The Green Room

She comes into the green room at one in the afternoon balancing a tray in her left hand stacked with two china saucers and two china teacups and one small blue china teapot and she sets the tray down in the middle of the room before drawing the shade.
"Why do that?" the blonde-haired child asks as he pokes around the soil of a large, low-hanging rhododendron pot with a branch he has broken from the same dwarf tree. "The sun is so very white and long."
"Because, Simon, this room is green," she says as she pours out the steaming tea. "These plants would brown and wilt if I left them out in the sunlight for too long a time."
"No, that’s not right."
"Actually," she sips carefully, "The sun can hurt these plants as much as it helps them."
"But then how did these plants live before you came along to draw down the shade for them?"
"Well."
"They had to be outside."
"Well, they’re from another part of the world. A part where the sun doesn’t shine so very white and long."
"Oh," the child says and he snaps the twig between his pale hands. "May I have some tea?"
"Yes, certainly. Sugar?"
"Five spoons."
She sifts out five spoons.
"That’s too much for a boy your age."
"No. It isn’t," Simon says as he drags the old mauve armchair around to face the shaded window. Its varnished wooden feet moan against the varnished wooden floor.
"You know, when I was young, we weren’t allowed more than two," handing him his saucer. "Usually we took one or none. That’s how our parents drank it. Strong black tea is more rich and better for the body."
"It’s not the body that concerns me."
"Well, it stimulates the mind as well."
Simon looks down through the slant blinds on the window and out into the yard across the street where the grass is clipped and brown and the trees are tall and brown and the house is grey and still.
"It’s not right of you to keep these plants in here," he says. "They’re shrinking at the roots and they’ll never grow up."
"But they’d die if I didn’t."
"So what," he says and pauses to consider.
"It’s better to live and die tall and brown than to hide and be small and green."
Mrs. Basu thinks about this for a time and sips her tea and Simon looks away through the window. The tilted shadows from the blinds and the sun spill in across the green walls and across the middle of the room where they settle upon her bare forearms and lap. The white light lingers long over her skin and it feels very sharp. Mrs. Basu tries to rub the heat away but stops and quietly decides then that Simon is absolutely right, but that she would never tell him this. Her plants are healthy, perfectly healthy.