Cat in Glass

B
alanced on the crumbly bedrock cliff at the edge of the old V & T grade, Kathy wondered whether she really wanted to do it, and if so, whether this was really the
way
she wanted to do it. She took a deep breath, then another and another. The jagged rocks and the green valley far below flickered like an old-time movie. Dizzy, she backed up a step and forced herself to breathe more evenly. If she was going to do it, she wanted to do it on purpose—not just hyperventilate herself into unconsciousness and drop over the edge like a sack of potatoes.

The thin, sweet call of a mountain blue-bird drifted down to her from a nearby juniper.

The wild smells of sagebrush and piñon pine and sun-warmed rocks rode on the back of the wind that came up the grade. She really wanted to do it. There was, after all, more to life than bluebirds and sagebrush. She stepped forward, closed her eyes, ducked her head, and stuck her arms out in front of her. The whole business would be much easier if she pretended she was jumping off the high dive at the municipal swimming pool. One, two, three. She bent her knees, considered holding her nose, then realized she didn’t need to. Not this time.

Someone grabbed her by the shoulder. A resonant contralto poured through the high desert stillness. “Hey, cookie. For crissakes. Give us both a break. You don’t really want to do that.”

Kathy went rigid, opened her eyes, and silently mouthed the words, Hell, hell, hell.

Perhaps she had made a mistake. Perhaps she hadn’t walked four hours to get to this place. Perhaps this wasn’t really the summit of a road so dilapidated that only hikers, horses, and lunatics in jeeps dared traverse it. No. She was incapable of that particular mistake. She had lived down there in the frigging valley all her life. She knew nobody came to this place. The old-timers had forgotten about it, and the newcomers didn’t care about good views unless they could see them from a living room window.

There were chinks in Kathy’s black despair. And anger, like blasting powder, was packed inside them all. She curled her hands into hard, rock fists and turned around.

A small woman stood before her, slender hands settled on slender hips. The woman regarded Kathy with sunlit brown eyes and an infuriating half smile. She wore an embroidered cotton shirt like the ones Kathy had often admired in the window of Parker’s Saddle Shop. But the flat-brimmed hat that rode far back among her short glossy curls looked South American, and the cut of her high-waisted denims marked her as a city jerk.

Kathy put on the sneer she used whenever she had to deal with unpleasant people—her drunken stepfather, the landlady’s bitchy daughter, and lately Reese Vanderberg as well.

“Who the hell are you? Why don’t you just mind your own damn business?” Kathy spit the words out like lit firecrackers.

The woman grinned. She had strong, white teeth. A network of spider-web laugh lines appeared at the corners of her eyes. She held out her left hand. A jagged, pale scar ran from the first joint of her index finger to the second.

Kathy knew the scar. She had one exactly like it on her own left index finger. She blinked, struggling to remember whether she had actually jumped off the cliff. Maybe she was dreaming this on the way to the ground. Or maybe she was already dead.

“Just call me Kate,” said the woman. “Whether you like it or not, my own damn business includes yours.”

“Huh?” said Kathy, scratching her nose. It burned. She’d been out in the sun too long.

“Sweetie, you don’t have to understand it. Just believe it. I’m you. I’m the woman you’re going to be twenty years from now. Look at me. Why are you trying to screw me up like this?”

Kathy squinted. Now that she thought of it, the woman did look a little familiar, in a middle-aged kind of way.

Kate took a cellophane-wrapped cigar out of her pocket. She offered it to Kathy. “No thanks,” said Kathy. “They make me sick.”

“Yeah, they used to make me sick, too.” Chuckling, Kate peeled away the cellophane. “Ten years from now, you’ll buy a sports car and take up smoking just because you like the idea of a woman driving fast cars and smoking good cigars.”

“Oh yeah?” said Kathy. She was beginning to feel the way she had years ago after she had drunk a bottle of vanilla with a friend—a little queasy and not altogether certain about the line between what was real and what was not.

Kate stuck the cigar in her mouth and sucked on it, unlit. She took Kathy firmly by the arm and led her away from the precipice, back onto the road.

“So what’s bothering you this time? I can’t quite remember,” she said, her words wet and pleasant.

“If you were really me, you’d remember,” said Kathy.

Kate laughed and nipped the end off the cigar with her large, familiar teeth. “Sweetie, you’re so dramatic. I admit you don’t come this close very often, but you think about it all the time. How the hell am I supposed to keep one trauma separate from the next?”

“I don’t think about it all the time!” said Kathy.

Kate snorted as she lit a wooden match and cupped it expertly away from the breeze. “Give me a break,” she said, puffing until a cloud of white smoke rose from between her hands.

Kathy kicked a pebble. She listened as it rattled down the precipice, striking other rocks on its way to the ground. She shivered. “I got jilted.”

“Oh yeah,” said Kate. “I remember now. That golden-haired jerk. Reese what’s-his-name.”

“Reese Vanderberg is not a jerk. And how would you know? You can’t even get his name right.”

“Look. I can’t get his name right because twenty years from now, you won’t be able to get his name right. Twenty years from now, Reese Vanderberg will be an insurance salesman with a Lincoln Continental and two preppy jerk kids, whom he will have gotten from that blond airhead, Sally what’s-her-name. Believe me, cookie, there are better things than that in store for you.”

Kathy kicked another pebble. “Sally, huh? Yeah. Sally’s a creep. And if Reese would rather have Sally, then he’s a creep, too.”

“Come on. It’s not that he’d rather have Sally. And it’s not as if you’re up here getting ready to jump off a cliff just because Vanderberg jilted you. You say that to me because it’s what you’d say to some stranger. But we both know there’s more to it than that.”

Kathy had sat awake in a chair all night, swept and tumbled by the old familiar river of dark thoughts. Reese
had tried to make love to her, just as all the others had, and she had tried to let him, just as she always did. But her body had betrayed her, in the pattern that had grown smooth through repetition—smooth as a stone in a glacial creek. She had stiffened, pulled back. She felt the surprise in his hands, saw it flutter like the shadow of a luna moth across his face. She grabbed her clothes and ran. And Reese shouted after her, “Bitch! Prick-teasing bitch!” Just like they all did.

She hunched her shoulders and looked over at Kate. Kate wore the dusty hat as if it were a part of her, tipped back in an easy way to reveal damp curls just beginning to turn gray around her ears. Her whole body told a story of pleasure, in the swing of her shoulders as she walked, in the rise and fall of her small breasts as she tasted the sweet tobacco smoke. The lines around Kate’s eyes and mouth looked custom made to mysterious specifications. Those lines cradled smiles, frowns, and dreams the way Kathy had always wanted to cradle a man. She was beautiful.

A dull red flower of grief blossomed, inside her. She could never be like that. Never. A tear splattered onto her boot. “Hell,” said Kathy.

Kate shoved a handkerchief into Kathy’s hand. Kathy scrubbed viciously at her eyes. The handkerchief was made of lavender silk and had a violet embroidered on it. It smelled like cigars. She wadded it into a wrinkled ball and flung it back at Kate. “Now I know you’re not me,” she said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead carrying around a thing like that.”

Kate stuck the handkerchief back in her pants pocket and gave Kathy a sidelong frown. She turned her gaze back
to the rutted road and the junipers that clung to the hillside above it. “All right. You want to know why you’re gonna be carrying silk handkerchiefs around someday? Because there’s a man in your future who likes them.”

Kathy shook her head. “There’s no man in my future.”

“Suit yourself,” said Kate, shrugging.

Kathy wondered why she would want a man in her future anyway. She shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her wash-softened Levi’s and found the arrowhead Reese had given her there. She rubbed her thumb hard along the sharp flint edge. She thought about the way her father had beaten her mother until she couldn’t stand up anymore. She thought about her stepfather, who acted like a stud in rut every time he got drunk. Her heart kept telling her they weren’t all like that. But her body just wouldn’t believe it.

Kathy looked at Kate again. Kate smiled at her. Kate’s face seemed so much at home with smiles. Was it true? Was it possible that Kathy’s own face would someday look like that? In the desert sun, something sparkled on one of the fingers of Kate’s left hand. A plain gold wedding ring. Kathy blinked, dazzled.

They had been walking as they talked, Kathy following the older woman down the rutted, white road, so preoccupied with her own pain that she paid no attention. Now they rounded a curve, and there, crouched like a steel tiger, sat a Jeep, almost brand-new, with all the extras, the kind Kathy had always wanted. A light coating of dust covered its deep burgundy paint. Kathy stared at it, dreaming of places
a machine like that could take her, of hillsides and valleys and canyons a million miles away.

“Is that yours? Where’d you get it?”

Kate rubbed her neck slowly, gazing at the Jeep as if she herself found it somewhat mysterious. “Yeah. It’s mine. I bought it about six months ago from a guy in Manhattan who told me it could take me places I’d never believe.” She gave Kathy a little grin. “I guess he was right.”

“Manhattan?” said Kathy.

“Yeah. Manhattan,” said Kate, eyes sparkling. “Hop in.”

Kathy climbed into the passenger seat, yelping as the heat from the sun-baked black Naugahyde crept through her thin shirt. Kate tossed her hat into the back, ran her fingers through her sweat-soaked hair. She winked.

“What do you think, sweetie? Isn’t this better than some blond jerk’s Lincoln Continental?”

Kathy grinned. “Could be,” she said.

Kate caressed the gearshift lever and twisted the key in the ignition. “Put your seat belt on, cookie.”

The Jeep roared and leaped off in a cloud of sand and thunder. Kathy clung to the seat the way she had clung to Reese when he took her on the double Ferris wheel at the county fair.

Kate drove like a maniac, laughing as they fishtailed around curves and sailed airborne over chuckholes and washouts. The cigar jutted from the corner of her mouth, alternately emitting vast windblown clouds and waving as Kate chewed on it.