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[sophiespencil-blog]

The Teak Table

by Sophie Gu

She leaned on the car window, away from her mother. The dappled sunlight stutter-stepped and she had to close her eyes against its pattering feet. That was no better; now it came in bursts of flesh tones and bruises through her thin eyelids. The glass was cool on her cheek and she felt the familiar dizzying drips of sleep behind her eyes. The light continued to flash and she imagined little beads of purple fluid condensing within her skull, pooling in the folds of spongy tissue, bleeding through the crevices and gently good-nighting each lobe of her brain. She felt close to nirvana when all went still for a moment. A hesitant hand shook the skin of her shoulder.

“We’re home.” A voice, tearing through silk sleep. She opened her eyes and her pupils dilated in the stagnant black of her garage. Her mother leaned on the wheel, mouth wound into a taut smile that could snap at the weight of one misspoken word.

“We’re home,” the voice repeated and she watched as the words fell weightless into the dark. She exhaled the last ashes of sleep and pushed open the metal door, letting her toes blindly poke about until they found ground. She hefted her backpack onto one shoulder and walked quickly, stiffly into the house. Her bedroom door was shut by the time her mother was slipping out of her heels. She pressed her vertebrae against the wall and held her breath as the tartan slippers approached, then distanced. The window before her was bare and the walls that enclosed her were bare and she curled into herself on her bare mattress, lost in an open sea of half-packed cardboard boxes. The setting sun covered her in a buttery blanket and the gentle afternoon breeze reignited her embers of slumber.

She woke again at the firm sound of two hundred sixty pounds on hardwood flooring; Dad was home. Joints creaking, she forced herself up and out to greet him. She pressed her face into his sternum and inhaled stale coffee and printer toner and floral perfume. She exhaled it all but the flowery note and the Oxford shirt grew warmer beneath her cheek. He took her birdbone hands and led her to the teak table, where the porcelain tableware from Grandmama’s will presented oily splatters of moo shoo gai pan and kung pao chicken. She didn’t understand the need for the charade; no one would think any differently had her mother left them in the cartons and broken apart wooden sticks, expecting everyone to please serve themselves.

Yes, the teak table. It was the pride and joy of the family. It remembered forgotten secrets in its fragrant grain and served as a roof for generations of pets and babies. The table crowned the matriarch of the household; her mother had inherited the teak table from a political journalist, who had inherited it from a schoolteacher, who had inherited it from an uneducated mother of five whose health could not wait long enough for penicillin. The teak table was the default during a lull in conversation. It was the centerpiece that held a centerpiece.

It was also where she had been conceived. Dad always told her the story when he finished the whole bottle— laughingly, if her mother had had enough to drink too, and miserably if her mother had excused herself from the table and went to bed. In the early days her father would pick a sprig of flowers, any flowers, and display them in a tiny crystal vase that sat in the middle of the table. Sometimes he would come home smirking, bursting to tell the story of how he was hit over the head by old Mrs.Wellings when she had caught him stooping over her forget-me-nots. Inevitably his arms would be around her mother’s waist and her mother’s breath would tickle the cup of his ear. On a warm summer night when he had brought home a single clipping of jasmine, she had showed him the double pink lines on the stick test. That’s what Dad had said was the beginning of the end.

When she was three, the teak table served as a battleground. Conan the German Shepherd barked like cannonfire and nipped playfully at her heels. She screamed in exhilaration and dodged his attacks, running to safety behind the four legs. When she was five the crystal vase held synthetic daisies, held them until the day she climbed onto the tabletop with Conan in pursuit and knocked it to the floor. Her mother and father had come running at the sound of breaking glass. She remembered distinctly their faces, warped in the curvature of the crystal. They were not as angry as she had thought they would be. The vase was never replaced, and the daisies went for a dime at the yard sale.

When she was ten Conan went to a butterfly farm and the teak table was her Petit Trianon. She crayoned her first crush's initials and hers together inside a lopsided heart at the base of a leg. When she invited her best friend over for a sleepover they draped mosquito netting over the tabletop and slept underneath on piles of sofa cushions. In the middle of the night when her guest was sprawled out in sleep, she would hear the pianissimo of conversation wafting from her parents’ room across the house. The murmuring would eventually crescendo and her friend would sigh and turn over. Then a break, and the voices would diminuendo back. But they would crest again in due time, dependable as the ocean tide.

When she was fourteen she experienced the first spill at the teak table. It was also the first time something big fell away from her mother’s facade. That was the day when her father had made an offhand comment on the temperature of the salmon filet. That was also the day that her mother had decided to cook them real dinner for once, because it was Mother’s Day and because she “felt good, dammit.” The tense exchange of polite displeasure escalated rapidly into an onslaught of profane names and forbidden histories. The arrow to the eye came when her mother had picked up and thrown the filet. Then she had packed a suitcase and disappeared for three days. Her father broke the wax of a bottle as soon as he heard the screeching tires. She sat fiddling with her place mat as her father told her that he no longer loved her mother. At the middle of the first bottle, he confessed once again to the flowers and the positive test, miserably this time. Towards the end of the first bottle was the spill. Then he broke the wax of another. At the middle of the second bottle, her father told her that had he not loved her, listen to him, goddammit, look him in the eye and listen to him, if he had not loved her he would’ve gotten the hell out of Dodge a long time ago. At the last amber crescent of the second bottle was when he told her about Rachel, who favored jasmine rollerball perfumes. He told her how he was repulsed by the neutral, almost masculine eau de toilettes her mother wore. She sat listening and all she could think of was the label on the bottle of hairspray she read in her mother’s bathroom. Contents under pressure, she said to herself. Keep away from open flame.

She sat at the teak table now, still very sleepy, still thinking very much the same thing.

“Honey,” said her mother the same time her father said “Baby,”

They looked at each other and the temperature seemed to drop a degree.

“We have something important to tell you,” said her mother.

“And we want you to know-”

“That we love you no matter what,” her mother cut in. Another degree.

“And I know the past few months have been hard on you. I understand. It must be confusing. I saw all those boxes you packed after that last little tiff your mother and I had.”

That was not the first time she had packed those boxes.

“But you don’t need to keep packing, honey. Your father and I, well… Would you like to give her the news?”

She tensed her jaw.

“Your mother and I are going to stay together. We’ve given it a lot of thought. We’ve gone in for legal advice and we went to a counselor, too.”

She had finished War and Peace in three different counselors’ offices.

“I think we can figure it out,” her mother said. “There’s really no good reason for a separation.”

You can’t divide anything by zero.   

“Your mother and I, we love you very much. And we love each other very much.”

And they smiled synthetic daisies at each other across their untouched dinners.

But she had long ago decided that she’d rather not inherit the teak table at all.

(written at csssa. honorable mentions from scholastic.)