by Vicki Myron
They say a girl always wants to marry their father. But does she, really? My dad was a drinker. He was very social. He cheated on my mom. Repeatedly. When I was a kid, she went away with Vicki and a few other friends every few months for a woman’s weekend. Kellie and I used to joke that they were her man-hating weekends, because she’d always fight with my father when she returned.
“I was with people who loved me this weekend,” she’d yell. “I was with people who cared.” I joked; I fought with my sister; but only because I was scared. I never wanted to be torn apart like that.
Steven never drinks. He never goes out with the boys, much less any girls. His parents, as far as I know, have never touched a drop of alcohol. They don’t yell. When he was growing up, they didn’t watch television. Steven and I do watch television (who doesn’t?), but we never fight. We’ve had disagreements, but in fifteen years of marriage, we’ve never had a yelling argument.
Oh my, Kristie, I said to myself, as I thought about my life, you married your cat.
It’s so true. I didn’t realize it until I started thinking about this book, but it’s true. All my life, I was looking for a man like Marshmallow. The other men in my life let me down. They hurt and abandoned me. So I latched on to Marshmallow. Not consciously, of course, not on purpose, but that scraggly runt was my beau ideal. Someone who listened. Someone who talked with me. Someone who was tough and outdoorsy, not soft. Not clingy or needy. Not house-broken. I wanted a man who was comfortable with himself, even if he wasn’t the golden boy. A man who built me up instead of tearing me down. Who was confident enough to let me have my space, but in love with me enough to always be there when I needed him. And someone I loved in the exact same way.
Isn’t it strange that someone like that existed? Isn’t it strange that I found a man as perfect as my cat?
And isn’t it strange that Steven was the one person in my life Marshmallow never liked? He wasn’t a cat person, for one thing, and cats can sense that. Steven had a man’s love for dogs, and particularly his yellow Labrador, Molly, who was two years old when we married and moved to Sioux City, Iowa. But that’s not it. My boyfriends all hated my cat. It took me years to realize this, since I had such a soft spot for that lopsided, matted kitten, but it’s true. Maybe they were jealous of him. Maybe they thought I was strange for talking about him so much. Maybe they just thought he was ugly or that I had too much cat hair on my prom dress. I guess I thought that was the way relationships worked. I spent my youth saying I wanted a man who loved Marshmallow, and then dating the exact opposite kinds of guys.
But Steven . . . he didn’t hate Marshmallow. No way. I’m not saying Steven loved him, but he was more like my sister. He didn’t have a connection with Marshmallow, but he was happy that I had such a strong one. He didn’t exactly jump for joy, but he didn’t argue when I insisted Marshmallow move to Sioux City and share our new lives. He knew how much Marshmallow meant to me.
And besides, Steven thought, just like my parents back in 1984, that Marshmallow wasn’t going to live long. He was eleven years old by then, which is not particularly old for a cat, but his hair was so stained and matted, he looked fifty-three. He had degenerative arthritis and sort of shamble-staggered when he walked. His energy was low; his appetite pathetic; his commitment to personal hygiene nonexistent. Worst of all, the cyst on his face had developed an abscess, so the left side of his nose appeared to be collapsing. The vet said he was too weak for surgery; the hole in his face wasn’t life-threatening, but the procedure to remove it might kill him. Even I wasn’t sure Marshmallow had long to live. But I knew, no matter how many days he had left, I was going to make them as comfortable and pleasurable as possible.
Steven tried. I have to give him that. He really tried. He got down on the floor every few days and said, “Come here, Marshmallow. Come here, buddy. Let me pet you.” Marshmallow would throw him a contemptuous glance—yeah, whatever, “buddy”—and walk away.
Being ignored wasn’t bad, though, compared to our one and only attempt to groom him. Now that Marshmallow was slowing down, I (foolishly) thought that I might be able to cut a few unsightly tangles out of his fur. I convinced Steven to hold him, while I chopped. Well, Marshmallow may have been old, but his claws were still sharp. He clamped on to Steven’s hands with his front claws, pulled his back legs up, and started cutting into his forearms with a series of kicks. He wasn’t trying to get away. I want to make that very clear. Marshmallow had been waiting for his chance to pay Steven back—for moving him to Sioux City, for taking me from him, for any number of unknown slights only the cat understood—and he wasn’t letting go. He shredded Steven’s arms with his back claws, just like he shredded the cast on my broken leg all those years before.
Steven finally tossed Marshmallow off and marched, tight-lipped and bloody, to the basement. He came back a few minutes later in his Carhartt jacket, hockey mask, and hunting gloves. “I’m ready,” he said, pounding his pads like a hockey goalie. Steven wasn’t going to let Marshmallow beat him.
But he did. Marshmallow won, of course. He wiggled and scratched so ferociously and for so long that we finally gave up and left him alone with his tangles. Marshmallow may have been slow and arthritic, but he was still the boss. That was obvious. When Marshmallow entered a room, Steven’s huge Labrador, Molly (a real man’s dog most of the time!) would almost bow to him. Molly wasn’t scared; it was more an unspoken respect for this wise old cat. After a dozen years of outdoor living, Marshmallow had that aura about him. He was a survivor. A bad boy. A cool cat. He may have been retired, but he was still the Don. He was content to sit all day under a house plant by the front door, hardly moving, but we weren’t fooled. Marshmallow knew—and approved—everything that went down in our house.
Like my jogging, for instance. With hard work and a loving husband (and my unbelievable cat, of course!), I had conquered my eating disorder. I had even turned the experience to my advantage, using it to reach and teach my learning-disabled teens and young adults. (Do you understand now why I felt so blessed to have gained weight, on purpose, to compete in a higher division of the marathon? And why my husband—and even my father—had tears in their eyes as they cheered me on? I mean, I might have only finished third, but . . . I won! Forever.) I’m not sick anymore, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take care of my body. I eat well, and I jog every day. Molly learned that last part fast. Every morning, she practically chased me to the front door with her leash jangling in her mouth. While I laced up my shoes and Molly worked herself into a frenzy, complete with flying slobber, Marshmallow lay under his plant watching us. Like the Godfather, he didn’t have to talk; everyone knew what he was thinking. The only reason I’m letting you go out with her, dog, is because I’m too old. One day, dog, you may be called upon to return this favor I now give to you.
When Molly and I left, Marshmallow hauled himself to the top of the sofa, where he could watch for us out the front window. When we returned, he always lumbered down to the floor and watched me stretch. This time, he would talk, talk, talk. That was a great thing about Marshmallow. No matter how old and tired, he never stopped talking to me.
After two years, he even taught Molly to find her voice. She started with a whimper, like an old door opening on squeaky hinges. Then she added a rumbling ah-rer, ah-rer, ah-rer, like a weed whacker straining through a pile of thick brush. I came home for lunch every afternoon, and the three of us would sit in my kitchen, chatting away.
“How was your morning, guys?”
Meow.
Ah-rer.
“Yeah, my day’s going pretty well, too.”
Me-oww.
“It’s the usual, peanut butter and jelly.”
Ah-rer-rer.
“No, you can’t have any.”
Meow, meow. Me-oww.
Ah-rrreerrrrr.
“Oh no,” my husband said, when he realized what was happening. “Not the dog, too.”
A few years later, I got pregnant. “I buy
food for that cat,” my husband grumbled, when he found out a pregnant woman shouldn’t clean a litter box. “I clean up his vomit. Now I scoop his poops. And all he does is ignore me. Why can’t he be more like Molly?”
Yeah, whatever, Marshmallow sighed, lifting his head for a moment and then drifting back to sleep under his beloved plant.
I will always cherish, until the moment I die, the night I went into labor with my son Luke. There is an interminable stretch of time, on the edge of motherhood, when it’s too soon to go to the hospital and too uncomfortable and exhilarating to relax. So I paced the living room, fighting the tightening in my belly and trying to focus on my breathing. By this time, Marshmallow was sixteen years old. He had lived with Steven and me for four years. He was stiff, arthritic, and nearly deaf. I hadn’t seen him move from under his plant, except for food or his litter box, in more than a year. But he got up that evening and walked with me. He always came to my side when I was sick, but this was different. Marshmallow walked with me every step for two hours, meowing the whole time. Molly, hunkered down near the sofa, eventually added her voice, ah-rer, ah-rer, meow, meow, breathe, breathe, meow, until the room echoed with sound. And love. Uninhibited, animal love. I was having a conversation with my two pets, while walking in labor on my swollen, calloused feet, and I couldn’t have been happier. I couldn’t have wished for better support.
When I brought Luke home, Marshmallow surprised me again. He moved out from under his plant and started sleeping under my son’s bed. When Luke was in the living room, Marshmallow shambled in and sat by his carrier. People told me, “You have to be careful with a cat. They will pounce on a baby’s chest.”
I thought, Marshmallow? Are you kidding me? He wouldn’t hurt Luke. And even if he wanted to . . . have you looked at that cat? He’s seventeen years old. He can barely walk. He hasn’t pounced since I was in high school.
After Luke’s birth, Marshmallow’s health continued to decline. Five years after our move to Sioux City, he stopped being able to walk to his litter box. He couldn’t climb up or down stairs. Some days, he could barely make it to his food dish, and he suddenly seemed forgetful. There were times when, I was sure, the Godfather had no idea where he was. Arthritis had twisted every joint in his legs. His hearing was gone. His face was a mess. I knew he was in pain. And I didn’t need a veterinarian to tell me it was time. It wasn’t a hard decision. Not at all. At ten years old, I had watched my grandfather eaten away, in great pain, day after day. Marshmallow was such a good buddy. I couldn’t let a friend of mine suffer.
I took a day off from work. I turned off the television. I held my infant son on my hip, so that I could lift Marshmallow into the center of my lap. As I petted him, I watched the loose hair float up into the streaming sunlight and settle over everything, even my sweater. “Mawshmawow,” I said to my infant son in baby talk, imitating that little child from so long ago. “This is Mawshmawow. Wemember him.”
I looked from my son to my cat to the sunlight shining through the window, still thick with fur. My window. My house. My adult world. The room was quiet, except for a gentle purring. Even at seventeen, Marshmallow was kneading his claws into my leg. I felt the slight pain, and I smiled. A sad day, but a sweet moment, sitting on the sofa with the ones I loved.
I opened my photo album. There I was in a purple zippy wind jacket with my straggly hair, the little girl I used to be. Marshmallow was just a kitten, and I was holding him up to the camera. I was so proud of him. You could see it in my face. I was so proud. It was just a Polaroid, it was starting to fade, but you could see the happiness in my face. We didn’t own a Polaroid camera, so our neighbor, Katherine, must have taken the picture. She was an older lady. She loved Marshmallow. She watched us from her window, or when she was gardening, and I’m sure she heard our conversations, too. I’m sure she heard my parents arguing, and my sister and I beating out our fear on each other. She took the picture and gave it to me, I’m sure, because I was just a little girl, and I was so proud of my cat.
I flipped the pages. There were pictures of me and Marshmallow buried in the leaves. Me and Marshmallow in the backyard. There was a section with nothing but me, in a series of formal dresses, holding Marshmallow. I took a picture with Marshmallow, I remembered, before every school dance I ever attended. Me and Marshmallow lying on our blanket in the sun. Me and Marshmallow when I graduated from high school. Me in my wedding dress, smiling, holding my cat. “Mom,” I remembered saying over and over again throughout the years. “Go get the camera, Mom. I want a picture with Marshmallow.”
It’s hard for me to think about that day. I’m sorry, you probably think I’m weird, but it’s hard. I won’t talk about his death. I just can’t. Because I miss him. Even fifteen years later, I miss my Marshmallow. But there was so much joy in his life. So much joy. He was with me from ten years old to twenty-seven, and it was an awe-some journey. I wouldn’t be where I am today without it, so I count it as a blessing. Obviously. Even the bad parts were a blessing. I mean, how many people get seventeen years with an animal, you know? How many people ever get to experience that kind of love?
EIGHT
Church Cat
“Words cannot express how much the book Dewey meant to me. . . . We adopted a stray cat at our church many years ago: ‘Church Cat’! She was pregnant and when her babies came, members adopted them. Then a collection of funds got her to the vet to be spayed. She lived in the church until we had major renovations and I took her home.”
Carol Ann Riggs surprised me. Her short note about Church Cat, a stray cat adopted by the Camden United Methodist Church in Camden, Alabama, had piqued my interest, but after the first ten minutes of our telephone conversation, I must admit, I was completely flummoxed. Not by the things she said, but by the way she said them. Ms. Carol Ann Riggs (as her friends call her) had an extraordinary Southern accent, the kind full of slow, honey-dripping pronunciations, the “sugahs” mixing with the “small-town law-yas” and singing in “the church qui-ah.”
I must admit, I liked it immensely. And I liked Carol Ann Riggs, too. She was born in the tiny town of Bragg, Alabama, where the nearest high school was a thirty-mile bus ride away. (Even today, Lowndes County has only two public high schools.) When she married Harris Riggs at nineteen and moved to his hometown of Camden, she thought she was moving to the big city. Camden, after all, had two stoplights, two restaurants, two banks, and almost fifteen hundred people. But it was a wonderfully friendly place, despite the “large” size. There wasn’t much money in Camden, but when someone died, not only did all the neighbors bring food, everyone in town attended the funeral. “Almost everybody was kin to everybody,” Carol Ann told me, and that included her husband Harris’s “people,” who for several generations had operated the town’s hardware store. Carol Ann wasn’t a librarian—she worked for that small town “law-ya” I mentioned earlier—but she was a longtime member of the local library board. And despite my misgivings about library boards, I liked that. In fact, I liked everything about her. Especially that accent.
“I know, I know,” her friend Kim Knox said. “It’s that Southern accent you hear on television, and you say to yourself, That’s not real.” Kim was born and raised across the border in Laurel, Mississippi, so she knows Southern accents. “But that’s a Camden accent. Lots of people in Camden talk that way. People think its old Southern aristocrat, but people in Camden aren’t like that. They’re very down to earth. Not any kind of attitude or anything.”
It’s the isolation, Kim figures, that keeps the citizens of Camden so charming. The town is the seat of Wilcox County, a sparsely populated area in the hardpan hill country of southwest Alabama. The county has only thirteen thousand residents, less even than Clay County, Iowa, and the median income is only sixteen thousand dollars, a third of the national median and six thousand dollars below the poverty line. People think of south Alabama as plantation country, with sprawling mansions and fields of cotton. But you don’t see large farms in Wilc
ox County. You see the occasional small family farm, essentially a sharecropper’s plot, sandwiched between thousands upon thousands of acres of tall straight southern pines.
“It’s a town in the middle of nowhere,” Kim Knox said. “It’s a picturesque gem.” When I heard that, I thought of Spencer, with its wide sidewalks and blocks of locally owned, pleasantly thread-worn shops. I pictured a town where the generations have their own tables at the local diner and a cup of coffee lasted two hours at least.
But Camden didn’t work like that, as photographs of their threadbare downtown showed. In Camden, the social life wasn’t centered on the commercial strip. There weren’t any movie theatres, fancy restaurants, or chain superstores. The center of social life in Camden, Alabama, was the churches. The four largest were located, one after another, on a stretch of Broad Street that was as immaculately maintained as the nearby shopping district was ragged. The biggest was the Baptist church. Across the street, next door to each other, were the two Presbyterian churches. Down the block toward the town’s main intersection and next to the Exxon gas station that marked the unofficial entrance to downtown was Camden United Methodist. None of the churches were huge—between them they probably had seven hundred members, or about half the town—but they offered meals, prayer meetings, youth activities, and adult and junior “qui-ahs.” And when something important came along, like the yearly Christmas pageant, they all worked together to put on a show.