Her Real Name
“I saw Cottonball the other day,” you laugh a little and this is not how I want this to go, but I don’t know her real name and I don’t know how to change this thing we started years ago.
“Really? What was she doing? Trying to kill you?” You ask smiling.
“She was walking this really old mixed-breed dog very patiently. Very sweet.” You stop smiling. You can tell I’m changing the narrative. We have a really old mixed breed dog that we try, sometimes unsuccessfully, to be patient with. I don’t remember ‘Cottonball’s’ real name. I think it was a grandmother’s or mother’s name like Linda or Pam. I know how she got the name Cottonball because we gave it to her. The joke was that she wasn’t safe to work anywhere but at a cottonball factory. Because we were afraid her real name would conjure her, the cursed one, the witch.
She was strange and silent and worked at the grocery store near campus where we would go at odd hours to avoid the university students buying beer and diet soda. She seemed attracted to you in the way magnets are attracted and would find reasons to force some interaction. She seemed to have a sixth sense for when we were in the store regardless of the time (did she ever go home?): she would spill things like boxes of spaghetti or bottles of soda so she could sweep or mop them up in front of us, taking up the entire aisle. Or she would just appear in our way to move things around on the shelves. If she saw us in line she would jump in to bag our groceries. The world’s slowest bagger. Heavy cans in with the eggs and tomatoes. A separate bag for each tiny can of cat food. She was strange and silent and her behavior was odd. She was odd. She looked odd. Bad teeth, orange tangled long hair, lumpen ugly sneakers. We were cool and trying to pass for a class much farther up than our pasts and our broke present. We also had a history of attracting people who attacked us and our happiness. Sometimes violently. So we were protective of each other and ourselves plural and singular. But that’s still no excuse. She would never look directly into my eyes. Years of bullying or someone had done something terrible to her. Maybe she was on the spectrum. I know the signs now but that’s not a substitute for knowing someone.
Then there was a story in the paper about a woman who’d been fined for feeding rats. She fed them cheap dog food and they kept coming, kept breeding until she was feeding hundreds of rats. Her neighbors complained. She said she thought in the beginning that they were cats or maybe fairies. That it made her feel good to feed them. They were her friends. Until there were more and more of them and she didn’t feel like she had a choice. But she was still upset that the city wanted to kill them all. They were her friends still and the city poisoned them.
The rat witch was, of course, her. We laughed about it, then went silent realizing that the city had killed hundreds of rats who trusted her to feed them. I would learn later that rats laugh, they giggle when tickled, and have arguments and families. They sing to each other. Like we do.
One of the few times we sat outside at the coffeehouse near our falling down house in the student slums, she saw us and crossed to our side of the street. We rarely saw her outside the grocery store, so we had no idea what to expect. She moved by us with a sort of skipping, stumbling walk, wobbling tables, knocking one chair into the street. I remember people at other tables laughing loudly, inappropriately even though they didn’t seem to see her. We realized, laughing after she’d passed, that she’d managed to steal every sugar and sweetener packet on every other table and a couple of salt shakers. Respect.
It reminded me of sitting outside the coffeehouse during an unexpected solar eclipse. (This was before smart phones were a thing and a near total solar eclipse could be a surprise.) It was the same affect: uncanny, unsettling. As if something supernatural had just happened to us and the world, as if time and space had been altered. But of course, she was just a person and the eclipse is just the moon briefly standing between us and the sun’s light. Nothing magical.
We moved on — to Brooklyn — but she didn’t. When we moved back to this, my hometown, and this neighborhood that once was too poor and parts still were, I saw her and didn’t mention it to you. It was just a glimpse. But there was no mistaking her even after all these years. She looked nearly the same. Maybe her hair wasn’t quite so orange, streaked now with gray, but after the years have worn my edges down, I see a quiet woman whose trauma sits like a heaviness around her, walking an older dog who wears a child’s blanket that has been sewn and crafted with care into a lightweight dog’s jacket. There are still patches of snow on the ground and the dog has her total patient attention as it noses at what’s left of the snow. She doesn’t smile, I’ve never seen her smile, but there’s a happiness to her no one could penetrate. She must must have lived in this neighborhood all her life.
I know I don’t look the same. She doesn’t seem to recognize me. But I was never the focus of her attention. You were.
“Do you remember what her name was? Her real name,” you ask.
No. No, I don’t.
