Currently, she is plodding from her bedroom to her bathroom. This is how she moves; hesitantly, one aching uncertain footfall after another, especially in the morning, very slowly. But she’ll get there, where her magic box of makeup lost its power to transform her ordinary into her special, years since.
She ends the night and begins her day in bed, where she lies prone upon its surface like a bony gnarly stone, twitching and softly growling her snoring susurrate way through furry dreams, and errant men. All men are errant, she muses, in one way or another, steadying herself against her fingerprinted wall.
But then she remembers Jack. Jack of the calloused fingertips, acquired through years of pressing and hammering the bronze and steel strings of his steel guitar, the twanging music of his soul’s needs, coursing through her then like a conduit to freedom. Unmannered, rough, but so gentle with her. Those hands like soft sandpaper smoothing the rough contours of her rounded shapes, until she felt flat beneath them. She was the pliant sand of his body’s beach. She drifted up upon it finally, like coming home, after years of aimless, shifting partners, their faces now a blur framed by whiskers and multi-colored hair.
She wonders idly how she might, were she an artist, frame that multifarious masculine collage into something tangible, if not wholly sensical. But her fingers, still soft (she uses a special creme at night), were bent in their final probing ends, and refused to wrest much precise control over pencil, brush, or pen. This was a loss she regretted, added to her steadily growing list of physical challenges; because her cursive was inclusive of her life, the thins and thicks of her practiced hand were graceful reminders and reflections of the valleys and the peaks, the narrow alleyways and broad boulevards of chance, and the two-headed fortunes of her life; her lengthy life.
I may have lived too long, she thinks; but that is silly. One would need to be a very indulgent fantasist to spin a truth out of so arrogant and controlling a notion. We live for as long as we live, and that’s an end to it. She smiles at her own unintended witticism.
There are about twelve-feet between her bed and her bath, eight along the hallway, straight, and four to the center of her sink, bent left through the doorway. This should be easy, but there are cats. One is dozing in the sink, and three more in the claw-footed tub are chasing dream mice in their feline slumbering brains.
So perhaps it is her good fortune that her gait is halting and methodical, for otherwise the cats at her feet (yes, there are more) would likely trip her up, causing her to fall upon one of her fragile, bird-boned hips, fracturing in an instant whatever hope remained to her of normalcy in aging circumstance.
It is noisy there in the bathroom, so many mammals breathing and purring together in confined space. But she is fine with that. The sounds are like a drowsy white noise, a comforting soft alarm of morning, a greeting, which would soon morph into hungry, insistent pussy yowls. My pussy used to yowl, she thinks. Jack was amazing down there. It was where and how he said he would like to spend a small forever. That was nice. He wrote a blues piece about it, their little ironic, metaphorical secret. So sweet, he was.
And so she begins her ablutions, in an order long since established by endless repetition. She pulls the sink’s stopper shut, rousing the youngish cat drowsing there, who rises, arched back, claws uselessly kneading the porcelain, and launches her graceful body to the counter, and then lightly to the floor, soundlessly, in one flowing, lithe movement.
The woman never fails to marvel at the grace inherent in all of her tabby cousins. They might decide to leap up or down, six-feet or one, and accomplish it with the insouciance of a practiced acrobat, the nonchalance of a porpoise slicing through the ocean’s surface, and all within a cocoon of soft-pawed silence. They are truly amazing, she thinks.
Of course she has her favorites, the cuddly ones, the ones who imagine themselves part of a loving pride, where food and chin scratches are on offer without obligation from their wrinkled, grey-haired cohabitor. Squabbles (every family has them) are minimal, and rarely injurious to its participants; for life there with Granny is good, and everyone is well, but not overfed, and the space, though limited, is not crowded, as she makes certain that the numbers never climb for long above twelve.
She used to recycle them, in a way, and one at a time, to the local Humane Society chapter, not three miles distant. But as time wore on, and she became incapable of driving due to failing eyesight, she settled on a slightly different, though equally practical path.
Eventually, she completes her body’s cleansing, moving slowly from the bathroom back to her bedroom, where it takes her about thirty to forty-five minutes to get dressed for the day. Her progress through the hallway is hampered on her return by five or six cats moving over and around her feet. She has found through the facility of long practice and infrequent though thoroughly frightened stumbles, that a short, shuffling gait is best. That way, both of her painful feet remain solidly on the floor at all times.
She allows only about five or six cats to enter the hallway on any given evening. This is relatively easy for her to manage, as there is a door at the end of the hallway leading to her bedroom, as well as one to the bedroom itself. She has only to shut the farther door once five or six tabbies, anxious to spend the evening within close proximity to their keeper, have happily scampered into the hallway.
Her calculus and method of the daily distribution of her cats is simplicity itself, with four or five cats confined to the hallway, and one per night within Granny’s bedroom. She attempts to ensure that the special privilege of sharing her bed is granted equitably, though some of the cats are so similar in appearance, she has no doubt that the more wily among them take advantage of that fact regularly.
Financially, she has found that the most economical food for the cats is of the dry variety, and fortunately, no one seems to mind. She has fashioned six small cardboard boxes in a row along one side of her kitchen, as serviceable feeding stations, each just large enough for two cats to share. This also provides her with a quick way of accomplishing a headcount, which is very important, considering the stinting measurements of her home.
Once all of the boxes have been straightened and supplied with food, she leans against the counter, a warm cup of instant coffee in her hand, and counts the crouching bums and swishing contented tails before her. She notes, after counting twice, that there are fourteen of them. Where do they all come from? she wonders, and then thinks of the blessing of companionship that they confer to her without much in the way of fuss or clamor, and a small smile forms at her wrinkled mouth, along with a barely audible sigh.
It is breakfast time, an event which she misses only rarely. She seems to be less tired and more alert through the typically undemanding nature of her days if she has a small breakfast to start things off.
The cats are not in a hurry, and she has some minutes to herself now to investigate what might be available for her to eat. She walks across the curling, fractured linoleum floor to her aging Frigidaire, which houses the ancient lever-type ice cube trays, and which for eighty years and more have never failed to deliver the large, deep, frigid squares common to her childhood and to her lemonade, which her mother prepared for her on hot summer days, made from fresh, squeezed lemons, water, honey, and sugar. Whenever she smells lemons, her mind and memories float to her mother.
Her mother was from a small fishing village on the craggy, dangerous northeast coast of Scotland, and where, sometime not distant from the turn of the last century, and for the exorbitant price of a straight pin or two, she gained admittance to the recently invented picture show, where its flickering, silent, disjointed images were first planted in her eyes indelibly, and where her mind in her latter years would often drift.
Her mother was never quite able to reconcile the paucity and threadbare nature of her earliest years with the bounty incidental to her newly-adopted homeland. Fresh fruit in the winter; cheap chicken, turkey, ham, and beef; sugar sold inexpensively in five-pound bags; butter, cheese; fifty varieties of bread, oatmeal for pennies; whole wheat flour, bread flour, all-purpose flour; brown rice, white rice, wild rice; marmalade, strawberry jam, grape jelly, peanut butter; anything you wanted; an endless supply of things you didn’t know you wanted until you noticed them there on the shelf, whispering imploringly to your dumbfounded, greedy hands.
Her mother maintained an almost manic supervision of the house’s light switches, never failing to remind Granny immediately upon leaving a room to “Mind you turn out the light!” and “Edison needs no extra help from us!” These sensibilities were born innocently enough in the presence of great privation, and little in the way of an expectation of deliverance from it. One needed to maintain diligence, to count and hoard one’s pennies, and one’s hopes, for at any moment the churlish, indifferent nature of life might rear up against you, and you would find yourself hard-put to gain the kindness of other starving, scrapping persons barely making their way right alongside of you.
Absentmindedly, she turns on the radio next to her breadbox, and as coincidence and her recent thoughts would have it, the somewhat harsh sounds of a steel guitar solo reaches for her ears from her local public radio station, specializing in all manner of folk music, and the lilting colorful sounds of many cultures. I wish Jack was close by, she thinks. I would sing for him, and he would sing for me.
He wrote me poems. No man ever wrote me poems, she thought. I could sometimes barely breathe when he was close. She glances upward at the ceiling, covered in a dark wood paneling, and closes her eyes. We could never be close enough.
She walks to the fridge, opens the sticky door, and looks inside. She sees a couple of eggs, some celery, some rice she had cooked a day or two ago, some short green onions, and a stick of butter.
She closes the door, walks to the sink, where next to it, one of the cats is mewling and arching its back and begging for some attention. She reaches over to pick him up, and in a movement so quick and in open defiance of her years, twists his neck, snapping it in a heartbeat with a muffled crack against her chest, unaccompanied by any other sound.
She always uses the left side of her kitchen sink for the entrails and the skin, the right side reserved for the meat, and its deboning. The ingredients of the fridge and the remnants of the cat creates a seductive thought of a tasty pilaf she would concoct, and which would feed her for at least another week.
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