“No, we don’t. Let’s leave them in.”
“I would rather. If it’s all right with you.”
When they were finished, Annie had made six holes in her husband’s chest. He tested them out, one at a time, until all his drawers were open and his chest looked puffed out. “You look like a peacock,” Annie said. “A proud peacock.” Annie put Ben’s collection back into his body. The piles of babies, the mustard, the tiny toothbrush, all of it. The two of them stayed in the dining room under all the lights and talked about baby names. She suggested mostly old-fashioned names like Annabelle and he suggested mostly names beginning with C, like Clarice.
Ben brushed Annie’s hair with his fingers, which came away wrapped in a few golden strands. Annie pulled them off and laid them in a drawer already populated by brown and pink babies. The glisten of her hair disappeared into the dark of Ben’s body.
“Can I keep those?” he asked.
“Those are yours,” she said.
Annie stuck the tips of her fingers into Ben’s new moons. Her arms hung like two sturdy bridges across the space between them.
Welcome to Your Life and Congratulations
I DO NOT FIND HOUDINI downstairs. Upstairs, my room smells like cat but has no cat in it. My bed is covered in the soft gray hairs. My parents’ bed is also ashy-gray, the fur hovering and landing when I sweep my hand over it. I find my father and mother lying on the slanted roof outside their window, what they call the Veranda. They are squinting against the sun, shielding their faces. Their shirts are pulled up to make way for the darkening of skin. They glisten with sweat.
“Did you sell your lunch ticket?” my father wants to know.
“Fifty cents.”
“What were they serving?”
“Sloppy Joes.”
“You could have gotten a dollar.”
“Have you seen Houdini?”
“You could have gotten seventy-five at least.”
My mother says, “We aren’t any fun up here. Why don’t you go and play with Belbog, next door? He’s come all the way from the continent of Europe.”
“And can’t you see we are tanning?” my father adds.
“I’m already nice to him on the bus,” I tell my mother, and sit down on the roof’s slanted face. I pull my shirt up too and reveal the stunning whiteness of my stomach.
“You can blame your father for that skin tone,” my mother says. “Good luck getting any dates with any babes.” She reaches out and takes my father’s hand. She rubs each finger individually, gets her own into the crevices between them. Those canyons are completely explored.
Were the roof not covered in something like sandpaper, if it were slick—say, metal—we would all three slide to our probable deaths.
My mother lights a cigarette from the pack at her side and my father picks up his constant companions: a knife and stick. He whittles. My father is making another letter opener to be added to the drawers already filled with them. My mother’s cigarette ashes get caught in the wind and circle all our heads.
“The best thing,” my father says, “will be for you to save up for a trip to a country where they have beautiful women and you can marry one.”
“What if I don’t love any of the beautiful women when I get there?” I ask.
“By the time you got there, you’d see. The hard thing would be knowing which one you loved best. The world is just waiting for you, son,” he tells me, looking up at the expansive heavens, shaking their rattles of sunlight down on us.
My mother says, “It doesn’t have to wait—you’re already here. Welcome to your life.”
I see flat-faced Belbog, all the way from the continent of Europe, walk out of his house and set up a card table and a chair on the sidewalk. He makes another trip and returns with three mugs and a pitcher of something red. He tapes a sign to his table, Beverage For Sale. He sits, his hands folded on his lap and his legs crossed, wearing a pair of large white women’s sunglasses very long out of fashion.
Cars pass, not slowing for refreshment. They send wind Belbog’s way, spread his hair out in the gusts. It is at this moment and from this incredible vantage point that I see Belbog’s hair blowing, and in front of him I see Houdini cross the street toward home, looking like a ghost in the white light. And then I see a car, a red car, come around the corner and not even slow down for my cat, and not even stop after the noise that we all hear.
“Houdini?” I ask of the air. The cat is a pile in the street. Belbog jumps up and knocks the pitcher off the table, covers himself, soaks himself red. My parents jump inside through the window first, pushing me aside. And the long journey down from the roof begins. There are stairs I must go down. I must go through the living room and the dining room and the back hall and the front hall before I can emerge from the door, screaming the name of my cat. When I get down to the street, Belbog has the cat in his arms, legs loose and swinging, and says, “The car! The cat! The car!”
I try to hug Houdini away from him, to take him to my chest. But Belbog has him tight, so I hug both of them, Houdini pressed between the two of us, all our lungs pumping together.
“That cat’s not going to make it,” my father says. My mother has the portable phone and starts to dial, but he stops her. “That cat’s not going to make it,” he repeats.
“Call the vet! Call 9-1-1! Call the vet!” I yell.
“We shouldn’t try?” my mother asks.
“It is hit!” Belbog says.
“He’s old,” my father says. “It would cost a fortune. It’s better to let him die.” The phone in my mother’s hand is quiet and no numbers are pushed. I go for it but she holds it tight and I cannot get it free. “Let’s take him inside,” my father says, already walking, “where we can say goodbye properly.”
“The cat will be dead from us?” Belbog asks, following behind the three of us until we reach the front door and I close it in his face. He stands there on the stoop, dripping onto the threshold of my home.
• • •
MY MOTHER PUTS a cookie sheet out on the kitchen table and I turn on the lamp above it, a spotlight. Houdini is matted with blood. He is not a gray cat anymore, he is a red cat.
“You have had him longer than you have had me,” I say.
“We have had each other longer than either of you,” my mother says, looking at my father. “The cat just showed up one day and I fed him.”
“It would cost thousands of dollars, and even then,” my father answers, “a new cat doesn’t cost anything. The price of a ball-chopping, or not. If we don’t chop the balls, we’d get kittens maybe. You’d like kittens, wouldn’t you?”
“Honey,” she scolds, “please.” My mother holds the cat’s two front paws in her own, she tips her head down to wipe her cheeks on her shoulder. “We would have kept putting food out for you. Milk. Leftovers.”
“I have my savings,” I offer.
“No amount of savings would be enough. He is going to go sooner or later. Sooner,” my father says. The light swings just slightly, its halo shifting over the cat, who is less and less alive. I put my ear to his chest and listen.
“Hush-a-hush-a-hush-a,” I whisper to him. When I come up, I can feel that my cheek is sticky wet. I rub the blood around. Rub it all over my face. This makes my mother cry harder. Flat-faced Belbog has his flat face pressed against the window, watching us. His snot drips out of his nose and down the glass.
“That’s enough,” my father says. “You are upsetting your mother. Goodbye, cat. Now is the time.” He holds Houdini up above his head, and again the four legs swing and hang. “A freezer bag, honey,” he says to my mother. Both of us follow him down the basement stairs. “Everybody needs to keep it together,” he says. “If you try anything, I will kick you out of the ceremony.”
“Can we at least sit?” my mother asks.
“Get comfortable,” he tells her. We lower ourselves onto the bottom stair. She takes my head onto her chest. I can hear her heart going through its beats
. My snot drips down out of my nose, it seeps into my mother’s shirt, and I make no motion to stop it. My tears too drain from my eyes and soak through to her skin. Houdini’s blood rubs from my cheek onto her chest. My face is stuck to her shirt is stuck to her skin. She says, “Hush-a-hush-a-hush-a,” while I try to drench her, to soak her through, to drown her.
Houdini is still alive when he goes in the freezer. My father says he figures zipping the plastic bag plus the cold will do it. He does not want to hit the cat with a hard object. He does not own any guns, and a knife is out of the question. When he zips the bag, he says, “I’m sorry, cat. You are about to feel less air in your lungs. The cold will work to numb you.”
My father sits on the floor with the freezer door open in the otherwise dark room. The only other things in there are some tubs of ground beef marinara sauce and the wool baby blanket my mother knit for me when I was born. She won a prize for it at the county fair and now it lives here to keep from getting eaten by moths. It is also zip-locked and its hair, like the cat’s, is pressed against the plastic, smashed flat.
My father, his tools still upstairs, pretends to whittle—one index finger shaving the other index finger down. He looks like he is preparing to survive in the wilderness. The blue light from inside the freezer cleans him up and makes him shine.
“Should we say something?” my mother asks.
“Houdini was a good cat,” my father tries.
“Houdini is in cat heaven, where there are rivers of milk and mountains of cheese,” my mother adds, looking at me, watching for the happiness she hopes I feel.
“Houdini is in the freezer,” I say, “and he is still alive.”
My mother whispers to me, “We’ll bury him in the morning. It will be a beautiful ceremony. When he is dead.” She takes me by the arm, both of us crying, to the bathtub. I am too big to be washed this way and I say so.
“I want to be covered,” I tell her.
“You will be, by water.”
But it does not hide the few new hairs growing on my body. Even if I hunker down as low as I can, the water does nothing but magnify. Our falling tears cannot make this a sea deep enough for me to hide in.
“I wouldn’t fit in the freezer,” I say to her.
“You are not going anywhere,” she says, and pours a bowl of the blood-pinked water onto my head. It rushes down heavy over my eyes.
• • •
EARLY IN THE MORNING when the light doesn’t look like it is coming from anywhere in particular, my parents come to my door knocking. “Time to bury the cat,” they say, like what they mean is “Happy birthday.” In the kitchen there are scones, homemade. My mother must have been up for hours. They are browned and perfect, sitting in rows.
“Are those scones on Houdini’s cookie sheet?” I ask.
“Houdini doesn’t have his own cookie sheet,” my father says. He has the shovel and he has a brown grocery bag. When I look at it, he answers a question I do not have.
“He’s cold. I couldn’t hold him.”
“He’s frozen,” my mother reminds him.
• • •
THE EARTH IS FULL OF STONES. Every shovelful turns up more of them. They leave round crevices behind. When my father takes a break, resting his hands on the long wooden handle, I kneel down and put my fist into one of the stone’s old homes. It feels warmed, like a just-left chair. Who knows how long that rock was there, sneaked down into the dirt, covered on all its ragged sides.
“The earth will digest him,” my mother says. “He’s free of his body now.”
“That’s enough hole touching,” my father tells me. “Come on, son,” he says, “let’s get this show on the road.” He returns to work. A pinecone comes up. A shoelace. Dirt, heavy and dark and wormy, comes up. When there is enough room for Houdini plus some, my father leans the shovel against the tree and turns the brown sack over. The cat is still in the plastic bag.
“We have to take him out of the bag,” I say.
“It’s OK. He’s bloody,” my mother says.
“For one thing, he won’t disintegrate, for another thing, look at him.” I go down onto my knees. I open the zip and try to dump him out, but he is stuck by his own blood to the walls. My mother and father stand over me, watching. I jam a stick in, try to loose the fur. The stick breaks. My parents do not suggest anything. I tear the bag off. Even when it goes, Houdini is still in the shape of it. His fur is still smoothed flat like something is pushing against it. Houdini cannot push back.
While dirt goes back in, I remove the worms one by one.
“You know they are part of the cycle,” my mother says, and I do know, but it is too soon. For now I want to let my cat rest alone without being crawled upon, under the turned earth.
• • •
AFTER THE BURIAL I find Belbog asleep under my kitchen windowsill. He is not wet anymore but is still red. I tap him, wake him up, walk him back to his house.
“Have you been here all night?” I ask.
“Is he?” he asks.
“It’s part of the cycle,” I say. Belbog stands in the doorway and watches me. I right his overturned table and sit at it. Look at the street, at the spot where Houdini landed. The street is steaming with heat, already, even this early in the day.
“My name means White God, did you know?” Belbog asks.
“The continent of Europe must be very far away. Are there beautiful women there?”
“The most beautiful anywhere, my father tells me. I hope we will be friends. Perhaps this summer you can come and together we can sell beverages on the side of the road,” Belbog says, and when he finally closes the door, I hear the lock slip, and then the other lock slip and a chain rattle itself into place.
• • •
WHEN I COME INSIDE, my parents are asleep on the couch, wrapped up in each other, the room full of morning light. I put a blanket over them. I take Houdini’s cookie sheet upstairs. I look out the window at the elm, at the unsmooth patch of ground. I eat scone after scone, hoping that some of the cat was left on the tray. The sun is still a colored sun, not like later when the light will be so bright the particulars of it disappear. I go to sleep too, taking the cookie sheet under the covers. I can hear my father snoring through the floor. The spears of sunlight hit my back. They drill slowly into me, warming up even the deepest insides, and I fall asleep.
Again, my parents come knocking. “We have to hold a cremation,” they say. “Are you ready? Put on your shorts.” Out the window I see that the hole has been opened. Everything we worked to dig down has been dug up. My mother’s hair is unbrushed. She is still wearing her nightgown and my father has only his underwear on.
“Dogs,” he says.
“We can do a cremation here, at the house?” I ask.
“We build a fire,” my father says.
“Obviously. And I put the whole cat in the fire?”
“There isn’t a whole cat,” my mother says.
“What is there?”
“Parts of a cat,” they say together.
“Bones?” I ask.
“Mostly. And some fur. And some face.”
The sun is now exactly overhead. The trees are sweating from the undersides of their leaves. The air does not move; it is a single object set in place. I am dripping by the time I leave my doorstep. Belbog is back out with his stand and a new pitcher. He is wearing all black. He waves. I do not wave back. Wood is taken from the shed and formed into a pyramid. I haul the three sun chairs together. My mother makes cucumber sandwiches. I walk across the street to Belbog’s stand.
“I would like three glasses, please,” I offer, and he pours.
He looks himself up and down. “We are mourning,” he says. “I am wearing black.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“No charge for the beverage,” he says. “It is on my house. What are you doing now?”
“A cremation,” I tell him. “Don’t come over.”
“If you need any more beverag
e, I will be here all day. I invite you to come and help me. We will split the profits fifty–fifty. Everything fair and even.”
“Not today. I have plans.”
I pass the cups out and put my drink-cooled hand on my mother’s forehead. “Nice, isn’t it?” I ask. She sighs and smiles under my palm. Even though her head heats me back up right away, I want to leave my hand there and let her burn it. Sear it if she wants.
The fire really gets going. It takes over the wood, sucking on it.
“Can I see the pieces?” I want to know. My father takes out another Ziploc bag full of bones and shreds. Both ears are there. There is a leg with a paw attached. A snout and nose.
“We can’t put that right into the fire—we’ll never be able to find it again,” my mother says.
“Find it again?” my father asks.
“The whole point of a cremation is the ashes. We won’t know which are Houdini’s ashes and which are the wood’s ashes. We have to sprinkle the ashes later, as part of the ceremony. To release Houdini into the place he loved best.” My mother goes inside for a pan. Right away, the fur begins to sizzle away and the smell of it is everywhere. The smoke of the fire is turning my whole sky gray. It is closing in. I begin not to be able to see the street. The world is farther and farther away.
My mother goes inside and changes into a bikini.
“You look hot,” my father tells her when she comes back outside. The fire is going and smoke is everywhere.
“I might as well get some color,” she says, smiling. She lies back in her chair, puts a big hat over her eyes. She moves her toes to a beat that I cannot hear. Her fingers wrap around the ends of the armrests like they have been melted there.
“So,” my father says, “your first burial and your first cremation, all in one day.”
“I have never been alive without Houdini.”
He gives Houdini’s bone-pan a little shake. “We are doing the best thing.” The bones have not turned to ash. They have browned a little and they rattle deeper when they hit the sides of the pan.
A Guide to Being Born: Stories Page 8