Revenge of the Paste Eaters (29 page)

My grandmother also told me that the elder of my two aunts had been born with a caul, which, never having heard before, I mistook for “towel” and had some difficulty piecing together into a seamless narrative.

Since I so obviously came from a family of seers, I practiced ESP religiously every day, my nine-year-old gifted self seizing, just moments after it happened, the intuition that exactly that event was going to happen minutes ago. I stared intently at the backs of playing cards. About the only real skill I ever demonstrated in ESP was hearing footsteps behind me—particularly if I happened to be walking at night—and imagining the more and more grotesque and horrible ghosts who made them. The day my mother came home from an evening out and found me and all of the smaller brothers and sisters under my charge quivering in terror behind our couch she suggested a career change. “There will be no more ghosts in this house,” my mother decreed, and beyond the odd wind that slammed doors on occasion, the house ghosts were pretty much limited to those who hid behind the doors I had to walk through to turn on lights.

Bitter, disillusioned, I perceived that I actually had no ESP at all, that I had simply picked up a telephone once by sheer fluke, and I would need something more substantial than that to support me when I got old. Which, at that time, meant seventeen or eighteen.

Had I stayed in the small town where I grew up and within the socioeconomic community in which I was born, that would doubtless have been the end of my story. I would have gotten married. According to the Ouija board, I would have had five children, all boys, and raised horses in Montana. The fact that I was not particularly enamored with children or horses probably did not seriously affect my Ouija future, but the fact that I was not particularly enamored with men brought that whole marriage scenario to a dead stop.

I became a feminist.

A week later I became a lesbian feminist.

A year after that I cast off the yoke of my oppressive, unsupportive straight sisters and became a feminist lesbian.

I did all of this from a very quiet little closet not all that far from the house where I was born, but the important thing is that—spiritually—I
did
it.

I snuck out of town in the dead of night and ran without lights to small gatherings of lesbians, where I determined, in my own supportive and nonjudgmental way, that every last one of them was crazier than a loon.

They turned God into a woman. They claimed She had originally been one. They described their moods in terms of the movements of the planets, they told their fortunes with oversized playing cards, they thought in loose and loopy strands of logic like, “That must be what the Universe was trying to tell me.”

They processed. Endlessly. There is no thought that can be expressed in English—no matter how vaguely—that a herd of lesbians will not sit down and immediately begin to process.

The problem for me, of course, was that in the egalitarian ethos of feminist lesbians, every opinion and every belief is of equal weight and validity as every other, so my traditional big-sister
My way is right, your way is wrong, so quit whining and do it my way
was not received all that positively by my spiritual sisters.
We have to
talk
about this
, they would protest, as if they had been doing anything else for the past three days.

The word “open” popped into any number of conversations that came up around me, as in
You have to be more open,
or
Can you be open to that?
It is exactly conversations like that that have caused me to at least try to seriously consider any number of stupid ideas.

Unfortunately, what I lacked in personal openness I could more than make up for with imagination. A week after I moved out of my mother’s house and into a home of my own I went out and got myself a cat. I grew up with cats. They are darling little creatures who hunt in the dead of night, who leap out at you in dark hallways, who run like coked-up junkies across rooms and up walls and hit the floors again with loud thuds. When you are lying in bed all alone in an apartment of your very own it is comforting to know that the thumps and thuds and bangs and footsteps in the hall are all caused by the small, furry little creature you have chosen to share your home with. Even if that little creature is lying on your pillow, snoring loudly in your ear. I have always thought of my cats as insurance. If you pay enough food bills and litter bills and vet bills, the home invaders will go to someone else’s house.

For fourteen years I lived in a house on Dettman Road in Jackson, Michigan. The house was about sixty years old and perched on the side of a hill two and a half blocks from where it was originally built. It was moved, local natives were eager to fill me in, during a burst of civic industry some years before.

Where did you buy your house?

Oh yeah, I know that house—they moved that, you know, it used to be down in the hollow on Michigan Avenue where the Alano Club is now . . .

I lived with four cats on Dettman Road. I would curl up in my bed with one perched just above my head, one ignoring me from the foot of the bed, one folded like royalty in the arch of my hip, and one tucked up against my chest, and I would wake up to the odd impression that people were walking around my house, talking to themselves. I could hear their conversations: I could never make out any of the words. I never saw them. I blamed the phenomena on people outside the house, on the street or perhaps in the neighbors’ yards. I would lie there in the dark and I would look at the cats, all sleeping peacefully and soundly around me, and I would promise myself that if there truly were invisible people walking around, talking inside my house, one of those cats would at least twitch.

I met my Beloved, who lived an hour-and-a-half drive from my house. I began to spend a lot of time on the road, driving to her house, driving back home . . .

Two of the cats died. I put the house up for sale, bought a new house halfway across the state, and the two surviving cats and I moved in. A year after we moved in, one of the two remaining cats died. I was left with Babycakes—the youngest—a motley red tabby who, in his then ten years of life, had never looked like his coat actually belongs to a cat. Part of the problem is that, while he has more than enough hair to coat the rugs, my pant legs, and anything he might lie down on, he does not have that dense, rabbit-fur coat that many longhairs have. On the upside, he does not mat. Like his human, he just never looks . . . groomed.

When I first moved into this house it was quiet and stately and curiously detached from street noise. About the only thing I could hear from the outside was car doors slamming. I hear a lot of car doors slamming. Eventually I began to wonder exactly how many car doors there are in my immediate neighborhood.

I remember thinking,
It’s still better than people walking around, talking to each other all night.

I was sitting home alone in my house one night when I remember thinking,
This house is probably fifty years older than the house on Dettman—it just seems odd that it
never
makes any noises . . .

Who makes up these thoughts and sifts them through your brains like they were your own? I am not a stupid woman—I know better than to thumb my nose at the goddess of the unexplained . . .

In the fall some friends and I went to a psychic fair in Camp Chesterfield, Indiana. Psychics of every imaginable specialty had set up tables in the dining room and for a small fee we could pick and choose our imagined fortunes. There was even a psychic willing to “read” my pet, and the idea made me laugh out loud.

At the same time . . . Babycakes had been steadily losing weight since the death of his companion cat. They had never struck me as being particularly good friends, nor did he give any other indication he was grieving. He did not appear to be unhealthy. But I was becoming concerned. In the end, my curiosity won.

The pet psychic was a kind woman who obviously loved animals and who obviously believed in what she was doing. This did not necessarily mean I believed in her, but I tried to be open to the experience. We determined that cats (even psychically) are “very secretive” about their health, but that he (a) was beginning his final transition, (b) had some sort of systemic disorder that prevented him from eating properly, or (c) had a hairball.

Laughing about it later with my friends, I agreed she probably had it covered.

Babycakes met me at the door when I got home, which is not unusual. He seemed exceptionally pleased to see me and could hardly bring himself to leave my side the entire evening. When I went to bed, he was right there, singing and purring in my ear. I remember thinking,
Apparently he likes the idea that I had a spiritualist talk to him,
but pushed it aside. We have always had a sort of feast or famine relationship. When he was younger he would be aloof and fairly see-if-I-care about my gallivanting, but since he has become an only cat—or perhaps just an older one—he has become more forgiving, more willing to waive the penalty period so we can get directly to forgiveness.

After my visit with the psychic, he began steadily gaining weight.

He also became . . . flightier. Noises that he used to shrug off seemed to startle him into flight. I began to notice gradually that he often behaved as if there were someone/something else in the house.

I put this down to a writer’s imagination.

About a week after my visit with the cat psychic I happened to be home in the early evening—something of a rarity—and it occurred to me that I had been gradually becoming aware of the fact that this house, which once seemed utterly silent and unmoving, has developed any number of odd thumps and thuds and . . . essentially the kind of unexplained phenomena that I’ve always kept cats around to excuse.

You’re losing it
, I reproved myself.
You’re going to have the whole family hunkered down behind the couch again if you keep this up.

Behind me—perhaps in the next room—there was a loud BANG! and someone said, “Boo!”

It startled me: I jumped, and then I sat there, wondering who was in the next room, reminding myself that it hadn’t sounded exactly like “Boo” and that little voice in my head said,
They can’t make it sound exactly like one person talking to another—there’s a rule against that.

And I realized belatedly that I had just imagined a ghost who said, “Boo!”
A spirit with a sense of humor, no less
, I admired . . .

And my cat—my insurance against unexplained entities—roared into the computer room at about a hundred miles an hour and came to a dead stop and stared at me. His hair was all sticking straight up, his eyes were like saucers, and he stared at me with that eerie cat-stare . . .

“As you open up, more and more things like that will happen,” my Beloved counseled me, and told me about adventures she had had in one of her own homes.

“If you smudge your house, that stuff will stop,” another friend counseled me, referring to the ancient art of burning sage or another herb to cleanse one’s space of spirits.

I spent some time wondering why smudging my house would repel spirits. I mean, what are the rules, exactly? And did I truly
want
to repel this spirit, or ghosts, or . . . whatever it may be? What I wanted was more specific than that: I wanted to
know.
Had I opened myself to something beyond the ordinary realm of see/hear/feel, or was I torturing myself with my own overactive imagination?

I was still pondering this in some obscure way when I went away for the weekend. We had a lovely time, took our time coming home, and as I walked into the house I realized I was a little curious about what my “spirit” might have in mind to surprise me with next. I felt fairly safe because these adventures were too small and happened too infrequently to keep me keyed up enough to really scare me. I was being “open” to whatever life had to offer.

I looked down at the loving cat at my feet, and I thought to myself, “God, he’s a beautiful animal.” And I stroked him . . .

And then I sat down and I looked at him.

Every hair on that cat was in perfect alignment with every other hair. His ruff was spread out just the way I like it, his tail was fluffed, his coat was thick and neatly brushed. He looked clean and healthy and just exquisitely groomed.

I don’t know who brushed out my normally tacky-looking cat. I can’t swear he didn’t groom himself. The noises have stopped, and I no longer have that sense of “otherness” in the house . . . And I have no idea what any of it means. Perhaps I never had any experience with a spirit—perhaps Babycakes had some sort of psychic experience with which he eventually came to terms, and I only saw the iceberg tips of this event.

I have always been curious about the paranormal. I have always wanted to
know
, one way or the other: is there a spirit world, and if so, is it accessible to those of us who live on this side of the door? But my mother’s oldest daughter has always known one thing for sure—the problem with keeping the door open is you’re never sure what might walk in.

about the author

C
HERYL PECK
: I was an imaginative (if not an overly motivated) child whose creative bent went largely unappreciated in the Midwest, where I was born and raised. We will probably never really know how many literary masterpieces were lost through my mother’s insistence that I “come back down here to earth, where the rest of us are.” I attended the University of Michigan, where I discovered diversity, social injustice, political activism, loud gay people, drugs, the counterculture, butt-kicking art fairs, and the women’s movement. Terrified, I scurried back to the rural red-and-white-checked work ethic I had known and despised as a child. I have lived within the confines of my imagination for most of my life and I am relatively happy there. Recently I have begun releasing small personal works on the general public.

As always, I am contemplating writing a book about something more interesting than my own life.