My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [64]
Once, a couple of years ago, Fletch had some corporate training in Denver. On his last night, he went out in the city with a bunch of people from his class. On his way back to the company’s suburban headquarters, his cabdriver got lost. So Fletch called home at two in the morning, asking me to pull up Google Maps to navigate them both back to campus. At the time I wanted to murder him, yet suddenly I’m a lot more compassionate.
“What are you doing in Chinatown? I thought you were going to look at the sea lions,” she says.
“I wanted to learn a goddamned tradition, and now I’m lost! Also, I think I may have accidentally bought black tar heroin because I don’t know how to say no in Chinese.”
There’s a pregnant pause before Angie replies, “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you. I believe I had a piece of crazy in my ear.”
“Just listen. I found a store that did tea ceremonies but they don’t just let you pay to learn. They want you to taste stuff you’ll buy, which is fine.”
As soon as I walked into the shop, an ancient little woman pounced on me, shouting “Youli’tea!” and started wildly gesticulating at all these tin canisters lining the walls. I immediately froze, thinking, “Shit, she’s going to steamroll me into leaving here with a Mogwai. What am I going to do with a Mogwai? I just know I’m going to screw up time zones and feed the damn thing after midnight because if I’m having a snack, it’s not like I could resist giving him some, too, because I hate for anything to be hungry ever, and also my house is already chaotic enough with two huge dogs and four cats and I can’t even imagine what’s going to happen once I accidentally unleash monsters, and . . . Wait, oh, she’s asking me if I’d ‘like a tea.’ Yeah, that probably makes more sense. My bad.” Eventually, she and I worked out a system of sign language—which mostly consisted of her pointing and my nodding—and we finally got the process under way.
(Sidebar: I hate when I encounter a language barrier. It’s not that I’m all hard-line conservative and believe if you’re going to be in this country, you need to speak the language and go get me a flag to hug, while you’re at it. I mean, I’m descended from immigrants; I’d be pretty hypocritical if I thought others didn’t belong here because they don’t yet speak proper “Murrican.” Rather, it’s that my life and my work revolve around words; I get very frustrated when I can’t use the tools of my trade to communicate with someone else.)
I continue. “This little Chinese lady took me around the place to find some teas to sample in the ceremony. I picked a jasmine tea—”
Angie interrupts, “I love jasmine tea!”
“Great! Because I have a pound of it, which, incidentally, costs eighty dollars. I’ll send you some. Anyway, I said I liked jasmine, so she pulls out this container, and they aren’t just leaves—they’re little, tight balls of jasmine and they smell amazing, like the most exquisitely delicious perfume. I didn’t know if I wanted to drink it or roll in it. Then, from what I can determine from her really broken English, she tells me she’s got jasmine tea with rose petals, too.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Yeah, I walked out of there with eighty bucks’ worth of that, too. I’ll put it on the list of stuff to send you. So, we sit down at this gorgeous wood table in the back that looks like it’s been carved out of a single tree. She starts to do the tea service, only I can’t understand a frigging word coming out of her mouth, and she doesn’t really understand me either. So I start talking slower and louder because part of me secretly believes that everyone understands English if you talk slowly and loudly—”
“Isn’t that a Fletch quote?”
“No, he says everyone speaks English at gunpoint. Anyway, I’m trying to ask her about the steps she’s taking and what everything means, but she just smiles and nods. Pretty much she just poured hot liquids into one little cup and then another and