Velva Jean Learns to Fly Read Online Free Page B

painted my lips as neat as I would paint a picture. Magnet Red—“very new, it’s very red. A dashing red.”
    In my new life I was going to wear lipstick all the time.

TWO
    O n Saturday, August 23, I drove into Nashville. Right away it was the biggest, noisiest city I’d ever seen. I said out loud, “You done it, Velva Jean. You got yourself all the way here.”
    I stopped at the first filling station I came to and sat there catching my breath. When the serviceman walked up, I rolled down the window and smoothed my hair. I said, “Can you tell me how to get to the Grand Ole Opry?”
    He stared at me like I’d been blown in on a windstorm, which was probably exactly what I looked like. He said, “Where you comin’ from, miss?”
    I said, “North Carolina. I just drove 346 miles.”
    He slapped the side of the truck, not too hard, but like he was clapping. He said, “Congratulations.”
    I said, “Thank you.”
    He said, “Welcome to Nashville.”
    I said, “Thank you. It’s awful good to be here.”
     
    The Grand Ole Opry broadcast out of the War Memorial Auditorium, just next to the state capitol, downtown. It looked, with its six fat columns, like it should have been someplace far away and exotic, like Greece. It was the dressiest place I’d ever seen—like something on a postcard.
    Nashville itself was fancy. The buildings were tall and grand and joined together side by side, all the way down Church Street, as far as the eye could see. There were red-and-white and green-and-white striped awnings at every storefront and streetlamps that already glowed a little even though the sun hadn’t set. The sidewalks were filled with people. Trolley cars rattled past. There were men preaching outside taverns and music halls, and men and women standing on curbs or up on truck beds, playing the guitar, the banjo, the fiddle. Most everyone was singing. Music was everywhere. All those years of dreaming of Nashville, and I realized I couldn’t have thought up this place if I’d tried.
    I parked the truck on Third Street and walked past all the places I’d read about in magazines and heard tales of: Shacklett’s Cafeteria; Candy’s Inc., with its windows full of sweets; the old Princess Theatre, which showed movies and a vaudeville stage show; Harveys department store; the Tulane Hotel. There were jewelry stores—glittering with gems of all shapes and sizes, and not rough uncut gems from the mountains but shiny ones set in rings or necklaces—sandwich shops, bakeries, eye doctors, a hat cleaner. Krystal, where they made cake doughnuts in the front window. La Vogue Beauty Salon, where the women from the Opry got their hair done. I stood at the corner of Fifth and Church—called St. Cloud’s Corner because of St. Cloud House, a hotel that had been there since the Civil War—and breathed it all in.
    Then I walked over to the War Memorial Auditorium and the Grand Ole Opry. I pushed through all the people going this way and that and walked right up to the Opry building and pressed my hand against the side of it. The stone was cool and smooth beneath my palm. It had a heartbeat. I could feel the life in it, feel it breathing, or maybe it was my own pulse.
    I’d just driven all those miles in a truck I’d learned to drive without any help from anyone. I’d pumped my own gas and changed my own tire and smiled at the things folks said about me being on my own, without a husband. I thought coming here was either the foolhardiest thing I’d ever done or the best.
    I leaned up against the building and closed my eyes and felt the stone pressing into my skin, holding me up. I was all alone in this world—no mama, no daddy, no husband. I didn’t know where my brother was, and I’d left my family far behind. I didn’t have anything but an old yellow truck, a suitcase, a hatbox, and a mandolin. But here was the Opry, right where I could touch it.
    There was a sign on the door of the War Memorial Auditorium that said: