by Cheryl Peck
No one I knew treated their pets any differently than we treated ours. We were normal.
My mother liked cats. I took the care and welfare of my kittens very seriously, naming each and every one of them, and I found them when Gus hid them from me and I handled them every day. But my mother would sometimes come out and look at them with me and play with them for a while. She was always quick to pick up on their personalities, and she loved to tell funny stories about things the kittens did. Our cats loved her.
I don’t have any memory of what the occasion was. Some friends of my parents had come over to our house. We probably had a big potluck picnic in the yard. There was a big, largely unused gravel pit behind our house, and in the pit there was a big pond, and for some reason my parents hauled a rowboat down onto the pond and my dad rowed my mother around on the water. I presume they must have hauled down more than one boat, so their friends could enjoy themselves as well. What I remember is that all of the adults seemed to have a wonderful time.
One of the kittens—one of maybe a hundred kittens in my childhood, a kitten my mother and I raised whose name I have long since forgotten—one of the kittens jumped into the water and swam behind my parents’ boat, swimming for all he was worth, as if he could not bear to be on land while my mother was out there on that godforsaken water. Wherever they rowed, he followed them, swimming madly, as if his life depended on his ability to keep up with her.
My father had a mean streak. Not a mean streak, really—a little-boy streak, let’s say. A little wayward bent of mischief that could overpower his better judgment sometimes. He may have deliberately rowed the boat farther than he had intended, just to see how far the kitten would swim.
Do I remember the kitten? He wasn’t very old, as I remember, maybe two or three months. In my mental picture he is a dark gray tiger, but then, in my mental picture—which may or may not be real—he is wet. The voice that directs me through the corridors of memory keeps telling me, It doesn’t matter about the cat—it’s not about the cat. But if I take away the cat, there is no story.
In my mental images I am standing above them all on a high bank overlooking the pond. I am not allowed to join them or go down into the gravel pit where they are because the pit is “dangerous.” I can see my father with his mischievous grin, rowing the boat along just ahead of the kitten while my mother protests, “Bob . . .” It’s not clear to me whether she wants him to stop, or if her protests are just part of the game. She is laughing. All of the adults are laughing, having a good time.
It seems so simple to me from where I am standing above them. My mother should stop the boat and pick up the kitten. Hold him in her lap for a while. He so obviously loves her, it is perplexing to me that she cannot see it—or that it seems not to make any difference to her if she can. It makes my chest hurt, standing there up above them, to watch how hard he is willing to work just to be with her and how little it matters to her that he does.
Floating in my mind, disconnected from this memory apparently, just lost in the halls of childhood memory is a question. Just what would it take to impress you?
My mother may have stopped the boat. I don’t remember. She may have.
A day or so later the kitten died, my mother said, of exhaustion and probably pneumonia.
I had easily a hundred cats in my life, when I was a child. I can tell a lot of cat stories, many with more details certainly than this one. I don’t know why it’s stuck so stubbornly in my mind all these years, just a story about a silly kitten that wanted to be with my mother so much he killed himself trying to reach her, and she thought it was funny.
tyger, tyger, burning bright
as i think this through it is just about two weeks after the amazing Las Vegas act of Siegfried and Roy came to an unpleasant end. A performing tiger grasped Roy by the throat and towed him backstage for a timeout. Many people are amazed that this kind of thing could happen to a man who worked with big cats all of his life (well, two people are amazed), while others are just amazed he’s still alive. Neither amazes me, particularly. I live with a tiger. What amazes me is that the man worked and lived with tigers for thirty years and apparently he was allowed to sleep.
My tiger weighs twelve pounds. He doesn’t know this, of course: if you were to introduce him to one of Siegfried and Roy’s six-hundred-pound cats, he would fluff up his ruff and growl and lash his tail as if he were annoyed by the trespasses of another animal so obviously too stupid to live. He would give the interloper the opportunity to flee, not because the notion of combat concerned him, but because that is what tigers do. And because he is not completely stupid, if the interloper refused to leave, my tiger might walk over to sit under a low-lying chair and issue endless strings of threats and foul consequences, but he would not run. On a trip to the vet once he hissed at my truck, which weighs considerably more than a white tiger.
Roy is alive because his tiger was vexed; there is no doubt in my mind. If the tiger had wanted him dead, he would be dead. The problem Roy ran into—that all of us who live with tigers run into—is that vexing a tiger is neither difficult nor a notably slow process. My tiger, for instance, can go from dead asleep to vexed in a millisecond. I can be sleeping peacefully in my bed, flop out a hand and accidentally strike my sleeping tiger, and find him wrapped around my hand like an inverse porcupine, all twenty claws burrowing for bone, all four hundred teeth just locked around my wrist, gnawing for my jugular.
I have my own professional opinion of what happened between Roy and Montecore onstage that day. I wasn’t there, I didn’t see it, but any number of opinions have been offered with equally impressive qualifications and this is mine.
Montecore was having a bad day.
Montecore said to himself, “Enough of this puny little twit who can’t even hunt for himself—I’m taking over the pride.”
He said to himself, “I’ll just grab him gently by the throat and drag him over to the side and explain the new rules to him. He’s not a bad man—he feeds me—he just needs a little training.”
When your tiger weighs twelve pounds and he decides to take command of the house you simply say, “Excuse me?” and he wanders off to take a bath and smooth out the kinks in his coat. When your tiger weighs six hundred pounds and he decides to take command of the house, you may not get the chance to say anything.
Perhaps Roy was just overtired that day.
I suggest this because I too live with a mobile alarm clock. I woke up this morning (one of the many times I woke up this morning) when twelve pounds of tiger jumped off the headboard and landed on my belly. I woke up when he burrowed under my blankets and affectionately kneaded my left ear with his claw. I woke up this morning when he settled in beside me, belly to belly, and retracted all twenty of his nails, which were still embedded, like tiny journalists, in my soft and comforting flesh.
I gave up that whole silly notion of sleeping in eventually because I had to go to the medicine cabinet and stanch the bleeding anyway, but as I did so I imagined this scene in my mind. Roy is in bed. Asleep. He stayed out late the night before—much the way I did—and now he is trying to make up his sleep. One of the many tigers who live in his house comes galloping through in a rip-tear (which all cats are prey to), skids to a stop on the carpet, and thinks, Oh my God—it’s morning and he’s still asleep.
I’ll just climb up on this headboard here and bounce on his chest.
I will wake him gently as I wake my fellow tigers by lying belly to belly next to him and gently kneading his pathetic fur with my claws. This is a sign of intense affection among tigers. This is why all cats have seven different kinds of hair layered in their coats—to survive the affections of their peers.
Look at that foolish man, he has accidentally buried his head under his blankets. I will just burrow in and gently wash his ear with my tongue. I have never been washed with a tiger tongue, but if my own tiny tiger is any gauge it must be like being scraped with stainless steel Velcro.
Why do yo
u put up with this? my friends ask me—as I am sure they ask Roy. I expect the question makes about equal sense to us. Because they are cats. Because that is the way cats are. Because part of living with anything is respecting those qualities that make it unique and define what it is. It does not surprise me in the least that while they wheeled Roy out on a stretcher, his greatest concern was that they not hurt his cat.
The cat did nothing wrong.
The cat was just being a cat.
That particular cat weighed six hundred pounds, but what he did is not remarkably different from what my twelve-pound companion, so aptly named “Babycakes,” might have done in the same situation.
Cats are cats. Dogs are dogs. Grizzly bears are grizzly bears. I suspect the bear expert who was just recently mauled to death by his expertise would say the same thing: we can choose to see an animal however we like, but what we want to see will not change their nature. Their own rules for behavior are instinctual, immutable, and effective. They work.
Roy Horn understood the risk and he willingly took it and thirty years later he was badly hurt. I am sorry for his injury. I am sorry about the man who was mauled to death in Alaska by bears.
As I sit here writing, my cat, who has worked so hard to get me up, has migrated up into my lap and then into my arms, where, his heart beating against mine, he has settled into a nap. He sees no irony in this, and for him, there is none.
insurance
when i was about nine years old I ran over to our telephone to call my best friend and share some amazing piece of information with her and when I picked up the receiver she started talking to me. I had never dialed her number. The phone had never rung. Astounded by this undeniable evidence, I determined that I had extrasensory perception and I was destined to grow up to locate dead bodies for the FBI. Inevitably some would doubt me, but I would become legendary for my gift, which I decided, right there on the spot, would be finding missing children.
That was forty-five years ago and so far exactly no missing children have reported their whereabouts to me, but I was young then, and I did not yet understand how quickly dreams can wither and die.
I shared my dream with my father’s mother, who told me she too was blessed with the Gift. She gave me several examples of her talent, all of which caused my eyebrows to furrow and my eyes themselves to flit nervously over to my mother. I wanted to become rich and famous for doing good (effortlessly, if at all possible). I had not anticipated that seeing the ghost of some several-days-dead neighbor might come as part of that package. I was willing to find dead people—I was not particularly anxious to talk to them, or watch them wandering around my house.
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 . . .