A Cat Called Charlotte Perkins Gilman Sam O’Brien

The man you swore you’d marry is finally moving out, God bless him. You were starting to worry that he didn’t have a backbone. He’s shuffling about your room, blinking the wet out of his eyes, like a schoolboy awaiting the public whipping of his bare ass-cheeks. He picks things up and then throws them down again in a grief-ridden frenzy, attempting to distinguish his from yours.

‘What you’re attempting to do right now is—by definition—impossible,’ you say, sitting upright in bed, your legs crossed, hair parted neatly down the center. Pious and un-human, like a medieval painting. You find it fascinating how little evidence there ever is that you give a damn. 

A t-shirt that you used to sleep in from a 5K that he ran lies limp in his arms. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he reassures.

Well, according to his logic, you get the house. All three floors, with the high vaulted ceilings, the big airy kitchen with the glass walls, tucked at the edge of the Alaskan wilderness—you alone signed the lease, put down the deposit, purchased and subsequently neglected all of the now-rotting plants. But it’s August, and he hasn’t slept at his own place since the New Year. Your toothbrushes stand upright, blue and pink, in a Mason jar by the sink. You fall asleep each night to the leafy alders swaying and stroking your windowsill, his palm lodged in the space between your shoulder blades. You wake up to the sound of ravens bickering, the smell of him frying eggs for two.

It had always seemed as though he were the most liable for hurt: he is younger, hopelessly romantic, with bright blue trusting eyes. He writes you bad songs, plucking them out for you on the ukulele, while you smile at him from behind a pair of tight lips. But you’ve gotta hand it to him: while you are busy waffling and making bad jokes and dodging serious questions, only to beg for him to hate-fuck you in a McDonald’s bathroom, he knows—long before you do—when it’s time to call it good. He knows how to finish what he’s started; whereas for you, nothing ever properly begins or ends, it just continues. 

He studies the t-shirt for a moment. Now he is crying. He is a man. He is a boy. He wants to be held. You are stoic. You are a girl—no, you’re a woman. Your breasts spill out of your shirt like cantaloupes. You hold a mortgage. You refuse to hold him. He folds the shirt into the box. You watch from the window as he loads up his truck, inches his car backward down your too-narrow, too-steep driveway, before hitting the gas and throttling forth.

In the early days, you made all sorts of marvelous promises, whispering them back and forth in ecstatic bursts while coiled in a heap on the floor, breathless, your future spooling out before you. Your faces flushed with wine from a box. I love you. I want to marry you. Buy a house. Raise a cat. A cat, who you agreed if you ever did get, you’d call Ernestine Hayes, after the Alaskan writer whose words you fell in love with around the same time you fell in love with each other. Maybe you’d read to her: Blonde Indian and The Tao of the Raven. A feline with a taste for postcolonial literature.  Each wild declaration, each heady, farfetched promise, came up organically as if pulled from the earth. You two built something together out of moss and rock and worms and dirt. 

But as summer bleeds into fall, it’s surprisingly easy to return to the normal cadence of existence. Your house becomes a staging ground for Real Life. You wake up early each morning, a woman with a job and a nearly paid-off mortgage. You sit by the window and drink coffee, meditate, make lists of goals and personal projects. You float around town in floor-length skirts, hair braided down the side, humming songs of your own improvisation. You stroll through the forest alone and think a lot about your life, the many brilliant things you could do with it. The tall trees and mountains help you put things In Perspective. You get coffee with acquaintances. People at work seem impressed by all the ideas you have for expansion, improvement. You get promoted not once, but thrice. You read modernist classics before bed and decide that you will commit to reading one novel a week, which means fifty-two a year. Four thousand, one hundred and thirty-one overall, if you make it to the average life expectancy of an American woman. You are usually asleep by ten, your body achieving a natural, circadian rhythm. 

So who says you can’t get the cat? You’re an evolved woman. You’re at the phase in your life where you can invite friends over for things called ‘dinner parties’ and serve them home-cooked meals on reusable plate ware, wine in big bulbous glasses as opposed to red Solo cups. You are chipping away at a graduate degree in the evenings, and sometimes you talk about starting a garden. A cat, at this point, seems inevitable. Sure, you can’t name her Ernestine Hayes—that version of your life was buried alive a month ago. So, you’ll call her something else: Charlotte Perkins Gilman. You loved The Yellow Wallpaper in high school because it was frightening—unreal yet somehow plausible—as all good stories are. 

September smells of rotting fish. You find it invigorating. One day, you march out into the damp air and to the local animal shelter to watch from the other side of the window as the kittens wriggle and play. And then you see her: sleek, metallic-gray, with big yellow eyes. She’s sitting to the side, eyeing the others as they tug at yarn balls and leap at beams of light projected on the wall. She’s suspicious of them, their witless, primitive joy. She makes them look trite. She is perfect. You pay in cash, stick her in a tote bag—her little head poking out warily—and walk a mile home in the wet fishy air. 

As you arrive at your house, your phone buzzes. Mother, and therefore, Father, too. You pick up out of habit, reflex. A lack of self-preservation instinct. You’d left home and moved across the continent five years ago because they never gave you space to breathe and grow, and you thought if you could put three thousand miles between yourself and them, you’d finally stand a chance. 

 ‘What happens when we’re old and sick and dying?’ they demand. 

‘Well, it’s a good thing you aren’t. Old, sick, or dying, that is.’ 

‘But what happens when we are?’ 

When the man entered your life, they softened a bit; love was a reason they could understand. But now the man is gone, and it’s as if you’ve left them all over again. You hang up the phone, something quiet and persistent gnawing at your insides. 

 As evening falls, you set up Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her new habitat: a litter box filled with wood chips and sand, smoked salmon in a dish, a nest of pillows and scarves by the open window. You sit on the couch and light up a joint to watch her as she settles. She circles the nest, nosing and pawing it now and then, before scampering toward her litter box, where she curls up and falls asleep instantly. You consider prodding her awake, perhaps out of some vague concern for infection, but she looks so sweet, so at peace in her own filth, the black slits of her eyes fluttering pleasurably, and who are you to take that away from her?

It’s time you put yourself to bed, anyway. You brush your teeth and floss and do a face mask, prop yourself up by the windowsill with some pillows and a paperback Kate Chopin, using a creased sheet of paper as a bookmark. The book is strange, but real life is stranger, and the bookmark keeps catching your eye, reminding you.

The man you thought you would marry went to a lot of therapy in his youth to help him process his parents’ divorce. As a result, in the immediate aftermath of your breakup, he uses dumb phrases such as ‘healthy separation’ and ‘toxic codependency’ and has made it a personal policy of his to block your number, unfollow you on all social media accounts, and never contact you again. When he cleaned out your shared bedroom, he did a thorough job of separating his things from yours to avoid the painful bureaucracy of a prolonged breakup.

But you are an expert at prolonging things. The day he left, you managed to filch a page from the notebook in which he wrote you songs, and other things, apparently, that he hadn’t bothered to share. The page contains his unnervingly neat scrawl: J. is like The Lightbulb. You can’t recall life without her. and then, several lines down, in different color ink, the scrawl becomes more erratic, littered with cross-outs: J= lightbulb. Bright enough to blind you, with her big, electric promises.  And then several lines past that, the writing is barely legible, but when you pin it up against the wall, smooth it out, and squint at it, you can decipher: J. is a lightbulb. She’ll convince you that you need her, even in a nightless Alaskan summer. Even when you’re better off just lighting a candle.  Now, you leave this out on the night table on his side of the bed. Sometimes you use it as a bookmark. You pick it up and crumple it and uncrumple it every now and then, looking at it for a long while, staring at the blue and black etchings on the page,  memorizing the way the letters look upside-down, sideways, tilted on an angle. There is a pattern to it. It shifts and rearranges itself. Like a Rorschach test, where you see whatever you are. You could conjure the image in your sleep, even as it shifts and rearranges itself beyond your comprehension. 

In October, it is still warm enough to keep the windows open, but only if you are brave. The rain is horizontal, so the inside of your bedroom is often needlessly damp. One night you roll yourself a thick joint, crank open the window closest to your bed, and slink beneath the covers, keeping a single hand postured on the sill. Flicking ashes into your woodsy expanse of a backyard. You are bleary-eyed, musty, and recumbent when Charlotte Perkins Gilman mounts your bed in a single, startling spring. It’s easy to forget about her, and on the rare occasion she makes her presence known, you notice something new: she has a gremlin-like aspect to her, her yellow eyes bulging like Gollum. That night as you fall asleep you imagine how it would feel to lift her up by the haunches and fling her out the window. To tell her, as she howls into the night air, that you love her. To sit and watch her fall three flights before landing with a satisfying splat in your spice garden.

November contains moments of rare and terrifying beauty, moments where the rain halts and the sun shines and it may as well be summer. Moments where the sky turns orange-pink at three in the afternoon, and you are seized by a sudden, inexplicable joy. You take a walk through the forest, your skirt hiked up to your knees, and arrive at a clearing. Stepping out from beneath the tree cover into a pool of light, you are seized by that feeling, that feeling that you know you’d better hold fast because soon it will be gone. Sometimes you think about leaving this place, about starting over, but then moments like these halt you, convince you that it’s okay if you’d rather just drift through this half-life rather than build a new one, only to watch it die slowly and painfully, yet again, from sheer neglect. 

You arrive home to find Charlotte Perkins Gilman sitting on your stoop, a gaping wound in her head. It oozes yellow-green pus and there’s crust along the sides. You sprint to the vet—guilt makes an Olympian out of you—Charlotte Perkins Gilman swinging in her tote by your side. But the vet is unperturbed.

‘A burst abscess,’ he explains, baring squarish, white teeth, ‘completely normal for our feline friends.’ He dabs some ointment on her head, patches her up with gauze, and adds, ‘If you’ve noticed her acting strange recently, this is why.’

You haven’t. You barely notice her at all, but of course, you can’t say this. He sends you off with a complimentary pouch of ointment— ‘that’ll do the trick’—instructs you to apply it twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. 

In December, the darkness comes so suddenly that if you don’t rush to catch the sun when it first peeks out, you might miss it entirely. It becomes easy to neglect the simplest of tasks: brushing your teeth, washing your hair, applying ointment to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s frothing wound. One such day, you peer out your window in your clothing from yesterday and find that night has descended before you’d had the chance to seize the day. But there is a certain comfort to this: If the day never started, then it never happened, and you don’t have to apologize for letting it slip through your fingers. You think you could go on sleeping like this. Pivoting on your heels, you turn to find Charlotte Perkins Gilman in a heap on your bedroom floor. You prod the lump of her back, confirming. And the feeling is this: not disgust, not horror, not even a tinge of sadness. Instead: resentment. No one prepared you for this. Your mother never lectured you on how to deal with the festering corpse of your neglected pet. Besides, the ground is frozen and unsuited for a proper burial.

But lucky for you, there is the Internet. An online forum suggests that when a pet dies, it’s best to store them in a freezer to avoid rot—the fact of death hard enough without the smell. At first, this suggestion appalls you, a dead cat bumping up against your frozen mangoes and Cherry Garcia and other things you don’t eat, but could. Then you remember: you have one of those industrial-sized freezers for stockpiling fish and meat, a relic from the Alaskan man whose life was once indistinguishable from yours. He left it behind because he couldn’t fit it into his truck, but also because for him there will be other houses with other freezers and other women to fall in and out of love with. He possesses a beautiful optimism that allows him to believe in such things. You don’t hunt, you don’t fish, and if you believed in other possibilities the way he did, you might start to wonder what, exactly, you are still doing here. But not right now. Right now, you are a woman with a dead cat. 

So you retrieve a pair of rubber gloves from the cabinet beneath the sink, an opaque garbage bag, flattening it out on the concrete step to use as rolling paper. Swaddling Charlotte Perkins Gilman like a botched loaf of bread, you release her into the freezer. She drops with a thud, and you slam the lid shut, with a rush of dizzying relief.

As winter dissolves into spring into summer, the house is no longer a staging ground for Real Life. The house is where it begins and ends. The strings of text messages from the acquaintances who perhaps were hoping to progress into friends have petered out. And your employers are beginning to suspect that your Big Ideas were just that. Your days become a series of quiet in-betweens, moments where it’s just you, trapped within your same four walls, startling at the sight of your own Self in the mirror, how she continues to exist, despite being subjected to utter neglect. The moment of silence before bed, once you’ve tossed your phone across the room and flicked off your bedside lamp, the moment between waking and awareness in which his hand would have once, in another life, reached across the sprawl of sheets for the space between your shoulder blades. Sometimes, something gray and formless will slink across the periphery of your vision. Sometimes the cat flap will swing, sometimes the tapestry lining the wall will begin to move, the patterns contorting themselves into something nimble and feline. Sometimes, you feel a yellow light like ice on your back. By June, the sun barely sets, and neither do you. Your life becomes one long sleepless night. 

Years pass in this fashion. Your body grows softer and rounder. You still jump and yelp rounding the corner in your hallway, not that anyone’s around to take notice of it. The man you once thought you’d marry calls you up to tell you that he’s married, breaking his no-contact pact for reasons completely beyond you, and his voice sounds different, strained, like that of a pleasant stranger and not at all like how you remembered. You almost wonder if you’d imagined it all—the man, the life. But then again, the evidence is everywhere: the way half of your bed is permanently made up, and how you make excuses when other men with big glasses and kind smiles ask you out for cocktails as if you hadn’t already started enough things you couldn’t finish for this lifetime and the next.

Your parents grow old and one day, your father dies. It is expected, in the way that age and illness prepare you for such things, but also not at all. You are consistently bad at predicting the ways in which your life will come apart at the seams.  

Your mother takes to calling you daily, sometimes twice, a grown woman cleaved in two. ‘I’ve lost my best friend,’ she whispers. Each time you speak, her voice seems to have grown smaller, as if decaying by halves. 

And so you quit your job, decide to move back home, as perhaps you always knew you would. The guilt of moving so far away so long ago—creeping up behind you for years—now coils itself around your legs and smothers you. It’s surprising how easy it is to uproot your existence when all you have holding you in place are logistics.

And it is not until the night before you are set to leave, your whole life folded into two suitcases, that Charlotte Perkins Gilman manifests herself to you fully. She appears to you like a silhouette, but the opposite. Instead of the absence of color and light, she is the absence of form: grey, crackling, and boneless. She sits on the edge of your bed and for the first time, you find her phantom presence calming. She will remain a crystalized corpse in the freezer for the new homeowners to find. It’s her house now. 

Tomorrow you will go home, be a good daughter, be someone worth loving. Because despite your best efforts, there are certain kinds of love that you can’t slough off, leave to die. These go on living, with or without your care. You’ve made loads of promises in your silly little life; it’s time you made good.

 Your grieving mother waits.

Sam O’Brien is a writer from New Jersey. She holds a masters in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh and a BA from Amherst College. Her short fiction has been published in Tidal Echoes, Jenny Magazine, and LikelyRed. She was shortlisted for the Magic Oxygen Literary Prize and received an honorable mention from the Writer’s Digest Short Story Competition. She attended the 2019 Alderworks Artists and Writers Retreat.

24 December 2021