Tea and Sympathy

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Tea and Sympathy” by Jillian Damiani. Jillian is a writer based in New York City. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University and was recently a finalist for the Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship. Her work is published or forthcoming in Compulsive Reader and RainTaxi Review of Books.

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In the spring of 2022, I bought myself a teacup and saucer set. It was green and white, glossy to the touch, and teasingly corrupted. “I could poison you,” it boasts from the inside, words only visible after two-thirds of the tea has been drunk. I think it’s funny. It happened to me.

My rapist lectured me on chai tea once he was finished with me. He sat me down at his kitchen table, shaking and sore and wild, and brewed two cups. The sun was up, high in the sky. It was afternoon. The poison he slipped me the night before worked that long.

How silly to be afraid of a cup of tea. But what that tea meant was, “This is normal, fine. Why must you always argue with me?”

“Why must you always argue with me?” He said that often. It falsely assured me I had the power in the dynamic, and I did, while conscious.

The on-call doctor who collected evidence for my rape kit insisted I needed to “give the system time to work.” This man ignored all the instructional posters in bold letters taped to the walls:

DO NOT CALL 911.

CALL NON-EMERGENCY NUMBER TO FILE POLICE REPORT.

Eleven hours later, the officers burst in like a satire of a raid. “We wanna catch this guy,” they said. They screamed at me for answers they could have found in my hospitalization report. They slammed the door on kind nurses offering me an array of beverages.

Once it hit six o’clock, they asked if I wanted coffee, but they may as well have asked if I wanted tea, because it was normalcy they were grasping for. The nurses sought normalcy on my behalf, while the doctor and police vied for themselves.

The system does not need time to work because it was never intended to work – it was built to hinder.

—-

In 1953, Robert Anderson wrote the play Tea and Sympathy. Laura Reynolds, wife of a schoolteacher, advises: “All you’re supposed to do every once in a while is give the boys a little tea and sympathy.”

Laura offers tea to her husband, visiting parents, and the students throughout the play to diffuse tension and reintroduce stability.

If boys deserve tea and sympathy, what do women deserve?

The boys deserved tea in World War II, especially. Funds were raised to pay for the Allied Forces’ tea from the American Midwest to Sri Lanka and everywhere in between.

In May 1941, 30,000 tons of tea were evacuated from London after the bombing of Mincing Lane – the center of the city’s tea trade – human lives and tea leaves, indiscriminately off to the countryside.

Water burners were lit in mobile canteens while buildings burned unfettered, so the fire brigades and ambulance drivers could drink tea during their duties.

In 2009, investigators found more than 11,000 untested rape kits in the Detroit Police Department’s storage facilities, some dated as far back as 1980. Survivors-turned-activists from Detroit, New York, and Tucson continue to demand justice.

Forensic evidence is wheeled back and forth on a cart not unlike one clanging with teacups and saucers. My kit is among them. But the tea packets are opened, inspected, and brewed with care. The kits stay neglected.

In April of 2023, Ukrainian soldiers stationed in bunkers around Bakhmut set their tables: pickled tomatoes and plastic cups for tea. The New York Times photos of the bunkers are all blood and earth and small glowing screens analyzing Russian assault strategies.

And tea, of course. Tea never stops. I wonder how many soldiers and civilians asked for tea once they knew they were dying: whether or not it comforted them, whether or not buildings crumbled unattended when the clock struck teatime.

—-

I brought my school notebook to the hospital and a whole backpack full of homework, not that I did any. I walked there in the dark while my childhood therapist coached me to the door. It was an ungodly hour and time she never charged me for.

I wrote small, warped letters on those pages. The letters look like broken bones, although I had none. The clothes I wore were bagged, labeled, and taken away. The letters are my keepsake evidence of struggle.

They look for that on your body, you know. When you go to the hospital for help. It feels like turning yourself in for a crime.

The hospital staff didn’t let me in at first. “No visitors” is what the security guard kept shouting in my face. Another girl had been admitted for rape, and he assumed I was trying to see her. It was the woman next to him who let me inside, who told her male colleague to be quiet and go away.

A woman’s problem, another woman’s duty to smooth over.

An advocate showed up after a few hours of waiting. She flagged down a nurse for blankets: thin as the paper I wrote on, but better than nothing against the dry chill of overactive air conditioning.

She dared to make jokes, and I was grateful. “Him being a math major should have been the first red flag,” she said.

We sat side by side on a large bench covered in dull synthetic leather. The doctor who ignored the instructional posters said, “So you two’ll be bonded for life after this, right? Best friends! You’re even wearing the same sneakers!”

“This is my profession,” my advocate said sharply. “Not meeting up for coffee.” But she meant tea, really.

—-

In Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out, a cup of tea and a silver spoon become tools in hypnosis. Wearing a bright white shirt, matriarch Missy Armitage offers to hypnotize Chris to curb his nicotine cravings. She asks a question, but there are no choices. He sits.

Scraping the spoon against the teacup, Missy begins her ‘therapy session,’ conjuring flashbacks of Chris’ worst memories until his face, frozen and tear-streaked, takes up the entire screen.

“Sink,” she commands. And he does, until he is craning his neck upward toward the room from a dark void.

The Sunken Place, Peele calls it, is built on a foundation of false civility and care. The foundation of the Armitage estate, the foundation of slavery, of servitude, of the powerlessness of “no.”

The police officers ordered me to provide information. They asked no questions, and there were no choices. Decisions had been made for my body according to the demands of my poisoner, then my examiner.

The streaks of sunlight peaking through the window swirled. I saw myself outside of my body, beneath the bench, the thin blanket, and my too-full backpack in that small, violent room.

“Back off,” my advocate said. “Now. She’s shutting down. You won’t get anything out of her. And I want your badge numbers.”

A nurse on the daytime rotation popped her head in and suggested coffee. “Or maybe tea?” she asked. I cried and refused.

The nurses tried to soothe, to smooth over. I knew my rage would come, but I was waiting for permission to feel it.

—-

Tea is largely farmed in China, Kenya, India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. The workers never drink any themselves: the fruits of their labor are bound for kettles across oceans.

As of 2023, more than 70 Kenyan women who farmed tea for Lipton, PG Tips, and Sainsbury’s Red Label were victims of sexual assault and harassment by their male managers. The conglomerate of 400 household brands faced similar allegations more than 10 years ago. No allegations were investigated.

“Will there be any honey to lick?” is what Samuel Yebei, a supervisor, asked an undercover reporter for the BBC. Sex in exchange for less grueling work.

He texted her a question, but there were no choices and certainly no tea for the workers to drink.

—-

“English tea is not real tea,” my rapist said to me. We were talking about my time in the UK, sitting on barstools, maybe an hour before disaster.

George Orwell wrote an entire essay on tea preparation. I read it while studying in London, drinking tea with my history professor. He wore three-piece suits and taught himself a posh accent in university to cover up his native Scottish. He showed the class the proper way to stir tea, back and forth rather than in a circle.

“I like English tea,” I said.

“That is because you don’t know any better,” my rapist said. He grabbed the bottom rung of my stool and slid it to his side. “But you will learn.”

“I’m getting an education?” I asked. “From who?”

“From me,” he said. He looked down and pressed his lips together shyly. “Why must you always argue with me?”

—-

In the days after I was raped, I made tea over and over in the microwave and abused the “+ 30 seconds” button. I drank it only once it was scalding. The angry welts on my neck burned and ached. I wanted to burn evenly, inside and out. I relished the ability to control one kind of hurt.

Long turtlenecks in spring looked frumpy, so I ditched them and let my mangled neck see the sun.

—-

“Can I sleep?” I asked. I think it was more like begging. I was in and out, back and forth, a correct spoon stirring a correct cup of tea.

“But you’ve slept so much already,” he said.

“Can I sleep?” I asked this time, every time. It was either the same day or an unending loop; I wasn’t sure then.

“Not now, please,” he said.

My body was on the bed, level and inextricable from his, but the rest of me was below.

—-

“Do you know what my last name means in Hindi?” he asked once I started to focus.

“No,” I said. He was lying on top of me. His forearm snaked around my neck. Raw. Prickling. Bruising.

He told me it was a title for local magistrates, people in charge of taxes and property. His father’s budding property portfolio propelled them socially upward, his surname like a prophecy for success. Preordained, deserved.

Pinned against his body, he told me a secret. He was driving. He hit a man. “Some idiot in the road.” The man died.

“And you?” I asked.

“My father helped. It went away. So I can go to school now and then work.” He was an aspiring politician.

—-

When he was satisfied and stood up, I fished my socks out from behind his twin bed. He stuck a hydrocolloid patch over a pimple on my cheek. “You need to take better care of yourself.”

He sat me down at his kitchen table when I was dressed. “You will eat something. You must. It’s been many hours.”

“I’ll eat later,” I said. “When I get home.”

But he walked me home. I kept the blinds down on all the windows until I moved out.

My professor took me home the day after I left the hospital. A woman in her eighties, living with Parkinson’s, firm and fiery in her determination. She held my arm while we walked, for her stability and mine.

A woman’s problem. Another woman’s job to smooth over.

—-

My rapist handed me clusters of dried fruit. Apricots and cranberries. There was a small basket of produce on top of his microwave, ordinary as anything. I wish there had been no pieces of humanity in that apartment. No toothbrushes neatly arranged next to the bathroom sink I vomited into, no loose homework assignments on his desk from the school we both attended. Then he could have been an anomaly rather than an upholder of the standard.

“You look…unwell,” he said. So he self-soothed.

I waited. I looked at the clock on his wall, ticking above the sink. Back and forth, a correct spoon stirring a correct cup of tea.

“I’m going to make you real tea,” he said. “The next time I see you, we will get real chai.” Real meaning loose tea leaves, no bags, perhaps even wheeled in on a fancy cart.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Why must you always argue with me?” he asked. He smiled thinly. I wanted to pluck his whole mouth off his face and shatter it like a saucer.

—-

“I’ll go with you if your parents can’t get here soon, but you need to go,” a classmate in her late 30s told me. It was the first day I showed up to class without a turtleneck, the same day our professor walked me home.

“This happened to my mom when she was in college. Do everything you can while it’s fresh.”

I made an appointment and called my mom.

—-

“He made me tea,” I said to the Special Victims Department detective. It was the following Monday.

“That’s nice,” he said slowly, watching my face.

“Why?”

“Why, what? Why make tea?” he asked.

“No. Why nice? Why be nice?”

He exhaled. The room was windowless, and his sharp breath compressed the space further.

“The waiting room looks like a dentist’s office,” I said. “Not like it does on TV.” Generic art, a multicolored bead maze for kids in the corner.

He clicked a pen. “Let’s circle back. So you said you were at this bar around 11:00 PM…”

The detective drank bad coffee. Drippy and dark and feeble. I didn’t ask whether or not he liked tea. I did ask why he worked there. He answered with his CV.

“Well, I started at this precinct in the Bronx and moved downtown. I had experience.”

“But why? Do you want to be here or do you have to be here?”

“This is not my interview,” he said coolly. Like recovering from rape was a job I applied for.

“I’m going to suggest a cold call. Are you familiar with cold calls?” he asked. Anyone familiar with cold calls is either a diehard Mariska Hargitay fan or a repeat “special victim.”

You’re not made to feel very special or like a victim. More like a villain, no matter if you’re dialing the phone in that windowless room or answering it while sunbathing.

By all technical definitions, the cold call was successful. My rapist admitted, on a recorded line, that I was not conscious for most of the interaction. He admitted that I struggled against him.

“You almost snapped my manhood,” he said, laughing, “manhood” meaning penis.

During the cold call, I was polite. I was told to keep my rapist talking, so I did. I laughed at the jokes he made, and I assured him I wasn’t upset.

“All you’re supposed to do every once in a while is give the boys a little tea and sympathy.” Except not once in a while, all the time.

When I hung up, the detective insinuated I enjoyed talking to him, the person who raped me. Even after I gagged over the wastebasket in the corner of that windowless room.

I defaulted to people-pleasing my rapist, although I was no longer being held by the throat in his bedroom, and the detective let himself be soothed, assuaged of duty, of the clumsy paperwork.

“Do you know why he’ll be a successful politician?” I asked.

“No,” the detective said, irritated.

“Because he already has vehicular manslaughter and sexual assault on his resume. What’s more politically typical than that?”

Silence.

“That was a good joke,” I informed him. “Witty. Hilarious. Ha ha.”

I called the detective in vain for months. I hadn’t convinced him to care. No one drinks bitter tea.

—-

In 2014, I made an Instagram account. I also spent a few weeks of that summer reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It was eight years before the assault.

In September of that year, a small business’s account popped up: Miss Havisham’s Curiosities, founded just two months earlier. The shop predominantly sells insulting teacups. Each is inscribed with phrases like:

I could poison you.

My therapist knows.

Melissa Johnson founded Miss Havisham’s Curiosities, bookended by the slogan, “tea without sympathy.” Her spiteful teacups and saucers are inspired by her grandmother, a serial antiquer, sporadic hobbyist, and small-town eccentric. Using nail polish and chipped or miscellaneous china, Johnson’s grandmother scrawled original, snarky sayings inside. The cups became a creative vessel to record her day-to-day frustrations.

Johnson uses the teacups in the same spirit, explicitly targeting the current political climate. She hopes her “insult cups” are “being used to put dreadful people in their place” or simply to delight their owners.

Her poison cup was my first step toward healing. Johnson permitted me to be bitter tea, and to dare people to see it, cups in their hands, tea swirling in their mouths.

I could poison you.

—-

Tea and no sympathy. Real tea, fake tea, tea that is shoved aside, undrunk, and bitter because, as the system goes, “Why must you always argue with me?”

Three years later, I count harmless tea trivia stories on one hand. I count tea-coded atrocities on the other hand, and run out of fingers, but I still drink. I want to be soothed too.

I can demand a new kind of normalcy that is not violence, or less violence. I can support a small business run by a woman who creates moments of deliberate unease amid a ritual meant to soothe. But I cannot figure out how to interrupt teatime, how to make the perpetrators swallow what has soured in their cups and mugs by their own doing.

I cannot dump the tea down a sink lined with the harmless toiletries of a sinister owner because it’s turned bitter. I can steep and pour a new cup, but I can’t go back.