by Lucy Ellmann
But I went in the kitchen on New Year’s Eve and thought, how the hell do I just heat something up in here? And my appliances stared back at me, seething with resentment and hope. use me! choose me! abuse me! take me! shake me! bake me! at least plug me in, you dope! It was scary in there! I cautiously backed out and, with the assistance of an old cane (bought long ago in a moment of self-deception, for the purpose of hill-walking), hauled ass down to the diner on the corner and got me a nice big bowl of matzo ball soup. You can survive a New York winter as long as you know where to go for soup.
Revelers were trying to revel outside in the snow. I watched them rush past the windows, and felt another pang of New Year’s exasperation about my lovelessness: no kiss at midnight for me. No Mimì either. But it was a fairly abstract concern, since Gertrude had ruined me for other women. Love now seemed ridiculous and Wagnerian to me, like the Bugs Bunny cartoon when he dresses up as Brunhilda and Elmer Fudd falls instantly in love, bellowing, “Bwoonhiwlda, you’re so wuvvawy!” and Bugs sings, “Yes, I know it. I can’t help it!”—Wagner and all of human sentiment, mocked in one cartoon. Wagner deserved it. no chair, not even a box at the Met, equips you for such interminable spectatorship.
Fortified by soup, I inched my way through the snowy wastes. For fear of being knocked over by the movers and shakers, I turned down a dark alley, feeling like an Antarctic explorer who’d had to leave his sled team behind to eat each other. “I may be some time.” The snow was a foot deep in places; I tackled each glacier as it arose. It was peaceful in the alley, an ideal spot for the unloved. Heaps of trash and tinsel peeked out from under snowbanks, and I came upon a ten-foot-high Styrofoam Santa who stood with his face against a brick wall, as if he’d just slipped out of some bar for a pee. Poor old Santa—his day was done, adoration time over. I stumbled on toward the North Pole (represented by the lights at the end of the alley) until I heard a voice. Not Santa’s luckily, but a muffled miaow. A cat, out in weather like this?
“Ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast!” I said to him, and the cat miaowed louder. A W. C. Fields fan! I headed in his direction, as unthreateningly as possible, to see if the cat needed any help. The miaowing seemed to be coming from behind a snow-covered mound of trash, and it became more frantic the closer I got. I scraped the snow away and, under a pile of crumpled bikes and lost umbrellas, finally saw a small form moving around. I put out my hand to pat him, and he obligingly tried to reach it but was prevented by a bunch of spokes. Maybe he’d gone under the bikes for shelter in a blizzard, and they’d shifted under the weight of the snow, barring his exit. Anyway, what might have seemed a safe sleeping spot before the snowstorm had become a potential tomb. It was freezing out there! He couldn’t survive the night.
Luckily, Pick-up Sticks was my ancient rainy-day specialty. I’d honed my skills by making Bee play it again and again when we were kids. (A talent that had proved handy in surgery too.) So I now carefully removed one knot of metal at a time, trying to prevent the whole structure collapsing onto the cat, who continued to cry out to me as I worked: he was a friendly little guy. When I finally got him out and placed him gently on a thin patch of snow, he limped right over to me and rubbed himself against my legs. A limp?! That did it. I couldn’t leave a fellow crip out in the cold. I’d search for his owners some other time—for now, he was coming home with me. And when I picked him up he clung to my shoulder like a baby, but weighed so little I had to keep checking he was still there beneath my thick glove.
Back in the apartment, I put him in a sink full of warm soapy water to raise his core body temperature (and clean him off), an ordeal he tolerated pretty well, for a cat. What emerged was a handsome young fellow, with black, white and reddish fur.
“What’s black and white and red all over?” I asked him. No answer. “A newspaper. Get with it, man!”
In the kitchen I found him some milk and an old ham sandwich, which he politely ate. So easy to please! Then he investigated my whole place, every nook and cranny, undaunted by his limp. He was particularly taken with the scalloped window seat below the slanted window in the living room, instantly recognizing it as the longest cat bed in the world. He jumped up and paused to stand there on his back legs, front paws on the window sill, looking out at New York.
I was about to lay down some newspapers in a closet, for him to use as a temporary cat-box, when I remembered an extremely bijou tray of 100% organic Irish peat-bog mulch, or some such thing, that Gertrude had lugged over at some point and dumped on my terrace intending me to grow tarragon or lemon thyme in it, maybe sorrel. Thanks to the gaudy phosphorescent swirls and curlicues around its rim, I was able to find it in the dark and brought it in. Bubbles, as I now called him since his bubble bath, instantly recognized the true purpose of Gertrude’s agricultural gift and scrabbled energetically in the dirt. He was clearly not feral. He was sophisticated, trusting, and accustomed to human contact and the demands of domesticity. But so thin—he must have been faring for himself on the streets of Manhattan for some time. And now he was sitting on my lap, licking my finger, and looking up at me with love. I hadn’t felt this good in years! Gertrude rarely licked me, and never liked me. Hell, she’d hardly even noticed me.
I checked his legs for any sign of a wound that might cause the limp, but nothing seemed amiss. He’d probably sprained an ankle, or the feline equivalent (my veterinary knowledge was scanty), but at least he didn’t seem uncomfortable. He luxuriated in the warmth and companionship offered, and stretched out on his back to have his stomach rubbed. This cat really knew how to live!
At midnight, we went out on the roof terrace together. I held Bubbles to my chest so he wouldn’t get lost out there in the dark, and we watched the faraway fireworks that seemed to mark his arrival.
NEW YEAR’S DAY, 2011
For hygienic reasons, I set up a bed for Bubbles on the window seat he liked so much in the living room, and left him there when I went to bed, but he soon nosed his way into my room. The door slowly opened a crack and then he peered in, looking comically astonished at first to find me lying there. Then with great self-satisfaction he joined me on the bed. He filled almost as much surface area as Gertrude ever had, but was a lot more fun to have around. He slept more soundly too! When we got up in the morning, he moved to a sunny spot on the window seat, while I went out to get cat food. He wolfed it down while I drank my coffee. I hadn’t felt this heroic since childhood!
Childhood is a largely dishonorable business and I remember very little of it (this is what Bee is for). My early years were notable for one vaguely heroic act on my part (among a lot of unheroic ones), an act so mythologized, sentimentalized, eulogized, and fetishized by my family that it eventually had to be catheterized to restore some sense of scale. Now it seems nothing compared to the heroism of an ant. Imagine being born an ant and having to uncurl yourself in some musty, dusty, rustly nest, realizing there’s no time to lose, your life of running around starts now, and a whole realm of unexplained duty awaits you.
I uncurled myself in the twin towns of Virtue and Chewing Gum, incorporating just about all the dualism a body can stand. Chewing Gum came first, established in 1880 by a gum manufacturer lured there by the mighty Chevron River, which suited his methods for dispersing the toxic by-products of the gum-making process. The gum was so good, a Bible town grew up right alongside: half the town chewed, the other half chewed your ear off.
My infancy was cozy, cozy to the point of being oppressive. I was a sitting duck in that high chair, with Bee stealing my food and poking me in the eye all the time with her Barbie dolls (even the tits on those things are sharp!). Mom cleaning all around me—back and forth with the vacuum cleaner, the mop, the dusting, the polishing, the folding, the ironing, the instant wash-a-rama of every plate and spoon we touched, the militaristic straightening of the eagle ornaments that hung on every wall, as if the nation depended on the surveillance work of these bas-relief birds. A million naps undertaken listening to Mom talk to some d
oofus on the phone while I pondered dust motes. (Phones and vacuum cleaners still fill me with melancholy, even in their dormant states.)
But my mother loved me! I know everybody thinks he was a cute baby, but I have it in writing—a letter my mom wrote to my teacher once, when I was in some kind of trouble at school (as was my custom):
Harrison was such a delightful
baby. He would totter over to you,
arms outstretched, always smiling.
He was the sort of child someone
might try to steal! And better than
a puppy at cheering you up. He was
so trusting, he had no idea there was
anything sad or bad in the world.
Give him a wooden spoon and a
cardboard box and he’d be happy
as a clam banging on that box all day.
He also liked making piles of stuff…
I gave you the facts, man—I was once a cheerful dimpled baby who pleased his mother.
This cozy setup of ours was punctuated by the precise arrivals and departures of my father, the great unknowing, unknowable American dad. Out he’d go every morning, with his old briefcase echoing the angularity of his suit on his slightly pudgy 1960s body; and later return, giving off a whiff of car smell from the jalopy his parents had given him when they got themselves a new Chevy. Armed with these accoutrements, our father displayed an obtuseness which at best amounted to kindly indifference—No hard feelings, kids, I just don’t give a damn what goes on here all day—compounded by his determined obliviousness of his wife’s concerns, chief among them being me, a distinction that often elicited his fears for my masculinity.
My admiration of him was unassailable, since he was in charge of a vehicle. Mom, a pedestrian and bus-user, earned my contempt. I liked to rile her in the grocery store: success was when I got her to yell, entitling me to sympathetic looks from strangers and apologetic candy from Mom.
The first vehicle I ever revered was my little red truck, the envy of the neighborhood, a miniature pickup truck with real headlights, red upholstery, horn, a dashboard covered with knobs and dials, and, under the chassis, the hidden source of propulsion: pedals. I drove that truck everywhere, couldn’t be parted from it. And one morning, at about the age of three, I drove it across the street and straight into the nice green Chevron River that surged so appealingly past our house. The truck floated fine and I held on for a wild ride, carried for miles clinging to the steering wheel, giggling and wiggling my toes out behind me in the water. People who saw me go by held their hands to their mouths or started running along the bank, hollering. I paid no attention. I was on my way in the world, and there can be no better feeling. I was happy as a clam in fact, until a boatload of cops fished me out, and left my beautiful red truck to spin away downriver (instilling in me my first real doubts about cops).
But why was I forced to use my truck as a boat, when there was a big old canoe sitting in our garage? The canoe had been hanging in the rafters since before I was born, left there by the previous owners of our house when they moved to Wyoming. But every time Bee and I asked if we could get the canoe down and try it out, Dad claimed the people who owned it might come back for it some day. Nobody ever comes back from Wyoming! They’re stuck there, moaning, “Why? Why?” No, they were never coming back for their stupid canoe. Our parents were just lazy stinkers.
They were the least adventurous people I ever knew! In my whole entire childhood we only left Virtue and Chewing Gum once, apart from trips to the farmers’ market just outside of town, where Mom bought stuff for bottling. Talk about corny! She was always pickling something—’maters, cukes, watermelon rind—for what good it did anybody. But one day, for reasons never specified, we all bundled into the hot car and drove through flat, hot plains and hazy, underpopulated towns, where other families mysteriously chose to live, past HoJos and blueberry stands and pet zoos and picnic spots, never stopping, despite our pleas and threats from the back (“I need to go to the bathroom!” “I’m gonna throw up!”).
When you’re a kid, you don’t really know if you’re going to survive boredom. It feels life-threatening. Bee and I played I Spy and Ghost, but there were long stretches when she just stared out the window at her imaginary stallion, Hollenius, who was apparently galloping beside our car the whole way. I was left to glare at the brown semicircle of my mom’s head, just visible over the front seat, or else chortle my way through my joke book, with which I tormented my family for years. “What’s yellow and goes up and down? A banana in an elevator!… What did the mayonnaise say when somebody left the fridge door open? Shut the door, I’m dressing!… What did one wall say to the other wall? Meetcha at the corner!… What trembles at the bottom of the sea?… Aw, forget it.” (A nervous wreck.) And then, a minute later, “What’s black and white and red all over?”
The only relief came when Dad thrilled us, and horrified Mom, by taking his hands off the wheel at 50 mph to demonstrate to me how big a salmon is. I was just beginning to grasp the fact that he and I were allies of some kind: men. Mom and Bee were there to be outstripped. Dad and I had developed a habit of guffawing at anything Mom or Bee said (when I remembered to). Our confederacy had solidified over many months of touring the drugstores and movie houses of Virtue and Chewing Gum where Mom had been on dates before she met Dad. He was curiously fixated on these historic locales. The rage and power of the man! And yet he had a fine tenor voice—and could yodel. He yodeled his way through “Sparkling Brown Eyes” for us now, with Bee and me chiming in from the back seat as his echo.
There’s a ramshackle shack
… (There’s a ramshackle shack)
Down in ol’ Caroline,
That’s calling me back
… (That’s calling me back)
To that ol’ gal o’ mine.
He followed this up, as usual, with:
Just a song at twilight
When the lights are low
And the evening shadows
Softly come and go.
Though your heart be weary,
Sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight
Comes love’s old sweet song.
And “The Brown and the Yellow Ale”, which made Bee and me snicker, due to our scatological interpretation of its meaning:
He asked was the woman with me my daughter
O the brown and the yellow ale!
And I said she was my married wife.
O love of my heart!
He asked would I lend her for an hour and a day
O the brown and the yellow ale!
And I said I would do anything that was fair.
O love of my heart!
By the time we stopped at a motel, I was comatose in a corner, having seen nothing out of the window but the tops of pine trees for hours. It was twilight and I stood unsteadily in the tree-lined parking lot beside the road, feeling smug about the people still stuck in their cars, driving by. We had somewhere to stay, and it wasn’t the usual kind of motel either, some U-shaped, two-story, paint-peeling number surrounding a bug-blocked pool. No, this was a real log cabin by a lake, with a fireplace! Bee and I went nuts when we saw it. That night we slept on camp beds with eiderdowns and feather pillows, perched on a balcony above the main room. She and I always spoke of that place later as the epitome of coziness. We were cozy in our beds that night, peering down through the wooden banister rails at our parents talking quietly by the fire. The illusion of contentment was profound.
The next day, there were pancakes at a nearby diner, and foot-dangling on the jetty. The lake was darker than we’d thought the night before, and full of yuck-muck lurking in the murk. Bee and I insisted on swimming in it anyway though, and this was when Mom forced us to make one of the most peculiar decisions of our lives: since we hadn’t brought any bathing suits she wanted us to choose whether we swam in our undershirts or our underpants—so as to save one dry item of underwear for the ride home. How do parents think t
his sort of stuff up? They all worry far too much about you catching cold.
I chose to swim in my underpants; Bee chose her undershirt. I always thought she made the wrong decision. The sight of her bare ass in the water embarrassed me. I felt kind of sorry for her. But we soon forgot about this sartorial conundrum (although I’m still thinking about it!), as we attempted to make it to the raft in the middle of the pond without getting sucked down into its muddy depths by leeches, or something worse. We were all too aware of the slimy black fish that must live in that slimy black pond.
Then it was back in the car for the long drive home, with goosebumps (despite the change into dry duds) and Baba Yaga stories, another of Bee’s bad choices. Baba Yaga gave me the creeps, with her peroxide-yellow hair, her mangy old cat, and that house on chicken feet. Baba Yaga flies cumbersomely on a pestle (god only knows what she did with the mortar) and all I could think about was her torpedoing toward me, top speed, with those mile-long bazongas of hers, dugs she had to spread out on a clothes line to dry! And her saggy-baggy arms, and legs so dimpled her thighs were striated with folds (horrific details of bodily decay I must have observed at Virtue Gum Factory summer picnics, where middle-aged women tended to let loose with shorts and sleeveless tops, to mind-boggling effect). But what about those claw-like hands, and the arthritic jaws, with which Baba Yaga would munch me if she got the chance? No good could come of those old teeth and old teats. Baba Yaga eats like a man, like she owns the place, and spits the bones out into the dark gelatinous lake…