the painted lady (walking on eggshells)

On the first floor of our little building, a man and woman live. I don’t know if they are brother and sister or man and wife. He is missing some teeth and wears jeans a few sizes too big - cinching them tight to his scrawny body, typically leaned over a car, fixing some mysterious part deep inside it. The woman rarely goes outside. Her hair is an angry tangle of gray locks, as if she washed up on some strange shore with seaweed laced through them, and never picked it out. Her face is always painted, and by painted, I mean massive brushstrokes, inches wide. Thick red rouge, coal black eyebrows drawn over a mess of white hairs. She limps around, the same long skirt, the hunched shoulders, the fierce expression.

She feeds the cats that live in the street.

The cats are close to feral, most missing an eye or a great stretch of fur, more scars than anything else. They fight constantly, like a barrel of raccoons, violent and epic battles, and then more cat fucking, moaning and moaning, howling like they are on fire. It is not Tennesee Williams romantic, there is no hot tin roof story, it is just a constant, ugly din of sex and violence, punctauted by kittens that appear and disappear.

She feeds the cats by leaving a tray of food for them outside their apartment door. This means the cats wander the halls of our little building and piss everywhere. There are few things as frustrating as coming home on a warm summer night to climb four flights of cat piss stairs to end a lovely evening on a sour note. The smell sticks to the soles of our shoes. But the woman cannot be talked to, it is impossible. The man has this odd removed manner about him, maybe he knows how wrong this is, but is just as helpless as everyone else in the buulding, There is no reason to remind him, he wakes up to it.

I come home, and there she is, her feet so dirty they are black, blue veins popping out from her ankles and long yellow toenails, as she shuffles around, calling to the cats as she sets a fresh bowl of food for them at the stairs. She does not work, and it is no great guess to understand she probably does not cook or clean. But she provides for these cats, and this gives her a reason to get up. This urge to care for someone else, something else - not just once, but rain or shine, is a big part of her life.

Did she always paint her face like this? Or did something happen, some tragedy, some unspeakable act and the transformation began? I cannot imagine the person under all of that red and blue and black, you cannot see past it. Just those wild eyes, wobbling in their own orbits, that you look away from. The cat looks up at me, crunching on its dinner. There is never a confrontation, just tiptoeing around the bowl of cat food, walking on eggshells.