by Marge Piercy
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.
PUTTING THE GOOD THINGS AWAY
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.
NINETEEN
INTERLUDE: OLD CATS
Dinah and Oboe are old now. I have had old cats before. Cho-Cho lived to be twenty-one. An old cat is a wonderful companion. They know the routines of the house. Things that sent them under the bed like the vacuum cleaner only rate a yawn. They know how to please you and how to ask for what they want, sometimes, like Dinah, at full volume and stridently. But mostly they are mellower and calmer than they were in their youth.
They are also a constant reminder of time, of aging, of their own mortality and yours. Whenever I touch Oboe, I feel his spine. Each knob is discrete. His fur is no longer the plush stuff that gave him his nickname, the Velvet Prince. His silver gray fur has a rusty cast in the sun. Wild leaps and tree climbing are beyond him. He scrambled up on the shed roof last week but could not get down. He still enjoys climbing the high fence around the Ram Garden and sauntering along the fence top, crying to me to come and pet him. Many cats enjoy making you reach up to them. It equalizes.
I massage him often these days, as it seems to help him and he likes the attention. I have never become completely accustomed—resigned or accepting—of his aged body. I touch him with affection and with pity. I do not mind being forced to think of dying. It’s a good idea to be aware of one’s own mortality and the rapid gallop of time, its stone-clad hoof-beats striking on my skull. He cowers when he knows I am about to give him his medicine, which makes me sad, but afterward, he is cheerful again. He understands it makes him feel better.
Dinah still feels soft and her bones do not jut. Rather, age has affected her performance, roughened her voice to a sandpapery screech, made her a little forgetful. She will start to do something and then stop cold, puzzled. She knows she had something in mind, but she cannot remember what. She eats and then forgets she has eaten and badgers Woody for food, then seems astonished she does not really want it—of course, since she finished a meal half an hour before. She sleeps a great deal and very soundly, which worries me when she goes to sleep outside.
Dinah was the kitten who would not grow up, who hated motherhood, who turned her favorite offspring into her playmate. She still plays, with Efi usually. But in the middle of playing she will stop with that same puzzled look and gaze around her, trying to remember what she was up to. She stares at Woody or at me fixedly with her round green eyes. I think it is partly that her vision is poor in old age, but also she seems to be asking a question. These are not unimportant questions: what is happening to me? What will become of me? She is peremptory, as if aware she has only so much time left to run into the summer garden among the flowers, to roll on her back on the warm bricks, to chase feathers on a string, to play tag or king of the mountain with Efi, to eat her favorite foods, to demand to sleep on my pillow, to be petted, to be picked up and carried about as she was when a kitten.
Amazingly, yesterday the cat next door, who picks on Max and, when he can catch up to her, on Malkah, attacked Dinah while she was sleeping on the patio by the gazebo. I heard her crying out and his hostile bellowing. I ran out just in time to see her claw his nose and that cat, a great
big longhaired and middle-aged orange tabby, take off with tiny Dinah on his tail pursuing him. She drove him off the land and then came back, not a hair out of place. I checked her over and she had not a scratch.
Oboe is more patient, unless it is a matter of being on the wrong side of a door, whether to go out, to come in, or to enter a room where we are and he isn’t. But then he has always insisted on his right to have doors opened that separated him from us. He is still top cat, even with his reduced strength. When Max steps out of line, Oboe cuffs him and Max lies down to receive discipline. Oboe still views Malkah and Efi and Dinah as his to protect and possess.
There is a sadness to living with old cats; also a comfort and pleasure, for you know each other thoroughly and the trust is almost absolute. The gray cats always sleep with me, but they also are with me when I read and when I meditate. It is a peaceful and intimate connection. The knowledge of how much I will miss them is always with me, but so is the sense of my own time flowing out, my life passing and the necessity to value it as I value them. Old cats are precious. I pity people who only like kittens.
