Closing Time
Jane Satterfield
Time has a way of marching on, your mother always said, herding you through family celebrations—the christenings, graduations, wedding showers, and God, yes, every Christmas. You were first to arrive and last to leave, hands in a whirl, rolling dough or wringing a soapy sponge, laying the table and clearing up after, hands plunging into a greasy sink, the duty roster like endless miles of bad road.
One day you’re at a corner table in a Staffordshire tea shop with your British-born mother and weeks-old daughter, shawl over your shoulder, trying to crack your first public feed; another, and you’re at a back table in an American tea spot, celebrating your mother’s birthday. Your daughter’s the exact age you were when she was born.
Now, and here, kettles whistle. A pony-tailed server stacks a tin tray with dessert plates, slides it onto the table. One day you’re touring a factory museum, daughter snoozing in a sling while your mother tries her hand at the pottery wheel, clay slipping as it turns; another, and you serve out crustless sandwiches, pour the steaming tea.
You escorted, not marched, your mother across the street, up the jagged curb. Hobbled by two surgeries, she refuses to use her cane. That will of iron gives her the right to tap her cup, demand you pour the steeped brew. She nibbles the edge of a scone. Another tap, another pour. You hold steady. Never spill. Time has not erased the scar on your left hand where the midwife ran an IV filled with Pitocin to speed your daughter into this world. Now she’s describing watching sunsets from her rooftop deck, how the sky shifts through shades of gold before night washes across the city. It’s peak summer.
Your teacup is antique. Spode—old enough to have been fired in one of the brick bottle ovens that cluster by the Trent and Mersey canal. Late afternoon sunlight streams through the shop window. Time is closing in, your mother said, as guests were about to arrive, get to your battle stations.
Now the tea shop staff is rattling cutlery and crockery, cranking up the background music. Semisonic booms through the speakers, a dose of sweet, alt-rock melancholia: You don’t have to go home/but you can’t stay here. But played at maximum volume, that spell is broken—the song’s a room-clearing anthem meant to move you quickly to the exit.
Jane Satterfield‘s most recent books are The Badass Brontës (a winner of the Diode Editions Poetry Prize) and Apocalypse Mix (Autumn House Poetry Prize.) Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize, the Faulkner Society/Pirate’s Alley Essay Award, and more. Born in England, she lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.
Table of Contents for A Formal Feeling