Gram Ruth’s long dead cat, Felix, lived eternally in the pink velvet bed.
Jude
Jude pressed both hands against the window frame and pushed up. The cool night air kissed her neck, a patch of goose pimples lighting along her arms. The muscles of her thick forearms grew taut as the glass pane slid skyward, the wooden frame rubbing roughly along. She smiled at her own reflection in the glass, the bone lit moon as stark white as her gleaming teeth, her red lips almost black. Her dark ponytail had loosened and electrified flyaways stood out along her temple, erasing the two hours of ironing she had done that evening.
Swinging a bare leg through the window, she searched for the satin covered step stool she had left that evening when she snuck-out. Her red pump waved wildly, then kicked the stool which didn’t tip, but bounced and settled. As she straddled the window ledge, the ridged wood pressed painfully against her pelvis, she imagined the look of horror on Gram Ruth’s face if she saw Jude climbing back through the second story window after eleven pm. Such would be her grandmother’s shock, Jude considered staying in place, her pelvic bone bruised by morning. Her pencil skirt was hiked around her thighs for easy climbing, exposing her left butt cheek to the dark estate.
Jude could see Gram’s high bushes clinging desperately to the driveway like frantic hitchhikers trying to catch a ride out of hell. When Jude had been a little girl, she and Peter had often played in the bushes. In places, their branches grew so thick she could climb on top and crawl their length. Peter, a husky boy, born eleven minutes Jude’s senior, always fell straight to the bottom.
After securing her foot on the stool, Jude slipped into the room. No lights shone, but she moved across the plush cream carpeting with ease, safe passage guaranteed by a full moon and fifteen years of familiarity.
As a baby Jude had not slept in this room. According to her father she’d slept in a raw silk bassinet that Gram Ruth bought in China when she was a newlywed. The bassinet, Jude’s father said, belonged to Chinese royalty, but was sold for a bargain when the child of the Chinese couple took ill and died. Jude moaned at this point and complained that she might have died of whatever plague or pox had killed this baby, but her father only laughed. The story worked better on Hattie who found such notions romantic, suiting her strange flights of fancy.
Jude slipped her skirt to the floor and stepped out, kicking it toward a pile of wet towels clumped in the corner. Gram would have a fit if she saw the towels: mildew and mold, she’d say, but Jude didn’t give two shits. Gram had too many rules, too many long sighs and disapproving looks.
She slid her slender fingers over her sleeveless blouse, plucking the buttons. Danny had busted two buttons, greedy and desperate as usual. He thought it turned Jude on, his frantic sucking and licking, tearing at her bra like some puppy after its mother’s teat. Jude sometimes wanted to slam a fist in his head when he did that, just cock back and let one go, crack her knuckles against the hard sheet of his cheekbone.
Jude did not love Danny, hardly liked him, but he had a car and his dear old dad had a big houseboat stocked with whiskey and gin. Danny would wait at the end of Gram Ruth’s long drive, his sleek blue Corvette like a heavy, haunched animal crouching in the dark. Sometimes he brought friends, other fast girls and rich boys with their windblown hair and sun ripened cheeks.
Jude would make Danny buy her a new blouse.
Hattie
For a long time, Hattie stared at the stuffed cat; its oily black fur abrasive in the pink velvet bed that held him. His pink satin collar held a heart-shaped platinum plate, Felix engraved in loopy cursive letters. A single diamond dotted the i on his name. His eyes were black rubies, his nose a dried crust with sunken warped nostrils. Hattie could see two pointed white fangs peeking beneath his black gummy smile that looked more like a grimace. She slid her palm over his back, the bones moving beneath her fingers like a string of pearls, down along his tail, wiry and stiff.
Her heart beat faster, a flush moving from her chest into her face as she stroked the animal, her stubby fingernails buried in fur, disappearing beneath black tufts. Felix’s body was hard, like a store mannequin, not giving in the fleshy way that a body should. Just a skeleton wrapped tight with leather and covered in fur, but not really: he was a cat who had lived, a cat whose staring face hung throughout Gram Ruth’s sprawling house.
Though Hattie had never met Felix, in life his eyes had been yellow, like the tiny orbs that bobbed in lanterns during the night. Gram said he was a true aristocrat, but Hattie hadn’t a clue what she meant. None of it mattered really, Felix’s life before the box. Hattie knew him only as this prized jewel. Perhaps in life he’d been just an ordinary house cat with an upturned nose and clumps of cat litter caked in the crevices of his padded feet. In the velvet casket, he was a Julius Caesar, a Babe Ruth, forever immortalized - in death infinitely more mysterious and grand than he’d ever been in life.
For several long minutes, Hattie stared, transfixed; petting his matted glossy fur and tracing his jeweled eyeballs with her free hand. She swayed to a music that only she could hear, a symphony of nostalgia not yet laden on her young brain, but already snaking in, leaving its slimy trail to stumble upon further down the line.
Without thought, for if she’d had one she’d never have dared, she plucked the cat from his velvety bed and thrust him to her chest inhaling his intoxicating scent of mothballs, castor oil and something deeper and fruity like melon. Hattie did not realize it then, but Felix would stay with her - the night a marked reminder of the end of life as she knew it.
Chapter 2
July 11, 1955
Jude
Once naked, Jude stood in front of her tall mirror.
She turned once, flexing her right calf forward and pointing her toe, evaluating herself from toe to hair roots and then back down again, appraising every centimeter. The way her toes spread out, thin and then widening into small square blocks, her toenails painted a deep red. Her ankles were narrow and opened into shapely calves, not too big, but a single wide line distinguishing the muscle from bone. Her small round knees became thick thighs then tapered off to her shaved crotch.
She stole razors from her father, refusing to make do with the tiny pink girl razors that barely cut the hairs, let alone scraped to her skin. She always left a single neat black line of hair, no complete baldness because it looked too juvenile and small, like an off-limits area rather than the sexy hideaway she hoped to cultivate. From the small streak of black curls came her flat belly that widened along her hips and then dove back in to stretch over her ribs and up to her plum sized breasts, small dark pink nipples pointed and severe. Her shoulders were wide, her muscular biceps hinged with thick forearms.
Her face sat proportionally on her thin short neck. Jude did not hate her face, but neither did she love it. Her upper lip was thin, barely disguising her long white teeth that Peter called buck. Her nose was small, a good feature, as were her wide almond-shaped brown eyes. Finally, her slightly bushy dark eyebrows and then her hair, just past her shoulders, chestnut, and wavy, neither straight nor curly. Her grandmother said her hair came from her great aunt Lynn, a woman she’d never met who died of syphilis - according to family legend. Perhaps more resemblance than Jude wanted to admit.