Title: Tea Cup
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Description: Catharine learns.
From the Story: She never understood how thin fabric really was until tonight.
Author's Note: This one doesn't have to be finished. It was going to be a shorter peice that covered more distance, but- as is always the case with me- it ended up a longer peice covering less distance. Let me know what you think... I'm in the habit of one parters but I might continue.
Feed Back: No. Never... Oh, please! Like you believe me?
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For her fifth birthday Catharine will have ice cream cake and red balloons. Friendly Sam is bringing them and he always keeps his promises. "He can afford to," says Catharine's mother Suzan, shaving her legs with her foot on the coffee table.
When Catharine asks for Barbie clothes Suzan says, "And a Jacuzzi."
Red haired Catharine: 4 pounds 7 ounces and, "Skinnier than ever!" says her mother when Catharine is almost five. Too much energy and too few socks and, "There she goes!" Barefoot through a beer bottle in the driveway. She'll scar but no one will get to see it. "At least she knows how to mess her self up," says Suzan, "it could be all black eyes and chicken pox scars. Not Catharine. Not even a single spot. Suzan swears she put her daughter in that crib with her cousin, "And he had them on his eye lids!"
She swears Catharine shared his blanket the entire time, while Suzan and her girlfriend laid out the leaves into baking pans to dry. Lord knows that takes forever. Or at least Catharine knows.
Three Friendly Giant shows and all the boring commercials in between too. She asks her mother about Monostat- mispronounces it so it sounds like "Monosat" and her mother laughs. "Is it an adult secret?" wonders Catharine and even when her mother tells her it's the worst kind of secret she still wants to find out.
Inquisitive Catharine with her wide eyes- long lashes and, "It makes her look like Audrey Hepburn doesn't it Tina?"
"One day..." everyone says. Everyone says it- "She'll be beautiful one day."
It's her fifth birthday and all she wants is Barbie clothes. "You only have one Barbie," argues her mother, sipping ginger ale on the front lawn with Friendly Sam and the radio blaring. Catharine is running through the sprinkler in her very first two-piece bathing suit.
"Doesn't your girl need friends?" asks Sam as he treks out to meet her with a fuzzy red towel but Catharine won't hear it.
"Not the towel and not the friends!" she jeers. "Then they'll have to share the clothes!" "And," she announces with authority, "one good doll is better than two I hate."
"Sounds like business sense," says Friendly Sam and he would know. Catharine's mother says that money grows on trees when Sam damn well asks it to.
"Don't give her any ideas," Suzan warns him. "She can already walk in my high heels better than I can, if she ends up in floss, I'm blaming it on you." Friendly Sam just laughs. He bites Suzan's ear lobe and puts his hands around behind her- places them into the pockets of her jeans and holds on like she might run away. "Relax," says Sam, "when she starts looking 'Tea Cup' I'll give you a heads up."
Catharine looks over to the patio, sees that neither of the adults are looking and steps into the spray of the sprinkler, right where it comes out of the nozzle and cuts against her legs. Her hands are slippery from suntan lotion and she has to hold onto the sprinkler head to keep from tipping over but Catharine doesn't mind- this is the part she likes the best.
Secretly Catharine wants two things for her birthday but one of them is a person and her mother says 'No' every time.
"No Catharine, it's his choice."
"No Catharine, I told you he's gone."
And finally, a few days before her mother went on vacation, when she had been drinking from the bottle in the freezer, "No Catharine! He doesn't want you!"
Catharine will be beautiful someday and then he'll come back- just like the way the moths come back to the house every night because they like the porch light. Sometimes Catharine sleeps on the porch now because Friendly Sam moved them to a nicer neighbor hood and there are no loose dogs and there are no gunshots and it's pretty safe here.
She tells her mother she wants Barbie clothes for her birthday. "It's in three more sleeps," she said to Friendly Sam when he came over and she showed him with her fingers.
"That's not very many," he said. He took her fingers in his big hand and led her to the freezer where he put a bowl on the counter and a big bucket of ice cream beside it. "What flavor?"
Catharine likes strawberry and vanilla better than chocolate even though her friend Tanya said that vanilla was stupid and strawberry wasn't real candy at all. "You're strawberry blondelicious," says Suzan and kisses her daughter's ear.
Outside on the patio later, Suzan is tilting her head back and her body forward against Friendly Sam and her hair sticks to her neck with sweat. When Sam puts his tongue in Suzan's mouth she is laughing and Catharine thinks that this is what she'll have someday.
Finally Suzan notices her daughter- skin still baby delicate- standing in the prickling spray with no expression on her face- just a vague slope of her lips.
"Sam!" warns her mother and Sam scoops Catharine up in the towel, grassy toes and all.
"It doesn't hurt," she tries to tell her mother every time, "I don't think about it and it feels neat." but her mother never listens.
In the winter Suzan slept over at her friend's houses a lot and sometimes she forgot to come home and tuck Catharine in to bed. Catharine taught herself how to set her alarm clock for the right time so she could go to school in the mornings even if Suzan wasn't banging around in the kitchen making scrambled eggs like she used to. Friendly Sam showed Catharine how to make the best Peanut butter sandwiches in the world and he named them so that she would be able to talk to them on the way to school if she was lonely.
"This is Mr. Peter Peanut and he thinks you're a princess."
On Ground Hog's Day Suzan burnt her neck with her curling iron and fell asleep on the bathroom floor. When Catharine came in to wake her Suzan had a little bottle in her hand and the lid was missing. Catharine remembered seven numbers and pressed them into the phone all by herself. Her mother said they were for talking to Friendly Sam.
Sam got to the house first and turned the sound on the TV up really loud. Other men came next. Catharine wanted to see what the men she didn't know were doing with her mother in the other room but Sam closed the door and peeled Catharine's orange so that the juice didn't sting her hangnail and he made Catharine watch the screen.
It was sunny. The ground hog saw his shadow. It wasn't spring.
"But sun is good." said Catharine, confused. When Sam explained how sometimes something that should be good can mean something bad Catharine said, "Like when mom is happy first, for no reason and then she's angry for no reason?" and Friendly Sam put his face in her hair and held her for the very first time ever and said nothing.
Suzan went on vacation without Catharine for 27 sleeps- Catharine counted them off on the calendar beside her bed- and her mother came back from someplace far away with a "One Month!" sticker on the bumper of their rusting blue Toyota. She had a whole sheet of stickers for Catharine. In the days after, her mother stayed on the couch and watched TV in the day and didn't remember to buy milk.
One day Catharine heard her mother say something funny.
When Suzan's friends came over with their hands in their pockets like they didn't know where to put them Suzan said, "I didn't mean to. I just... wanted to see how close I could get."
Once Suzan said it while she was alone in the bathroom and Catharine was watching throughthe crack in the door. Her mother lifted her head from her hands and Catharine watched while her mother peed and lit her cigarette. Her mother dropped the cigarette by accident and cried when she thought Catharine wasn't there.
Sometimes Catharine's legs have bruises on them after she stands so close to the sprinkler. Suzan lets Catharine sit on her lap at night and she puts her hands over her daughter's shins while they watch talk shows. "I'm sorry," says Suzan during the commercial one evening and Catharine thinks she knows exactly what her mother meant before.