Tara's Teahouse: Chapter 3

“Telephone!” The gaggling voice called from the top of the stairs. “Telephone!”



I had heard it ringing, but had kept my fingers crossed that it wasn’t for me. We only had one phone line in the building, and I took the liberty of letting Mrs. Pardes upstairs screen my calls for me.



“Telephone!”



I sat hunched over a stack of papers, my eyes glazed in a cloud of black text. Two hundred names, and I was to call all of them by the end of the week.



Footsteps in the hall. I looked up, saw Mrs. Pardes standing in the doorway. She was “Mrs.” to me because her first name, Kitty, sounded all wrong. A matronly widow in her mid-fifties, Mrs. Pardes reminded me of a turkey. She had a fluff of grayish hair, cropped at the sides, and a loose, waddle-like throat that hung down beneath her chin. Her nose was bent like a small beak, and the way she held it up, as if sniffing for heresy, gave her the perfect profile of a turkey.



“Telephone for you!” She shouted, pecking at the doorway. “It’s Our Savior Student Ministries!”



I glanced up from the papers on my desk.



“Tell them I’m not here right now.”



“Thou shall not lie.” She sniffed.



“That’s not one of the ten commandments, and anyway, I feel sick.”



“Again? And at your age, too!”



Only she could make illness into a sin. I admired her art, and wondered if there was anything she couldn’t somehow make into a “thou shall not.” But I knew how to divert her…



“Did you hear what Governor Roberts did today?”



Her nose pricked up, turkey like, so that I could see into her nostrils.



“He’s decided to raise the state income tax again – to support those perverts.”

The turkey nose sniffed the air, then came down in a decisive peck.



“You don’t say?”



“It was in the morning paper.” I said. “They’re building a new museum – The Sodom Institute.”



The waddle dropped and went limp.



“Well, that’s not really what it’s being called, but it’s close enough. And to think, your tax dollars are paying for it.”



She cupped a hand over her mouth, went pale.



“It’s horrendous.” She said. “Now you know I’m not one of those end-times speculators, but at this rate….”



I completed her sentence for her.



“The Lord should be showing up any day now.”



“Why yes!” She said. “Judgment is long overdue on this country!”



“Indeed.” I said. “Just wait until He catches those perverts with their pants down.”



She laughed – a gobbling, turkey-like laugh – but I wasn’t sure she had caught the innuendo.



“It’ll be a glorious day!” She remarked. Turning to leave, she broke into song: “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah! Our God is marching on!”



I glanced at the phone; the red “hold” light clicked off. I sighed and turned back to my papers. I had bought enough time to avoid having to converse with another organization looking for contributions.

---

Sometime around September, Tressa gave up on her weekly walks through the church halls, and I held out a glimmer of hope that she had decided to return to school. Still, something had been bothering me since that afternoon in Gretel’s Coffee Shop. It was the first time I had heard Tressa’s last name, and that name – Durham – sounded strangely familiar. I wracked my mind, trying to recall where I had seen that name before. It was a common name, I reasoned, particularly in the south, but still it continued to circulate in my mind as if it were important.



I became curious, and one morning I casually asked Reverend Law “how’s Tressa Durham doing?”



“Oh, her?” The Reverend replied. “I haven’t seen her in a month of Sundays now. Her father hasn’t seen her, either. Poor man’s worried sick.”



“Is she alright?” I asked, mentally mumbling “idiot” again.



“Probably.” The Reverend said. “She does this all the time.”



And that was it. Reverend Law had a phone call to make, so if I would please excuse myself, he would see me in the evening for Bible study. I went back to my office mumbling “idiot” and wondering what had become of Tressa.

---

I realize now, as I gaze out the windows of the Teahouse towards the valley below, that there were deeper questions on my mind – questions I suppressed by a sheer act of will because I was unwilling to follow them through to their natural conclusions.



“Where did Tressa go?” Wasn’t the question. I didn’t care where she went.



“Is Tressa a hero or a victim?” Was the bigger question. “Do I admire her or hate her, the unholy idiot?”



I would not allow myself to ask those questions – to trace my contempt for Tressa through to its root and find it to be jealousy – because then I would be confronted by a whole slew of other questions. How had I come to be here, in the dusty halls of this church? What would have happened had I disappeared, like Tressa, that week before my eighteenth birthday?



I might be writing a script even now, or polishing up a manuscript, or editing the New York Time’s next bestselling novel.



And I would never have known about the Teahouse.



I would never have known that Truth that encapsulates all other “truths” – the Truth that even now whispers in my ear, laying bare the hidden thread that wove all of these occurrences together into a coherent narrative o. I would have lived and died in a labyrinth of illusion made by other hands.



And I began to wonder – was Tressa an illusion? A homunculus conjured by my fevered brain to justify myself; a golem who would live out the life I had rejected when I put on my clerical collar?



But no, now I was carrying myself too far. I could remember the taste of her lips, and the hot tears on my shoulder.