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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
January 18, 2009
Published as Fiction in a
Words in Progress dated October 24, 2000.
© 1989, 2000, 2009 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Tulip in Glass, 2005
© 2005 by Bud Grossmann
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MATCHLESS MARVEL
After nearly nineteen years of married life, Satoshi Kunimura and his wife Gayle Chang possess not even one complete matched set of anything in their kitchen cupboards. At least a half dozen different patterns distinguish their knives, forks, and spoons. No fewer than eight kinds of cloth napkins rest in the shallow drawer beside the stove. The couple’s “good” china set, seventy-five presumably antique pieces purchased at an estate sale in the fourth year of Satoshi and Gayle’s marriage, never did have any cups, though the set included ten saucers, in perfect condition. Only those saucers and the ten salad plates have survived without casualties, while various dinner plates, bowls, and serving platters were chipped or broken in dishwashing mishaps or during the three times that the Kunimura-Chang family moved from one East Bay home to another.
Satoshi and Gayle own five styles of drinking glasses at the present time, not including plastic cups their children use. Satoshi’s favorite juice glass is one-of-a-kind, at least in his household. He found it about a year ago, discarded or forgotten, in a city park.
Lacking all embellishments, the heavy, clear, thick-bottomed vessel holds eight ounces when filled to its brim. Satoshi loves its heft in his hand, loves the weight of its smooth lip upon his own lower lip. He likes the size, too small, really, to allow a cold drink to grow warm before he consumes it. He likes to open the refrigerator and fill his glass with chilled water from a jug. He takes a few gulps, refills the glass, and only then puts the jug back again and closes the refrigerator door.
Yes, Satoshi found it in a park. That’s another thing he likes about the glass: the brief history he supposes it may have had before he acquired it. After parking his newly painted second-hand Subaru near the municipal swimming pool on a muggy Saturday morning in September, Satoshi and his seven-year-old son, toting towels, had gone only a few steps up a neglected hill toward the pool, when Satoshi noticed the sparkle of his now-beloved drinking cup in the tall grass. Free of scratches but holding a sugary smudge of beverage, the glass was adorned with a perfectly bright white price tag with the name of a nearby drugstore. Less than a dollar was the printed price.
Satoshi looked around for anyone who might claim ownership of this item or someone who might watch disapprovingly as he salvaged it. Seeing no one who seemed to care, he picked it up. He glanced about for clues to the events that may have taken place on the hill the night before. He saw flattened grass, nothing more. He carried the glass back to his car.
“What’s that, Dad?” asked Satoshi’s son.
“What do you think?”
“A cup for juice. But what’s it doing here?”
“What do you think?”
“Someone was thirsty here?”
“That, son, would be my guess, yes.”
“But, Dad. Why didn’t the person drink at home?”
Satoshi leaned in through an open window of the unlocked coupe and gently tossed the juice glass onto the floor mat behind the driver’s seat. “Look at this hill, son,” he said. “Imagine it last night. The stars overhead, the wind whispering in this grass. Wouldn’t this be a fine place to sit with a friend and talk, and drink something good?”
“Yeah!”
“Let’s go swim, my boy!”
After supper that night, when Satoshi was doing dishes and scraping with a fingernail at the gummy price tag residue, Gayle asked him where the new glass had come from. He told her. She scowled, made a remark about communicable diseases, and urged him to throw it into the trash.
Satoshi simply smiled in reply. Ever since, the glass has been his alone.
That first evening, as he patiently scratched at the sticky smear on the soapy surface, Satoshi wondered—as he has wondered many times since—who might have abandoned the freshly-purchased glass upon that grassy hill. Young lovers, perhaps. A man with a plan. He strides into the drugstore and chooses a pint bottle of liquor. From the chill case, he takes a cold can of Seven-Up. And then, in Housewares, he finds the simple, substantial, less-than-a-buck juice glass. Should he buy two? Should he buy condoms? Should he go back to the front of the store for a shopping basket and risk being late to his rendezvous?
Nah. His hands are full, his date awaits. He heads straight to the checkout. One glass will do for two.
Satoshi, sometimes when he lifts this glass filled with water or apple juice or Coca-Cola, thinks of grassy hills and starlit nights and wood smoke in Oakland’s autumn air. He thinks of pounding hearts, of drink-dulled fingertips tugging at a co-ed’s cotton undergarments. He recalls a certain girl of way back when, when Satoshi was himself an uncertain boy not yet of legal age to drink.
Nine p.m. in a silent house on a Thursday night in October 1989. Wife out of town, children bathed and sleeping, supper dishes washed, dried, and put away. Satoshi Kunimura uncharacteristically longs for a taste of alcohol. The only liquor in the house tonight are three dusty, mismatched bottles of amaretto in a high kitchen cabinet. These were gifts to Gayle, who enjoys, on rare occasions, splashing a little liqueur over a dish of ice cream.
Satoshi takes his juice glass from the cabinet and gets himself a drink of water. Then, holding the glass in both hands like a chalice, he sets it softly on the counter. He’d love a gulp of Seven-Seven now or a bourbon-and-Coca-Cola. He’d welcome the scorching, dizzying tingle as the drink moves past his heart. He’d love once more to feel love beneath an inky, autumn sky; he’d love to love, surrounded by the scent and scratch of unmown hay.
Satoshi takes another sip of water. The glass sweats, and he dreamily encircles it with thumb and forefinger. He pushes the vessel back another inch from the counter’s edge. If he ever drops this treasure and it shatters on the floor, he knows exactly where to buy another. But this one glass, mined by chance from a meadowy slope where lovers dreamed bright dreams, is, Satoshi feels, unmatched in all the world. ♦
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