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  • The Perfidy of Things
  • Hollis Giammatteo (bio)

Among the tumble of objects that accrued to her estate, my mother's pride had been her blush-dyed black cross mink coat. It is a handsome thing, blond laced with silver, the two contrasting tones teased into relationship by thin strands of black. To see it in the wild, as the pelt of a wild thing, say, you'd be struck as if by the tresses of an angel. It is full length, which in my mother's case, shrinking as she did in her later years, meant floor length. It is cut in a classic style. Supple, while very thick, the coat could pass as practical, something that would get you through a deep and endless Arctic winter.

I was introduced to my mother's mink soon after she bought it. She was understandably proud - thrilled, even - as if acquiring the object meant arrival at a station in life characterized by dignity and respect. The coat conferred something upon her, even though elegance did not attach to my mother by virtue of the coat. Huddled and round inside it, she looked like a honey bear. Or a little girl, beside herself in the pleasure of make believe.

It was wrong, of course, owning such a thing. It was beautiful, but wrong in many ways, a response I did not share with my parents when I met the coat, because they were, after all, my parents - the big people - those who knew what they wanted and had a right to want what they wanted as well, and to consume accordingly. But in this time of mink, I'd begun to notice certain disquieting behaviors. The parents who had instilled in me a latticework of right and wrong, values of frugality and consumer conservatism had, as they crept toward their high seventies, begun to spend their money in insurgent ways - a kitchen remodel coinciding with my mother's lost interest in the culinary arts; a vacuum cleaner whose amazing features were spoken of in the hushed tones reserved for religious experiences, and that cost one thousand dollars. A Cadillac. Were these sprees a prelude to dementia? [End Page 147]

Because objects were, in our family, love's proxy, I'd been called back to Pennsylvania six times in the year before my mother's death, allegedly to get familiar with her estate. The sheer quantity of Mother's things enrobed my mind like lsd - the contents of her drawers, trunks, and room-length closets; her abandoned coin collection; a krugerrand; silver presidential plates issued by the Franklin mint, a complete set of ugly heads engraved in silver; jewelry, pieces of and of no value and, of course, the fur. A delusion of affluence began to cloud my thinking, but the raw truth was my yearning. Tricked by fiction's death bed scenes, I yearned for the love between two people equally committed to finding a language for their complicated relationship, even though it was the very passion of the one and the coolness of the other that in some ways defined the complication. Such love would not suddenly manifest. How could it?

The grip on her precious world of things loosened only gradually. Even on the last day of her life, she was fishing around in the loose satchel of her mind for the appropriate who to give the perfect what. It was as if her shifting, incoherent lists kept death at bay - Jeanne must get the silver sugar bowl; Hilma, the Moravian cups and saucers; Doris a set of crystal candlesticks. Then something changed her mind. She'd grow resentful. Generosity would seize her, and she'd look with love upon whomever sat beside her. She would take their hand and, riding the thermals of generosity, let slide a promise. And then she'd take it back.

When Mother died, the mink was mine. It is, as noted, a handsome thing, and it is a dead thing, meaning that its lack of animation is more pronounced, because the beings involved were once, like Mother, animate. In their habitat, for example, a mink typically spends 60% to 70% of its lifetime in the...

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