Tea Time

“I’m not sure if we should go,” she said.

“Why not?” he replied. He stopped scrubbing the dishes and turned to face her. “It’ll be fun. Anyway, you don’t have to partake if you don’t want to.”

“Well for one thing, it’s illegal,” she said.

“Is it?” he shot back. “They grow naturally, right there on the edge of the trees at the park down the street a little bit from his place." He was rambling. "They grow everywhere if you know where to look. Well, not everywhere but lots of places, especially after it rains. They grow in cow patties, too. They’re only illegal if you pick them and dry them.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Even if it’s," she made exaggerated air quotes with her fingers, "legal," she went on, "it seems dangerous to be gathering in a crowd even outside and I’m concerned that people will let their masks down.”

He returned to the sink full of dishes. “This year it’s a golf theme.” He gripped a wooden ladle, looked at it, put it back down. “He’s set up a miniature golf course in his backyard and he’s projecting golf movies onto a bed sheet. Tea time is 8:45.” He picked up the ladle again absentmindedly. “He’s calling it miniature golf, but it’s really croquet.”

“Okay." Not the same thing, but close enough. None of their friends were sports enthusiasts. "What’s he showing?"

She was warming to the idea of sipping Amanita tea, under a blanket in a camping chair, taking in a backyard movie screening—as long as the subject wasn’t too serious. How scary could a golf movie be? Surely there weren't any David Cronenberg-esque body horror movies about golf? The identical twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers didn't go golfing did they? She couldn’t remember.

If it were just a silly movie and not too visceral, she could stomach it. She needed some comic relief and it might be good for a laugh. It might not lead her down a rabbit hole of self-reflection and regret. It might be fun! It might even turn out to be enlightening, an inner eye-opener. The psychedelic tea could help her foresee a life beyond her dull routine, something beyond working from home, safely bored, isolated from danger and face to face interaction.

“It’s a double feature,” he answered. “First up is Caddyshack, a classic, and then he’s showing The Legend of Bagger Vance.” He started singing the chorus to the theme song. “I’m alright, don’t nobody worry ‘bout me. Why you gotta give me advice?”

She winced as he butchered a high note. “What’s the Bagger Vance movie?”

A part of her hoped it would be so bad that they could leave early or skip the tea party entirely. She knew he wouldn’t want to stay if the movie were terrible, but there was a greater than zero possibility that it was so bad that they were screening it ironically.

“I haven’t seen it,” he told her, “but I heard it’s loosely based on the Bhagavad-Gita."

"How is that?" She was skeptical.

"The main character’s name sounds like Arjuna and he’s having second thoughts about his life. They’re on a golf course instead of a battlefield, though. Will Smith is in it.”

She squinted her eyes. “So is Will Smith’s character supposed to be Krishna?”

“I guess so. I’ve never heard of anybody with a name ‘Bagger,’” he said, “but ‘Bagger Vance’ sounds sort of like Bhagavan, and he’s a caddy instead of a chariot driver.” He said it in a thick Southern Belle drawl: Bogga vons.

She considered the allusions. The names did indeed sound similar. He's also Black. And isn’t Krishna blackish too? …or blue, or is it green? No, that’s a different deity, Rama. He’s the green-skinned one with a monkey friend that flies. Or something like that. She had lost track of who's who in the Hindu pantheon and it had been years since she had visited India on a six-week pilgrimage.

Over there she had possessed a humble self-assurance that seemed too simple in retrospect. She had been a champion of humility. There she was, escorted on a rickshaw, traversing the gritty, dirty streets, experiencing an impossible sense of belonging, in fleeting moments, even though the language and ways were inscrutable. Those weeks overseas she had kept herself busy chanting mantras whenever she wasn't failing to stand her ground, fumbling, losing haggle battles with vendors. The winding thread of continuity to that other person, her younger self, was spider-silk thin, more of a cobweb collecting dust than a ray of sunshine. The floating motes had settled into a stillness, burrowed into a comfortable gravity. It was hard to connect the dots in a line from then until now, from there to here.

He was still rattling on in the kitchen, trying on ideas out loud, in real time. "I wonder if they adapt the trippiest part of the whole story, when Krishna reveals his universal form."

"What's that?" She had lost the thread.

"It's like the cover of that Jimi Hendrix and the Experience album." His hands were waving. "He's got like twenty heads, an elephant head like whatshisname, yeah Ganesh, and a bunch more heads. It's a riff on Vishnu in his universal form, and Vishnu is the same as Krishna. He shows Arjuna his universal form and Arjuna is basically tripping balls."

Ganesh, the elephant-headed demigod that likes to eat sweets and is afraid of a little rat? Or maybe the rat is his friend? It might have been a mouse--her memory of Hindu mythology didn't serve her very well. Still, she was fairly certain that Ganesh wasn't a form of Vishnu. Neither was Jimi Hendrix, for that matter.

When they arrived at the gathering the first movie was halfway over. Bill Murray's character was puttering, obsessed with a groundhog. Under an awning sat a picnic table with an offering to the guests, a spread of Vegan finger food. A silver bowl centerpiece reflected twinkling stars and the full moon in a brown murky concoction. Across the yard the sounds of laughter and knocking mallets rose up from a teeming handful of croquet players. Some dude was playing out a scene from Heathers, but it wasn't clear which Heather he was impersonating.

She picked up a red plastic Solo cup, swirled in a ladleful of tea. She stared into the electric brew, saw the moon's face returning her gaze. She gasped when the man in the moon winked at her. The tea was breathing, its elements churning in a tiny abyss.

She took a sip and closed her eyes. A thousand strands of her hair billowed in the breeze of the summer air, buoyed, twisting in time.