Tea Cups

It was about that time when mommy started collecting her treasures. Every Saturday she’d come home with precious-stone plated globes or a washing tub from the civil war. Then she’d look up the prices on e-Bay to feel good about the $20 she’d just turned into $200 by bidding at the city’s hidden goldmines. But it was the tea cups she had her eye on. She could spot and sort the value of antique teacups from across the auction hall, and the house just filled up with them. Daddy said Titan would walk in the dining room and howl at all the tea cups, then walk out with a cocked head looking back at Daddy as if to say, “What in the world is she doing with all those tea cups?”
Like almost all of mommy’s successes, the cups were borne of stress. One year when work was too much to swallow the house filled up with yarn, crochet hooks and slowly a step by step chronological showcase of the mastery of crochet. Once there was simply little else accomplishable with a skein she laid low for a while before moving onto something else and something else until it was tea cup city.

Meanwhile I was on a jet over the jungle when I began making out the slithery ‘ssssss’ and the hard ‘k’s and ‘t’s – the important consonances that give structure to a whisper. It had been almost 72 hours since I’d last slept and my ears began piecing together the sounds despite efforts to simply push them away and close my eyes.

Titan would never figure it out completely. He was Daddy’s dog; he went on long quiet walks, he had never sat at the kitchen table listening to women like I had. Though he must have heard something – that’s why he kept howling back at them. Between them all, I guess the cups had centuries listening to women talk around them; hundreds of patterns having been held in the hands of mothers. They must’ve loved hearing the secrets as much as I had loved listening to mommy’s stories while she permed a girlfriend’s hair in the kitchen. Sitting at the table, I’d practice writing my name in cursive, feet not quite reaching the floor and listen to how she drank castor oil so her water would break, or how it was when this one left her husband or what it was like when that one’s father died.

All the kitchen tables they’d seen, all the women they’d heard – it’s no wonder they began to whisper too. I suppose I know now that’s why she started collecting them. She knew they’d call me home. And if she gathered enough, I’d be able to hear them across the globe.