Great Are the Myths - Episode 6

Great Are the Myths – Chapters 10–12Birdie returns to Memphis for Christmas, and the reunion with the boy is immediate, electric, and slightly changed by time apart. Standing on the drive outside her house, they circle each other with jokes and flirtation, both noticing how the other has grown. Birdie is sharper and more self-possessed; the boy is taller, bolder, and about to turn fifteen.Inside the house, the old intimacy quickly returns. They talk more honestly than before — about England, about loneliness, and about the strange freedom Birdie feels in being left to make her own life in America. The boy admits he’s simply glad she’s home. Miss Mary keeps a discreet but watchful eye on them, though the two teenagers have already become skilled at keeping their secrets.The boy plays Birdie a new song on his guitar and dreams aloud of becoming something bigger. When he notices she no longer wears the promise ring he gave her on her finger, Birdie quickly produces it from the chain around her neck and turns the moment into romance. She doesn’t confess that girls at school mocked it and told her to throw it away.At the boy’s new apartment they spend evenings listening to the radio — switching between Sinatra and race records — and kissing whenever they can get away with it. In public they behave perfectly for his religious mother; in private they are discovering that they are no longer quite the children everyone thinks they are.Birdie begins to sense a difference in how they see the future. She believes that people can belong with someone without belonging to them. The boy hears something else entirely — the possibility that she might one day leave him behind. Their arguments end the way most things do between them: with laughter, books, films, and promises they don’t yet fully understand.New Year’s Eve arrives with fireworks and midnight wishes. Before Birdie returns to school, she gives the boy an extravagant birthday present: a portable record player and a stack of new records. For him, she says, nothing is ever enough.On their final evening she hosts dinner at the Peabody Hotel with Miss Mary and the boy’s parents, determined to prove she can play the role of a grown-up hostess. On the way in, the boy’s father mentions a local sound engineer opening a recording service on Union Avenue — a man named Sam Phillips. Birdie teases the boy that one day he’ll record there himself.Soon afterwards, the story returns to New York.During a visit to the city, Birdie spends an afternoon with Cary Grant, who confides that fame can be lonely. For the first time she begins to see that even the most glamorous lives contain private doubts.As summer approaches, Birdie finds herself pulled between two worlds: the bright, restless life she shares with Tilly and her friends in New York, and the quieter devotion waiting for her in Memphis. Rumours reach her that the boy has been seen with other girls. When she teases him about it on the telephone, he laughs it off, joking that a man has needs.Birdie laughs too, but when the line goes dead she lingers with the receiver in her hand, wondering what part she is really playing in this story — and what will happen to the boy if she ever steps off the stage.