My momma always told me, “I never loved my body, but it’s okay cause it don’t love me neither.” I couldn’t ever figure out what she meant. I thought she was gorgeous. Thick rippling thighs stopped her legs from crossing at the knee. Her belly overflowed the top of her shorts when she sat down. I saw her in a bikini once when I was real little and her whole body looked like it was made of cottage cheese. I liked cottage cheese.
Of course she tried all sorts of diets. Different drinks and videotapes. I’d do aerobics with her in the living room before I would get tired and sit on the floor in front of the couch. As I got older, she made me follow along all the way through. Said nobody would want a fat girlfriend. I got the feeling she was mostly talking to herself but using my name. I didn’t get why anyone would want to look like the people on the tapes. You could see all the strands of thin muscle on the men, and the women didn’t look like any woman I ever saw. I just shrugged and went along with the moves.
I grew up like my momma despite the aerobics tapes and meal replacement shakes: thick hipped and busting through every shirt I owned. In school, some of the kids gave me a hard time. They always do, especially if your name’s different enough. But I always felt sorry for the kids with names so boring no joke could be made. That’s the worst thing, isn’t it? Being forgettable?
But my name was a joke, sort of. Momma loved to tell me the story about the velvet Elvis painting.
“Your daddy used to sing to me like Elvis when we met. Over and over again, when he’d show up at my doorstep or when we were in the back of his Impala, and I’d push him and tell him to go find himself another girl.” She and I had just gone through a drive-thru on our way to church. Momma got a ham biscuit and a Diet Coke, and I had a cheese biscuit and an orange juice. She’d waveher biscuit in between bites as she talked. “And you know even then I was out at the yard sales every Saturday, and that’s where I saw that god-awful thing. Two-foot wide velvet Elvis. So, I brought it home and hung it on my wall. And when you were born your daddy wasn’t there so I named you Priscilla because he couldn’t stop me.”
That’s how I became Priscilla Songbird. My mother was just spiteful enough to make me the punch line of a joke only she knows.
I met him when I was nineteen, working at the Dairy Queen for the summer. He was a little bit older, but I never asked for any numbers, and he had dark eyes that went on forever into his head. It was a hot night, even for Landis in July, and I was sweating through my uniform in that little building. He ordered a hot fudge sundae and smiled real wide when I bent over to get his change out of the drawer. It was a nice smile, the kind you wanted to keep around. He was still there an hour later when I got off, leaning against the hood of his Trans Am still smiling big at me as I walked to my car.
He was there again the next night, too. He ordered a banana split and when I got off, there he was again, this time leaning against the hood of my Pinto.
“If you dent the hood you’re gonna have to pay me for it.”
“I just had to introduce myself to you. Aren’t many girls like you around here. You’re something special. You can’t leave something like that sitting in the window.”
“Something, huh? Well, who are you then, seeing something so special about me?”
“Ray Clifton, sweetheart. You’re gonna remember that name.”
“It was nice meeting you, but I think I’ll be on my way home now.”
I started the car and backed up, just a little, just to knock him off his feet. He stumbled, hands on his knees and laughed at the ground. I turned the car around to leave.
“Wait, you ain’t gonna return the favor, darling?” He ran to my window.
“I’m Priscilla Songbird, mister. You’re gonna remember my name.”
The next week I was naked on his couch, a thin blanket spread half over us. He touched me like other boys had, trying to hold everything in one hand despite nothing fitting in any hand. When he came he tried to call out my name, but the “’cilla” just turned into a groan and he collapsed. After a minute, he started laughing so hard he was out of breath.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I was right, is all. You’re not like most girls.”
“How so?”
“Most girls, well you know, bigger girls, they’re mostly the same.”
“You mean the cow girls?”
“I’m not talking about rodeo.”
“I’m not either. Those girls. Big, dumb eyes, move slow, talk slow, always chewing something over. They’ll follow you anywhere.”
“Yeah, I guess you could put it that way.” He laughed.
“They don’t know how to stand up for themselves. They just go around doing what you want them to.” I rolled onto my back. “I promised myself I wouldn’t be one of them.”
“Well, I think it’s safe to say you succeeded. You grow up on a farm or something?”
“No. It just seemed right.” I rolled over and pulled my dress over my head.
My momma was a different type of big girl. The kind always apologizing for herself. She wouldn’t be seen eating anything fried in public, even though at home it was a different story. She had her damn tapes. The workout clothes. The ThighMasters. When she talked to her friends on the phone, the other receptionists from the doctor’s office, she was always talking about the new thing she was trying or how if my daddy hadn’t left it wouldn’t be so hard, raising a girl by herself.
I still lived with her, in my same bedroom I grew up in. We had an understanding that I would stay out of her way and she would stay out of mine. She worked and I took care of the house. I worked nights for spending money and we didn’t ask each other questions.
It was late when I got back to Momma’s house. All the lights were off but I knew better than to believe she was asleep. Despite our rule, she still liked to ask questions in her own sort of way. I had to walk past her room to get to mine, and sure enough there she was, and she called out to me from her bed.
I leaned in the doorway. The room was dark except for the glow of the TV. That thing was almost never got turned off. She was watching a Lifetime movie, I think. She liked the ones about bad men so she could keep on blaming my dad. On her rocking chair was a pile of clothes from every morning when she tried on an outfit, didn’t like it, tore it off and tried on another. She was lying in bed with the covers pulled up just below her chin and her fingers gripping the edge of the blanket on either side of her face, like a little kid scared of something.
“I’m glad you’re having fun, honey. It’s so good to be young. You know when I was your age, I wished I could go out with lots of boys, but that was never the plan for me.”
“Momma.”
“What’s his name? Does he treat you right?”
“Momma, please don’t start.”
“I just want you to be careful, now. I’d hate for something like what happened to me to happen to you. You’re so young.”
“I’m what happened to you.”
“Now you know you’re my whole life, baby, don’t try to start a fight over this. I’m just trying to help you and you’re telling me I don’t love my only child, my sweet girl.”
I walked over to the bed and laid down beside her. “I’m sorry momma, I know you’re just looking out for me.” She stroked my hair and leaned her forehead against mine.
“I love you, baby. Don’t you ever forget that.”
“I know. I love you too.”
When her hand stopped moving, I knew she was asleep, and I just lay there watching the movie for a while. It was hard to tell what was going on, the volume was most of the way down and it was half over, but everyone looked very serious and it was always night. There were flashes of gunfire as I fell asleep.
I found Velvet Elvis when I was eight. Momma had gone out for a while and I was playing in her room. I opened her closet and there it was wedged behind some boxes. I already knew the story by heart; I think she’d begun telling me as soon as I was born. I pulled it out and ran my fingers around the edges of the King’s head. He was traced in purple and fell away to black. He looked ugly and cheap. I wondered if this is what meeting my father would feel like.
That afternoon, Momma came home from work to find me dancing to “Burning Love” on her bed, Velvet Elvis watching from the corner. She turned off the radio and grabbed me by the arm. She dragged me to my room and slammed the door. She never said a word. I spent the rest of the day in my room alone, until I heard her come by and leave dinner on a tray in front of my door. That was her way of saying sorry. Just not sorry enough to talk about it.
I started seeing Ray more often, even staying over. I cleaned his house while he was at work. He was doing construction on some new houses outside of town. Some nights he’d bring friends home to drink. They were always dirty, and their shirts were too big and torn. I didn’t much care for beer but I’d bring them out of the fridge and Ray’d slap me on the ass when I walked away.
One night after more drinks than usual he called me over. He pulled me closer by my hips to where he sat on the couch. He barely looked away from the two guys sitting across from him.
“Listen,” he said, looking serious. “Nobody’ll tell you this, but you got to find a girl like this one. Most fun you’ll ever have.” Those other guys turned to me and nodded their heads, looking me over like they knew something.
I pulled away from him and went outside. I could hear him call after me and then they all laughed. I stayed out on the porch for a few minutes, crying and wishing he was dead. I kept wishing all the way back home to the TV in momma’s room lighting up the night. I knew the next night I worked, there’d he’d be, sitting on the hood of my car looking sorry, and I’d follow him home.
But he didn’t show up. I was distracted at the front counter, missing orders or getting them wrong, trying to keep track of the cars in the parking lot. After we shut down I walked out, sure I’d see him, but there was only my car and the dumpster. I unlocked the door and sat down with my hands on the wheel. For a while I just stayed like that, half hoping he’d show, half not knowing what else to do. I went home straight to my room and laid flat on bed with my arms crossed until I fell asleep.
Next night he wasn’t there either. I drove to his house after closing. His car was there, along with a couple more. I rolled down my window and I could hear a little laughter leaking out the thin walls. I thought about walking to the door, about seeing some other girl in there maybe, or just him and his drunk friends. Or that maybe me wishing him dead all those times worked. I couldn’t tell what I wanted to find. It didn’t matter. It all meant the same thing.
Back home, I walked as quiet as I could toward the TV light of Momma’s room. Standing at the edge of the doorframe, I could see her there in bed, asleep on her stomach, her hands bunching up the pillow under her head. There was a movie playing, the same kind there always was, half over and the volume down. I sat in bed beside her for a minute staring at the screen before I picked up the remote and turned the TV off. In the dark for the first time in years, the moon glow crept in from the window.
Maria Adkins is a fiction writer. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She lives in Greensboro with her husband and pets.