How Did You Get This Number (18 page)

You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to keep tabs on the birds, their living in a cage as they did. But they came and went so quickly, and for so many years. When I’d uncover them to let the light in each morning, I’d often forget who it was I was waking up. My father went through bird phases: parakeets and canaries, then cockatiels and lovebirds. He bought two lovebirds, though apparently they’re quite egotistical by nature. One lovebird + one mirror = a happy bird experience. Meanwhile, rainbow finches filled the time and space between. They were all incredibly fragile creatures. I came to look on their expected life spans as I would later look on home maintenance products like hair dye and waxing kits. “Up to eight weeks” really means “two and a half weeks if you’re lucky.”

After my sister left for college, I became depressed on behalf of the birds. I was convinced they lived such short lives because they were forbidden to fly. Just like me, a teenager who felt she would surely die like this, trapped alone with
these people in this house
. I had decided that everything about my life was tepid, so naturally my vote for our next bird was a giant cockatoo or a parrot or something you could keep on a wooden pole and eccentrically bequeath. I wanted one of these birds despite being petrified of their beaks. Is it such a good idea to purchase an animal whose face is the basis for can openers? It didn’t matter, anyway. Giant cockatoos were too expensive, especially given our track record of killing the cheaper models. Plus, they talked back. I wondered what language a cockatoo would regurgitate if it lived in our house. Can a bird imitate the sound of a bedroom door slamming?

My sister had driven home after her freshman year just in time to see the final finches go.

“What’s happening to them?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I said. “They’re dying of boredom.”

In truth, it hadn’t occurred to me that their deaths could be related. If there was a problem, surely it lay with us and not the birds. She scooped up their lifeless bodies with dish-towels and put them in a shoe box.

“Grab the cage,” she instructed. College girl, problem solver.

A man in a Bird World vest (
Bird World: because a lot is riding on your talons!)
accepted our shoe box without opening it and looked suspiciously at the cage. He got out a Q-tip and ran the cotton head along the wires. Apparently, the cage was covered in a poisonous, scentless, invisible mold. The birds weren’t fragile or suicidal; we had been escorting them to their deaths. It was all our fault after all.

“We’re bird Nazis,” I said as I got back into the car, buried my head in my hands, and started to cry.

“They’re like pigeons,” said my sister. “It’s not like we’re murdering African grays. Honestly, you were going to outgrow them soon, anyway.”

“I know! But...” I continued to bawl.

“Hey.” She put her arm around me and rubbed my shoulder. “Why don’t you come visit me at school?”

“Okay”—I sniffed—“maybe I will.”

There was an albino squirrel that lived on our property. We’d toss him the pistachio nuts we couldn’t open. One evening my father spotted this pouffy flash of white violently tearing the bark off a hickory tree. He picked up a rock, thinking he’d throw it into the branches and scare the animal away. The squirrel turned around, caught the rock in its mouth, slammed its little head against the tree, fell down, and died.

Pick a number between 1 and 10.

That’s how many cats we had. Though not all at once. There was the Siamese that meowed like a baby. The tortoiseshell that had worms. The prissy Persian that ran from impending feet. I always felt sorry for the Persian and its overly aligned features. To have a face that flat, to have no profile to speak of, is to never be able to send your nose into a situation ahead of you. There is no preliminary exploration of a stranger’s hand or a new pair of sneakers. You just have to go for it, get your whole head in there at once. Our prissy Persian was, to my mind, excessively judicious in these matters. So much unlike our fourth cat, who had no reservations about smelling anything ever.

A fearless black brute, Bucky led a pack of raccoons. We’d see him traipsing through the backyard at night with an honest-to-God pack of raccoons in V formation behind him. Like geese. My father built Bucky a cat-sized wooden shed outside, and for fifteen years he and the raccoons would change shifts at dawn. It was a point of pride for my father that our cat selflessly recognized the raccoons’ need for shelter. Cats are dilettantes of the nocturnal world, compared to raccoons. Although my sister and I were taught not to go near the shed during the day, since it was essentially Nap Time for Rabies.

Bucky was something else. My mother had dozed off one summer afternoon and my sister and I woke her, telling her that the cat—who left modest presents of dead mice on the doorstep—had really outdone himself.

“Mommy.” My sister shook my mother’s shoulder.

“Bucky killed an eagle.”

“It’s a pigeon.” My mother spoke to the interior of the bed. “Dad will take care of it later.”

“Mommy!” My sister shook again. “Bucky killed an eagle!”

I nodded. I had seen the eagle in question.

Finally roused, my mother allowed herself to be escorted downstairs by two small hands that flanked her like training wheels. When she opened the front door, there it was. Bucky had not, in fact, killed an eagle. What he had done was tear the heart out of an adult hawk with a wingspan that exceeded the width of our doormat. We had a family meeting. Rather than put the ASPCA on speed-dial, we put a small bell on the cat’s collar. Which had no effect whatsoever. He just stalked more methodically.

Two days before he died, Bucky cornered a tiny stray kitten on our porch, and we took it in. Now, my parents are not big believers in God. Or, rather, they believe in him partially. Which is tricky. It’s like being kind of pregnant or only mostly dead. You’re either in or you’re out. The only time they evoked God with any certainty was when speaking of how Bucky
knew
he was dying and didn’t want us to be lonely. So Bucky and God put their heads together and placed this precious kitten in the right place at the right time. At the vet’s suggestion, my parents filled latex gloves with kitten formula and let her drink from the fingers. My father watched over the new kitten as if she were the Virgin Mary in a potato chip.

This zealous logic lasted about a week. They were only delaying the inevitable. They were in mourning for our beloved cat and couldn’t be bothered reconstructing their affections with a new kitten. God or no God. My father tore down the shed and retired the bell.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; /Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
My parents scratched the kitten’s ears out of habit. If it’s possible to play with yarn in a sullen fashion, they did it. When she performed some amusing kitten antic, they cooed the way Hollywood producers laugh—by saying “That’s funny” instead of actually laughing. This defeatist attitude reached its nadir with the naming of the kitten.

“We’re calling her Kitty Kitty,” said my mother, in a totally monotone I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-this-animal voice.

“You can’t do that,” my sister and I protested.

“But that’s what she responds to,” said my father.

And that we couldn’t argue with. My sister had been out of the house for years, and I was off to college in a matter of months.
Someone
had to come when called.

So we kept quiet, both of us privately knowing that a cat with a name like that wouldn’t live past a year at the outside.

It didn’t help matters that Kitty Kitty had a thing for cars. Not only did she possess a quarter of Bucky’s yard smarts, she seemed not to have been raised by cats at all. By auto mechanics, maybe. When she wasn’t plowing headfirst into the garage door, she’d hop onto the trunk of any car that came up the driveway. She was manning a one-pussy drive-through safari. She’d chase cars down the road, dense as a Dalmatian prancing after a fire truck.

How, we wondered, did we come to be in possession of such a suicidal animal? Maybe she was not suicidal at all but simply running after these strange vehicles as if to say, “Take me with you!” Could she sense our ambivalence? Was it that obvious? A lifetime of pet affection had worn us down. All those different cans and bags of food! The different sizes and consistencies of waste pellets! The jingling and the squeaking and the neediness! The tongues alone. Paper-thin lizard tongues that looked like they’d been clipped with shirring scissors, dry bird tongues, humid dog tongues, tiny rabbit tongues, rough cat tongues that loved you by accident if you got in the way of a bath.

A year to the day after we took in the kitten, my mother was backing out of the garage when she heard an unnaturally high-pitched meow. This time I was the one home from college for the weekend. I pulled into the driveway and she was waiting for me, looking sullen. The cat had not hopped on my hood.

“You killed her. Didn’t you?” I said. I didn’t have to ask how it happened.

“I’m sorry.” She nodded.

“Sure.” I sat next to my mother on our front steps. “You’re not even sad.”

“I’m a little sad.”

“Are not. You killed our cat today—show some remorse, woman!”

“Actually”—she covered her mouth—“I killed her yesterday.”

“I told you guys you never should have named her that.”

Those pets who weren’t flushed down the toilet or euthanized by the vet (oddly, a licensed veterinarian will not just hand over a dead iguana in a bag) got buried in the backyard. But not in the way most house pets get buried in the backyard. My father puts the animals in Tupperware. Each creature is buried in an aptly sized container that has been duct-taped into a silver blob. This is meant to ensure that their eternal slumber, along with the newly seeded lawn, remains undisturbed by other animals. But when I imagine the rounded plastic pools of rotting bones and gas, I have to ask: Who is this really helping? Not us when we imagine it. Not the animals that are buried in a manner that flies in the face of Mother Nature.

Instead of asking, we just accept it. My sister says this is part of becoming an adult, accepting our parents’ illogical behaviors just as they used to accept ours. The Tupperware coffins are but one of my father’s many questionable schemes. Walk into any room of his home and you will spend an inordinate amount of time slapping the wall, trying to turn the lights on, because a switch so high-tech you have to blow on it has just been installed. Pour yourself a glass of water from the kitchen sink and see if one of the jiggered spray settings doesn’t soak your shirt.

My sister was at school and I went to the movies the night Kitty Kitty was buried. My mother, not guilty but ambivalent, wanted no part of it. I felt like we were missing something as a family. Despite her low rung on the ladder of favorites, Kitty Kitty held the distinction of Last of the Childhood Pets. I thought it might be good to have a real funeral. Not good enough to miss out on a trip to the movies, but just enough to think about it in general.

“There’s a joke about Jewish holidays,” one of us would begin, “that each holiday has the same theme. And that theme is:
They tried to kill us. We lived. Let’s drink.
Well, as we look around at our pets today, we think:
We tried to love them. They died. Let’s bury them.
”

Then we’d stand around a headstone and drink some nice beer and listen to the crickets. We’d have a dinner outside that involved asparagus, because for some reason asparagus always gets in there. And my father would raise his bottle and toast to the many tongues that supported us throughout the years.

In reality, it was just a man alone with his Tupperware collection of dead animals. See him there, in the dirt, digging at dusk. A shovel put back in the garage, a light switch brutally smacked, an alarm clock mistakenly set for p.m. so that the buttons have to be clicked all the way around again. Behind all our great pets—even behind all our mediocre pets—is the man who bought and buried them. These dead animals are so sad. They are the only things we buy and bury with the intention of covering them up for good. Buried treasure, flower bulbs, umbrellas in the sand: they’re all meant to come back up. But with dead pets, you just have to say good-bye, cut your losses, and start over. I used to know the location of every plastic coffin in the dirt, but I haven’t gone back there in such a long time.

I
t’s incredibly difficult to get yourself banished from a city. A country is not so tough. There are words for that on both sides of the border.
Emigrate. Defect. Deport.
But when New Yorkers use those words to explain their residency here, what they really mean is that they packed their bags and got on a plane and it meant more to them than it did to anyone else. No one stopped them. No one checked their papers in Hoboken. No one kept them in quarantine in Queens. No one earns a living being stationed at the Lincoln Tunnel and scowling. At least not technically, they don’t. Because as it is with most cities, this one is porous. We absorb the new and sweat out the old and put about as much conscious effort into it as we do into actually sweating. Once you’re in, you really have to get creative to be pushed back out.

It’s not so tough to get yourself banished from a person’s apartment. Smoke in the freshly painted bathroom. Feed the dog chocolate. Ask the hosts if they think it’s weird that their two-year-old hasn’t started talking yet. The door shuts, the bolt locks, the whispers commence, and your passport to game night gets revoked faster than you can say “baby fish mouth.” But in order to get bounced from a city, that place in between, you have to break the public transit system. Or execute some very specific offense on par with killing your young lover’s cousin in a vicious street fight in Verona. Or run for office.