Waiting for light

She didn’t know what was worse: the stench of cat urine drowning every one of her pores, or the dull, throbbing ache in her lower back.  Or maybe the heat was the worst. Nothing quite like DC in July.  She patted the sheet under her until she found the phone, which had fallen off the air mattress and was wedged under her carry on bag. Only 3:15. 

What were the odds she could catch a cab at this time of night? What were the odds any of the hotels around here would have electricity? She checked WaPo online. Power still out through most of the city. It had been one hell of a storm.  As though reading her mind, her son emitted a deep sigh from his double bed on the other side of the room.

Grunting, she rolled onto her side then stiffly stood up, blinking and rubbing at her eyes to coax them back to work. A purring cat rubbed up against her leg. Then another. Gradually, her surroundings emerged. The studio was tiny, about the size of her dining room.  Joey’s bed/ couch took up one wall near the front door.  His bureau, desk, and television, were against the wall next to her makeshift bed. A couple of steps in front of her to the left was the compact kitchen: two burner stove, narrow fridge, a couple of cabinets, and a bank of windows, the safety kind that only opened a few inches.

As her eyes adjusted, she noticed one of the cats pawing at a window screen.  Maybe it was cooler outside than in.  She picked her way carefully, over spiral notebooks, pens, highlighters, and heavy law books that were scattered randomly over the floor. She’d only arrived six hours ago, but the intense heat made the passing time seem like centuries.

She turned on the cold water at the sink then searched the cabinets for paper towels to wet her burning neck and back. Finding none, she splashed water on her face then arms, legs, neck, back, hair. The black and white cat jumped onto the counter next to her and she dripped water onto the cat’s forehead and down its spine. The cat purred in appreciation, then stuck out her tiny pink tongue to catch droplets as they fell.  

She searched the floor for the pet food and water dishes. Finding them all empty, she filled a dish with cool water and all three cats came running.  In search of cat food, she intensified her rifling through the cabinets, and found shot glasses, beer glasses, one coffee mug with her son’s university insignia, three bottles of scotch – all open, two bottles of gin – one empty, a half full bottle of peppermint schnapps, two bags of chips, a box of crumbling Saltines, and an economy size can of tuna fish. This she opened and dumped into the cats’ bowls, as they swam around her butting against each other to get first dibs.  

In the fridge she found a half gallon of orange juice, a couple of cartons of milk, some oranges covered in green fuzz, and two containers of the fat free yogurt she liked to eat every morning. Joey must have been referring to the yogurt when he said, upon her arrival, that he’d bought her breakfast.  

He’d been late picking her up at the airport. Said the bar was nuts. But on the plus side, he made a ton in tips.  She’d pretended not to notice the liquor on his breath, and that he was wearing street clothes, not his bartender uniform.  She hadn’t yet mentioned the call from his manager, saying they’d had to fire Joey for drinking on the job.  Third time they’d caught him, even though he’d been warned. She hadn’t yet mentioned the ticket home she’d bought him, or the spot in rehab she’d already reserved.  

After pouring water into one of the beer glasses, first checking that it was clean, she walked to the windows.  There was no traffic this time of night on Wisconsin. No pedestrians either. The neighborhood was waiting for dawn. The surrounding buildings were black and glistening with wet, the streets dark and shiny from rain.  The sky was shades lighter, specked with pinpoints of bright stars flashing here and there.  She breathed in deeply, a heady mix of damp foliage and lingering car exhaust. The air was warm, but more refreshing than what swirled in the rank apartment.  

A block away were shivering silhouettes of mighty oaks and pines. Behind them the great spires of the National Cathedral soared.  She closed her eyes and prayed for guidance, for the words she’d need later that morning, while she waited for the sun to rise.   

Nanowrimo prompt #4: a hot room

Mud, mud. I love Sue

Mud. Mud. I love mud. I’m absolutely positively wild about mud. Can’t go around it. Got to go through it. Beautiful, fabulous, super duper mud. 

When I think mud, I think of my friend Sue.  Whether I’m squishing, squashing, walking, running, or singing the mud song in class with a bunch of kindergartners, there’s always Sue. 

Sue was the music teacher at my old school. I call it my old school but it’s really my heart school my love school my beloved school. I hated that school. I loved it more than anything, too. Loved the kids and the families and loved some but not all of the staff. Super duper loved Sue. 

Sue was a music teacher, but she was so much more than that. She was a music savant. She was a champion of children. She railed against injustice, especially the injustice she saw in terms of music curriculum and student behaviors. She knew music and knew kids. She knew music was more than tapping out notes and singing simple songs. Music was pounding on a table, tapping your feet, immersion, a merging of body and soul. 

Her spirit animal  was Animal, the muppet drummer. Sue played every instrument – drums, organ,  piano, flute, guitar, waste baskets, everything. She was zany and crazy and  saw all of us as tiny beings in a much bigger picture.  When I was sick she’d perform reiki on me, rubbing her hands together then placing warm palms on my back to break up the congestion in my lungs.

 

She was French Canadian and Native American.  She adored her mother, who died from cancer when Sue was just a young girl. Sue abhorred addiction but not the addict, unless they were violent. She had no patience for anyone who hurt anyone else.  Sue believed in forgiveness but also believed that not everything should be forgiven.

Sue loved her job even as it got more difficult, as demands to conform to lesser music standards than she held were placed upon her, as she was blamed when students who were physically violent in other classrooms were physically violent in her own. 

She had severe health issues her entire adult life. She was a cancer survivor, lived with rheumatoid arthritis that often reduced her to wearing braces or using a wheelchair, and had a severely compromised immune system.

As the years went by, school admin had no problem assigning her to work in rooms on the third floor of a century old building with one undependable elevator.  The last few years of her career, Sue endured bullying bosses who had no idea the magic she could work in her classroom. Had no idea of the lives she saved just by being there to listen to a child who had no one else to turn to, or a child who found their life’s calling in music through her. 

When I think mud, I remember Sue, especially our weekly school sing-a-longs. Scream-a-longs, she called them.  In our school’s heyday, over 800 kids would be packed in our auditorium and every single child would join in to sing “Mud,” “Pizza Hut,” and so many other songs, silly and serious. During the sing-a-long following 9/11, we all cried, kids and adults, as we sang the National Anthem, “Proud to be an American,” God Bless America.” All led by Sue and her electric piano.

Student behaviors escalated over the years, our school’s population dropped to nearly half what it was. Admin bullying of teachers became a thing. The building hemorrhaged experienced, talented staff who chose to take jobs in schools with fewer behavior issues, where teachers felt valued too. Sue stayed. She loved the kids. They were her life.

Eventually, Sue couldn’t take it anymore. Though she hoped to stay teaching a few more years, until at least her mid-60s, her stress level was beyond anything her body could handle.

The exact day she retired, Sue got the news that her body was riddled with cancer. Less than a month later, she passed.  In the days before she passed, she radiated a sparkling, silver aura. Even the universe knew that Sue was a gift.

Life is messy. Mud is too. I love mud. And when I see it, like Pavlov’s dog and that bell, my reaction is automatic: I start singing the Mud song, and I remember Sue, beautiful, fabulous, super duper Sue.  I remember other things too.  The emotional slaying of innocents is never acceptable. And like Sue, I hope karma takes its toll. 

Nanowrimo day #3 prompt: mud

Redecorating

At first she was overwhelmed. You want a new bathroom? Fix it yourself, he’d said.  You’re home all day anyhow. 

She’d glared at him, hands on hips.  But I don’t know what I’m doing.  

He shrugged. Not my problem. Then he left for work. 

So here she was with gallons of paints, brushes, spackle, tape, pans, pails, detergents, sponges, and a wallpaper scraper that looked like a lady bug on one side and had sharp metal teeth on the other.

She sipped her coffee and studied the walls. They weren’t in bad shape, faded in some spots, stained in others, the paper only a decade old,  peeling at the corners. Laura Ashley pink pinstripes on white with a pretty border near the ceiling of pink tulips with sage leaves. She’d spent hours working with a decorator to flesh out the colors in this room and all the others. The wallpaper hanger had been there for weeks.  

In this room, the paper matched the pink tub perfectly. Matching towels too.  And a matching bath curtain and balloon shades she’d had specially made from some Laura Ashley sheets she got at TJ Maxx. That was before the kids, when she worked full time, instead of the part time job she held now, and before he started going from job to job, each layoff longer than the next. 

It was the economy, he said, even when she noted that the want ads were thicker than ever and his old companies were hiring.  

She looked at the pile of painting supplies and took some deep breaths. With the scraper and lots of detergent, the paper peeled easily in satisfyingly long, languid strips as she stepped from the bathtub edge to the toilet seat – bloodstains still near the base from that second miscarriage, to the countertop. The border came off in one entire piece. I win! She thought. 

The walls beneath were white, small gouges here and there which she filled with spackle then smoothed.  Then she applied tape at the ceiling and at the baseboards where she had some trouble behind the toilet. More old blood than I thought, she noted.

With a wide brush, she tentatively dipped into the first paint can. Nantucket Rose. Just a dab to start, a sketch of a line on the wall above the toilet. Then a longer line, then a longer, wider line, a pathway really. Then dots and x’s and A, B, Cs, and trunks, branches, leaves, flowers, neighborhoods of houses.   Finally, the can was mostly empty and she stood back and looked. Rouge walls dripping in places, spots on the pebbled linoleum and even on the ceiling. Color closing in, warming, drenching, wild. 

In the mirror she studied her paint- speckled visage –  worn cheeks, indifferent chin, hair gray in sections too,  torn T-shirt.  She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Rose nose now. What remained in the can she dabbed again on the blood stains violent vile behind the toilet until the color there dripped onto the floor and dribbled toward the hallway, a pathetic, lonely stream.  

She opened another can, carnation this time. Ripping an old diaper she dipped again and again and in between slapped at the walls, the splashes forming arcs, clouds, plains, waves, ferns, flowers, cliffs, dunes, mountains. Sprays landed on ceiling, floor, tub, sink, and these she rubbed and polished into Van Gogh swirls, thinking starry starry bathroom.  

The green can was next, meadow and light, dabbed in places that still seemed plain and needy. The corners, the closet door, her arms, the ceiling light, and towel bar, her cheeks, knees, neck, belly again and once more.  

And so it went through the day. Even as the children returned from school and yelled for snacks and dinner she worked mightily on landscapes, seascapes, galaxies, constellations, and other miasmas of emptiness and light. 

That night at dark when  her husband returned home he followed the river now of green, pink, rose from the floor in the kitchen where the children ate cookies and played on their phones and into the bathroom where the stream ended in convergent oceans of color and though he called and called heard nothing but the soft still sound of drying paint on paint on paint on paint.

She died

She died.

The news came two minutes before the first staff meeting of the new school year.  

Ellie had been at the Wachusett Animal Hospital less than 12 hours.  The last time I'd seen her, maybe ten hours earlier, she was lying on her side in an incubator, all six pounds of her rising and falling with each urgent, quick breath.  Her eyes, probably blind they told me, were closed.  One butterscotch paw was wrapped in a fuschia bandage that held in place an IV pulsing medicine to her overworked liver.

That hospital that night was our second stop. Our first stop had been the vet. I’d spent the day setting up my classroom and then instead of going home had stopped off to pick up supplies at Target and the Dollar Store. Maybe if I’d gone straight home, things would have been different.

That day, for the first time ever, Ellie didn’t come to the door to greet me when I arrived home. I searched everywhere – closets, the laundry room, even the refrigerator which she would sneak into sometimes while I was retrieving dinner or kitty treats, and finally found her under my bed, curled up in a ball, yellow eyes glittering. She wouldn’t come when I called or even when I got out her fishy snacks and shook them in front of her. So I slid under the bed and pulled her out by her front paws. She yowled and twisted with a ferocity I’d never heard or seen from her before. She clawed at me as I held her, fur matted and damp with urine. There was blood too.

Three times I called the vet. Three times the phone went to voicemail as I paced, with her on my shoulder wrapped in a towel. There was no time to find her carrier so I gently placed her next to me on the front seat and started driving. At first she seemed to sleep. A few blocks from the vet, as we bumped over potholes, she came alive, jumped into the back seat and on her hind legs clawed at the window.

The clerk took one look her at her and called for assistance. They made me wait in the lobby while they examined my baby cat, the youngest of my three, named Eloise after the mischievous Kay Thompson character.

I’d adopted her almost two years earlier when she was about four weeks old and a friend of a friend found her wandering by the side of a busy road.  Ellie loved to drink from a kitten bottle and did so for three months after I adopted her, even though her teeth by then were sharp and strong. She loved solid food too, especially canned whitefish. Each night she fell asleep nestled against my left hip.  Sometimes her snoring woke me up, but I didn’t mind.  

Reality hadn’t set in. When the vet called me in to the examining room, I was expecting at most an expensive prescription. I wasn’t expecting a diagnosis that Ellie was in critical condition. The vet gave me a list of tests and a three figure estimate, or I could opt for euthanasia.  

As long as there was hope for her, I couldn’t imagine letting her go.  She lived to wrestle with her best buddy, mouse-colored Gus Gus, and took quite seriously her main job in the household, annoying to near insanity my neurotic black beauty Molly.  She was so young and until that day was so healthy. I couldn’t let her die when she still had so much living left.

They gave her medicine and ran tests. All confirmed that she was fine except for her liver. All indications pointed to poisoning.  I wracked my brain  struggling to figure out what on earth she could have gotten into.  I had no idea. Anything potentially poisonous was out of cat reach. I’m an experienced pet owner. Plus, my other two cats were fine. 

Hours later Ellie was still hanging in there. There was still hope, but she’d need overnight care, which my vet didn’t provide.  I drove home and got her carrier then drove her to the animal hospital a half hour away.  They were waiting for her with more questions about what on earth she could have eaten. Still no answers. They ran more tests and gave her more drugs. My credit card got even more exercise.  The doc told me to call any time for updates.  

The drive home was quiet and dark. It was late. I knew my older daughter would still be awake so I called her and promised I’d keep her in the loop. She assured me I’d done the right thing, pulling out all the stops for the baby cat.

The next day, Thursday, was the first day back at school, a meeting day. Students would arrive the next week.  I called the hospital as soon as I woke up. The vet was busy caring for another ill animal. The clerk said I could wait and she’d get me an update on Ellie, or I could call back.  I said I was off to work in a few minutes, so I’d call back from there.

Walking into that classroom was disheartening. I’d hoped to be in a different position in a different building. I couldn’t help thinking of  how I’d spent several hours the day before out buying supplies for this room that I didn’t want to be in. And how if I’d been home instead, I’d have gotten Ellie to the vet sooner, and perhaps she’d have more of a chance of living.

I dreaded calling the vet again, especially from this depressing locale. The vet said there’d been no change during the night, and said the only hope was to bring Eloise to another hospital where they could do more tests.  She said Ellie was blind and likely had extensive brain damage, but they weren’t sure how much.  My other option was euthanasia.

The pitch of her voice shifted.  “Can you hold on?” she said. “My assistant is calling to me.” 

As I waited, I decided to tell the doc it was time to let Ellie go.  It seemed inevitable anyhow.  I was thinking of how I’d have to tell my boss I needed to leave.  What if she said no? She’d have to let me leave. I had to say good-bye to my cat.  Would I lose my job if she denied me permission and I left?  Did she have that much power?  Did I even care at that point?  

The vet returned pretty fast. She told me Ellie was coding right then and there. What did I want to do?

My brain shifted to another plane as I told the vet to let her go. It was a no-brainer. The vet stayed on the phone with me as Ellie passed. She assured me my kitten likely died with no pain.

One of my colleagues came into the room as I got off the phone.  He made some sarcastic joke about another fun year coming up.  Our jobs aren’t easy. 

“My cat died. Just now,” I said. "That was the vet.”  

My friend said he was sorry. We shared a few comments about how just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, they do. Then we went to the meeting.  

That night, my daughter and I drove together to pick up Ellie. We buried her in the back yard near other pets.  All but Ellie had lived long lives. 

The next day, on my way into yet another school meeting, I got the call I’d been waiting for saying I had a new job in a new place. My first thought was of all that time I wasted buying classroom supplies when I could have been helping my cat. My second thought was how glad I was to be starting someplace new.

I still can’t look at pictures of Eloise without feeling scraped up inside.  I wish I could have done more.