I.

After my second husband left us, after the miscarriage and my brother's long pneumonia, I moved my family to the coast, to the ground floor of a mauve Victorian at the top of F Street in Eureka. It was our first apartment. We always had lived in houses before. I knew our yelling would not set well with the neighbors. During our three months there I practiced dealing with domestic issues in lowered tones. It was a good thing, being forced to remain calm.

And it was just as well then that I pawned the stereo to get money for gasoline and laundry soap and cat food--items not included in the fat sacks we got at the food bank.

Those weeks we would climb the steep sidewalks toward home with our bags of half-rotted celery, summer squash, stale sourdough bread, withered beets (Dead beets for deadbeats, I quipped), and four pounds of American processed cheese, despised by one and all.

The boys were old enough then to understand the seriousness of our predicament, and they did not complain when I handed them lunch sandwiches of inedible cheese guck and called them to suppers made up entirely of root vegetables.

II.

I got up very early and went to the kitchen and wrote letters until the residue of blanket-warmth had evaporated and the chill of the real world began to seep through my several sweaters. Then I made coffee and watched out the windows, determining the wind's direction by the plumes of smoke from the stacks in the harbor.

At night the soft orange sun went down behind the pulp mills, placing the complex in flattering silhouette. The early mornings, though, gave the factories an underlit, science-fiction cast. They glowed menacingly on the water, incessantly generating their sour perfumes, the essences of that city.

Our cat Moth deserted us there. It had taken me time to feel close to her. She was stupid, and a glutton besides, and overgenerous with her affection. I was forever tossing her off the bed or out of the kitchen or shutting her in a bedroom to keep her off a visitor's lap. It was only after we introduced a new pet into the household that I began to develop a fondness for and even to empathize with the displaced Moth. But it was too late. She became ill-tempered and withdrawn. She growled and spat. We had hoped she would come to love the kitten Basket, but then we moved to Eureka, that foul-smelling town, into an apartment that reeked of dogs. It was too much to ask of her.

Moth, who so rarely in her life had ever ventured farther out of doors than the porch steps, fled.

III.

Day after day dawned gray and melancholy. I awoke to the alarm resentful, puffy, with waterlogged eyeballs and stones in my brain, and lay under the covers until I heard mail clunk into the box on the other side of the wall--signaling hope, a time to stand clear of blankets and move forward.

And then one morning I awoke with gladness in my heart. I leaped to the kitchen to make pineapple breakfast cake and reconstitute the orange juice and start the morning coffee. Even in my sleep I must have sensed a shift in the barometer: the light through the windows was bright and warm; not a shred of fog or cloud remained.

The children slept on until, impatient with feeding only myself and bored with my solitude, I went to their rooms and exclaimed about the cake, and flipped up the windowshades as flappingly as I could manage, and let the clear, deliciously cruel sunlight come at them full-force before they could defend themselves. I think they were happy to see me so happy and to know I was lonely for them. No one protested.

A flurry of clean laundry was flung about, socks and underwear flumped down next to each dresser, everyone trying to put their clothes away quickly, to clear the brain's cobwebs and complete pre-breakfast rituals.

Immediately after eating the boys rushed to their bicycles and were gone, to the old-town comic-book and junk shops, and to the docks for more reeking starfish to bring home.

My young half-brother who lived with us, a boy with Down syndrome, sat in the dim living room like Gautama Siddhartha and peered at me through his toy binoculars, where I sat in the next room in the broad sunbeam reading and gulping down coffee and waiting for the mail.
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