driving the carpool some day, I get stopped by a cop and have to show him my license because I don’t have one with your name on it. That would be all she wrote. The jig would be up. Everybody in town would know I’m playing you, and it’s only a baby step from there to the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say.”
“What if I have to drive while I’m out in Texas?” I asked.
“You can take my license.”
I shook my head. “But I won’t be pretending to be you.”
“Okay, I’ll keep them both.”
The license business did the trick. Carmen was allowed to move in three days before Mama and I were to leave. She shared my room, of course, and for the most part we delighted in the novelty of having each other around. Talking and giggling until late in the night and sharing secrets was like being real sisters.
She fit easily into my clothes and shoes and said they were classy. This came as a surprise to me from one whose own choice in clothes made her look cheap and loose. She especially liked the new dress I’d just bought at Earl Allen’s.
That night before we fell asleep she said, “I want to wear the new blue one with the see-through coat to the junior class party.”
“You can’t wear that one. Even though Maylene was with me when I bought it, it’s special to me. I’ve never worn it, and Mama and I are saving it for when I . . .” A knot swelled in my throat.
“Don’t start,” Carmen said. “I won’t wear it, if you don’t want me to, but won’t it arouse Maylene’s suspicions if you don’t wear it to the party? Hey, girl, it’s nothing to squall about.” She patted my hand.
“I don’t want to go away. Why can’t I just stay here and have my baby?”
“You can, if you’ve got the guts,” Carmen said, rolling over and reaching for the pack of cigarettes on her night table.
“You can’t smoke in bed. Mama will kill you.”
She jumped onto the floor, flipped her lighter, lit up, and took a long drag.
“Gee whillikers, that tastes good. Oh pooh! I’m going to have to quit. You don’t smoke. This is my last one.”
The next night, late, as we lay talking in the darkened room, I brought up something that had been worrying me.
“Carmen.”
“Huh?” she said in a sleepy voice.
“What will you do if Farrel calls?”
“What?”
“If Farrel calls you . . . uh . . . me and wants to go out?”
“I don’t know. Go out with him, I guess.”
I sat straight up in bed. “Carmen, you can’t! After what he did to me, I don’t ever want to see him again.”
“As I recall, he didn’t do anything to you that you didn’t invite. And besides, it won’t be you seeing him. It’ll be me.”
“But he’ll think it’s me. No, Carmen, you can’t. Promise me you won’t.”
“I don’t understand why.”
“He’s mine, that’s why!”
“I thought you never wanted to see him again.”
“I don’t, but if you go out with him, he’ll think you are me, and that he can just walk all over me and I’ll let him come running back.”
“He’s asked twice if you’re preggy-poo-pie. That don’t sound like treating you bad to me.”
“Doesn’t,” I said.
She looked perplexed. “What?”
“You’re here early to polish up your grammar. Do it, or you’ll never pass for me.”
“Okay, okay. It’s not that I don’t know better. It’s just that talking like you and the rest of your in-crowd sounds so put-on, so hoity-toity.”
She went to my desk chair and sat, smoking and looking out into the night.
“It might be better if I did go out with him.”
I pulled my hair with both hands. “Jeez Louise! How could it be better?”
“It would definitely prove to him you hadn’t gotten pregnant.”
“Thinking it’s me when he sees you around town will do the same thing.”
“Look, Julie,” she said, “there’s a ton of things I’m gonna have to deal with, most of which will come as a huge surprise, no matter how much we try to plan ahead. You’re going to have to trust me a little. I’ll do the best I can, but sometimes I won’t know until the situation crops up exactly what I need to do to keep your deep, dark secret from getting out. I’m doing you a favor, you know.”
“Actually, Carmen, I’m doing you a favor too. Otherwise, you wouldn’t get to stay here in town and go to school. Which brings up another issue. I’ll be back right after the baby is born. Where will you go then, and how will we explain it when both of us are here in town and your mother is gone?”
The widening of her eyes was visible in the glow of her cigarette.
“Oops! Guess we failed to cover that base. It’ll be September, won’t it? We can say I’ve come back for the start of senior year.”
I took hold of a handful of her long hair. “Here’s another base we failed to cover. Your hair. We’ll have to cut it ourselves. Word would get all over town if you went to Opal, my beauty parlor lady, and asked her to cut your hair like mine.”
“Nobody’s cutting my hair,” Carmen said, folding her arms across her chest.
“Mama, get the scissors and come here,” I called.
—||—
Dressed in my blue and white suit-dress for travel, I took a long last look around my room, which already bore signs of Carmen’s invasion—like pinups of Paul Newman on the wall and forty-five records by rock ’n’ roll singers other than Elvis. In the mail the day before, a note had come from him about his new purchase.
March 26, 1957
Dear Juliet,
I have the most out-of-sight news! I bought a house in Memphis! It’s a mansion called Graceland after a girl named Grace who lived back during the Civil War. It used to be a farm where they raised Hereford cattle, but I won’t be keeping cows. The house was built in 1939 and sits on 13.8 acres. It has 10,266 square feet inside, and my mama and daddy and my grandma are going to live with me. I always did want to get Mama a big, fine house. Hopefully, I can move in by June. I’m going to have a pool installed too, and maybe someday you will be in Memphis and can come swimming.
I’m off to Canada to perform in April, and in May I start shooting my third movie, Jailhouse Rock. I can’t believe all this is happening to me.
Hope everything is going great for you, my good luck charm, and that you bring yourself as much luck as you have brought me.
As ever,
Elvis
I scratched out a hasty note, and Mama dropped it in the drive-by box at the post office. It didn’t say much.
Dear Elvis,
That’s great news about your house. I will do everything in my power to come visit you and swim in the pool someday.
Sorry I have to make it short and sweet this time. There isn’t much news anyway—that I can tell—except I got a new dress. Maybe someday I’ll get to wear it to one of your concerts. Meanwhile, I will always be thinking about you and sending all the luck I can imagine your way.
Juliet
Before dawn on Saturday, Mama and I sneaked our bags out of the house—both small, for I would get hand-me-down maternity clothes at the home, and Mama and Carmen would only be gone until Sunday night. Carmen put her stuff in a paper sack.
With me on the floor of the backseat and covered with a blanket, we dropped Carmen off at our father’s house on the way out of town. I regretted not getting to visit him and my grandparents before leaving, but it couldn’t be helped what with the last-minute scramble to bring Carmen up to speed on the technicalities of becoming me. We were nervous about whether they would buy into our deception, especially our father, but time had run out. There was nothing to do but go forward with the plan.
The road to Dallas was long and flat. To keep our spirits up, I read aloud the Burma Shave signs spaced along the highway.
“Dinah doesn’t . . . Treat him right . . . But if he’d shave . . . Dyna-mite! . . . Burma Shave.”
“Your voice is trembling,” Mama said. “Get a hold of yourself.”
“I’ll try. Substitutes can let you down . . . Quicker than a strapless gown . . . Burma Shave. Oh, Mama, I’m so scared.”
“Don’t be. We can prolong it a bit if I take you to the motel with me to register, and after that I have a surprise. We’re going to The Golden Pheasant for dinner. It’s a special treat I’ve saved up for. Maybe you’ll think back on it and not feel so lonely when I have to leave you.”
I tried to crack a joke, but it fell flat. “Like a last meal?”
“Don’t even think such a thing,” she said.
Nowhere in El Dorado was there a restaurant as lush and highfalutin’ as this one. The front doors, under bright-yellow awnings, had a sign over them advertising a new cooling system and were inlaid with stained glass pheasants. Two stuffed pheasants sat on top of big pillars in the foyer.
On tables covered with starched white cloths, silverware for every possible course had been laid. Although Mama had taught me what all the spoons and forks were for, I hadn’t planned on getting to use them until I grew up. But maybe being pregnant made me already grown up. I did okay, except for giving my order to the waiter.
“A hamburger, please,” I said.
He smiled. “Maybe the young miss would enjoy trying another version of our Texas beef.”
I agreed, and the result was my first filet mignon, cooked to a perfect pink tint inside. Mama had wine with the meal, and we shared an order of cherries jubilee for dessert. She doled out her hard-earned cash, and we left the beautiful restaurant through the elegant doors into the evening and the hour of my exile.