The Cup

better days ________ www.coopradio.org

The cup was white once. He held it in his worn,
yellowed fingers as he sat on the porch stoop at
sundown. Over the years the cup had absorbed
stains, stains so deep that even after a scrubbing
the cup remained a sad vanilla with brown scars.
One day he simply stopped trying to get it clean.
There were other, newer cups in the cupboard
but he never took them down except when guests
came by on a cold day wanting coffee. They
seemed to come less frequently now. He had
an idea why that was.When she left, almost a
quarter century ago, he'd let her take almost all
the dishes, all the pots and things. He kept this cup.
It was new then, and white, and had a shine.
It didn't have a shine now. Two or three cups of
coffee a day will do that. From the porch he could
see into the neighbors' yard, the neatly-arranged
patio, barbecue, rakes and shovels, trowels hung
on nails, rose bushes pruned back for another year.
Other people always seemed more organized. He's
seen Mrs. Pavone use over a dozen different cups
over the period he'd stuck to his one and only.
Hers had floral pattern cups, big yellow ones, tall
and stately black ones she brought out in summer
when she invited friends back from the country club.
He was embarrassed then to sit where she could see
him, and would go around the front of the house,
sit in the shade with his old cup, the java steaming.
He bought his coffee from the young Latin couple
who ran the little place up the avenue. After trying
six or seven kinds, he'd settled on the Peruvian dark
beans. He'd read a story once about the soul of black
Peru, and had seen a photo of a woman who looked
like she'd come out of fire. When he drank his coffee,
he thought of her sometimes, imagined her in the other
room, naked, waiting for him to tie his boat in and
remove his workboots. He'd bathe first, rub lemons on
his arms and hands to take away the smell of the fish
and the brine. He collected books, in Spanish and in
English, but the books were like the other cups in the
cupboard. It was The Old Man And The Sea that he
read, Hemingway's little novel about the aging fisherman
whose great fish was eaten by the sharks. He read it
many times, until its pages were creased. He most loved
the parts where the old man dreamed of the Gran Ligas,
of the great DiMaggio, and of the parts where the boy
would come while the old man slept dreaming of the lions.
Cup of memories. It was white once. Everything was
white once, and clean, and new. Then a day comes
when the whiteness is gone and no amount of scrubbing
brings it back. He held his cup in his broken fingers, sat
alone on the porch watching the night sky swallow the
last evidence of the sun.

DL