on having giddiness.
THE RETURN
LIKE ULYSSES, I WAS GONE FOR TEN YEARS. Little changed in my absence.
My husband was still in bed. He had not taken up weaving. “I’ve been using the services of an elderly prostitute named Crystal,” he told me. He looked wan and threadbare lying on the unmade bed, the sheets grey and unraveling.
The dog was miserable when I left and not much had changed there either. Upon my return she leapt into my arms and bit me.
My son, now thirty, was still at home watching TV—Great Sea Journeys of the World. But thinking, he said, of becoming a male siren in the Fall. At last, I thought, direction!
Only my daughter had moved on. Uninterested in Queendom, she was living on a ranch in New Mexico, studying the adventurous techniques of Georgia O’Keefe.
She had changed her name to Penny Pacific and was painting from memory the delicate pink interiors of the West Coast clam.
THE THINGS I DO FOR YOU
THE CAT’S MADE A DECISION. He doesn’t want his breakfast now. He got tired of waiting in front of his bowl. He sat in front of his empty bowl for forty-five minutes trusting that his breakfast would arrive. Demonstrating for us the famous “patience of a cat” behavior, staring calmly at his empty bowl. He didn’t lie down and wait. He sat. He might have even sighed. While you ignored him. Fussing about the kitchen cleaning up last night’s dishes. The cat watching you, waiting and trusting. Then he got mad. After forty-five minutes of waiting he got mad and went out the window.
Don’t bother calling him now. He’s gone off hungry again. Don’t be surprised if he finds another home. Someplace where meals occur on time.
It’s not my job to feed the cat, it’s yours. This was our agreement. We have it in writing from Salvador & Davis, Notary Public. You do the cat, I do the garbage. You signed the document. You affixed your curlicue signature to the document, beside my neat MacLean’s script. Judith M. Davis witnessed our signatures. It’s all down on paper. You agreed to feed the cat, even going so far as mentioning your love of cats, your relief at being spared the garbage duties. Judith M. Davis smiled when you said this. Herself a lover of cats, she told us, a hater of garbage. “ Aren’t we all,” I said, and then we left for the pet store where we purchased the cat.
Save your breath. Don’t bother hanging out the window calling the cat. He’s not coming back. He’s catching another hummingbird. He’s caught four this week, leaving their chewed heads on the front porch mat. All because. Well, what did you expect? The cat’s telling us something by leaving these iridescent green hummingbird heads. This is not a case of wanton slaughter. End of story.
“Technically,” you said, “the heads are garbage.”
“Technically,” I said, “you’re right—but under the circumstances.”
“Your department,” you said.
And four times this week you walked away from the tiny heads. Our agreement didn’t mention the cross-contamination of duties. An oversight. I realize that now.
I buried the hummingbird heads in the garden. Alongside the remains of the rabbits, snakes, mice and finches that the cat’s resorted to killing because his breakfast hasn’t arrived on time.
Ed English came over pushing his walker while I was burying yesterday’s hummingbird. He planted the walker alongside the graves and stared at the earth while I was burying number four. Ed English is present at most of the burials. Yesterday, he shook his head as he always does and said what he always says, namely, “I’ll be next.” An ominous, hopeless tone to his voice. The red-rimmed eyes of Ed English staring at the gravesite. He seems to think that tending the backyard graves is my job in life, that I’m a gravedigger by choice. Ed English forgets what the rows of grave markers indicate. Besides the birds, mice, snakes and hummingbirds, Ed English thinks I’m ridding the neighborhood of Old Age Pensioners. An idea, incidentally, whose time may have come.
Because Ed English is becoming noisome. It was the same with the plants, if you recall. They, too, had become noisome.
Because each Fall you rip the year-old geraniums out of their hanging baskets, declaring, “They look like shit,” and throw them on the compost. (There’s a cluster of survivor geraniums planted by the back fence. Thanks to me.)
“Noisome” equals your views about children.
“They fracture the peaceful air with their whining, bawling and screaming,” was how you put it. And slept in the spare bed for a year.
“Fair enough,” I finally said. And had my penis seen to.
Twenty-seven years ago.
For which you were grateful. Admit it. You were grateful. The things I do for you.
Ed English was over Wednesday night while you were at the Centre playing Bridge. Watching me at the kitchen table while I made the grave markers, the balsam crucifixes. While I soldered on the species type and date of kill.
“I thought there’d be more to it, making grave markers, digging graves,” Ed English said. “It’s beginning to look like dying is no big deal.”
Here Kitty, Kitty.
The cat returning in hope of an evening meal. Being fed by me. Then settling himself in the middle of the finished crucifixes.
JANE AND MR. LEAKEY
OKAY, WE WERE BORED. One night. One decade. We were sitting on the couch, staring out the window, waiting for the sunset to dazzle and we only had three and a half hours to go. So we thought about it, sort of, and decided that the remedy for our boredom could be had with the purchase of a live pet to keep in a cage like a bunny. The idea just came to us. Like a cartoon light bulb flashing over our heads. Like inspiration.
So we thought some more, sort of, and decided the new pet couldn’t be a bunny, after all, because of the cats. “Picture this,” one of us said: “Cat claws gripping the cage wire, then cat fangs and panic when the bunny attempts to flee, thump thumping to nowhere, then a bunny heart attack, then a bunny stiff … ”
So a ferret. We decided on a ferret. Something miserable that could hold it’s own against the cats. Could even, if need be, destroy the cats. A nasty ferret in a cage on the kitchen floor to look at and love.
We imagined our lives with a ferret. There’d be the initial reading up on ferrets; we’d feel obliged to do that. Then the shopping for one, or searching the internet wilds for one, and then, possibly, discovering that the only way to get hold of a ferret was to trap one.
“How do you do that?” one of us said.
“Make a trap using common household items like coat hangers and nylon stockings and plastic bags and empty cottage cheese containers and bobby pins. You blockhead.” One of us said. One of us called the other a “blockhead.”
“Well,
