Manx by Jamey Genna

Read by Elizabeth Bower

My sister-in-law had a cat, a black cat with a square bulky body.  It didn’t have a tail.  It was what they call a Manx cat. I know you don’t want to hear about the cat, but wait.  The thing was it was always hiding under things whenever you came in a room.  It wasn’t afraid, just angry.  It would hide under the bed, under the sofa, under the hide-a-bed in the living room.  Squeeze its tailless butt under there like if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be able to control itself.  It might kill you for invading its territory.  It would lie on its back under there and scratch and claw at the fiber to tell you it meant business.  You had to get a broom handle just to get it out and pet it.  That thing wasn’t even a cat.  It hated people.  It should’ve been a Lynx, not a Manx. It should’ve been thrown out into the snow bank where it belonged.  Why bother owning a cat that’s not even a cat?  Cats are difficult enough.

 My sister-in-law had a way of hanging up her clothes.  She tells me, they have to all hang in the same direction—the buttons all facing the same direction.  The shirts have to be buttoned, “All the Way Up!”  she says.

 I’m amazed.  She has plastic hangers that are all the same color.  Beige.  They match the color of her walls in her bedroom—beige.  Beige isn’t even a color.  She hangs all her pants together in one area in her closet, all her shirts in another, all her winter jackets pushed toward the back.  And even her pants are divided according to use—jeans together, dress pants together, slidy pants together—that’s elastic waist pants.

 Her brother, my husband’s the same way.  He gets mad at me if I turn the dryer back on to fluff up the clothes in there before I fold them because sometimes I forget I turned the dryer on again to fluff them up and then I forget to fold them. 

When we’re drinking, he accuses me of doing it on purpose.  He says, “You just turn it on again so you won’t have to fold them.”

 “I forget,” I say.  “That’s ridiculous.  Why are we even talking about this?”

 He’s paranoid.   When we’re drinking he says, “You use so much goddamn toilet paper.”

 I cry and I’m angry, but I don’t think to say until the next day, “Why the fuck are you counting the sheets of toilet paper?  Toilet paper costs two dollars and fifty cents a package, you don’t see me counting the two hundred and fifty dollars you spent apiece on the unnecessarily new tires for your truck.”  But I’m hungover and tired and I don’t want to fight, so I don’t say anything.

 He hangs his clothes in the closet the same way as his sister.  But my side is disorderly.  I don’t care for their Dutch heritage systems of cleanliness.  I hang my wedding dress way in the back without a bag and when my cat, who likes to sleep on my head and jump on the counter and scratch on the speakers, has a batch of kittens, they go into the back of my closet one day, climb up my wedding dress, and jump onto the suitcases and shoes in there like they’re at a kitty carnival.  The dress is torn to shreds.  I don’t show it to her brother.

 Sometimes when I’m eating in the living room, her brother will pick up my plate off the smoked glass coffee table we had made out of a wagon wheel and he’ll spray clean the glass before I’m done eating.  He’ll spray it with 4O9 and wipe it with a paper towel as if I am not allowed to leave a mark now that he’s finished.  He eats faster than any man, woman, or child I’ve ever seen.  Even my sister-in-law tells me how their dad used to cuff him for eating so fast.

 The two of them whenever we’re all together share stories about shoplifting.  My sister-in-law was arrested once, in Target of all places, for stealing some jewelry, Target jewelry.  She had to go on parole, but she hadn’t learned her lesson.  She and their Aunt Tootie took a woman’s pocketbook out of her purse in a bar one time and they went to Omaha and they charged up the credit cards, because my sister-in-law looked just like the woman in the picture on the driver’s license.  They never got caught for that.  My husband had stolen some things, too.  I’ll tell you that story in a minute. 

 

Let me just correct something, I never stuck a broom under my sister-in-law’s hide-a-bed to get her Manx out from under there to show everybody its tailless butt—that was her and my husband’s idea.  My sister-in-law’s husband Bob just sat in the recliner and laughed when it yowled and snarled, and then it scratched my husband’s hand while he was yanking it past the springs under there.  Then my husband threw it out in the snow bank, after it scratched him, the same way he threw my cat across the room for climbing the screen door to our patio to get outside.  My cat flew across the room and just barely missed hitting the wall because it reached out and grabbed the sofa on its velocity across the room.

 

 In the middle of the night one night, we were over at my sister’s apartment drinking all night with her and some friends.  It was me and my husband and our friend Skip and his sometime girlfriend Annie who rode over there with us, and it was late and I wanted to sleep on my sister’s couch, but my husband wanted to go home so he could stretch out in his waterbed, he’s a long guy, and for some reason he and Skip and Annie wanted me to drive home.  So we went out to my little mink-colored Citation that my sister-in-law had sold to us at the beginning of winter for a bargain, it was still pretty new, and we got in.  My Citation was a stick shift, so when I put it in reverse, it just revved and wouldn’t back up, and my husband said, “What’s the matter?”

 And I said, “I don’t know.  It won’t back up.”

 And you could tell he was already getting mad and he said, “Try it again, maybe you popped it into neutral.”

 I sucked my teeth at him like his mother does when he’s not making any sense and I tried it again, but it just revved and wouldn’t go anywhere.

 Then Skip laughed and said, “Somebody did something to your car,” he said. “It sounds like it doesn’t have any wheels.”  He’d know because that’s how they do it when they steal things.

 Sure enough, we all got out of the car and the car was up on blocks and we were all too drunk to notice when we got in.  It was the middle of winter, the middle of the night, cold, cold, cold, and I had a new jacket—a soft tan corduroy jacket with a fleece lining and a snug hood, and my husband didn’t have a coat—he never got cold and sometimes he got frustrated with having to carry a coat around so sometimes he just didn’t wear one, even if it was the middle of the winter.  And my husband was really mad then, “The cars up on blocks!” he screamed at me like it was my fault.  So he walked around the car and around it, stomping mad, and then he sent everybody back up to my sister’s apartment and I stayed and offered him my coat to wear and he took it and told me to go up, too.  Then he walked all around this huge apartment complex that my sister lived in until he found another Citation, it was a popular car, and he stole that person’s tires and wheels and put that person’s car neatly up on blocks the way they do it—with all four metal hubs sitting there on cement, like a car statue in a museum.  He looked ridiculous in my coat with his wrists sticking out and his shoulders stretching the fibers, but he didn’t get any grease on it.  Not a spot.

  

And one other correction is that her brother threw me across the room, too.  He picked me up and he threw me over the couch and I landed on the waterbed and he was screaming, “Well, just leave then if you’re going to leave me!  Quit talking about it and just do it.”  And he threw my clothes out in the stairwell between the condos into the snow bank.  “Go now, right now!” he screamed, but I guess he figured out he was being too loud and the cops might come again, so he quit.  And then he started crying and he said he didn’t mean it when he got to my wedding dress in the back of the closet all torn up by those kitties we’d had to give away.

 

 My sister-in-law and he and my new brother-in-law and even I laughed and laughed and laughed when he told what happened with the Citation.  She said to him, “That was pretty decent how you put it up on blocks for them.”

And he said, “Well, that’s how it’s done.” 

Some fucking orderly pirates, those two. 

Then my sister-in-law’s Manx came trotting back into the room and jumped up onto the counter like all it ever wanted was to be petted.  My husband reached out and that damn thing let him slide his hand across her back.

Something in me felt like grabbing that Manx and throwing it in the closet with all my sister-in-law’s clothes—sliding the doors shut.  I knew what would happen.  Chaos.

Manx by Jamey Genna was read by Elizabeth Bower at the Liars' League Honour & Obey event on Tuesday 10 July 2010 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London

Jamey Genna teaches writing in the Bay area of San Francisco. She received her Masters in writing from the University of San Francisco. Her short fiction has been published in many literary magazines such as Crab Orchard Review, Cutthroat, Eleven Eleven, Georgetown Review and the Iowa Review.

Elizabeth Bower graduated from Warwick University and trained at Mountview. She has played Shakespeare's Juliet and Lady Macbeth on stage and recently appeared in the BBC4 film Micro Men and as series regular, Melody Bell in BBC1 drama, Doctors. She narrates children’s adventures for BBC7 and for Short Story Radio. Elizabeth is delighted to be reading with the Liars’ League.