Cat's eye полностью

My mother did most of the cooking but it was not her favorite thing. She was not fond of housework generally. In the steamer trunk in the cellar, along with a cut-velvet evening gown from the twenties and a pair of riding jodhpurs, there were several things made of real silver, ornate salt and pepper shakers, sugar tongs in the shape of chickens’ feet, rose bowls lavish with silver flowers. They were down there, wrapped in tissue paper and turning black, because otherwise they would have to be polished. Our knives and forks and spoons had to be polished, with an old toothbrush for the decorations. The scrolled legs under the dining table were dust catchers, and so were the kinds of objects—doodads, my mother called them—other people kept on their mantelpieces. But she liked making cakes, though this may only be something I prefer to think.

What would I have done if I had been my mother? She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my lips where I’d pulled off patches of the skin. If it were happening now, to a child of my own, I would know what to do. But then? There were fewer choices, and a great deal less was said. I once did a series about my mother. It was six images, six panels, like a double triptych or a comic book, arranged in two groups, three on top, three underneath. The first was my mother in colored pencil, in her city house kitchen and her late-forties dress. Even she had a bib apron, blue flowers with navy piping, even she wore it, from time to time. The second image was the same figure in collage, made from the illustrations from old Ladies’ Home Journals and Chatelaines, not the photos but the artwork, with those rancid greens and faded blues and dirty-looking pinks. The third was the same figure, white on white, the raised parts pipe cleaners contoured side by side and glued onto a white cloth-covered backing. Reading across from left to right it looked as if my mother was slowly dissolving, from real life into a Babylonian bas-relief shadow.

The bottom set of images went the other way: first the pipe-cleaners, then the same image in collage, then the final one in full-colored realistic detail But this time my mother was in her slacks and boots and her man’s jacket, making chokecherry jam over the outdoor fire. You could read it as a materialization, out of the white pipe cleaner mist into the solid light of day.

I called the whole series Pressure Cooker. Because of when it was done and what was going on in those years, some people thought it was about the Earth Goddess, which I found hilarious in view of my mother’s dislike of housework. Other people thought it was about female slavery, others that it was a stereotyping of women in negative and trivial domestic roles. But it was only my mother cooking, in the ways and places she used to cook, in the late forties.

I made this right after she died. I suppose I wanted to bring her back to life. I suppose I wanted her timeless, though there is no such thing on earth. These pictures of her, like everything else, are drenched in time.

I finish my cappuccino, pay for it, leave a tip for the imitation Italian waiter who served it to me. I know I won’t buy any food in the food hall, I’m too intimidated by it. Ordinarily, or in some other city, I would not be: I am a grown-up and used to shopping. But how could I find, down here, anything I want right now? I’ll stop in at some corner store on the way back, some place where they sell milk till midnight and slightly stale sliced white bread. Such stores are run, now, by people the color of Mr. Banerji, or by Chinese people. They aren’t necessarily any friendlier than the pasty-white people who used to run such stores, but the general content of their disapproval is more easily guessed; though not the details. I head back up the escalator, into the perfumed fug of the ground floor. The air is bad here, there’s too much musk, the overpowering scent of money. I make it into the open air and walk west, past the murderous mannequins in the windows, past the bivalvular City Hall.

Ahead of me there’s a body lying on the sidewalk. People walk around it, look down, look away, keep going. I see their faces coming toward me bearing that careful rearrangement of the features that’s meant to say, This is none of my business.

When I get up even, I see that this person is a woman. She’s lying on her back, staring straight at me.

“Lady,” she says. “Lady. Lady.”

That word has been through a lot. Noble lady, Dark Lady, she’s a real lady, old-lady lace, Listen lady, Hey lady watch where you’re going, Ladies’ Room, run through with lipstick and replaced with Women. But still the final word of appeal. If you want something very badly you do not say Woman, Woman, you say Lady, Lady. As she is saying now.