Revenge of the Paste Eaters (18 page)
When I came back later to pick her up they brought her to me in her carrier and I peeked in. She was lying on her back with her back legs pulled up like a stunned rabbit. The vet told me to leave her in the carrier for the next few hours and to not let her eat too much right away. I took her home. It became clear to me very shortly that fully half of the cat was nonfunctional, and even hours later when I released her from the carrier, the back half of the cat stumbled and fell over sideways. I gave her a little food and left her downstairs, thinking she would stay. Sometime later I found her hanging from the end of the waterbed, too stuck by the front claws to get loose and too weak in the rear to heave up.
I immediately concluded she had had a stroke or had suffered some unknown spinal damage. I spent the night trying not to move (after knocking her over and nearly crushing her when I crawled in) and I mourned her, convinced that I would have to take her in this morning and have her put down. At two o’clock this morning she was still navigating in figure eights, compensating for erratic rear-end flops, rather than walking.
But when I woke up this morning, she was moving better—not as well as she should, but much better. I called the vet, who assured me it is probably just a matter of age. She is very old for a cat, and it takes her system a long time to fight off the anesthesia.
So she is sleeping, and I am watching her sleep. She is my oldest cat, and certainly the longest-lived of any I’ve had. She has made relatively few demands of me in her life. When I got her, as a gift from my brother, she sat in the palm of my hand with her back to me. I had never seen a kitten so tiny or quite so aloof, and for most of her life she has held both standards. In her prime she was beautiful, exquisitely groomed, with the short nose, the round eyes, and the classically sweet expression that is a black cat. As she has grown older, she has taken on a more ragged appearance, but she has become friendlier.
In fact, in our shared activities, I have found a standard that describes her size and her brand of affection perfectly. Curled up in a ball to sleep, she occupies exactly three-quarters of a mouse pad.
It seems a little odd to write without her.
i never thought i was a
tomboy. Tomboys conjured up images of little girls with bad haircuts, gender-inappropriate clothing, and some sort of snickering dirty joke I never quite got. Tomboys, I read from the subtext of the adults around me, were somehow imitations. Wannabes. (I have never met a tomboy to whose face I would say that yet—I’m merely reporting the mood of the times.) I skipped that whole throw-a-bowl-over-your-head haircut, spit, kick dirt, and use bad words stage of gender self-definition. Forget being a tomboy: I wanted to be a boy.
Boys could wear jeans. To school. Most of the boys I knew lived in jeans seven days a week. (Even better, I’ll swear some spent all seven days in the same pair.) Boys popped out of the womb with that amazing, universally accepted motherthing that excused them from having manners or brains or consideration or even the need to curb their sexual instincts.
Oh, you know . . . he’s a boy
. Somewhere during my school career it became social law that we all had to find little underskirts, fill them so full of starch that they crackled when we walked and stuck out almost horizontally from our waists, and then we had to catch them, somehow jump on top of them, and sit on them all day. Boys never did stupid shit like that.
In fifth grade we were broken up into groups—girls and boys—and taken to secret hidden places in the schools where we girls were told our bodies would soon turn on us, start leaking disgusting bodily fluids without notice, and our hormones would throw us into hysterical rages and unaccountable weeping sessions. We couldn’t wait to find out what would happen to the boys—they already leaked disgusting bodily fluids and we’d been advised of their congenitally poor impulse control even before this new twist came along. The boys came back to class looking smug and mysterious and every last one of them had a new comb.
So, tell us
, we would whisper during class.
What godawful thing is your body going to do to you soon?
They looked blank.
What was your meeting about?
we demanded. They said,
Grooming.
Cramps, bloating, mood swings, walking down the hall in eighth grade to have a friend come up, cover you with her coat, and whisper,
You have blood all over the back of your dress . . .
versus shaving little hairs off your chin once a day. Give me a razor. (Imagine my aggravation a year or so later.)
I cried when my mother dragged me to a store to buy me a bra. In the first place the one we bought was too tight and it began gnawing into my shoulders and under my shoulder blades almost immediately—but it was a
bra
. It meant my body was determined to stay a girl in spite of the clear and ever-present evidence that a horrible mistake had been made.
Just about everything about boys fascinated me except the boys themselves. Boys were rude and crude and there was apparently no end to the jokes they could make about the same body part. They were mean to each other. They were mean to me. They could tease you until you cried and they would laugh and snicker and poke each other in the ribs and tease you some more, but God forbid a
boy
ever got hurt. He would freeze all of the muscles of his face until they quivered, one single tear would leak out of one eye, and the whole world came to a stop. National headlines screamed:
WOUNDED BOY BRAVE IN THE FACE OF PAIN
Coldwater, MI: Despite cruel and bitter teasing by local feral girls, Brave Boy Number One has refrained from tears. Upsucking like the trooper he is, Brave said, “I’m sure she’s just having a bad day. I’m just glad I have the the stones to take it.” Local authorities have planned a special recognition ceremony for Brave on Friday, July 12, at the American Legion in Coldwater. Blinking courageously, Brave remarks, “My uncle from California may fly in . . .”
I’m not bitter. When I was a kid these were the boys for whom the gyms were built and the sports equipment was purchased. They were the boys who copied my German homework (a dangerous practice in itself) so they could sleep off a too-late night before and still keep up their grade point average to be able to stay on the baseball team. They were the boys who proudly told me one of their buds had knocked up some girl, but they were all going to go down to the friend of the court and “admit” that each and every one of them had slept with her so the friend wouldn’t be hung with paying child support the rest of his life. I don’t know if their plan worked: I do know none of them could see anything wrong with it. They were just being boys.
My cousin got caught driving drunk when he was sixteen or seventeen and his father had to come bail him out of jail, a story my uncle told with that rueful, what-can-you-do-he’s-a-boy grin. It was a wonderful family story. Had I done the same thing I would have been lucky to get out of jail and doubly lucky to have a home to come to.
I know a lot of wonderful men. Gentle, kind, enlightened men. A great many of the mannerless ruffians I grew up with managed to grow up to be decent, considerate men. Some of my closest friends are men, and I cherish their presence in my life.
About the only time I get angry now is when local, state, or national governments start to think about writing legislation about allowing gay marriages or living-together partners health coverage. You can count the seconds until up pops a man—just about my age—and he starts waving the American flag and babbling on about “special privileges” and “special rights” and the purpose of the flag, the Constitution, and the American Way of Life. Every time he does, I want to say, “I know you, and brother—you’ve had ‘special privileges’ and ‘special rights’ your whole damned life. Sit down, shut up, and let the rest of us have a chance.”
i used to skate
like Dorothy Hamill. I used to swoop and glide around the ice with my little skating skirt swirling and my long, elegant tresses flying in the wind . . . It would have been hard for the casual observer to see my little skating skirt swirling under the insulated snow pants my mother made me wear, and my long, elegant tresses regularly fell victim to my mother’s scissors, but a girl can dream. No girl ever dreamed of looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy on ice.
Realistically I suspect I could rate my skating talents right around Could Stand Up, but skates are wondrous things for the young. Racing across the ice, cutting abrupt turns, making that sharp, slicing-ice sound could make any child feel like a born athlete. I could feel every muscle in my body moving in perfect harmony with speed and grace and balance. I was quick and agile and when I fell I slid a good fifteen feet, as if that were in fact the very maneuver I had intended.
I remember spending a great deal of my childhood skating on the frozen ponds behind my house. Winters were longer when I was a child (particularly the frozen part), and more perfectly suited to winter sports. Hours, of course, were longer and not quite so evenly measured. The cold was friendly, the wind was irrelevant, and when I was a child and had just spent hours doing exquisitely graceful pirouettes on the ice, chili and oyster crackers were a nearly perfect meal. (For the record, should anyone feel the need to feed me, I detest chili. I am fond of oyster crackers.) I don’t remember why I quit skating. Bad winters, perhaps. I may have outgrown my skates. For reasons I can no longer remember there came a long period of time when I didn’t skate at all.
In college I discovered that my roommates and I lived half a block from a public skating pond. I spent ten dollars on a pair of skates for my birthday (serendipitously in January) and I convinced my friends to go down to the pond with me. I had visions of awing them with my skills and grace. I tied on my skates, stood up, and realized almost immediately that Dorothy Hamill must have skated
every
day. I had failed to take several sensations into account when I spoke so eloquently to my gullible friends about the joys of skating. I had forgotten what it feels like to have ankles made of damp noodle material. I had forgotten that ice is cold. I had forgotten that ice is not only cold, it’s hard. Ice is amazingly hard. Ice can take your breath away. And when it does, it gets even colder. Your gloves, your left ear, even the seat of your pants will begin to stick to it. My friends discovered in very short order that the best part of ice skating was leaving the ice, and a few warming beers didn’t hurt.
I paid money not too long ago (well, someone paid money—I think the trip was a birthday present for me) to watch Dorothy Hamill skate. I must have misplaced my skates the last time I moved, and I have a written list of weak joints and potentially breakable bones right here in my pocket just in case anyone offers to buy me a new pair—and to be honest, I’m just not all that enamored with the concept of ice anymore—but there was Dorothy Hamill swirling around on the ice in her elegant little skating skirt, making it all look like a child could do it. And I am secure in the knowledge that when I was a child, I could.
not long ago a
friend and I were talking (I was talking) and she reminded me that working for twenty-five years as a caseworker for the department of social services could easily color my opinions of people in general. I had to stop and think about that. She’s right. It probably does. We had been talking about men, and in the work I do men come and go (some more violently than others) but women and children are the meat and potatoes of welfare. Even reformed welfare.
We are all potential victims of reactive, reflexive thinking. In my job, for instance, we butter our bread with emergencies. The first time someone called me to tell me the electric company was sitting in their front yard ready to disconnect their power, I thought,
Oh my God, I have to drop everything and solve this crisis for my client.
Ten years and several thousand power disconnections later I thought,
So . . . what happened to all of those steps between missing a payment and the arrival of that truck . . .
When I deal with people in crisis their crisis may last anywhere from a few hours to a few months. When all of the issues in their lives that I can assist them with are resolved I don’t hear from them anymore. I don’t notice they are gone because there are so many other families in crisis to take their place. Thus for something like twenty-five years my relationship with my clients has begun, “I need . . .” More often than not I don’t have the tools to give them the help they want. I can patch, but I can’t heal. And throughout this continual abrasion of too many problems versus too few solutions, there is a natural self-protective process that takes place not unlike a callus forming on the heart.
Today my friend Annie and I went to lunch and I was complaining about some serious obstacle in my life (a train, if I remember correctly, hurtling along directly between me and my lunch) and Annie answered, “Oh sure—someone’s four-year-old child is hit and killed by a car, but in the overall scheme of the universe I’m SURE the fact that you had to wait on lunch for a train is the truly important issue.”
I don’t have a four-year-old child, dead or alive, but I’m fairly sure I would feel terrible if someone ran over her: my grief might even outweigh my aggravation with not being fed. I said, “Whose child is dead?”
She said, “The guard’s.”
We are protected from the more demonstrative of our customers at work by security guards, many of whom—before we wooed them out of poverty with the promise of minimum wage—were (or still are) our customers. I said, “What guard?”
Annie said, “The woman on the second (my) floor. The
only
woman, right now.”
I pride myself on my powers of observation.
I persevered. “When did the kid die?”
“Last night.”
This at least explained how the child had wedged herself between the Amtrak and my lunch. “What happened?”