JEZEBEL’S
Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.
It hasn’t happened this morning, either.
I put on my clothes, summer clothes, it’s still summer; it seems to have stopped at summer. July, its breathless days and sauna nights, hard to sleep. I make a point of keeping track. I should scratch marks on the wall, one for each day of the week, and run a line through them when I have seven. But what would be the use, this isn’t a jail sentence; there’s no time here that can be done and finished with. Anyway, all I have to do is ask, to find out what day it is. Yesterday was July the Fourth, which used to be Independence Day, before they abolished it. September First will be Labour Day, they still have that. Though it didn’t used to have anything to do with mothers.
But I tell time by the moon. Lunar, not solar.
I bend over to do up my red shoes; lighter weight these days, with discreet slits cut in them, though nothing so daring as sandals. It’s an effort to stoop; despite the exercises, I can feel my body gradually seizing up, refusing. Being a woman this way is how I used to imagine it would be to be very old. I feel I even walk like that: crouched over, my spine constricting to a question mark, my bones leached of calcium and porous as limestone. When I was younger, imagining age, I would think, Maybe you appreciate things more when you don’t have much time left. I forgot to include the loss of energy. Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I’m only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like the beautiful- sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts.
