Sue Ellen Thompson

My parents argued over wallpaper. Would stripes make the room look larger? He would measure, cut, and paste; she’d swipe the flaws out with her brush. Once it was properly hung, doubt would set in. Would the floral have been a better choice? Then it would grow until she was certain: it had to go. Divorce terrified me as a child. I didn’t know what led to it, but I had my suspicions. The stripes came down. Up went the flowers. Eventually it became my definition of marriage: bad choices, arguments whose victors time refused to tell, but everything done together and done well.

I bring the cat’s body home from the vet’s in a running-shoe box held shut with elastic bands. Then I clean the corners where she has eaten and slept, scrubbing the hard bits of food from the baseboard, dumping the litter and blasting the pan with a hose. The plastic dishes I hide in the basement, the pee- soaked towel I put in the trash. I put the catnip mouse in the box and I put the box away, too, in a deep dirt drawer in the earth. When the death-energy leaves me, I go to the room where my daughter slept in nursery school, grammar school, high school, I lie on her milky bedspread and think of the day I left her at college, how nothing could keep me from gouging the melted candle-wax out from between her floorboards, or taking a razor blade to the decal that said to the firemen, “Break this window first.” I close my eyes now and enter a place that’s clearly expecting me, swaddled in loss and then losing that, too, as I move from room to bone-white room in the house of the rest of my life.

This is all I am to her now: a pair of legs in running shoes, two arms strung with braided wire. She heaves a carton sagging with CDs at me and I accept it gladly, lifting with my legs, not bending over, raising each foot high enough to clear the step. Fortunate to be of any use to her at all, I wrestle, stooped and single-handed, with her mattress in the stairwell, saying nothing as it pins me, sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner, spiny cactus, five-pound sacks of rice and lentils slumped against my heart: up one flight of stairs and then another, down again with nothing in my arms.