The First Day

When it occurred to Margret that she was developing a definite and noticeable flaw, she was placing two porcelain teacups in the back of the cupboard. Unlike the cheap stuff, real Dutch porcelain doesn’t stain on the inside. It was of no use to her to stand on her bare but manicured toes and reach far into the same cupboard ever morning, mimicking some great sorceress reaching to produce the potion which preserved an ageless beauty, to find stains on her teacups. This expectation was too important, so Margret bought the real ones.

The table outside where she ceremonially took her tea was a wrought iron wreck accompanied by two chairs and a rustic eighteenth century look. Its position on the only concrete slab in the small rectangular garden was deliberately aimed to catch the best the morning summer sun could give. Despite this kind consideration, two white and yellow asphodels shamelessly let their pointed pedals fall around the slender blue glass vase holding them, disrupting the completeness that Margret had tried to create. She had not noticed this insult while she brought out the still steaming teapot and filled two cups. The cups, being balanced on two saucers that did not match the rest of the set, raddled as the tea splashed around the inside. She placed one cup in front of her and then reached across the flowers to place one on the other side of the table. She noticed the fallen pedals. Annoyed, Margret blew them off the table, exerting a great deal more breath than needed, as they caught a breeze and joined their place with the leaves on the overgrown grass. She coughed and then took her seat. She would wait for Julie.  

Julie, whom Margret had met in college though the two attended different schools in different parts of the city, was the happy and unaffected owner of the apartment in which Margret was spending the summer. Under unclear circumstances and without even so much as a timetable for her departure, Julie took her struggling friend in with the sort of genuine kindness that only someone who had never requested such a thing of someone else could. She made Margret meals and took her out to restaurants, helped her make her essential purchases, and encouraged her to make the best of, what she saw as a “delightful situation.”

“You are not happy, I know. But we are intimates! I can but only help you, though you may doubt my hospitable powers. You remember Elizabeth, Nancy, and Charles. Three babies at once, all but a year apart, and I the eldest. Though at nine and a half a girl might be expected to lessen the burdens of her mother at such a time, few could have expected the levels I took upon myself. I washed clothes, changed diapers, and read countless fairy tales to carry away many crying babies to sleep. While my mother fed ‘Lizzy and Nancy, I’d wash little Charles, and once he was put to bed �" the girls now in the bath �" I’d clear and clean the table. It was no great trouble, in fact the specific placements of the forks and knives and dishes my mother was so particular about, I must admit, improved my critical memory skills at that young age. Really, you are very lucky! Only my special touch of friendship could be of such benefit!”

Julie could offer Margret all this, but not conversation. She did look for moments when Margret’s long hazel eyes slanted toward the window, but she often saw her own input produce in them only more disappointment as they would close and hang closer to the floor. Like a child beyond its years, it upset Margret to listen to Julie’s simple and typical opinions. She was too general and seemed to have lost all trace of the very small wish she once had to know anything and anybody. It was this wish that had provided Margret the excuse needed to begin her first conversation with the leggy girl chatting much too loudly with her girlfriends at the bar the two regularly visited.

“He is not too immense!”

Margret herd her retort to one of the other blonde girls Julie was sharing gin and tonics with.

“Really, only a bitchy daddy’s girl like you could hold it against a genius for writing things that you have no time to read.”

Her friend, apparently owing the insult to her drink laughed and said,
              “But only star gazing farm girls like you actually have the time to read Shakespeare. Besides, why a girl who could conquer anyone of these boyish freshman with only a Midwest ascent and a bat of the eyes would actually bother to read is beyond me.”

Blushing at the compliment, Julie rested her defense and brought the glass close to her parting lips, trying to suppress a smile before mumbling,

“Oh, Samantha.”

            Margret had wished to pick up the defense where Julie had given up, but proper conduct prevented her. After all, it is not admissible to start catfights with strangers over Elizabethan playwrights. But hers would not have been a catfight so much as a thorough lecture, highlighted with stints of anger, before ultimately folding in on itself with embarrassment and shame. She knew this pattern, and instead waited until Julie ordered another drink to ask her what her favorite play was. Surprised, but pleased at the girl and the question, Julie answered Macbeth. Amused at the irony, Margret was proud of her courage in approaching the girl and the two spent the next four years as good college friends.

            By the time Julie walked through the lobby and into the garden, the weather had turned and was threatening rain. Margret had been relaxing her chin in her palm, looking down at the handful of white and yellow pedals jumping from blade to blade on the now more constant breeze, but she turned and collected herself before receiving her friend with a patient and loving look.

            “Good morning, Margret.”

            These words rose from Julie’s mouth as the final wisps of steam flew from their waiting teacups.

            “I’m so sorry it’s become so gloomy, it’s all my fault. I saw you from my window sitting alone playing with the asphodels and it looked like such a lovely day that I swore not to be long. But I fussed too much in the mirror with this problem hair I suffer and now the beauty of both have been lost.”

            “Your looks have not gone with the weather, Jules.”

            “But perhaps they go the way of your flowers,” said Julie flinging her honey blond hair behind her ears with a playful expression on her face, “they droop and curl like these silly locks.”  

Julie’s high spirits eased Margret who was afraid of being blamed. She smiled and picked up her teacup with both hands as if to toast her friend’s loquaciousness. Julie, pleased for having apparently saved morning civilities, continued her playfulness and raised her little teacup like a king celebrating a stroke of good fortune. Still smiling, they looked at each other over the lips of their cups as they sipped the English breakfast blend that Margret routinely served.

It is strange how conversation can rush upon two people at any time regardless of the years of their acquaintance. This morning, however, it flowed like a leaky faucet. Drip by drip Julie would ask what groceries needed buying and Margret would reply in quick, cut-off answers.

“And what about the bread?”

“No. Toast with marmalade.”

“This morning or the last?”

“Before I made the tea.”

            Julie could hardly make anything out of Margret’s responses but she couldn’t really care when the bread was finished. She thought white bread terribly unhealthy anyway. Besides, they were both used to dull morning conversation, the symptoms of sleep not yet worn away.

            As was usual, Julie slurped her last bit of tea and proceeded to explain that she had left her workbags in the lobby and would be leaving straight for town. Margret found as little interest in Julie’s work as I do in telling it, so with her friend gone she gathered the teacups, said her adieus to the asphodels, and returned upstairs to the cupboard where she soon first felt the embarrassment of her situation.