Another Song About the King

Prologue My hands are calm. I put in, take out, take my time. I'm standing inside my closet, filling my honeymoon suitcase. Three o'clock in the morning. I can't sleep. Sunglasses. Hat. Lingerie. Bathing suit, jeans, sneakers. Outside my bedroom window, light swallows darkness until, gradually, morning will come, my wedding day. I start humming a Dylan song, "Visions of Johanna," our song, Scottie'smy fiance'sand mine, and fold a nightgown my mother might have bought me if she were here, for my trousseau. I slip into one of my mother's favorite songs, "All Shook Up," picking up the pace a little, the Elvis rhythm. Tuck the sunscreen and my sketchbook in the corner of my suitcase until suddenly I'm bent over, unable to move as my mind races back, remembering. "You were named for Elvis," my mother says calmly, as if she's telling me we've run out of milk or bread or juice. Theo's not born yet, so I must be four, almost five. It is my first real memory, and we are in the kitchen in our small house in Michigan. It is 1966. When my father is out of town, we spend a lot of time in the kitchen, at the round Formica tableme with my coloring book, my mother heating leftovers. She cuts corners when he's away. And she sews. The tiny square of brown linoleum floor becomes a place where outfits get made and tales get spun. Alone with me, my mother can transform herself from an ordinary wife and mother into someone capable of greatness. I look up from the house I'm coloring without saying a word. And so she lowers her sewing and repeats, in her pretty southern accent, "Darlin', did you hear me? You were named for Elvis Presley. Not even your father knows that. Wouldn't you like to share a secret, just you and me?" My mother and I have never shared a secret before, and I'm flattered and shy and resistant all at once, as if she is taking me somewhere I'm not sure I want to go. "But my name is Silvie, not Elvis!" I say, thrusting out my lip, looking at her. When I was older, I thought my mother had a stern and noisy beauty, a high forehead and long, oval face that, to me, suggested the nobility she longed for. Her large nose had a bump that only made her more beautiful, along with the thick straight hair the color of warm toast and the lips red with lipstick. But on this day in the kitchen, she frightens methere is too much to see in her face, and I look down at the house I'm coloring, purse my lips, let my fingers graze over the shiny points of my new box of sixty-four Crayola crayons. "Silvie backwards spells Elvis," my mother says. "Roughly speaking, of course. The exact backwards is Sivle, but I didn't want to get too carried away." She laughs brightly. I feel somehow ashamed. I thought I had my own name. "It's an anagram," my mother says, and I hold my sky-blue crayon tightly; I've been coloring the sky above the house and I don't want to stop. All my pictures are the same: a burnt-sienna house with a chimney, a green tree, green grass with a red tulip, and sky, sky, sky, all around and above. I love the sky, because it takes a long time to color, although, really, it's nothing, just color layered upon color. "An anagram is letters all scrambled up that make different words. If you take your name, Silvie, and move the letters around, you get Elvis." "Oh," I say, and concentrate harder on my coloring, hooking my feet around the legs of my chair. "You knStern, Kathryn is the author of 'Another Song About the King' with ISBN 9780345433190 and ISBN 034543319X.