Lady Parts (17 page)

Y
esterday I hired an animal control company to remove a squirrel’s nest outside my home. The mother squirrel had dragged branches and leaves from my willow tree into an eavestrough beneath my bedroom window. Of course, I knew none of the specifics, like who dragged what where, until Jaime, the wildlife removal expert, confirmed what kind of animal it was. I was thinking possibly raccoon, but that didn’t entirely make sense. A raccoon is much bigger than an eavestrough, and yet how could a small squirrel gnaw off branches from a willow tree and drag them a few feet to the gutter? Jaime took a look from the yard and in one instant yelled out, “Squirrels, and believe me, I’ve got no problem slapping that squirrel’s head around.”

“Isn’t that dangerous? Won’t she attack you?” I asked, completely ignoring the fact he planned to punch out the little guy and make mince-rodent out of her.

He replied, “Squirrels ain’t the brightest animals. Once I slap his face around a little bit, he knows who’s boss and he won’t come back.”

Jaime walked into my bedroom and climbed out the window onto the roof. As he approached the nest, an adult squirrel frantically jumped out of it and onto the adjacent tree. Jaime then put on some gloves and continued with glee and maniacal anticipation to dismantle the nest. Meanwhile, the squirrel, perched on her tree branch, was watching nervously. Jaime took full advantage of the onlooking squirrel. He dislodged one branch at a time and crumbled it in front of the now homeless rodent. He cackled and taunted the squirrel by shaking each branch in front of her. Jaime was the alpha. He was showing the squirrel who was in charge.

Suddenly Jaime stopped and quizzically looked into the nest.

“What’s that high-pitched squealing?” I asked. “Do you hear that?”

“Babies,” Jaime replied.

“How many?” I asked nervously.

“Probably three to five,” he confidently responded.

He took off his gloves, stuck his hand in the nest, and gently removed the first baby. It was pink, about three inches long, and had arms and legs and a suggestion of a tail. Its eyes were not yet open, but it was squealing and squirming in Jaime’s palm.

Jaime stuck his hand back into the nest and one by one pulled out three more babies.

He then took out his iPhone.

“Do you have a dish or a box?” he asked.

“Of course.” I ran down to the kitchen and picked out an aluminum pie plate. (Was that an unconscious act? Was I thinking of squirrel pie?)

I brought the plate back to Jaime. He placed it on the roof and put the four babies into it, then clicked on his iPhone camera. I glanced at the tree and saw that the mother had vanished.

“What are you doing, Jaime?” I asked, feeling unsettled as I stared at the four pink squirrel newborns squirming in the pie pan.

“I’m making a movie. The mother will be back in a minute to get the babies, and I want to film this.”

Good,
I thought. The mother squirrel had bolted when Jaime initially approached the nest. How could a mother, in spite of the presence of an evil giant looming over her nest, leave her defenceless babies, not more than a few days old? My maternal instincts were on fire. As a member of Million Moms for Squirrels, it was my duty to stand up for these helpless babies, these newborn and not particularly attractive vermin.

Jaime and I waited for the mother squirrel to return. She was nowhere in sight.

“Oh my God, Jaime, the babies are in an aluminum pie
plate. Will they roast in the sun? Should we take them out? What if the mother doesn’t come back right away?”

“She’ll be back. Trust me.”

Jaime placed the plate out of the sun, in the corner of the roof, and climbed back into my bedroom. I grabbed an empty shoebox, climbed out onto the roof, and positioned the box over the plate in such a way that the babies wouldn’t suffocate and would still be seen from the window. The babies were now protected from the sun, though not protected from other potential killers: raccoons, herons, and seagulls—not to mention the elements, rain and wind.

“She’ll be back. Trust me.”

It was time for Jaime to move on to his next appointment. His work as the squirrel exterminator was done. I wrote a cheque for $333.35 and handed it to him as he got in his truck.

“Jaime,” I asked. “Did we do the right thing? If we hadn’t dismantled the nest, would the squirrels have moved on after they became stronger?”

“You did the right thing,” Jaime said. “They would have made a home there and eventually dug their way into the attic. Toronto has thousands of squirrels. Don’t feel bad.”

The pied piper of the GTA smiled reassuringly and drove away.

I did feel bad. And guilty. I kept checking throughout the day to see if the mother squirrel had come back to
retrieve her young. I thought of bringing the babies into the house and feeding them with an eyedropper and raising them as pets.

They wouldn’t have been my first pet rodents.

When my sons were small, we had a pet rat named Cocoa. We loved the little guy. He was smart and cute and cuddly. His home was a cage in the kitchen, but often we would let him out to play. He greeted my sons at the front door when they came home from school. He sat on my sons’ shoulders as they did their homework. He could find his way out of a maze that my sons built from blocks. Cocoa lived almost three years, unheard of for a pet rat, whose usual life span is two years. He developed a skin rash that took over his body, and eventually his hind legs became paralyzed. Even though I purchased Cocoa for $2, I spent over $500 on medicine and visits to the veterinarian to keep him alive. When I drove Cocoa away in his cage to be put down, my sons and I cried. Cocoa was a grey rat that looked like he’d been plucked from the tracks of the A train in Manhattan, but we loved him.

I have known other people to raise pet rats, but I have never heard of a pet squirrel, which is kind of interesting, really, when you think that the nickname for a squirrel is “a rat with a tail.”

But now my sons were grown and I’d be nursing four squirrels back to health, only to wreak havoc in my home and nest inside my five-hundred-count Egyptian bedding. And I had better things to do with my time than build a maze out
of blocks on the floor. That’s not entirely true. I have plenty of time to build a maze, anywhere, but it seems like a lonely, crazy thing for a sixty-five-year-old woman to do on her own. I would, however, have taken the time to train them to greet me at the door. That would have been charming.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking of the babies.

By the evening, five hours later, it started to rain. The temperature was dropping and there was no sign of the mother. I went to bed and prayed all night that the babies would be gone when I woke up. Not eaten by a raccoon but lovingly rescued by their guilt-ridden mom.

At 5:30 a.m., I gingerly opened the bedroom curtains. One baby had managed to escape, or the rain had washed him out onto the roof. He lay dead a few feet away. The three other babies, all huddled together, were dead in the pan. I was heartsick.

Did I kill them? Was I their surrogate mom and I let them die?

I remembered a book I read to my children when they were little. It was called
Are You My Mother?

I could never get through the book without falling apart. In the story, a baby bird hatches from his mother’s egg, just after the mother bird leaves to find food for her baby. The baby does not see his mother anywhere. And so he goes to look for her. He can’t fly, so he walks and walks, looking for his mother. He asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and a cow if they are his mother. They all reply no. The baby bird eventually
is dropped back into its nest by a crane and is reunited with its mom. I bought a copy of the book recently to give to a new mother, and as I reread it in the bookstore, I began to cry uncontrollably.

What’s behind this unbridled show of emotion toward a fictional motherless bird in a book, and four dead baby squirrels on my roof?

Why can I cry at this sight and be torn apart, yet not feel gut-wrenching despair at the carnage in Syria, the murder of twelve moviegoers in Colorado, young soldiers dying in combat all around the world? How can these tragedies not touch my heart, make me want to do something to change these heinous crimes against humanity?

I am so desensitized by images on TV, by self-serving newscasters, by exploitative websites, that very little out there touches my heart. I want to feel in my bones the atrocities committed every day. But I feel nothing. Instead, I glance at the latest headline, shake my head in sorrow for a moment, and carry on with my life, my very comfortable life. Nothing really penetrates for long.

Too much pain. Too much sadness to let in. I cry over a dead two-day-old squirrel but not for twelve innocent people who died by an insane boy’s rifle in Aurora.

I can touch the baby squirrel. Cradle it. Bury it. Be its mother.

I turn off the TV, crumple up the newspaper, and go about my day.

I
hear the chainsaw. I can’t look outside. I’m frozen at my desk. Two men are on my terrace, where my pine tree has sat for the last forty years. They have been ordered to cut down the tree.

The Latin name for my pine tree is
Pinus bungeana,
a rare, beautiful Chinese pine. A lacebark pine, it is called, because of the delicate lace design on the bark.

It had lived for more than forty years on my terrace, and that is no small feat. My apartment in New York is on the seventeenth floor. It’s a penthouse apartment with a huge wraparound terrace. Last week, I received a certified letter from the landlord’s lawyers demanding that the tree be taken off the terrace because the weight was causing damage to the roof. There was no way to lift it and get it into the elevator. By now, it was more than twelve feet high. There was no way to dispose of the tree other than to chainsaw it apart.

Back in 1979, when I moved into the apartment, I discovered that the previous tenants had left the tree behind. It was small then, a few feet high, secure in its terracotta pot. It was indestructible. It kept flourishing against all odds. Over the years, I had containers especially constructed for it. It cost me thousands of dollars to have them hand-built and assembled, and the tree planted and replanted and repotted. Nothing deterred this tree from growing; it has survived brutal winters, high blustery winds, ice, snow, pollution, bugs, lack of rain, too much rain. Occasionally, because of fifty-mile-an-hour winds, it has toppled over, been lifted back up, and kept thriving. It’s been tethered to the railing that sits perched upon the parapet that wraps around my terrace. Or more precisely,
their
terrace. The landlord reminds me every time I let the pronoun “my” slip out unconsciously. I don’t own the apartment. I rent it.

I first rented it almost forty years ago, with my closest friend, Claude Tessier. My darling, dear Canadian boyfriend. Claude was a dancer and singer, and spoke with the slightest French-Canadian accent. He was born in Hull, Quebec. We met in Prince Edward Island in a production of
Anne of Green Gables,
and we instantly bonded. We dated and then lived together back in Toronto. Claude was bisexual and, eventually, as painful as the realization was for our relationship, he made the decision to be exclusively with men. We kept our deep friendship and co-signed the lease to our apartment in 1976.

By then Claude was working on Broadway. He had been snatched up in Toronto by Broadway producers and given a work permit to appear in
A Chorus Line.
He was cast as an understudy in the original production. He was the go-to boy for understudying. He learned quickly, was reliable, never missed a step, a line, a verse. I saw
A Chorus Line
fourteen times while Claude was in it. I was always so proud to sit in the audience and witness my exceptionally talented best friend shine on stage.

I married Claude in the spring of 1979 so that he could get a green card. That way, he wouldn’t have to worry about being deported. Claude moved from show to show.
Copperfield, Cats, Evita,
and
Les Misérables.
I don’t ever remember him being out of work. Everyone loved Claude,
but I loved him more than anyone. He was my soulmate.

We were perfect roommates. I worshipped him, and we were devoted to each other. Claude loved taking care of me. He cooked for us and decorated the apartment. He macraméd, knit, played the recorder, the piano; his tap shoes, always worn out, crowded the closets. He picked audition songs for me, cheered me up with hand puppets he had made, taught me how to tap, and even picked out my wedding dress when I later married Bob Dolman. He witnessed the birth of my two sons, and they loved him.

Claude was on the road, in Florida, touring with
Les Miz.
He called me in Los Angeles where I was then living, and told me he was very sick. This was the late ’80s, when there were murmurs of a “gay” disease called AIDS, but I didn’t know anyone who had it yet. And then Claude started showing the symptoms. He was tired. He had constant diarrhea. He was weak. He couldn’t continue with the show; the production was flying him back to New York.

Claude’s dream for me was that one day I would star on Broadway. I had all but given up the dream for myself. I had two small children and was deeply ensconced in my life in Pacific Palisades, California. And then out of the blue I got a phone call to audition for
My Favorite Year,
a new musical by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty that was being adapted for Broadway from the successful movie starring Peter O’Toole. It was 1989. I was asked to fly to New York to audition. I didn’t want to leave my kids. But Claude
encouraged me to audition. I knew how important it was to him. I got the part. It was my first role on Broadway. Claude was forty and I was forty-four.

The truth is, the real reason I left my two small children with their dad in Los Angeles was to be with Claude as he tried to fight his dreadful disease. I didn’t want him to be alone. I wanted to take care of him. We lived together once again. By then he was very sick. Claude was extremely thin, losing weight rapidly. He had sores all over his face, cold sores on his lips, and reddish-purple marks everywhere else on his body. He was weak and so frightened of being alone.

“Please, can I sleep with you tonight, Andrea? I’m scared,” he said.

“Yes, my darling, come into bed.”

We shared the same bed for weeks while I was in rehearsals, until previews started. I wasn’t sleeping, and I was exhausted. It was becoming too difficult to take care of Claude. His behaviour was erratic. Hallucinating, he’d pack his bags and say that he was flying to Florida for a vacation. “Come back, honey,” I would say to him as he struggled, one unsteady step at a time, to walk to the elevator. “Come back, let’s unpack your bags and I’ll run you a bath, and you can put your pyjamas on and get all cozy and comfortable in bed, and I’ll sit with you and read you a story. Doesn’t that sound like a nice thing to do, honey?”

“Okay, I’ll go to Florida tomorrow.”

“Yes, darling. Tomorrow. But for now, let me take your bags, and you sit and I’ll run you a bath.”

While my show was still in previews, Claude was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital. The dear, kind nurses there on the eighth floor, the AIDS floor, looked after him. Every day before rehearsal started, I would visit Claude, and every night after the curtain came down, I would run to Lenox Hill to be with him again. “Hang on, Claude, please hang on,” I’d say. “It’s our dream, honey. Both of us on Broadway. What you always wanted. What I always wanted. I want you in the audience on opening night. I need you in the audience. I want to make you proud.”

Claude died during a preview performance, three days before opening night. The stage manager met me in the wings and told me the hospital had called and that Claude had passed away. The show was not the hit we all hoped it would be, but six months after we opened, I won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Our Tony Award, Claude’s and mine. It was his last gift to me. I know this.

And now our pine tree is being sawed in half. It is killing me. Claude’s and my tall, beautiful pine tree, which witnessed our life together. It’s the end of an era. I can’t bear to go out there and see what they have done to our tree. The sound of the saw is cutting a hole in my heart. I have never emptied the one closet that still holds most of Claude’s mementoes from Broadway. His gold
Chorus Line
top hat, his tap shoes, the original sheet music from
Les Miz,
his pens and
colouring pencils and sketch pads and handmade puppets, and headshots and recorder and resumés and signed photo from Michael Bennett, the director and choreographer of the Broadway cast of
A
Chorus Line
—I have never been able to part with any of these things. Our pine tree was a witness to the deep bond and love I had for this man. Now it’s gone. There are no more witnesses. Just memories.