Orange Juice
“Flow” by Carolyn Adams
It’s just a song about orange juice, an advertisement playing on a 1973 radio in a 1973 kitchen. The boy hears it every morning while his mother makes breakfast. The singer has a sweet voice, like his mother did when she used to sing him to sleep. He’s too old for lullabies now, but the song is always there while he eats his cereal.
His mother doesn’t eat cereal. The boy watches her slice a grapefruit while his father’s eggs cook. She comes to the table with half the grapefruit in one hand and the plate of eggs in the other.
The night before, the boy heard his father come home long after his mother had put him to bed. Now he can hear water running in the bathroom while the eggs wait next to a cup of coffee, growing cold. He knows this happens certain mornings, has learned not to ask about it. He eats his cereal while his mother pokes at her grapefruit.
When his father finally sits down in front of the eggs, the boy wonders if he’s sick. His dark hair is sticking out in funny directions, and his breath smells like copper pennies. The boy looks at his mother, wondering if she sees it too, but she’s concentrating on her grapefruit.
She sticks her spoon into it, and it squirts juice back at her, hitting just below the top button of her shirt. The boy and his mother laugh as she dabs at the wet spot with a napkin, but his father only nods. His father isn’t eating the eggs. When he drinks coffee, his hand shakes.
The boy finishes, runs to get his backpack, stands at the front door, ready. He can hear his parents’ voices coming from the kitchen, but they’re speaking quietly, so he can’t hear the words. While he waits, he peeks at the lunch his mother has made him: two Oreos, an apple, and a bologna sandwich. He doesn’t like bologna much, but it’s okay. We don’t get everything we want. His mother says that sometimes.
The boy’s father always drives him to school. His mother says he isn’t old enough to sit in the front seat, but his father lets him do it anyway. “Hey, tiger,” he says, “find something you like on the radio.” The boy pushes the buttons, but the only thing that comes in clearly is a man in a helicopter talking about the traffic.
***
Sherry was the woman with the sweet voice who sang the commercial. She was thirty-four and still lived with a roommate. The roommate was a singer, too, but she was a decade younger and still had hope.
Sherry got the orange juice job by answering the phone and saying “yes” every time the producer on the other end asked her a question. They recorded the ad in a studio in Culver City that smelled like Lysol and burned coffee.
The producer was a fleshy man named Keith who combed his straw-colored hair over a bald spot. When he shook her hand, he hung on too long, looking her over. Sherry had dressed in an oversize sweatshirt and jeans. She had sung for a lot of men like Keith.
“Fresh and alive,” he kept telling her. “I need you to sound fresh and alive.” After three takes, Keith decided Sherry sounded fresh and alive enough for an orange juice commercial. He wrote her a six-hundred dollar check and invited her to do a couple of lines in the parking lot.
Coke wasn’t Sherry’s thing, but it was part of the business. If you didn’t party with the producers, your phone stopped ringing. She got into the passenger side of Keith’s van. There was an air-brushed rainbow on the outside and blue shag carpeting on the inside. She checked to make sure her door wasn’t locked.
“You’re gonna love this stuff,” Keith said. “I get it from this Japanese guy, runs a restaurant on La Cienega. One of those places where you sit at the grill and watch the chef juggle your food while he cooks it.” Keith presented a rectangle of mirror to her with both hands, as though it were an offering. “Ladies first.”
Sherry looked down at her reflected face, interrupted by six lines of off-white powder and a short brass straw. She pinched one nostril shut and snorted a line through the other. The inside of her nose went numb and the familiar chemical taste leaked down the back of her throat. She didn’t like doing coke off mirrors. It made her see herself close-up when she least wanted to. Still sniffling, she tried to return the mirror, but Keith pushed it back toward her.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Do another line. Or two.” He leaned in, laid his hand on her thigh. “Don’t be shy.”
Sherry looked down at the mirror and thought about her rent. She thought about the check in her pocket and about the shag carpet in the back of the van. She leaned past Keith and placed the mirror on the sloping dash. The brass straw rolled off, disappearing between her knees.
She groped for the door handle.
“What’s the problem, honey?” he asked. There was no need to answer. They both knew what the problem was.
Sherry made herself look at him. With his graying mustache and a jacket that wouldn’t close across his pot belly, he could have been any of a dozen producers she’d sung for. She doubted the man remembered her name.
When Sherry slammed the door, the mirror slid off the dash. She didn’t listen to what Keith said after that.
***
The boy is finishing his cereal one morning when he realizes he hasn’t heard the orange juice song. In fact, he hasn’t heard it for days. He asks his mother, and she shakes her head. “They don’t play commercials forever,” she says. “They last for a while, and then they’re gone.”
For no reason he understands, tears crowd the corners of the boy’s eyes. He blinks them back, hoping his mother won’t notice.
“You can write them a letter,” his mother says. “If they know someone cares, they might bring it back. That happens sometimes.”
He has to sit in the back seat when his mother drives him to school. The radio is playing an ad for an insurance company. He wonders who he should write to, but the boy already knows no one reads letters like that.
about the author
Daniel Cohen is from Boston and has the accent to prove it. He’s earned his living fixing telephones, washing pots, and teaching at Tufts and UMass Amherst. His story “Treat” was nominated for the 2025 Pushcart Prize. To date, he has struck three Nobel Prize winners (two economists and a chemist) with paper airplanes.
about the artist
Carolyn Adams’ poetry and art have been published in the pages, and on the covers of Defunkt Magazine, Steam Ticket, Change Seven Magazine, The Fictional Cafe, and Red Weather, among others. She has authored five chapbooks, with one being a collection of her collage art, entitled What Do You See?