Tea Story

Tea Fairy photo by emup.

The tea merchant opens his back door in the morning, tosses out empty crates of earl grey and oolong and imperial jade beside the dumpster, then lets the door slam shut and locked behind him. Not even a handle on which to pull, just flat steel, one way entrance, and I’m on the wrong side. I limp over to the crates, ease myself down on a sheet of cardboard and pull the crates closer. I smell inside them and inhale the rich, nostalgic scent of oil of bergamot, the earthy smell of oolong, shipped all the way to the states straight from the hillsides of a Chinese tea garden.

I hold two dollars and seventeen cents of change inside my pants pocket, spoils from an afternoon of panhandling along the mall; why don’t I go inside for a cup of tea? I’ve been banned, that’s why, by that red faced, heartless tea merchant recently exeunt from the alley, stage left.

Okay, so I exposed myself from under the table to a couple of elderly ladies sitting at the table next to me. But that was months ago. Since then the voices have subsided, the roiling waves of my subconscious calmed to a smooth surface. But the merchant won’t let me back in for another couple of weeks. I guess I shouldn’t be too angry with him; he didn’t call the cops on me. He just tossed me out the back door to this alley, through the steel door, one way exit, no handles.

I remember going to his tea shop as a boy with my mother. She would wear a flowered dress, bring her crocheting in a large bag stuffed with motherly kinds of things; knitting needles and aspirin and throat lozenges and checkbooks, wadded up tissues used to wipe my nose. I’d get a cup of juice while my mother would get a two cup pot of dark English Breakfast, lightened with milk and sweetened with two teaspoons of sugar. She would break off small bites from her scone and feed them to me. The tea merchant was younger then, face not so red, hair thicker and body slimmer. He’d flirt with my mother, though she mostly discouraged conversation with the merchant. We were here to get away from men, I suppose, all of whom were mere reproductions from that single deplorable image of my father. At least deplorable to her standards. My standards had not yet been formed, but I knew something was not right with the man that lived in our house, whom my mother discouraged me from calling “dad”, instead referring to him by his first name always: Chester. Chester was not the head of the household. Chester was not her husband or my father. Chester was a boarder in the attic, sleeping on an old army cot.

What was so bad about Chester? Beside the outbursts of profanity, the nervous ticks that would fling dishes or silverware from table to floor? I don’t think the primary reason was his stink: he was afraid of water, afraid of drowning, which he did one day in three and a half inches of bathwater, an accident for which my mother was acquitted. What really bothered her I suppose were his poems, written with charcoal on the walls of our cellar. Poems she would whitewash away each Sunday morning, but which would appear again throughout the week; different poems, magnificent, brilliant, rare glimpses at the colorful expanses of Chester’s fractured mind. She was afraid of it, perhaps, angered that the emotions and beauty remained either locked in his mind or confined to the cellar. Or maybe she hated that Chester’s poems were better than hers. I remember her poems only faintly, as they were quite forgettable; I only remember the flowery bindings of the vanity presses, the booklets that took much of her money to have printed for herself and relatives, signed in sprawling loops and squiggles carefully practiced. My mother, lover of tea, offender of bad poetry, guilty of neglect and cruelty towards her Tourette’s ridden husband referred to not as sweetheart or father or husband, but only as Chester.