Free Me and My Baby View the Eclipse by Lee Smith

straps and a ruffle around the bottom, and new white shoes with Cuban heels. Those were my first heels. My piece was the “Trish-Trash Polka.” I could see my mama in the audience, and Uncle Earl and Aunt Adele, and everybody who was anybody in town. I started my piece. Now this was a piece with a refrain between each section and a great big finale at the end. Only, when I was almost through I realized I couldn’t remember how to begin the ending. So I played the refrain again, and when that didn’t work I played the part before the refrain, and then I played the refrain again. I could feel the spot-light shining hotter and hotter on my face, I could see Aunt Adele in her blue sequined evening dress lean forward in her chair. I played the refrain again. I heard somebody clear their throat and Susie Milligan, who I hated, start to giggle. I played the refrain again. I played it four more times and then I just stood up and said, “I’m sorry, I forgot my piece.” Everybody clapped and clapped but they didn’t fool me, I locked myself in the bathroom for the rest of the recital and wouldn’t go over to Lucie’s for two whole days.
    We grew apart a little, after that. I quit taking piano. Lucie got interested in boys. But we still went to the movies every weekend, same as always, and sat together in church and in school, and read
Teen
magazine swinging in the swing on her front porch. The big break didn’t come until 1956, I can tell you exactly because of Elvis Presley. That was the year when “Heartbreak Hotel” hit so big.
    Now I had never heard of Elvis Presley until Lucie called me on the phone one day after school—it was winter—and said I had better come over there right away. “I’m busy,” I said, which I was, doing I think it was math. “Come on over here anyway,” Lucie said. “It’s real important.” So I did, and when I got there she was jumping all around the record player in the living room, saying, “June, you’ve just got to listen to this.” Nobody else seemed to be at home right then, I remember wondering where her little brothers were. So I sat down in Uncle Earl’s chair and she put one of those little red plastic rings on the record, it was a forty-five, to make it work on their record player. “Just wait,” Lucie said. She held on to the edge of the record player so hard that her fingers were white and her eyes shone out from her white face in a dark liquid way I had never seen before, a way which seemed to me somehow scary. It was starting to get dark outside. She pushed a button, the forty-five dropped. Elvis came on.
    I had never heard anything like it, the way his voice went way down and trembly on “I’m so lonely, baby, I’m just so lonely I could die.” Elvis’s voice seemed to fill up Lucie’s whole darkening living room with something hot and crazy and full of pain. It made me think about things I didn’t want to, such as Uncle Earl sending Aunt Adele all those roses and my own mama carrying cardboard boxes around after Daddy or just standing on the back porch and staring at nothing, which I had found her doing only a couple of days before Lucie played Elvis for me, standing on the back porch staring at an old photograph of her and Daddy they had made one time at a fair, dressed up in sailor suits. She said they rented the sailor suits from the photographer. When I came out on the porch, she put the picture in her apron pocket but I saw. “It’s down at the end of Lonely Street,” Elvis sang. I thought I was coming down with a virus, I stood up to go. Lucie’s face shone out white in the darkness of her living room. “Don’t you just love it,” she said. I didn’t say a thing.
    I left, followed by the shaking, wanting voice of Elvis across the freezing grass. So this is how I remember it—the end of Lucie and me. Of