She wondered that the chains they’d always talked about could slip away so easily if only you walked out.
That day she walked out of a forest barely worthy of the name, out of the tarpaper shack in a stand of scrubby pines behind a strip-malled strip of highway running between two nowheres.
That day, the irons that had weighed her down fell off like skeins of silly string made heavy by a game of make-believe she’d learned to play when she was nine or ten:
Pretend the hour to herself (putting off thank you notes, piano scales, dishes in brown water) in order to stand in the evening air waiting for the brindled alley cat to come for his saucer of milk was — (what had her father said?) — “pure selfishness.”
That game of make-believe, enchanted prison she’d stepped into, chains of quiet obligation, other people’s expectations, hairshirt of recriminations willingly slipped on and then allowed to itch and rub for decades.
She’d felt at home in there, despite the iron and the hair. Tuned the magical machine of her mind to read in the most inscrutable glance of any acquaintance aggrieved disappointment. She’d struggled to bear it like another link of chain.
Sometimes she’d had companions. Fellow prisoners. Together they’d bewailed their state, and felt in that communion of misery some small stirring of dissatisfied satisfaction.
It went along this way until the day that she’d walk out.
What was it made her do it? Perhaps the stirring of the evening air. Or a whisper coming from somewhere beyond the open door, whisper of something that needed her more than this pile of plates in brown water, which, after all didn’t need her at all.
The shiver of it made her wriggle, shrug her shoulders. Of a sudden the chains fell away and shriveled on the floor, looking ever so much like the spent ash of a firework snake in the driveway on the third of July.
She touched them with her toe, but it was clearly time to go, out into the evening air where, oh, it felt like vertigo for a moment, sunset splitting the sky like that, red chasm with clouds falling into it. Birds singing as they rose and fell in a curtain of song she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
What a relief when the cat appeared, as cats do, out of nowhere.
He wound himself around her legs a few times, not bothering to meow.
She looked at him. Said, plaintively, “Where now?”
“Wherever you want,” said the cat.
Then, seeing her look of almost despair, he relented.
“But there’s no hurry,” he said. “Here, sit down by me while I drink this saucer of milk. You can scratch my head, behind the ears; I like that. And when we’re done you can decide” — he paused as if to emphasize — “And when we’re done you can decide all the whens and all the wheres — but now, just sit, and drink the air.
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