Aunt Matilda

Chloe's Aunt Matilda lived in a low-stuccoed-celinged high rise in Midtown. She had 13 cats and a yappy poodle, who she dragged alongside her beat up red pushcart when she went on her Sunday morning trip to Gristedes. Her place always smelled of a mixture of cat litter, piss, and oil paint, the physical elements of which would also be found mixed together, when Chloe would come to visit.
It was always a depressing trip up the 6 train, alighting onto the sidewalk into a busy, noisy city canyon, and then walking the few blocks to the building with the sleeping doorman and the dingy elevator, up to the 18th floor. Aunt Matilda, though, seemed to enjoy her life of 40 years there, in the same apartment her mother, Chloe's grandmother, had bought for her when she first moved to New York at 23, with big ambitions and even bigger hopes for the future.
Over the years, she had once told Chloe, from one disappointment to another, Matilda began to falter. Job after job, date after date, her friends disappeared to marry off, sometimes with one another, and her cats continued to multiply, Matilda growing more weary year after year. By her 40's, she had finally resigned herself, becoming infinitely numb to all that the modern world's society demanded of her. She reveled in the New York City ballet performances, had affairs with Courbet at the Met, interludes with Stravinsky at the New York Philharmonic, and brought T.S. Eliot from Bauman Rare Books back to sleep with her. She was happy, nonetheless.