Gladys sits in her favourite chair by the kitchen window, sipping at her grapefruit juice with a little vodka stirred in, wishing the sky would blacken enough for snow so Elvis could have a proper Christmas before he leaves for the army. Once, back in Tupelo, he’d been so excited by the snow that he’d eaten it until he turned a pasty shade of blue; she’d had to bring him inside and feed him whiskey to warm him.
The phone rings.
Nobody answers. Reluctantly, Gladys puts down her drink, heaves her big body from the seat, then crosses the kitchen. Pain prickles through her legs and into her back. She hopes it is not Mr Parker calling. After his manager left yesterday, Elvis had seemed resigned to his fate, and had refused to discuss it further.
‘Hello?’
‘Mama?’
She always forgets that her son has had this new internal phone system installed, to make it easy for him to find out who is in his house before he leaves his room, or to order food to be taken upstairs.
‘I’m coming down,’ he says. ‘Tell Alberta to fix breakfast for me.’
‘I can fix it, son.’
There’s a pause.
‘I’m coming down,’ he repeats. Then the line goes dead.
It is barely midday – early for Elvis, who often won’t get up until mid-afternoon when he’s home. Much of the household will still be asleep, aside from Minnie Mae, whose TV set provides a constant background murmur to each morning at Graceland. As soon as the news spreads that Elvis has risen, though, the mansion will spring to life. Cliff and Lamar, who have been staying with them for months now, will emerge from the basement and grab themselves Pepsis. George will arrive. Nickels will be fed into the jukebox. All the TV sets will be flicked on. The girls, selected by Cliff, will come up the drive, most of them doing their very best not to break into a sprint, although there is usually one who lags behind, her footsteps a little unsure. Whenever she spots such a girl, Gladys wants to rush out and welcome her into the mansion. She cannot imagine what the parents of these girls are doing, letting them hang around the gate of a stranger. But, for now, Graceland is quiet, and Gladys may be able to snatch fifteen minutes alone with her son.
That is, unless he decides to use the main staircase. She’s seen him descend like Scarlett O’Hara, letting the mirrors on either wall get a good look at him. When he glides down those stairs, he is already Elvis Presley: fully coiffed, immaculately dressed, eye make-up and powder applied, and the rest of the house is sure to come running. If he chooses the back staircase, which leads directly into the kitchen, there’s a chance he might still be her boy, sleep in his eyes, hair sticking up at the crown of his head.
Gladys waits at the foot of the stairs, tapping her foot, hoping. On hearing his heavy tread, she ignores the pain in her legs and rushes to the refrigerator. She finds the peeled onion she keeps in the crisper and bites down on it, hard. It makes her gag, but there’s nothing like it for masking the smell of alcohol. Then she begins crashing skillets, fetching bacon and cracking eggs.
Elvis appears behind her, stretching and letting out a loud groan. His kiss on her cheek is soft and wet. There’s a whiff of last night’s cigars about him. He puts his arms around her waist and nuzzles his face into her shoulder.
‘You still eating onions for breakfast, Mama?’ he asks, drawing back.
‘Got me a craving for them, I guess,’ says Gladys. ‘Sleep well, son?’
‘Like a baby. You?’
‘Not so well.’
‘You take them pills I give you?’
‘I don’t like to take them every night.’
‘The doc says they’re safe. You oughta take them.’ He leans over the stove. ‘Smells good.’
She selects a grapefruit from the bowl on the counter, then realises, with a stab of shame and irritation, that she still doesn’t know this kitchen well enough to be able to locate a sharp knife.
‘Why don’t you make yourself comfortable in the dining room?’ she says, hoping to buy herself time to root around in the drawers. ‘I’ll bring it over.’
Elvis runs his hands through his hair. She knows it is not looking as he would like: she can see where he’s slept on it.
‘I’ll sit at the counter. But let me call Daddy first.’
While he’s on the phone, Gladys hunts for a knife. Opening and closing all the metallic drawers, she finds a whole tray of bone-handled blades of various shapes and sizes, some of which look big enough for hunting. There’s even a cleaver. She’s not sure who bought these items. She doesn’t recall them being on the list she sent to Goldsmith’s.
Elvis settles himself on a stool. ‘You know Alberta can do that, Mama.’
‘I like to do some little things for you.’
‘You’ve had a lifetime of little things. You oughta rest. Take the weight off.’
At the mention of weight, she slams the grapefruit on the counter.
‘I didn’t mean nothing!’ There is panic in her son’s face, but also anger.
She tries to calm herself, but it’s hard to catch a full breath. Her legs throb. The skin there is hot and tight, as if ready to split. Lately her stomach feels hard and swollen, too. It reminds Gladys of when she was expecting Elvis and Jesse and her body had ballooned and every part of her had pulsed with pressure.
Elvis stands and takes her by the shoulders, as if, she thinks, to keep her at arm’s length. ‘You ain’t – sad, are you, Mama?’
Gladys focuses on the grapefruit, unable to speak.
‘It’s Christmas, and I’m home now. Ain’t no call to be sad.’
Her vision blurs to a yellow smear. It’ll be easier on him if she weeps instead of getting mad. ‘I miss you, Elvie.’
She’s said it so many times these last three years that even she has come to hate the words.
‘And now you’re going away …’
‘You can come visit. As soon as I know where I’m headed, I’ll bring you and Daddy along.’
‘The army might not allow that, son.’
‘Colonel will fix it. Trust me.’ He smiles. ‘Don’t he always fix everything?’
She can only blink at him.
‘You make me worried, Mama.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I can’t sleep some nights, fretting over you.’
‘I don’t want you to do that, son.’
‘I got enough on my mind.’
‘I know it.’
He sighs, and lets his hands drop. ‘You seen Doctor Evans again?’
‘More tests. That’s all he ever says.’
‘What they testing for?’
‘Seems like everything under the sun.’
Doctor Evans has asked a couple of times about her alcohol intake, and both times Gladys has managed to laugh and say, ‘No more than’s ladylike, doctor,’ which has been enough to stop him pressing her on the subject.
She sniffs. ‘I figure the more tests they do, the less they know.’
‘If it was something serious, they woulda found it by now.’
She wipes her eyes, even though tears have actually evaded her. ‘Let me fix this breakfast,’ she says, eager to get him off the subject of her health.
As soon as Elvis’s food – four eggs, six rashers of bacon, sliced tomatoes, freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and coffee – is on the counter, Vernon appears. Although his hair is prematurely grey, and he’s put on a little weight, he seems to Gladys to be getting younger. Today he’s wearing an open-necked pastel-yellow shirt with a blue fleck – she’s seen Elvis in something similar. Vernon favours pale clothes, not caring one whit about how easy they are to stain. Gladys wanted to slap him when he admitted that he enjoyed having his laundry done by the maids. But at least he doesn’t throw his clothes away, like Elvis. Several times, Gladys has rescued her son’s barely soiled shirts from the trash.
Vernon pours himself some coffee with the air of a man too busy to take a break. In his office next to the car porch, he has filing cabinets, two telephone lines, pinboards, a desk calculator and a swivelling leather chair, but what he does in there Gladys cannot fathom.
He drops onto the stool next to his son. ‘You wanted to speak with me?’
‘Let me get through eating first,’ says Elvis. ‘You want some?’
Vernon shakes his head.
Gladys sits opposite the men, taking a chair by the window. She eyes the sky, but there’s still no sign of snow.
‘Who’s coming to eat tomorrow, son? ’Cause I need to fix things up …’
‘I don’t know, Mama. Just do enough for ten.’
‘Ten?’ asks Vernon. ‘Seems like a lot.’
‘Ten’s fine. I can manage ten,’ says Gladys.
When he’s finished eating, Elvis wipes his mouth on a napkin and says, ‘Daddy, I need twenty-five thousand dollars, cash. Can you go get it for me?’
Vernon lets out a loud, mirthless laugh. ‘What in the world for?’
Elvis smiles. ‘It’s Christmas.’
‘What happened to yesterday’s thousand?’
‘I need more.’
Vernon sits forward, clenching his coffee cup. ‘Tell me what it’s for, then I’ll go get it.’
Elvis glances at Gladys. ‘Why is Daddy questioning me, Mama?’
Before she can reply, Vernon raises his voice. ‘I am trying to do what’s right. I am trying to help you.’
Elvis’s knee has begun to jog up and down, making the counter shake. ‘It’s my money, and you can help by getting it for me.’ He shows his father his palms, as if this is obvious.
‘What you gotta understand, son, is if you keep spending, there won’t be no money left.’
‘What you gotta understand is, I can always make another movie.’
Vernon leaves a pause before saying, softly, ‘Not now you’ve been drafted you can’t.’
Gladys rushes to her son’s side. Placing a hand on his sleeve, she says, ‘What Daddy means is, it’s better to be careful. We know you’re gonna be even more popular when you come out of the army, but a little caution never hurt nobody.’
Elvis shrugs her off. He pauses for a second, as if considering an appropriate reaction to this outrage, then, with one swoop of his arm, sends his dirty plate crashing to the floor.
‘Now, hold on a minute!’ cries Gladys. ‘You better clean that up!’
‘Get Alberta to do it.’ Kicking the plate out of his way, Elvis pushes past her to the staircase. Then he turns and glares at his father. ‘That money is mine. You are gonna get it for me. And you ain’t gonna lecture me about my career ever again, ’cause you know jackshit about it.’
When he’s gone, Gladys gathers the scattered cutlery and the greasy plate.
Vernon watches her without moving. ‘I’d like to whip his sorry ass,’ he mutters.
From the sink, she says, ‘You better go get it for him.’
‘He oughta be happy!’ Vernon snaps. ‘I woulda given anything to serve my country.’
Gladys is so surprised by this statement that she freezes. Then she manages to say, ‘You woulda made a good solider. And so will Elvis.’
But her husband has already left the room, slamming the door behind him.
Perhaps it’s the beers she had at supper – a feast of honey-dipped ham, fried chicken, potato salad, cornbread and three types of chocolate pudding – but by the time Gladys has retired to her bedroom to wrap gifts, her mood has lifted. She presumes Vernon gave in about the money, because Elvis was back to his best at the dining-room table, joking with the boys about getting his army haircut, singing the occasional snatch of ‘Silent Night’ to his grandmother, nuzzling up to Anita. Anita is dazzlingly blonde, pert and pretty as a peach. She shines so cleanly that Elvis must see his own face when he looks at her. Anita has even promised to help with the cooking tomorrow, as Alberta and Daisy will be with their own families for Christmas.
As she sits on the bed to begin her task, Gladys’s mind slips back to the worry of whether the oven will be large enough to accommodate the bird, and her breath comes quick and her head feels as though a heavy hand is pressing upon it. She reaches for her brandy nightcap, and instructs herself to keep focused on Elvis’s gift.
For weeks she has been wondering what to give him. There is, of course, little that he cannot buy for himself, and since all her money comes from him, it feels strange to buy her boy a gift at all. So, eventually, she decided to make him something.
When he was a child, she’d regularly made clothes for him and herself, but Gladys hasn’t used her sewing machine since the move to Audubon Drive. Elvis and Vernon laughed at her when she insisted on bringing it to Graceland too, asking why she would choose to sweat for hours over that noisy machine. Didn’t she realise she could just buy something? In many ways, she agrees with them: it is a kind of madness to want to run her needle over cloth when she can order anything she wants from Goldsmith’s, but all her adult life Gladys has known the joy of stitching a well-fitted sleeve into a shirt, finishing a collar, choosing buttons. She’s no longer sure, though, if her fingers are up to the task. They tend to slide on any small, smooth object; sometimes she finds it difficult to keep hold of her cutlery. Even this wrapping paper is slipping through her fingers.
And so, with the help of McCall’s magazine, she has made Elvis a washbag. Although she selected it because it had seemed a manageable task, one she could definitely finish in the time she’d allowed herself, it wasn’t easy to sew: gripping the needle made her fingers ache, and the close work had her eyes smarting. She has fashioned it from thick black velvet, lined with gold satin, and embroidered his initials on the front in gold thread. Monogrammed objects have always pleased him; he has been writing his name on his possessions ever since he was a boy.
She slices through the thick silver paper and places the washbag in its centre. Looking at it now, she is alarmed by its amateurish appearance. The letters are slightly askew, the upper loop of the ‘E’ not quite matching the lower, and the drawstring doesn’t pull as tight as it should, but, she reassures herself, it is a private item that he can use without fear of judgement from others.
And she has the snowballs in the deep freeze.
They’d had a heavy fall in November, while Elvis was away in Hawaii. Flakes had whirled and dived past the kitchen window, gently patting the glass, and as she’d watched Gladys had felt a deep contentment settle within her. She’d sat for a good hour, witnessing the world turning white. The tips of the fence, the angles of the car porch, the spikes of the oak branches all became blunted with snow. She’d wondered how she could share this comfort with her son. Calling him was out of the question, because he’d be working, getting ready for his show, and it would be almost impossible, anyway, to communicate how it felt to be in the middle of a snowfall when he was under a burning Hawaiian sun. She’d pictured him rolling down the white bank of the hill towards the gates of his mansion, snow sticking to his hair and coat, leaving a green trail as he tumbled, hugging himself, all the way to the bottom.
Then it came to her. She had rushed out in her housecoat and scooped up what she could. First being careful to remove any stray grass, mud or stones, she squeezed the snow into six neat balls, then held up the hem of her dress so it made a bowl, dropped the snowballs in it, and carried them to the house. She placed them carefully in a pan, and hurried to the deep freeze, where she stashed her bounty. After letting the heavy lid drop with a great whoosh of freezing air, she turned to see Vernon watching her. He stared at her hot cheeks, wet hands, and house shoes soaked with snow.
‘You done lost your mind, woman?’ he asked.
Gladys did not feel the need to answer him.
She hasn’t planned how she will present her son with the gift of snow just yet, but the thought of it glows within her as she puts the final piece of sticky tape in place. Perhaps she will keep it in reserve, in case he doesn’t respond well to the washbag.
She’s been asleep for less than an hour when she’s woken by an almighty bang, and she’s right back in the Tupelo tornado, a green sky above, the walls of her house shivering from the blast. Groping blindly for her son, she pulls only the silk coverlet towards her. Another explosion has Gladys fully awake and sitting up, heart racing, and realising that she’s not at home, but in the mansion, alone in her huge bed. Vernon chooses the guest bedroom more and more now, saying he can’t stand his wife’s night-time wanderings.
As she pulls on her housecoat, she’s calling for Elvis. Maybe he’s still safely in the basement, where he’d gone after supper with Gene and Junior and Lamar and Cliff and Anita and the rest of the girls – she’s given up trying to learn their names. Gladys peers down the steps. Though the lights are burning and the TV sets are on, there are no voices.
Suddenly there’s a boom and a flash. The hallway lights up, and she ducks and cries out his name again, but nobody comes running. Guns. There must be guns. Just months ago, there was an attack on Liberace’s mother at the star’s home, and ever since, Elvis has been careful that Gladys should never be alone in the house. He has surrounded his family with more men; he never calls them bodyguards, but they certainly look ready for a fight.
In the kitchen, she calls for him again and is answered by another explosion; the windows go blue and green. When she sees fire falling through the sky, she understands what is happening and sinks into a chair, all the strength in her legs gone. There is no shooting. There are no intruders. Elvis is letting off fireworks.
Now she understands why he needed so much cash: he’ll have driven over the state line to buy boxes of the things. It’s not the first time.
Boom. The window glows pink. Squinting through the glass, she makes out bodies rushing around the back lawn. There are squeals and shouts of ‘Over here!’ and ‘Come on!’ and ‘Now!’ Then another crack, and a series of Roman candles illuminate the sky, fizzing above the fields and plummeting back to earth. She sighs. She won’t interfere. It’s important for Elvis to blow off steam, especially after the news of the drafting.
But where is Vernon? Surely the noise must have woken him. For a second she considers knocking on the guest bedroom door, then thinks better of it. Some nights he crawls in even later than Elvis, and if this is one of those nights she’d really rather not know.
Resolving to pour herself a beer and find her pills, she rises and, from the corner of her eye, she spots a glowing figure running towards the house. As it gets closer, she realises it’s Cliff, and there are flames coming from his coat.
She rushes to open the back door and peer out. Her nephew Gene, who Vernon calls ‘that idiot boy’, throws himself at Cliff, bundling him to the ground.
‘Aunt Gladys!’ he shouts. ‘Get water!’
She grabs the nearest pan from a shelf and runs to the faucet, ignoring the ache in her legs. As she does so, she remembers the snow in the deep freeze, but rejects the idea of using it: that is for her son, for Christmas.
By the time she’s reached them, the fire is out, and Cliff is sitting on the grass, grasping his forearm and moaning, his coat smoking in his lap.
‘What in the world are you boys up to?’ Gladys demands.
‘He’s OK. Ain’t you, Cliff? Ain’t you OK?’ says Gene, whose freckled face is smeared with soot.
Gladys crouches next to Cliff. The sleeve of his shirt is in tatters.
‘Put your arm in this, if you can,’ she instructs, placing the pan of water by his side. He does as he’s told, and lets out a yelp. Now that she’s outside, Gladys can hear, between the explosions, the sound of her son’s laughter as it climbs from amused chuckles to wild barks. Usually, on hearing this delirious sound, Gladys cannot help but laugh in response. But not tonight.
‘We got to get you to a doctor,’ she says.
‘Noooooo!’ sings Gene, jogging on the spot. ‘Noooooo doctor!’
‘Ain’t no need,’ says Cliff, through jagged breath. ‘I’m OK.’
‘Where’s Elvis?’
Cliff and Gene exchange a glance. The laughter is becoming louder.
‘Over yonder, in them trees,’ says Gene.
‘Well, go find him and tell him to quit. I want an end to this.’
‘It’s a game of war, Aunt Gladys!’ says Gene, clenching a fist and punching the air. ‘Elvis is the captain!’
‘War?’
‘Battles! Fighting! Real fun stuff!’
‘And what you fighting with, Gene?’
Gene looks at the ground, then at Cliff, then at the ground again. ‘Not the fireworks. Noooo, ma’am! Noooo!’
Gladys hauls herself to her feet. ‘You fetch Elvis, right now!’
‘But it’s safe, Aunt Gladys! Elvis says so! He told us, didn’t he, Cliff? He said, nooooo aiming for the face—’
‘Gene,’ says Cliff. ‘Go get the boss.’
Another explosion. Green fire drips through the sky.
‘Get Elvis!’ Gladys cries.
Gene scampers away.
‘Let’s go inside and patch you up,’ Gladys says to Cliff, helping him to his feet.
As they walk to the house, she asks, ‘How can a game be called war?’ and Cliff replies, ‘Guess it ain’t really much of a game, Miss Gladys.’