Twenty-Eight
A tidy house and naked ladies.
Article by Piper Campbell, art by Sienna Busby
11.1.21
The reason I went to her tidy house was because she’d stopped me in the hallway
on a Monday
when I’d been taking a self-designated bathroom break from a dull class,
and while that professor droned on
this professor asked if I would like to cat sit for her.
The fluorescent lights flickered above
Humming
Gray walls squeezed us in.
Cat-sitting!
What a liberty.
I smiled,
of course, Joyce.
When I entered the house, I was worried that it looked this tidy.
Worried that the cat was brushed every day
that clearly, this was not a house of dirty dishes.
And why did she keep such a tidy house? I knew she did not have a lover or children.
But next I saw her craft table and the vases and picture frames within which
naked ladies rested and
some old weeds arched sideways dead
in the garden and I thought, maybe.
When my friend came to visit
we drank vodka and cranberry juice
played at her craft table with her cat and counted
all the naked ladies we could find (there were twenty seven).
We dressed up and tried on her earrings and spoke in British accents and laughed
and laughed.
Later that night when my hands were clenched around my professors toilet
(after my friend had hollered from the craft table, asking if I needed someone
to hold my hair to which I had waved a groggy no)
it occurred to me, oddly,
that perhaps Joyce loves women.
When the second friend came to visit
she stayed up past 1 am finishing an essay.
Though it was a Tuesday, I was still disappointed in her,
because earlier in my professor’s kitchen
as we teetered about, pantless and naked ladies
watched us from the fridge magnets,
I told her I was bleeding and she shrugged and said that’s okay
with me.
So around 2 am, bound by her word, we covered white sheets with red towels
and she fucked me hard and fast and too soon,
before she had even kissed me for long.
I sighed when I realized I should have gone to sleep.
She held it out then,
long, bloody and thick,
and said
You should probably clean this up, and I rolled my eyes.
The naked ladies in the bathroom watched me
as scalding water seared the silicon shaft
It seared me, too
and I did not meet their gaze.
When the third friend came to visit
we baked cookies and somehow mine were burnt even though
we were eating off the same tray.
We watched a movie and I massaged his hand how
I knew he liked it,
how I did when we used to sleep together
for those quick and confusing weeks
and when I hit the right spot his shoulder melted into me on the couch
while the cat watched
and my clit twitched.
But I kept eating cookies and drove him home early because I was tired,
too tired to open that door again.
Not like that, full of burnt cookies with the twenty seven naked ladies watching.
When the final friend came to visit
I showed her the twenty seven naked ladies.
And she nodded, slowly, waving her head up and down as if greeting,
individually, all twenty seven of them.
Gay? I wondered, and she waved her head up and down
at me.
Months later I sat alone across the country
far from the cat and the twenty seven ladies
eagerly lapping up a book of her poems.
The book, of course, with a naked lady on the cover
who I think perhaps is Joyce.
I was surprised, somehow, even after the twenty seven naked ladies,
to find out she loved women and furthermore the way she said it
not lesbian, not dyke, not gay or queer, but
elegant.
Almost like she had been there
on the other nights when my friends were not,
when I became the twenty eighth and
pulled the blinds to walk with them once
slipping into her floor length, fur-lined coat and looking into the mirror
above the sink,
where I washed off burnt cookie
where I washed off thick blood
where I washed off vodka vomit
where a naked lady watched me.
I stroked her cat and
stroked her fur-lined coat
and for a moment
it was me
and it was her
and we were elegant.
I see why she keeps it tidy, I whispered to the well-brushed cat.