When Gregory died, I saw two clear paths ahead of me; move on and stoically watch myself grow older in the mirror, or buy a house in the woods, close enough to town for children to walk past on the way home, but far enough away that I wouldn’t need to know them. I chose the latter.
In November of that year, I chose to become an alcoholic, Mondays I drank gin and tonic, Tuesdays was bloody marys, Wednesdays I sipped on manhattans, Thursdays martinis, and Fridays I indulged in a deep, red wine, one that would send you to sleep at quarter after five. On Saturdays and Sundays I rested. After a while I had accumulated a splendid collection of bottles. They were all different colors and shapes, some pink and rotund, others green and cylindrical, others still a deep blue and curving as if they had melted into my hands. Naturally, I hung them from the trees.
After a while, I became tired of my routine imbibing, so I departed from that stage of grief, and I bought a cat. I named it Oscar, although the litter of kittens that appeared on my porch swing made it clear that I had erred in judgment. But, it never listen when I called it anyway, so I continued in calling it Oscar out of spite.
Some time after Christmas, Oscar stopped coming to the house to find food, so I was forced to assume that she had found a gullible child somewhere to take her in. Luckily I had raided the attic only days before in search of a new activity, and I had found a plethora of knitting implements. The windows needed curtains to match the bottles outside. I began to knit in frenzy until each of the gaping windows was covered in an impenetrable layer of woolen yarn. I had not bothered to find threads that matched, so each curtain looked as if it had been cut straight out of a homeless man’s jacket; mismatched, and ass backwards. It was perfect.
Once spring came it occurred to me that a nice garden would use my time well, so I dug up every wild plant in the expansive yard, and potted them in old ceramic bowls to line the stairs. They died in no time at all, but as I had expected, they had certainly taken up my useless hours. Besides, now if the house were ever broken into I would hear the intruder tripping on 37 odd dishes that had once held life.
Still restless, I made it my new duty to become the neighborhood watch. I ordered a pair of binoculars off the internet, and my search for criminals began. Within a week I had memorized the TIPS hotline number. Within two they had changed it. I spent the rest of the month watching law and order.
As summer began to creep in, and the sweltering sun rose higher in the sky each afternoon, I discovered that I needed a new hobby. This discovery of course lead me to the basement. There I found bats. The only option I saw was to take an online course on bat catching. It was an incredible success, and by early July I could swing a tennis racket up to the ceiling without hearing a single screech.
But alas, my new lack of bats proved to cause an infestation of mosquitoes and other insects that would draw blood in the night. This prompted my next endeavor; insecticide through candle making. With a slightly hazardous combination of various waxes, paraffin, noxious chemicals, and the remnants of yarn left from the winter months, I created a small factory in the deserted dining room. With the bottles swinging in the wind outside, I set to work melting and molding and mixing and melting again until I had a menagerie of stalagmite shaped candles. For the next week and a half, I burned them along with random papers, some wood bits I had found about the house, and a lead horse figurine that had worked its way into a crack in the windowsill.
As the rest of the summer wafted by, I lay beneath the ceiling fan in the kitchen, wearing nothing but an evening gown.
Once August had passed, I called my children. I had long since disconnected the answering machine, so each conversation was forced to begin with the necessary expletives, explanations, and exuberance. Suzanne the third youngest of the grandchildren, after all, had lost her first tooth. Somewhere in America, a desperate director was in search for such drama, I was sure.
The next day I unplugged my phone.
Slowly, as October began to creep around, I began to write my first novel on a thirty-year-old typewriter. It was a torrid love affair between a solder and a nurse. It took me a while to realize that I was merely repeating A Farewell to Arms. I then proceeded to dissemble the typewriter in hopes to salvage some metal to make tap shoes. There was none to be found suitable.
Then, one morning, as the sun was just beginning to rise, and I was just beginning to go to sleep, it occurred to me. I had left my cat-eye spectacles outside on the porch. Oh well, I sighed to myself. Doubtless it would rain, leaving the glasses watermarked and blurry. That, at the very least, I could accept. I could accept the rain, and the storms, and the blurred green glasses. They would come and go through my life, like the men and the children and the loved ones. Just like the jumpropes of the little girls on the street; up and down, in and out, there one moment, gone the next.
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