What is the “bargaining” stage of grief? Since I’ve never figured that out, I fear I’m trapped in whatever “it” is. If I hold my temper when a customer spills clotted cream on the floor, will Alicia reappear? If I smile as a woman changes her order from white tea to rooibos to the Zen Mix, will my child’s ghost appear? If I throw out the news clippings about the two young madmen who tormented and murdered Alicia, will I get un-stuck in Time? (Is that even something I want?) My ex-husband, Bill, lives with a new wife and son (already a schoolboy!) in Phoenix, and we chat on occasion; we have lunch (I watch him eat while I can’t finish my soup) when he returns for the parole hearings. I’m glad for him. He blamed me for Alicia, but I blame myself. At an arts-and-crafts emporium in Chelsea, while gathering holly and garlands for Christmas, I turned my back, and the earth swallowed her.
Above the shop, my rented rooms are so minute it’s as if I live in the cutaway of a whelk shell. Painted on the face of the ticking tabletop clock is a girl on a swing, her Mary Janes frozen toward heaven. There’s never wine on hand, because I’d drink it and then there’d be no wine anyway. Occasionally I resort to pills for sleep and glide in technicolor dreams, flowers talking, flamingoes playing a game with me as the baseball. I maintain, intact, the pint-sized tea table that Alicia loved arranging for Mr. Bun, her stuffed rabbit, and Mabel the mouse, and Jackie the toucan. At each setting are plastic wands filled with water, glitter, and tiny keys. Bill joined the little parties we threw for her animals, mint in sugar-water and vanilla wafers; he was a warm father and husband.
I used to teach poetry at a small college on Staten Island, but those eager faces, even the ones ravaged by wild partying, blazed their hopeful innocence in my direction, nearly burning me alive. Bill was an accountant. We lived modestly, us three, in Murray Hill. We sold our apartment and shared the profits after the two boys—rich, with a lawyer passionately loud about the burden of their privileges—were sentenced to only twelve years. Alicia died at age six. Eight years ago. It was yesterday.
Of course Kumiko Mori is the first employee to show up, clear-eyed, cheerful, with a red streak feathering her hair and her signature thick belt accenting a cinched waist her boyfriend likely spans with his hands. “Morning, Mrs. Dias.”
I’ve told her to call me Dorrie. Or Doreen. Old-school, she resists. I should return to my maiden name, Lewis—I’m a custard of Welsh, English, and Finnish—but then I wouldn’t have Alicia’s final name anymore. Bill Dias is of Brazilian and Irish stock.
Kumiko picks up the sign-up sheet at the counter to see how many people want to try a tea ceremony. Zero. Her grandfather is at the ready, should we enlist enough takers. Chanoyu. Sweets served to balance tea’s bitterness. Everything spotless, arranged with flowers. Tranquility, the meaningfulness of nothing-meaning-much: Who in modernity can bear submitting to a breakdown and examination of every action and minute?
I joke about how many entertainments vie for our attention nowadays, and tea ceremonies of painstaking slowness are a tough sell.
Kumiko grins and unwinds the eternity scarf from her neck. It’s autumn; our décor is purple and gilt. She hangs her scarf and coat on the hook in the kitchen as she takes the teapots from the shelf, and she says, “I need to tell you something, Mrs. Dias.”
Why does my heart skip a beat? All the servers eventually leave, but I hate giving her up. Her beauty, grace, and hard work. The faint promise of a ceremony of tea.
“Kumiko?”
But then in barrels Jason, sleepy, mild, a decent waitperson, good with card tricks at the tables while the tea brews. He wants to be an actor. The older man he lives with might be cheating on him. He’s pleasant. Less so is Alex, dragging himself in, a lean practitioner of the faint sneer, eager to convey that he’s primed for better things when he graduates from Columbia. His financial-world parents—he lives with them—encourage his refusal to abase himself with a mice-filled, starter studio apartment. I should fire him, but he keeps his disdain subdued, and it’s hard to find help.
Kumiko unlocks the front door, and hordes on their way to work pour in for cinnamon rolls and croissants to go, and the mothers-at-ease trundle in their squalling children, babies wrinkled as piglets. I feed off the tumult of children, though Alicia was quiet. Why didn’t she bellow and scream when those boys abducted her?
A girl in a fairy princess outfit tugs my apron and says, “I like apricots!”
I kneel to meet her eyes with mine, delighted. “Guess what? I made apricot tarts last night.” All true! I treasure these unexpected little connections as victories.
The mother, a natural beauty in a ponytail, a child herself, says, “Wonderful.”
Then laughs. Because wonderful and wonder belong in wonderland.
I never remember that Alicia would be fourteen now. I live for these girls who come with their mothers, a special treat. They’re joyful in this make-believe realm I’ve made. Throwback to gracious times. Tea, gen-til-i-ty. Bite-sized salmon sandwiches. The pots warmed British-style, loose leaves if you have more time, an extra spoon for the pot. I’m not raking in a fortune, but I’ve kept my nose above water.
Kumiko carries a tray of Earl Grey. More customers sweep in. Morning rush. The walls offer murals of white and red roses, white rabbits. Fish-footmen. A queen, a chorus of humans as playing cards. A caterpillar on a mushroom, hookah in mouth; the college kids flock near that one.
I wave at Kumiko over the tables, the sea of speeding New Yorkers. She does a funny mock-dance of panic. Her red-and-white Wonderland apron is spotless. Crash! A child has dropped her fragile cup; an accident. Kumiko comforts her and sweeps it up. Alex checks his phone until he sees me glaring. Jason’s sleeves are already stained with jam.
My child once found a songbird, egg-yolk yellow, with a head wound, during a walk with us in Central Park. She fed it with an eyedropper at home. Bill and I warned it wouldn’t make it. She insisted that it would, or at least it wouldn’t die alone. She was all of five, one year left to live. She named the birdie “Dodo.” I’ll never know why. Came the dawn that the bird flapped around her room, and Alicia opened the window and chanted, “Go now, go away. Fly! Go on,” though she was in tears.
One night, as a prank, Alicia put crayons in Bill’s and my bed. Her reason was that we seemed so drained she was afraid we were dreaming in black-and-white.
When I ask Kumiko, as breakfast cedes to the lunch crowd—more sandwiches, more tiered stands with savory items on top and petit fours below—what she needed to tell me, she says, “Mrs. Dias, I got that internship at Bellevue.” Her smooth skin suddenly looks like satin balled up in a fist and then let go. “It’s full-time.”
No surprise, really. She wants to be a psychiatrist, and she deserves any portal that opens. Her future is unfurling before her. But as she gently gives two-weeks’ notice, I drop into the chair behind the counter, because the purple room is spinning.
“Hey,” she says. “Hey, Mrs. Dias. I’m so sorry.”
I say I’m glad for her. And I am. I hiss at Alex to get off his phone and stop pretending he can’t see the guests at Table Five waving their arms as if they’re in a lifeboat. For a horrid moment, I imagine unlocking the drawer near the register, extracting my silver pistol, and scaring the dumb grin off his spoiled face.