The Way We Heard: Way Down

1977

 

The screened porch was hotter than the kitchen but at least it was hers. Wanda sat on the metal rocker that didn't rock anymore and worked through her cigarette while the kitchen radio behind her went through one of the early ones and then through whatever the station was playing next. The TV in the living room was its own weather. She could hear Glenn say something to Marvin and Marvin laugh, and the announcer's voice underneath both of them like a watery bass line.

The cicadas were already in their late-afternoon volume. The light was slanting amber across the Bermuda grass, and the dogwood was beginning to brown at its leaf-edges. September. Three weeks since they'd buried him. Two weeks since Kim had asked Glenn for a record and Glenn had told her to ask her mother and Wanda had said no, not yet, and Kim had not asked again.

She crushed the cigarette against the tuna can on the porch table. The can was half-full of butts and ash from the long weekend. She had been smoking inside for twenty years and had only recently started coming out here for them. She could not have said why. The porch was hers. Glenn did not come out here. Marvin had come out once this weekend to look at the soybean field across the road and had said something about property values and gone back in.

She picked up her tumbler. The tea was warm and weak. She had been letting it dilute on purpose. She would refill it in the kitchen and then she would have to go back into the living room for the rest of the documentary and the rest of supper and the rest of Sunday. She stood up. The screen door caught and she pushed it harder. The hinge sounded the way it always sounded.

The kitchen was darker than the porch. Her eyes took a second to adjust. The radio was finishing something — a strings-and-piano thing she did not recognize, or recognized but could not have placed — and Kim was at the counter with her back to the door.

Wanda did not say anything. Kim had not heard her come in. Kim was concentrating on whatever Kim was concentrating on.

The kitchen had its usual September arrangement. The Sunday paper was folded on the table with the Section B spread visible, half a page of his face from some earlier era, smiling in black and white. The paperback Marvin had brought in from the truck stop — the one the bodyguards wrote — was on the table beside it, face down, where Wanda had moved it after she had read the back cover. The orange Tupperware lemonade pitcher was on the dish drainer where Wanda had left it Friday. The Domino sugar box was open on the counter with the spoon still in it. The fan was oscillating, and each time it changed direction it made a small click that Wanda noticed without registering and that Kim, three feet from it, had been hearing for the last twenty minutes.

There was a pitcher on the counter. The glass pitcher, not the Tupperware. Full. The condensation already beading. The two glasses had already been set out beside it, the green tumbler that Glenn liked because he could fit more ice in it and the small chipped clear glass that nobody had thrown away because nobody had decided to throw it away. The chipped one was at the position closer to where Kim was standing. The green tumbler was past it, on the side closer to where Wanda would be when she walked further in.

Wanda did not walk further in. She stood in the doorway from the porch and watched her daughter at the counter.

The pitcher had been made. That was the first thing. The water had been boiled and the bags steeped and the sugar dissolved while the tea was still hot — the way sugar had to be dissolved or it would grit-grain at the bottom. The way Wanda had been making it since 1962. Her own mother had made it the same way. The ice had been added after. The pitcher had been refrigerated long enough to bring the temperature down. The pitcher had been brought back out. The condensation had begun. All of this had been done while Wanda was on the porch with her cigarette and her tumbler.

The lemon was on a small plate beside the pitcher. Cut. Two wedges off it. The larger wedge was already on the rim of the green tumbler. The smaller wedge was on the rim of the chipped clear glass. Glenn liked more lemon. Kim had not asked Wanda whether to cut a lemon. Kim had cut the lemon.

The pitcher Kim had chosen was the right pitcher. The Tupperware lemonade pitcher and the glass iced tea pitcher sat on the same shelf, the same approximate size. Wanda's mother had said that Tupperware tasted of itself when you put hot tea in it and the taste did not come out. The glass was for tea. Kim had picked the glass.

The radio finished the strings-and-piano thing. The DJ's voice came through the small speaker, low because someone had turned the volume down sometime in the last hour. The DJ said something Wanda did not catch. Then the artist's name. Then the title of one of the early ones. The song started.

It was Heartbreak Hotel. Wanda heard it from where she was standing in the doorway, three feet from the counter, ten feet from the radio.

She had been sixteen the year that record came out. The Sullivan show. Her sister Doris and three of Doris's friends had been in the living room of their parents' house, and the girls had been screaming, and Wanda had not screamed. She had watched. The Memphis girls had hung around at the gate of the house he had bought for his parents — the one before Graceland. Little Frances had been thirteen at that gate, still young enough to believe in Santa Claus in that more innocent decade. Frances had got noticed at fourteen. There had been three of them, all fourteen. Wanda had read about it in a magazine years after — after the divorce, after most of it could no longer be denied.

A yellow bedroom with pink stuffed animals.

A "king" combing a little girls' hair.

From the living room, the TV cut to his current single. Way Down. They had been playing it all afternoon between the funeral footage and the interviews — his last hit, the one rising on the chart now because he had died. Wanda heard the piano through the wall. The title came back to her the way the title would. Way Down. It was on every speaker now. It was on the TV and it had been on the radio twice this morning and it had been on every car that passed her on the way to the IGA on Friday.

Then the bodyguard's voice came back over the song. One of the bodyguards, the older one, the one who had been with him since the army, was working through some account. Sandy Ferra. The Cross Bow nightclub in Panorama City. The girl's father had kept her photograph in the office. Fourteen years old. The bodyguard said the number twice. Wanda did not let herself catch the rest of the sentence.

Priscilla. Bad Nauheim, 1959. The small items in the Sunday papers about the Army. Then the wedding in sixty-seven, and the press doing its math on her age and walking the math back. Fourteen was the number on Priscilla too, and Wanda had registered it then and put it down.

The bodyguard's voice in the next room had moved on. Vegas now. Reeca Smith. Three years ago. Wanda had not known the name then; she might not have known it now if the bodyguard hadn't said it. But the time she remembered. Three years ago Kim had been ten, and had been pulling at her sleeve at the IGA about a candy bar.

She had not thought about any of it in years. She had not had to. She had thought about Glenn's water heater. She had not let herself think about it since the funeral. The numbers had been somewhere in the back of her head where she did not go.

They moved.

Her hand moved slightly. Toward the counter. Toward the radio that was on the counter. The radio was three feet from her right hand if she took one step further into the kitchen. She did not take the step. Her hand stopped where it was. Her hand was at her side.

Kim did not register the radio. Kim did not register the TV. Kim did not register the bodyguard. Kim was angling the pitcher's spout above the green tumbler. The arc of the pitcher in Kim's hand was the arc Wanda had been making since 1962, when she was twenty-two and just married and still learning what marriage was.

Wanda walked the rest of the way into the kitchen. She had to go to the counter to set down her tumbler — that was what she had come in for, ostensibly, to refill the tumbler — and the counter was where Kim was. Kim looked up. The look was brief. A daughter registering a parent in the same room. Then the look went back down to the work.

The tea poured into the green tumbler. The level rose. Kim was watching the level. Her eye was on it. The pitcher's spout was steady. She judged the moment to stop without measuring it. She stopped. She lifted the pitcher away. She set the pitcher down on the formica with no jolt and no sound.

She picked up the chipped clear glass and held it under the spout. She lifted the pitcher again. She poured. The level in the chipped clear glass came up to slightly less than the level in the green tumbler. Marvin did not get as much.

Wanda set her own tumbler down on the counter beside the pitcher. The tumbler made a small sound on the formica. Kim did not look up.

Wanda heard herself say Sugar. The endearment fell into the kitchen alongside the sugar Kim had already dissolved into the tea hours ago, in the morning before the documentary started, in the late morning when Wanda had been on the phone with Doris.

Mind, she began. The consonant caught on the back of her teeth. She was reaching for an instruction. Nothing came. She wanted whatever came after Mind that would have made the sentence make sense to her daughter, who was thirteen, and who had cut the larger lemon wedge for the man in the next room.

Kim's wrist tipped the pitcher above the chipped clear glass.

The arc was the arc.

Wanda saw it. Wanda saw her own wrist. She saw the wrist she had been making for fifteen years. Above the same kind of pitcher. In the same kind of room. The wrist was Kim's. It was Wanda's.

Kim had watched her mother.

The half-word stalled. Mind. The d-sound did not articulate. Wanda's mouth was open and the next sound did not come.

The word Wanda had needed was Hush. But Hush was what she had been for thirteen years. Hush did not have a second syllable.

Kim finished pouring the chipped clear glass. She set the pitcher down. She picked up both glasses, one in each hand, the larger green tumbler in her stronger hand. She did not look at her mother on the way past.

The doorway from the kitchen to the den was narrow enough that Kim had to angle her shoulders to get through with both hands full. She did so without thinking about it. She had done it before.

In the living room, the bodyguard had moved on to something else. Glenn made a sound when Kim came in with the tea, a satisfied half-grunt that Wanda heard from the kitchen and recognized. Marvin said something Wanda could not make out. The TV continued. The bodyguard's voice continued underneath whatever Marvin was saying.

The kitchen radio had moved past Way Down. The DJ would say something next. The next song would come.

Wanda did not move.

The pitcher was still on the counter. The condensation had run down its sides and pooled at its base and made a ring on the formica. The ring was an inch wide all around. The fan on the counter, oscillating, was blowing across the ring, and the ring was already evaporating at its outer edge.

Wanda's hand was on the formica two inches from the pitcher's base. She had set it there. She did not remember setting it there. The fan's air came across her hand and across the ring.
 

~End~

 

Image Credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-close-up-of-a-hair-brush-on-a-table-b_wK7J...