I smeared my glamorous mouth into the Joker in the mirror.
‘There’s no harm in it,’ Judy said. ‘Shouldn’t us girls look our best for Dad one last time?’
Nothing bothered her: worry belonged to a whole other species of women who didn’t paint their nails. They’d both known different fathers, I think. Judy’s was a man with a sandy quiff and a wink, popping to a bar to sell electrical appliances without a warranty, and not popping back when she was ten. Mom’s father was older. He huddled in a retirement village. Women waved Mom over in aprons they wore to make packet soup or watch The Price is Right. They were inconsolable.
‘Your dad’s chucked me,’ an English lady called Pisky said.
Mom wasn’t sure what to say. Later, she told me my grandfather was no longer going to the seventy-four-year-old woman’s house for tea. He’d switched to mango juice and pruning the little ball-shaped trees outside the door of a woman of seventy-two.
I was listening to it all, figuring things out. Judy, me and Mom had the same eyes, but Judy’s were cat’s eyes on a highway. Mom’s were quiet as lamps that aren’t plugged in. Everyone said Judy was like her father, while Mom took after her mom. Who I was wasn’t clear. ‘She’s so like her mother!’ they said, when I organised my dolls by hair colour on the shelf. ‘She’s just like Judy!’ they said, when I laughed in the wrong place or refused to wear nylon because I got scratchy. I didn’t like how people said it. It was like they were squeezing me into a hand-me-down leather suit, tattooing on a cat mask I’d be stuck with for ever, even if I became a dentist. I fought it, doing my best not to be Mom or Catwoman, and just be me. Whatever that was.
For a while, that was some sort of GI Jane. Studying for my exams, I wore boots and combat pants like a get-out clause. I walked and Judy winced. Mom frowned at the sound of me, like the Hulk clunking downstairs for coffee and muffins. I wasn’t ladylike, they agreed, whatever that means. For Mom, ladylike was running water into the sink so no one would ever hear her go to the bathroom. For Judy, it was wiggles and frills. Even when she had to walk with a cane she wrapped the handle in lace and wore satin gloves so no one saw the veins in her hands stand to attention as she leaned on the stick. Another thing in her ladylike package was her laugh. That husky purr. Even as an ageing woman, if you heard her, you’d turn around expecting to see a girl practising for the sexiest laugh contest. Mom didn’t approve.
‘Is it really suitable for a woman your age?’ she said, as Judy bypassed the thermals in the outlet store for the silk camisoles. None of us were sure how old she really was. (Judy said ‘a lady never reveals her bust size or her age’.)
‘If you don’t feel like a lady in your underwear, how can you expect to act like one?’ she said to the underpants in the packet.
Mom came back alone to buy a plaid bathrobe for Judy’s birthday. We found it over the canary’s cage with instructions to sit the cage by the window and let the bird fly once a day. Judy had flitted off again, migrated to Spain with a man who had a theory it was cheaper than heating his house in Colorado all winter.
Mom often said it was a pity Judy never found ‘the one’ and settled down. She had to: she married a man who began most of his sentences with ‘actually…’ I don’t think Judy felt she missed out. I only heard her mention marriage once. She’d been seeing some widower for a while. Mom was doing backflips.
‘Do you think you’ll get married?’
Judy’s laugh meowed as if she’d caught her tail in a mousetrap.
‘Married? If you love cake would you want only Twinkies for thirty years?’
I started thinking of red velvet cake, baked Alaska, whoopie pie…
Catwoman had something, a secret that didn’t make marriage necessary. No one could figure out how, even on her eighth life, Judy always had boyfriends. That’s what she called them, boyfriends. We’d stop by her apartment to find her pouring coffee, old men blushing, laughing, like being a boyfriend flushed the years away. I’d never called anyone a boyfriend myself. Once, when I was seven, I punched this boy in the face, POW! He showed up at my door the next day, asking me to play.
‘She’s so like Judy,’ Dad said.
‘Go away. You smell like candy apples,’ I said, slamming the door in the boy’s face. I can’t remember his name, but I remember his smell, sticky sweet, like if I licked him I’d get toothache.
In my senior year, I got married, at least mentally, to a boy in my class called Noah. I wasn’t Catwoman. I didn’t go on dates. Noah and I only spoke in English, and not to each other. We spoke via Much Ado, The Great Gatsby, one comment laid on top of the other, agreeing, sparring, intertwined. His cold-looking hands fidgeted under a gangly jumper. I looked at him and promised to see him, only him, when I saw movies. I was Superman; he was Lois Lane. He was Rhett Butler, I was Scarlett. I promised to impose only Noah’s face onto every movie kiss and advert.
I doubted Catwoman ever felt such devotion. Judy hopped from one boyfriend to another. She found them all over, even where people only talk to say they have the wrong change or don’t need a bag — supermarkets, petrol stations, restaurants, the timber place Mom called when the fence wanted fixing.
‘How much did you pay for it?’ Judy asked.
Mom told her. Judy shook her head. ‘I could have got it cheaper,’ she said.
Whatever Mom bought, her sister said she could have got it cheaper with her ‘blonde discount’ — the bathroom sink from the plumbing place, shingles for the shed. Mom refused to take her to the builders’ yard EVER again. Every time Judy giggled, twining her smile around the guy behind the counter like a silky tail on a leg. She always got things at cost.
‘It’s embarrassing on a woman her age. There’ll come a day when that discount of hers will run out,’ Mom said.
It didn’t. Catwoman’s lives ran out just in time, and her secret was mine.
On the Saturday before she died, Judy sat by the window like she was soaking the sunlight into her skin for later. She invited me around for tea, just me. It was unusual enough to seem important, like she was going to leap off the rooftop and show me she really had been Catwoman all along, but when I got there she just poured Earl Grey, feathers on the cuff of her cardigan dipping into her china cup. I sipped, wondering how long I should stay. I liked Judy, but if I liked her too much Mom would think we were forming some sort of gang against her.
‘So, you’re not courting?’ said Judy.
‘No, I haven’t time.’ I was glad of study. Books were camouflage for a girl who didn’t know how to stand out.
Judy nodded, like she heard beyond words. The red in my cheeks ratted me out.
‘I have something for you, if anything ever happens to me: an inheritance. It’s for you. Only.’
‘Don’t be stupid! Nothing’s going to happen,’ I said.
My laughter wafted over the fact she was getting on, and ‘if anything happens’ meant when.
Judy would have loved her funeral if it hadn’t been, you know, her funeral, and Mom hadn’t picked out her clothes. Mom insisted on a suit jacket and blouse buttoned to the neck, like Judy might have some sort of interview at the pearly gates and these clothes could stop her getting fresh with St Peter. I thought we should let Judy wear the kitty ears and cat mask, but Mom said it was too sad, to be dressed forevermore as someone she almost was.
There were men outside the church just shuffling around with no one to laugh at their jokes or ask interesting questions about the responsibilities their jobs must entail. Who these men were, we had no idea. Mom said Judy always landed on her feet, except the day she fell down the stairs. No matter what, she always landed herself a man. And here they were, jammed into a room with silk flowers after the service. I’d never seen so many stages of frowns on middle-aged men. Their whole faces looked like they’d never recover from the downturn.