I'm going to read you a short story.
It's Finnish.
You're going to think it's not a short story,
you're going to say that it's memoir,
it's not though, it's a short story.
It's called, "Look at a Teacup".
I guess I've given you the little lesson in Czech history,
so you don't really need to know any more about that except, one
little quote that it might be nice for you to know.
In 1938, Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister,
and some others, including Hitler,
decided that they perhaps would be able to end the war
or put off a war, or not have a war, if they
gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
Then later in 1939, they decided that wasn't going to stop him.
But, the line that Chamberlain-- the famous line that's
gone down in history when Chamberlain came back
explaining how he had sold out this little defenseless country
was, this is something like, "this is a country far
away, of which we know little.
And, which is a hellish thing to say about other human beings
that you're pledged to."
And he had a black umbrella in his hand,
which figures in this thing.
I didn't make up the black umbrella.
Look at a Teacup.
She bought the teacup in 1939, of all years.
It was on sale downtown because it was a discontinued pattern.
Even on sale, it was an extravagance as far
as her new in-laws were concerned, et cetera part.
She used to say how she just put the money down on that counter
and let aunt Gert sigh as loud as she pleased.
1939, my mother was buying dishes
that had come from Czechoslovakia because they
made the best china, and she was marrying an American Czech.
Most of the teacups are still unbroken,
they're mine now, because I'm her daughter
and she cleaned out her china cabinet last week.
Each piece is a tiny Czechoslovakia stamped
on the bottom.
The cup is thin, you can almost see through its paleness
when it's empty.
Right now there's tea in it, and its level
can be gauged from the shadow outside.
The cup is the palest water green imaginable.
Sometimes, in certain lights, it is so pale,
it doesn't seem green at all, just something not white.
It is shiny and there are thin bands of gold
around the edges of the saucer and cup,
and again, midway down the bowl of the cup, and at its base
which is subtly formed into a semi pedestal.
There's also a band of gold on the inner circle of the saucer,
but it has been worn away after so many years,
except for a dulled, blurred line.
There's no other decoration on the outside of the cup.
A bland precision of lines and curved light.
But inside the cup, there are flowers,
as if someone had scattered a bouquet
and it had tumbled into separate blossoms,
falling in a full circle around the inside.
Some had fallen faster to the bottom of the cup,
while some are still floating.
The blossoms don't seem to be pasted
on the surface like decals, they really
appear to be caught in motion.
And now, for the first time alone in my own house,
I've never been alone with one of these cups
before, they were her company dishes.
I see that no two flowers on the cup or the saucer
are the same, each a different flower,
different colors, different altitudes of falling,
nothing to create a pattern, yet the cup and saucer together
are pure light, something extremely
delicate but definite, as refined as a face.
My mother's face, which has fallen into sadness.
Nothing tragic ever happened to her, nothing big, she says.
I'm the one who's wanted something big.
I know the most important thing in the world,
I told her when I was 10, "Well, what is it?" she asked.
Work, work is the most important thing.
Her face showed fear.
"Oh no," she said quickly, trying to sweep
away the thought, "No, family is the important thing, family
darling."
Even then, her voice was sounding a farewell,
the first of all those goodbyes mothers say to their daughters,
or maybe our parting began the day when dad came up
behind her in the kitchen, he kissed her
on the back of the neck, she thought
they were alone but my brother and I had followed him
into the kitchen.
He kissed her neck just where the hair stops.
She turned from the sink like a swaying
stem, with her hands all full of soapsuds,
and put her stem arms around his neck.
Her eyes were closed, her arms heavy
and soapy, pure and passionate soap arms of my mother.
He drew her down suddenly, in a swooping joke
of an embrace of Valentino band and antic pose
for us giggling kids, he swept her in his arms
and gave her lips a clownish kiss.
We giggled, and our father laughed and turned
to grin at his audience.
"My darling, I love you," he said to her soulfully.
Her body struggled awkwardly, her eyes flew open
and she tried to rise from his clownish embrace.
"No, no," she said, no, no, to any joke.
She stood at the edge of her red pedaled life,
there are buds that never open, "just let me up,"
she said, "I got these dishes to do, let me up."
And she plunged her hands back into the dishwater.
Every night she swam with her thoughts in that small sea.
In the cup, amid the bundle of pastel falling flowers
at the bottom of the bowl, there's another firm, thin gold
circlet.
It shines up just below the most deeply submerged flower,
like a shoreline submerged by a momentary tide of morning tea.
The engulfed flowers become oranges and violets,
those colors.
Above the tea lime, there are green leaves and several jots
of blue flowers, not deep and bright like corn flowers,
but a powdery toneless blue, a monochrome
without shadow or cloud.
Also, there is the shape of the flowers.
Some are plump, all curve and weight,
there is a pale lavender rose on the saucer,
with a rounded balled up cabbage head of petals.
And on the opposite side, a spiky orange
dahlia-like flower.
None of the flowers looks real, they are suggestions.
Pale, almost unfinished, with occasional sparks
of brightness like a replica of memory itself.
There is a slur of recollection about them,
something imprecise, seductive, and foggy,
but held together with a bright bolt of accuracy, perhaps
a piercing glance from a long dead uncle,
whose face, all the features, has otherwise faded and gone.
In 1939 in Chicago, my mother was a bride.
That was the first year of the war, when
Europe began to eat itself raw.
And the newspaper picture announcing
the marriage, her head had a halo,
a golden light was around her head.
"I wasn't one for buying a lot of stuff," she tells me.
"You only need so much.
I bought when I needed, when I got married."
In the past few years, she's been giving me many
of those things piece by piece.
Every time I go over to visit she says, "Well, you
might as well take the yellow tablecloth,"
or there will be a pile of silverware she'll
want me to have, these teacups.
I'm always walking off with something.
I try to get her to talk about her life but she won't do that.
It's not that she thinks I'm prying, "Well honey, what
do you want to know?" she says, "I mean, what's there to say?"
And she pushes her hair, which is still
more blonde than anything else, away from her face
and she looks really beautiful.
I start talking fast, saying about how everybody knows
the world has changed a lot since the Second World
War ended, and she was alive when
Hitler was in power, for God's sake,
and she's lived through something
and that's part of history.
"It wasn't that long ago," she says, and flips
her honey hair again and lights a cigarette,
"Besides, you'd have to talk to somebody from Europe about all
that, they lived through it."
Once she told me that in high school,
she'd had an assignment to write an essay about why
Hitler was good for Germany.
"Personally, I never liked him," she said,
"we were always democrats, but we did have that assignment."
So I go over to visit, and we talk,
and I ask all these questions, and she
says "You sound like one of those oral history projects."
and I say, "No, really I'm interested."
I'm always telling her, "Anything
you can remember, any detail, it's really important,
everybody's life is important," I say.
"I'm interested, I can't even explain why."
Sometimes she says things like, "You know,
I bet you won't believe this, but we girls way back,
and this wasn't in the country either,
we used to use cotton strips all bundled up instead of Kotex.
And we wash them out and use them over again.
Or the first pair of nylon stockings I bought,
they lasted two years, then stockings started not lasting."
Once she looked across the kitchen table at me
and said almost experimentally, as if she wanted
to hear how it would sound aloud,
"You know, one day your father came home, just
an ordinary day, and I looked up and I wasn't even thinking,
it just dotted into my head, someday he'll walk in
and I just won't be here, I'll just leave,"
but it never happened.
None of it amounts to anything though, her details
don't add up to a life story.
Maybe that's why she's been giving me all these things,
the past few years.
Her possessions, everything she bought in 1939,
the year of her marriage.
This teacup, which I look at closely for a long time,
sitting at my own white and yellow kitchen table
across the city from her.
The teacup was made in a country far away, of which
other countries know little.
"An English politician, but you can't go just blaming him,"
my mother says, "Shook a nation away,
as he tightly furled his black umbrella."
A country lost its absorption and peaceful work,
lost its pure science of flinging flowers
onto the sides of teacups.
I tell her, I believe that something
could have been different.
What would have happened if someone
was an important black umbrella, had considered
the future of teacups?
If powerful men bowed their heads
at the difficulties of implanting the waxy tulip
on porcelain.
Old questions, certain people have tried to answer them.
There are books, but many of us still live with the details.
The souvenirs of some places are never broken.
This cup is a detail, a small uncharred finger
from the mid-century bonfire.
I visit my mother, we sit in her blue and white kitchen.
My mother stands up for the future.
"Life goes on, you can't keep going over things,"
she says, "Its the flow of life that counts."
She wants me to ride forward, into the golden light that she
says is the future in all its possibilities.
"Look ahead," she tells me.
I try, but everything drives me into the past,
that she insists is safely gone.
How can I ride forward on her errand
when all the world, even the smallest object,
sends me back, sets me wondering over
and over about our own strange life in country?
Always trying to understand history and sex.
Details, however small get sorted
into their appropriate stories all right,
but I'm always holding out for the past
and thinking how it keeps coming back at us.
"No details are disparate," I tell her.
"Mother, the cups were discontinued
because the country was discontinued."
"Oh, but now you're talking politics,"
she says and clears off the table,
"over my head, over my head."
But it's not, that's what makes me mad,
she knows, they all do, those brides
who chose their china in 1939.
Many things fell that year for those brides, not only flowers
into teacups.
Their bodies fell, paired with other bodies,
on beds together for the first time.
"But that was no tragedy," she says, smiling with her hands
on the back of a chair.
Smiling because she knows after all our talks,
that I think something was wasted when she first fell,
because I have refused to fall.
"Some people just don't want to get married, I know that,"
she says broad mindedly.
But she knows I'm saying that marriage isn't there
anymore, the flowered flannel nightgown isn't being hung
on a peg in a closet next to a pair of striped drawstring
pajamas anymore.
"We don't get married anymore mother, don't blame me,
I didn't think it up."
"Don't talk like a sausage," she says, "There are always
some people who do not want to get married I understand this,
I understand you.
You don't want to get married?
Fine, that's just fine, it's fine.
Many people live that way."
Her own marriage, I agree was no tragedy.
It was the old ball pulled across the cello,
making its first sexual sound again,
another generation joining the long, low moan.
The falling of flowers down the sides
of teacups, the plunging bodies on white sheets.
I know people could take any amount of this pain.
But the falling of the other bodies,
the rain of bodies in Europe, that
happened that year to mother.
Marriage, that's one thing we agree that for her it
was no tragedy, wasn't the end really.
But Europe was broken, broken for good.
There was no replacing a nation of glass blowers.
Bodies fell that year in Madrid too, in the cities of Spain,
women looked up at the sky in terror,
in Barcelona, almost for the first time in history, a woman
carrying home a branch of forsythia
wrapped in waxed paper, ran for cover, hiding from the air.
In that war, bombs fell on women from the air
and it was planned.
My mother says she can't get over how
I'm always connecting things.
"Everybody I know talks this way," I say,
"Does it embarrass you?"
"No, just," "Well tell the truth."
"I will, I'll try to."
The only real difference between us, between my mother and me,
is all the talking I do, her cello voice
was drowned somewhere in the sound
of falling flowers in marriage, and the new thought of bombs
falling on women with flowers with teacups.
But this particular teacup and its golden shoreline
escaped, and she and I both sat with it in our kitchen.
She gave it to me.
Mothers know their daughters go to their bedrooms
and try on the strange clothes women wear,
and look at themselves in the full length mirror,
trying to understand the future, the lipstick, the bras.
Is there a mother who gives a daughter a teacup
and thinks it is not also inspected?
"Mother," I said last week when I was over to visit,
and she was putting red tulips in a vase talking
about how everybody she knew smoked
and how she was glad I'd never taken it up.
"Mother, everybody I know they're
always talking about their parents,
trying to figure out their mothers, did you do that?"
My friends, we all do that.
"No." she said, "We didn't I guess,
we didn't talk the way you do, we didn't have relationships."
Then she remembered about the teacups,
and we changed the conversation.
If she were alone, having a cup of tea as I am now,
she would be smoking a cigarette,
staring dreamily out the kitchen window,
absolutely rubbing her index finger
over the nail of her thumb, she still uses nail polish.
In circle after circle, the smoke
would be circling around your head of honey and smoke hair,
just sitting.
I can see her.
This afternoon though, it is my finger
looped in the ear of this European cup.
She is not the only submerged figure I see.
She and this buoyant cabbage head rose.
There is so much sinking, no hand
can hold all that has happened.
We sit around the kitchen table my friends and I,
and try to describe even one thing,
but it flies apart in words.
Whole afternoons go, women often waste time this way,
but history has to get written somehow.
There are all these souvenirs in our houses,
we have to wash and dust them, they
get handed down, when there's no way of explaining things.
It's as if my mother has always been
saying, "Darling, look at the teacup, it has more to say."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]