Sleeping with Cats (5 page)

The backyard, when they were not fighting about it, was heaven to me. From the time I was little, I loved to lie in the grass, looking into the spears of the iris bed where huge spiders lived, looking at the tiny cities of broken bricks with which my mother tried to defend her beds from his mower. I saw them as pueblos, whose pictures I had studied in the encyclopedia my mother bought at a yard sale. I caught caterpillars and attempted to raise butterflies in jars. My mother had read a book about
organic gardening, so she had a compost pile about two feet by three feet in which she put everything that could decay and then used the soil to raise vegetables. It was right beside the lilac bush I loved. From the time I was six, the little space between the lilac bush and the alley fence was my own garden, where I could plant whatever I could, always mint and nasturtiums. In school in spring they sold seeds through special catalogs, and I would order the seeds my mother wanted and also some I could choose. The smell of lilacs recalls to me the best aspects of my mother. I still love seed catalogs, and every year, I order far too many packets of seeds, for the joy of them. Hollyhocks grew along the alley fence, outside, and my friends and I played with them, making hollyhock ladies dance on buckets of water, making heads from buds and impaling them on the open blossoms that became skirts. One girlfriend who lived kitty-corner across the alley was the daughter of a cop. I especially liked her because when we played dress-up, she wanted to be the rescued princess and I could do the rescuing. She was obsessed with what went on at burlesque shows, which her father regularly attended and her mother reviled. They were confused in her mind with whorehouses. We could locate those houses in the neighborhood, beside the streetwalkers we also knew. As I grew older, some of my friends joined their ranks.

Mother was a storyteller, as Grandma was, but even when they told the same stories, the emphasis, the characters, sometimes even the outcomes were different. I have often said that I learned about viewpoint long before I wrote my first novel from listening to the different ways my mother and my grandmother saw the same people, the same events. If it was a family tale, then Aunt Ruth would also have a version. Mother's stories were more dramatic and sensational; Grandma's were moralistic or spiritual. Her best stories came from the rich pack of folklore of the women of the shtetl, a world of brutal violence and powerful magic. The story of the golem that I used in
He, She and It,
I first heard from my grandmother. Ruth's versions of family stories emphasized the facts, what really happened, how she figured it out. They were little detective stories. Mother had tales about everyone in the neighborhood, for if they had secrets, she would know them sooner or later. Women came into her
kitchen to consult her, to drink her coffee and eat her apple cake, to weep and sometimes giggle like me and my friends, and tell stories that made the hair stand up on my arms, when I could manage to keep quiet and overhear. Sometimes she read their palms. All this coming and going was in my father's absence and never could be mentioned when he could hear it. He had forbidden her to read palms; it was one of our many secrets.
Don't tell your father
was a refrain of my childhood, along with the threat
I'll tell your father if you do that
. One of our weapons against his domination and his temper was to withhold information—little excursions we might have taken downtown, a dress she bought on sale and hid away, the visits of neighbors, the stories she told me of her previous boyfriends and husbands, the secrets of the neighborhood added to ours.

Violence was a daily part of the neighborhood—not the violence of today, drive-by shootings. Hardly anyone had a gun, but many of us had knives or razors. Violence was in the family, between the races, among neighbors. The man next door used to come home on payday tanked to the gills and throw his entire family out of the house, one at a time. He would work his way through them, starting with the youngest, swat them around, rough them up and then hurl them out the grade door so they slammed one at a time against our house so it shook. The youngest son was my on-and-off-again boyfriend, and it made me feel bad to hear him pleading and then crying. We would lie in bed waiting till it was over to sleep, but of course, we never said anything. The father was the breadwinner: a Lithuanian immigrant, he worked as a bus driver. He had the right to beat his wife and his sons. We knew it was coming when we would hear his voice, never otherwise raised, lamenting his brood of bloodsuckers. Then we knew the beatings were about to start. That did not surprise me, since I was frequently beaten.

It was not that my parents were cruel. My father never hit my mother, although he terrorized her with his temper, as she in turn went into blind crazy rages. Once when they were fighting about whether to go to Ebensburg for Thanksgiving, she pulled the tablecloth fully laden with supper off the table, flinging it at the window. My father did hit me, quite often.
If he got angry enough, he kicked me, hard. The worst thing was being beaten with a wooden yardstick that leaned against the wall behind two doors that always stood open, where the mangle and the vacuum cleaner were kept. That continued until I took the yardstick and broke it into many pieces.

My father was impatient, and working with him had a dangerous side. He might let go of the ladder when I was climbing, he might drop a hammer on my foot, he might let a table I was helping him move pin me to the wall. It was a tamped-down hostility suddenly leaping out of control: a desire to be free of my mother and of me. A desire to be alone again. On the afternoon of my mother's memorial, many years later in Florida, we returned through the sweltering humidity to their empty house. My father seemed oddly jolly.

“I want to get a burger and a beer. I always wanted to try Harpoon Louie's.”

That was the local TGI Friday's imitation. “You want to go out now?” Woody asked.

“Why not?” My father chuckled. “Now that I'm baching it again.”

That desire to get rid of the burden of the two of us may have been behind his terrifying impatience. I have a crushed misshapen finger, the index finger of my left hand, because I was too slow getting into the car to go to Sears, and he slammed the door on my hand. He might have been a fine uncle, full of jokes and singing off-key and playing cards with enthusiasm and skill, letting his nephews and nieces have a sip of his beer, but he should never have been a father. I understand. I would not be an adequate mother. Having to put up with us was more than he could easily endure.

But he was an honorable man with a strong sense of duty, so he stayed, where another man would simply have taken off. If he had left, we would really have been reduced to poverty. Mother had no ability to earn a living. Not only did he stay, but he also paid monthly for my grandmother's keep, a woman who meant nothing to him, however important she was to me. That was a lot of money going out every month from what was never an ample salary, but I didn't hear him complain.

One charming thing he did was recite poetry that he had learned in school. This love of poetry was something my parents gave me. In the Ebensburg school system, every child learned certain poems by heart. “On the day we French stormed Ratisbon / a mile or so away / on a little mound Napoleon stood….” “The boy stood on the burning deck.” Heliked to recite in a loud sonorous voice. I loved those times. It would happen in the evenings, over coffee and cake at the kitchen table. I would ask for the poems I particularly liked. My mother would reel off “The Owl and the Pussycat.” The owl and the pussycat were happy, for once.

My parents were simply obsessed with each other and after my early childhood, in which I pleased my mother, found me more of a nuisance than an asset. I began doing very well in school after my illnesses, but neither of them was interested in grades. My brother had done poorly in school but had been their idea of a proper boy. I seemed incapable of learning when I carried home my dim accomplishments—all A's, my spelling bee victories—how little such things were valued by my parents. They would much rather have had a healthy flirtatious little girl, a sort of minor-league Shirley Temple. When we were given intelligence tests, I was made to take mine over again. The score was inconceivable. It was embarrassing for my mother and annoying to the school. The principal did not know what to do with me. Since I read way above my grade level, I was sent out of class to tutor the kids who could not read. I rather liked that, and I liked them. Usually they were from African-American families just up from the South to work in the nearby factories. They liked getting out of the classroom and so did I. We were misfits together.

I confided my ambitions only to Buttons, who listened approvingly. Like many cats, he loved to be talked to. I had dressed Whiskers in doll clothes, but I never did that to Buttons. He was my coconspirator. I did not know much about college, but I knew it was where you learned the things you needed in order to understand the world, I knew it was the way out of the neighborhood I wanted to escape. By the time I was twelve, I knew. I listened to my aunt Ruth saying that with a college
diploma, she could have been a professional, she could have achieved a high civil service rating. Staying was death. It was drinking too much or doing drugs. Staying was going on the streets as some of my girlfriends soon did, running numbers like the guys, working at dead-end jobs, having babies too young and too many. It meant violence or tedium, dying fast or slow. It meant reform school and then prison. That was all I could see before me if I did not get out.

Buttons had an unusual habit: when I went out into the alley to scavenge or make my way through the neighborhood, often he would walk at my side. He trotted along beside me, giving an occasional chirp or meow of comment. If we met a dog, he climbed something. If I ran into a friend, he dropped back. Those were our secret walks.

Buttons disappeared when I was twelve. We never found his body, although I spent endless afternoons and weekends looking for him, always hoping to find him still alive. There are so many ways a cat living half on the streets and in the alleys could have died. I mourned him violently.

Shortly thereafter, I found a way to have a sense of community, of belonging—by joining a street gang.

It was right after the war of my childhood

World War II, and the parks were wide open.

The lights were all turned on, house

lights, street lights, neon like green

and purple blood pumping the city's heart.

I had grown up in brown out, black out,

my father the air raid warden going house to

house to check that no pencil

of light stabbed out between blackout curtains.

Now it was summer and Detroit was celebrating.

Fireworks burst open their incandescent petals

flaring in arcs down into my wide eyes.

A band was playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

Then the lights came on brighter and starker

than day and sprayers began to mist the field.

It was the new miracle DDT in which we danced,

its faint perfumy smell like privet along the sidewalks.

It was comfort in mist, for there would be no more

mosquitoes ever, and now we would always be safe.

Out in Nevada soldiers were bathing in fallout.

People downwind of the tests were drinking

heavy water out of their faucets. Cancer

was the rising sign in the neon painted night.

Little birds fell out of the trees but no one

noticed. We had so many birds then.

In Europe American cigarettes were money.

Here all the kids smoked on street corners.

I used to light kitchen matches with my thumbnail.

My parents threw out their depression ware

and bought Melmac plastic dishes.

They believed in plastic and the promise

that when they got old, they would go

to Florida and live like the middle class.

My brother settled in California with a new

wife and his old discontent. New car,

new refrigerator, Mom and Dad have new hats.

Crouch and cover. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

Y
ou must not imagine
the gang I joined at age twelve was like the gangs of today. We were not part of a drug distribution system, for that was in underworld hands. Heroin and marijuana and uppers existed in school and in the neighborhood, but we were more interested in alcohol and tobacco. We had no guns. When turf fights existed, they were sporadic and a matter of fists, baseball bats, Sam Browne belts, occasional knives and razors; since no income was involved, they were not pursued long or vigorously. Nobody much wanted our turf, from the gasworks to the railroad tracks. I was stronger by then, no longer fainting. I learned to pick easy locks and I could run like hell. I had quick hands. I was gifted at shoplifting and never caught. My gifts were appreciated in the gang, who forgave me for doing well in school—something I never gave up. I would not allow my grades to falter no matter what I did in the hours afterward, because of my dream of somehow escaping to that place called “college.”

We specialized in petty theft—stuff found in unlocked garages and cars, what we could get by shoplifting, opening basements, stealing bikes and running mild scams. We played “scavenger hunt,” working up the side of a block, asking for a buffalo nickel. Almost every house would give us one. With a couple of dollars, we felt rich. A package of cigarettes
was a quarter. We were just street kids working the blocks we could reach on foot. We climbed on the roof of the White Castle, a local fast-food chain, and blocked the chimney or threw garbage down it. We stole hubcaps and, a couple of times, shirts left out on a line. We got older brothers to buy beer, which we'd drink till somebody puked. We all needed money for cigarettes. I smoked Lucky Strikes. Mostly we stole stuff we could use, but if we found something like a good saw or electric drill, we could sell it to an older kid who acted as agent for a fence. He would give us a dollar for something his boss could sell. We knew about marijuana and heroin, but none of us touched it—yet. We did get our hands on white lightning from a local still in a garage. It was cheap, strong and merciless and burned the lining off my throat. I did not enjoy it but drank it out of pride, not to seem afraid.

Another skill I acquired around this time was lying. When I was younger, I was truthful with my mother. She could empty me out like a pocket and I would tell her everything. She would have been a terrific interrogator, as she could play either soft cop or tough cop. Her skills at reading body language were intense. As I entered puberty, she began frantically to police me. She went through my things, she violated my privacy daily. After all, my room was hardly private. It held her sewing machine; it was the route to the attic and storage. I returned her hostility and became master of the quick and easy lie. She never knew where I had been, although she imagined she did. I created lies within lies, tangles of obfuscation in which all of the invention I would later put into my novels was developed and perfected in keeping my mother at bay. I still have an overdeveloped and paranoid sense of privacy. I become hostile if someone, even Ira, picks up objects on my desk or dresser and appears to be looking through them. I am nosy about other people, but I hate being questioned myself.

As I said, my mother was forty-four when she had me, so when I began to menstruate, she must have been well into menopause. Certainly her response to my first period was close to anger. She went down to the corner drugstore, returned with a box of menstrual pads and a sanitary belt. “Go in the bathroom, shut the door and put it on,” she yelled.
Obviously I had done something wrong. I managed as best I could. I had no idea how to attach the pad to the belt, so I hung a string of safety pins from the belt down to the end of the pad and put the belt around my waist. This was extremely uncomfortable and prone to stick out in back or front in a embarrassing way. A year later, my aunt Ruth saw me putting on a menstrual pad and showed me how to loop it through the sharp end of the belt and wear the belt and pad properly.

When I had my period, Mother would not let me near wine she was making or dough that was rising, and I had to take my pads out to the alley and burn them. At first I had to ask for each pad, as if I might use too many. I took to stealing them by the box from the drugstore and then I did not have to ask. I was an accomplished shoplifter from twelve on through college. It was how I got the things I did not have the money to pay for. I stole my first brassiere. I needed a bra from the time I was twelve, but my mother would not let me wear one, saying I wasn't old enough. I began walking all hunched over. I stole one and hid it, so when I went out, I could slip into a bathroom and put it on. Finally in high school, she bought me a couple of bras. At the same time, she presented me with my first girdle. Since I weighed ninety pounds, this was superfluous by any rational standard, but not by the mores of the 1950s. If you might jiggle, you needed a girdle. I hated it. It was a white rubber contraption with garters hanging down. I could see only one advantage in growing up: being able, I imagined, to control my own destiny and make my own choices.

Another cat walked into the backyard, a long-haired tabby someone had taken the trouble to have altered. I was picking lilacs from the bush by the tiny compost pile. A strange tabby stood at the alley gate and stared at me expectantly. He did not meow, he did not do anything except look straight at me. I walked slowly to the gate, expecting him to run away. Instead he held his ground. I opened the gate and he stepped intelligently out of the way, then strolled onto the cement walkway that led from the alley gate to the grade door of the house. He walked to the door and I followed. He waited to be let in. “Mother!” I called. He was gravely polite with her, allowing both of us to pet him. He was very hungry but ate carefully, without getting food on the floor.

My mother named him Fluffy. He was an exceptionally mild and sweet-tempered cat, although he would sit on the fence and tease the dog next door, who could not reach him. I would wait till my parents went to sleep and then sneak down to the basement (where he unlike Buttons was permitted to sleep) and carry him up to my bed. I don't think I slept much those years, as I had to sneak him out in the morning. Like Malkah he enormously appreciated having a home and was demonstrative with all of us. He wanted to be a lap cat. He quietly and inexorably worked on my parents with his charm and his patience and his persistence until he was allowed to sleep inside, until he was taken on vacation with us, until he had at least some of the privileges he strongly desired. He had little interest in the life of the alley and would eat almost anything presented to him, including cantaloupe and tomato sauce. He would try anything you offered him, out of politeness if not hunger.

The neighborhood in Detroit was Black and white by blocks, like a crazy checkerboard. I had always gotten along with the Black kids in my grade school; in fact some of them protected me from the white kids. Being one of the only Jews in the neighborhood, I was not white and I was not Black, but something in between. Jews were not whites and were kept out of most neighborhoods in Detroit by covenants, as were the Blacks. My first boyfriend in grade school (I had a couple earlier) was Black, but that earned me a beating and got him into trouble too. He took his mother's brooch to give me. That didn't help either of us. But his sister Josephine looked out for me. She knew I had really cared for Joey. I was casually prejudiced but at the same time recognized I had more in common with the two brightest Black girls in my class, who had also been double-promoted with me and who were hard and fast, than I did with any of the doll-like white girls the teachers liked. My white friends were all kids up from Appalachia or tough girls placed in foster families.

Cats were my usual pets, but I had others: turtles bought from the dime store that promptly died; tadpoles or frogs from science class in school that I would keep in the house for a week or so and then get my parents to picnic someplace where I could free them; a garter snake a boy
named Floyd gave me. I thought it much better than presents other boyfriends gave me, silly jewelry from the dime store or half a bag of candy. I named it Slinky and got books from the library about how to care for it. My mother disliked that snake intensely. Her neighborhood ladies did not want to come into the house. One day I came home from school to find that Slinky had disappeared. I tore the house apart looking for him. I was consumed with guilt, imagining him dying of starvation or thirst in some ventilation duct. It was not until ten years later, my mother told me she had taken him out to a vacant lot and let him go—which was probably the kindest thing to do, but I wasted a lot of time and guilt looking for him. I brought home all the amphibians because I had a crush on my general science teacher, Mrs. Williams. I loved her cool rationality combined with enthusiasm for her subject. I thought I might be a scientist, if I were not to be a successful thief.

One tremendous pleasure of my childhood from the time I was perhaps four years old into adolescence was travel. I mentioned the regular trips to Cleveland and Ebensburg. My father was sent by Westinghouse all over the state to repair machinery—in steel mills, paper mills, foundries. In summer, Mother and I accompanied him. Sometimes in the spring or fall, I would skip school and we would go. I remember my mother and me hanging around parks in Port Huron, in Lansing, in Kalamazoo. I was particularly fond of the Winona Hotel in Bay City, which was fronted by a big old-fashioned verandah with vines where I could often find Isabella woolly bear caterpillars. I thought of them as the pussycats of the caterpillar family. Also in the dining room they had a relish tray that went around before the meal was served. I was impressed by that—as I was by anything that gave me a choice. Radishes, cottage cheese, scallions, olives—that was luxury. Travel seemed to me a wonderful freedom from daily life, and I think it was so to my mother, as she was often playful. We would find something free or cheap to occupy our stolen time, perhaps a small ratty zoo, a museum of coins or local history, a park, a fountain, a river. This was her escape from housework.

In the summers, my father would have two separate one-week vacations, and we would rent a summer cottage. They were rather primitive
but on a lake or river. Fluffy alone of our cats was a good traveler. He would get into the car willingly and sit in the backseat with me. He liked those cottages. My father fished and brought home sunfish or perch. My mother would fry them, and Fluffy would have his share. What a stupid name for an amiable, intelligent creature, one of the world's gentlest.

One place we returned for several years was a cottage colony on a river in the thumb area of Michigan, near Bay City. Fluffy liked to sit on the pier and dabble his foot in the running water of the river. My mother insisted he was trying to fish, but I thought in the heat he simply liked the sensation of cool water. Always there was some kind of water, always a rowboat, always a few battered pots and frying pans. Often it was damp. I loved those vacations, especially when we brought along Fluffy. More than once, I took him out in a boat with me. I liked to row; he liked to be rowed. He found it all amusing. A benign overseer, he was interested in everything we did. The magic for me lay in these little cottages being somebody else's. There might be odd or interesting books. The furniture was different. The beds were uncomfortable, but no worse than mine at home. Even looking in closets and cabinets was fascinating. I walked a great deal from the ages of ten to fifteen, walked miles, exploring I called it. When we rented a cottage up at Crystal Lake, I worked picking cherries. It was child labor but who cared. My mother made exquisite pies from them. She was not much of a cook, but she was a terrific baker. Apple pie, peach pie, plum, chocolate, lemon. Hermits, Toll House, raisin molasses, sugar, oatmeal cookies.

My parents were different on the road. My mother played games with me, my father and mother and I sang, all sorts of old songs including many popular when they were first together: “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?,” “Tea for Two,” and barbershop favorites of my father, like “Shine on Harvest Moon.” They were jolly, they behaved affectionately toward each other. It was a briefly happy family, unless one of us wanted to make a stop the others refused. That was usually my mother, and she would sulk. My mother was a champion sulker. Ira, who only met her once, remembers her sulking, sitting in a restaurant—the wrong restaurant because we could not get into the one she wanted—refusing to
speak a word, balling up bread from the basket in the middle of the table and throwing the tightly wadded-up balls of bread in all directions, pouting.

From the time I could sit up and make out the lines on maps, I became the navigator. My mother hated maps and could not even fold them. The maze of lines confused her. I always filled in, rushing to prove competent where my mother would not or could not. It kept the peace, and my father's temper was always looming over us. I usually had a reasonable idea what would please them in the way of routes and activities. So after World War II, when we were able to take a journey westward to Yellowstone, I picked out where we went and what we did. I tend to do the same thing today when Ira and I are traveling. Old habits hang in there. I'm good at itineraries and at finding offbeat but fascinating places. My ambition after that trip was to be a park ranger.

I had a couple of girlfriends up from Appalachia who lived in a swaybacked house by the railroad tracks. We spent a lot of time in the fields by the tracks, finding baby rabbits, chasing pheasants, poking in the water holes for what we might find. It was a patch of industrial wilderness between the streets of little houses and the factories. By my later childhood, it filled up with new houses we played in as they were being built. Then they were finished, rows of identical two-bedroom houses speedily sold to veterans and their new families. We called that row Babyland. Soon we were baby-sitting there. I discovered sex with these girlfriends. It was more a game than anything else, but a pleasurable one. The first time I had an orgasm—I was eleven—I was astonished and also I had a feeling of recognition. Of course, that's it. As if that was what I had been expecting or looking for. We touched each other, first one being the “man” and then the other. Usually there was role-playing—kidnapping, Robin Hood, plots taken from movies or books with sexy scenes, the bodice rippers we weren't supposed to read. In the next few years, until I was fifteen, I had sex with twenty-odd girls, usually as the seducer. Some of my girlfriends used the sex to manipulate me into doing what they wanted, such as lifting things for them—lipsticks, bottles of Evening in Paris, a dime-store perfume.