Sleeping with Cats (10 page)

Another friend, Edith, was naive but energetic. I learned a little Finnish as I hung out with her, and she was one of the only friends to whom I showed my writing. She was far less judgmental than my other friends but easily shocked. Although at times I enjoyed pushing writing or opinions at her that were bound to overwhelm her sense of how things were, mostly I respected her innocence. She and her brothers were not allowed to have pets. Her mother considered them unsanitary and a waste of food. Therefore Edith made a great fuss over Brutus. We were both bound for Ann Arbor together, but her mother did not want her to room with me, for she mistrusted me.

I had another friend from the school paper, Louise. I liked her but thought her silly, the stereotypical ditzy blonde. Her hair was almost white and her eyes a pale but startlingly clear blue. In college I would
room with her by my second semester, after discovering we had elements of our past in common and that we were both more experienced and tougher than we appeared. She was to become as close to me as anyone in my life ever has been, but I would never have guessed that from the role she played in high school. Later she would be beautiful, but then she was too frantic, too nervous to be more than pretty, with tight curls around her face that did not go with her delicate features.

All through my senior year, I was counting time toward my flight. It wasn't that I became detached or uninvolved with the people around me, but that I endured the boredom of high school, the war with my parents, the sense of being invisible—all as a temporary condition soon to be erased by my departure. I was walking through the maze of what was expected of me while putting my best effort into trying to understand what I read and trying to write. My fiction suffered from being a strange uncouth hybrid of Faulknerian characters and situations, and plots from the girls' novels my friends were reading. I burned that first novel in the fireplace a few years ago, when it occurred to me I could die at any moment in a highway accident or an airplane crash, and someone else might actually read the ghastly thing. I scattered its ashes in the woods. Somebody may read my old love letters or my angry letters, bad enough, but to permit anyone to read that gangling adolescent mix of baroque storytelling and simplistic notions of dialogue and romance, was unendurable to any dignity I still possess. Still, some of the poems I wrote then do not embarrass me. I included a few in
Early Grrrl
. My poetry developed earlier and quicker than my fiction. I grappled with dialogue. I would write “I mize well do it,” and only after some weeks figure out that while that was what I heard, what was meant would be written as “I might as well do it.” I figured out on my own that long semitranscribed conversations about what to have for lunch were realistic but boring. Writing dialogue was not transcribing what people really said. These were important lessons.

Once in a while, I went out with a boy from school or the neighborhood, but none of them interested me. I went out with them because I was supposed to. That at least pleased my mother, although she felt I did
not treat them well. Once I went out with a jazz musician, a trumpet player I met downtown. I realized very quickly I was out past my depth and retreated. I am sure if any benign older man or woman had appeared and offered to seduce me and carry me away into a better or at least more interesting world, I would have accepted in ten seconds. I would have fallen into bed or gone off with anyone who spoke kindly and patted my head. Fortunately—I suppose—no one did. In some ways I knew a great deal and in other respects I was an idiot—a fool like the one on the tarot card who walks off a precipice whistling to herself.

Brutus developed a friendship with the dog next door, two-thirds his size. They would play together—chasing each other around his yard. Then they would lie in the sun. Normally he ran dogs off if they came on his lawn or his property, but he liked that dog. After the dog died, many years later, he developed a close bond with the young woman who had owned it. He used to visit her. When my father retired and my parents moved to Florida, he—at twenty years old—decided he didn't want to go and instead adopted that woman and lived out his life with her. I have never had a cat who did not want to go off with me wherever I went, but my parents had been going down to Florida for months at a time, and he stayed with her when they were absent. He was a great survivor, Brutus was.

My relationship with him was not as intense as that with the two previous cats, because I was already partly gone—ready to get out and away. I had been applying to colleges and trying for scholarships without my parents' knowledge or cooperation. When I got a full tuition scholarship to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, they were not pleased and started arguing that if I insisted on college, I should live at home and go to Wayne, in Detroit. I had no intention of doing that, and I had been saving money since I was twelve.

After I left home, when I visited, Brutus never came back to my bed. He did not forgive me for going away, although he knew me and was still affectionate. I was no longer his; he was no longer mine. I had thought I would take him back after college, but it became clear he did not care to go with me. He was now my parents' cat. My father was able to give
Brutus more affection than I ever saw him lavish on any person—including his sisters and brothers, Grant, his nephews and nieces, myself and especially my mother. For many years, they were good companions. Butch followed my father into the garage when he was working on carpentry or on his car. My father talked to him. I think Brutus was his idea of how a creature should be: big, strong, manly, quiet, dignified and mostly undemanding.

The one thing Brutus did that annoyed my father was that occasionally he would piss on the television set. It was the only object in the house he sprayed, but I viewed that action as social criticism. The TV was a rival for my father's attention, so the cat marked it as his own. He intensely disliked the gunfire noises when my father was watching his favorite westerns or cop shows.

Brutus was in his way a strong personality, a match for my father in dignity and stubbornness. I did not begrudge him Brutus, but I was surprised. My father was never otherwise as likable as when he was with his own and only cat. It made me think that if I had been born a particular type of boy, a good athlete, say, or a whiz with machinery or cars, he might even have loved me.

On Monday my mother washed.

It was the way of the world,

all those lines of sheets flapping

in the narrow yards of the neighborhood,

the pulleys stretching out second

and third floor windows.

Down in the dank steamy basement,

wash tubs vast and grey, the wringer

sliding between the washer

and each tub. At least every

year she or I caught

a hand in it.

Tuesday my mother ironed.

One iron was the mangle.

She sat at it feeding in towels,

sheets, pillow cases.

The hand ironing began

with my father's underwear.

She ironed his shorts.

She ironed his socks.

She ironed his undershirts.

Then came the shirts,

a half hour to each, the starch

boiling on the stove.

I forgot blueing. I forgot

the props that held up the line

clattering down. I forgot

chasing the pigeons that shat

on her billowing housedresses.

I forgot clothespins in the teeth.

Tuesday my mother ironed my

father's underwear. Wednesday

she mended, darned socks on

a wooden egg. Shined shoes.

Thursday she scrubbed floors.

Put down newspapers to keep

them clean. Friday she

vacuumed, dusted, polished

scraped, waxed, pummeled.

How did you become a feminist

interviewers always ask

as if to say, when did this

rare virus attack your brain?

It could have been Sunday

when she washed the windows,

Thursday when she burned

the trash, bought groceries

hauling the heavy bags home.

It could have been any day

she did again and again what

time and dust obliterated

at once until stroke broke

her open. I think it was Tuesday

when she ironed my father's shorts.

O
f the cats we have now,
Max is the golden prince, a long lean red mackerel tabby with aquamarine eyes and a patrician nose. His color is changeable, golden under the sun and deep orange under artificial light. Max has perfect tabby markings like the striations on a sandbar at low tide. His mew is tiny and seems to belong to the kitten he was. He is the most outdoor of all our cats. He could not be kept in any enclosure or on a leash. He turned himself into water and slid out. A thirteen-pound cat, he can slip through cracks. He is extremely affectionate—on his terms. When we annoy him, he swats us the same way he cuffs Efi the kitten when she bothers him. He views us as helpless in the important things.

All the cats have various nicknames: Max's is Mr. Pitiful, as in the old Wilson Pickett song. His whole body inscribes an arc of sorrow or dejection. When he is hungry, his spine, his posture, his magnificent full white whiskers, his tail all speak starvation and neglect. When he comes in soaked with rain, he runs to me, cries his distress once, twice, and then throws himself down at my feet and stays there making an occasional exclamation point over himself until I get a towel and properly dry him. Every morning Max and Oboe go out with eagerness and some apprehension: is everything in place out there, have any strange cats pissed on
their bushes, what scents reveal adventures during the night, passing coyotes, strange dogs, raccoons on the porch.

When I was younger, I would travel anyplace, anytime, in the same way that I would pursue casual sexual adventures. Now like the cats, I am rooted. For me the ideal vacation is not to go off to the Caribbean or London, but to stay and immerse myself in my chosen life. I remember the first extensive tour I went on in 1973, ten California schools in two weeks, two hundred dollars a reading. At that time I was living in a group marriage. My youngest partner wanted to go to graduate school. We needed money for his tuition. Two weeks in California, up and down the coast, what could be more fun? Two weeks of sleeping on couches, floors, eating fast food, being driven from Chico to Fresno to Sacramento to Irvine to San Diego by strangers, sleepless and babbling. I got home exhausted, with no lining left on my stomach. I enjoy performing, but I dislike planes and motel rooms. When I am on the road too long, I grow morose and irritable. I complain as pitifully as Max.

Many writers go on about how writing is painful, born of blood and pain, torn from the gut. But the truth is, I very much like to write. I enjoy writing poetry and I enjoy fiction. I get to exorcise my impulse to autobiography in my poems and in what were until now short memoirs. In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time. I am a repository of many people's stories and secrets. Immersing myself in other lives satisfies me.

Malkah is the largest of our cats. The vet says she is the largest female he has ever seen, not only rotund but big boned, big framed, the size of a pregnant raccoon. She is apricot and creamy white, impeccably clean, plush. Her face is round, her eyes are moonlike, round and pale greenish
yellow. Almost no one else ever sees her. Some friends maintain we have only four cats and pretend to have five. There is something of the odalisque in Malkah, a quality languid and opulent. After a period of her hiding when we first brought her home, I seduced her, gradually, painstakingly, with food, attention, soft words and patience. I have patience for little, but I had it for her. She loves Ira, but she is my cat. I wake sometimes in the night and she is pressed against my side kneading me and purring, purring, an engine of passion.

Guests seldom see Malkah, unless they sleep over, when they catch a glimpse of her stealing a peek at them or wake in the night to see two enormous round eyes watching. For the first two years, she did not go out. Then one sunny July morning, she sidled to the door, looking into my eyes, asking. She plunges out the way a swimmer will throw her body into cold ocean water: all at once, as if daring herself. Her farthest journey is into the two upper gardens. She has never walked down the drive or seen the two lower gardens. Max is adventurous and roving; Malkah is careful and tied to the house by a mental leash of no more than fifty feet. Even the way she moves is cautious. She is fast when she hunts, but generally, she looks quite hard before she leaps. In spite of her girth, she never knocks things over, because she places her big furry feet so painstakingly.

In spite of her fearfulness she is the happiest cat I have ever lived with. To eat and to have a home and feel loved is bliss. I understand this, for I am the same way. I inherited from my mother the capacity to take great joy in small things, in the taste of a salad fresh from the garden, the scent of a just plucked rose, Ira's company, a friend, the pleasure of making a favorite dish or inventing a new soup, a walk. When I am allowed to be happy, I am, like a state of rest I naturally return to—now, that is.

The youngest cat is Efi. When the vet gave Oboe only a matter of weeks, I became very depressed. Ira bought me a kitten on Valentine's Day of last year, a chocolate-point Siamese. That very first night this creature, no bigger than a lab rat and, like many Siamese kittens, rather resembling one, crawled boldly into bed and plastered herself against Ira. She is the most confident kitten we ever brought into the house. It took Dinah five months to fully accept Max and Malkah. Efi simply
refused to be rejected. They would spit at her, growl, then when they went to sleep, they would wake up with her purring in their arms and think,
Oh, obviously I must like her
. Two weeks, and fierce Dinah was washing her and permitting Efi to chew on her tail. Oboe regained a strong interest in life.

Efi believes Malkah is her mother. Malkah believes Efi is her kitten. There is no physical resemblance: Malkah is enormous with medium-long orange fur and everything round, her face, her eyes, her body; Efi is long and lean like Max, muscular, lithe, with extremely short fur. Her body is ivory with chocolate markings, her ears pointy, her tail extremely long, high-set muscular legs and pure large dark blue radiant eyes. But whenever Malkah purrs, Efi comes running. The sound makes her dance with pleasure.

Malkah is a natural mouser and has set out to teach Efi. At first it was a farce. Malkah is a patient hunter. She outwaits mice and never forgets where they are in the walls or under the wallboard radiators. She would sit meditating on mousiness and willing the mouse to appear, for hours if necessary. Finally the mouse would creep out—and then Efi would get so excited, she would hurl herself at the mouse and under the radiator it would go for another two hours. Now they hunt together, with great success.

Efi grows more affectionate. She climbs in my lap often now and she comes up to me as I sit at my computer and demands to be petted. If I do not pet her, she takes my hand in her paws and pulls gently on it, to remind me of my duty. She begins to express a personality. When you acquire a kitten or the kitten acquires you, you can only guess what kind of being you have brought into your life. Some of the personality is there from the beginning, born in or burned in by genetics and the early days and weeks of life, but much of it flowers as the animal grows and matures. You have brought in a being to share your time and your space, and like a new lover, you cannot be at all sure what you have opened yourself to. Efi is still becoming who she is. She is on my computer monitor right now. We quarrel about her tail passing back and forth like an extralong windshield wiper across my screen.

She is as beautiful as a Siamese can be. Exquisite. She and Malkah wash
each other with a housewifely seriousness, holding on and madly cleaning; they do this daily, as part of their bonding. Efi is constantly learning. That posture with the head tilted, sitting bolt upright like a statue of Bastet, is one of her signature poses. What does that mean, she is always asking. Malkah and Efi play structured games, reaching through the bars of the coffee-table legs to count coup on each other's paws. With Max, Efi plays rough. I imagine wrestling was invented by someone watching cats play. They throw each other, they pin each other. Efi is as athletic as Max. Their romps are like choreographed scenes from kung fu movies. They race from one end of the house to the other, they hurl themselves down the steps. They collide, they dodge, they feint. They roll over and over. They lunge at each other and tumble. They climb and pounce.

Tomorrow I will start the first seedlings downstairs in the former darkroom—a mad gardener's laboratory full of bags of starting medium, sphagnum moss, envelopes dated in black marking pen when the seeds inside are to be started, bird food in twenty-five-pound sacks. Two days ago as we drove into Boston for me to fly off to a gig in Michigan, we noticed the first red blush, almost a mist, among the swamp maples, and the chartreuse of some weeping willows. It begins to begin to imagine being spring. Spring to me is not a matter of temperature, but of what is happening with trees and bushes, birds and skunks.

I never truly experienced seasons before I moved here, just as I never noticed phases of the moon. Living out to sea on this sandbar, gardening, walking in the woods and by the marshes and along the shores have attuned me to the changes of wind and weather, of sun and moon. It has greatly enriched my poetry. Everything a poet experiences becomes part of that strange irrational cauldron of images cooking always in the back brain. If you truly look at a bird—a red-shouldered hawk, a towhee, a tufted titmouse, and you see how that bird moves and what it eats and how it flies, if you listen to it—then that bird is lodged in you. It is accessible to your imagination and will probably appear someday, an unexpected gift to a poem needing just that bird. Everything that I ingest—history, zoology, botany, anthropology, paleontology, astronomy—becomes part of that lore stored away. Spring moves in me when it is only a faint
softening of the soil, a lengthening of the light and a shortening of the shadows, long before I ever noticed change when I lived in cities.

Now, four days later, it is snowing, thick white blankety stuff muffling everything. I view it with a sharp sense of betrayal and anger, although I know it is ridiculous to be surprised by snow in February in New England. Nonetheless, the cats line up and stare through the bay windows and we all are briefly melancholy together that yesterday was only a promise not to be fulfilled for weeks. Because I love spring so fiercely, love even the mud and the messiness of it, I mourn. Yes, it will come, but I have not yet learned to be patient enough, no matter how long I study to be so, no matter that every Rosh Hashona I try to throw away my impatience in
tashlich
. It is the renewal I long for, the first sharp blades of grass poking up through the mat of last year's dead straw.

Ever since we finally got cable, years after friends in the city would gush about shows invisible on the Lower Cape, I have been addicted to the Weather Channel. I certainly had little interest in weather when I was younger, but it seems to come with middle age. Besides, I have the excuse that I travel a great deal and have to keep an eye on what it will be like where I am going.

The cats too take weather personally, viewing wind as animate. Out here on our sandbar, wind is a potent player. Hurricanes are the extreme danger, but nor'easters can be rough. We lose power several times a year, usually for a few hours but sometimes longer—for days, after a hurricane or an ice storm. As I write this, a wet snow is plastering everything, shrouding the gardens and hiding the paths. Only Max is outside, picking his way along. Sometimes Malkah plays in the snow, digging at it with her huge plush paws and tossing it up, but this morning, she has not ventured out but lies with her paw across Efi as they curl spoon-fashion. They have relinquished the hope of spring.