for lsz, who has decided to teach me a lesson, and has succeeded

a few weeks ago lsz, my most attentive listener and the cattle prod to my ever-lapsing humanitarianism, told her readers that she was going away and gave us an assignment to complete in her absence: write about the most beautiful thing you have ever seen, felt or heard. and then she didn't go away, and so i don't think any of us wrote for her. of course, she didn't want us to write it for her, really; she wanted us to remember it for ourselves. she's sneaky, that lsz. wonderful, but sneaky.

well, today i woke up and she was gone. and i thought, what a brat, until i remembered that i told her i was going to vanish in exactly the same manner when i left on my vacation, and i didn't think i was being mean, but you just never know, do you? sometimes people count on your presence more than you realize. lsz has been missing for close to six hours . . . and i'm terribly sad. lesson learned, love: i'm leaving the evening of the 23rd, i'll be home on the 28th, i'll have presents for all of you and you'll have them in your hands by the end of the month. anyhow, coupling my sudden turned-tables revelation with the momentousness of last night's episode of my name is earl, which was about remembering not to neglect our loved ones or take them for granted, i was finally driven to make the time to do this small perfect thing i was asked to do by this small perfect girl.

you would think—wouldn't you?—that the most beautiful experience of your life would be eternally center-stage in your mind, like a spoiled lap dog waiting for you at your front door, frantic to be lifted up and caressed. but it isn't; it gets trampled and muddied and elbowed to the back of the room by all manner of stuff and nonsense, like sunrise from a hilltop or hellenistic sculpture or that song that made you cry that time you heard it live, or the time that person you were afraid to let yourself trust reached for you in the middle of the night, or the lightning storm over the ocean that you watched all alone from the beach . . . rubbish. iridescent baubles. they could have belonged to anyone. i had something better, something simpler, something right, if i could just reach it; so i thought, and i thought, and i thought and i thought and i thought

and then i remembered.

kismet was a little black cat who became a giant black cat. i told you how we met here and how we parted here, and after that i never really mentioned him. but he's the one true love of my life, and there was a moment when i became sure that he always would be, because no one else would ever earn it the way he did right then and there, and nothing's been so beautiful, before or since. if you'd like to listen, i'll tell you a story.

six months after i left him, eight days after my twenty-first birthday and eight months to the day after his first, i was at my parents' house for a visit. it was the middle of the afternoon and no one else was home, and i was in the kitchen reading a book that had been making me laugh but that suddenly made me very, very sad. it made me so sad that i had to put it down and move away from it, so i got up and walked to the back of the house, where the sliding doors let you look down over the back yard and the woods that stretch out of sight beyond it. i was crying, just a little. i wasn't entirely sure why. kismet, who was getting to be a very big boy, a much bigger boy than i had imagined he'd be, was taking up a fair amount of space on the floor in front of the left-hand door; when i reached him he opened one dozy bronze eye, yawned, stretched out his leg to grab the tip of my sneaker with his claws, went back to sleep.

something inside me imploded.

i started sobbing and couldn't stop and sat down to keep from keeling over, and as i did kismet looked up at me with a most unnatural degree of alarm and i was hysterical, could not catch my breath, and he was all at once on his feet and panic-stricken, his eyes so wide i could see the whites and my little cat, whom i had abandoned with no warning or explanation and who in the six months since had not shown any interest in any human member of his new household, did something he had never before done.

he climbed into my lap. when he lived with me he was everywhere i went; he followed me from room to room, sat in the chair next to me when i was at the kitchen table, sat on the couch beside me when i watched tv, spent the entire night curled beside my head like a furry pillow—but he never once tried to settle on me. now that he had done it we were both surprised, and he made some tiny, hesitant half-steps, not sure whether to sit or stand, confused on altogether too many levels for a young cat with an innocent walnut brain. but he didn't leave, and finally he stretched his small saucer-eyed face up to mine and pressed the top of his head against my wet wobbling chin. and i cried all over him, made sticky salty spots all up and down his back, and he never moved or even blinked, only leaned in closer to me and every few seconds offered a quiet, chirping non-meow. my little baby, kissing my face, saying, "don't be sad, mommy; i love you."

it was the first time i could remember being a part of something so clean, so even and honest and entirely above-board. it's the only time, and i can't imagine there ever being anyone in my life whom i could share a similar moment with. you can't cry in front of your parents because it breaks their hearts, can't cry in front of your children because it frightens them, can't cry in front of your friends because it's embarrassing for everyone in the room, can't cry in front of anyone, just because. because it's a futile exercise in guilt management; no one ever knows what to do. you know that no one knows what to do and feel guilty for making them feel like they should, and they feel guilty for not being able to amaze you by magically knowing what to do. or you think they should know, and they know that's unfair, and everyone is curdled by irrational resentment. a person who catches you crying asks you if you are okay and then hopes that you will say yes, which you most likely will do, and then you will quickly go about meaning it as the other person gears up to ask you if you are sure, even though you both would have liked for him or her to have left the room already. maybe not every time, but the majority of the time, comfort is either offered or received, or both, out of obligation, not sincerity. something is always off, and no one walks away without a little shame. that's not how it ought to be, and i don't think it's how it has to be, but i believe, when you're dealing with adult human beings, it's how it inevitably is.

only, not that time. that time i ran my hand over a soggy shedding body and knew what it was to be sure of something, and i didn't need to cry anymore. i tried to dry my tears off his head but he wouldn't hold still, he kept trying to look at me, to nuzzle my face. so i laughed and wiped the tears off myself instead, told him it was okay, i was fine, i didn't know what had happened but i was all right now; he didn't believe me. he stepped out of my lap, walked over to one knee, rubbed up against it, looked up at me quickly to make sure i hadn't started crying again, walked over to the other knee, repeated, did this until i had stopped sniffling, sprawled out in front of me on his side and yawned, stretched out his leg to grab the tip of my sneaker with his claws. everything as it was, only now he was purring, and until it became dark we sat there looking at each other, kismet with his foot on my foot as he purred and purred.

there it is, lsz; my one flawless instant. i'm sorry it took me so long.

now will you come home?

cat got your . . .

brittle douglas fir
drops brown needles on my rug
and prays for sweet death.



meet ophelia.

here she is, all six pounds of her, perched on the windowsill like a shiny black nugget of feline perfection, her one-inch-diameter exquisite kitty feet that absolutely ruin me with their cuteness tucked up underneath her waifish little ribcage, her tail dangling straight until the very tip, which curves up in a tight fish-hook "u." she knows i'm talking about her now, she's giving me her audrey hepburn face, fierce diva that she is. my little monster. and all mine, i've single-handedly spoiled her into this demon starlet. but i had no choice, you see. the little ninny kept trying to die on me, she loves me that much. at least, i suppose it's love, in some contorted girl kitty form. it isn't how i might have gone about it... here, i'll just tell you.

ophelia came with a twin brother (unidentical in everything but temperament, who was later named andrew for no real reason) the summer before i turned 15, when they were both about eight weeks old. our kittens were two of four, the litter of a family friend's cat. the whole furry lot was tumbling about clumsily in a cardboard box when we arrived. i walked over to the playpen and looked in, and ophelia dropped another kitten's tail and stretched her round baby body up towards my face. none of the others paid one whit of attention to either of us as she tried to haul herself up over the side. as decisions go, it was one of the simpler ones i've made. she dug her tiny claws into me immediately; i had no say. every morning from then on i woke up with a very small, very warm four-legged body draped across my neck, half-tangled in my hair.

five years later, when i was living in my first apartment and ophelia was living in my parents', and living there very happily, i might add, a stray cat that my friends and i had been looking after gave birth to three black kittens. i kept them in my bedroom from the time they were born, all three, and only one of them ever cared to sleep in my bed. so he was kismet, and he stayed with me, and we were utterly content. and when i brought him to my parents' house with me for a visit, ophelia tried to kill him, and when i brought him back to my apartment with me ophelia tried to kill herself, in a hopelessly girlish and catty passive-aggressive sort of way.

she stopped eating. just like that. she didn't want to be around the other people in the house. she developed a sudden, profound and unprovoked loathing for her brother, who up until then had been quite fond and protective of her. she spent nearly 90% of any given day on top of the kitchen cabinets, hissing at everything and nothing, not eating. when i came home for christmas a month and a half later she had full-blown pancreatitis and had lost a pound and a half, which isn't much, except when it's over a sixth of your body weight, which it was. so i was concerned.

my parents were not concerned. they told me i was making it up. then they told me that the real problem was that she wanted to be a supermodel, that actually she ate all the time and then when no one was looking she hid in the basement and stuck her tiny kitty paw down her throat. less than funny, i found that. considerably less, especially since my mother had come down with an alarming gastrointestinal ailment of her own about two months after i first left home for college my freshman year. from what i understand no concrete diagnosis was ever made, but she didn't seem to be able to keep anything she ate in her body, and she lost near to 40 pounds in something like four months. the first semester of college i went home every weekend, knowing it wouldn't fix anything. there was just that obligation, the need to do my fair share of suffering. the tendency of my immediate family members to go to pieces in this manner is more or less how i wound up in worcester in the first place instead of in athens, ga, where i had been offered full tuition coverage including books, room and board; it's why i didn't even bother to respond to cornell when they told me i had been waitlisted. i had applied to those schools in a moment of feverish delusion, thinking, like all of my other classmates, that college was something you did for yourself, that it was where all of your ultimate becoming could finally begin. but i knew even before i'd put the stamps on the envelopes that i was kidding myself; i wouldn't go. such a complete removal, that sort of extricating... five other college applications went unmailed. i found them at the bottom of my locker at the end of the year. but that's neither here nor there. as i was saying...

every day for my entire christmas break i sat on the bathroom floor with ophelia for close to an hour, hand-feeding her. if i could get a full eighth of a can of food into her i considered it a triumph. it was the only time she ate. her eyes were sinking into her skull. she walked around with her belly tucked up from pain. she continued to attempt to murder kismet every time she saw him. my family continued to ridicule my excessive concern. i didn't know how i wasn't insane.

i finally forced my mother to agree to sit with ophelia while she ate so that i could go back to school. kismet and i returned to worcester, and i called home every few days to make sure ophelia was okay, and i was always assured that i had nothing to worry about, and kismet and i went home in march for spring break,

and nothing had changed. there was ophelia on top of the kitchen cabinets, her stomach sucked up into her spine, her fur standing on end, my mother puttering about below her as if every kitchen ceiling housed a sickly, enraged, emaciated black cat. and i knew that she wasn't going to get any better that way.

so i left kismet there, the doing of which broke my heart as he tried to climb into the carrier that he knew was his and had been hiding all his toys in, as he ran in front of me when i tried to walk out the front door with ophelia in my hand instead of him, confused as all get-out because i had never left him anywhere before, ever, in the just over a year that he had been alive. but leave him i did, because what else could i do, ophelia had picked me just the same as he had, and she had done it first, and i owed her...

which seems to have been precisely what she was thinking, because inside of two weeks she was better than new, eating and playing and jumping up onto every newcomer's shoulders and in her sleep all wrapped around my throat, just like old times. brat, rotten conniving selfish sneaky deceitful brat.

but don't i love her more than life. and i understand, almost, i think, at least a bit, how all those boys in relationships with girls that make me want to strangle myself with my own intestinal tract can be in love with those girls. so they're snotty, and they're selfish, and they're vain and demanding and whiny, and when you go out for an hour without telling them where you're going they're standing at the door howling when you get home. so what? because sometimes in the middle of the night you wake up and you don't know why, and you turn your head and there she is next to you, purring in her sleep, and you reach over and put your hand very gently on the back of her head, and she stretches silently and curves into you, and her tiny sigh is the only exquisite sound.

is that right?

my kismet has grown up just fine. he's four and a half now, about the size of a small moose. he loves my dad. when i visit he stays right with me the whole time. i bring him toys, he hides them in his bed and sleeps on top of them like a furry hen. i love him desperately, i miss him every day.

but here's my diva, all glossy and spry and convinced she's the queen of the universe . . . we do what we have to do, i guess. these damned ties, all these senseless insurmountable loves that keep us all the ways we swear to ourselves we aren't going to be anymore, that keep us in these places that we can't for the life of us figure out what we're doing in. i hate this city. i hate this state. i'd pack one duffel bag and leave everything for a cot in a hostel in new orleans

if there weren't all these strings, if any of them might stretch.

meet ophelia. here, on my thigh, the holes are small but they're deep, you can see all five, in a circle, white scars and red wounds where she sinks her claws into me. and next to them, here, this is a birthmark, it's the same as my sister's, you'll find it on all of us, my sister, my mother, and me.