Egypt is the world's largest producer of high grade, long staple cotton, most grown near the Nile Delta, and maintaining the quality of its higher grades has been troublesome; the U.S. imports considerable amounts of it for making thread, lace, and tire cord. Foreign imports, from China, India, and the Far East, have vastly changed the U.S. textile industry, and now mill workers in North Carolina can't find work. Imports drastically affected my father and uncle's business, which was why it wasn't an option for me when I finished college, even though my brother hadn't taken his place in it, but business was bad, it wasn't encouraging, and I hadn't wanted to design fabrics and sell them then, which I regret.
I looked again at the Fabric Monolith, with its plenty of secrets.
The following morning, I didn't go to breakfast, I didn't want conversation, contentious or pacific, I didn't want to leave my bed, I wasn't very hungry, I ate a navel orange and banana, and knew there'd be lunch, usually the poorest meal of the day, but edible and eaten in private. The radio voices complained and joked, anonymous company, harbingers or bearers of bad news, prejudice, and expert advice or ignorance. I didn't attend breakfast all week after the seance and, like some of the former residents, entered the dining room when no one was likely to be around, no residents or staff, in order to forage food, so that I wouldn't go hungry until lunch. Dinnertime during that week, the third in the cook's cycle, was subdued, even though the Turkish poet, Contesa, Spike, Henry, and Arthur were in residence, and though there was the usual banter, benign grumbling about the lunches, especially from the demanding man, and the appearance of a few new residents, who blended into the walls, whose acquaintance I didn't want to make, though they appeared to be lively under their skins. After dinner, I hastened to the sanctity of my bedroom, which isn't mine forever. Life, and everything in it, is temporary, and this oppressive, venerable fact I reckon with and contest daily, if subliminally, and, in a modest, morose manner, attack, which doesn't afford peace.
When I'm at home, I may hold my young wild cat, if he allows it, and, especially when he lies near or on my face and I inhale his familiar musty male feline smell, I feel calm, content and also able to recall the family cat, with her kittens, but not the one who died at birth who lay near her and her other healthy kittens, wrapped in a small piece of black wool. I rub my face against my cat's coal black fur, soft as cashmere, and if loose fur doesn't enter my nostrils and cause me to sneeze, after which he cries-my sneezing upsets him-the cat is a temporary consolation, and when I tuck him even closer in my arms, he objects, usually quickly, and leaps off the bed. When the family cat was given away and killed, because it ate my parakeet, a creature I didn't care about, though it had once jumped into my soft-boiled egg in a small, white bowl, endearingly, I was allowed to adopt a homeless, six-month old pregnant mixed-breed dog, around the time my brother disappeared. I had my dog for nine years, but I've never had another dog, because there can be no other dog but her, or I don't deserve another, since, if I had protected my dog, if I'd been aware, not lost in myself, my parents wouldn't have been able to give her away and kill her, for which I take the blame. I feel sorry for people who treasure their furniture more than animals or for people who are allergic to them, since people live longer who have an animal to pet and love, to be in sympathy with, but some people don't want the bother, have never liked animals, or care more about material possessions and how they appear to others and to themselves than longevity. Allergies are different from intolerances, real food allergies are rare, but here many believe they are allergic to various foods, including milk, which is extremely rare, though some have trouble digesting it; if there is an allergy, an allergic reaction, mild or severe, proceeds, because the immune system is involved, while it's not involved if a person is intolerant of, or just sensitive to, a food group. Intolerance to foods or food idiosyncrasies, as health professionals lately designate food sensitivities, are reactions and discomforts but not allergies, since allergens are not involved, and many believe they are sensitive, women especially like to think they're sensitive. I don't care who sees my black, second-hand, two-seat modernist couch, which my young wild cat recognized as his scratching post and whose raised one hundred percent wool upholstery he ripped, fabric I selected in ecstasy at a warehouse of sumptuous textiles, many of which I touched and smelled, I won't let any people enter my apartment, since my young wild cat might claw them badly and then they might insist I have him put down, or they might imagine they understand me or can defend themselves from me, by what I have on my walls, shelves, and with which furniture I surround myself.
The next week, I returned to my usual schedule, needing regularity in most things, and it was on this day that, after breakfast, which the head cook prepared, because the assistant cook was ill again, so the head cook was annoyed to be on duty, though she would, we residents now knew with certainty, retire soon, the Magician left. He said he had been doing a flyby, and moments before he left I urged him again to tell me what he'd done, especially to me but also to the Count, during the seance, but he persisted in saying everything that happened I'd wanted to happen, with no coaxing from him, and I don't believe him, so, even if my father appeared, which I question, though it was my wish, he was dead, nothing had changed, but that wasn't the Magician's fault. The Magician shook his head ruefully and told me I didn't understand. The Count was no longer in residence and couldn't argue. The young married man, who didn't appear as content again, but who still liked everything the kitchen presented, left a week and a day after the seance, that is, last night, a Sunday night, Sunday can be the worst day here, and Sunday dinners are often the worst of the dinners.
This morning, when I rushed into the breakfast room, past the two disconsolate young women, who were both in their pajamas, apparently in distress, I didn't hesitate to ignore them, not engage in their business, especially because they sat near new residents who might be stuck in time or who believed themselves ahead of it, since time was and always is of the essence, time's in everything, it provokes currents and forms in design, it resides in art and history, but I was hungry, nearly late, and feared that the head cook wouldn't allow me breakfast, because she doesn't like me or any of us. After I rushed into the kitchen and printed my order, smiling at the cook, so that I might not earn any more of her wrath, but barely looking at the kitchen helper, though he looked at me, the Magician waved me over to his table, and it was then he told me he was leaving, his work here was done, but since he's an obituary writer, I couldn't imagine what work he'd accomplished, except maybe the seance, which I discounted, and it was at that moment I received his disappointing answer. When he arose, the Magician rang a bell and announced to all assembled that he was about to make himself disappear, which he accomplished by walking out of the dining room. I felt the need to accomplish something, having spent the previous week indifferently or unremarkably, though deliberately so. For instance, empty headed, I rocked and swung in a decent copy of an American swinging porch chair, the original dates from the 1920s, while the snow melted incrementally from the main house's roof and icicles cracked and dropped, and also I reclined on a 1940s leather couch in the library, but didn't read or listen to music, and watched other residents, surreptitiously. I slept at all hours, day and night, in my room, exhausted, as if recovering from major surgery, an amputation of some sort. In the evenings, before dinner, I telephoned my mother's companion and listened most carefully to every complaint, to the nuances and shadings in her voice to detect a reason sufficient for her to abandon my mother, because it can be exhausting to tend a person who asks the same question over and over, or believes she's lost a ten dollar bill, when she hasn't and yet searches, agitated, all day for it, or, worse, a necklace she never owned, and the whole day frets about where it might have gone, since it must be found, and then she wakes up with it on her mind, and if you say it's a fantasy or a dream, she is insulted and furious. These problems might require my return to the place I call home, and, against my will and desire, to bear the weight of my mother's care, relinquishing some of my liberty. People move in with their ailing, aging parents, some sacrifice their lives, in a sense, but I'm incapable of it, though in another society with other customs I might, as I might also have eaten human flesh in a ritual ceremony or walked ten paces behind my husband, but in America, where I'm at liberty to make my own mistakes in marriage, which I have, a woman's walking behind men has never been required, probably because of the need for their labor from the start, while, in the Donner Pass, westward-bound settlers who followed a little-used route to California, trapped by snow, cold, starving, and near-mad, ate human flesh. After the Magician, I also left the breakfast room, stopping to make an appointment with the Turkish poet and Spike for drinks after dinner, but Contesa said, reticently, that she was already engaged. "A sweet date?" the Turkish poet asked, teasing her and me, "is it a sweet Medjool date?" Contesa paid no attention to his insinuation, but it awakened something in me, and, later, when no one was around, I walked to the kitchen.