Page 31 of Kitten

“Maybe in her next installation, she’ll throw the fish back into the sea,” James said.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. James made a shushing noise. I registered that my voice had grown shrill. “I hate it.” Across the hallway, a few heads turned. Indignation made me self-possessed, and I marched in the opposite direction. I couldn’t yet identify the source of my conviction, but whatever it was, it was powerful.

“Do you want to go to another room?” James appeared behind me. “Talk to me.”

I continued to pace.

“Katie.” James’s hand pressed my shoulder. “Do you want to go?”

We found a bench outside. The breeze wafted over the stench of a nearby trash bin.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It made me feel so sad.”

“Just sad?”

“And guilty, I guess, for leaving it there. I don’t know. I know I’m being difficult.”

“Yes, well.” He looked away. “Something’s on your mind.”

A pebble pressed into my thigh. I brushed it off the bench.

“It feels like I’m missing something,” James said. “Like, maybe your feelings toward me have changed.”

I lifted my head in surprise. Wasn’t it obvious how much I needed him? James noted my silence and saved me from filling it. “You feel distant, is what I mean. I keep trying to reach you, but it’s not working, and I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s this town. I want to go back.”

“Okay. Back to New York?”

“No,” I replied. “I don’t know, I don’t know where.” I thought of the fish. Part of me had a compulsion to look at the fish again, while the other part was desperate to extinguish the desire to do so. And then I recognized the specific tenor and physical manifestation of the latter feeling: a need to shake my head over and over so as to shake off the particular guilt that overcame me when I was reminded of my mother.

“I think,” I said, then stopped. It was tiring to resist so much. “I think I miss my mother.”

“Ah.” James paused. “You still haven’t spoken?”

“I called. She didn’t pick up.”

“What? When?”

“A couple days ago.”

“Oh, Katie.” James put his arm around my neck. Gently he stroked my hair. A few minutes passed until finally he asked, his voice quiet, “Will you please tell me what happened with her?”

It wasn’t the first time he’d asked, but something was different about the way he did so now. Already his eyes were downcast, like he was prepared to be denied. If I denied him this time, I understood, he would not ask again.

I thought about how inconsolable my mother was when she discovered I’d discussed her with my high school counselor.It’s not right,she said.It’s like you’ve cut me, that’s how it feels.I thought also of the beeping phone line. Eight before it went to voicemail. She usually never let it go past two. What was left between us had already been cut straight through.

So, in spite of myself, I began to explain to James what had happened in the beginning of my senior year in college. I was going to drop out, or at least take a leave of absence. My grades were bad, and I had no plans, no desires. Even Lou told me to go home for a while.

Revisiting the details of that semester made my hands damp. My hands were perpetually clammy that September, a month trapped in a heatwave, the city like a rag that never dried. Things that never bothered me before drove me to rage: the shock of metal hitting belly when my subway fare didn’t go through, flyers for God slipped into my purse. I developed a strange inability to hear people, their speech refusing to translate into meaning in my brain. Envy toward my classmates, effortlessly pious about things I failed to care about—internships, theses, graduation—transformedat any instant into fury whenever they said something banal, although it was worse when they were intelligent or impressive. I learned that these people possessed a drive to do something great, something that would propel them far away from where they came, or else closer to where they naturally belonged. But it was becoming clear to me that I was only good at home.

When I told my mother in a rash declaration that I was quitting school, she didn’t try to stop me. To my relief, she bought me a plane ticket. I arrived at dinnertime with a backpack of clothes, sweating, hungrier than I’d been in months. The air smelled familiar. Crushed leaves, wet gravel.

My mother looked small. She made a show of having dinner with me. I could tell she was unwell, because she’d stopped painting entirely. Learning that I’d stopped, too, cheered her temporarily. When she reached to hug me, I could feel her bones. Her thinness had always saddened me, but distance had made her strange, and now it caused me to recoil. I could not stand to be close to her and smell her breath, unfamiliar and powerful and, I thought with pain in my heart, bad; I could not stand to have her kiss me. I remembered why I’d wanted to leave.

My mother did not ask about school, nor my desire to drop out. Each time the conversation lulled, she recited memories from my childhood. “Do you remember,” she said, “when I’d braid your hair and you’d try to sit as still as possible, even when you sneezed?” Or: “Do you remember the way we used to sleep together? The way you’d wet the bed if you were alone?” Of course I remembered. They werethe same stories she always told. Still, she asked me anyway, just to hear me say yes. Her eyes softened with a particular relief each time, like an object she’d been trying to catch had finally landed safely in her hands.

After a week, I grew tired of hearing the stories of my childhood and became filled with an even more acute sense of grief than before. I felt myself rotting gently in the middle of nowhere, going no place, a piece of fallen fruit waiting to be reclaimed by the soil. When I spoke about my classes or the city, she closed off. “You’ve never cared about this kind of thing,” she said.