Issue Eight
Fiction (excerpts): HERE KITTY KITTY by Jardine Libaire Paintings by Isabelle Pelissier
Sitting there in Yves’s car, I was sure I’d mourned, I’d been grieving for almost two years, but nothing had changed.
Sitting there in Yves’s car, I was sure I’d mourned, I’d been grieving for almost two years, but nothing had changed. I still didn’t want to go in there. Months ago, I’d come to box the remaining belongings so I could rent out the house.
My mother had been an elegant woman in her own carrot-top way, and it was excruciating to go through panties with elastics broken, stockings dotted with nail polish, widowed gloves stowed away just in case. Within an hour, everything I came across—the apricot slip hanging from the bedpost, a lipstick in the medicine cabinet, an abalone shell still dusty with ash—loomed and shivered like objects from a nightmare. I’d fled with the job half-finished, and hadn’t returned until tonight.
My mother had made my childhood into a paradise. She didn’t believe in ordinary life. Every day should be a kingdom, the proportions of each hour majestic, regal.
When I’d come down for breakfast in the morning, dragging my book bag on the stairs, yawning, the first thing I’d hear was my mother singing. By my plate of sugared toast: a blue jay feather. In the windows hung glass prisms, and rainbows shot their colors against the walls. To this day, when I opened books, brown wafers of red roses fell from the pages.
With pajamas on my bath-damp body, I’d find a snowbell on my pillow. My mother always told a bedtime story. Then I asked her to tell another, and she would. Then she asked me to tell one, and she lay on my bed with her eyes closed.
We played with lipstick. We rollerskated on a summer midnight. We ate pancakes for dinner. Once, I remember, a snow day was predicted. We woke up, and the roads were clear. But she let me stay home. We sat by the fire that whole day, the soles of our feet pinked by the flames, and strung shells onto necklaces. In the evenings, I did homework at the dinner table while she played records: June Christy, Lee Wiley, Billie Holiday. With a cigarette in one hand and a mug in the other, she danced. Red sun burned through her kimono. The fabric seemed to dissolve in the violent light. Sometimes I watched her. Sometimes I danced with her. We never turned on the lamps until we couldn’t see.
But with the god gone, the house was just a house, and I couldn’t bear to enter it. I adjusted the leather car seat, and closed my drunken eyes.
I inherited this halfway syndrome from my mother. At five-two, my mother weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. Her simian face was playful, her orange curls innocent, but she wouldn’t have been, and wasn’t, caught dead without lipstick. She was half-child, half-woman. She’d light up after crushing a half-smoked cigarette, and never waited to finish a drink before she refreshed it. She slept on the couch and ate in bed. She could never fall asleep, and always slept late.
No one could help but love her. Guests would arrive at eight and find her in a damp bikini, only beginning to scour cookbooks for ideas. But the night would be unforgettable: midnight dinner on the porch, an impromptu reading of Midsummer Night’s Dream, children playing in the rhododendrons—their bodies illusory as vapors. She never read the books for the book club, and missed most meetings, but when it was her turn to host, she warmed the winter afternoon by serving hot cider and gingersnaps and jazz. The girls laughed, gossiped, and forfeited the book. In the community center dressing room, my mother painted on a geisha face. Her kimono belt was wet from the toilet, and there weren’t enough bobby pins to secure her wig, but she cracked deadpan joke after joke till the cast was crying, literally, dabbing white makeup with tissue. On stage, she froze, but she made that backstage room, with its mirrors and hot lights and cheap costumes, into theatre.
Too many unconsummated plans, though. Dead dogwood saplings leaning against the house, roots trapped in burlap sacks, unplanted. Yellowing patterns and fabric for dresses never sewed. A white upright with a bench full of unlearned standards. She’d half-loved men, and they’d half-failed her. Combing my hair with her fingers, when one had finally left after dinner, she explained how he’d have made a great husband but a bad father, or vice versa. Even I could be counted among her unfinished dreams. I was not anything. I was an incomplete work. She died quickly, but not peacefully. She fought like someone caught in the doors of an elevator.
I believe, in fact, she lived her whole life caught between the fifties and the sixties, stranded between convention and freedom. Stuck between what she was supposed to be and what she wanted to be.
My mom took me to meet my grandfather only once, even though he lived in New Jersey. At ten, I’d just hZad my first growth spurt, and while we waited on his stoop, my mom told me to pull my rabbit-fur jacket over my belly. The ice on the steps was studded with rock salt. A birdfeeder, empty of seed, dangled from the eave.
“Well, well,” he said, as I’d imagined he would, and he shook my mitten.
The living room was shrouded in plastic, even though the dog had died years ago. The visit had been planned for lunchtime, but he offered none. Although the lamps were off, a powerful whiteness that fell short of actual light came through the window from the snow outside.
I don’t remember why we went, or what they talked about. I probably slouched on the sofa, fiddling with my jacket zipper, staring at him through narrowed eyes. His lips were full and red, and a blueprint for mine, but I found them repulsive on a six-foot-three man with a white crewcut.
“Glad that’s over, little partner,” my mom said in the car, her hand searching for my fries.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
She squinted, thinking. The turnpike’s shoulder was a gray wall of snow. I unwrapped my steaming cheeseburger from its paper. When I was older, she’d explain that she left home at eighteen because her dream was to be an actress, which he insisted was prostitution. They’d fought violently about many things over the years, but that had been the breaking point.
“Hmmm,” she said now, hoping to explain this to a ten-year-old. “The problem is, he fears being moved. He hates anything that moves him.”
She darted a glance at me. I looked up, unaffected, from removing pickles.
“What that means, Lee,” she continued. “Is he doesn’t like to be made to feel anything. He doesn’t like pleasure or sorrow or joy or anger unless he’s chosen it, unless he controls it. He doesn’t like when someone expresses herself. It makes him feel dirty.”
She lit a cigarette, replaced the glowing lighter, cracked the window.
“Tell me if this makes you cold, baby,” she said, simultaneously exhaling smoke into cold air.
With pajamas on my bath-damp body, I’d find a snowbell on my pillow. My mother always told a bedtime story. Then I asked her to tell another, and she would. Then she asked me to tell one, and she lay on my bed with her eyes closed.
Like I said, we only visited him once. He didn’t know where we lived, and I doubt he ever left his house, but I think he visited her all the time.
From the book HERE KITTY KITTY by Jardine Libaire. Copyright © 2004 by Jardine Raven Libarire. Published by permission of Little, Brown and Company (Inc.), New York, NY. All rights reserved.