What the Sphinx Knows

Nefertiti, my sphinx cat, sits in her usual sunbeam on the kitchen table, her wrinkled skin catching the afternoon light. At eighteen, she's nearly as old as my marriage to Arthur was long. Granddaughter Lily watches the cat with wide eyes.

"She looks like a mummy," Lily whispers.

"She's been with me through everything," I say, stroking Nefertiti's warm shoulder. "She knows more than she tells."

I pull down the pyramid of photo albums from the shelf—three stacks, largest at bottom, rising like the ancient monuments Arthur and I visited in Egypt on our thirtieth anniversary. That was the year we learned sphinx riddles weren't just myths, but the questions life asks you when you're not looking.

We open the albums. There's the community pool where I spent every summer of my childhood, where Arthur courted me during the sweltering July of 1954, where we later taught our own children to swim. The pool in the photographs is a time capsule—high-waisted swimsuits, the diving board where Arthur once did a cannonball that soaked the mayor's wife, the lifeguard stand where our son met his future wife.

"Was Grandma a good swimmer?" Lily asks.

"The best," I say, though I wasn't really. Arthur was. I was afraid of the deep end until the summer he taught me that some things worth having require jumping in when you can't see the bottom.

Nefertiti opens one yellow eye, then closes it again. Sphinx cat, sphinx riddles. What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, three in the evening? Life itself, is the answer. I'm at the three-legged stage now, cane in hand, but I've learned the riddle isn't about legs at all—it's about who walks beside you.

"Tell me about the pyramid, Grandma," Lily says, pointing to our Egypt trip.

I tell her how Arthur stood before the Great Pyramid and said, "We're building one too, you know. Layer by layer." I understand now what he meant. The foundation was our parents, then came our marriage, then children and grandchildren, each generation another tier. Arthur's gone eight years, but the pyramid stands.

Nefertiti rises from her sunbeam, stretches, and pads over to inspect Lily's fingers. She sniffs, then bumps her forehead against the girl's hand.

"She likes you," I say. "That's rare."

"What else does she know?" Lily asks, scratching behind the cat's ears.

"Oh," I say, "she knows that love builds pyramids, not monuments. She knows the only thing that matters is who taught you to swim, who held your hand when you were scared, and who remembers your name when you're old and wrinkled and look like a mummy cat."

Nefertiti purrs, a rumble like ancient wisdom. Outside, summer stretches before us, and for a moment, I feel Arthur beside me again. Sphinx riddles, all of them, but the answer never changes: it's love, layer upon layer, building something that outlasts us all.