Anatomy of a Dress

Right now Mackerel is wearing a cotton onesie and his tankhead is poking out of the small zippered opening of his carrier. His eyes are half-open and his pupils are huge. This morning Dr. S took a huge swath of flesh all the way around his (returned, again) fibrosarcoma and left him a seven-inch suture line. It’s a good thing he’s so fat because otherwise he might have missed all that skin. 

It’s taking about 4 times longer than usual to type this because without my hands smoothing out the fur on his head and my face up close to his, Mack begins to growl and flail. It’s his third anesthesia in about two months; he looks miserable. I am praying very fervently to the random chaotic sometimes-cruel, sometimes-generous universal forces that those angry little knots of hand-shaped cells won’t come back anymore. 

Because I haven’t been reading anything but aging– timeless!– issues of Real Simple Magazine (.60 apiece at Half Price books) and watching Top Chef for the past few days, I steal a quote shamelessly from the Un: 

The good-enough mother…starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure. (DW Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 1951)

My mother has more or less disowned me after this sudden abrupt turn my life has taken. She doesn’t want any part of my “drama”. I can’t even tell you how it undermines one’s confidence to have been disowned by one’s family. Dana virtually claps me on the back, announces that I am having the life of any self-respecting young artist. And so I gird my loins and try not to think about it. 

J and I are moving in together, into a large airy 2-bedroom apartment in a historic district. The building is corrugated metal, excessively modern, and right next door to an elementary school-turned book depository, so Mama Cass and I can spend hours on the swingset alone. The entire building is green — low wattage lighting, passive gain temperature control, and it full of art freaks — graphic designers, opera singers, french horn players, writers. 

So here comes the next incarnation.