Assorted Prose (4 page)

 
DRINKING FROM A CUP MADE CINCHY

(After Reading Too Many Books on How to Play Golf)

I
N MY TOURS
around the nation I am frequently asked, “Have you
ever
broken a cup?” Of course I have. Don’t let anybody kid you on that score.
Everyone
who regularly drinks from china, no matter how adept he has become, has had his share of ruined tablecloths and scalded knees.
No human being
is born with the ability to take liquid from a cup successfully; you can easily prove this by trying to feed a baby. Those of us who have attained some proficiency have done so at the price of long hours of systematic application. Without these long hours our natural grace and poise would never have evolved into
skill
. I would not say that everyone is endowed equally; I
do
say that everyone, no matter how clumsy, can reduce his accidents to a minimum that will amaze his wife and friends. He can do this by rigorously adhering to a few simple principles that I have discovered through painful trial-and-error. Had these principles been available in legible form when I was young, my present eminence would have been attained by me
years ago
.

I have analyzed drinking from a cup into three three-part stages: (1) Receipt, (2) The Cooling Pause, and (3) Consummation. However, bear in mind that in practice these “compartments” are run together in one fluid, harmonious social action.

(1) Address the cup by sitting erect, your chest at right angles to the extended arm of the cup-offerer, or “hostess.” Even if this person is a
spouse or close relative, do not take a relaxed, slouching position, with the frontal plane of your rib cage related obliquely to the cup’s line of approach. Such an attitude, no matter how good-naturedly it is assumed, has the inevitable effect of making one of your arms feel shorter than the other, a hopeless handicap at this crucial juncture, where 30 percent of common errors occur. The reason:
both hands should move toward the saucer simultaneously
.

(2) In seizure, first touch, with feathery lightness, the rim of the saucer with the pad of the index finger of the right hand. (Left-handers: read all these sentences backward.) A split-second—perhaps .07—later, the first knuckle of the middle, “big” finger, sliding toward the center of the saucer’s invisible underside, and the tip of the thumb
must
coördinate in a prehensile “pinching” motion.
This motion must occur
. The two remaining fingers of the right hand of necessity accompany the big finger, but should not immediately exert pressure, despite their deep-seated instinct to do so. Rather, the wrist is gently supinated. This brings the two passive fingers into contact with the underside of the saucer while at the same time the cup is drawn in toward the body by a firm, but not angry, forearm.

Meanwhile, the left hand is not just “taking Sunday off.” Fingers and thumb united in one scooplike unit (an imaginary line drawn through the knuckles should intersect your foot), the left hand hovers, convex without being “balled” into a fist, an inch or two (whichever feels most natural) to the left of the inner left edge of the saucer. What is it doing there? Many beginners, having asked this question and failing to receive an adequate answer, keep their left hands in their pockets and fancy that they are achieving insouciance. They are not. They are just being foolish. The left hand, in its “escort” role, performs many functions. For one thing, its close proximity to the right hand gives that hand confidence and eases its fear. For another, the index and middle fingers are now in a position to swoop over and hush the distressing but frequent phenomenon of “cup chatter,” should it develop. Thirdly, if the spoon, with its eccentric center of gravity, begins to slither from the saucer, the left hand is there to act as a trap. Fourthly, if worse comes to worst and the cup tips, the left hand can rush right in and make the best of a bad situation, whose further ramifications take us into the psychological realm discussed in the chapter “To Err Is Human.”

Throughout, keep your eyes travelling rapidly around the rim of the cup.

(3) The saucer is held by your right hand, the “executor.” Your left hand, the “guardian angel,” cruises in the air inches away. A napkin—the “landing field”—has been previously spread on your right knee.
Now
softly
constrict
. By this I mean, with one impulse, bring your forearms in toward your sides, bend your spine forward, bow your head, and touch your knees. Without any thought on your part, this syndrome of actions will lead the cup and saucer to descend along a parabolic line whose equation on Cartesian coördinates is 2x = y
²
. At x = 0, the tea will be on your knee. Your left hand will have automatically joined the right
under the saucer
and as automatically glided away. You will find that your thighs have become firm flat surfaces. For the first time since your index fingertip touched the icy edge of china, you may smile.

(1) The key to this phase—in point of time the longest of the three—is
immobility
. Only the fingers, eyelids, and tongue move at all. Resolutely maintain your bent position over the cup. Think of yourself as “mothering” the beverage. Let your stillness be placid, vegetal, and Olympian, rather than rigid, electric, and Byzantine. Be diffident and amiable in conversation. Some of my fellow pros advise beginners not to speak at all, but such total exclusion is apt to be in itself unsettling. However,
do
avoid anecdotes requiring much facial or other animation, and arguments whose logical structure must be indicated by any action of the hands, whether in drawing diagrams in the air or ticking off points on the fingers.

(2) Resist the temptation, once the saucer appears secure, of straightening up in the chair (or, worse, sofa), thereby placing a long diagonal hypotenuse between your nose and the cup. Any hauteur is felt
throughout the body
. Dignity of bearing is
no substitute
for muscular control. An obsequious, attentive hunch will not be thought rude as long as you are able to raise your eyes to your hostess fitfully. Indeed, the distention of the eyebrows needed to glimpse her lends to many people an arch charm of mien they otherwise would lack.

(3) Rotate the broad part of the spoon—
not
the handle—in the liquid. Do not splash. Do not toy with the fascinating ripples individual droplets make. Do not attempt to return liquid from the saucer to the cup.
Be still
.

“My goodness,” I can hear many readers asking, “will we never get a taste of the brew?”

“Yes, you will” is my answer—“especially if you have followed my advice up to now.” The reason I have outlined the procedure so meticulously is this: having come thus far without a blunder, you feel “clean” and possess the crispness to go on. Success succeeds. If I am wrong, see the chapter titled “There’s Many a Slip.”

(1) Steam has ceased to arise from the liquid and you are certain it is cool enough to drink. Restore the spoon to the saucer, pinning it with the left thumb. Look around and make sure no one is about to jostle you, either in fun or by accident. The physical action of bringing food to the mouth is so ancient, so fundamental to Man, that a detailed description would be mere padding. The one ticklish procedure that remains is the Separation of Cup and Saucer.

(2) The two possible extremes—leaving the saucer on the knee or bringing it with the cup all the way to the chin—are too contemptible to denounce, though I have seen both done. In fact, the problem is self-solving if, contrary to instinct, you pick up the saucer with the
left
hand, gripping the cup handle with the right. They begin the ascent together, but the inequality of their strengths soon tells; in the powerful yet delicate grasp of the right hand, the cup completes its flight to the lips, while the left hand weakly halts at the level of the sternum, where the saucer, braced against your necktie, acts as a tacit bib.

(3) Be conscious that, as you consume the beverage, the weight of the cup diminishes; otherwise the right hand may snap it clear over your shoulder. Never hang on to an empty cup.
Get rid of it
. In replacing the unit on the table or tray presumably provided, a jaunty clatter need not be avoided, if it can be induced without force. When your hands are at last free, sigh and say, “That was delicious,” or “I needed that.”

Congratulations. You have just drunk from a cup.

1. Don’t be tense.

2. Don’t be “loose.”

3. Think of yourself not as an assembly of hinged joints inflexibly
connected by rods of calcium but as a plastic, pliant animal, capable of warmth, wit, and aspiration.

4. Think of the cup-and-saucer complex, from the instant it is received into your hands to the instant it leaves, as a charge delivered to your care and toward which you feel the maternal emotions mentioned above (II.1). Imagine yourself “crooning” to it, recognizing hereditary resemblances to your own face in
its
face, etc.

5. The angle made by the forearms should
never
exceed 110 degrees or fall below 72 degrees, assuming the room is at less than body temperature. If it is not, you need my companion work, “The Elements of Sipping Through a Straw.”

 
ON THE SIDEWALK

(After Reading, At Long Last, “On The Road,” by Jack Kerouac)

I
WAS
just thinking around in my sad backyard, looking at those little drab careless starshaped clumps of crabgrass and beautiful chunks of some old bicycle crying out without words of the American Noon and half a newspaper with an ad about a lotion for people with dry skins and dry souls, when my mother opened our frantic banging screendoor and shouted, “Gogi Himmelman’s here.” She might have shouted the Archangel Gabriel was here, or Captain Easy or Baron Charlus in Proust’s great book: Gogi Himmelman of the tattered old greenasgrass knickers and wild teeth and the vastiest, most vortical, most insatiable wonderfilled eyes I have ever known. “Let’s go, Lee,” he sang out, and I could see he looked sadder than ever, his nose all rubbed raw by a cheap handkerchief and a dreary Bandaid unravelling off his thumb. “I know the WAY!” That was Gogi’s inimitable unintellectual method of putting it that he was on fire with the esoteric paradoxical Tao and there was no holding him when he was in that mood. I said, “I’m going, Mom,” and she said, “O.K.” and when I looked back at her hesitant in the pearly mystical UnitedStateshome light I felt absolutely sad, thinking of all the times she had vacuumed the same carpets.

His scooter was out front, the selfsame, the nonpareil, with its paint scabbing off intricately and its scratchedon dirty words and its nuts and bolts chattering with fear, and I got my tricycle out of the garage, and he was off, his left foot kicking with that same insuperable energy or even better. I said, “Hey wait,” and wondered if I could keep up and probably couldn’t have if my beltbuckle hadn’t got involved with his
rear fender. This was IT. We scuttered down our drive and right over Mrs. Cacciatore’s rock garden with the tiny castles made out of plaster that always made me sad when I looked at them alone. With Gogi it was different; he just kept right on going, his foot kicking with that delirious thirty​revolutions​a​second frenzy, right over the top of the biggest, a Blenheim six feet tall at the turrets; and suddenly I saw it the way he saw it, embracing everything with his unfluctuating generosity, imbecile saint of our fudging age, a mad desperado in our Twentieth Century Northern Hemisphere Nirvana deserts.

We rattled on down through her iris bed and broke into the wide shimmering pavement. “Contemplate those holy hydrants,” he shouted back at me through the wind. “Get a load of those petulant operable latches; catch the magic of those pickets standing up proud and sequential like the arguments in Immanuel Kant; boom, boom, bitty-boom BOOM!” and it was true.