The Tea Party

New neighbor girls have settled in.

We hear the squeals and screams,

the mother calls and father scoldings

through the open windows.

An angry hedge divides us in back,

though our houses lean together,

shingles and sagging porches

almost blending, identical

weeds abuzz with bumblebees.

The low-slung church

of solemn Mennonites

sits glum and silent

across the street.

The girls' names are Faith and Abby,

my mother tells me,

ten and seven in stiff blue dresses.

Their parents never spoke to us.

Just up the hill, behind a fence,

white-washed and cedar-lined,

Charlene and Marilyn,

   the Jewish girls

live in the great brick house

(anything brick

     is a mansion to us).

I play canasta with Marilyn (my age),

learn to admire her parents,

watch as they light

     the Chanukah candles,

move among them summers

as hundreds congregate

at their swimming pool.

Their mother loves opera,

but not, she says,

not Wagner.

One August day,

an invitation comes,

crayon on tablet paper,

for tea with Faith and Abby.

My mother says be nice and go.

I sit in their yard

with toy furniture.

The doll whose daddy

I'm pretending to be

has one arm missing.

The tea, which is licorice

dissolved in warm water,

is served in tiny cups,

tarnished aluminum,

from a tiny aluminum teapot.

I want to gag

     from the taste of it,

but I sip on and ask for more.

Now Faith addresses me.

"I'll dress the baby

and we shall take her to church."

"Oh, we don't go to church,"

I told my newfound Mrs.

"Never, ever?"

                      "Not even once?"

I shook my head --

I've never set foot inside a church.

"That's just what Daddy told us!"

Abby exclaimed. "You'll go to Hell!"

"You'll go to Hell and be damned!"

they chanted,

"You'll go to hell and be damned!"

"What else does your Daddy say?"

I asked them.  "He says

you'll go to Hell and be damned,

because you're atheists and heathens."

Faith looked fierce,

She poured more tea

and made me take it,

as if it were holy water,

as if I would drink

baptism by stealth.

She raised her cup daintily,

glanced and nodded

at the fence and the cedars.

"Charlene and Marilyn

will go to Hell, too,

right to the bottom

of the flaming pit,

because they're Jews

and murdered Jesus.

Would you like ice cream now?"