The Fur Coat

The fur coat is raccoon, bushy to my thighs, and dyed an outrageous sapphire blue. It weighs at least fifteen pounds. I only wear the coat at night in New Jersey winters when it’s freezing cold, when the whole block is asleep, when my dog, a peach-colored Labradoodle, needs her walk. I don’t want to be seen in it. People might get the wrong idea. The coat belongs to me now, but it once belonged to my once alive mother.
*
My mother’s boyfriend smoked Newports and tied back his gray hair in a low ponytail. Almost thirty years ago, when I was on a visit home to Chicago from college, he took the three of us out for Ethiopian food in the city, then to some blues bar, where we all got hammered. He preferred the weak and dependent version of my mother, the woman who hated to be alone, who crumpled with relief when he claimed her, one arm around her shoulders in the wide front seat of his Chevy Suburban.
*
The coat is decadent and oily with the glamour of cruelty. It puzzles my dog. She can’t understand it, but seems to know it has something to do with death, the cold. I body slam it out of the way when I grab the upright vacuum cleaner, rummage for shopping bags, locate a lost glove. The coat is my burden to bear. I’m its caretaker now.
*
His truck, his rules. We were at his drunk mercy, in his world where “whoever pays, says.” Seventy miles an hour down black tar at two in the morning, I thought of the extra plates of injera bread rolled like spa towels, the club’s cover and two-drink minimum, Mom’s mortgage, back taxes, her recent root canal. I clenched the handhold in the passenger door as centrifugal force pushed my face against the glass. Sparks from Mom’s cigarette out the window splashed orange onto the pavement.
*
When she was alive, my mother had a carnivorous lust for life. She weighed 100 pounds and wore layers to soften her edges. I remember her long neck, doorknob-sized rhinestone broaches on her lapels, purple cowboy boots on her elegant monkey feet. Her love for me, her only child, had felt fierce and rabid, the superhuman kind that enabled women to lift Volvos off trapped newborns. When he was around, that mom vanished, and I was on my own.
*
Blues guitar on the truck stereo like a man sobbing then a flash in the high-beams, all at once a terrified raccoon the size of a crawling toddler. Its fur lit up silver, eyes giant gold sequins. Three frantic kits scrambled behind, desperate to survive. Sweat down his neck, a fishtail swerve, then two rapid circular thuds, fast, under a front wheel, sneakers in a dryer and Mom’s eyes clamped tight. Panting, his whisky breath steamed up the car like rotten bananas.
*
Fur storage is as expensive as rent, so the coat droops from a thick plastic hanger in the front closet, even in summer, its black satin insides dank and slippery. Silent and lying in wait, it pulses with regret and smells like the peppery humid skin of a mourning night animal.
*
Out of the car, he staggered up the stairs to bed, clothes and all, Mom right behind him, her green eyes like cracked marbles. Alone, I ran my finger under the wheel well to touch the blood, wet and red as my own. That Christmas, an extravagant engagement gift from her husband-to-be, an inside joke between them, a blue raccoon fur coat in a white cardboard box as big as a sheet cake.
*
Tonight, I’m somehow an adult in New Jersey, with a house, a family, a life of my own. My peach-colored dog and I venture out into the dead of night. I wear the blue raccoon coat. Our breath clouds hang in paper-crisp air. We’re on high-alert for mitten-pawed foxes, squint-faced opossum, leathery bats, and velvet-antlered deer- all the nocturnal suburban creatures whose hearts quicken at our approach. At this noiseless hour, under this icy moon white as Ivory soap, in this heavy hot coat I can’t wear and I can’t get rid of, I finally allow myself to feel the insistent constant throb—my mother, my mother, my mother.