by Jessie Haas
“Don’t be taken in,” I said. “She sat here on the breezeway the whole time you were calling.”
The boy picked her up and put her on his shoulder. Still purring, she wrapped her paws around his head as far as she could reach and tried to gnaw his ear off. He asked through a grimace, “How’d you find her?”
“She was out here when I opened the door. She didn’t ask to come in or anything. We just sat and visited a while.”
He smiled at that, and I realized how foolish I must sound, babbling away to a perfect stranger. I tried to find a way to stop.
“Yeah, but … like I said, she heard you all the time. She was just waiting till you got here.” Oh, God, Kris, shut up!
“Yeah,” said the boy, “they have their own agendas.” He detached the kitten from his ear and cradled her upside down on one arm, tickling her stomach while she chewed and kicked his hand. “Anyway, thanks for keeping her busy till I caught up. We just moved in yesterday—I don’t think she knows where to come back to yet.”
“Oh, she’s a pretty wise little customer.”
“Yeah, she is,” said the boy, smiling at me while his hands battled the kitten. “Anyway, thanks!” He moved away down the street, and I went slowly inside.
He’ll be going to our school in the fall, I bet.
I fell asleep thinking over the conversation and awoke in the morning on the phrase, They have their own agendas.
The sun was shining, and snores down the hall told me that Mum and Dad had come in late, without disturbing me in the slightest. It was too nice a morning to hold a grudge. I ate a yogurt out on the steps and then biked over to Aunt Mil’s.
Aunt Mil, I decided, had spoken without thinking yesterday and had continued not to think. Of course, she wouldn’t apologize, and I didn’t care. If it happened again, I’d bring her up pretty sharply, that’s all.
Aunt Mil, I decided, was being as willfully blind as my father. But I could change her mind, more likely, because with her I could insist on being treated as a person instead of a project. Besides, I had a trick or two up my sleeve.
Other things I decided on the twenty-minute bike ride were that the kitten Thea was likely to return, that next time I would find out the boy’s name, and that I liked the way I looked—straight and strong and sort of handsome-plain—and maybe he would too. I decided I was now old enough to admit to thinking about boys.
Early as it was, I found Aunt Mil in the garden. She’s somewhat obsessive about work; a person in her early eighties has something to prove every single day. She has her pride, too, as people exclaim over her gardens and point her out to their friends. Then, too, she doesn’t need as much sleep anymore. She thinks she’s supposed to accomplish some spiritual growth during this period, and worries if she’s doing it.
She straightened at my call with only the barest suggestion of stiffness, and her smile was everything I’d hoped for. “You’re early, Kris. Have you had breakfast?”
“Sort of.”
“Me too. Let’s sort of have it again.”
Over the good homemade toast and strawberry jam, and fresh dark cherries from the backyard tree, I told her about Thea and the boy. I enjoyed going over it again, with Aunt Mil smiling at all the right parts.
Just as we were finishing, the phone rang. I jumped and wasn’t surprised that the caller was my father. Aunt Mil made soothing sensible noises and turned him over to me.
“It was very irresponsible of you not to leave a note,” was his greeting.
“I forgot. But you knew where I was.”
“I surmised you’d be there, since that’s where you spend seventy percent of your time. I’d be a lot happier, Kris, if you had friends your own age.”
“I have friends my own age! You don’t like them!”
“Oh, that foolish Karen—”
“Karen’s all right!” I said.
“Yes, Karen’s all right, and so is your Aunt Mil, but not quite so much of her. I must say, I would have thought a woman her age would encourage you to be more responsible. We’ll be seeing you sometime this week, I presume?” Without waiting for an answer, he hung up.
Aunt Mil was at the sink washing dishes. I went to dry, trying to clamp down on everything inside me, not to let her know the things he had said. We worked quietly for a couple of minutes. Then, as Aunt Mil turned off the faucet, she said, “I suspect he’s rather jealous, Kris.”
“I hate him!”
She didn’t jump in to correct me. In the silent space she left, I was able to wonder in what degree it was true. How much did I hate my father? Did I love him at all? I remember loving him as a little girl. I’ve seen pictures of me on his lap, him smiling at me.
Aunt Mil sighed, staring into space as she slowly dried her hands. “I sometimes wonder how that man manages to teach.”
“Some people say he’s all right.”
“Yet he does so badly with you. He cares, he wants you to come out right, but he’s so clumsy.”
“He hates me to come here.”
“Well,” said Aunt Mil, sounding unusually tolerant, “I don’t think he quite sees me as a member of the family. If I lived with you, it might be different.”
“Huh?”
“In earlier times, Kris, an old widow like me wouldn’t live alone. Since I have no children of my own, I’d probably live with my nearest relative: your mother. In a situation like that, your father probably wouldn’t notice if you and I preferred each other’s company.”
“The extended family,” I said, to show I knew what she was talking about.
She took me up on that, with a sharp, alert look that momentarily reminded me of my father. “That’s what they call it nowadays, but that’s sloppy thinking. I suspect the modern arrangements fit that description more accurately. Families are extended over great distances of space and culture, and I think they’re stretched too thin. The old way seems more nuclear, in the sense of being clustered around a center.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“I know you didn’t. Watch out for words, Kris. They’re not things; they’re ways of referring to things. You must always ask yourself if they are accurate.”
“But you have to use the same words other people do,” I said experimentally. “You have to be understood.”
“Compromise exists,” Aunt Mil allowed after considering a moment. “As long as you’re clear in your own mind, and you’re sure you’re getting through. But I find it’s usually best to be explicit if at all possible. It saves time later on.”
She had taken the sting out of the morning. As we separated, each to her own work, I wondered what it would be like if Aunt Mil lived with us.
Fights. Even under the same roof, she and my father would never agree. But there were fights now, so that was no different. Rational conversation at any hour of the day. Without a doubt there would be a cat. There would be more, and better, books. Home would be rich, complex, and interesting.
Family, to me, is a threatening word. It means being boxed in with a few people you didn’t choose, who don’t understand you, who have authority over you, who bore and stifle you, who are in every way insufficient.
But what if those few people didn’t have to be sufficient? What if they included the parents of your best friends, and the best friends of your parents, all those honorary aunts and uncles; Aunt Dot, say, who was the person to call if you were sick at school and nobody was home to come for you? Or Uncle Pete, that wisecracking college friend of Dad’s. Or …
Something bumped my ladder and slipped silkenly past my legs—Robert, hopping onto the paint shelf with tail erect, eyes hot and golden and full of self. What was Robert saying, greeting me as a kitten greets its mother? Was he naming me “Aunt Kris”?
How Aunt Mil would shudder! But I looked down into Robert’s beaming eyes and thought, They have their own agendas.
So did I.
Ten-thirty came—a good time, and half this side of the house was scraped. “Aunt
Mil,” I called. “D’you think you could drive me over to Karen’s?”
Aunt Mil was in harmony with me this morning, and unsuspicious. She didn’t ask why I was going on Sunday, which I usually don’t. She didn’t remember that Karen’s family goes to church every Sunday, and then has dinner with her grandparents. She just sank her trowel up to the hilt in the good loose dirt and came along.
Karen’s house is at the top of a steep, tree-lined driveway, in its own little world. All the long swoop upward I held my breath, but their car was not in the yard. So far so good.
When the old VW stopped wheezing, the yard was beautifully still, with an old-fashioned Sunday peace. Wind ruffled the treetops and stirred the chimes. The two horses grazed on the skyline, and deep in the shed I saw the white flash of a kitten at play.
I got slowly out of the car. My heart was pounding. I’m not used to deceiving people, particularly Aunt Mil.
“Hmm,” I said. “I wonder where everyone is.” I went to the door and knocked, crossing my fingers that nobody had stayed behind. But the knock flattened to nothing in the empty house, and I went back to the car.
“They must have gone out for a minute. Do you mind if we wait?”
“Not for a little while,” said Aunt Mil. She reached for a magazine from the littered backseat.
Damn! I didn’t think of that.
I wandered into the shed, trying to think what to do. The kittens bounced out and swirled in wild play around my ankles. They made me feel like a giantess. Amazing, that these tiny animals should have such confidence in the huge members of another species! What does it mean, to be of another species? Which is greater, the sum of the differences or the sum of what we hold in common?
As if they’d sensed something interesting going on, older cats began to converge; mother and a couple of uncles, gathering casually from different points. One kitten reared on its hind legs to grab the neck of a huge, fluffy uncle, biting fiercely for the jugular. Uncle flattened kitten for an aggressive bath, frequently punctuated with bites.
“Aunt Mil,” I called. “Come see the cats.”
I think perhaps she’d been watching already, over the top of the magazine. The magazine was old, and the day too fine for reading. But as she got slowly out of the car, I began to see suspicion on her face.
“Are you sure Karen’s expecting you?” she asked.
“I thought so,” I said, sounding innocent and troubled.
“Well—” said Aunt Mil, and had to stop, as a kitten pounced on her moving foot. For a second she arched up a little, ready to spit. But she thought again, stooped, and stroked it with one finger. The kitten rose in pleasure under her hand, starting to purr.
Instantly the other kittens converged, curious. They tumbled and stroked themselves around Aunt Mil’s hand, some gazing up at her face, others seeming to regard the hand as the total creature, the feet and face as other things entirely.
The mother cat pulled herself up from her sprawl on the cool, packed earth of the shed floor. She was a big brilliant calico, warm marmalade-orange and black, with dramatic splashes of white. She ambled toward Aunt Mil with an air of unworried responsibility, coming to check out her children’s new playmate.
Two kittens saw and trotted to her, tails high in happy expectation. As they bumped their heads under her chin, I looked up to see Aunt Mil watching.
“There!” I said. “That’s just the way Robert greeted you. See?”
Her eyes flew to mine, startled and growing cold. “I see indeed,” she said, glancing around the yard. “I take it we do not expect Karen after all?”
“Aunt Mil—”
“Kris,” she said, “I do not use my cats as substitute children.”
I suddenly felt how possible it was to be furious with Aunt Mil. It was frightening—the kind of fury I’d felt so far only toward my father, the fury of a perfectly good argument denied a chance. I paused to steady myself, to find the exact thing I wanted to say. I held her eye all the while, trying for an expression of friendly challenge.
“I didn’t say anything about what you think,” I said finally. “I’m talking about what they think.”
That interested her, but not quite enough.
“You can define the relationship any way you want,” I said, “but if you don’t give the animal what it needs, it’ll look somewhere else. Like me.”
“Like you?” asked Aunt Mil quickly.
“Well, I can’t get any rational conversation at home, so I come to you. It’s like what we were talking about this morning, the extended family. All I’m saying is, we aren’t the only ones defining things. Cats have their own agendas, and I think they’re including us in some extended family structure of their own.”
No response.
“Like lions,” I said. “Like a pride.”
Aunt Mil’s gaze dropped from me to the group of cats at our feet; a knot of tussling kittens, Uncle still engaged in a bath-fight, Mama and another uncle washing each other’s faces affectionately. Quite a social whirl, for animals traditionally described as aloof and solitary. Watching them, Aunt Mil sank without seeming to realize it onto an upturned apple crate.
“It’s not unscientific,” I said as the silence stretched. “Konrad Lorenz talks about stuff like this all the time—how animals fit you into their social structure.…”
Aunt Mil glanced up at me, her naturally down-curved mouth breaking into a smile that just passed the sour point. “All right, Kris, all right. Sometimes I understand your poor father only too well.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Only that you’re very persistent, and you won’t think as you’re told. I never understood how annoying that can be.”
“Oh.”
“Now don’t …” She looked down, momentarily distracted, as a kitten launched itself onto her skirt and started climbing, with wild eyes and wicked, lashing tail. When it reached her lap, she scooped it up and set it on her shoulder. It was a vivid little calico and looked striking there, beside her white hair and faded face.
“Don’t look so crestfallen, Kris,” she said. “I may understand him, but I won’t be like him any more than I can help—especially now that I know the strength of the temptation.”
“Oh.”
“Stubbornness is a good thing for a thinker,” said Aunt Mil. The kitten’s ears leapt forward in excitement. It tapped the corner of her moving mouth. She smiled.
“So come now,” she said. “I’m proud of you. It’s hard to stand up to someone you love, especially when they’re old and overbearing. I’m glad to see you do it. I know you’ll never think something you can’t believe in, no matter who tells you to. But you mustn’t expect it to be comfortable.”
Right then I certainly wasn’t comfortable. I was aboil with strong emotions: chagrin and self-esteem, explosively mixed; resentment; and love. The trapper was trapped, and the extended family was still the family, where love and manipulation mingled. Not knowing what to say or how to look, I bent to stroke a kitten, thinking, Another reason we have, then—social lubrication.
Aunt Mil’s kitten was swinging down from her shoulder, its claws making tiny popping sounds in and out the fabric of her dress. It reached the ground and headed toward the swirl of playing brothers and sisters. Aunt Mil twitched her foot and caught its eye. It came back, to conduct a serious experiment with shoelaces.
“A calico,” said Aunt Mil, rather grimly. “Female, of course.”
“Robert would like a female better,” I said; not quite to Aunt Mil but in her direction. “It’s better to take a girl. Other people won’t.”
“Mmm,” said Aunt Mil. The calico kitten was mugged by a little tiger. They kicked each other, head and stomach, and squealed in fury.
“This kitten already has a family,” she said. “Do we have any right—”
Then she shook her head vigorously. “Oh, don’t be foolish! They live with people, and people have power over them. Morally questionable, but that’s the w
ay it is. Kris, in the glove compartment you’ll find pen and paper. Write a note to your friend, explaining where this kitten’s gone.”
“But …” I said with difficulty. “I don’t want to force you.…”
“Nonsense, girl, of course you do! What you mean is, you want me not to mind. Well, I don’t. The girl who does yard work for me will be cleaning out the litter box, and I shall have all the fun. Now hurry! I want to get her home and see what Robert thinks.”
She scooped the kitten up as she finished. Startled and annoyed, it wailed in her face and struggled to get free.
No such luck, kitten! You’re in this family now.
THE SIXTH SENSE
“OH, FOR PETE’S SAKE!” James squeezed his eyes shut for a second, then opened them wide and re-read the sentence in disbelief and horror.
“The instructor is quite right in emphasizing this fundamental condition for correct locomotion, for without long strides of the hind legs, and hence of the forehand (to which the impulse is communicated through the muscles of the back), no extension is conceivable—”
He snapped the book shut and thrust it back on the shelf, got up restlessly, and stood at the window, hands in pockets.
Rain dripped steadily off the eaves and rippled the broad shallow puddles in the yard. Infrequent gusts of wind blew bright leaves down from the maple. They lay slick and shiny on the brilliant green autumn lawn. It was cold out. James had ridden Ghazal in the covered ring that morning, but he’d elected to give his other horses the day off. Now …
Oh, now he was bored. The writer had failed him. He was looking for poetry, for an understanding of the heart, for answers to the questions opening for him ever since the ride on Avatar. The writer gave him “this fundamental condition for correct locomotion.”
Bored. He didn’t want to go riding, no interesting work to do, no place to go …
But he did want to ride. He wanted that ideal partnership again. He wanted to go out and work Ghazal through the afternoon, sculpting away all that was not the perfect horse—stiffness, laziness, crookedness, haste.
