Sleeping with Cats (37 page)

Two of the kittens flourished, but two began to fail. I kept them alive by feeding them kitten formula every two hours. However, I had to go off to a conference. While I was gone, two kittens died. Woody tried, but he frankly had no aptitude for nursing. We had not named the kittens but identified them, as Dinah's breeder suggested, with nail polish. Purple foot and red foot died. Female and orange foot flourished. When they reached seven weeks, we named the female Morgan. The male was named for his reedy insistent voice, Oboe.

I had intended to sell Oboe and keep Morgan, but the kittens made it
clear they felt differently. Morgan did not want to be in a house with so many other cats. Oboe was his mother's favorite and already bonded to me. When Morgan was twelve weeks old, the son of a local contractor came to the house to meet her, and there was instant attraction. We bartered her for having the driveway graveled. Oboe stayed. When Dinah came into heat again, we took her to the vet and had her altered. She purred all the way there and all the way back, as if she understood. Now, whenever she begins to gain weight, she puts herself on a diet. She seems to believe if she gains too much weight, she will have kittens again. However, she managed to give birth to her lifelong playmate, platonic lover, best friend. They are still inseparable.

At Christmastime, the power went out in the house. When we got an electrician, he found that the power lines to the house had been damaged by the builders when Woody's room was added. The line needed replacing. Now, the electrician knew about Korats. He wanted one. He presented us with a bill, said it had to be paid for the work to proceed and power (and heat and water) to be restored, but he would take Oboe as full payment. We found the money. It was a tight time, but not that tight.

Colette was angry at me for letting Dinah have kittens. She remained aloof for the rest of the year, from June through December. She stayed out several nights during the summer, no longer my shadow. She did not forgive me until January, when we had to leave the Cape.

I am not sure when I actually began to write
Gone to Soldiers
. However, it was such a long novel that we ran out of money while I was still working on third draft. Then I was offered the Elliston Chair as poet in residence at the University of Cincinnati, where over the years I had given readings several times. The teaching duties ran from the beginning of January to the beginning of April. I accepted with the condition that the housing provided accommodate Woody and the four cats, whose pictures I sent along. I wasn't going to leave the cats alone for months as I had Arofa and Cho-Cho. The university agreed. We were given a loft in a predominantly Afro-American partially gentrified area called Over the Rhine.

The cats yowled their way across country, two to a carrying case. Once in the loft, Jim Beam fell into a state of despair. We had been afraid he
would spray everything and try to get out. He didn't want to go outside in Cincinnati, and he had no desire whatsoever to mark this space as his territory. He loved his land passionately and wanted to be nowhere else. The other cats were far more adaptable. Colette was pleased to be with us. Immediately she began to forgive me and reclaimed my lap. Colette, Dinah and Oboe loved the big space of the loft, where they played constantly. We were around a great deal, giving them more attention than they got at home. After all, there was little to do beside work. We had no garden to tend, no house to take care of, few friends to see. For all the cats except Jim, it was a delightful time. This was not a neighborhood you would stroll around in. The block across from us had been torn down in urban renewal never renewed. The one house standing had a chain-link fence around it and a German shepherd kept outside in wintry weather, who barked all night.
BARKED ALL NIGHT.
That winter Woody and I discovered earplugs.

We were bored. Every morning, Jim Beam sang a baritone solo, entitled “How Beautiful Is Wellfleet with Its Marshes, Pines and Delicious Saltwater Grass-Fed Mice.” Woody counted the days to departure, usually wrong. For two weeks, there were twenty-seven days left. At home our hours were fifty minutes long and each day held only twenty-two of them. Here the days were twenty-eight hours long and every week had at least eight.

Sometimes it felt like a time warp, and we were caught in 1955. The city administration was busy banning things and censoring art. The abortion clinic was bombed. Even the academics told Kentucky jokes, saying to me,
They are our Polacks,
and
The best thing that ever came out of Kentucky was an empty bus
. Yet the nicest people I met were from Kentucky, and it surely was prettier across the bridges over the Ohio. We lived near downtown where after 5
P.M.
, boulevards wide as the deck of aircraft carriers were witness to three cars in the distance. We could have picnicked in the middle of any of them. The river itself was impressive, muttering as it carried along hillsides it had torn off. We watched the Ohio in flood carrying whole trees, bits of roofing, boats and buildings it nibbled on. The river was coppery with mud and slashed along.

We made a few friends, but mostly we went to malls for amusement—and Woody sees malls as a preview of hell. We walked to the farmers' market in the middle of the ghetto every week to buy fruits and vegetables, observing that they certainly knew 147 ways to use a pig. Finally I completed a fourth draft of
Gone to Soldiers
and submitted it to my agent. It was a very long novel, and I did not have any idea if she could sell it. When spring came, we returned to Wellfleet, gratefully. In spite of the date, we hit a bad snowstorm on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was terrifying, huge trucks all around us and the road slippery, the visibility nil, the cats howling. We were pulling a trailer, which slewed us crookedly from left to right. If Woody were a less good driver, we would have died, but we arrived home alive and happy, two humans and four cats. Jim Beam charged out of the car and ran in circles, tail straight up like a flag. I was grateful too that I was with a man who was just as glad to be home as I was. Our confluences still thrill me.

The day after Thanksgiving I took you to the sea.

The sky was low and scudding. The wind was stiff.

The sea broke over itself in seething froth

like whipped up eggwhites, blowing to settle

in slowly popping masses at my feet.

I ran, boots on, into the bucking surf

taking you in handfuls, tossing you

into wind, into water, into the elements:

go back, give back. Time is all spent,

the flesh is spent to ashes.

Mother's were colored like a mosaic,

vivid hues of the inside of conch shells,

pastels, pearls, green, salmon as feathers

of tropical birds. They fit in my cupped hands.

I put her in the rose garden and said kaddish.

Your ashes are old movies, black into grey.

Heavy as iron filings, they sag the box

sides. They fill it to overflowing.

Handful after handful I give to the waves

which seize and churn you over and under.

I am silent as I give you to the cold

winter ocean grey as a ship of war,

the color of your eyes, grey with green

and blue washed in, that so seldom met

my gaze, that looked right through me.

What is to be said? Did you have a religion?

If so, you never spoke of it to me.

I remember you saying
No,
saying it often

and loud, I remember your saying,
Never,

I remember,
I won't have that in my house.

I grew up under the threat of your anger

as peasants occupy the slopes of a volcano

sniffing the wind, repeating old adages,

reading birdflight and always waiting, even

in sleep for the ground to quake and open.

My injustices, my pains, my resentments;

they are numerous, precious as the marbles

I kept in a jar, not so much for playing

as simply rolling in my hands to see

the colors trap the light and swell.

Tossing your ashes in my hands as the waves

drag the sand from under me, trying to topple

me into the turning eddy of far storms,

I want to cast that anger from me, finally

to say, you begot me and although my body

my hair my eyes are my mother's so that at your

funeral, your brother called me by her name,

I will agree that in the long bones of my legs,

in my knees, in my Welsh mouth that sits oddly

in my Jewish Tartar face, you are imprinted.

I was born the wrong sex to a woman

in her mid-forties who had tried to get pregnant

for five years. A hard birth,

I was her miracle and your disappointment.

Everything followed from that, downhill.

I search now through the ashes of my old pain

to find something to praise, and I find that

withholding love, you made me strive to be worthy,

reaching, always reaching, thinking that when I leaped

high enough you would be watching. You weren't.

That did not cancel the leaping or the fruit

at last grasped in the hand and gnawed to the pit.

You were the stone on which I built my strength.

Your indifference honed me. Your coldness

toughened my flesh. Your anger stropped me.

I was reading maps for family trips at age

five, navigating from the back seat. Till

I was twenty, I did not know other children

did not direct all turns and plot route numbers.

When Mother feigned helplessness, I was factotum.

Nurse, houseboy, carpenter's helper, maid,

whatever chinks appeared I filled, responsible

and rebellious with equal passion, equal time,

and thus quite primed to charge like a rocket

out the door trailing sparks at seventeen.

We were illsuited as fox and bull. Once

I stopped following baseball, we could not talk.

I'd ask you how some process was done—open

hearth steel, how generators worked.

Your answers had a clarity I savored.

I did with mother as I had promised her,

I took her from you and brought her home to me,

I buried her as a Jew and mourn her still.

To you I made no promises. You asked none.

Forty-nine years we spoke of nothing real.

For decades I thought someday we would talk

at last. In California I came to you in the mountains

at the dam carrying that fantasy like a picnic

lunch beautifully cooked and packed, but never

to be eaten. Not by you and me.

When I think of the rare good times

I am ten or eleven and we are working together

on some task in silence. In silence I faded into

the cartoon son. Hand me the chisel. I handed.

Bevel the edge smooth. I always got bored.

I'd start asking questions, I'd start asking

why and wherefore and how come and who said so.

I was lonely on the icefield, I was lonely

in the ice caves of your sometime favor.

I kept trying to start a fire or conversation.

Time burns down and the dark rushes in in waves.

I can't lie. What was between us was history,

not love. I have striven to be just to you,

stranger, first cause, old man, my father,

and now I give you over to salt and silence.

G
one to Soldiers did the best
of any of my novels up to then, so that for a time we felt quite affluent. We managed to save some of the money and some we used to put a room on the house—a dining room with skylights and windows on three sides, a pleasant airy room surrounded by garden and trees. We also had the house shingled and added a bay window to the living room, great for starting plants too tender for the hotbed—peppers, eggplants, basil. The cats resent that use. They think the bay window is theirs to loll in, overseeing the gardens.

Oboe was developing into a cat of grave dignity. Unlike his mother, who never wanted to grow up, Oboe couldn't wait. He became portly, gentlemanly, gentle—except for a tendency to be jealous of Colette, because of her preeminent position as my lap cat. She slept beside me in bed with her head on my pillow. Woody called it a ridiculous sight, but except in the hottest weather, that was her position—her long lean body stretched out against me, her head on my pillow. She liked our working in the garden, whereas Jim Beam usually pretended he did not know us outside—except that he would come when called. Often he was way into the marsh in the evening. Woody or I would call or whistle for him and far far off we would hear him bellowing an answer. He would come crying as he ambled along, although it might take him ten minutes to arrive.

The Burmese were social cats. They greeted company and explored them. We would shut Jim Beam out of the downstairs room that is my assistant's office but occasionally serves as a guest room. He found a way through the vents and ducts, and would suddenly appear in that room in the middle of the night. He was not hostile but interested. He seemed to expect praise for his exploits and was visibly disappointed when a guest threw him out.

There were many things about training cats that we did not know when we got the Burmese. Jim developed the habit of crying in the night, around 3
A.M.
It always woke me, but not Woody. I would chase Jim and throw him in the bathroom. It wasn't until years later I understood that far from discouraging him by chasing, yelling and throwing him in the bathroom, I was inventing a game he played sedulously. When Max cries too early in the morning, I am careful to do nothing exciting or amusing. I ignore him if I can, or hold him under the covers with me. Therefore he seldom wakes me before the alarm goes off. Most mornings he waits to see if I am really getting up before he moves. For Jim Beam, punishment was attention, and he vastly preferred being punished to being ignored. One of his worst habits was picking on Colette when he was bored. The higher the temperature, the more restless and wicked he was. I used to say, we should put Jim Beam in the freezer for an hour. Certainly in the winter, he was a better behaved cat, cuddling with the others, affectionate. In the summer, he was a heller. Some summers, he got into a fight every three weeks. He would no sooner recover from his abscess and antibiotics and being kept in, than he would go out and get into another fight, often with the same damned cat.

Partly it was the invasion of the summer people. Jim maintained a large territory, much larger than any cat I have known since Brutus. Unfortunately, in the summer, it included the houses of people who brought their dogs or cats with them. He never mellowed out and never became less combative while he could swagger around. He was a gorgeous cat. Whenever we took him to the vet's, other cats would stare at him and preen themselves. He had a circle of male friends as well as enemies. He was always being called on by other cats. When we finally
began to let Oboe and Dinah go out, Jim gained a little respect for Oboe, but not much. Oboe was not about to trot off with him into the marsh or hang out with seven other male cats under the full moon on a hillock near the creek, Dunn's Run. Oboe remained a homebody.

We let go of our pied-à-terre in Cambridge, but still travel to Boston regularly. Those were years when we went frequently to Europe, usually for a combination of publicity for a book publication and research for a novel I was writing. Woody had two novels published, wrote a couple of screenplays under contract and one on spec, began to teach workshops at writers' conferences. We travel well together. I vastly prefer traveling with him, for he takes the edge off and eases the bleakness and the loneliness of being on the road.

In the late 1980s, twelve of us locals started a havurah—a term for a lay Jewish group that operates without a rabbi for most purposes, sort of do-it-yourself Judaism. We were a motley group in our thirties, forties and fifties, all living on the Cape year-round and trying to find a meaningful way to relate to Judaism. The nearest synagogue in Hyannis was traditional and impossible for a number of us to deal with. We began meeting every other Friday for a potluck and discussions, for holidays. The group grew quickly to fifteen. Several people joined because they wanted some kind of Jewish education for their children and a way for their children to get bar or bat mitzvahed.

Our first public event was a Purim party for children and their adult friends. We expected thirty people and over a hundred showed up. We began doing lay Friday night services once a month in the Chapel in the Pines, a place where folksingers performed. Services varied wildly, because we intentionally did not have a ritual committee. People might not like the services other people put on, but it was the right of every member to produce the kind of service they wanted. Some worked, some didn't, but it was loose and free and warm. We were a friendly group. It was a group with strong women running it, and it reflected that. It was nonhierarchical. In actuality, it was an anarchist havurah, casual in the extreme and open to all kinds, especially including gays and lesbians and those married to non-Jews. Our many potlucks brought people in who
wanted the social occasion, wanted services, but also wanted to feed their kids.

The smaller core group of fifteen met every other Friday night. Soon the larger havurah spawned a discussion group, bar and bat mitzvah preparation tutoring, Hebrew classes that met weekly. I was one of the participants and continued studying Hebrew until our teacher, one of the most important women in the havurah, moved to Maine with her husband, a biologist with the park service. We had reached the intermediate level. I would have gone on forever studying with her; I loved our group and the lessons.

Sometimes rabbis would volunteer to do a service for us, if we would put them up on the Cape. We were a rather special group then. We also began, during the third year of the havurah, bringing in last-year students from the Hebrew Union College to conduct High Holiday services. After having a male student one year, we always requested women thereafter, a special pleasure for a lot of the women who had grown up when only men were rabbis. We called the havurah Am ha-Yam—people of the sea. Several of the people in the havurah made their living from the sea, including a woman who farmed shellfish and a man who lobstered, and our president Helaine, who with her husband ran a seafood-processing and wholesale plant on the pier in Provincetown. We sometimes had services in Provincetown, led by a serious young gay man who had studied for the rabbinate years before.

It was a lot of work. Our potlucks grew popular and began to attract hundreds of Jews from all over the Cape, including summer people who extended their vacations for our High Holiday services. We had a real community and a willingness to improvise and create some kind of spiritual connection. I led rituals myself. There are scenes I will always remember, like a young dyke from Provincetown carrying the Torah and weeping, because she had always felt excluded. On the other end of the pleasure spectrum, I remember when Helaine decided we of the core group should make gefilte fish for two hundred at Pesach instead of buying it. I was enthusiastic, because I had fond memories of my grand
mother making it. Well, we each got a pail of smelly ground-up carp shipped from a Hassidic supplier in New York. The process took all day and our kitchen stank and so did we. I could not eat the resulting slop and did without gefilte fish that Passover. The Perels brought Sephardic traditions into the havurah to mix with the Ashkenazi expectations of most members, broadening but annoying to people comfortable only with their expected rituals. It was a time I felt tremendously and joyfully involved in Judaism.

I was diagnosed around this time with glaucoma and cataracts. Heredity wins a round: cataracts from my mother and grandmother; glaucoma from my father. I went to a doctor with all the best credentials and affiliations, who essentially played with my eyes for the next three years, telling me nothing could be done for me except to take various eyedrops, always in increasing amounts and with vastly increasing discomfort. I tried many New Age remedies on the side, an osteopath who said the pressure was caused by the misalignment of bones in the skull, herbs, poultices, daily periods of visualization. My pressure kept rising and my sight diminishing. I was going perceptibly blind, and it terrified me. Finally my gynecologist, one of my heroes (he is on those antichoice hit lists), insisted I go to his ophthalmologist, who recommended an immediate operation, sending me to a glaucoma surgeon.

I will always remember that summer of pain and near blindness, when every normal activity was almost impossible. Without meditation, I don't know how I would have survived. I remember trying to walk by following
the white of Woody's socks before me, stumbling through the woods, tripping over branches and roots and smacking into boughs still attached. I remember falling innumerable times. I must have been covered with bruises, but I could not see them. There was a laser “procedure” in both eyes that left me in agonizing pain. Eye doctors do not tend to prescribe painkillers. Mostly it is a field that attracts doctors who would dearly like to remove your eyes, take them away and work on them in private, and not have to deal with the rest of you at all. Then I had a major eye operation on my left eye. During eye operations, you are conscious. You are drugged and everything is blurry, but your eyes are open and you are quite, quite conscious. You can talk. I usually do so, at least occasionally.

Then came the period of office “procedures”—minor operations. The doctor would inject various drugs into my eye with a long needle and sometimes use a laser. It was painful. It was very painful afterward. It was painful in between these three-times-a-week procedures. Mondays the procedure was done in Hyannis, and my friend Ann would drive me. Wednesdays, Woody took me to Boston, and my friend Denya did it Fridays. Much of my life was used up going back and forth to be tortured, then lying on the couch in between using eyedrops and whimpering. I stepped on the cats constantly, because I could not see them. The drugs blurred the vision in my good eye. But I still managed to write. We bought a great big monitor, though I could barely see the keyboard. Fortunately, I am a touch typist. All summer into the fall, I was not to bend over, to lift anything, to lie other than flat on my back with my head propped up. I shocked my surgeon by asking whether Woody and I could have sex. He said no one had ever asked that before, but it had to be missionary position and I was not to be “overactive.”

I had never been stung by a bee or a wasp before that summer, but during those months, I was stung five times. Going into the garden to pick herbs or vegetables, I would inadvertently close my hand on one of the social insects. I can't imagine how I cooked—slowly and with little imagination I suppose.

I woke one morning—it was the first day of my period—and I was numb from the chin down. I had no sensation in my body. Woody
thought exercise would help, so we went for a walk, but things got worse. My heart was pounding furiously. I could not eat. I could barely swallow. I could only tell I had to urinate when liquid came out of me. I tried calling my surgeon, but he denied what was happening to me had any relation to what he was doing to me or any medication I was taking. Woody called a friend of his who worked in an emergency room, and he said it definitely sounded like a drug reaction to him. Finally I went to see my own doctor, Janet Whelan, in Provincetown.

One wonderful thing about Janet is that she doesn't fake it. She will tell you honestly when she has no idea what's wrong. She also talked to the glaucoma surgeon, who insisted that the eye was a self-enclosed system. Then she had me make a list of everything I was putting into my body and correlated it with the information from him about what he was injecting me with. Finally she worked it out. I had atropine poisoning. By this time, my heart rate and my blood pressure were almost off the scale and I could not feel my body at all.

She started me on fluids and drinking as much water as I could get down. I was to go off atropine immediately and stay off. Slowly, slowly through the next eight hours, my heart rate lessened, my blood pressure dropped and feeling returned from the chin down. It was extremely gradual, but I was no longer terrified. Woody freaked out that day and ran off to the ocean, unable to endure what appeared to be my total disintegration. He had little experience dealing with illness or incapacity, and my near disaster frightened him.

It was humiliating to be seen in public during these weeks, but a certain amount of business traveling was unavoidable. One eye was shrouded in a metal cage and bandages and my face was swollen and distorted. I am not vain. I had always taken my appearance pretty much for granted, but I found it embarrassing to walk into a public rest room and have teenage girls look at me and go,
Yetch!
Which happened.

About a week after my episode of atropine poisoning, Hurricane Bob hit the Cape with devastating winds and associated tornadoes. A swath was cut through the center of town, taking century-old maples and oaks and breaking them off or uprooting them and bashing in houses. Tangles
of live wires swarmed buzzing and sparking over the streets and roads. We were on the side of the hurricane with tremendously high roaring winds but little rain. We cowered in the house with the cats. Occasionally I would go to the window, crisscrossed with masking tape, and hold Colette up to see. Even I could watch the wind blowing the trees sideward like inside-out umbrellas, watch the branches going past like javelins. The wind bombarded us, shaking the house and deafening us. Human helplessness is what you most experience. We were not hit badly, except that we were without power for six days and lost trees, including our best apple tree and one of the sugar maples. Without power, we had no water. I had filled many containers, but we ran out by the third day. We have a gas stove, so we were able to cook—which meant we cooked all we could the first couple of days, since the freezer went, of course.