Three Ceramic Plates

Content warning: abuse

***

Four ceramic plates, four tall glasses, eight pieces of silverware and a basket of bread in the middle. The family sitting around the table with a painted poise on each of our black canvas faces. My father will come home to this each day, cascading his fork into the pile of food without a second glance at the human chickens before him. But, without fail, my mom and I’s hands will always take us back to the dishes each night, despite our reluctance and depressive state. Our life depends on it, my mother says, because my father is our lifeline.

He leaves at eight thirty in the morning and takes the train to the city. I’ve been on a train before, when we moved from there to the suburbs. I cried, because the shake and the rumbles remind me of the way my father looks when he gets angry. He shakes the table and the floor rumbles, and sometimes one of our four tall glasses will fall and break.

My mother is a wonderful wife, my father says passively to our neighbors and other passersby. He’ll shine a bright white smile at her, and she’ll return with a toothy grin. He’ll take her hand and clasp his around it, but anyone with a functioning eye can realize the fallacy.

The sun will set each night, but no longer are the days where the two figures lounge on the chaise with the light low and only dimming. Instead, the dimming has revealed itself in the way the sparkle has diminished from each of their eyes the past few years. This darkening has not even spared me.

I think of this as we bring dinner out from the kitchen to be served in the dining room. Today, we’ve made a steaming hot shepherd's pie about the size of two of my heads. It’s my father’s favorite: for the day that he gets his news. News about what, I do not know.

The shepherd's pie smells like family gatherings and late nights with my cousins, where I’d usually fall asleep to the melody of my mother’s heartbeat. That was a couple of years ago, when I was seven. These days, we don’t seem to visit family anymore. Father says that they don’t understand our way of life.

Mother waits patiently, but not without anxiety. I can tell by the sparkle of her forehead against the light and the twirling of her hair. Each minute that passes brings another turn of the neck, another tilt of the head upwards, and another laying of her eyes on the clock.

“Are you okay?” I ask her, my voice like honey.

She turns to face me with wide and grateful eyes. “Yes, Lily,” she wipes the sweat off of her forehead and smiles downward. “Thank you for asking.”

Running down the stairs is my brother, Thomas. I fear that the wooden stairs under him will crack with every loud bang of his step. And with each bang, the muscles of my heart match loudly with the beating of his feet.

We wait silently at the dinner table until the door knob begins to excitedly jingle up and down. I kick my legs back and forth under the table Thomas playfully dances around. The door opens and my dad stands with a smile under the golden light of the lamp.

“Did you get the job?” my mother asks in a soft voice.

My father looks at me and then to Mother again, “No,” he says with a forced smile. His face is boiling underneath the translucent bubbles of restraintment. It looks as if they will pop at any moment.

“That’s okay. We made your favorite,” she says as my father sits down. 

He does not verbally respond. But by the look on his face, the bubbles have popped, and so have all chances of a happy evening.

***********************

We eat dinner in an unfortunate silence that night, each of us too unsure of the situation to speak. I make quick glances at mother to see if she’ll choose to start a conversation, but I only see the lift of her fork into her mouth. 

After dinner, my father takes glass bottles out of the refrigerator. They’re dripping water, and I fear that one will slip out of my father’s hands and produce a puddle of brown liquid on the floor. He watches the television with intent eyes as my mother cleans up the table and the kitchen. My brother and I play cards until our eyes begin to droop and our mouths begin to only muster short mutters.

Mother puts me to sleep that night. The sweet scrambling of her voice as she finds soothing words to say lumbers me to sleep. My eyes are eager to close before she leaves the room, and I obey their enthused commands.

I wake after only an hour of slumber. The dreams that have visited me tonight are not pleasant: they’re filled with demons and spiders crawling over me, giving me either the choice to be bitten or to descend to hell. The time on the clock on the side of my wall says that the time is 10 o’clock.

Sometimes, when I used to not be able to sleep in the summer, I would come downstairs with mother and father and they’d read me bedtime stories. Usually, at the start, I would be wide-awake, waiting for each word to pass by and move the story further along. Eventually, my excitement would reduce to a settled listen. At last, their words would begin to scramble like eggs and I would be asleep.

Today, I walk the upstairs hall and listen to hear if my parents are still awake. Instead of the usual calm shuffling, I hear low voices that climb up and down the walls like insects. The legs of them are thin and would tickle my skin, like the words I hear are quiet and tickle my ears.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” my mother says in a hushed voice.

“They told me today,” my father sizzles. “It’s not really your business anyway.”

“It’s my business if we’re not going to have a source of income anymore!” my mother says, before deafening silence floods. The water has seemed to pull back before the tsunami comes crashing down.

I gently linger at the top of the stairwell before I hear a loud crash and a gasp. I suppose that father must have dropped one of his drink bottles, so I step back out of habit. The floor creaks under me, and my heart beats harder.

That night, I go back into my room. Soft cries, like a lamb bleating as it is shaved, echo downstairs. I do not sleep that night. Instead, I drown out the cries, listening to the crickets’ uniformed jingle perforating the walls through the hours of the night.

***************************

I pour down the stairs like I am a bottle of maple syrup, my legs dragging across the wood like the amber liquid would a pancake. I look around the room and realize that a figure is missing. My father isn’t present. Yet, my mom stands in the kitchen, soaking a tea bag in a mug full of water. She lifts it up to her face, steaming, before she notices my presence.

“Good morning, Lily,” she says. Her voice is hoarse and shallow. I notice her tired eyes and the dark circles that rest underneath them. Red lines cover the surface of her whites. Bruises, like piles of mud, cover the surface of her hay-colored legs. I know the ruthless pig that rolled around in her last night, yet I do not want to face the truth.

“Good morning, Momma,” I say back. She sets the mug of tea down on the table and sighs softly. Her hair is wispy and thin, but her eyes are thick with regret. An idea grazes the surface of her mind, and tickles her slowly brightening eyes.

“I was thinking we could go out to breakfast today,” she suggests. 

“Yes!” I gratefully respond. Although, a question still rests in my own mind, crawling around in my tired crud. It slithers out like a worm left to die in the sun just before rain pours. 

“Where are Daddy and Tom?” I ask. 

“They’re gone, for now,” she says. A frown forms over her tense face. “They should be back by around five o’clock in the evening.”

It’s Saturday, so there is no way that father is at work and Thomas has gone with him. 

“Can we go to the diner?” I ask mother. 

She says yes, so we walk over. It’s only about a mile away, but when we get there, we’re ravenous. Mother says that I can order whatever I want, so I take the menu and search for the gold. 

We order golden pancakes and maple syrup, a stack of bacon, buttered toast, hash browns, and two vanilla milkshakes. When the food arrives, I stare at the drip of amber down the side of the stack. I sip at my milkshake, and taste the sweetness that I have long waited for.

After gorging ourselves on all we could possibly eat, we sit with our contentment. The sun is almost directly above us in the sun. I trace the side of the smooth table as I watch cars speed on the road.

Curiously, I ask my mother, “Did you tell daddy about our trip?”

She opens her mouth to say something, but closes it immediately. Instead, she shakes her head side to side and lets few words dribble from her voice: “We don’t need to.”

**************************

After our small adventure at the diner, mother insisted we visit the pharmacy for her prescription. The translucent green bottle is filled with white pills about the size of the tip of my thumb. As we walk back home, I reach my hand over to touch it, to pick it up and give myself a better look, but mother slaps my hand.

It leaves a bright red mark on the side of my wrist. It stings, and I begin to cry. She tells me that they could make me very sick if I were to swallow one, so she is just protecting me. To me, it seems like she just wanted my hands off of her. 

When we arrive home, Thomas is back from wherever he visited. Father is not. It’s around noon: lunch time for Thomas, 

“Where is your father?” mother asks Thomas. 

“I don’t know.”

I think that I see her smile at the answer. Her bruises have gotten darker throughout the day, the black leaking through her skin. They are small deltas that flow into the ocean, filling up with the opaque slime of pain. The ocean is graying, not far from succumbing to the foreign substance.

************************

That day, the sun seems to barely swim across the sky. It feels stuck in the same position, until I realize that the darkening of the sky is not my imagining. My best friends, Laura and Katie, tell me about their plans for Christmas break, and their excitement looking forward to cuddles on the coach with cocoa and cream. I smile and nod, accepting with a craving for what it must be like to have a family content and not brooding with their scratched souls.

After we have already eaten dinner, with three ceramic plates instead of four, my father walks through the door with red bruises all over his neck and a torn apart outfit of a tank top and jeans. I have never seen him like this, and I don’t think that he wants me to, based off of the red that turns over on his cheeks.

It’s 8 o’clock, and my mother was reading my brother and I bedtime stories already. There was a sparkle in her eye that I must not have noticed before. Her hair was bubbly and her voice was too. I think she was ready to go out for the night--to a place far away, like the one in the novel she was reading us.

A shadow falls upon my mother’s face as she closes the fairytale’s pages, placing it gently on the floor. We sit like an oiled canvas in the tension that was illustrated with the return of my father. 

“Where have you been?” my mother asks while scooting my brother and I upstairs.

“You don’t ever ask me that,” my father says. “Why ask now?” There’s a bite within his growl. I’m surprised he does not bear his yellowing teeth.

I stay at the top of the stairwell, like I did the night before. I struggle to stay awake, for the day has been long and filled with surprises. 

“Don’t you ever question me in front of the kids again,” I hear my father say. And a slap follows behind, with a soft welp.

My heart sinks into my stomach. Tuna casserole swims up my esophagus and I taste the bitterness of vomit. 

I hear my father sit down: I know the sound of it from the heaviness of the sinking. 

“I promise never again,” mother says. She is cooperating. “Would you like a drink?” 

I guess that my father nods his head, because I hear the clanging of the glasses and the swish of the wine. Then I hear a new sound: the clicking of a container and the rolling of something cylindrical. 

As I peek out from behind the banister, I see my mother hand the class to my father. They sip their wine in silence, not daring to look at eachother. They would usually be screeching by now, but I assume that they are both tired. I tip-toe to my bedroom, shut off the light, and sleep soundly for the first time in my life.

*************************

The sun seeps in from outside, bouncing off the white walls of my room and along the edges of the walls. I greet the early morning with a smile and a stretch. I look up to my hands and spread my arms wide, hugging the glorious light. 

Father has been taken out. Mother says that he must have left the house in the middle of the night, but I see the black bag peering in from the downstairs window. Within the day, it’s gone. I do not know where it went.

The routine is the same, but the table feels lighter without the presence of the father figure, looming over us and challenging our every move. We eat. We drink. We speak. However, we do not blush, nor do we clench our fists until our nails dig into our palms, or sweat on the back of our shirts.

After breakfast, the table stays dirty. The chairs are not pushed in, and the television still running the morning news and weather reports. Thomas runs around the house, not just around the table. I draw with my new bucket of crayons and pad of white sheet paper. It’s a refreshing sight, with the order of the old gone. Mother does not bother to clean the dishes yet, for she knows she has enough time. 

The cabinet takes my hand on its handle and pushes my elbow back, opening the door. I observe the dusty glasses and silverware as I reach my hand in and flowingly take one out. The birds detailed on the rim chirp melodically, harmonizing in a familiar way.

The plate jumps from my hand and crashes to the hard tiled floor, cracking like a scream into countless sharpened corners. The shards fly across the room like birds that have been set free after years spent caged. I watch as black paint on the plates chips off, revealing its white interior.

There are no objections--neither from my brother or my mother. Even the birds outside that chirping happily against the windy morning agree. Three ceramic plates is all we need.