On the Eve of Epiphany
"Yours is always sweetest..."
Because. Today is Epiphany, and I wrote this on the Eve.
January 5, 1998
Grace had been named for her elegance in motion and her gentle hands. Fair of hair and bright of eye, she loved everyone and everything—well, except for the things she hated, like spiders and asparagus and Russel Landon and his little dog, too. Russ called her names that made her cry and chased her through the woods and sicked Napoleon on her ankles, so she hated them quite a bit.
At her fifth birthday party, Mom and Dad gave her a very special gift: a glass cup of her own, deep and decorated with a simple design of blue flowers. Mom warned her that she would have to be very careful when handling the cup, for it was fragile and would break if she dropped it. After watching how the adults and older children carried their cups, she grasped hers in her small hands, marveling at how heavy it was. “See my new cup?” she asked, lifting it to show anyone who passed by.
“Very pretty, Grace,” said the ladies, and the men said, “Wow, a big cup for such a little girl!”
Each person would then pour some of the water from their own cups into hers. Sometimes the water was sweet and sometimes it was bitter, sometimes sour and other times it had no taste at all. She could never drink enough to empty the cup, for someone new would always come along and give her more.
Eventually, her cup became so full that she had trouble carrying it, spilling often, and nearly dropping her precious gift. Upon seeing this, Mom and Dad beckoned her to them, so she let Dad pull her up on his knee. “Do you see Timmy over there?” he said, pointing at the neighbor boy sitting all alone on the swing set. “His cup is nearly empty. Why don’t you go give him some of your water? That way, he won’t be thirsty and your cup won’t be so heavy.”
“Okay,” Grace answered, hopping down and toddling over to Timmy with her very big cup.
Mom and Dad watched proudly as she filled the boy’s cup from her own, barely spilling a drop. Timmy’s face lit up, but then he peered over the lip of Grace’s cup, wrinkling up his freckled nose. “But now your cup is almost dry. Here.” And he filled her cup once more.
“But now yours is almost dry!” Grace giggled, giving it back, and the two of them made a game of filling and refilling each other’s cups.
Inspired, Mom and Dad beamed at each other, each drinking from the other’s cup, and Mom said to Dad, “Yours is always sweetest.”
Dad answered, “As is yours, my sweet.”
Now Grace grew a little older and her hands grew stronger, so she could easily carry her cup when it was full, but she still loved the sharing game. She played it with many people, young and old, friend and stranger, and she found that sometimes when she played with strangers, they soon became friends. Of course, sometimes the strangers would not share, and one group of girls even spat into her cup, so they did not become friends. But this didn’t bother Grace, for she knew that if her cup was empty, she could always go home to get more from Mom and Dad.
One day she wandered far from home and came across an old man sitting at the edge of the curb. In her usual manner, she held out her cup to show him. “See my cup?”
“Yes, I see,” he said. “A big cup for such a little girl.”
Though the old man was poorly dressed, his eyes were friendly, so she plopped down next to him. She looked behind him; she looked around the other side of him; she lifted up his tattered shirt. Wrinkling up her nose in confusion, she asked, “Where is your cup?”
He smiled wearily and pointed to a pile of broken glass next to him.
“Oh…” Grace sighed, scrambling over to get a closer look. “Was it pretty?”
“Not really.”
“Was it big?”
After a pause, he cleared his throat and said, “Not really.”
Scrunching up her eyes, trying to envision it as it had been, she shrugged. “But you could drink out of it, right?”
“Yes, I suppose,” he answered. “But I never really had much to drink to begin with, so I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s broken.”
With a gasp, Grace sat up, her eyes round. “Oh, but it does matter! How are you supposed to play the game without a cup?”
The man cocked his head. “Game?”
“The sharing game!”
“I’ve heard of that game.”
“Isn’t it fun?”
With a wistful sigh, he whispered, “It’s kind of hard to play with a broken cup.”
Climbing up into the old man’s lap, Grace lifted her cup to his lips. “Here. You can drink out of mine. My parents play like this all the time.” With a quick pause, she asked, “You’re not sick, are you?”
With his chuckling assurance that he was not, she let him drink. A sigh of utter relief fell from his mouth, and she suddenly noticed that his lips were so very cracked. His hands were so very dry. After one last gulp, he guiltily handed the cup back, apologizing for drinking so much, but she shook her head fiercely. “No, you go ahead. You look really thirsty.”
So the old man guzzled the rest of the water, then sat back and closed his eyes. “So sweet,” she thought she heard him say, but he had said it so quietly that she wasn’t quite sure. He rested for a moment, a brilliant smile on his face, then finally sat up and said, “But now your cup is dry.”
Grace laughed and clapped her hands, overjoyed at finding someone else to play the game with. He bent down to the road, just beneath his feet and oh-so carefully picked something up. When he lifted it, she saw that it was a piece of his broken mug, a large one, and curved so that it held just a tiny bit of water. “Open your mouth,” he said and when she did, he let the droplets trickle in.
There was hardly enough for a mouthful, but her eyes shot open and her little mouth puckered into an astonished “O.” Breathless, she didn’t know what to say. She had never tasted such sweetness! Finally whispering, “Thank you,” she turned and walked the long way home.
It did not matter to her that the old man had drunk all her water, for her cup was soon filled by Mom and Dad and Timmy and her other friends. She played her days away as always, but every so often, she would make the long trip across town to find the old man. One day, after drinking from his little shard, she climbed up on his lap and sighed, “Yours is always sweetest.”
The old man said nothing.
Hurt by his lack of response she pulled away, but then he gulped down a lump in his throat and she saw the misted sheen in his eyes, and she knew that he thought hers sweetest as well.
When Grace grew older and learned to ride a bike, she was happy, for this would allow her to venture across town more often. But she found that the more often she visited the old man, the less he would pour into her cup, and this confused her. With her other playmates, the more often they played, the more they shared, but sometimes the old man would not play the game at all, gruffly brushing her away. Sometimes he even refused to come outside. “Why, why, why?” she asked, but the only answer he would give was, “It’s hard to play with a broken cup.”
"Then why don't you glue it back together?" she finally pouted.
His voice grew bitter as he answered, "It doesn't work that way, Grace."
"Why? Why doesn't it work that way!"
"You'll understand when you're older."
She thought about his words for a long time, but she did not understand.
A long time passed, and though she thought about the old man often, Grace did not visit him, until one day they passed by each other on the street. The moment he spied her, a smile lit up his face and his eyes.“How big you’ve gotten!” Picking her up, he swung her around and covered her cheeks with soft kisses.
Surprised, she laughed and flung her arms around his neck, nuzzling close. “Oh, I’ve missed you so!”
Taking her hand, he invited her to come visit, and the two of them played the afternoon away, relishing in the old game. She let him drink his fill from her cup and he once again filled her mouth with the water from his shard. “Yours is always sweetest,” she said.
And the familiar lump in his throat answered for him.
Because he was her favorite playmate and so dear to her, she decided that she needed to give him a special gift, so she bought some glue, gathered up all the shards of glass she could find, and burst into his house, crying, “I have it! I have it! Now you'll be able to play like everyone else does!” She immediately set to work gluing all the pieces together, shushing his protests with the wave of a hand. He only sat down, watching her with his sad eyes as she worked furiously. When she had glued every piece into place she lifted it up triumphantly but light shone through the cracks, and in some places there were holes from missing pieces. She began to tear through his house in a mad search but he finally grabbed her shoulders, yelling, “You won’t find them!”
“They have to be here somewhere!”
“No! Don’t you understand? This is my cup, as it is! Exactly as it is!”
And she began to cry, for the sweetest water she had ever tasted was from his cup and there was the lump in his throat and why, oh why!
“You won't even try to fix it! If you did, we could play the game best of anyone! Why don't you want to play?" Tears streamed down her cheeks as she emptied her cup into the glued pieces, but the weight and force of the water was too much for it to bear. It shattered once more, falling apart in her hands. Sobbing, she scrambled for the pieces but some fell to the floor and others cut her hands as the water spilled though her fingers.
She looked up to see that he had gone to the window and was staring out, his back to her, hands gripping the window panes tightly. Throwing down the shards of glass—all but one—she ran to him, demanding one last time, "Why!"
Silence answered.
Screaming in rage, she grabbed his hands. "You're so dry! Your lips and your hands and—and you!" She thrust the shard up into his face. "This is all you have to drink from! And all you give me to drink from! Don't you want a whole cup? Well, don't you?”
When he did not answer—when he refused to so much as look at her—she slapped the shard into his palm. A jagged edge nipped him, and he flinched in pain.
She flinched, too, gasping out an apology. Yet she was surprised to feel the tiniest nip of her own—a terrible smidge of satisfaction that now his palm was cut and bleeding, just like hers was. She did not understand.
When he remained hard-eyed and silent, she whirled around and ran for home with her cup clutched close to her chest, spilling all the remaining water down the front of her and trailing droplets behind her on the road.
The sun rose and set many times, as did the moon, and Grace grew older still. She became a lovely woman, as graceful as her name. Only once did she venture past the old man's house. He still lived, which pleased her, and as he came out the front door she ducked behind the hedge to watch him. He bent down, clutching his aching back, and carefully, so carefully, gathered one drop of dew from the grass, scooping it up onto the broken piece of his cup. He reached a little farther and gathered another and then another, until his joints could no longer support him in the crouch. Groaning, he stood and a single tear trickled down his cheek.
Carefully, so carefully, he caught it in the shard.
In an instant, Grace finally understood all he had tried to tell her, and she realized that, although she had played the game with all her heart, giving him all that her cup could hold, the old man had done no less.
© 1998 Hartebeast
Such a beautiful story, Alexx. It is so deep in its metaphorical meaning. It’s moving. I really enjoyed it, and how it worked so well so much without ever explicitly saying it. Bravo :)