Dress Me Up, Dress Me Down
Cathy Adams
The box was already full, but I kept stuffing clothes into it, not bothering to fold them. All I could think was that I wanted out of this house as soon as possible. I could feel Ben as much as I could hear him, exhaling behind me as I took armload after armload of clothes from the drawer and pushed them down into a cardboard box.
“You’ll never make it to the car with that.”
I pushed in one last pair of slacks. “Hide and watch,” I said, using one of the phrases he liked to use on me. He always told me I nag too much. You ought not smoke so much pot. You shouldn’t eat that entire pack of sausage. You are not going to skip out on your grandfather’s birthday party. You will not waste one more penny of our money betting on football.
“Hide and watch,” he’d retort. And I did. I watched him for eighteen years, and then I decided I was through watching him do stupid things.
He stomped around for a minute before taking notice of something on a shelf behind me. “You’re not taking the clock.” He pointed an accusing finger at an ornamental clock with fake gold paint on its four curlicue legs and two dusty cherubs embracing one another over the top. The tiny clock face was so faded the only way to tell the time was to lean in close and squint at the thin gold arms pointing at chipped numerals.
I paused from taping the lid down on the box. I hated that clock because it was ugly and a bitch to dust. It was handed down from Ben’s grandfather, and Ben had always insisted that this relic from the 40’s was worth “at least ten thousand dollars, maybe more.”
“Why would you think I’d even want that?” I asked. “Wait, don’t tell me, it’s worth soooo much money.”
And yes, Ben actually launched into the story once again of how his grandfather had just returned from World War II and won it in a poker game from a local judge, and blah, blah, blah, the story went on exactly the way it did every time he told it. He was just getting to the part about how it had once belonged to Ida Lupino’s hairdresser when I stepped into the closet and began pulling clothes from hangers. When I didn’t take the bait to argue with him about his damn clock, he didn’t know what else to say. He just stood there, hovering over me as I filled another box with coats.
“What are you doing with that?” he barked, pointing at the black coat with a wide fur collar in my hand.
“I’m packing it. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You’re not taking that. It was my mother’s, and you’re not taking anything out of this house that was hers.” He pointed at it as if he was about to snatch it from my hands.
“Your mother gave that coat to me a year before she died. You’ve seen me wear it at least ten times, so it’s mine and I’m taking it.” I flipped the hem up over the fur shawl collar and shoved it into the box; he lunged for it.
I can’t remember any other time in our marriage when a conflict had ended up in physical confrontation. Once at Thanksgiving he’d drew back his hand as if to slap me when I accidentally tipped a bowl of soup in his lap, but he pulled his wits about him in time. Other than slamming his coffee cup down in anger and breaking it after I told him his favorite Eminem CD got cracked a July 4th party, Ben had always been relatively mellow. But in the throes of a divorce when everything we’d accumulated over an eighteen-year marriage was being pulled apart, he’d become as possessive as a five-year-old clutching toys he cared nothing about just to keep another kid from playing with them.
Ben managed to get one handful of silk lining when he tried to jerk the coat from my grasp, tearing the side seam with an unholy sounding rrriiiiip. “Oh my god,” I shouted. “Look what you’ve done! You tore your mother’s coat! What would she think if she were here to see what you did?” My teasing retaliation softened a tiny bit when I saw the horror on his face, as if he’d ripped her soul instead of the coat. I always liked Ben’s mother, Kitty, more than I liked him. My own mother died when I was ten. I married Ben, in part, because I envisioned Kitty and I like mother and daughter going to yoga classes, attending Country Club Sunday lunches, shopping for shoes, and cooking Thanksgiving dinners in her kitchen. And that was the way it was until she died three years ago. When I lost Kitty I lost the best part of being married to Ben.
“I don’t want you taking Mama’s coat,” he said in a slightly softer tone.
“This coat. Is mine. She gave it to ME. And I’m taking it. End of discussion.” I pulled the cloth from his hand and dunked the coat back in the box. Ben’s face reddened and jerked in little patches of twitching muscle. If ever I had feared he would hit me, now was the moment, but I stood my ground, daring him to touch that coat. When he wheeled around and headed for the door, I exhaled so deeply my head spun.
I hate the phrase, “going through a divorce.” People may be “going through a horror house” or “going through a car wash,” but divorces are not things to be gone through. They are a hundred steps to be completed with lawyers, paperwork, and therapy before you get out the other side with all the flotsam you can manage to trudge away with. Everything you’ve collected over years of marriage is split apart like King Solomon dividing the baby. The house was our main joint property; we were selling it and splitting the proceeds. He had his fishing equipment, his 75-inch TV, and his thirty-three guns. I had my studio in a downtown loft in my name alone. The place held no interest for Ben other than him knowing how much it meant to me and trying to claim a stake in it just for punitive purposes. My sculpture studio was how I made my living as an artist, and over the past fifteen years I’d found my occupational and creative niche in a world that had always been shriveled but was declining even more rapidly in the swamp of the American MAGA present. Now that the place had an air mattress, dorm fridge, and hot plate, it had become my temporary residence as well. The letter arrived at my studio address. Printed on heavy cream paper in an envelope lined in peacock blue that looked more like a wedding invitation than a notice from a law firm, the return address was printed in navy letters: Wheelan, Busby & Associates, LLC. I unfolded the letter and began reading. Dear Leslie Burke. I stopped after the first paragraph and was out the door with the letter crumpled in my fist.
I pushed the front door of our house open so hard the door handle smacked against the wall. I hoped it dented the drywall. Ben was standing in the kitchen, and his smirk told me he was expecting me. I flipped the envelope across the table and it skittered off the other side onto the floor. He didn’t reach down to pick it up. His face said he was not the wheedling little boy he had been the day I packed up the last of my things.
Ben tilted his head upward and peered down at me from the doorway. “I see you’ve read your mail.”
I planted my feet apart, and though my hair had been blown askew in the fall wind, I refused to smooth it down. “Shared marital asset? Seriously? You haven’t set foot in my studio in four years. The place is worth nothing to you, but that studio is my livelihood. You’re just dragging all this out to be a dick!”
“Which is precisely why it makes no sense for you to put yourself through another trip to court. If you recall, I helped you get it all set up when you were starting out. You didn’t even know how to hold a drill back then. I painted the whole place for you by myself, and remember, I put up the shelves, too.” His tone was cool, controlled. He’d been waiting for this moment.
I willed myself to stay calm. “So, years ago you spend one week of our married life helping me set up my studio, the place I’ve spent every day of my life in since then, splitting the skin of my fingers in clay and paint to build a career. Straining my muscles climbing ladders to work on my sculptures, pulling muscles in my back lifting supplies, and now you think you’re entitled to half?”
“Just the building,” he said in his one-up tone. “You own that outright, so I figure I should have half. Isn’t that what we agreed on? Everything split down the middle? You can still work there doing your art stuff. I don’t care.”
Doing your art stuff. I wanted to pull his tongue out of his mouth and cut it off with my table saw. “I have no idea how Kitty raised you to be the petty little man you’ve shriveled into.”
He shook his head slowly from side to side with a fake I-have-an-idea expression. “There is one thing you could do that would make me forget all about the studio. I told you I wanted everything of Mother’s. The coat, for example. And I know you took a bunch of her jewelry when she died.”
“What are you going to do with your mother’s coat and jewelry? Sit around like Norman Bates in Psycho?”
His lips shook as he showed the first signs of cracking, but he pulled himself together and casually took a seat at the kitchen table. A cold cup of coffee was centered on his placemat, and he took as sip as if the move had been scripted. “It’s none of your business what I’m going to do with Mama’s stuff. I want it, and that’s all there is to it. Unless of course you want to go to court over half your studio.”
All of Kitty’s stuff put together was worth less than a hundred dollars in a vintage shop. The coat, a handful of rhinestone and fake crystal necklaces, about five rings encrusted with gaudy colored stones, the dog-ear sized drop earrings that she’d last worn to a New Year’s Eve party in the 90’s, and an oversized costume silver bracelet lined in blue plastic flower blossoms, a hideously fun piece I paired with a halter top and wore to a cook-out last summer. It was all the stuff of a goth girl’s junior high dress-up party. Ben had managed to make it a will of egos that he knew he’d win. The terms dictated that. He was sure he’d beaten me. “All this just to keep me from having it, huh?”
“I took the liberty of writing everything up all solid and legal so we could sign it.” Ben took a pen and yellow folder from a drawer and placed them on the table, keeping his eyes on me as he opened it to reveal a single sheet of paper with places at the bottom for us to sign. He’d always said he wanted to be a lawyer despite ending up an assistant manager of a concrete paving company. Kitty once confided after one too many Mojitos that though she loved her son, she always knew he was too dumb to be a lawyer. Ben clicked the pen, once, twice, and again, then shoved it next to the paper in front of me. I could have picked any moment of this entire meeting to be my stopping point at which I could walk away. The obnoxious clicking of the pen, the swaggering head, cocky tone. I read the paper at a snail’s pace just to make him wait.
. . .Every personal item belonging to the late Kitty Elizabeth Burke to be turned over to her son, Benjamin Carson Burke. . .
I picked up the pen and gave it three clicks. He waited as I let it hover over the paper. “And you’ll drop your claim on my studio?”
He tapped a finger on the document. “Says so right there. You give me all of Mama’s stuff, every piece, and the studio’s off the table. But remember, I want every button, every pearl, every thread of that coat. Don’t think you can hold anything back. I know what all she had down to the number of heads on that fur coat collar.” Ben, the man I’d spent eighteen years of my life with, had counted dead chinchilla heads on a coat.
I leaned back in my seat and gave him a relaxed smile. He loved few things more than thinking he’d gotten the better of someone. “Let me ask one thing of you, and I’ll sign,” I said.
His eyes narrowed in suspicion but he quickly shrugged it off, confident of an easy victory. “What’s that?”
“You know I have my big fall exhibition coming up in November. Our divorce papers won’t be ready before then anyway. You know how I like to make a splash at my shows, so let me get one last use out of Kitty’s stuff.” I drew my index finger over the line where my name was to go. He strained his neck resisting the urge to follow it with his eyes. “It’s such a unique coat, and I think I would have made Kitty proud with this show. I’ll give every piece back to you after the opening. Every button, every pearl, every tiny mammal paw. For Kitty, what do you say?”
He thought it over for a few moments and then put out his hand to shake on it.
“Since we’re being all legal and proper here, let’s add that part in writing, too,” I said, handing the pen to him.
He laughed, trying to sound friendly as he began writing the addendum. He was sure he’d won.
I tossed the box of Kitty’s junk jewelry next to the coat on the studio table and pushed my hands up the deep fur panels of the front. The four, shining pewter-colored buttons were the size of newborn baby fists. At the top, a luscious deep black fur collar extended from the neck and draped down the back and sides over the shoulders before meeting in a deep V in the front. Six tiny reddish-brown fur tendrils hung down. I felt like Bette Davis when I wore that coat, the fur bits slapping against the small of my back as I walked. Across the front of the collar were four grotesque mammal heads with plastic eyes. Circa 1950’s, this outlandish coat was now so out of date it qualified as a costume. I’d never been sure what kind of fur made up the top drape. It was the softest fiber I had ever touched. The few times I’d worn it I felt guilty that my body was surrounded by this conglomeration of tiny carcasses. Laid out before me on the table, it was outdated, useless, dead, and thoroughly hideous, just like my marriage. I went to work.
The number fourteen on my November calendar above my large work table had been circled in red for over three weeks, and by the day’s arrival, I was both giddy and exhausted. Three plasters encircled fingers on my right hand, all scrapes from wire and one accidental jab from a Phillips Head. The larger injury on my right shin was from the welding torch on a late night of work when I’d grown so tired I became sloppy. Though I couldn’t completely hide the limp, my silk calypso pants hid the bandage from the crowd mingling with wine glasses in their hands as they bent close to read the placards next to each new piece. Touted on social media as Atlanta’s premiere visual art happening of the winter season, this show was proving to be my highest attended opening ever. Gulch Magazine and Atlanta Art Week both sent writers to cover it, and everyone’s cell phones were tilted upward on my featured sculpture around which all the other pieces were encircled on the floor. Hanging from a six-sided, black wooden frame towering twelve feet in the air in the center of the room was my pièce de resistance, the sculpture that held in its components every look of bitterness, each word of resentment, and all the disappointment I had ever felt from my years with Ben. The placard next to it read: Kitty’s Last Best Gift. And printed underneath: Sold.
“Oh my god, Leslie, this is sublime. It’s mercurial,” said Edison McDuffy, one the city’s best known gallery owners. He waved his wine glass with his ring-covered left hand at the sculpture in something between a salute and a toast. “Girlypoppy, you are gambaruing the hell out of this show. I mean, look at this!”
“It was inspired,” was all I could say.
“And this magnificent piece sold before the show even began,” he dipped his chin to his chest in one of his quaint poses. “Do tell. How much? If it was anything under $20,000 it was a give-away.”
Two small animal heads stared down at us. I’d repainted their eyes black with red irises and centered them with the smallest of rhinestones glittering down on the patrons. The pearls set in each ear looked like tiny moons on their heads. “It was definitely my costliest piece yet.”
“Can we get a photo of you with the sculpture?” A frumpy, bearded photographer lugging an old-fashioned bag of equipment looked out of place among the crowd of Gen Z’ers and Millennials. “Come on, Edison,” I said linking my arm in his. “Let’s make the place look old jazz club elegant.” Edison was known never to turn down an opportunity to be featured on social media. Frumpy Beard flipped open a pad and held an honest-to-God pencil in his hand. “This is one of your most distinctly composite mixed media pieces yet. Can you tell us about its conception?”
Words were forming in my head, but they never made it out of my mouth. Ben’s wail was heard even over the chatter of art patrons and Lil Nas X on the speakers. “What have you done? What the fuck have you done, Leslie?” He clutched his hair so hard I thought he was going to tear it out. His eyes flicked over the glittering lights of the sculpture. I particularly liked the way each chandelier bulb, encircled by a fist-sized piece of fur sparkling with fake baubles glued to the edges. Each bulb twinkled against long ropes of black fur cascading downward from the center forming a kind of macabre carousel roof over the lights mounted below. Underneath the light bulbs, the six tassels spun in the center from a battery powered crib mobile covered in the coat’s silk lining. Between all of the tassels, I left one rhinestone earring intact. The stones caught the light as it turned, lightly spattering the walls with shifting stars.
“I counted the heads, too, Ben. They’re all there. All four of them.”
He could not take his eyes from my art, magnificent and grotesque. It was all his.
“Are you the buyer?” asked the photographer, raising his camera. The picture he immortalized of Ben’s face melting off his bones at the sight of Kitty’s belongings remains one of my most treasured possessions. I keep it in the top drawer of my desk.
“Did you want a cardboard box to take it in?” I asked. “I kept a big one just for that.” I stepped in front of him, but I was too short to block his view. All I managed to do was insert my face underneath the long, spidery fur chandelier arms of my new favorite sculpture such that he could not look at it without seeing me as well. Without another word, Ben walked out of my studio.
~ ~ ~
May 2026
Cathy Adams
The box was already full, but I kept stuffing clothes into it, not bothering to fold them. All I could think was that I wanted out of this house as soon as possible. I could feel Ben as much as I could hear him, exhaling behind me as I took armload after armload of clothes from the drawer and pushed them down into a cardboard box.
“You’ll never make it to the car with that.”
I pushed in one last pair of slacks. “Hide and watch,” I said, using one of the phrases he liked to use on me. He always told me I nag too much. You ought not smoke so much pot. You shouldn’t eat that entire pack of sausage. You are not going to skip out on your grandfather’s birthday party. You will not waste one more penny of our money betting on football.
“Hide and watch,” he’d retort. And I did. I watched him for eighteen years, and then I decided I was through watching him do stupid things.
He stomped around for a minute before taking notice of something on a shelf behind me. “You’re not taking the clock.” He pointed an accusing finger at an ornamental clock with fake gold paint on its four curlicue legs and two dusty cherubs embracing one another over the top. The tiny clock face was so faded the only way to tell the time was to lean in close and squint at the thin gold arms pointing at chipped numerals.
I paused from taping the lid down on the box. I hated that clock because it was ugly and a bitch to dust. It was handed down from Ben’s grandfather, and Ben had always insisted that this relic from the 40’s was worth “at least ten thousand dollars, maybe more.”
“Why would you think I’d even want that?” I asked. “Wait, don’t tell me, it’s worth soooo much money.”
And yes, Ben actually launched into the story once again of how his grandfather had just returned from World War II and won it in a poker game from a local judge, and blah, blah, blah, the story went on exactly the way it did every time he told it. He was just getting to the part about how it had once belonged to Ida Lupino’s hairdresser when I stepped into the closet and began pulling clothes from hangers. When I didn’t take the bait to argue with him about his damn clock, he didn’t know what else to say. He just stood there, hovering over me as I filled another box with coats.
“What are you doing with that?” he barked, pointing at the black coat with a wide fur collar in my hand.
“I’m packing it. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You’re not taking that. It was my mother’s, and you’re not taking anything out of this house that was hers.” He pointed at it as if he was about to snatch it from my hands.
“Your mother gave that coat to me a year before she died. You’ve seen me wear it at least ten times, so it’s mine and I’m taking it.” I flipped the hem up over the fur shawl collar and shoved it into the box; he lunged for it.
I can’t remember any other time in our marriage when a conflict had ended up in physical confrontation. Once at Thanksgiving he’d drew back his hand as if to slap me when I accidentally tipped a bowl of soup in his lap, but he pulled his wits about him in time. Other than slamming his coffee cup down in anger and breaking it after I told him his favorite Eminem CD got cracked a July 4th party, Ben had always been relatively mellow. But in the throes of a divorce when everything we’d accumulated over an eighteen-year marriage was being pulled apart, he’d become as possessive as a five-year-old clutching toys he cared nothing about just to keep another kid from playing with them.
Ben managed to get one handful of silk lining when he tried to jerk the coat from my grasp, tearing the side seam with an unholy sounding rrriiiiip. “Oh my god,” I shouted. “Look what you’ve done! You tore your mother’s coat! What would she think if she were here to see what you did?” My teasing retaliation softened a tiny bit when I saw the horror on his face, as if he’d ripped her soul instead of the coat. I always liked Ben’s mother, Kitty, more than I liked him. My own mother died when I was ten. I married Ben, in part, because I envisioned Kitty and I like mother and daughter going to yoga classes, attending Country Club Sunday lunches, shopping for shoes, and cooking Thanksgiving dinners in her kitchen. And that was the way it was until she died three years ago. When I lost Kitty I lost the best part of being married to Ben.
“I don’t want you taking Mama’s coat,” he said in a slightly softer tone.
“This coat. Is mine. She gave it to ME. And I’m taking it. End of discussion.” I pulled the cloth from his hand and dunked the coat back in the box. Ben’s face reddened and jerked in little patches of twitching muscle. If ever I had feared he would hit me, now was the moment, but I stood my ground, daring him to touch that coat. When he wheeled around and headed for the door, I exhaled so deeply my head spun.
I hate the phrase, “going through a divorce.” People may be “going through a horror house” or “going through a car wash,” but divorces are not things to be gone through. They are a hundred steps to be completed with lawyers, paperwork, and therapy before you get out the other side with all the flotsam you can manage to trudge away with. Everything you’ve collected over years of marriage is split apart like King Solomon dividing the baby. The house was our main joint property; we were selling it and splitting the proceeds. He had his fishing equipment, his 75-inch TV, and his thirty-three guns. I had my studio in a downtown loft in my name alone. The place held no interest for Ben other than him knowing how much it meant to me and trying to claim a stake in it just for punitive purposes. My sculpture studio was how I made my living as an artist, and over the past fifteen years I’d found my occupational and creative niche in a world that had always been shriveled but was declining even more rapidly in the swamp of the American MAGA present. Now that the place had an air mattress, dorm fridge, and hot plate, it had become my temporary residence as well. The letter arrived at my studio address. Printed on heavy cream paper in an envelope lined in peacock blue that looked more like a wedding invitation than a notice from a law firm, the return address was printed in navy letters: Wheelan, Busby & Associates, LLC. I unfolded the letter and began reading. Dear Leslie Burke. I stopped after the first paragraph and was out the door with the letter crumpled in my fist.
I pushed the front door of our house open so hard the door handle smacked against the wall. I hoped it dented the drywall. Ben was standing in the kitchen, and his smirk told me he was expecting me. I flipped the envelope across the table and it skittered off the other side onto the floor. He didn’t reach down to pick it up. His face said he was not the wheedling little boy he had been the day I packed up the last of my things.
Ben tilted his head upward and peered down at me from the doorway. “I see you’ve read your mail.”
I planted my feet apart, and though my hair had been blown askew in the fall wind, I refused to smooth it down. “Shared marital asset? Seriously? You haven’t set foot in my studio in four years. The place is worth nothing to you, but that studio is my livelihood. You’re just dragging all this out to be a dick!”
“Which is precisely why it makes no sense for you to put yourself through another trip to court. If you recall, I helped you get it all set up when you were starting out. You didn’t even know how to hold a drill back then. I painted the whole place for you by myself, and remember, I put up the shelves, too.” His tone was cool, controlled. He’d been waiting for this moment.
I willed myself to stay calm. “So, years ago you spend one week of our married life helping me set up my studio, the place I’ve spent every day of my life in since then, splitting the skin of my fingers in clay and paint to build a career. Straining my muscles climbing ladders to work on my sculptures, pulling muscles in my back lifting supplies, and now you think you’re entitled to half?”
“Just the building,” he said in his one-up tone. “You own that outright, so I figure I should have half. Isn’t that what we agreed on? Everything split down the middle? You can still work there doing your art stuff. I don’t care.”
Doing your art stuff. I wanted to pull his tongue out of his mouth and cut it off with my table saw. “I have no idea how Kitty raised you to be the petty little man you’ve shriveled into.”
He shook his head slowly from side to side with a fake I-have-an-idea expression. “There is one thing you could do that would make me forget all about the studio. I told you I wanted everything of Mother’s. The coat, for example. And I know you took a bunch of her jewelry when she died.”
“What are you going to do with your mother’s coat and jewelry? Sit around like Norman Bates in Psycho?”
His lips shook as he showed the first signs of cracking, but he pulled himself together and casually took a seat at the kitchen table. A cold cup of coffee was centered on his placemat, and he took as sip as if the move had been scripted. “It’s none of your business what I’m going to do with Mama’s stuff. I want it, and that’s all there is to it. Unless of course you want to go to court over half your studio.”
All of Kitty’s stuff put together was worth less than a hundred dollars in a vintage shop. The coat, a handful of rhinestone and fake crystal necklaces, about five rings encrusted with gaudy colored stones, the dog-ear sized drop earrings that she’d last worn to a New Year’s Eve party in the 90’s, and an oversized costume silver bracelet lined in blue plastic flower blossoms, a hideously fun piece I paired with a halter top and wore to a cook-out last summer. It was all the stuff of a goth girl’s junior high dress-up party. Ben had managed to make it a will of egos that he knew he’d win. The terms dictated that. He was sure he’d beaten me. “All this just to keep me from having it, huh?”
“I took the liberty of writing everything up all solid and legal so we could sign it.” Ben took a pen and yellow folder from a drawer and placed them on the table, keeping his eyes on me as he opened it to reveal a single sheet of paper with places at the bottom for us to sign. He’d always said he wanted to be a lawyer despite ending up an assistant manager of a concrete paving company. Kitty once confided after one too many Mojitos that though she loved her son, she always knew he was too dumb to be a lawyer. Ben clicked the pen, once, twice, and again, then shoved it next to the paper in front of me. I could have picked any moment of this entire meeting to be my stopping point at which I could walk away. The obnoxious clicking of the pen, the swaggering head, cocky tone. I read the paper at a snail’s pace just to make him wait.
. . .Every personal item belonging to the late Kitty Elizabeth Burke to be turned over to her son, Benjamin Carson Burke. . .
I picked up the pen and gave it three clicks. He waited as I let it hover over the paper. “And you’ll drop your claim on my studio?”
He tapped a finger on the document. “Says so right there. You give me all of Mama’s stuff, every piece, and the studio’s off the table. But remember, I want every button, every pearl, every thread of that coat. Don’t think you can hold anything back. I know what all she had down to the number of heads on that fur coat collar.” Ben, the man I’d spent eighteen years of my life with, had counted dead chinchilla heads on a coat.
I leaned back in my seat and gave him a relaxed smile. He loved few things more than thinking he’d gotten the better of someone. “Let me ask one thing of you, and I’ll sign,” I said.
His eyes narrowed in suspicion but he quickly shrugged it off, confident of an easy victory. “What’s that?”
“You know I have my big fall exhibition coming up in November. Our divorce papers won’t be ready before then anyway. You know how I like to make a splash at my shows, so let me get one last use out of Kitty’s stuff.” I drew my index finger over the line where my name was to go. He strained his neck resisting the urge to follow it with his eyes. “It’s such a unique coat, and I think I would have made Kitty proud with this show. I’ll give every piece back to you after the opening. Every button, every pearl, every tiny mammal paw. For Kitty, what do you say?”
He thought it over for a few moments and then put out his hand to shake on it.
“Since we’re being all legal and proper here, let’s add that part in writing, too,” I said, handing the pen to him.
He laughed, trying to sound friendly as he began writing the addendum. He was sure he’d won.
I tossed the box of Kitty’s junk jewelry next to the coat on the studio table and pushed my hands up the deep fur panels of the front. The four, shining pewter-colored buttons were the size of newborn baby fists. At the top, a luscious deep black fur collar extended from the neck and draped down the back and sides over the shoulders before meeting in a deep V in the front. Six tiny reddish-brown fur tendrils hung down. I felt like Bette Davis when I wore that coat, the fur bits slapping against the small of my back as I walked. Across the front of the collar were four grotesque mammal heads with plastic eyes. Circa 1950’s, this outlandish coat was now so out of date it qualified as a costume. I’d never been sure what kind of fur made up the top drape. It was the softest fiber I had ever touched. The few times I’d worn it I felt guilty that my body was surrounded by this conglomeration of tiny carcasses. Laid out before me on the table, it was outdated, useless, dead, and thoroughly hideous, just like my marriage. I went to work.
The number fourteen on my November calendar above my large work table had been circled in red for over three weeks, and by the day’s arrival, I was both giddy and exhausted. Three plasters encircled fingers on my right hand, all scrapes from wire and one accidental jab from a Phillips Head. The larger injury on my right shin was from the welding torch on a late night of work when I’d grown so tired I became sloppy. Though I couldn’t completely hide the limp, my silk calypso pants hid the bandage from the crowd mingling with wine glasses in their hands as they bent close to read the placards next to each new piece. Touted on social media as Atlanta’s premiere visual art happening of the winter season, this show was proving to be my highest attended opening ever. Gulch Magazine and Atlanta Art Week both sent writers to cover it, and everyone’s cell phones were tilted upward on my featured sculpture around which all the other pieces were encircled on the floor. Hanging from a six-sided, black wooden frame towering twelve feet in the air in the center of the room was my pièce de resistance, the sculpture that held in its components every look of bitterness, each word of resentment, and all the disappointment I had ever felt from my years with Ben. The placard next to it read: Kitty’s Last Best Gift. And printed underneath: Sold.
“Oh my god, Leslie, this is sublime. It’s mercurial,” said Edison McDuffy, one the city’s best known gallery owners. He waved his wine glass with his ring-covered left hand at the sculpture in something between a salute and a toast. “Girlypoppy, you are gambaruing the hell out of this show. I mean, look at this!”
“It was inspired,” was all I could say.
“And this magnificent piece sold before the show even began,” he dipped his chin to his chest in one of his quaint poses. “Do tell. How much? If it was anything under $20,000 it was a give-away.”
Two small animal heads stared down at us. I’d repainted their eyes black with red irises and centered them with the smallest of rhinestones glittering down on the patrons. The pearls set in each ear looked like tiny moons on their heads. “It was definitely my costliest piece yet.”
“Can we get a photo of you with the sculpture?” A frumpy, bearded photographer lugging an old-fashioned bag of equipment looked out of place among the crowd of Gen Z’ers and Millennials. “Come on, Edison,” I said linking my arm in his. “Let’s make the place look old jazz club elegant.” Edison was known never to turn down an opportunity to be featured on social media. Frumpy Beard flipped open a pad and held an honest-to-God pencil in his hand. “This is one of your most distinctly composite mixed media pieces yet. Can you tell us about its conception?”
Words were forming in my head, but they never made it out of my mouth. Ben’s wail was heard even over the chatter of art patrons and Lil Nas X on the speakers. “What have you done? What the fuck have you done, Leslie?” He clutched his hair so hard I thought he was going to tear it out. His eyes flicked over the glittering lights of the sculpture. I particularly liked the way each chandelier bulb, encircled by a fist-sized piece of fur sparkling with fake baubles glued to the edges. Each bulb twinkled against long ropes of black fur cascading downward from the center forming a kind of macabre carousel roof over the lights mounted below. Underneath the light bulbs, the six tassels spun in the center from a battery powered crib mobile covered in the coat’s silk lining. Between all of the tassels, I left one rhinestone earring intact. The stones caught the light as it turned, lightly spattering the walls with shifting stars.
“I counted the heads, too, Ben. They’re all there. All four of them.”
He could not take his eyes from my art, magnificent and grotesque. It was all his.
“Are you the buyer?” asked the photographer, raising his camera. The picture he immortalized of Ben’s face melting off his bones at the sight of Kitty’s belongings remains one of my most treasured possessions. I keep it in the top drawer of my desk.
“Did you want a cardboard box to take it in?” I asked. “I kept a big one just for that.” I stepped in front of him, but I was too short to block his view. All I managed to do was insert my face underneath the long, spidery fur chandelier arms of my new favorite sculpture such that he could not look at it without seeing me as well. Without another word, Ben walked out of my studio.
~ ~ ~
May 2026
