It was still there, no doubt about it. She patted her stomach warily, as if she were afraid it would go away with too critical an examination. But it was real -or as real as any present could be inside a box- hidden away, untouchable: Schrödinger’s cat… Some things required faith; not everything in life was a punishment.
Up till now it had been a draw. Meaning, purpose, goal -whatever one called it- was a childhood memory, or maybe a fantasy. The fabric of her life, like an often-mended blouse, was intact but barely recognizeable. Even Bill, who had promised so much at first, had not so much the power of a colored thread in any dream she wove. Nothing distinguished him from a thousand others. He was like a picture that had hung above the bed for years: describable in an instant, but noticed only when missing. He added nothing to her life, subtracted nothing. Were other men the same, she wondered, looking vacantly around the room?
She was sitting in the front room – the back room, actually, since it looked out over an ill-kept back yard of aging trees and spotty grass. It was raining as usual and the rotting boards of the patio seemed to stare blankly at the clouds like old men waiting in their beds to die. The furniture was the same, she thought, itemizing it one by one as if she were still a stock clerk after all these years. A china cabinet made of some cheap wood by her grandfather a century or so before, stood at fragile attention across the room, arthritic and brittle with age. She ticked it off mentally with a sigh, noticing the lack of dishes on its shelves. Like her, it merely occupied space.
A lot of the furniture was like that, though -the couch on which she sat, for example. Even looking at it, she was hard-pressed to name the colour. Its utter banality saved her from the need to classify it as to style or pattern. It merely was; it existed, and was allowed to, simply because it was there. No other reason. Nor did the coffee table distinguish itself, except that it was not the floor, nor was it the same color or texture as the blue-green rug. The room was an occupied space; it was not the kitchen, it was not the bedroom… The room and what it contained -including herself- could best be characterized by what they were not; some inscrutable pique of nature had defined them all by inference only.
Maybe that’s why her life had never changed: Nothing is difficult to rearrange. Until now, that is. She allowed herself a little smile and glanced at her unseen present, her secret. For a moment in her mind, it seemed to glow, the colors expanding and wavering with her breath. What did they call those color-filled boxes you held up to the light and turned? Kaleidoscopes? In the grey, unpolished world she now had a kaleidoscope of her very own.
A brief pain lanced though her lower back, followed by a burning sensation in her groin. Not yet, she thought, clenching her fists tightly against the jolt. But this wasn’t the first time she’d felt its complaint. There was also the pressure -the constant, dragging pressure that made her feel as if all her pelvic organs were going to drop out- and the bloating, to the point of nausea. All to be expected however, and she smiled again, embarrassed by her sudden wealth.
It had been a couple of months since she’d begun to feel different. At first, only the pressure and discomfort after eating -nothing major, and really only noticed because she had nothing else to notice in her life. Well, that wasn’t quite true: Bill had seemed more attentive to her. He said she was losing weight, not eating -that she was changing on him. Bill didn’t like people to change because then he never knew what to expect. But what did it matter what he thought? She could see where she was gaining weight… She was different, and that was that.
Bill seldom confronted her with the change, but she could tell he was concerned. Communication was not something he entered lightly and he often changed his mind on the brink of a sentence. Recently he had been trying to fathom the problem from a distance with inquisitive glances and a puzzled look on his face -attempts, in other words, to make her admit there was something wrong. Admit? What he really wanted was a confession. As if she had done something wrong by not being the routine, predictable Emily. She shrugged and sighed inwardly. Maybe if he just talked about it… Or about something: the weather, the supper, her hair, the time of day -anything. Maybe then it would be alright… Or a least better… But of course in a grey and toneless world, words are just passing clouds, indistinguishable after a while from everything else.
She was interrupted in her reverie by Bill -not the man (he seldom came into this room), but the voice… the command, rather. Ever since she had known him, even his questions had been commands garnished over. Then, at least he had tried to disguise them; now he seldom bothered.
“Emily, what are you doing? You’ll be late for the doctor.”
“In a minute, Bill.” Oh how she hated him sometimes. Hated? Was that true, or was it just painful when he surfaced abruptly from the background where he lived? Possibly where they both lived. Until recently she couldn’t have said where she lived, but of course all that was different now.
She rose slowly to her feet, dizziness stirring the room like pudding -but it didn’t last: things like that are not designed to last. Markers -that’s what she called them- events that rimmed a change of state: up, down, standing or sitting… She did not dwell on the thought, and the dizziness passed as quietly as it had arrived.
She ventured a few tentative steps across the carpet but towards the window and not the door as she had intended. A movement outside had caught her eye and she was captured by the damp, leaf-strewn lawn. A four o’clock wind was mindlessly poking at the balding trees that stood like a living fence around the yard. They, too, were brown, but not what had attracted her. There was also the patio, rambling and broken, where a chair leg had teased the ancient boards apart. It was brown as well. And so was the grass under the rhododendron bush that squatted like a disheveled toad in the middle of the yard, untidy, unadorned… But it was the lawn’s problem, not hers.
She sighed and looked away. But not soon enough; there, almost hidden under a yellowed leaf beside the railing of the decaying deck, she saw it. Only the tail was visible now, but a smeared, red line marked its erratic trail. While she watched, the tail twitched once. A cat, brick-still on the rail above, studied the movement for a moment, then pounced. Emily quickly shut her eyes as a wave of nausea rolled over her.
“Emily! What’s keeping you, woman?” This time it was the man who entered the room. Balding and short, he kept fingering a caterpillar-like moustache on his marshmallow face. He looked out of place in the room -like some waxen, glistening beetle that hadn’t yet scuttled out of sight. His head was perspiring and the dim light from the yard speckled it with tiny shadows. “Emily, I thought I asked you to hurry up!”
She looked at him -or rather, through him- like she had the window. “What? Oh, the doctor… I’d forgotten,” she lied.
He stared at her with unreadable insect eyes. “Forgotten?” he hissed, “You asked me to make the damned appointment in the first place. Christ woman..!” He stomped his foot in anger, but to her the gesture and the words were empty. “I can’t understand you,” he sputtered, choking on his saliva. “For a month you’re sick, and when you finally decide to do something about it besides complain, you forget.”
“I’ve never complained,” she interrupted softly.
His face grew red, and he paused long enough from fingering his moustache to wipe his forehead with his sleeve. It was a sloppy habit, she thought, and blinked twice.
“No, you never complain!” he continued. “Not you. Not in words, anyway; words I could handle. No it’s all the other things: the sighs, the groaning at night… No, you don’t complain, you torment.”
It was meant to be cruel she realized, but it had no effect. The words just disappeared into the cracks of the floor hitting nothing: water sucked down a drain.
He turned abruptly and left the room. “I’ll be in the car,” he shouted at the hallway, then vanished as if he’d never been. She could hear him fussing around by the front door, banging things or dropping them in frustration, but he might as well have been outside for all it mattered to her.
The tail was gone now, she noticed; so was the cat. She shuddered at the hidden, unfair struggle going on somewhere outside, but even as she did, it occurred to her that it probably wasn’t like that at all. Life and death likely snuck past her each day unseen… Like her life.
A sudden spasm of pain shot through her pelvis leaving her nauseated. And a horn somewhere continued its insistent complaint. She smiled as the pain eased slowly from her back. Unseen could be a wonderful thing: it was a gift not yet unwrapped.
