Free The Sunken Cathedral by Kate Walbert

but his face is familiar. She prefers to pick her own, she tells him, approaching with her string bag. She does not imagine he recalls her daily request. He nods as if he doesn’t. She would guess him to be Mohammad or Raz. He does not look at her. When she has chosen, he counts her change, his fingers inked and raw with morning cold. Then to the butcher around the corner on Ninth.
    But first, tea, her habit, in one of the cups Abe’s relatives collected, always on the prowl for what they could, according to Abe, figuratively steal. His great-aunt Eleanor, of the Philadelphia-Greenwich set, best for the bargains—nose like a beagle; stout of frame. Eleanor had bargained for their wedding present, the dragon-spouted teapot worth thousands and the cups to match, gold-leafed, scaly. Sugar bowl, too, even more valuable given its coloring and the quality of the porcelain. Marie pictures the set in the Antoinette cabinet in the foyer, higher than she can reach but still. The foyer! How Abe loved that word. Left the mail in the foyer, he would call. Keys in the cloisonné bowl, foyer! She walks from the back, the yellow kitchen, to the front foyer, blue. French blue. Dark now, sconces of the faux gas variety, unlit, elaborate, brass, fussy. Something Very Grand would find fitting if she looked from her gilded frame. Very Grand rights her hair, her gown, pulls the wrap round her brittle, regal shoulders, military-straight from years of ballet. And so, Marie, she says—she’s learned their names!—time goes by, does it not?
    Marie finds the stepladder at the mouth of the basement stairs, there for when the gas or electric man comes to read the meter. Foolish, she thinks, before she climbs, but she can almost reach. She just needs a little height, the dragon-spouted teapot long ago stashed on the highest shelf—she hasn’t thought of it in years!—a gift from Great-Aunt Eleanor, unable to make the wedding for a buying trip to Leningrad. I The teapot arrived weeks after the ceremony wrapped in tea towels in a blue Tiffany box. The box Marie saved for years; the tea towels finally stripped to rags.
    Very clever, Abe had said, unwrapping. Clever Eleanor. It even looks a bit like her. “I’m a little teapot, short and stout,” he sang. The spout a dragon’s head, or something similarly mythological, the handle its tail, puckered with scales: a scaly teapot. The entire thing glazed gold. Odd. Unique. Valuable. For a while, on Brooklyn Sunday mornings, when Marie and Abe were childless and young, they would wake and make love, Abe slipping off her nightgown as she slept, or almost slept. She pretended to be sleeping and then she helped him by taking off her panties, his boxers. They were naked beneath the covers and she was both warm and cold as Abe went under to lick her toes, her legs. She pulled the covers up—could he breathe? Her eyes burned, squeezed tight. She arched her back, twisted. She could still remember.
    They stayed in bed drinking tea from the dragon pot, the newspaper spread around them, the sun streaming in. Abe called it a dragon encounter, insisting served this way there was luck involved, a difference in the way the tea tasted.
    Marie steps on the stepladder a bit shaky. She’s in her nightgown and robe, thin, her face in pots and brushes on the bathroom vanity, eyesight dim, glasses in the pocket of the robe, forgotten, feet slippered, slippery, so that the eventual slip seems almost a question of semantics. That she catches her fall on the corner of the cabinet saves her hip but not her ankle, which turns in a way unnatural, fracturing the bone, a tiny jag so painful she cries out, setting off the movie star’s twins, newly born and sequestered in the renovated maid’s room on the other side of the wall. Their cries mask Marie’s own, so that it’s a good while later before she’s discovered by Sid Morris, who has tracked down Marie’s address from the registration form Simone filled in for both of