Brass Cat
My brass cat rests on his four toed and even feet, tail outstretched, tip curled just so, silent since birth, hot-forged in some sandy die, black coal-eyes, watching my writing. Louise Eisenman played tournament bridge but could not teach my sister past confusing diamonds and clubs. Louise gave me this cat. She loved cats. I did too.
I was eleven. Maybe twelve. Louise died in her
forties, not long after she gave me the cat. She had a heart attack. She was
also a boozer, as was her husband Marx a serious drinker, too. Later Marx drove
mom and me and his son Mike to dinner in
Five hundred stitches. Mom now paints on her eyebrows.
Mike was crying. Whining. I woke, as from a dream. I crawled up off the floor, onto the rear seat. "Shut up Mike!" I advised. He did. I was amazed.
Marx climbed out his door, the car had struck on my mother's side. She was totally silent, pulling herself back through broken glass and turning to look for me. Steam rose. Glass sprinkled. Mom's head was deeply gashed--over and around her eye--and I saw the gashes slowly fill with blood which then began pouring down her face. She was entering shock but she kept calling for me--was I alright. I was. She was not. She could not hear me answer. I kept repeating that I was ok. She kept asking me if I was ok.
Marx ran around and around the car. "I'm sorry Teal," "I didn't mean it." I thought, so clearly, to myself, Asshole. You just drove right the hell off the road and full bore into a tree. Never touched the brakes. Marx had a cut on his knee. I told him to shut up too. He was worthless.
It was dusk and hard to see outside of the car. Through this dimness a gray face peered through the passenger window at us. The window was rolled up. I called out: "Have you called an ambulance?" "Naw." "Well goddammit call a goddam ambulance--can't you see my mother is bleeding to death?"
I gave Mom a tissue--or she found one somewhere, and pressed it to her head, to the center of pulpy mess. The face in the window disappeared, frightened.
Many ambulances came. I guess he called them. Maybe several people did. I don't know. Mom was taken first, then Asshole, then Whining. I was left, silent, walking around, staring at the car. They wouldn't let me in the ambulance. I was not bleeding.
There was a policeman.
"Can you take me to the hospital?" I asked. "My mother was
hurt."
"How did you get here?"
"I was in the car!"
He didn't believe me until he saw Mom's blood on my shirt.
His voice softened. "Sure kid, get in."
I have always been grateful to Louise for giving me that brass cat. The "whump" when we hit that tree was exactly like the time my sister Linda, angry with me for some eight-year-old transgression, came into my room while I was sleeping and whapped the bejeesus out of me by bashing me on the head with a heavy book. I thought I was dead.
In the car I had been unconscious for a moment, stunned by the crash into the tree, but it was the same sound, same feeling as my head smacked the back of the seat in front of me. Perhaps I'd been dozing when we hit. This was worse than the book incident.
Since the book bash I've always imagined that that's how I would end. Some sudden, surprised WHUMP on the head. Totally unexpected, totally stunning, painless. Better actually than drowning, or being stung to death by bees, or being freezing cold, scared, stuck in a too-small passage in a cave. Whump! Blankness. Silence. Peace.
I never, ever liked Marx. He was a creep even if he liked my Mom. I think it was a Buick--the car, not the book that my Sister used to hit me over the head.
7/17/98, 7/30/2005
Into crystal water, stilled, a surface reflecting pale white light and the memory of trees, these blank pages beckon--silent cry for words, drawings, numbers, information, feeling, new ideas or old ones, thoughts which first find themselves, the define themselves by the process of writing itself across vague mists of unformed mind, across eons of time, reaching out, hoping above hope, to touch and be touched before moving on to infinite solitude. --df
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