Chapter 5

“That’s it. You’re doing just fine.” She looked at me with a smile and a twinkle in her eye. “Did I tell you that this tea set belonged to my mother?”

“And someday, when you’re older, it will be yours.”

“And that’s where you got the tea set?” Karin asked.

“Yes, it was passed down from my mother to me. Tradition is to give it to the eldest daughter, so I suppose it would go to you next, unless Desi has been lying about her age all this time.”

“I heard that,” shouted Desi from the kitchen.

Karin smiled, reached for Betty’s hand, and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I would be honored, Mistress.”

“Don’t get too excited, girl,” Betty quipped. “I’ve still got a lot of years left in me.”

“What did I miss?” asked Desi. She was making her way gingerly to the dining room table while holding three glasses of water between her hands in a triangular formation. Each glass was adorned with a half slice of lemon.

“Thank you, dear,” said Betty.

“I was getting a lesson on the proper way to prepare tea,” Karin said, and then taking a glass in her hand, “Thanks, baby.”

“Okay, good, I thought it was something important,” Desi said.

Karin straightened her posture and peered directly into Desi’s eyes. “And this is why the eldest daughter inherits the tea set.”

“Wait,” Desi said. “You’re getting the tea set?”

“Girls.” Betty leveled her gaze at first Desi, then Karin. “I’ve got a lot of years left in me, okay? Nobody’s getting the tea set. You keep this up and I’ll be donating it to Goodwill.”

Betty sat for a long while, tight-lipped and alternating her stare between the two woman at the table with her. Karin and Desi sat in silence with their mouths slightly agape. Then the corners of Betty’s mouth began a slow upward journey. Soon the three were giggling, and Desi got going hard enough that she let out a small snort.

“I was telling Karin about how my mother taught me the way to prepare tea,” Betty said. “It is one of my fondest memories of her. It’s when she was at her best.”

“I’m sorry, Mistress,” said Desi, “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay, honey. I’m not cutting you out of my will.”

Smiles passed around the table.

“Shall we move closer to the fire?” Betty asked. “I’ve got a bit of a chill.”

The three women arrayed themselves around the potbelly stove that occupied a corner of the living area. Betty stoked up the fire while Karin and Desi had moved a wingback chair to face directly in front of it. Betty was invited to sit in the chair while Karin and Desi sat on the rug at her feet.

Betty’s robe was open to her navel and her legs were relaxed and spread wide. Karin and Desi were completely nude and each sat with their arms clutching one of Betty’s bare calves. Karin’s phone was on the rug between Betty’s feet, but the recording app was paused.

“A girl could get used to this,” Betty said, stroking the hair of the two women at her feet.

“Yes, Mistress,” Karin and Desi said in unison.

“I suppose you’d like me to finish the story about my mother,” Betty said, “for your book.”

“Whenever you’re ready, Mistress,” Karin replied.

Betty nodded and Karin touched her finger to the record/pause symbol on her phone’s screen.

My mother didn’t have any particularly valuable skills. Mending fishing nets was not in high demand here in The States. Plus there was the language barrier. I was a little more fortunate in that respect. It’s said that it is easier to learn a new language when you’re young. My mother was twenty-five when we got here—young, but not young enough.

There were organizations that helped to settle refugees like us, so we had a place to live and food on the table, but that was about it. The only work my mother could find at the time was cleaning rooms at the local motel, and housekeeping is what she did almost up until the day she died.

So, as you can imagine, we didn’t have much. All of my clothes came from thrift shops or charity. We never heard from Uncle Chris again either, which made me further question if he had actually married into our family, or if he was just some G.I. who was still trying to save our homeland, one family at a time. But then again, Mom had a pretty big extended family.

We were scraping by, paycheck to paycheck I suppose, but making it. I went to school, which made my mother very excited—maybe even more excited than when she was showing me the proper way to make tea.

“You’re very lucky to go to school,” mother said as she hugged me on that first day. “You’re going to learn so much. When you grow up, you can be anything you want.”

I smiled. “I’ll make you proud, mother.”

Well, as you know, I had a bit of an adjustment period before I got into the swing of things. Or maybe my whole life was an adjustment period, all the way through high school.

I didn’t exactly fit in with the rest of the kids. And kids being kids, they were sure to let me know it. Inevitably, one of them would pull the corners of their eyes back and stick out their front teeth while talking some nonsense gibberish with words that made absolutely no sense, but they still thought were extremely funny.

That was in kindergarten. I didn’t really start beating any of them up until later, but it still hurt. And I guess my mother probably went through the same sort of thing at work, because every day she became a little more withdrawn. I tried to pull her out of her mood, but there’s only so much a six year-old can do.

“Can we make some tea, mother? I’ll prepare the leaves if you boil the water.”

“I had a long day, dear. Maybe tomorrow?”

My mother, the one who had carried me for miles along the back roads of Vietnam. My mother, who had survived hell on that over-crowded boat. My mother… was tired.

“Sure, okay. You rest.”

I don’t know if that was the first time I watched my mother go straight from work to lying balled up on the couch, but it certainly wasn’t the last. It got worse. It got to the point where she could barely function some days. I think now that it was post-traumatic stress syndrome, but nobody really talked much about it in those days, and if they did, they didn’t talk about it with a six year-old.

By the time I was seven, I was making most of our meals for us, and I was the one making sure my mother got to work on time and didn’t miss the bus that took her there. Can you imagine? A seven year-old? I grew up pretty fast that year.

That was also the year that Sally’s family moved into a house up the street. At first, I didn’t know what to do—my social skills were not exactly top notch—but I was excited to see a girl whose skin was closer in color to mine. Somehow, somewhere, we became friends.

I remember when she first invited me over to dinner at her house. I’m not sure if it was her idea or her dad’s, because I think her mother might have been suffering in the same way as my mother—I didn’t see her around much anyway. Maybe that’s why we connected so well. I just know it started becoming a regular thing.

This worked out really well for me, since my mother had started working second shift cleaning at an office building and was never around for dinner anyway. At some point, maybe around fifth grade, I realized that we really didn’t know each other anymore. I still packed her dinners, and made sure she left the house on time, but we never really did anything together. The tea set was put away in the cupboard and didn’t come out again until after I graduated college.

“Is that enough for your book, dear?” Betty asked.

Karin reached over to tap the stop icon on her phone’s screen. “That’ll be fine, Mistress. Thank you.”

“I don’t want you to judge her,” Betty said. “She was a good woman. She got dealt a crummy hand, that’s all.”

From her perch on the floor, Karin hugged her arms around Betty’s bare calf and laid her cheek against Betty’s thigh. “I know, Mistress,” she said.

Desi wrapped Betty’s other leg in her hands, and Karin watched as a tiny tear started in the corner of Desi’s eye, and made its way down her cheek.

Part III — Lost and Found

After some time of relaxing by the fire, Betty announced, “Anyone care to join me for a morning constitutional?”

“Um, we’re naked,” Desi said.

“Then I’ll go easy on you and won’t march you very far.”

Karin was already getting to her feet by this time and reached her hand out to Desi. “Come on Desi girl,” she said, “it’ll be good for you. I’m sure Mistress has an extra coat around here somewhere.”

“Come on, Desi.” Betty said. “Let’s get that blood flowing.”

“If I remember correctly, you used to regularly do squat thrusts for Mistress. With a crop in your teeth.” Karin beamed, and soon Desi was pulling herself to her feet, both of them were grinning from ear to ear.

“Thank you for the reminder, dear,” Betty remarked, and dug around in the coat closet to produce two knee-length coats and one black leather riding crop. She handed one coat to Desi and put the other one on herself, over her robe.

While Karin was busy pulling on her own overcoat, she watched as Betty tapped the nasty end of the crop against her open palm a few times—not hard enough to leave a mark, but enough to fill the air with slapping sounds. She seemed quite amused by the reaction from her girls, particularly Desi.

“We can stay on the property,” Betty said. “Just walk the tree line.”

The three women stepped into the crisp January air. Karin felt her nipples immediately hardening, despite the protection of her warm, wool overcoat. Desi looked to be in about the same state, and was busy stamping her feet on the floor of the front porch.

For all of Betty’s earlier theatrics with the riding crop, she seemed content to leave it tucked up under her arm as she set out. A bit like a field marshal or a commandant, Karin mused.

“Let’s go down to the barn,” Betty said, and the three women set off in the early morning chill.

“I was always planning to buy my mother a horse,” Betty said. “It was a bit of an obsession with me, really. I think she only mentioned it that one time, when I was six. ‘They have horses in America’, she said, just as we were getting set to leave. I never knew if she actually wanted one.”

“I wish I’d brought my recorder,” Karin said.

“Do you want to run back to the house?” Betty said. “I’m sure I can find some ways to keep your girlfriend entertained while you’re gone.”

Betty untucked the crop from under her arm and used it to stir the air in front of her while Karin pondered the question. Half a second later, Karin blew Desi a kiss and trotted off to the farmhouse.

By the time Karin returned, Desi was clutching the crop in her mouth, and her cheeks had a nice warm rosy glow to them, despite the cool weather. Karin smiled and tapped the record symbol on her phone.

“I bought this farm after I graduated college and had been working for a while,” Betty said. “I made some good money in the dot-com boom. But we’ll get to that later. Let me get you caught up, first. You ready, Karin?”

Karin glanced at the recording app on her phone and watched the minutes and seconds ticking over. She nodded. “Yes, Mistress.”

When I arrived at Chico State University, in Northern California, I was absolutely blown away. While the surrounding town wasn’t any larger than Salem, the biggest city near where I grew up, the population in Chico was certainly skewed toward people my age. For the first time since I touched the shores of this country, I felt like I belonged.

There were students of every creed and color, and for once in my life, I blended right in. But after small town life, it was still a bit of a shock and hard to make friends. I found that a lot of new students tended to congregate with the kids they already knew from their hometowns. There were international students as well, but ironically, I had been living in America long enough that I didn’t really fit with them either. So I spent a lot of time studying or at the gym.