Ten
This happens when I am sixteen. She’s in the shower. I’m in my room reading when I realize that the water has been running for a long time. I knock, ask, “Amma, are you all right? Is everything okay?” I am answered only by the hiss of water running. I stand with my ear against the door, the surface of my lobe melded to its cool surface. There are odd noises, small animal sounds. I sit on the ground, back against the door. It feels like those days when I was small, sitting outside her bedroom door, waiting and hearing nothing.
Time goes by. Maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty, then a quiet click. I jump up, grasp the knob, and turn. She is staring at her wrists held over the sink, blood dripping on the knife dropped there. The white porcelain is streaked as if with food coloring. I turn the water on, grasp her arms from behind, hold her wrists to the flow. Flesh opens; the water runs deep red, then rosy, then a delicate pink. She is muttering. “He left us. He left us. I didn’t do anything. It’s my fault. I didn’t do anything.”
I turn her to me, dab at her wound with a towel. Wrench the door of the cupboard behind her head open, grasp a tube and slide antiseptic gel along her wrist. A long thin cut revealing the layers of her flesh like strata: pink flesh, white fat, red muscle, the colors of her interior.
I pull the edges together, cleanly, neatly, wrap long strips of white bandage around her torn skin. I say, “Why did you do this?” She stares down at her wrists as if they belong to a stranger. She says, “Why did he go? Why did he leave us?”
“I don’t know, Amma.”
I put her in her bed. Take to my own bed. Lie there, my heart opening and closing in the rhythm of an anemone, something that passes salt water through its tender, delicate self in order to live.
*
I beg and beg for a pet. I miss Judy and Punch more than almost anything else. One day Amma comes home with a tabby kitten, all glinting amber eyes, rose-petal softness, and tiny thorned paws. He is supposed to be my kitten, but it is Amma whom he claims. Tucked under my mother’s chin, the kitten falls asleep, and she whispers, “Isn’t this the sweetest thing?” Her hand covers the tiny body. She says, “So small and all alone. No one to take care of him. He must think I’m his mother.” Tenderness in her voice.
Catney Houston, she calls it, ignoring gender and after the pop star who is singing her heart out on the radio, newly discovered, young, and luminescent. The kitten reminds her of the singer, my mother says, something about his meow—loud, soulful, and diva-ish.
I hate Catney Houston as much as I hate Whitney Houston. It is impossible to turn on the radio without the singer crying out about an adulterous love affair or issuing passionate invitations to dance. At home my mother strokes the kitten, follows it with her eyes, talks to it in that baby voice. I hate the way it winds around her feet and insists on sleeping curled next to her. When it comes meowing to me, I push it away with my foot. Not so very hard, but enough to make it jump in surprise.
At home alone, I slip scissors around its whiskers, snip on one side, and then quickly before he leaps away, on the other side. The cat looks lopsided now. When she comes home, Amma says, “Why did you do this?” with a bewildered look and holds it even tighter. I shrug. I don’t know why I did it. I was just bored. There was nothing else to do.
Another day, Amma is late from work. I lie on the couch waiting, watching TV and trying not to pay attention to the ticking clock. On the ledge the cat is also waiting, and from its suddenly pricked ears and the steam-engine rumble in its throat, I know that my mother is approaching. The door opens and she stoops to sweep up the animal in a hail of kisses, a soft glut of love noises. “I’m going to bed,” I say. I get up and stretch, and still they do not look at me.
Now always this animal is on her lap or next to her head on the sofa. The cat, sensing my rancor in the way that animals do, hisses when I come near, shrinks away as if I have hit it. Amma says, “I don’t know why he doesn’t like you. He’s so loving with everyone else.”
*