All through the rest of the house, it is quiet and still.Inside the dining room, the woman has decided to turn over the china cabinet. With labored breathing, she heaves it away from the wall, felling it in one strained motion like a lumberjack. Glazed plates with cornflower blue rings painted around their rims slide off their shelves and spin through the air like flying saucers. A matching set of teacups with miniature portraits of the house itself painted on their bottoms clatter and crash to the hardwood floor. After a moment where she pauses to catch her breath and run her fingers through her hair--a job well done--a cloud of dust stirred up by the fallen cabinet begins to settle. The woman peers around the room with her eyes darting around in their sockets, angle to angle, perspectives shifting, in search of her next victim.
Aha, she breathes, and walks determined and directly to the side table where the tea service has been set out for all to see, art objects of her mothers. The teapot is large and round, a swollen empty stomach. The woman picks it up by the handle and, spinning in a circle like a discus thrower, hurls it through the window over the sink that looks out onto the creek, where once she sat on a checked blanket and held mock tea parties with her older sister in the summers.
The teapot shatters the glass. The window is left smashed in the shape of an awkward star, with one shard of glass still dangling. It drops and clatters into the sink. The teapot is outside the house now, landing and rolling to who knows where.
The woman is the daughter of the woman who died in the house the night before. Two nights ago, she received a phone call from her older sister just an hour after their mother died, and was told in the practiced tone of disdain her sister reserves for her, the tone that forces her to imagine scenes of arctic bleakness, "Mother's dead. The funeral is in two days. You can come or not." Then the phone went dead as well and she wondered why dead is an uninterrupted buzzing sound that issues from phones and heart monitors. Flies, too, but they can be stunned into silence with a swat of the hand. She wondered was her mother now buzzing endlessly, wherever her body had been laid out? Was she humming her own death?
Shelves with dolls and porcelain figurines of cats lined upon them--here are the new targets. She lumbers across the room, awkward and unruly, until she reaches the wall where the dolls and cats all smile down at her from their higher vantages. With one stroke she sweeps them from their perches and tramples each and every one. Here lies a dolls head with its eyes still clicking open and shut. There, in the corner, lay the porcelain scraps of a red Persian.
The Persians face remains intact. Its mouth turns up at the corners. Bold and bodiless, it smiles.
A door opens unexpectedly in the house, and in rushes an autumn wind, chilling the air quickly. Goosebumps rise on her flesh, and she rubs her arms repeatedly. She turns from her task of destruction and peers wearily into the front room. There, in the doorway, stands her older sister, a silhouette backlit by the day.
"What have you done?" her sister says, shocked and gesturing at the mess the house has become. She moves across the room and surveys the domestic rubble, repeating the words, "What have you done, Alice? Just what have you done?"
Alice--for now that her sister has reminded her of who she is, she remembers--stands stock still in the heart of the disaster zone. She does not move, not even an inch. She wants to thank her sister, though, because she almost lost herself for a moment there. If Maureen hadnt swept in and named her so abruptly, she might have fallen down that dark, alien tunnel forever.
How did it happen? she wonders. How did she come to be here again? One moment she was answering the phone and hearing her sisters voice tell her, Mothers dead; and the next, she was boarding a plane that lifted her into thick darkness. She remembers a flight attendant nudging her awake in the middle of her flight--he had very white teeth and spoke with a French accent--and he said, "Its time, Cherie." He held a gold pocket watch close to her face, and it swung on its chain like a pendulum. Then he led her down the narrow aisle--past disheveled passengers sleeping in their seats or paging through magazines--till they reached the emergency exit, which he popped open. Wind rushed in, so fast and heavy it felt like hands groping her all over her body. "Go ahead," the attendant said, nodding toward the black, curdling clouds outside. "Au voir," Alice told him. And she jumped out, into the dark void.
Falling, falling.
#
"Mothers dead," her sister says. It seems as though these are the only words in Maureens vocabulary. Like a stroke victim left with partial aphasia, with two words she can use to respond to any question put to her.
Q: How are you today, Maureen?
A: Mother's dead.
Q: Would you like to go out for a breath of fresh air?
A: Mother's dead.
Q: Do you need to use the bathroom, dear?
(Her face seems to strain at this one. Her lips rise like curtains to reveal the empty stage of her mouth).
A: Mother's dead.
"Mother's dead, Alice," she says. "What is wrong with you?"
Alice doesnt know how to answer. Its the same question her mother and Maureen have asked since she was a little girl. She doesnt know whats wrong with her. She just does things that make them angry. Mostly because she's angry. She looks around in a sudden panic, searching the ruins of the dining room for some clue that will explain everything. The shards of cups and saucers lay strewn about her feet; the dolls bodies lay with their arms flopped out at their sides, as though they've been lined up and shot. She chews her bottom lip. The evidence is stacked against her.
"You're mad," Maureen says. She bends down at her knees and scoops up random pieces of porcelain. "Mothers teacups," she says, her voice straining. She holds the pieces in her cupped hands and rattles them at Alice. The porcelain scraps scrape against one another. "They were supposed to be left for me! You know how much Mother loved these. How could you, Alice? How could you?"
"Im sorry," Alice says, her voice weak and milky. She scuffs one foot against the floor and looks over her shoulder to avoid Maureens scrutiny.
"You're sorry?" Maureen says. "You're sorry? You're a mad woman is what you are. A mad woman! Get out of this house right now."
"No," Alice answers. "I wont leave. You get out." She will not be made into a stranger in this house again. She will not allow herself to be treated as she once had, when shed run away from this home to find another, one that opened its doors for her and sealed behind her, shutting out the light. In that place, in that other house, she used to sit on a braided rug all day, watching the legs of other people walk around her. Shed put any powder or pill or needle into her body. Whatever anyone gave her, she put it inside her. It was always very dark in that house. The blinds were always closed. But one day, for no reason she could think of, she stepped out onto the porch, blinking in the warm sunlight, and saw palm trees tossing their heads by the roadside. She didnt know where she was, and stepped down off the porch. She called her mothers home from a pay phone on the street corner, and was received with the words, "You are not my daughter."
She picks up a sliver of plate, and holds it in her hand like a knife.
"Put that down, Alice," her sister warns, holding out her hands like a traffic cop. "Put that down right now. I'll call the police, I swear." But Alice swings the broken plate in the air, missing her sister with it purposefully.
Maureen screams and runs out the front door, leaving it swinging ajar behind her. Mother would not be happy with her, Alice thinks. Maureen knows better than to leave a door open behind her. It isnt proper. She was right though. I am mad. I'm a mad woman. This is a mad tea party and there is only room at the table for one.
#
There is the sound of Maureen's engine turning over, then its revving, and Alice knows she has gone. The shard of plate she's holding slips from her grasp and falls to the floor. It clatters against the remnants of the other china, and Alice bends down to pick up the pieces. Now that she has nothing left to say to this room, she begins to clean it up. To pull it together again, back to a semblance of normality. All but one of the teacups is left in an irreversible condition, though, and even the sole survivor has been damaged. It has a long crack running through it. At anytime it will split in two and then this particular species of teacup will be extinct.
"They were completely original," her mother says. "There was not a set of teacups like them on this side of the Atlantic. How could you, Alice? You were always a difficult girl."
Faint sobbing in the next room.
Alice gathers the pieces to her, holding them in her shirt as a peasant girl might gather apples in her apron, then pours them into the dustbin. Once she sets the china cabinet back on its feet (which is much harder than it was to topple it), she places the last teacup in the center of one of its shelves. Behind the glass of the cabinet doors, the teacup looks like a relic. It looks as though it should be a museum exhibit, squared off by a velvet rope.
She hears a monologue run of its own accord in her head: This here is Alices mothers last teacup. It was brought here in the late twentieth century, after Alice herself destroyed the rest. You can tell by the details of the portrait of the house at the bottom of the cup that the artist had a steady hand and, in fact, was Alices father. Legend has it that he disappeared one night when Alice was a little girl, and that the circumstances surrounding his disappearance are vague. Alices mother maintained that he was a sickly man, and had to go away for medical attention. But Alices sister once told her he was a bastard and that she heard him one night on the phone, talking to a woman who was not their mother, and that she was glad hed gone, and that she hoped he wouldnt ever come back. Not ever!
Are there any questions? Good. Then let's move on.
#
She is tired. Although she's the one whos been dealing out the blows, her body feels battered and old. A second hand coat. She pulls herself up the staircase, clinging to the banister in case her legs give way beneath her. When she reaches her room, her childhood room, she lays herself out on the bed with the lavender comforter and presses her face into a pillow.
She can't believe her mothers dead; it doesn't seem possible. This cannot be the woman she's wished dead so many times in the past, the woman who survived each death wished upon her. She was supposed to be invulnerable. She was supposed to live forever.
This is when she wants to scream and begin destroying the house all over again. This is when the air suddenly sticks in her throat, and she gasps over and over, suffocating. This is when the inside of her body aches hollow and empty, as if a fires been burning her up from the inside out. If she opened her mouth to scream, black smoke would come billowing out. This is when she wants to cry so much, the rims of her eyes prick with pain and tremble.
But she refuses to do that. she's promised herself over and over again that she wont cry. That a dead mother wont defeat her like the living one did. That she wont feel anything. Nothing. Not a thing.
#
She passes the night in a constant state of waking. It is mere minutes that pass each time she closes her eyes before they flutter open again, and she stares blindly in the dark of the room to find the numbers on the alarm clock glowering at her. "Alice," she says, softly, every so often. "Alice, are you there?"
She nods in answer to herself. It is a system devised years ago, when she lived in the other house, the dark one. She based it off the game she and Maureen used to play in the swimming pool. "Marco!" she would shout with her eyes closed tight and her hands searching blindly through the water around her. "Polo!" Maureen would shout back, from a distance that was nearly incalculable.
#
In the morning, she dresses for the funeral. She still can't believe that her mother's dead and she has an incredible craving for a cup of tea. Sweet mint tea, like her mother always made for her whenever she was sad or sick or upset at something. She goes downstairs to make herself a cup and then remembers that she threw the teapot through the window, and that her mother was in the habit of storing her tea in that pot. Shed given up serving from it years ago, deciding to leave it out for show instead.
Alice convinces herself to do without it. She knows how to do without a lot.
At the funeral, Maureen stares coldly from beneath her black lace veil. Alice stands on one side of the grave, and Maureen stands on the other. Their mother is between them.
Steven, the insurance agent, has his arm laced around Maureens waist and looks briefly at Alice every few minutes. Each time he looks away, he fiddles with his tie. Probably he is remembering the time he kissed her and got slapped. The time he tried to sell life insurance to her and the girls in her dormitory. "Hey, Alice, let's write you up a policy. Let's make sure you're safe and insured."
They bent over the paperwork together, almost touching heads. And then he turned to her and, smack, he kissed her. And then, smack, she kissed him back with her hand. She never told Maureen about that, and by the time Steven did, it had become Alice who kissed him. Now that her mother's dead, she supposes Maureen and Steven are rich. He has this great way of selling people insurance--he can convince almost anyone that theyll die someday.
Her mother is lowered into the ground and Maureen throws a handful of dirt ceremoniously onto the casket. Alice bends down and scoops up some dirt, too. She knows this is expected of her, that its time to bury her mother. But her hand wont budge when she holds it over the grave. All she can think is, I want a cup of tea. I could really use a cup of tea right now. Tea would be good.
Her hand is shaking. A few clumps of dirt fall over the sides of her palms, dribbling against the casket lid. But those don't count! Those were dropped by chance, Alice thinks. Chance, I tell you! She clenches the dirt in her hand, shakes her head, and walks away from the mourners, the dirt locked tight in her fist.
#
Alice doesn't go to the after-funeral party at Maureens house. Besides, Maureen would probably chase her out anyway. Instead she walks all the way home from the cemetery, which is only a few miles away, along the banks of the creek, which is gurgling over smooth stones and carrying orange and yellow leaves along its current. She carries her high heels in her hands and ruins her stockings.
When she reaches her backyard, she rushes into the house because she still wants a cup of tea, mother's famous tea, with lots of milk like the English use, and honey to sweeten it up. She still has the dirt from the grave in her hand; by now she's molded it round and smooth and sweaty. If she held it in the hot palm of her hand and squeezed it for a long enough time, it might turn into a stone. A burial stone, in which she could drill a hole and thread it on a leather thong. She could strap it around her neck to wear forever.
But once she reaches the kitchen, she remembers again. The teapot--she threw it out the window, with all of the tea inside it too. She laughs out loud. This reminds her of something her mother used to say. "Dont throw the baby out with the bath water!" And how she never knew what that meant. She runs outside again and searches in some nearby shrubbery until she finds the teapot, exhumes it, only to discover it broken open and all of the loose black tea spilled out.
It blends in with the damp mulch so well.
She wants to scream again. All she wants is some tea. Is that so much to ask? She goes back into the house and pounds walls and tables, surfaces, with her open palm, the one without the dirt, until it reddens with pain. The house starts to shake again. She plays it for all its worth, pounding on the dining room table, slamming her hand against the wall, stamping her feet on the hardwood floor. She curses. Is it so much to ask for some tea?
She sits down at the dining room table, lays her arms on the cold polished wood, then rests her head in her arms. Last nights tears and screams boil up inside her. Theyre in her throat, foaming. But she wont, she wont, she wont. she's promised herself that she wont. Her body shudders under the pressure.
"Alice!" her mother scolds. "Stop this right now. Its unattractive! Not like a lady at all."
Now her mother's hand is on her back, rubbing it. This feels really good. Alice lifts her head to find the teacup, the last of the teacups, sitting in front of her, empty.
"Cry into it, dear," her mother coos into her ear. "Your tears are hot enough."
She nods and nods, like a good girl, and she does. They slip out fast and hot down her cheeks and drop--drop one or two at a time--until the cup is full and the hand-painted house at the bottom is drowned beneath them. Enough tears to flood the entire house. Chairs and picture frames float down the hallways, and the walls collapse like a deck of cards. When she opens her mouth to breathe, a tiny squeal rushes out. Her cheeks and eyes are left streaked with mascara-tinted snail tracks.
"Drink," her mother tells her. Now she's kneading her shoulders. Alice looks into the cup to find a darkness appearing inside, spreading through her tears like octopus ink.
"Drink, love," her mother urges.
So she does. She drinks it. She almost chokes on the first sip, though. It is hot and bitter, not sweet at all. But she swallows and swallows, until every last drop is gone.
Copyright 2000, Chris Barzak. Story may not be reproduced or copied, except for one-time personal use, without express permission. Story first appeared in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. An occasional outburst.