The summer heat in Memphis arrived in June and did not leave until October. And in the years when Elvis was home at Graceland during the summer months, the heat was simply a condition of the days, present, insistent, the specific quality of Tennessee July that made the shade of the oak trees along the driveway feel like a genuine gift rather than merely the absence of sun.
Elvis noticed the boy for the first time in the second week of July. He had been in the back of the car returning from an errand, one of the brief departures from Graceland that punctuated the long unhurried days of a summer at home. When the car turned onto Elvis Presley Boulevard and he saw on the sidewalk, perhaps 30 yards from the Graceland gate, a small wooden table.
Behind the table sat a boy of perhaps nine or 10 years old with a cardboard sign and a pitcher at a stack of paper cups in the specific configuration of a child who has set up a lemonade stand and is waiting for the world to discover it. The world on that particular afternoon appeared not to have discovered it.
No one was at the table. The boy was sitting on an upturned crate behind it, elbows on the table, chin in his hands, watching the cars pass on the boulevard with the patient expression of someone who has been waiting for a while and has not yet decided whether to stop waiting. Elvis watched him as the car passed.
He saw the stand again 3 days later. Same table, same position, same hand lettered cardboard sign, same boy. Elvis could tell it was the same boy from the way he sat, the specific posture of someone who had established a relationship with waiting. The pitcher was full, which meant either business had been nonexistent or he had just refilled it and the stack of cups appeared untouched.
A woman walked past with a stroller, moving quickly in the heat, and did not stop. A man in a work shirt passed on the other side of the boulevard without crossing. The boy watched them go. Elvis watched the boy. “Slow down,” Elvis said. The driver slowed. They passed the table at reduced speed, and Elvis looked at the sign, “Lemonade 5 cents,” written in blue crayon with the careful block letters of a child who has taken the sign seriously, and at the pitcher, which caught the afternoon sun in the specific way of glass containing something cold, and at the boy, who had not noticed the car slowing because the boy was looking at his hands. “Keep going,” Elvis said. The car moved on. He saw the stand four more times over the following two weeks. Each time, the situation was essentially the same.
The table, the sign, the pitcher, the cups, and the boy behind it with the gradually accumulating posture of someone whose optimism is being tested by the specific indifference of a boulevard in July. The boulevard was not a natural location for a lemonade stand. It was a through street rather than a neighborhood street, carrying traffic that was going somewhere rather than traffic that was moving through a place it lived in.
The people who walked past were not the people who stopped for lemonade. Elvis noted this without acting on it. He noted the boy’s posture, which changed incrementally across the sightings. The first time bright with the specific energy of someone who has just set up and believes strongly in what they’ve set up, and then by the fourth or fifth time settling into something more resigned.
The posture of someone who has revised their expectations downward without quite abandoning the enterprise. He noted that the boy kept coming back. This was the detail that stayed with him. Not the absence of customers, the Boulevard was a reasonable explanation for that, a structural problem with the location that had nothing to do with the quality of the lemonade or the commitment of the seller.
What stayed with him was that the boy kept coming back anyway, day after day, setting up his table and his sign and his pitcher in the same spot on the sidewalk and waiting for the world to come to him despite the accumulated evidence that the world was not planning to. There was something in that he recognized.
On a Wednesday morning in the third week of July, Elvis told the driver to stop at the gate. He walked, not in the direction of the car or the Boulevard, but along the inside of the fence that bordered the Graceland property, toward the section of it that ran parallel to the sidewalk where the boy had his stand.
The fence was a low stone wall in this section and through it the Boulevard was visible and the sidewalk and the table. The boy was there. He was sitting on his crate in the specific way Elvis had come to associate with him. Elbows on the table, a slight forward lean, eyes on the traffic. He was wearing a blue T-shirt that had been washed many times and shorts and sneakers with one lace slightly loose.
The pitcher was full. The cups were stacked. The sign was the same sign, the blue crayon letters having faded slightly from the days of sun. Elvis stood at the fence for a moment. The boy had not seen him. Elvis opened the pedestrian gate in the fence, the small gate that was there for exactly this kind of movement, the coming and going that did not require a car, and he walked through it onto the sidewalk. The boy’s name was Theo.
Elvis learned this approximately 45 seconds after approaching the table when he asked, and Theo told him with the directness of a child who has not yet learned to be cautious about giving his name to adults who ask for it. Theo was 9 years old. He had set up the stand because summer was long, and he wanted to earn some money, and lemonade stands were a thing you could do to earn money in the summer, which he had understood from a combination of things he had read and things older kids had told him. “How’s business?” Elvis said. Theo looked at him. He was a boy with a serious face, not unfriendly, but with the quality of someone who takes things as they are, rather than as he wishes them to be. “Not good,” he said. “How long have you been out here?” Theo thought about this. “Since the second week of July,” he said. “And how many cups have you sold?”
Advertisements
Theo looked at the stack of cups. “Seven,” he said. “Two of them were my mom.” Elvis looked at the pitcher. “Can I try some?” Theo’s expression moved through a brief sequence, the surprise of an unexpected customer, the recovery, the professional assumption of the seller’s role. He took a cup from the stack and poured carefully, the way a child pours when they are concentrating, and held it out.
Elvis took it and drank. It was good lemonade, not sweet in the way of things made from powder, actually tart with the specific quality of something made from real lemons by someone who had paid attention to the ratio. “This is good,” Elvis said. “I know,” simply, without boasting, the statement of someone reporting a fact.
Elvis looked at him. “Then why it selling? Theo looked at the Boulevard. “Wrong street,” he said. “Not enough people walking. The ones in cars don’t stop.” He paused. “I figured that out pretty early, but I already had the table set up.” “So why do you keep coming back?” Theo considered this question with the seriousness it deserved.
“Because I made it.” “The lemonade.” “And the sign.” He looked at the sign, at the faded blue crayon letters. “If I pack up, it’s like it’s like saying it didn’t matter that I made it.” Elvis looked at the boy behind the table with the empty street in front of him. “How much for all of it? The whole pitcher?” Theo looked at the pitcher.
He did the arithmetic, the number of cups it would fill, 5 cents a cup. “40 cents,” he said. Elvis reached into his pocket. Theo held up a hand. The gesture was so unexpected, a 9-year-old holding up Elvis Presley from paying, that Elvis stopped. “I don’t want that.” Theo said. “I want to sell it,” Theo said, “not just have someone buy it all at once.
” He looked at the street. “That’s not the same thing.” He said it without apology, not challenging, not rude, simply stating a distinction that mattered to him with the quiet certainty of someone who has thought about the difference between the two things and knows which one he is here for. Elvis put his money back in his pocket.
He stood at the table for a moment, looking at the Boulevard
, at the traffic moving through the July heat, at the sidewalk that was mostly empty. Then he said, “Move over.” Theo looked at him. “On the crate,” Elvis said, “move over.” Theo moved to one end of the crate. Elvis sat on the other end, which was somewhat too small for an adult and required a specific arrangement of limbs.
And he put his elbows on the table the way Theo had his elbows on the table, and he looked at the boulevard. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Elvis said. “You and me, we’re going to sell this lemonade together. Whatever’s in that pitcher, we sell it before I go back inside.” He looked at Theo. “Not me buying it. Us selling it.
Deal?” Theo looked at him. “Why?” Theo said. “Because you’re right,” Elvis said. “It’s not the same thing.” Theo considered this. “Okay,” he said. What happened in the next hour was not something that either of them had planned because neither of them had planned anything beyond the immediate decision to sit at the table together and try.
The first car that stopped was a blue Chevrolet whose driver had seen from the boulevard something on the sidewalk that required a second look. He pulled over and rolled down his window and looked at the lemonade stand and at the two people behind it, the boy with the serious face and the young man sitting beside him on an upturned crate.
And the look on his face moved through recognition in a way that was visible even from a distance. He got out of the car. “Is that,” he started, “lemonade?” Elvis said, “5 cents a cup. My partner here made it himself.” The man bought two cups. The woman who stopped next had been walking past on the far side of the boulevard and had crossed when she saw the small crowd forming.
Because by the time she crossed, there were three people at the table, which constituted a crowd by the standards of this particular sidewalk. She bought one cup and asked Theo how long he had been out here, and Theo told her, and she shook her head in the specific way of an adult who has just been told something that strikes her as both unremarkable and vaguely unjust.
The afternoon acquired a momentum that lemonade stands in better locations had in abundance and this one had not previously had. People stopped because other people had stopped, which was the way of things. Some of them recognized Elvis and some of them did not and the ones who did not simply bought lemonade from a boy and a man on the sidewalk outside a stone wall in the July heat.
Elvis poured when Theo was managing the money. Theo poured when Elvis was talking to a customer. They worked with the ease of people who have divided labor naturally rather than negotiating it. The specific efficiency of two people who have independently arrived at the same understanding of what the task requires.
Theo sold lemonade. Not had his lemonade bought, sold it in the full sense of the word, the sense that he had been here for, the sense that required the presence of an actual customer who had actually stopped and actually decided. He made change for a dollar with the concentration of someone doing arithmetic in public and wanting to get it right.
He refilled cups when people asked for refills. He answered questions about how he had made it with the authority of someone who knows exactly how they made it and is not modest about the knowledge. The pitcher emptied at 4:17 in the afternoon. Theo looked at the empty pitcher. Then he looked at the money in front of him, the nickels and the occasional dimes that had accumulated in the course of the hour, more than he had made in the entire two and a half weeks previous.
“We sold it,” he said. “You sold it,” Elvis said. Theo looked at him. “You helped.” “I sat on a crate,” Elvis said. “You made the lemonade. You made the sign. You came back every day.” He paused. “I just sat on the crate.” Theo looked at the money, then at the empty pitcher, then at the street, which had returned to its ordinary indifference now that there was nothing on the sidewalk to stop for.
“It worked.” He said. The two words had the quality of something confirmed, a hypothesis tested and found accurate. The specific satisfaction of being right about something you were not certain you were right about. “It worked.” Elvis agreed. He stood up from the crate. He reached into his pocket, not for payment because they had already handled the question of payment because Theo had already answered the question of what he was here for and it was not to have someone buy his lemonade for him. He took out a small pocketknife, the kind with a handle of dark wood, worn smooth from use. He held it out to Theo. Theo looked at it. “A partner deserves something for a good day’s work.” Elvis said. Theo took the knife. He turned it over in his hands, examining it with the seriousness he brought to most things. “Thanks.” he said. Then, after a pause, “What’s your name?” Elvis looked at him.
“I’m your neighbor.” he said. He walked back through the pedestrian gate in the stone wall. Theo stood behind his table with the empty pitcher and the folded money and the pocketknife and watched him go and the Graceland gate closed behind the man who had sat on his crate for an hour and helped him sell lemonade.
And the boulevard resumed its ordinary traffic in the July heat. Theo began packing up his table. He was not thinking about who the man was. He was thinking about the empty pitcher, about the money in his pocket, about the way the afternoon had gone from the long stillness of waiting to the specific motion of actually selling.
The difference between the two things that he had known was real and had now proved was real. He folded the sign carefully, the one with the faded blue crayon letters, and put it under his arm. He picked up the pitcher. He walked home. His mother was in the kitchen when he came in, and he put the money on the table in front of her, and she counted it, and looked at him with the expression of a mother who expected a particular number and has been given a different one.
“How?” she said. Tiyo told her. His mother listened with the quality of attention she gave to things that surprised her, which was complete and still. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment. “Who was this man?” she said. “My neighbor,” Tiyo said. His mother looked at the money on the table, then at Tiyo.
Then she got up and went to the kitchen window that faced the direction of Elvis Presley Boulevard, and she looked toward the stone wall that was visible at the end of the street and the gate in it and the property behind it. She stood at the window for a while. Then she came back to the table and sat down. “Did you say thank you?” she said.
“Yes,” Tiyo said. “Good,” she said. She pushed the money across the table to him. He took it. Outside, the July heat was doing what July heat does in Memphis, persisting, patient, waiting for nothing, needing nothing, simply present. The boulevard carried its traffic in both directions. The sidewalk in front of the stone wall was empty.
The lemonade stand would not come back the following summer. Tiyo would be 10 by then, and 10 had different ideas about what to do with the summer, and the table would go into the garage, and the cardboard signs would be lost in the way that cardboard signs are lost. But on a Wednesday afternoon in July of 1966, a boy with serious eyes and a table on the wrong street had sold every cup in the pitcher. Not had it bought, sold it.
And that was the thing he carried, not the money, not the pocketknife, though he kept the pocketknife for many years. The thing he carried was the empty pitcher at 4:17 and the understanding arrived at on a sidewalk in Memphis in the company of a neighbor he would not properly identify until years later that the difference between the two things was real and mattered and was worth coming back for every day until it worked.
