by Lucy Ellmann
When we reached our street, Dad woke us up by saying, as always, “And so they turned the corner to find the smoldering remains of what was once 39 Cranberry Avenue,” which never failed to amuse us. But it wasn’t smoldering yet.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY
My “cat found” notices had been up for two weeks now without any response. Bubbles was safely mine. I briefly considered issuing some “girlfriend dumped” signs as well, to see if anyone rose to the challenge of taking over Gertrude’s role. But Bubbles had already done that, proving himself a superior companion on almost every front (no sex was on offer—but sex with Gertrude wasn’t a grievous loss). He wasn’t clingy or demanding, like some people I could mention. He just liked to be near me. He loved me! In fact he was the most even-tempered and well-adjusted personality I’d ever known, sure of himself, but never arrogant in that standoffish feline way, and always affectionate. He had great concentration abilities too, and would stare for twenty minutes at a time at a pigeon on the roof, or a spider on the floor. Liked watching baseball too! Bubbles was clearly a very intelligent cat. Also a big investigator: he’d check out any open door or closet, but he was polite about it and didn’t knock things over—he wasn’t searching for food or anything, just having a good look around. And musical! There was nothing he liked better than lying atop the piano licking himself while I played Schubert.
The vet checked Bubbles out and found nothing wrong with him besides emaciation, which was diminishing. His teeth were good, and the limp had vanished. The vet gave him a few vaccinations and recommended a diet of Fancy Feast cat food (the Classic variety, not the grilled kind or the stuff with gravy), because it’s just meat, instead of all the buckwheat and pumpkin seeds and barbecue flavor Manhattanites think their cats need. “Cats were made to eat meat,” he said with unexpected vehemence. “This is all they need, nutritionally.” A real cat-food zealot. Nuts, but I liked him: he wanted the best for Bubbles.
The only other thing he could tell me was that Bubbles was female, not male. I was surprised. But in the end, what’s the difference, with a cat? We’re all so hooked on these dichotomies: male/female, human/animal, right/wrong. We act like they’re opposites but they’re not really, just part of the same spectrum. You neuter a cat and that’s the end of it, just as Virtue neutered Chewing Gum and Minneapolis neutered St. Paul. Bubbles had already been spayed, so all I had to do was adjust with grace to his/her new gender. (As far as I knew, he/she didn’t give a damn about mine.)
I added “gender changes” and “dualism” to my List of Melancholy, along with “Ant and Bee books”. Also, “shaving.” It occurred to me that shaving gives men an airtight excuse for vanity and self-obsession—otherwise we’d be obliterated by hair! During my convalescence, I’d had time for several ornate additions to my list. The entry on “bathrobes” had numbered subdivisions:
WHY I HATE BATHROBES
1. The belt never stays tied.
2. Often an old Kleenex in the pocket.
3. They’re always too hot.
4. And frequently tartan.
5. Remind me of slippers.
6. Or of men lounging around in Sears catalogs. Next page: a billion socks.
7. Reminiscent of oddly formal occasions in childhood—Christmas and sleepovers—when pj’s are for some reason deemed not enough.
I was clearly not ready to go back to work: I hadn’t regressed enough yet. I couldn’t face anyone else’s pain but my own, especially the patients’. You have to gear up for that, crank the old smile into place. Nor did I feel like leaving Bubbles. So it was fortunate I was my own boss: my time off was up to me. I kept my partners notified of my progress and in return was sent get-well cards and hot-water bottles from the nurses, and a bunch of flowers weekly—leaving me free to whirl the whorl of hair on my left wrist, examine my collection of clutch pencils, accidentally unravel a whole sweater Gertrude had knitted me (just by pulling on one annoying thread), and look up cheerleading websites, which turned out to be all about bulimia, not ponytails and candied thighs. What boors women are, always thinking about their stomachs!
The next item for my List of Melancholy was “bulldozers”: the fact that I’d never yet driven one and now probably never would. Come on, you get in that windowed rookery and start manoeuvering those gears, turning the thing 360 degrees, lifting and lowering the scoop! The verticals and horizontals, the bare molded flanks, the mammoth treads, the shiny joints and pistons, the giant nuts and bolts, and all the greases needed to make those monsters go! So goddam male it breaks your heart! The sheer weight of it, its steadiness under duress, the power, the know-how—the determination in its makers to build the machine you need, whatever the consequences. Its pliant usefulness, as those arms lift beseechingly aloft!… All I’ve ever wanted, all anyone really wants, is to get inside a bulldozer and make it do its stuff.
Then I realized I should add Berlioz to my list, or rather, listening in early life to too much Berlioz, or what I took to be Berlioz. I ruined myself with that guy. My parents must have fallen prey to a Record of the Month deal at some point, so we were burdened with an over-abundance of Berlioz and Buxtehude records. I dutifully listened to them all, convinced that I was a budding composer. My parents were strict about bedtime (6:00 on schoolnights) so, after grappling with some grim roundel of grilled ham topped with a slice of pineapple (an early example of “tower food” and my least favorite meal), I’d be lying there with the summer sun still streaking in over my bed, waging my desperate nightly battle with “Berlioz.” My task was to put an end to the symphonic strains I couldn’t get out of my head, by coming up with a final chord or coda so crushing and climactic it would quell an entire orchestra and blast old Berlioz into outer space where he belonged.
“Da-daaa” was never enough. “Dadada-dadada-dong-deeeee-dadoooooo!” No. “Bam-bam bang, ba-ba-badaaaaah vroom zissshtee ta!” “Dumpety, dumpety, ra-ra-ra-tatarata-tatatat-tee, ra-chung!!” “Tum-tum-tum-tum-tee-dee-tee-tee-wham-pah!” Every time I thought I had him beat, Berlioz would sneak back in with a distant harp or piccolo, and my toils would begin again. A guy could spontaneously combust, combust I tell you, doing this stuff! You have to build to one of those climaxes, you can’t just stick one on at the end of something (maybe Berlioz had the same problem). I suffered aural apoplexies of this nature every night until I discovered James Bond movies: it was only by superimposing Bond tunes over the Berlioz that I finally managed to get some shut-eye.
These torments, and my dad’s insistence that Bee and I each play an instrument, were the only exposure I got to music apart from the arrival of the Virtue and Chewing Gum Philharmonic in the school gym, one afternoon a year. We all had to file in, sit down, shut up, keep still, and listen to the concert. If the teachers saw a foot tapping, or your head rocking a bit to the music, you were out. Most of my early Beethoven moments were therefore gleaned from the corridor outside. The real point of this cultural event wasn’t the music but the military exercise of making us (and the orchestra) assemble and disassemble. It didn’t help me much with Berlioz.
Another of my neurotic insomnia strategies was Tongue Bandit. In this game, my tongue was a bandit on the run from a posse of lawmen. The bandit has to scramble along the cliff face of my teeth, looking for a foothold or a gap he could squeeze through. But the rocks are slippery and it’s hard to find purchase (unless I’d just lost a baby tooth). The lynch mob’s closing in, so sometimes the desperado has to make a sudden leap for freedom. This got me through many a bout of sleeplessness or boredom at home and at school until Gus, the class pest, noticed something weird going on in my mouth one day and yelled out in the middle of Geography class, “Hey, Harrison’s about to puke!”
When I was older, bedtime moved from 6:00 to 7:30, but by then I could climb out of my window at night, slip the six feet to the ground below, and go commune with animals in the woods, or try to. I had a tracker’s book of scat, paw prints, and animal silhouettes, which I hoped would help me
locate some entity that wanted to be befriended. But these excursions too were often destroyed by Gus, who’d turn up with a frog he’d just disemboweled, or a squirrel he’d skinned. (Gus’s real name was Fergus but he’d stripped the Fer off that too). He considered himself a rugged outdoorsman, and hunted me down, to lecture me to death on Churchill and World War II (Gus’s favorite war), or serenade me on his stupid guitar.
Gus was an addict of fright. He was the kind of kid who was always snapping your underpants as you went past his desk, or plotting vengeance against the teachers who of course hated him (everybody did!). But he was a good source of maniac stories, which we were all crazy for—though for quite a while I didn’t even know what a “maniac” was. I had the idea it was something like a midget, probably because of the maniac story in which a maniac manages to hang on to some honeymooners’ car door for miles and miles, after they refused to give him a ride. I figured only a midget could survive a journey like that, hanging on to a door handle. This confusion kind of wrecked The Wizard of Oz for me, and might never have been cleared up if Bee hadn’t called Dad a maniac one day.
“But he’s six feet tall!” I said.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
She’d called him a maniac because of the canoeing lessons. Dad had finally caved on the canoe front—he didn’t get the big old canoe down from the garage but he bought us a cheap inflatable one, a mild act of benevolence he followed up with a lot of denunciation of Bee’s attempts to use it. When verbal scorn failed, he bopped her on the head with the plastic oar one day, and kicked the canoe so hard it shot out into the middle of the river with the tearful Bee inside it. She drifted quickly out of sight downstream, and had to walk home for miles with the deflated canoe under her arm.
My real friend at school was Pete, the sweetest guy I ever knew. Pete was in love with death: whatever game we played, he had to be the dying cowboy, the dying spaceman, the dying cop or robber. He loved to be carried, twitching, off a battlefield. He was also an expert on melancholy. Everything got Pete down: flightless birds, dying daffodils, the ultimate futility of the patches my mother sewed on the elbows of my jacket… Over the years Pete pointed out to me the inherent sadness of stale bread, old newspapers, nipples, empty envelopes, house plants, shuffleboard, “Greensleeves,” goose migration, dry tufted grass “like old man hair,” the color pink, babies, lambs, puppies and kittens (the fact that they all grow up), knitwear, unused fireplaces, and my mother’s tomatoes all lined up for bottling (Pete had chanced upon the little-known staring-at-the-produce stage of the preserving process). The world was a cornucopia of melancholy for Pete!
I still fret about my scuzzy Mr. Potatohead, which I traded one day for Pete’s trusty stopwatch. Does everyone agonize over the unfair swaps of yesteryear?
But now, safe in adulthood, I no longer needed Tongue Bandit because I could watch Bette Davis movies all day! And pat Bubs. Whenever my lap was available, Bubbles would claim it, and it was available to him (her) most of the time, since I was still trying to keep my foot elevated. Bubbles proved a much better moviegoer than Gertrude ever was: Bubbles could concentrate.
So there I was on Martin Luther King Day, sitting around in shorts and a T-shirt (due to my antipathy to bathrobes) watching Now, Voyager, with Bubbles draped across my legs enjoying a cat nap that had been preceded by an extravagantly long patting and purring session. This had ended in sound slumber only when I let my hand lie still on her. She liked that. Leaving me free to give myself to Bette. But for once I was transfixed not by Bette Davis’s eyes, like two rogue planets trying to found their own solar system, but by her eyebrows. In the first scene Bette—severely depressed, nearing thirty, still living at home with her mother—spends all her time carving ivory boxes and secretly smoking. As a result, apparently, her eyebrows when she first appears are hairier than Claude Rains’s—and his are all over the place! It must have been so long since anyone in Hollywood had seen a real pair of unplucked female eyebrows, the make-up artists (precursors to my own profession) panicked and slapped two walruses on her face. Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains) comes in mumbling something about pipe-smoking. Forget the pipe, man, get a load of those brows!
It was at this point that my cleaner, Deedee, barged into the apartment, my cleaner who had specifically requested long ago that I should never be around when she came to clean. Or, if I had to be home, I was to let her know ahead of time so that she could wear pants—she always wore pants, it seemed, when men were present, to prevent any sexual overtures. I was never at home in the daytime, I assured her, though privately I had felt a little aggrieved. The woman was at least sixty years old, and not top on the list of people I might wish to ravish. Also, I spend my life trying to help women, not violate them. But for five years I had duly made sure I wasn’t home on Deedee’s cleaning days, and left her monthly check on the hall table. The mix-up today had occurred because she’d been off on vacation for a few weeks over Christmas; in the meantime I’d wallowed for so long in sickness, sloth and solitude I’d appropriated my own apartment and clean forgotten about my cleaner!
But here she was, wearing a spotty, dotty dress (not unlike Bette’s mid-breakdown) and I, barely clothed at all! Apologies, apologies. I stood up and tried to make my way to the bedroom. But at the sight of my limp, Deedee rushed to my aid, and supported me all the way back to bed. She even tucked me in and brought me a sandwich, her own lunch, straight from the deli. I almost couldn’t swallow it, so touched was I by the ministrations of this near-stranger after all those weeks alone. I wasn’t used to compassion—that stuff’s for laymen! To top it off, she admired Bubbles, who cheerfully followed Deedee around, until the vacuuming began.
At some point in the morning, Deedee brought me my mail. She must have thought I couldn’t make it to the hall table or something, where I’d dumped it (out of apathy, not incapacity). So I felt I had to open it. The first envelope was from old Gus, for chrissake. What did he want with me? I thought I’d successfully freed myself of his sinister influence decades ago. Wasn’t warping my whole childhood enough for him? But there’s no telling what bug will crawl out of the woodwork these days, with the internet-spurred fervor for reuniting. (Word to the wise: there’s a reason why you lost touch, guys. You hate each other!) How had Gus even gotten hold of my address? In the letter, he informed me that he’d just been let off for stabbing his ex-girlfriend’s mother when she tried to stop him seeing her daughter: the usual kind of scrape he got himself into. His acquittal parties were a regular feature of our high school years. Now he had some proposition for me he wanted to discuss. “Wanna meet?” he asked. no.
Next in the pile, as if magically drawn to me by my sickbed descent into the past, was a letter from Chevron High, our old high school in Virtue and Chewing Gum. Now and then they’d do a mass mailing to see which of us had died, and I would normally have thrown it straight in the trash. Why should I satisfy their ghoulish curiosity? But under Deedee’s kindly supervision I felt compelled to open it, and inside was a surprisingly cordial, obsequious, even gratifying letter from the new principal, asking if I’d come give the graduation speech that summer. Having never met me, this fellow managed to regard me as a credit to the school, and was sure the students graduating in June, 2011 would be fascinated to hear what I had to say. Chevron would pay my way and put me up at the Chewing Gum Plaza Hotel…
The thing is, speech making is my Everest—it had been an insurmountable difficulty to me throughout life. I’d had trouble giving the shortest of talks at a million medical shindigs. Even intimate, casual clinic meetings to discuss diagnoses, prognoses and lawsuits amongst “friends” could undo me. I’d rather talk to strangers! I displayed all the usual symptoms of stage fright: cold sweats, hot sweats, trembling, nausea, shortness of breath, abdominal cramps, coughing fits, hiccups, stuttering, fidgeting, corpsing, inexplicably rushing, forgetting what I was supposed to say altogether, and bouts of slapstick: I once dropped a whole cup of coffee on the person
next to me as I got up to speak (about scalding marks). And what I always wondered was why—why must the show go on? Why is there never any getting out of the show?
Also, I hated that place. I’d been fleeing Chevron High all my life, and now they wanted me back? And if so—why hadn’t they asked me before? Did the School Board wearily consult a list of old alumni each year, debating which corny goofball could be cajoled into returning? I couldn’t even picture the old codger they’d rustled up for my own graduation. All I knew was, I only had six hours left to lose my virginity before I finished high school, and his speech was taking up one of them! The whole ceremony was just a big interruption of my quest to get laid. Everything was an interruption! The only sage advice I wanted from that old geezer was how to get laid and quick.
Why didn’t they ask Gus instead? Nothing like an ex-con for speechifying. What did they expect me to talk about? I’m a surgeon, a manual laborer. No Churchill! Did they want me to rhapsodize on the benefits of getting your double chin rescinded and artificial dimples installed? Or maybe just testify to the great moral principles instilled in us at Chevron High during those four joyless years? All I mastered was Math and masturbation (sometimes simultaneously), and that it sucks to have zits. (“Talk about that!” my colleagues would cry. “Drum up some acne work for us.”)
I must have been delirious from watching Now, Voyager too many times, because Dr. Jaquith’s advice to Bette post-breakdown, as she’s boarding the boat, came back to me now: “Be open, take part, be curious, unbend!” If Bette could take on South America, maybe I could return (briefly) to Virtue and Chewing Gum. This was the sort of guy Chevron had made me—lazy, scared, shy, indecisive… but also susceptible to sycophancy and old movies. So I wrote back saying I’d do the damn speech—and had my mechanical pencil ever turned up, the one stolen from my locker in 1978? I sealed the envelope and let Deedee mail it when she left—and then I got the heebie-jeebies, with the jitters, with the sweating, with the hiccups. I had just volunteered for the surest form of vexation: senseless, vapid, unpaid public humiliation. What was I thinking? This was no South American cruise, with Claude Rains just a phone call away!