Sleeping with Cats (6 page)

I spent a great deal of time up in the unheated attic of our house, where I had some old furniture and a bookcase with tilting glass doors. At some garage sale, my mother had picked up a collection of books, the Harvard Five Foot Bookshelf. Each volume was a collection from a different culture: not only Greek and Roman myths, but also myths from India, from Native Americans, from the Norse, from
The Arabian Nights
(bowdlerized of course). I read and reread those stories and they helped form my imagination. Once the attic had been my playroom, where I kept the dolls various aunts gave me and the wonderful doll clothes my grandmother made. Now it was my retreat, where in spite of the cold, Fluffy would join me, sitting on my lap in a child-sized rocking chair painted dark green with scrolls on the back that was rapidly growing too small for me. But I was a small person.

My parents bought a cottage of their own, an hour out of Detroit. It was a tiny lot on a weedy little lake called Pardee. I thought this a made-up peculiar-sounding name, but nobody could tell me what it was named for. The cottage was run-down, had a leaking roof and no inside plumbing, only a pump in the yard. It was not winterized. There were holes in the walls. In short it was a complete mess and very cheap. My father began rebuilding it and continued to do so until they sold it thirty years later. It was an ongoing fix-it project never intended to be completed, a toy for him. He did all the work himself, and sometimes he was successful and sometimes it was a disaster. The first plumbing job he did exploded shit and hot water simultaneously.

At first, I loved going out there. Fluffy often accompanied us. Purple martins occupied a white birdhouse, a miniature colonial up on a high pole on the lot next door (the lots were extremely narrow and the houses almost touched), and used to dive-bomb him, so he preferred the screened-in porch to the actual outside. I sometimes slept on that porch and sometimes in a tiny room whose partitions did not go all the way up to the ceiling. The cottage was heated by an old potbellied wood-burning stove, which I loved to feed. My father's first project was to add a bathroom on the back, put in a water heater, and then bring running water into the kitchen. I think there was almost no fix-it job beyond him. He enjoyed
mastering plumbing and carpentry and tiling. In my adult life, I have often expected more from the men I've been with than comes easily to them in the way of the ability to repair and fix up, because of my father.

Our back fence at the cottage gave onto the land of an immigrant everybody called The Russian, who grew black walnuts. A canal he had dug to give himself more privacy—perhaps I should call it a moat—separated our land (and that of ten other people) from his. Frogs twanged from the canal and snapping turtles raised their snouts like U-boat periscopes. He lived in a year-round house he had built of logs. My father never had anything to do with him, but my mother, who knew a few Russian phrases, charmed him. He was always inviting us to come over to collect walnuts. The pulp stained our hands, and I went to school with brown palms. Mother flirted with him, as she did with most men. It was her standard tool for getting what she hoped for, second nature. She had a well-honed contempt for women who couldn't or wouldn't flirt—like my aunt Ruth and like me. Her flirting embarrassed me until I would turn my back and pretend I could not hear her. I was an awkward mopey creature still painfully skinny but with visible breasts, a source of terrible embarrassment to me, with whacked-off black hair and a permanent slump, wearing too-big plastic glasses and clothes that never quite fit, since few of them had been bought for me. My aunt Ruth was one source of my clothes. We were close to the same size, but my breasts were already bigger, so nothing buttoned completely.

When I was twelve, I began reading my way through the mysteries in the Gabriel Richard branch library because Aunt Ruth read them, and what she did was glamorous. For the next year and a half I must have read 90 percent of the mysteries in that library. Then, abruptly, I stopped. I was bored. The last ones I really loved were Dorothy Sayers's. Rereading them in adulthood, I still liked them, although the class attitudes made me gag. I began reading biographies. Perhaps I was looking for role models, for lives to try on mentally. When I turned fourteen, I began to read real novels—Dickens, Hemingway, the Brontë sisters, as well as a lot of 1930s through 1950s fiction.

Strange the things I remember vividly. A tree stood to one side of the
sand road at the cottage. We called it fish head tree because local fishermen, if they had caught a particularly big pike or bass, would nail its head to the tree. We used that tree as home base in hide-and-seek and other games. Yet when it came back to me in dreams, it was sinister and dangerous—a portent of death.

We had not had Fluffy for more than two years when I found a kitten. I was always cutting through the alleys of my neighborhood and I always had my eye out for anything salvageable, little treasures like interesting bottles or a stool somebody might have thrown away. This time it was a tiny abandoned kitten thrown out in a box. I thought her adorable and I brought her home. It was late spring and my mother was in a good mood, I have no idea why. She also thought the little tricolored kitten was cute and said that if Fluffy accepted her, we might keep her, at least for a while. I don't know why I thought it was a female, for she was quite young and I did not know how to sex a kitten. This was Friday after school and the next morning, we drove out to the cottage.

I had not named her yet, as mother for the first time had given me permission to name a pet myself. Since I had disliked Fluffy's name, I took very seriously my right to name my new kitten. Fluffy accepted her and proceeded to wash her. He was, as I have said, an exceptionally friendly and adaptable cat. He even played with her. She tried to suckle him, which he discouraged. I had never had a kitten before, and everything about her enchanted me. In the car, she was a little frightened but crawled into my blouse and hid there, little nameless ball of white, orange and tan fluff purring loudly, pleased to be fed and warm and held. I made lists and lists of possible names. Perhaps she was my first poem.

I was intensely proud of her, and I wanted to engage my friends out at the cottage in the naming. After we had lunch, I started up the dirt road, carrying the kitten in my jacket to a cottage that belonged to another family from our neighborhood. While visiting them we had first learned of the run-down house for sale cheap on the same road. I had left the lower houses behind and was climbing a hill through the woods to their house when a large hunting dog came leaping out of the bushes. I held the kitten to me but the dog knocked me down, biting my arm and ripped the kitten from me. In front of me as I beat ineffectively at the dog, kicking and screaming, it tore the kitten into pieces of gore. I chased the dog through the woods, screaming, still somehow thinking I could recover my kitten. I was hysterical. I was brought home in shock. For years, I had nightmares. I went over those few seconds again and again, trying to think what I could have done. It was my fault for taking the kitten to my friend's house. My parents were embarrassed that I made such a fuss. Nothing was done to the dog.

I never liked the cottage so well after that. What I did like was walking. At that time the area had thick forest and trails through it. On the other side of the small lake, deer came down to drink in the morning. I made friends with a man who lived down the road. His name was Tom and I thought him an old man, although probably he was no older than I am now. He was Native American, a Wyandot, married to a white woman who worked in an office in a nearby town. My mother said his wife did not love him any longer, wanted to be rid of him. He had worked in construction, but his heart was bad. Now he did odd jobs—build a shed, repair a roof, put up a fence. Around the clump of cottages on the lake forest stretched, crossed only by trails. In the other direction, there was an old gravel pit near a smaller lake where I often saw massasauga rattlers sunning themselves. I had no fear of snakes and left them alone, simply admiring them. I never bothered them and they never bothered me, although a couple of times, I inadvertently came within inches of their dusty sleekness. Past that were meadows I was fond of and past that were farms and apple orchards.

Tom showed me the old trails through the woods. To this day I dream
of those woods, because I had never to that time tasted freedom such as I knew there. I walked and wandered in the city, but always it was somebody's turf and I had to be careful. I had to watch out for boys, for men, for trains, for trucks, for the cops. In the woods, I feared nothing, if I avoided hunting season. I rarely saw another person. I saw deer, raccoons and foxes, toads, weasels, box turtles. The woods were mine. I tried to persuade friends to accompany me, and sometimes they would, but they saw little point to my wanderings. My girlfriends out there were boy crazy, movie star crazy. I kept a scrapbook of movie star photos, but I never looked at them when I wasn't with my girlfriends. With an apple and a piece of cheese or bread in my pocket, I would go out as soon as I had finished my daily chores and walk six miles, eight miles, ten miles, returning only for supper. Walking alone was a fierce high joy. I didn't have to explain or justify myself. I was accustomed enough to navigating the streets of my neighborhood alone after dark; the country roads and wood trails felt safe. Once when I heard men's voices, I simply hid in the bushes. I could move far more quietly than they could. They passed by and I continued. Being wary of men when I was alone was second nature to me. If guys in cars or trucks stopped on the roads, I just gave them some story and moved on quickly. Mostly nobody ever bothered me around the cottage, except for a local boy who got me down on the floor once, when I came over to see his sister, but I punched him and got away. I didn't take it seriously. To me, that was just how it was. If you didn't want some bozo pulling your panties down, you had to fight him. I was never afraid to hit, and I had certainly taken enough punches by early adolescence to know I could stand being hurt, if needed. I combined that with screaming my head off. I had boyfriends, and I let them rub against me or touched them through their clothes—what “good” girls did—but I was too terrified of pregnancy to exercise my strong curiosity about sex with males. By eighth grade, several friends had gotten caught, as we said, and had to leave school. That looked like the end of their lives. Often they were sent away from their families or just disappeared. Some went into prostitution.

I felt Tom had given me the gift of the woods. He was the one who finally
told me that the name of the lake, Pardee, was an amalgam of the names of the two men who had sold off the land on one side for cottages, bringing the sand road in. He had stories too, like my mother and my grandmother. Who had ever heard of a man with stories? Except for my brother.

When Grant came home from the marines and the war in the Pacific, he talked compulsively about it in a graphic and realistic way that stayed with me for years and years until I wrote about it in the Murray sections of
Gone to Soldiers
. He told me what war had been like, poured it out. He talked of the landings where men on either side of him had their heads blown off, where the ocean was red and sticky. He spoke of shooting wounded Japanese soldiers. He spoke of the smell of the trenches on Okinawa, the smell of rotting meat that was human and the smell of shit. He told about how his sergeant had persecuted him for being Jewish and how he finally punched him and was thrown into the stockade. Visiting us, he was on some antimalarial drug that made him high. But a couple of years later, when I recalled those stories, he was already telling tales of a glorious, heroic war. I did not believe the later stories, as the earlier ones had burnt themselves into my brain.

My father rarely talked about his childhood or his adolescence. In fact, he rarely talked about his life at all. I would ask him questions and he would answer one or two and then he would get annoyed. He had an intense dislike for the emotional, the irrational, the personal. So I was astonished and moved when Tom told me wonderful stories, stories of his people, stories of the history of the area—where his family had lived for a thousand years or more—stories of the towns, stories of animals. I formed a strong sympathy for Native Americans I have never lost. I had been reading adventure stories about the settling of Ohio and Kentucky, written I think by somebody named Altshuller, in which renegades were villains. But I thought if the Indians were right and defending their land, Altshuller was wrong, and if you were not an Indian, the only right thing to do would have been to be a renegade and join up with them. I even learned to count in Wyandot from one to ten, long since forgotten. Tom died of a heart attack a couple of years later. He was up repairing a roof. It was not clear if the heart attack or the fall killed him.

When I found a new trail, when I found a new road, I had to know where it went, and since I was twelve, thirteen, then fourteen years old, I did not drive. Occasionally I hitched a ride on the running board of a farm truck, just for the fun of it. Some roads were called corduroy roads. They were made by laying logs down and putting sand or gravel over them, so driving on them was a bump-and-bump, tooth-rattling, bone-shaking experience. I was chased by a bull. I watched deer from hiding. I found an old icehouse long abandoned and climbed up a rotting staircase to the loft. I bought cider gushing as it came from the press. I picked apples from roadside trees. That time, my mother sent me back with a bag and eventually I filled enough to stock our cellar for the winter. I love the smell of apples. I gathered hickory nuts; my mother gave bags of them to friends. I took my role as scavenger seriously. Once I brought home Osage oranges, but they turned out to be inedible. I picked raspberries, blueberries, elderberries, from which Mother made pies, jellies and wine. Wherever I went, I kept an eye out for windfalls.