I’ll bet they were. I noticed it never occurred to Aunt Grace to worry about how I was supposed to pray and keep the twins from leaping all over the church like they were in a Martin and Lewis movie.
“We prayed for the President,” Honey said importantly. “That he should get better.”
“That he shouldn’t die,” Bunny said, nodding.
“And we prayed that Elvis Presley should die,” Honey said.
“Oh, Honey, you’re all mixed up,” Aunt Grace laughed. “That was the sermon. You should have been there, Sylvie. The sermon was very appropriate. It was all about this rock-and-roll music.”
“Did he really say Elvis should die?” I asked, horrified. Dr. Cannon could get pretty worked up about juvenile delinquency and communism and all, but I never heard him actually wish for somebody to die.
“No, he just said the music ought to die out and probably would. He certainly doesn’t think much of that Elvis, though, I’ll tell you that.”
Boy, was I sorry I missed that sermon! It was probably the first time in history Dr. Cannon preached something I was interested in.
“All right, look,” Uncle Ted said impatiently. “Are we going to get this barbecue started or what? Sylvie, you want to come down and lie on the patio where it’s cooler? Even if you don’t want to eat—”
“No, maybe later. I just want to rest. I feel real weak and dizzy.”
“All right. Maybe you can have some tea and toast later,” Aunt Grace said. “Now, come on everybody, and let Sylvie rest in peace.”
Finally! They all cleared out of my room, including Uncle Ted. I heard the sounds of drawers and closets opening and closing as they changed from their Sunday clothes into their backyard clothes.
Soon the twins were shrieking in the backyard at the fire, and the smell of charcoal smoke began to drift up through my window. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. I washed all over with a washcloth and cold water then patted myself dry with a towel and dusted with Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder. I didn’t have to worry about Uncle Ted coming upstairs as long as the barbecue was going.
He loved to barbecue. He made a real big deal out of it, like he was chef for the day and no one else could turn a hamburger on the grill like he could.
Aunt Grace acted the same way, and it was such a joke! She got him this barbecue apron with a picture of a chef in a tall white hat holding a big platter of hamburgers and saying, “Come and get it!” And the only thing he actually did was to light the charcoal and turn over the hamburgers and hot dogs. Because Aunt Grace mixed up the hamburger and squeezed it into flat patties, and made the potato salad and the coleslaw, unless she bought them from the delicatessen. And I peeled the cellophane off each hot dog, so what was the big deal about Uncle Ted doing all the cooking?
But everybody had to make a fuss about how good his hamburgers were, and you couldn’t get that charcoal taste in a restaurant, and even a hot dog at a baseball game didn’t taste this good, all black and puffy and squirting juice out when you bit into it.
What it was, really, was that when we had barbecues, Aunt Grace and Uncle Ted could act like we were all one big, happy, normal American family, just like in the article in Look magazine, with pictures showing how the weekend barbecue is the most popular way for families to practice togetherness.
We would come home from church, where everyone knew how good and kind Uncle Ted and Aunt Grace were to poor Sylvie, taking her in even though they had two children of their own to care for. I guess no one ever stopped to think that that might be just the reason Aunt Grace and Uncle Ted took me in. Maybe the O’Connors hadn’t needed a baby-sitter that much, but here I was practically the twins’ second mother. And then there was the money the county paid them every month. That didn’t hurt either.
Anyway, when the church service was over, Uncle Ted was all cheerful and smiling, seeing all those men he sold insurance to, slapping people on the back and praising Dr. Cannon’s “thought-provoking” sermon and probably feeling so all-around noble and fatherly and religious that he completely forgot all the times he came into my room to “kiss me good-night.”
And Aunt Grace would be showing off the twins in their matching dresses, and putting her arm around me to show everyone I was just like her own daughter, and telling Dr. Cannon that his sermon was so inspiring, it really gave her something to think about. And a minute later she’d ask Uncle Ted whether she should try to make a heart-shaped marshmallow Jell-O mold for her canasta group the next day, or would it get all mushed up when she tried to unmold it?
So, feeling all warm and churchy, they’d go home and change and set us all up in the backyard, just like we were posing for those pictures in Look magazine. The perfect family, doing what the perfect family does every weekend. They probably wished a photographer would come and take a picture of us and print it in some magazine so everyone could see what a perfect family we were.
But I bet Uncle Ted wouldn’t want any photographers around at night. Say, ten o’clock at night. Upstairs. In my room.
I turned the radio back on. Harry Belafonte was singing “Sylvie.”
It was like a sign. I love that song. It’s just like it was written for me. Except some of the boys in school sing it to me and change the words, so they sing it: “Sylvie, Sylvie, I’m so hot and dry. Sylvie, Sylvie, can’t you hear, can’t you hear me callin’, Bring me little mm mm Sylvie, Bring me little mm mm now-ow . . .” Instead of “water,” they sing “mm mm” in a really dirty way.
I try to ignore it and to just walk away with my head high to show them how juvenile I think they are. And they really are. They’re just juvenile babies. None of the boys in school are mature enough for me and it makes them mad because I won’t even look at them, so that’s how they get back at me.
A lot of them try to act like James Dean and dress like him and let their cigarettes hang off their lips till you think they’re going to set fire to themselves. But it takes a lot more than a pair of jeans and a garrison belt to be James Dean. They just end up looking hoody, and some of them really are JDs, but the thing is, you know James Dean isn’t; you know that he’s just misunderstood, and on the inside he’s good and it just takes the right person to understand him and sympathize with him for the goodness to come out.
These guys who imitate him, they don’t know how he suffers, they don’t understand how he really hurts inside. So they’ll never be James Dean because they don’t know what it feels like to hurt so much that you can hardly talk to people.
Anyway, another interesting thing about that song, “Sylvie,” besides that it’s my name is that it’s the first song I ever heard with the word “damn” in it. I didn’t know you could say that on the radio, but it’s in the song, and they play it on the radio. And none of the rock-and-roll songs I like have any swear words in them, so I don’t understand why people are more upset by rock and roll than by “Sylvie.”
Also, I think Harry Belafonte is beautiful. Not just handsome, but beautiful, and I never thought any man was beautiful before. He isn’t in too many magazines so I only have one picture of him, but I love to look at it and imagine him kissing me. Even if he is a Negro, I don’t care, it doesn’t make him any less beautiful, and when I hear him sing “Sylvie,” I imagine him holding me in his arms and singing the words softly right into my ear.
The barbecue smells really began to get to me, so I got into a pair of capri pants and my striped boat-neck top and went downstairs.
Uncle Ted was toasting marshmallows on the grill. “Well, well, how’s the patient?”
“Sylvie, Sylvie!” the twins screamed, like they hadn’t seen me for a year. “Marshmallows! Daddy’s toasting marshmallows!”
“Yes, I see.”
“Are