Sleeping with Cats (34 page)

We drove home much more quickly, still not sure what my mother had wanted to give us that was so important we had to drive down for it. I decided she had just wanted to see Woody, and that the $1,200 had cost her such effort to put together, it felt like something that would need a truck to carry back north.

The cats had been at Elise's Cambridge apartment, where Jim had revealed some of his willful and wicked character by terrorizing her cat Zoe. Elise had shut Jim Beam into a spare bedroom. We were annoyed, protective of our darling. She just didn't understand him, we thought, but she had seen the bully in him long before we recognized it. Both Burmese were growing into large sleek dark brown muscular cats. A friend once saw Jim slipping through the undergrowth and shouted, “What's that!” He said the first thing he thought of was a panther.

We had not intended to let them outside, but they chose otherwise. Jim knocked out the screen and led the way. We tried putting them on leashes. He would simply wriggle free in ninety seconds. Colette was not much slower. They wanted to be indoor/outdoor cats, and so they were.

Slowly we decided to let go of the apartment in the city. One summer we sublet it and became instant landlords. We tried sharing it: another disaster. Our young roommate looked on us as parents who should take care of him. He could not imagine that a woman had anything to do but cater to him. Also, rents in Cambridge were skyrocketing. Woody moved out here, and we rented a room from Elise for our time in the city. She had an apartment on a pleasant tree-lined street near Central Square in Cambridge.

Colette went into heat. She was fierce. She backed Woody into a corner and would not let him out. We got her altered at once, but we were too sentimental about Jim. Some idiot assistant at the vet's said he was so beautiful, we shouldn't have him altered until he was full grown. Well, he soon discovered sex. He pushed out the screen and went gallivanting. He was seen two miles away on the other side of Route 6. We tried to keep him in. When we left a friend here while we were doing readings, she was so terrorized by him, she hid in Woody's study with the door locked.

He began his lifelong campaign of marking territory. While we had him, half our house smelled of piss. We couldn't leave a shirt on the floor. We finally got him altered, but too late to abrade his macho personality, now fully formed. The vet bills he ran up fighting with other cats ran into the thousands over the years. He had his moments. He always met us at the foot of the drive. He was strongly affectionate with Woody, espe
cially. He was Woody's cat. They played games together of dominance and submission that Jim Beam craved. He needed Woody to dominate him, just as he needed to dominate every cat for miles. Perhaps he should have had therapy, but frankly I doubt there was a cat therapist closer than Manhattan. He was a magnificent hunter, but his sister was better. Jim Beam was so strong, he did not feel soft when you picked him up. He was all steel muscles. I could not hold him when he did not want to be confined.

Among cats, he was a Genghis Khan. His energy was electric and his will, absolute. He never wavered from what he wanted. He simply would not change his mind and would not give up: the image of a tyrant in the form of a gorgeous sleek cat. When you have a pet who is by all objective standards bad, it is like any other love relationship with someone who is half crazy. You cling to the good times and make excuses; you understand and understand. Jim was wildly affectionate and absolutely ours.

Then Jim Beam fell in love. It was a male tabby ( Jim was definitely gay in spite of his fathering kittens all over Wellfleet before we had the brains to get him fixed) who had been dumped by some irresponsible summer person. He had lived through the winter in a tree. Jim Beam brought him home like a prize, a large brown tabby with heavy jowls and a chewed ear, a pugilistic air but a fighter who had been beaten. He had everything wrong with him: fleas, worms, ear mites. We had him altered and cleaned up and named him Boris.

Boris could not stay in the house at night unless it was bitter cold. His time as a feral cat had formed him. If we did not let him out when he wanted, he would piss on the door. Otherwise, he was gentle, sweet, friendly. He had a sexual relationship with my nightgowns. He would grab them by what he considered the scruff of their neck and drag them about between his legs, purring madly. He would eat anything. You only have to live with fussy house cats to know how you can love a cat who eats everything—the cheap stuff in the big cans, dried-up food the others refused, leftovers from supper. I had seen him before, because two years ago he had come calling on Cho-Cho regularly. Cho-Cho must have retained a female scent, because toms were always waiting hopefully for
the day she would surely come into heat. She had liked Boris as a suitor, but once he came in the house, she spat at him. It was not right that he should be inside. She would not permit him near her.

Jim Beam and Boris would hang out together inside and outside. Jim, who had adored his sister when he was younger, now rejected her. He did not want her palling with the two of them. Colette often sat on Arofa's grave, and she began to act more like Arofa. She stayed with me while I wrote and became my special lap cat. Still, there was a wild streak in her. I went to teach in Nashville for a writers' conference, where Reagan's firing of the air controllers stranded me. Colette was so furious that I was gone for nine days, she ran away from home and would not return until I did. Woody would call her and catch a glimpse of her on the hill across the road, but she would not come. When he walked toward her, she ran into the brambles.

Every so often she would go off in the summer and stay out all night. I could not sleep, afraid she would be eaten by a great horned owl or the coyotes that had begun to flourish on the Cape. She would sometimes get a bladder infection after one of those excursions. Otherwise, she was a healthy strong cat. I found her beautiful, although the vet would say she had a face only a mother could love, for it was a pushed-in pug face. She was my brown Amazon. I adored her. Colette could open doors. She would stand on her hind legs and turn the doorknob, throwing her weight forward. When I shut the cats into the back of the house, they would line up and wait for Colette to open the door and let them out.

My mother was increasingly upset. On her birthday in late November she called me, crying. My father was determined to move them into a high-rise complex, total life care. You bought into it, paid a hefty fee every month, and were to be provided with an instant and elegant social life. She did not want to move from the neighborhood where gradually she had made friends and she had Virgil for company. There were no pets allowed in the high-rise. She looked at the people there, and they were not her kind. The women looked shellacked. The men had far more money than my father. My father had been playing the stock market since he moved to Florida. Not in affluent terms, but in terms of the kind of
money he had never seen, he was doing well through his stockbroker and loved to talk about it. He felt like a success. I asked Mother if, since he was moving them into a facility, she would rather be in one up north near us. She said she would much prefer that, but he wouldn't consider it. She could not imagine doing it in spite of him. His glaucoma was much worse, and he had been driving on a sidewalk when the police stopped him and he lost his license. As for the new facility, she had a clearer sense of social class than my father and knew they would not fit in.

It was Chanukah, and we had been planning a little party with latkes and dreydls and friends. Friday I had a splitting headache, unusual for me, all afternoon and evening. That evening my father called. “It's your mother,” he said. “She had a stroke this afternoon. She's in the hospital.”

It was hard to pry information out of him. I could not figure out how serious it was until the next morning when I spoke with her doctor. My mother had been cleaning up after lunch. My father was napping. She had a stroke and fell. As she went down, she broke a fluorescent light. My father picked up every tiny piece of glass before he called the rescue squad. She was conscious for a while and then she lost consciousness, never to regain it. He chose that she should not be on any machines except a respirator, so the doctor gave her no chance. In fact, he thought she had been brain-dead before the rescue squad arrived.

Chanukah was close to Christmas that year, and we could not get a flight. It was Sunday before we could fly to Florida, on the same plane but in separated seats, since we were on standby. She died while we were in the air. I felt it. I knew she was dead before we landed. They had a burial plot in Detroit, but he had stopped paying for it. All the arrangements for her death were made by my father, none of them complying with Jewish law or tradition. As usual, he simply pretended she was not Jewish. I saw my brother approach the coffin, open according to Christian practice. He knelt and crossed himself. I knew then what my mother had speculated to me was true: that he had converted to Catholicism. I was surprised but said nothing. My father had her cremated and was going to have the undertaker dispose of the ashes. I insisted on taking them.

My father was in a strangely jovial mood, as I said before. He would be moving into the high-rise in a few months, when his apartment was ready. He said, “I'll be baching it,” with a twinkle in his eye. I think he was remembering the bachelor life he led in his twenties and early thirties, before he met my mother. I arranged for a cleaning service, since I could imagine what the house would be like in a week. After I left, the woman came in twice, then wouldn't return. She said she could not work for him.

He asked Grant and me to get rid of her things. Grant's wife, Lilly, and I went through them, bundling most of it for Goodwill. I let Lilly take almost everything she desired. I wanted my mother's jade necklace, the one she had always told me was my father's engagement present to her. When I asked him, he had no idea what I was talking about. He did not remember giving it to her. I also took the wedding ring that had been cut from her hand. I took the cameo brooch my grandfather Morris had bought for my grandmother Hannah in Naples, when they were waiting for a boat to take them to the States, after they had escaped from Russia. I took her box of buttons, some from dresses she had worn in my early childhood, a bowl I had given her for her birthday years before, a tile trivet I had bought her in Florence. I found all the shawls I bought her wrapped in plastic, never worn, some with the tags still on them, and those I brought home. She hoped for so much, and she got so little. I was weeping constantly, and my family kept looking at me as if I were crazy. Almost every present I had ever given her was wrapped up and stowed away, presumably for some future time when it would be right to use them, when she would feel loved. I could not tell if my brother mourned her. I could not read him. We were as opaque to each other as a cat and a bull.

The librarian who had become her friend mourned her. I was sure Virgil would miss her. I did not know if anyone else cared. She had enjoyed many friends, but most were dead, the others scattered in the North. I found clippings on stroke in her dresser drawer. She had known she was at risk but said nothing. Grant had already endured a stroke. I tried to speak with Grant and Lilly, but we couldn't talk with any honesty. They were closer and more sympathetic to my father than I was. I had never been able to communicate with my father, and my own sense of my
mother was totally at odds with his opinion. I have always seen her as someone with immense energy and potential, thwarted, starved, stunted, able to be sublimely happy when given a chance, but seldom given that opening, that little space of attention and respect.

I found all the books and pamphlets, the health foods, the whole grain foods, the supplements, the biofeedback gadgets stuffed way up on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinets, where she could have put them only by standing on a step stool, but where she would never have to look at them. She did not throw them out, but she never touched them except to stow them out of sight. I went around that dirty dreary house weeping, already missing her. I had grown used to our communication.

We took a red-eye flight back Christmas Eve, rough and bumpy, but we could sit together. I held my mother's ashes in my lap. It was mild when we got home in the dawn. That day I dug her ashes into my garden alongside Arofa. I would plant a rosebush over her, next to the wisteria I had planted the year before over Arofa. We went into the woods and chopped down a small pitch pine and put the ornaments on it. Although we don't otherwise observe Christmas, I have had a tree since, because she asked me to. It's a small remembrance, just as I light the yahrtzeit candle for her the first night of Chanukah. My one consolation was that we had become close the last years of her life. Now there would be no more Monday-night conversations. I realized Grant would not say kaddish for her, so I did, for the next year. As I was reciting the words, which were nonsense to me, day after day, just rhythmic syllables, I began to realize I needed to learn Hebrew. It was maddening and embarrassing that I had no idea at all what I was saying every day, facing east and thinking of my mother whose face I would never see again except in dreams—in dreams again and again.

In the drawer were folded fine

batiste slips embroidered with scrolls

and posies, edged with handmade

lace too good for her to wear.

Daily she put on shmatehs

fit only to wash the car

or the windows, rags

that had never been pretty

even when new: somewhere

such dresses are sold only

to women without money to waste

on themselves, on pleasure,

to women who hate their bodies,

to women whose lives close on them.

Such dresses come bleached by tears,

packed in salt like herring.

Yet she put the good things away

for the good day that must surely

come, when promises would open

like tulips their satin cups

for her to drink the sweet

sacramental wine of fulfillment.

The story shone in her as through

tinted glass, how the mother

gave up and did without

and was in the end crowned

with what? scallions? crowned

queen of the dead place

in the heart where old dreams

whistle on bone flutes,

where run-over pets are forgotten,

where lost stockings go?

In the coffin she was beautiful

not because of the undertaker's

garish cosmetics but because

that face at eighty was still

her face at eighteen peering

over the drab long dress

of poverty, clutching a book.

Where did you read your dreams, Mother?

Because her expression softened

from the pucker of disappointment,

the grimace of swallowed rage,

she looked a white-haired girl.

The anger turned inward, the anger

turned inward, where

could it go except to make pain?

It flowed into me with her milk.

Her anger annealed me.

I was dipped into the cauldron

of boiling rage and rose

a warrior and a witch

but still vulnerable

there where she held me.

She could always wound me

for she knew the secret places.

She could always touch me

for she knew the pressure

points of pleasure and pain.

Our minds were woven together.

I gave her presents and she hid

them away, wrapped in plastic.

Too good, she said, too good.

I'm saving them. So after her death

I sort them, the ugly things

that were sufficient for every

day and the pretty things for which

no day of hers was ever good enough.