The Brass Teapot
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The old
woman running the roadside antique stand spoke with a heavy eastern accent. She
skirted the table with two limping legs, hidden by loose, draping leather pants
and no shoes. Andy couldn't help staring at the woman's black toes, as if she
had once suffered frostbite.
Everything about her seemed to have
once suffered an altering cold.
Alice and Andy were on their way home
from visiting their oldest daughter in college. They had only stopped so Andy
could stretch his sore back. Alice
had been sleeping the entire drive, or pretending to sleep, while thinking
about all of the money they had given their daughter as a loan. They had
secretly had to scrap the idea of a small vacation so she could retake her
algebra in the summer.
The old woman approached Andy's wife.
With her long fingers she pushed a brass teapot into Alice 's hands. The transparent skin on her
arms swung with the momentum of her tiny motions.
"Thank you," Alice responded politely,
not knowing what else to say.
The old woman's stand consisted of
one green table, overwhelmed with useless things from the past. Heavy, iron
mementos.
Andy rolled his eyes when his wife
set the brass teapot in the backseat of their Ford Festiva. The car was
noticeably struggling as they drove down the interstate, burdened by the small
weight of weekend suitcases.
On the drive home they argued about
money. Wasted money. With two children in college, neither having been able to
maintain their scholarships, not only was Andy and Alice's retirement dwindling
but also their ability to make ends meet.
There had been mention of a second
mortgage.
As the car pulled into their house
each went to collect a suitcase. Andy slammed Alice 's finger in the trunk, accidentally,
before she could snatch her hand away.
"I'm sorry...." He started
to say as he took her hand to kiss it. A clanging emanated from inside the car.
Like someone tapping on a brass kettle.
When Alice 's finger stopped throbbing she picked
up the teapot, removed the top and saw that inside was five quarters.
"Practically paid for
itself," she remarked.
Still, Andy was annoyed when she
insisted on setting it on the stove.
For days he felt disrupted by its
presence in their otherwise modern kitchen. They had overhauled everything when
the children moved out. They got a fridge with two doors and a self-cleaning
flat-surface oven. If they had known the children were going to lose their
scholarships and that Alice
would be demoted, they would have never done it. In three years it would all be
paid for and the warranties would simultaneously expire.
Andy was most aggravated when Alice decided to make
their morning coffee using the brass teapot.
"The electric one's
broken," she reported.
Andy watched her, standing in her
business suit; her graying hair pulled into a neat ponytail, as she clumsily
boiled water and added coffee grounds.
"I've never done it this
way," she said, stirring with a plastic spoon that bent in the boiling
heat. Andy tried to show her the right way to do it, but it was too early to be
giving orders. Neither was in a good mood until they had coffee and breakfast.
Kisses, hugs, any affections came after food and caffeine.
"You've got to stir it...like
this," he said. He dipped a metal spoon into the cavernous depths of the
darkening teapot. She looked away, like she always did when Andy was correcting
her.
"No you don't!" she
snapped. She pushed his hand out of the way, causing the pot to lurch and send
one boiling wave cresting onto Andy's exposed wrist. He yelped, climbed into
the kitchen chair and poked at the tender pink skin until his wife brought him
an ice pack.
"It's going to blister,"
she said, applying the ice. He nodded and the two didn't speak until after
she'd poured the coffee and he'd set out toast for each of them.
"What time do you think you'll
be home tonight?" she asked.
"Late," he replied. There
were shipments coming in from all over the country and he alone could work the
new processing system for incoming orders. There was one other person, an
up-and-coming woman straight out of college, but Andy preferred to do it
himself. If she proved her worth too quickly he might find himself out of a
job.
With his last gulp of coffee, just
before he was going to stand up and kiss his wife goodbye, Andy found something
floating in his mouth.
"Did you wash this thing
out?"
"Of course. It's clean."
He pulled out some paper that had
adhered to the roof of his mouth. It was a two-dollar bill.
"What the hell is this
then?" he asked.
They both bent over the kitchen table
where Andy laid the bill out to dry. Neither of the two could explain the
presence of the money except to say that Alice
must have missed it somehow when she was cleaning, though she swore she had
scrubbed every angle of the brass teapot.
The two soon embraced for a long
kiss, both regretting the fighting they had done over the long weekend. Alice 's tongue snuck in
through Andy's slightly parted lips. He squirmed with genuine surprise. His
burned wrist brushed against his wife's cotton top as he reached to put his
hand beneath it. He yelped again from the raw pain.
A nickel dropped in the teapot.
The two bent over and stared in
wonder. Andy picked it out, held it up to the light.
"How did that happen?" Andy
asked.
"Hit me," she said.
He stared at her.
"Don't knock me out or anything.
Punch me in my arm. Hard enough to leave a bruise."
Andy wouldn't hit her. Instead, he
picked up his briefcase and headed for the front door.
"If I'm late they're going to
let her handle the shipments. We can't afford
for me to miss out on all of this overtime. We have tuition to pay in less than
a month."
He kissed Alice and closed the door behind him.
*
The routine
was that Alice
made dinner because she got home first ever since her demotion from accountant
to glorified messenger. Andy made breakfast and handled all of the meals on the
weekends. When Andy returned home that night, however, there wasn't the smell
of any cooking in the air.
He found his wife lying on the couch,
the teapot resting on her stomach. It was late, after ten, he had told his boss
that he could handle things alone and told him to send her home because she would only be in the
way. Without any help, it took him hours longer than it should have to finish
processing the shipments.
Andy's stomach grumbled painfully at
the lack of ready food. He hadn't eaten since toast at breakfast, there had
been no time. The bile that churned, and had been churning everyday for months,
had created an ulcer in Andy's stomach. His knees ached from standing for hours
at a time.
The living room was dark, except for
some light flickering out of the muted television set.
"What are you doing?" he
asked, turning on the overhead light.
She tried to hide her face with a
pillow from the couch, but he saw the bruise and the swelling.
"What happened?"
She jumped up, said it was too
sensitive and asked him to wrap a towel around it first.
"Did someone attack you? Do I
need to call the police?"
His heart beat in his ears. Beneath
the worries that his wife might suffer a hemorrhage and die was the worry about
the impending hospital bill. They had been forced to stop making the payments
on Alice 's
health insurance since her company had doubled employee responsibility.
"No," she replied.
She handed Andy the teapot. He
removed the lid and saw inside it three ten dollar bills.
"I hit myself with the
iron," she said. She looked ashamed but was determined to tell him the
truth. "It gave me ten dollars. I did it two more times." She told
him that she thought it might eventually be more.
"We've got to get you to a
hospital."
She refused.
"The swelling will go
down." After a long, heavy breath, after resting her throbbing head on her
husband's shoulder, she suggested they use the money to go out to eat.
The thought of food, of a restaurant,
which they couldn't afford anymore, was enough for Andy to forget the
strangeness of his wife hitting herself in the face with an iron, if only
momentarily.
"I will think better on a full
stomach," he ruminated.
As they gathered their things to go
out to dinner, Alice
took the teapot and held it close to her stomach. He asked her to leave it
behind, but she refused.
"What if someone broke in and
stole it?" she asked.
She set it on the table at the
restaurant, much to the confusion of the waiter who eyeballed Andy like he was
an abusive husband. It was the first time anyone had ever suspected him capable
of violence.
"What do you think we're going
to do with that?" he asked, after he devoured his salad. They went to the
Italian place where they used to go on birthdays and holidays. It was their
favorite.
"I don't know," she
admitted. Little droplets of white pus sneaked out of an opening beneath the
bottom lid of her eye. Andy dabbed at it with his napkin after wetting it in
his water glass.
"I just know that we've got an
opportunity here...."
"Opportunity ?"
The waiter returned with their meals.
Andy got the veal on top of pasta, Alice
had a sample plate consisting of a small portion of several things on the menu.
They didn't speak as they ate. At Alice 's
job there was no time for lunch that day either. She ran memos around a huge
office building, going up stairs and down long hallways all day long. They
wouldn't let her wear sneakers because of the dress code so her feet were
always blistered. The pay was much less than what she had received as a
full-time accountant, a job she lost because of her tendency to make
mathematical errors. Reportedly, she had cost the company millions by misfiling
a tax return for an important client.
When the bill came it was over thirty
dollars. The two hadn't been to the restaurant in so long that the prices had
risen and they hadn't even looked at their menus.
"We could put it on the
Discover," Andy suggested.
"It's maxed."
They sat in silence. They were eleven
dollars short of even being able to pay the check, much less leave a tip. The
trip to see their daughter over the long weekend had eaten what was left of
their checking, with gas and giving her extra money. Payday was still three
days away.
"I could write a check
and...."
"No checks," she said,
pointing to a sign in the window of the restaurant. Andy's ulcer screamed
within his stomach, no longer satisfied by the warm, nourishing food.
After a few moments of avoiding eye
contact with the waiter, Andy took the teapot with him into the men's room. He
locked the door behind him, thankful that it was a bathroom for one person
only, and he proceeded to punch his fist into the wall. At first, his
tentativeness profited him only in small change, dimes and nickels. He counted
after five strikes into the porcelain tiling of the wall. There was not quite
three dollars, though his fingers were red and burning.
He drove his kneecap into the sink as
hard as he could make himself. The pain sent icy blood in every direction
starting at his heart. Toppling over, he leered into the teapot. A five dollar
bill. With every ounce of his courage he ran the water as hot as it would go,
sitting on the bathroom floor to the right of the spigot, and he held his hand
beneath it for twenty seconds while it burned his skin. With his eyes tightly
shut, he listened to the sound of quarters dropping until he was sure that he
finally had enough.
*
Andy had passed out on the couch not long after they returned
home. Alice
tinkered for a bit in the kitchen. He could hear whispers of "ow" and
"shit" coming from the room, followed by the sound of change
sprinkling into brass.
In the morning he realized he had
overslept. Normally he would've been in his bed where the alarm was set, but in
the living room all was silent. It was ten a.m. Alice was unaccounted for, as was the teapot.
Andy rushed into work where they told him to go ahead and take the day off.
They told him he looked "beat up."She could handle it on her own. She'd
already proven that in less than two hours of processing shipments.
Dejected, Andy returned home to find
his wife also not working.
"Why are you home?" she
asked. He stared into her face. The noon sunlight made her face look even worse
than it had in the restaurant.
"Why didn't you wake me up
before you left this morning?" he asked.
She told him that she hadn't left
that morning. She had accidentally knocked herself out in the garage when one
of the hanging shovels had fallen on her head.
Andy felt around her skull until his
fingers reached the bump.
"I'm fine," she said.
"We have to stop this!" he
shouted. He forcefully took the teapot out of her arms and put it on top of a
kitchen cupboard, where she couldn't reach. Undeterred, she scooted a chair
over and took it down.
"We have an opportunity to
finally get ahead!" she screamed back. This time she would not let him
take the teapot from her grasp.
"Get ahead?" He explained
to her that the only way they were going to get ahead was if they both worked
their overtime. "Today's already set us back...."
"We'll never get ahead, Andy. We
never have and we never will. The moment we get any money something breaks or
one of the children...."
They argued for an hour, Alice the entire time
clutching the closed teapot. She called him a loser three times during the
fight and he once, out of frustration, told her that she had been a bad mother.
It was the dirtiest they had ever treated one another. When they finished, when
both were hunched over in exhaustion from not having eaten breakfast, Alice lifted the lid to
find the teapot filled with twenty dollar bills. There was just over four
hundred dollars.
"But how?" Andy asked.
A twenty dollar bill appeared, though
Andy was too hunched over to see it.
"Now you do me!" she said.
"You're a bitch!" he said.
Change clinked.
"No! Do me for real. Tell me
something that you hate about me or something awful that you've done. Something
that will really hurt my feelings."
Andy thought as he sat at the table,
still trying to form the picture of what their postman looked like.
"I slept with Ellen Waterson...."
"I already know that," she
interrupted.
"I slept with her after you and
I were dating," he said spitefully.
It had been a secret. Words festering
beneath Andy's skin for twenty years. He could smell the words at night while
he was lying in bed, next to Alice .
Mildewed, damp, green words under his skin but not in his blood.
Her face was pale but a smile crept
onto it as she looked in the teapot and saw a fifty dollar bill appear.
"Keep going," she said.
The two proceeded to tell one another
everything. Things which no married couple have ever shared. Andy told her
about the woman at work, the one who might be replacing him, and how
wonderfully upright her breasts were. Alice
told him about the men she had been with before him and the things she had
allowed them to do that she would never allow Andy to do to her. They did still
love one another and by the end of the day the pot had given them over a
thousand dollars. More than either of them could make in a week at their job.
They continued on the next day, after
shouting at one another so furiously that they had each finally retreated to
their corners and cried themselves to sleep. Andy got a call on the fourth day
from his boss saying that he shouldn't bother coming in again. That she could handle it.
"Fine," Andy replied.
"I've found something else anyway." His boss was surprised at the
lack of emotion. Alice ,
too, decided to not return to her employer. Though they were running short on
secrets and genuine insults - insincere insults didn't pay a dime - they had
still worked up enough money to get by for months.
Each morning they woke up late,
sometimes not until after noon, typically alone, and they met at the kitchen
table where they set the teapot in between them.
"I always referred to you as
loose when we were in high school," Andy said.
Clank. Clank. Clank.
"You have never given me an
orgasm," Alice
replied.
Three twenty dollar bills.
By the third month the teapot was
rewarding them with less and less money each day. Alice had begun reverting to slamming her
fingers in the cupboards to reach the minimum amount needed to survive. The two
figured if they could get at least a hundred dollars a day from the teapot,
they would be fine.
When their eldest daughter called
them that third month to inform them that she was coming home for a weekend
visit, Alice
tried to gently suggest that she not come. The girl wouldn't listen. She showed
up on their doorstep the very next night, not expecting what she saw.
When she entered her childhood home,
things were different. The pictures that had been on the mantle were smashed.
Some by fists, others by emotions. Her mother's hair was short, cropped close
to the head. She told her daughter that she had wanted something different, but
honestly she had been pulling it out by the fistful for money to the point
where she had to shave it to get it all one even length again.
The girl's father was the biggest
surprise. His hair had gone gray and he was heavier than he'd ever been before.
The two had been eating well and never getting any exercise. They never wanted
to leave the teapot, to miss a moment when they might make a little money.
As she sat on the couch, drinking a
cup of tea, staring at the changed environment in wonder, she began telling
them stories of her classes and her professors. Normally, they would've
listened intently. They would've had questions or comments about the girl's
stories, but neither spoke. Both Alice and Andy were thinking of the teapot
which was sitting, waiting on the coffee table in front of them.
When the girl picked it up both
parents lunged at her and pulled it from her hands.
"It's an antique," Alice commented, setting
it back down gently on the coffee table.
"What happened to your eye,
Mom?" the girl asked. There were four separate scars if one looked
closely, but there was one brutal gash from where she'd struck herself with the
iron that was noticeable at any distance.
"That's nothing. I fell,"
she said. The words in her mouth formed like "thank you" and
"hello".
"What'd you do that for?"
the girl yelled. The sound of change clanging in the pot went unnoticed to her.
"Sorry," her mother said,
disappointed by the familiar sound of nickels.
As she handed the girl her suitcase, Alice banged it into her
daughter's still sensitive shin. She howled and hobbled about for a few moments
while her mother apologized over the promising sound of sprinkling quarters.
Andy and Alice waited for their
daughter to go out with her high school friends or to go to bed at night before
starting their ritual of insults and physical attacks. When the girl asked in
the morning what had happened, why her mother's lip was swollen, the two
remained quiet.
The girl left on Sunday, earlier than
she had planned, because her mother had tripped and accidentally pushed her
down the staircase while walking behind her. Her elbow might have had a small
fracture and she wanted to go home to take advantage of the college's medical
facilities. She thought it was strange that neither parent offered gas money.
"You shouldn't have done
that," Andy said, as they smiled and waved.
"It's fifty dollars that we're
going to use to pay for her education!"
With all of their secrets scattered
about their modest home, covered in broken glass and splintered wood, the two
were forced to go back to beating themselves. Andy called his old boss and
begged for his job on his boss's voicemail, but his calls were never returned.
The tuition bills came every three
months, they were on the payment plan. In addition to that there was the
electric bill, the mortgage, the water and the credit cards. Not to mention the
fact that they had to take Alice
to the emergency room to treat a concussion that she had given herself with one
of the garage shovels.
A policeman had visited Andy in the
waiting room and asked him questions. He had written Andy's answers into a little
notebook and showed Andy pictures of Alice 's
bruises.
"She fell?" the policeman
asked.
Andy nodded his head and stared off
in the other direction.
At the end of each week Andy took a
giant bucket of change to the bank to be counted out and returned in bills. The
change was even diminishing. They had begun to expect four hundred dollars a
week in change, but it soon dwindled to two hundred and fifty.
"The fridge doesn't work," Alice reported.
"What? Why not?" Andy
asked, returning from a disappointing trip to the bank.
"I don't know," she
replied. "Maybe because you punched it a thousand times."
Her attitude was changing with each
new day. Andy suspected that she had given herself another concussion the week
before when she'd "slipped" in the shower and he had to pull her
unconscious body, dangling, crimson, wet head to the bed. She said it was an
accident, but the teapot had been suspiciously in the room with her. They had
found through trial and error that the teapot only worked when it was within a
certain range of the person being wounded.
"So you're blaming me for the
refrigerator being broken," he asked her. "What about the car? I
could blame you for the shattered windshield."
Her skin was bluish, pale. Her eyes
had no white, only red and green. Sleep deprivation gave a little bit of money,
but that wasn't why she lay there awake at night. She was in pain. Her head
ached endlessly but she refused to go back to the doctor, saying that they
would never get ahead if they had to pay yet another hospital bill.
When the repairman came to work on
the refrigerator he informed them that their warranty didn't cover the damage. Alice exploded in the
man's face. He was short, bald, heavy. On his fingers were rings, gold and
silver. He wore long blue overalls with a nametag that read "Randy."
"Miss, I don't make the
rules...." he started to say.
Andy, dabbing at an injury on his
chin that wouldn't stop bleeding, walked in on his wife striking the man on his
head with a wooden spoon. He was older, slow from his weight and had a limp in
his right leg.
"Alice !" Andy yelled. He pulled her off
of the heavy man who was covering his face with his hands. The clank of the
wooden spoon hitting his rings had played in unison with the change rattling in
the teapot.
"You're crazy!" he screamed
at her. "You're wife's a crazy bitch!" He covered his face with his
hand.
"She's not crazy," Andy
responded calmly.
Andy walked over to the teapot and
pulled out a newly formed hundred dollar bill. He handed it to the repairman.
"Will you fix it for this?"
he asked.
The man laughed.
"I'm taking you to court. My
nose is broken!"
Andy leered at Alice . Her bluish skin basked in the kitchen
light. The phone rang somewhere in the distance, but no one heard it. All
anyone could hear, including the repairman, was the tearing sound of the knife Alice pushed into the
repairman's stomach. Both of his hands reached to the handle, to pull it out,
but Alice
pushed it in farther and turned it like she had seen done in movies.
"What the hell did you do?"
Andy yelled.
Immediately he started thinking about
what they would do with the body. How could he protect her from this?
The fat man's body fell to the
kitchen floor in two stages. Some undead portion of his spine tried to stay
upright, while his thighs and ankles wanted to lay flat and be deceased. Alice kicked him to the
ground once before his heart stopped beating.
"What the hell did you do?"
Andy asked again.
She got down next to him, stabbed him
three or four more times, in hopes that he could still feel the pain. She then
lifted herself, Andy standing horrified in the corner, and walked over to the
teapot. She lifted the lid. A blood-spattered smile charmed across her face.
"Look at this!" she said.
She held the pot out for him to see, though he didn't look. It was full of
hundreds. Stuffed full of hundreds.
"You killed a man!" Andy
yelled. In a panic he looked out the kitchen window. There was no one in sight.
"We'll have to get his body into his work truck outside. See if you can
find his keys."
Andy went to grab towels out of the
bathroom to mop up the blood. When he returned she was at the man again with
her knife.
"It doesn't work after they're
dead," she said.
"Can you help me?" he
asked.
He had taken out several cleaning
agents.
"We've got to do something with
him before people know he's missing."
"We could buy our way to
paradise," she whispered. "There's got to be fifteen neighbors in
houses right around here that trust us. Don across the street has a gun in his
closet. He keeps it loaded."
He had shown both of them on the
fourth of July.
"This is over ten thousand
dollars," she said, fumbling through the unchanging faces of Benjamin
Franklin. "We could buy our way to Paradise ,"
she repeated.
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