The Tea Party: A Childhood Memory

The Tea Party

by Brett Rutherford

Scottdale, PA, childhood on Kingview Road. (Revision of an older poem.)


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 the same
busy-body bumblebees.

The low-slung church

of solemn Mennonites

sits glum and silent

across the street.

The girls' names are Faith and Abby,

ten and seven in stiff blue dresses.

Their parents seldom speak 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 Hanukkah 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!"

the sisters 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.

My eyes followed.

"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?"