Silver Alert by Lee Smith
I enjoyed Silver Alert very much! I told this story in my list of books I read and will repeat it here: I have read other books by Lee Smith and also heard her speak years ago at the Festival of Faith & Writing, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI, which I try to attend every other year. Smith is from the South and speaks with a bit of a drawl. She was very funny in her talk. If I remember correctly, I think she’s the person who quoted one of my favorite lines, a variation on “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.” Some relative or family friend of hers used to say, according to Smith, in a slow, drawn-out, Southern accent, “Poe me a drank, it’s duh-ark und-uh the ha-ouse.” {Pour me a drink; it’s dark under the house.) It makes me smile whenever I think of it.
I guess Dolly Parton liked it, too. Some of the reviews prominently quoted Dolly, “It’s very different and it’s very special and it’s very good! I loved it.” So there you go. Some of the book summaries call it a story of a joy ride, and although the two main characters, Herb Atlas and Dee Dee, do end up on a road trip together, there is a lot of story before that happens. Herb is an old man whose wife Susan has Alzheimer’s and who has become very hard to control and care for. Dee Dee is a young woman with a hard life background who is hired by Herb to give manicures to his wife. Herb and Dee Dee both have engaging, funny, quirky, and strong personalities. The chapters go back and forth between each of them telling the story. I loved getting to know them both.
Here’s the first paragraph, which immediately made me smile and want to keep reading.
The doorbell rings promptly at 10 am (exactly when Pat said), sending its jazzy little Hawaiian tune throughout the stately rooms of their big pink tropical house—hell, mansion is more like it—in Key West: 108 Washinton Street, a primo address only one block from the classy Casa Marina Hotel and also Louie’s Backyard restaurant, also classy, also pink. Too much pink in this goddamn town for a man, a real live man anyway, a man like Herb used to be, yeah right, ha. Shit. Their house would go for a coupla mil right now. The song sounds again through the scented air of the solarium, big flowers blooming everyplace in here, Susan used to love them so, bless her soul and damn it all to hell.
“Bless her soul and damn it all to hell.” Don’t you love it? I can imagine that pink Key West house, too. We lived in base housing when I lived there in sixth & seventh grade while my dad was stationed at the Naval Air station, but I had a good friend who lived in a Key West house. It seemed huge to me, with lots of light coming into lots of rooms from lots of big windows. Once, I got disoriented and a bit lost on the upstairs floor because there were so many bedrooms and not a lot of hallways—you walked through one room directly into another.
Dee Dee writes several letters to Paula, a woman who ran a charity that took in young women like Dee Dee and helped them learn life skills to get themselves out of the cycle of sex slavery, abuse, and the hard lives they led. Here is an excerpt of one of Dee Dee’s letters to Paula.
Dear Paula,
I guess you are surprised to hear from me after what I did, but I think of you every single day of my life, I will never forget you and how good you were to me and all the things you told me…[Dee Dee goes on to describe the little pink trailer she and her friend from “the program,” Tamika, live in, the job she has giving manicures to rich old people, then writes…] May be we really will get to Disney World now and see all those real Princesses and Tamika and me will get a job singing THERE. Well, you have to dream, remember when you said that? You always said DREAM BIG…
P.S. You will be proud to know that I have got me a vocabulary book now to improve myself, it is right here.
My boyfriend is a poet.
He is GENEROUS (word)
And COORDINATED (word)
And HIRSUTE (word)
Ha ha! Dee Dee!
For the rest of the book, Dee Dee’s thoughts have that pattern, with “(word),” like “…she sees him looming (word) there at the window, that wild old man.”
Dee Dee and Herb end up escaping Herb’s family in a Porsche that Herb has the keys to. At first, they are only planning a short drive and then back home “to face the music,” but eventually, they decide to go to Disney World, a lifetime dream of Dee Dee’s. When their disappearance is discovered, the family puts out a silver alert, hence the name. It’s a fairly short book with a satisfying ending. It was fun to read.