Sleeping with Cats (2 page)

Full in the hand, heavy

with ripeness, perfume spreading

its fan: moments now resemble

sweet russet pears glowing

on the bough, peaches warm

from the afternoon sun, amber

and juicy, flesh that can

make you drunk.

There is a turn in things

that makes the heart catch.

We are ripening, all the hard

green grasping, the stony will

swelling into sweetness, the acid

and sugar in balance, the sun

stored as energy that is pleasure

and pleasure that is energy.

Whatever happens, whatever,

we say, and hold hard and let

go and go on. In the perfect

moment the future coils,

a tree inside a pit. Take,

eat, we are each other's

perfection, the wine of our

mouths is sweet and heavy.

Soon enough comes the vinegar.

The fruit is ripe for the taking

and we take. There is

no other wisdom.

T
he cats of my childhood
came out of the alley. Alleys ran up the center of our blocks, as they often do in the Midwest, so that to a child, each house faced two ways. For me, the most important direction was the alley. I was an alley child, as my cats were alley cats.

Some of my earliest memories are artificial, based on photos in the family album, myself eight months old on a blanket at the beach near Traverse City, Michigan, near the tip of the little finger of Michigan's palm. I have rich and splendid memories of things that happened in 1912 and 1926, from seeing in my imagination scenes described with such color and emotion by my mother Bert, my grandmother Hannah and my aunt Ruth. Therefore as I begin to unpack this load of rags and riches, caveat emptor. I come from a long line of storytelling women. I have a vivid childhood memory of standing in the back alley with my brother Grant and looking up at tall buildings—in an alley lined with garages in a neighborhood where the tallest building was two stories. It is very early childhood and I am so small, all buildings are tall to me.

I remember peeing in my bed and how good it felt while it was warm under me and how nasty it felt when it grew cold. I remember the sense that the sounds my parents made were powerful and made things happen and if I made sounds, things I wanted would happen, though crying
sometimes worked. The words that were only shaped noise to me felt dense as objects. I remember the sense of my parents locked in war and myself caught in the middle, torn, tormented, guilty. They were always at war, and I was one of their battlegrounds. My father had desperately wanted a son, and although he occasionally tried to turn me into one, I was never satisfactory. He related more fully to my half brother, Grant, son of my mother's previous marriage, but Grant was already a teenager and usually in trouble. In the culture of our neighborhood, that was acceptable for a male child, although my parents balked at his sexual involvements.

The hospital I was born in, at the corner of Grand River and Livernois, had failed and become a bank in the middle of a row of used-car dealers by the time I was old enough to look at it. All that stays with me from the first tiny apartment upstairs in a two-story wooden house divided into four furnished apartments: I am lying on my back and I hear pigeons cooing. I clap my hands and my mother leans over me with her flower face. All through my life if I stop and listen to pigeons, I enjoy a sense of well-being. It soothes me, which carries over to the sound of mourning doves I hear often in these woods, especially in the spring. I slept in my parents' room, as I was to do until my brother left home. Grant was thirteen years older.

We lived at first in a Jewish neighborhood, familiar to me all through my childhood because when my grandmother came to live with us each summer, my mother and I would take the streetcar there to buy kosher meat, gefilte fish,
rugolach,
bagels and bialys, smoked fish and other treats—when there was enough money. When there wasn't, Grandma had to live on canned fish or vegetable soups, for she was Orthodox. Shortly after my parents moved to Detroit from Cleveland, where they met, my father was laid off for two years. My parents doubled up with another couple, Lucy and Lon, up from Appalachia. What little we had, we shared.

When I was three, my father was rehired and we moved into a house my parents bought, where we would live until I was fifteen. It was a tiny house with asbestos siding that had been foreclosed on by the bank. My
parents would be paying it off for the next ten years. It was in a working-class neighborhood largely Irish, Polish Catholic, and African-American. My parents had a bad Depression and it was not over, although my father was back at work. My mother was a housewife. I will not say she did not work, because she worked incessantly. My mother had been taken out of school in the middle of the tenth grade and sent to work as a chambermaid. My father had finished high school and gone to a technical night school, which had given him some sort of credential as an engineer, although he did not have a college diploma. He worked for Westinghouse installing and repairing heavy machinery. He worked for them at least fifty years, never promoted until the end when he was the last person left in the Detroit office; then they gave him an honorary title: supervisor—of himself.

Lucy and Lon moved out as tenant farmers to a small holding near the River Rouge Ford Plant. Every Sunday we drove to see them. I could see and smell the red smoke across the marshes. My mother would bring cakes or home-canned goods to Lucy and Lon. In exchange, they would kill a chicken for us to take home. I remember Lucy swinging the chicken and then chopping the head off, and how much blood gushed out. Through much of my early childhood, until World War II brought prosperity to Detroit, that was the only meat we could afford. I remember plucking the chickens and scorching the stumps of the feathers. Perhaps that made it easier to pluck out the quill ends. Out of the mysterious opened belly of the chicken came eggs, some with shells and some without, down to the tiniest little yellow and red worlds. My mother made a wonderful soup with the unborn eggs. Then she usually made the
chicken as a pot roast with vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, celery: a dish I still make, with many variations. My mother was not a good cook, but she had her successes—most of which I have learned by trial and error to duplicate.

Even after my father went back to work, times were hard and there was little surplus. Sometimes it was difficult to make the house payments, and my mother would take me with her when she went to the bank to stave them off. My mother's only tool in the battle with bureaucracy and men with power was flirtation. She was an accomplished and persuasive flirt, a tiny woman with an extravagant hourglass figure, intense dark brown eyes and short curly black hair. She had a way of walking, a way of moving, a way of sitting that drew men's eyes to her. She moved like the dancer two of her sisters had been. Half the men we dealt with were convinced she was crazy about them, but she mostly felt contempt. They were marks. She had a job to do and she did it. She was obsessed with my father, not with any of these men about whom she had a rich vocabulary of Yiddish insults which she muttered to me after each encounter.

I shared my parents' bedroom until my brother was forced by my parents to marry his girlfriend Isabelle. Our parents came home unexpectedly and caught Grant and Isabelle having sex on the couch while they were baby-sitting me. The marriage did not last, but I inherited my brother's room—not really a room but a hallway. This was the space my grandmother shared with me every summer. Isabelle, Grant's first wife, was a redhead with creamy skin. I remember he played the guitar then. I adored him. He was warm and emotional where my father was cold and withdrawn and judgmental. I adored my father too when I was little, but I think by the time I was seven, I had learned I could not please him. My brother would get bored if I asked too much of him, but while he was paying attention, he was affectionate and funny and endearing. He looked like me. Everyone we touched looked like us, nieces, nephews, cousins. We all have dark hair and dark dark brown Oriental eyes, a stocky build.

It's hard to excavate my childhood. On one hand, I have vivid sensual
and emotional memories. I know I was fearful of death. Perhaps it was my favorite aunt on my father's side dying young from complications after an auto accident on an icy mountain road near Monday's Corners—my uncle Zimmy, a coal miner, driving and presumably drunk, after a dance. Perhaps it was the death of the first cat I remember, Whiskers. For whatever reason, I was terrified that my mother would suddenly die, or that my grandmother, when she slept with me, would stop breathing. Perhaps it was my mother's melodramatic streak, for she would assume a pose and say, “You'll be sorry you did that when I'm dead!” “When I'm dead and gone, you'll remember how wicked you were to me!” “When you've put me in my grave, you'll understand what it is to be a motherless child, alone in the mean world without anybody to take care of you!”

My room was painted “robin's egg blue”—a name that impressed me because I did know what color the eggs of the neighborhood robins were, as sometimes cowbirds would push them from the nests and I would find them broken on the ground.

Until age nine or ten, I found this tiny house and yard rich and wonderful. I was fascinated by the mirror that hung near the front door, which I have to this day, one of the few relics of my childhood. It has an owl's head on top, the ornate frame made of once-gilded plaster. On a shelf stood a strange teapot from my great-grandmother back in Lithuania, the pattern long faded into the grayish curve of the sides. When my father broke it in a temper tantrum years later, I was furious, for I had always presumed it would be mine someday. I found the space under the front porch mysterious, sandy and hung with spiderwebs. I loved the front porch, screened in by my father, with its creaky glider I could lie on and stare up at the boards of the dark green ceiling. That was one piece of furniture my cat was allowed on, so we curled up there together.

We always had a car. My father's manhood meshed strongly with automobiles, and even if we were eating only oatmeal or beans and potatoes, the car always had gas. After the war, he bought a new car every two years. There was no money to go to the dentist when mother or I had a toothache. I went to school in hand-me-downs, sometimes with Aunt
Ruth's initials shaming me on my blouses; but a new car was as important to him as the fact that we owned our tiny ramshackle house. To him it meant that we were middle class. We weren't, but never mind. There was a lawn out front the size of a nine-by-twelve rug, but it had grass growing on it, and that too was a badge of his station in life. These things were very important to my parents. To my father being able to regard himself as middle class was necessary because he had been raised with those pretensions—for his family had to differentiate themselves from the coal miners around them—and to my mother, it was important because she had not been so raised. Her childhood and adolescence had been spent in vicious poverty, too many children and too little of everything else.

I remember once sitting in Austin, Texas, with the fine poet, my friend Audre Lorde (who wrote a remarkable memoir,
Zami
). We were in a Holiday Inn that had at the top one of those restaurants that revolved—a fad of the time. We were looking down into the neighborhood of working-class or poor families, and Audre remarked that living in places where people had little houses and little yards was better than living in the downtown areas of cities. I agreed, thinking of my Detroit neighborhood. At the end of every block loomed dilapidated apartment houses where some of my friends lived, or housing projects, but most of the neighborhood was composed of what were called bungalows, tiny houses, or two-and four-family frame houses. Detroit has a wet climate and the sand must be fertile, as it is here on the Cape, for if a house burns down, within a couple of months, a jungle of greenery grows in its place. Nature is avid to take back any available space. When I was a child, the
streets of Detroit were lined with huge elms and an occasional oak. It gave me a vision of an alternate city of green over the grim and hostile streets. If my father cherished the minute front lawn, my mother grew vegetables, herbs and flowers in the only slightly bigger backyard. She used every inch she could pry from his vision of green lawns.

Early on after we moved into that tiny house, my uncle Danny lived with us. Maybe he had got into trouble in Cleveland; maybe he was just out of work. He and my brother were only two years apart. My grandmother Hannah had eleven children before she finally left off childbearing, at fifty-three. Danny was the last child and the only one she had the leisure to spoil. He was an anarchist and believed in the power and virtue of the working class; he loved jazz and had a huge collection of records. He was the coolest of my uncles. Danny and my brother Grant gambled together, ran after women, borrowed money. When they had any money, they lost it immediately or spent it on loud clothes and louder women. I loved but never wanted to emulate them. But I thought them both the handsomest men alive.

The first cat I remember was Whiskers, a gray tabby. My mother named all the cats. Danny brought home two bunnies he had won in a card game. They lived down in the basement until they chewed the insulation off the washing machine. Whiskers would wait on the ledge by the furnace and then pounce on one of the rabbits and ride him. Sometimes he would chase them, and sometimes one or both of them would chase him. I also remember the little raisiny turds they dropped all over the basement. Like most little kids, I was fascinated by shit.

The rabbits were shipped off to Lucy and Lon, where, for all I know, we might have eaten them. I was far more involved with Whiskers. The cats of my childhood were not long-lived. They were all males, never altered, never taken to the vet and usually put out at night. They got in fights, they were hit by cars, they fought with the huge rats that inhabited the alleys. Boys shot them with BB guns. My mother was wonderful at nursing hurt animals, but it would never have occurred to her to try to prevent those injuries.

I am enormously fond of the writings of M. F. K. Fisher and was
flattered and honored that she liked my novel
Gone to Soldiers
. However, when I read her memoir of her cat who was finally torn apart by other male cats when he could no longer defend himself, I could not help wondering what was with all those women of the older generations who insisted on leaving male cats intact until they were killed. It reminds me of guys who identify with the size and power of their dogs. When I was faced with that situation for the first time, with Jim Beam, Ira and I were sentimental and waited too long to have him altered—a lapse we were to regret the rest of his life. To this day, I will find some object in the house that stinks of male cat piss, and remember Jim Beam, who expressed himself on it. But somehow to that earlier generation, the sexual adventures of a male cat were more important than his health, well-being, or even his life.