The operative words are dingy, unclean, depressing, grey. Cat hair covers everything. The tv trays are crusted with spilt food, the mahogany dining-room table deep in mail (Clearinghouse sweepstakes years old, newsletters from the Masons, solicitations from the Elks), the chair cushions stuffed with Kleenex, the hassock stacked with newspapers. The cat luxuriates beside the register; it is all they care to talk about: the cat did this, the cat did that. Grandmother lies fetally on the couch in a foul bathrobe, watching Gilligan’s Island, the volume up, while grandfather, in yellowed underwear, teeth out, sucks oranges and waits for Merv on the one tv of four that works in the sunroom. The cat strolls sullenly about. Charro stars and is charming. And so we hate to visit, to shout over the television, compete with the cat. There is nowhere to sit that is not soiled, dusty, heaped. The air is dry, the hot rooms too close. But the last time I called, I remember how pleased grandmother was to learn we were expecting, and how loudly she laughed out of her small and breathless self when I shouted as a joke, “it’s no big deal—what I did, almost anyone could do.”