Saturn 2/3
Her Worst Enemy
Time was the only thing Eileen couldn’t charm.
When she was young, her bones grew too slowly to suit. Everyone thought she was pretty, but no one could tell her how to cash it in now. Her grandmother would chide her for gazing so long in the mirror.
‘Looks don’t last, my dear,’ she’d say. ‘Cooking does.’
It seemed so unfair. A man could look like anything, and be rich or powerful as a god. But a woman could not escape the tick-tock in her head. Young, she was always playing catch-up. Then, suddenly, one day, she saw a wrinkle…
The first day we spoke on the phone, she was already nearly seventy, but her words still had the scent of chocolate cooling under the stars.
When we finally met in Brisbane, she was postcard bright under a wig and patina skin. She couldn’t rewind to that beautiful seventeen year-old who’d stopped men in their tracks, but she did her best. And I thought she was doing it for me.
Then, at her home in Cleveland, I saw her at dawn without the wig, a blur on her way to the bathroom. Her hair, her beautiful hair that she’d sat brushing for hours like Rapunzel, was nearly gone.
She couldn’t look me in the eye at breakfast.
Later, she told me about the hardest part of giving me up: ‘I would have given anything, anything, if you could have grabbed a fistful of my hair that morning before they took you away!’
Night Feed 1
Eileen doesn’t have any choice in the matter. Not really.
The raccoons depend on her. She insists on that.
Winter is the only time she gets any peace. But she still worries about her babies at night. Especially under the leer of a full moon.
The neighbors complain. About the noise. The greedy fights. The smell of coon shit wafting on the evening breeze.
They don’t care about why she does it. The pain of swollen breasts, wet nipples waiting, deprived of their infant.
They would sue her if the courts weren’t so clogged with pedophiles and drug dealers.
Moaning, they fasten their drapes against the moon.
Richard, her live-in, fetches food for the ritual, dog pellets, in huge bags. In between heart attacks.
He’s been home from the hospital for more than a week now and takes a stand. He refuses to lift anything heavier than a sandwich – or perhaps a steak. My mother says he’s being stubborn [‘bypasses are so routine these days!’]
She thinks he’ll be harder to get rid of than the raccoons.
Which is saying something.