The Tea Ceremony

From a chipped repurposed Milo tin, Frances shook out the dried flowers, crumpled together like children’s fists, into a glass teapot of steaming water. She followed the flowers with half a palm-full of South Word “Lump Candy” that splashed up the clear walls, sending snaking droplets racing down and down. After stirring the tea with a wooden spoon, Frances replaced the lid without making a clink or a pop, gripped the teapot’s handle and adjusted to its weight without letting the moist glass slip in her hand. Then, with her left hand, she pinched together three tall porcelain tea cups, each with a depiction of a rooster on it, and carried everything to the circular coffee table in her room. 

    Frances poured the sweet chrysanthemum tea into the three cups, one for her mother, Evelyn, who sat on the bed, her legs stretched into the tangle of blankets left out for her cats to nap in, one to her sister, Joanna, who occupied the grey armchair to the right of the coffee table, then one for herself, which she immediately sipped upon sitting in the identical armchair on the left of the coffee table. Though the three women sat facing each other now, France had designed the room to maximize the natural light, placing the armchairs in front of the only windows in the room so she could look out over the sprawling mess of wildflowers, mostly occidental daisies and nasturtium, that Frances and Evelyn had scattered one year and had subsequently exploded in uncontrollable growth. Though the two women hacked the stalks down every year, each spring, the flowers returned, sometimes reaching several feet. They attracted red-breasted hummingbirds, bees, tiny sparrows, yellow butterflies, and sometimes rats that would gnaw on the wood panels outside the windows at night, prompting Frances to run outside barefoot and throw fist-fulls of sliced Serrano peppers at the ground wherever she saw any movement in the stalks. 

    Joanna was second to taste the tea, bringing the cup to her mouth, carefully gauging the heat of her drink before inviting the pale golden liquid in.

    “It’s been a while since we had sweet tea like this,” Joanna smiled, tucking a loose strand of her silk-thread brown hair behind her ear. Frances’ eye caught the glint off of a gem on her older sister's finger and reminded herself it would be even longer soon after this.

    “You’ll just have to bully Rob into making tea for you,” Frances chuckled, avoiding her sister’s hand as it flicked toward her. 

    “Jo, make sure not to bully Rob, okay?” Evelyn looked over her daughters, barely noticing their smiles.

    “I don’t bully him.”

    “Anymore,” Frances dodged again, but Joanna landed a smack on Frances’ shoulder. 

    “I don’t bully you into making tea either. Plus you make it so well.”

    Frances rolled her eyes slightly. In her mid-20’s now, she finally picked up on Joanna’s manipulation techniques. But she didn’t mind making tea for her family. She had claimed the title of tea preparer years ago, not only because she was the youngest, but also because she enjoyed the art of it, watching thin shrivels of mountain oolong or silver thread green tea unfurl, swell, and burst out plumes of green, yellow, sometimes blue. Frances even loved the teapots, the way water poured like glass from their spouts, the deepening sheen and richness in color of the Yixing clay, the way the handles distributed the weight as she moved her wrist. She collected them, the Purple Sand clay teapots, and stored them in her old room on the other side of the house.

    “I got these cups for you, right?” Evelyn inspected the roosters.

    Frances nodded, humming out a yes. 

    “I grew up with cups like these, with painted roosters. I tried to find hand painted ones for you, but they’re all printed nowadays.”

    “That’s okay, Mom. I like them.”

    Evelyn propped herself up more in bed. Gray hair frizzed out from the nape of Evelyn’s neck where she didn’t bother to dye it black yet. She usually waited until her monthly trip to the hairdresser who would only scold Evelyn for not saving money and using boxed root-touch-up. Evelyn always tried to scold back but at home, told Frances that she only wanted to give her friend the business as she knew the hairdresser’s family had medical bills weighing down on them. 

    Noticing Evelyn’s shift in gaze, from the teacup to the two sisters, Frances pressed her lips together, bracing.

    “I got a letter a few days ago,” Evelyn’s voice resumed a sternness overused in Frances’ childhood. “I have to decide whether or not I should continue to pay Dad’s life insurance. And remove myself as his primary beneficiary.”

    Joanna sat up in the armchair, planting her feet flat into the pile of the off-white shag carpet. Frances pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them so that she barely had room to inhale deeply and let out a shallow breath. With her mouth shut tight, the taste of floral rock sugar soured.

    “Why are you even paying for it in the first place? Didn’t you remove yourself as his primary beneficiary during the divorce? How do you even have the access to pay it?”

    Frances eyed her mother and then Joanna, recognizing the immediate anger, the rage at the injustice of it all, as similar to her own anger from years ago that had burned so hot and so wildly that Frances fizzled to ashes. Back then, Joanna disapproved of her younger’s sister’s anger, but now Joanna understood it: anger at the wounds of abandonment. 

    “Jo, don’t give me a hard time about it,” Though Evelyn’s face was plastered with irritation, she shrunk back into the pillows cushioning her back.

    Joanna scratched the top of the teacup with a long nail, smothering the printed rooster with her thumb.

    “I won’t,” Joanna gulped the tea. “So what are you deciding on?”

    “Well, I’m still paying for it,” Evelyn stated, monotone and terse.

    An image of Joanna’s scowl flashed into Frances’ mind, but she focused her attention on the grit forming on her teeth. An ache of guilt gnawed at Frances’ tongue as the secret Evelyn asked Frances to keep begged to be spoken. Evelyn had been paying for several of her ex-husband’s bills whenever she came across them, which was often. He never changed his permanent address, even though he lived half-way across the globe. Frances always figured he had run away to a place he once revered and that had revered him as a white man, after years of living away from his family, chasing images that his muddled brain conjured up in his dreams. That is how Frances came to understand her father now: caught in a game of chasing and running away. 

    “But I don’t know if I should keep paying it,” Evelyn’s voice called Frances away from her guilty conscience, “It just depends on whether or not we think he’ll die in the next ten years.”

    Frances once again looked up at her mother, whose cavernous frown lines, like the one split down the middle of her eyebrows, had softened recently, and then at her sister, who still sat with her back straight, even as she relaxed. 

    “I know he’s gained some weight, but I doubt he’d die in the next ten years,” Frances eyed her family more carefully.

    “Personally, I’m more worried something’s going to happen to him,” Joanna pinched her lips together.

    “I am too. That’s why I’m asking you girls,” Evelyn met Joanna’s eyes and nodded.

    “What sort of something?” Frances’ grip on the conversation began to slip and she felt herself falling away from her mother and sister, who remained on the same level.

    “I’m just worried he’ll kill himself,” Joanna shrugged.

    “And that’s where the beneficiary money comes in. If he does die…”

    Words jumbled together as Evelyn and Joanna continued to talk of the logistics of death, numbers, payouts, how-to’s. Frances didn’t understand half of what they talked about, especially the mutual conclusion of her father killing himself. 

    Instead, her father’s hospital bed, his home for two weeks when she was 10, came to mind. Eyes swollen to the point of near-bursting, green, purple, and blue tracing out rings on his face, her father’s jaw wired shut so that his protests of drinking strawberry flavored liquid protein and homemade split pea soup from the neighbors were an incoherent mumble. 

    The stitches in his head that held together his fractured skull, the rhythmic whoosh of machines pressing against his feet to keep the blood from pooling, the smell of disinfectant and hot flesh of open wounds on the verge of infection. 

    The uncontrollable disgust that fluttered up when she first visited, the pity as she watched him hobble to and from his car, struggling to breath, grappling with tasks that should have been familiar, but something in his brain had been crossed. 

    Then the rage as his body healed but his mind did not, and Frances’ prepubescent body could not understand who this stranger that had replaced her father was. 

    Frances nibbled the inside of her cheek with her front molars, making small tears into the gelatin of her mouth until she tasted copper. 

    “One of us will have to go get his remains, but I doubt I’ll be able to do it with the work schedule I have now,” Joanna rubbed her temples, and Frances noticed the bare etchings of crow’s feet around her sister’s eyes.

    “Do you really think he’d kill himself?” Frances echoed aloud the question that resounded in her mind. 

    “It’s just a feeling,” Joanna turned toward Frances, but Frances couldn’t meet her older sister’s eyes.

    “I have it, too,” Evelyn sighed. 

    Evelyn’s intuition was eerily attuned to reality, and Frances learned to trust it. Releasing her knees, Frances inhaled deeply, conjuring the image of her father sitting in his box apartment in Nanjing, piles of ungraded college essays stacked high amongst strewn pens and white board markers. Though he had been lucky to land a job at an international university in his favorite country, Frances struggled to picture him as he might be now: sinking behind unfamiliar shadows that she couldn't fill in the gaps for--the rice cooker he used now or if he just used the stove, his bed frame though he often slept on the floor to help his back, his speakers, since the ones he used to play Dexter Gordon and Norah Jones on broke a few months before he moved to China--but further he sunk, undiscovered and alone, until finally a stranger--his neighbor or landlord--found him. 

    Frances knew she would be the one to buy the ticket, to struggle to navigate her way to his foreign apartment to pack his things and sell them or bring them back, arrange in broken Mandarin for his remains to be cremated, to bring him back.

    Holding the rooster cup in her hand, cradling the cooling ceramic and rubbing the outline of the print, Frances let out a long breath. The tea had cooled into syrup as the women sat in a long stillness. Soon, Frances would take the teapot, still mostly full, and pour its contents into a mason jar to be sealed and stored in the fridge. She would toss the bloated flowers in the trash, wash, and dry everything, and put them where they belonged. 

    She might think of her father as she threw the chrysanthemums away, white flowers good for sweet tea and death. 

    “If you want to pay for it, you should. I can help out, too,” Frances swallowed the last bit of copper in her mouth. 

    Joanna shook her head and with hooded eyes betraying reluctance, said “I’m making more than you, I’ll handle it.”

    “Tsk,” Evelyn waved her hand at the younger women, “I can handle it just fine.” 

    Throwing her legs off the bed and pushing herself up, Evelyn waved once more.

    “Alright, alright. Enough tea. Jo, come look at the tiles we picked out for the bathroom remodel. I think you’ll approve.”

    Joanna followed her mother’s movements and stood up. Frances, slower and more deliberate, stood up too, stared at the now vacant room, and collected the half-empty tea cups and nearly full teapot, which,unlike the cups, sloshed with warmth. She looked forward to pouring it over ice and drinking it at her coffee table, looking out over the wildflowers and birds and mountains.