If Blanca
BY LILY KAYLOR HONORÉ
If your tongue repeatedly protrudes in a trefoil cupped shape, like an embellishment in a medieval illuminated manuscript, that means death, or so I understood that night.
If I knew how to articulate emotions, I wouldn’t be buying dolls on eBay, pouring sugar out of sacks. A doll hospital might require small square teeth, a Victorian red plaster tongue, not unlike Saint Anthony’s own, glass-encased in Padua.
If Blanca. The vet, staring at the screen, tells me that the weight loss is insignificant. She sees only old numbers, she doesn’t look up at the still-alive cat. 4.5 pounds, down from 13, Blanca totters. Still alive, still alive.
There has been a change: she’s not an It – but she has become Her, her body, she is no longer You.
- Bedmates
Why the fuck were my neck, shoulders, and arms now melded into one radiant torqued line of cramp? The weird posture from the previous night, forty minutes of leaning forward over Blanca on my mattress, talking to her and petting her while she died. It was a position not unlike fucking, complete with worrying about neighbors right below me and trying not to be too loud. Eleven years with Blanca, definitely my longest LTR – long-term relationship – and, since I’m in some strange period of intentional celibacy For The Sake of Art (or the sake of Not Crazy) since K. and I broke up, also my most recent bedmate.
As Blanca was dying, tragicomically she scrambled out of my lap and over the edge of my bed, falling into the crevice between the mattress and the wall. It was midnight, everyone in the building asleep, and I had to reach and pull and dig the cat out; no, come back, don’t die there, wedged in the crack, in this tiny closet-turned-bedroom where there’s no way to pull the bed away from the wall, the bed jammed on three sides into the already coffinlike closet, toes outward, in defiance of all rules of feng shui.
This is the second time I’ve intimately seen a cat die of natural causes. The first time was K.’s elderly cat, Scotch, during the first year that K. and I were together. I came in at the end of Scotch’s life, knowing only the frail being, and the stories; theirs was a relationship of 21 years. That morning, K. was in her armchair, cradling the cat to her chest, and I was scooched over on the living room carpet, hugging K.’s legs. From my angle, I could see what K. could not: Scotch’s face, turned outward, and the greenish vomit spilling forth in the last act of Scotch’s living body.
- Lesbian Rules
Those early 20th century lesbian writers who took on the tropes of the decadent damned beautifully sinning lesbian from the 19th century works of Balzac and Baudelaire, and wrote their own poems with an adopted vocabulary, their own real stories expressed in the fetishizing words of those male fictioneers. As if some ‘tribe’ began to behave and to think of themselves only in the terms of their ‘discovering’ anthropologists.
Lesbian rules (a pliant measure, that which is made of lead and conforms to the form.)
Lesbian Rule No. 1: whereby girlfriends, having been for years exposed to your secrets and family dramas, are now, post-amicable-breakup, molded into new family members.
Two years ago, K. broke off our romantic relationship in one quick eruption, dumping my garbage-bagged belongings on the carpet outside my door; after a short period of adjustment we became close friends. In a similar manner, my other San Francisco ex-girlfriend, D., and I have been friends since approximately two weeks and one day after our last fight in 1997.
- Hallmark
The thermostat is held onto the wall with packing tape; there’s heat for 23 seconds at a time before the slick tape unsticks itself, the wiring disconnects. A hole where the screw was leaks 100-year-old plaster dust. In front, a tasteful card informs:
THE HARDEST PART OF LOVING A PET IS SAYING GOOD-BYE
I waited a week. In case someone went to Walgreens and saw that Hallmark has a LOSS OF PET category in the SYMPATHY section. Then I bought the card myself.
Exiting my apartment building, the day after Blanca died, I saw a hot pink mini delivery van for bougie mini cupcakes, parking at the meter. And I hovered at the gate, not stepping down into 24th Street foot traffic, because I actually thought for a moment that Someone had ordered me cupcakes. I don’t know that I even particularly like cupcakes, but that is when I knew that, if one has sat up late at night with a dying cat, Someone should send cupcakes.
(verso) THIS CARD IS MADE WITH PAPER FROM WELL-MANAGED FORESTS.
Many hyphens for one greeting card.
Is this why I can’t say goodbye, I’m spelling it wrong?
I suppose we are to note that LOVING and LOSING differ only by a letter.
- the other world
It was early January, 2019, when Blanca stopped eating. K. was out of town, gone for a month rigid with agony caring for her didn’t-want-to-be-cared-for elderly mother. D. drove us to the SPCA, where the vet suggested baby food, chicken puree in little jars.
My teenager cat, spiraling back to infancy, the body closing down; swaddled in worn velvet, silent babe, take pap, take butter on a fingertip, take anything.
One week after my cat died, K.’s brother died, unexpectedly, alone on the floor of his apartment, far from family. It was kidney failure for both of them. And so K. stayed on, another two months, driving through the country’s interior to box up his life, circling her own frozen hell. In her parallel realm, the mother’s lost memories, the brother’s last moments, might they somehow be found? I’ve hit backspace on the words for the morgue, for the coroner’s photographs, but I still see her driving, driving on ice-slick roads, while her real car and her real life sit unoccupied in San Francisco. She’s there, and I’m here, and her parked car grows moss; not just what would have been my ride to the vet, but my ride to the crematory. I have not had time to dispose of my cat’s body, not one free day in which to mourn. My grief on ice as well.
- Sarcophagus
I’d say the death of my cat is affecting me in many ways, not least of which is that I can’t really cook, since she’s taking up one whole side of my freezer, and I’m not about to balance a half-quart of soup on top of her cloth-wrapped body. She is opaquely covered, contours softened by successive layers of household materials: like the obsidian outer shells of the Louvre’s Egyptian sarcophagi, asterisks chipped in granite for the night sky – or like a manic television testimonial against freezer burn. I wrapped her in a length of red satin which had once wrapped around me for a party outfit, half-concealing the important bits. I had to wrap her in the fabric first, because it is awful to slide a cat into a plastic bag. Of course I know she’s not alive, but the since-childhood prohibition of plastic bags covering the face remains. Ingrained as well is automatically turning the saucepan handle inward on the stovetop, though I’ve never had a child of my own and now never will, I still had younger sisters, and know to do this, and silently correct youngest-child K.’s pot handle placement on her stove, though all in her apartment are over forty and unlikely to reach up and scald themselves by mistake.
- Discount City
I don’t go to church, but I do find soothing ritual in the halls of commerce, picking up and setting down again objects in neighborhood stores. The week after Blanca died I went to Discount City, looking for I know not what. In stately processional I walked the dollar store aisles. The green awning is now repainted “1.50 and up,” the newest emporium of Chinese export plastic wares and made-in-Mexico toiletries to open on that same stretch of Mission Street that has held, and seen closed, so many others. I examined the heavy wire in metallic colors, for use in some supervised child’s craft; there is an odd back corner of brand-name American sets of pipe-cleaners with complicated instructions, as though an educational toy store in Noe Valley had exploded, bits landing down the hill, now hung up among the unmarked cellophane bags of tiny plastic pink or blue baby buggies, the tinier blue or pink plastic crosses, for some baby shower function that I don’t understand because of the many layers of gauze between me and whoever’s culture that would be, me different and uncomprehending because white not Latina, because grew up middle class in that upper middle class suburb, because we were atheists, because my unmarried mother went to the opera, because I was a bastard.
- The space where she is not
Shall I just keep her in the freezer, at a not-unfriendly distance? Keep, along with everything else in this apartment? Boxed journals, vintage gowns spilling out of bags, the 1930s veiled hat bought with babysitting money in 1988. The love of things. The ownership of things. The French think the Anglophone use of the possessive article childlike. But it is my freezer because I am an adult and have my apartment and this is what is my identity, this residing in this residence, this street address. If I were not here, who would I be?
Wrap the body in gold wires, preserve the outlines’ shape, A chalk line around the Sun.
Thin-beaten metal to hold the impression of her flanks, the space she takes up in air, record this before she becomes only air. Hesitate over bathtub clots of hair: harvest myself, mingle my trimmings with Blanca’s bones; mixed, we are enough carbon to form a diamond.
The thingness that is death.
Traders in balm in pharaonic Egypt drew salts from a dry lakebed, Lebanon cedar, myrrh. Beeswax and bitumen, mastic tears from Chios in blue faience jars. Somewhere I have a postcard of a linen-wrapped cat, from that one Italian winter. A Southern California pet taxidermist offers “Paw Preservation,” one foreleg affixed to a keyring hook, placed on a pedestal. (Pedestal, from the Latin for foot.) Which paw could I choose?
All her bones in a box of worship. Toothbrush-cleaned, ruby-stuck, a bone saint.
- Grief is frozen depression is frozen they are not the same are they the same
Be paralyzed in every decision. Worry about homeless people. Worry about not having the correct notebook for a To Do list. Save food packaging, the inner white cardboard might be good for making a card for somebody. In the rasp of sleeve buttons at the edge of a wooden table hear the cat raking the plastic pan. Recycling sack fills itself and slumps to the floor: the cat too. Hold before me in anxious offering, three dollars to the man lying on the sidewalk in the rain. Sort my three kinds of garbage. Worry about the garbage. Childhood = freedom to think that there is such a place as away. There is no away in the throwing away. It will always be somewhere, ready to hurt someone.
The empty dental floss container, so well-designed. Deep marine teal, glitter invisible unless you look closely, that metal biter. Unrefillable and probably unrecyclable in this community. What is my community. I pick up all the books by local poets and then put them down again, instead spend a dollar on a book about frogs. That is fiction. The frog book is free, but I rescue it for the friend out of state who might want it, when she comes back, when she comes back to this state. What is this state. The state of not-grief. I am in a state of grief, she is in another.
Who will love the floss container?
- _____
When I hear something and think for a second she is still alive, I don’t imagine her as in the last year, jumping and missing, her blind falls from attempted chair leaps making me cry; instead, her former self, the well cat I hardly remember in conscious thought, is the one who jumps out in my subconscious associations. I’ll never hear her knocking anything over again. The only noise in here will be me. The only life in here will be me. I stay up all hours looking at antique dolls on eBay like a different caricature of a middle-aged lady.
A man in Amsterdam, white-haired now, gives tours of a small museum, built for the cat of his youth.
The cold warmth of Blanca’s bladder releasing, while she lay on my chest, under the blankets in the dark of January. Just clear water running straight through her, odorless, the saline solution from the bag of subcutaneous fluids I’d administered two hours before. The first time, sitting cross-legged on the dirty kitchen floor with her on my thigh, the IV bag hooked on a kitchen cart, the needle went in easily (“She has very thin skin,” said the veterinarian), the cat too stunned or too ill to wrench away. But the second night she convulses on my leg, the will gathered in her scant muscles to power away from me and the thick needle under the skin of her neck.
Kidney disease can cause a change in the breath: K. wondered if anyone was ever physically near enough to her brother to sense this. Is he a poignant figure because it’s just objectively sad, or do I imagine myself dying like that, alone in a one-person apartment? Am I piggybacking on K.’s grief out of loyal friendship, or monstrous vampirehood? I look in the mirror and I don’t like my face. This is new. Through it all I have always thought that I was beautiful, the one steady thought through the mercilessness of childhood and sudden illumination of adolescence and the thin and the fat and the depressed and all of it.
- McDonald’s
The last time I ate across a table from someone was when I bundled my loneliness into McDonald’s on 24th Street and the (possibly a fellow dyke) (probably a substance user) (similar age to me, middle-class-sounding like me) woman stirred creamers and sugar packets into her medium coffee, “That looks like the right color” she said of it, I put my hand to my ear in old lady cupped position and she repeated it, the banal comment, two strangers sharing a table, she said I was lucky (to live here) and I am. I’d said, looking for a way to phrase it politely, “Are you between places right now?” and she half-laughed and said “You could say that. Is it that obvious?” to which I replied “No,” and it wouldn’t be, just the large backpack. And that by now I have fallen in love with three different people experiencing homelessness, and addiction, and had invited all of them to move in.
- Foods for the Dead
I was eating a pomegranate, one year, when I received a call with bad news; the next year, I bought one to place on my household altar. The heavy fruit withers and lightens from within: unseen red beads pull into themselves, and the waxy outer skin dulls and leathers, shrinks to the hexagonal structure of its inner honeycomb pores. Each November, over twenty now, I buy a pomegranate at Casa Maria, to mark the Day of the Dead. I syncretize: Persephone plucked back from Pluto, a grey Parisian cemetery’s Toussaint in 1993, the white rose left on Ravenna marble for Aunt Jenny, 2002. I borrow: Día de los Muertos, as observed in S.F.’s Mission District; a Mexican American neighborhood holiday I stand next to but not inside of. I observe, I observe.
John, Jenny, Titi, Mimi, Kenny. Avon, Pat, Rebeca, Bill, Kenton.
Kathy, Michael, Brigit, Brian, Joel. Alex. Alyx. Bill.
Names to write on slips of paper, thread through chain-link fence at the community celebration in Garfield Park (I walk through the crowds to look at the altars, head down hood up, don’t talk to anyone, don’t paint my face like a pretty calavera.) With such wonder my sister and I had looked up, exiting the 24th Street laundromat at dusk, to see the candlelit procession, the drums, the torchflare dancing body press through narrow muraled Balmy Alley; it was 1996 and no one would ever die but let us heave in ceremonied birth.
- Metacarcinus magister
That first January Sunday in 2019, the night D. dropped me and Blanca off back home from the vet, I finally used the Instacart gift card my sister had given me for my birthday the previous spring, against future illness and grocerying incapacity, or for pleasure. To a single woman who has been living on food stamp allotments for years, $60 all at once for groceries is crazy. I spent it on Gerber’s baby food and, New Year’s treat, a fresh Dungeness crab – I’d never cooked one but it seemed appropriately lavish. Inherited ideas of “fancy:” crab, because my mother loves it, along with raspberries and brie, luxuries to a woman raising three girls as a single parent. Now she buys art books and travels, courtesy of an inheritance from a childless aunt. Aunt Titi, who herself never had the opportunity to attend college, who liked to pretend she’d been an opera singer in her youth, whose fur coat hangs in my closet of unwearable clothes, drank champagne at intermission at the San Francisco Ballet, up the shallow marble steps on the mezzanine of the War Memorial Opera House.
What came to my house wrapped in butcher paper were two detached crab claws, bodiless; pre-cooked and frozen solid. Just as well. Blanca died four days later, so I was in no mood for celebratory crab. And now, spring again, PG&E will turn off the electricity, tomorrow, for a planned day of outages. And so I’m working my way through the frozen food. (Of course, the most important perishable item in my freezer is not foodstuffs but my cat.)
Tucking the frozen crab claws into the too-small vegetable steamer requires folding the claws in on themselves, like a grisly scene from the TV show The Americans, in which a character must break the leg bones of his pretty girlfriend in order to conceal her body in a suitcase.
My body still thinks I can have a baby, erratically sending down blood. I always thought I would raise a child on my own, as our mother did; but my thirties went by in a long haze of depression and clutching at misaligned romances. A bit unfair, to have gotten my brain back, finally hopeful and healthy again, after forty, just when my ovaries are ready to retire.
In the 90s lesbian movie Go Fish (which my friends and I didn’t like but thought we were supposed to) there’s a supposedly sexy fingernail-clipping scene. I kept a nail clipper by the couch, not for paramours but to use on Blanca: after she became blind, she stopped filing her nails down on the sofa arm. I’d have to do it quickly before she protested. Holding each paw, gently pressing to make the claws extend.
So too-briny crab, for my cat Blanca. If she were alive, would she have liked the meat? The fragile orange shell from a California bay, bending under the pressure of my fingers.
