BETWEEN POP’S FIRST and second cancers, we went to dinner at the low-ceilinged house of a client with a five-year-old girl. Small children were then illegible to me; I didn’t remember much of being small.
At first we sat on deep couches in an intact conversation pit still outfitted with shag. The father of the family offered me a ginger ale as the adults warmed their engines with respectable amounts of wine and beer. Pop was guffawing too often at things the father said, Ma nodding too much. I got embarrassed, just like a teen. Soda bubbles pin-balled in my nasal passages. I tried, with no luck, to care about what the adults were saying. The girl skipped along the edge of the gathering, a toy or doll in her hand.
After the beverages had been reduced to sloshes, the father suggested that we move to the back deck to eat and to enjoy the weather. It was late spring. We followed him through sliding doors, onto a deck with a view of their grass-and-clover quarter acre, the neighbors’ trees, a bunny hutch. Pop still had twenty days on the contract. The girl asked could I sit next to her. I had no excuse but contrary desire, which I did not voice. She squirmed and smacked as I waffled. The mother asked her to sit now and to sit quietly, please. The mother herself was a quiet sitter, easy to miss. Her long hair hung to her bottom. As we began to arrange ourselves around the picnic table, Ma pulled me aside to whisper: “Denise, never trust anyone with hair that long!” When I laughed Ma said she was serious, that hair that long demonstrated a pathological lack of practicality.
While we ate palate-slicing hard-shell tacos with corn on the cob and an iceberg-and-ranch salad, it became clear that the five-year-old was growing enamored with me. For she scooped her sour cream and diced tomatoes onto my plate as little gifts. She told jokes I couldn’t follow. I didn’t pretend to find them funny. She pulled at my hand adhesively. Perhaps the admiration was understandable; I was a teen at the time, that last best age.
“Let’s do a magic trick,” she spat into my eardrum. “Can I make you disappear?” She said I should go inside and crouch behind the kitchen counter while everyone waited. I said OK, bereft of any reasonable response in the face of this sticky adorer. “Everyone!” the girl announced. “Everyone close your eyes.” The adults obeyed, the rubes. I extricated myself from the picnic bench and went through the open sliding door, crouched as requested. The fridge hummed charmingly and I saw a bottle of wine close enough to grab. I thought I might just stay there for the duration of the evening, really make myself a home.
From outside I heard the grown-ups open their eyes and dramatize shock. “Where’d you put my daughter?” Pop gasped, game.
“I disappeared her!” said the kid.
“Can you bring her back?” asked her long-haired mom.
“Not yet!”
As I saw this playing out I thought it might be funny to disrupt it. I unfolded myself, crept from my retreat, and tiptoed across the linoleum. The dad and Pop were facing the kitchen, and began to open their mouths in mock surprise. Two grown men, their mouths O-made, playing this game.
“Ta-da!” I said.
The five-year-old turned and saw me and began a brawny wail. “You ruined it!” she screamed. “You ruined it!”
“It’s OK,” her dad said to me, as the mom went to comfort her. “We indulge her more than we should, probably.” Then he announced: “We have ice cream, and cones!” The ringmaster was taking control of the crowd. The mom carried the kid inside. I no longer try to be funny in this kind of way.
Ma looked at me, smirking, and I smirked back until Pop interfered with his sad kind eyes, as if to say, it’s fine now, this kind of thing, but when you’re a grown-up you’re going to have to learn custody for smaller, weaker things.
Too soon the mom emerged carrying the child, who was lounging on her mother’s hip and licking a cone. We ate dessert. We left. On the way home I asked why they were selling. Pop said, “Oh, they’re splitting up.” He sold the place two weeks later, at a price no one was happy about. I’m less awful now, but it doesn’t matter.
THE CAT WAS not my pet. I was its nurse. I regarded this as luck; utility need not involve the heart. Ritually, I examined the patient, built fires, argued with Gene about small domestic choices, ate soup. Gene, who’d reappeared once the yowls ceased, was upset at me for rescuing the cat. He called me a pants-wetter; he popped in and out of my days, staying just long enough to make me feel lonelier, more put-upon, once he was gone. It was now no longer summer. The cold was coming to catch us.
He strolled into the kitchen area while I was stacking dishes. “I lived, once, I think, in an apartment on Wilshire Boulevard, between the university and the cemetery, with Marjorie and a dour housekeeper who took Sundays off. She had a mole on her lip, the size and shape of a ladybug.”
I let a tin plate clatter slightly. “Was she good at her job?”
“I swear sometimes I could see that thing crawl!”
“Was she good at her job?”
“I can’t recall.”
“That probably means she was.” I wished to have said this to a real person, to have been truly valiant in this minor way, defending this woman who did or did not exist. “Did you ever have any pets?” I wanted to hear about the dogs. I couldn’t remember their names.
“I don’t even understand why you’d bother to ask!” He was in the front doorframe now, filling it like a villain. He did not wear a cape, but, oddly, a small Tyrolean with a feather rosy as his cheeks.
“What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It doesn’t matter at all. Pay attention to yourself, dearie short-pants! Time is running thin! There are beasts in the bushes! There are maggots in your meals!”
I told him to shut up. He walked out. I let go of my breath and went on with the dishes. Soon it would be time to take care of the patient once more.
FOR SEVERAL DAYS after the shooting I woke with goosebumps up my forearms, in newly cool air. I distracted myself from the cool with the cat. When it was sleeping I performed minor household duties. For instance, I decided to move the woodpile inside. I said to myself that I was worried it would snow and that the wood would get wet. Both of the wilderness handbooks seemed quite concerned about dry wood. I moved the wood from outside to inside, onto a tarp on the kitchen table, at which I had not eaten even once, despite previous desires. A degradation of these previous desires. A fun violence to domesticity. That killed an afternoon.
In order to keep the Thing sedate I fed it tri- or bi-daily crumbles of Pop’s pain pills. Also I made the Thing a little bed out of towels and a blanket on the floor. The cat was like a snoozing old man, hour by hour, digesting these chemicals: It made the animal pliable and easy to wound-check. Doing so I admired its sweet soft fur, its delicate jaw-forward face. At first the skin around the stitches, crooked like bad railroad tracks, flared angry, but in a day or three settled down, with more ointment. Because of this animal I did not return to the lake. I was worried the cat would escape and die alone from its injuries. I missed swimming, already missed the hot wetness of late summer. I was aware of time and its push.
Periodically, in our early days together, the Thing yowled and I attended to it with stroking or examination or a small bowl of the rice mush I had been feeding it. I recalled, over and over, how “the Thing” was not really a name.
Every time Gene showed up, he showed up complaining. With a drippy, honking nose. With eye-bags big enough to travel the world. With suspicious lesions at his thinning hairline. As the Thing strengthened, he was worsening. I do not mean to make a causality here. But to describe a coincidental parallel which, like a North and South Pole, pinned me spinning. “Marjorie?” he’d bellow from the back room.
“Wrong number!” I’d respond.
On the mountain it became clear to me that I had no obvious art. Of course my talents were compulsion and self-haunting. And Gene was the result. What pride could I take in that. So instead I stroked the cat’s bony head. I curled up. I lived.
AT FIRST IT w
as just relentless percussion: roof-tap and timpani. This was what rain in the woods was like. I witnessed it from inside the only building in view. In the suburbs heavy rain had always made me irritable, though a little drizzle never provoked anything. In college for my science requirement I had taken a course on hydrology and water management thinking it would soothe me, to know how each liquid molecule dispersed to gas and then reconstituted toward earth. Instead the course was a drag, packed with students majoring in landscape management. They would go on to work at golf courses and parks.
The rain, steady, beat through the morning. I got up from the back bottom bunk, where I’d been attempting sleep for at least five hours. I had not slept well since shooting the cat. Nor did I feel I deserved to.
When I rose I saw the Thing had drug itself from its towel-blanket nest. Now it lay where the wood and the linoleum met. The wisp-thin molding bisected its dark pity. “Oh, Thingy,” I said. “Oh, cat!” And stooped to give little Thing a pat, which it curled into. It was indeed a pleasingly wild thing, by turns vacant and mean or weak and demure. That is a romantic affect.
For, simply: sometimes the cat came to me. Other times it did not have the will to fight. Presently I scooped its little heft into my arms. A dingle of shit fell from its bottom to the floor. The rain was now quieting, faucet dripping. I bounced the cat like a babe as I ventured forward, to open the front door, to stand on the porch and watch the rain evaporate into a downy mist.
I stood on the porch with the Thing, and told it: “Here is our world as it looks now, as we should always remember it.” What a sap. All around the mist laid itself on the blunt and sharp and curved landscape, robing the trees and grasses and brambles and stones in a thin and glittering film.
The cat let out a loose bellow, pushing its paws into my lower abdomen. It was the strangest thing—I had discovered—that the cat had no claws at all. Though this made me less tentative, handling it, I did wonder: how it had survived alone? A bird cawed and shot out against the tree line. The day was warmer but not hot. The cat dug its forelegs into the softest part of my stomach, the organs. “Simmer,” I said to it. “Hush.” Everywhere the earth was rain softened, steam hissing from loam. I may have imagined this.
Just then a tree of lightning cracked out in the distance, on the horizon, out past our valley and beyond the nearest summit. A roil of thunder then cupped the peak, causing the cat to stir rigid before settling. Then the Thing began to purr, the baby.
I had become comfortable caring for this cat. It was a blend of obligation and generosity: a human submission. The wound was by this time healing slowly around the stitches, pinkly and with a shine. The cat ranged into the yard sometimes, but more often stuck by me.
Now I resigned to the couch and its soft wiles. I was so tired. The Thing approached to lay beside me, waggling its butt like a drunk. Its smell was honeyed and dank, not unlike the smell of the lab flies’ sweet-rot fare, that hanging labor odor. Outside it began to rain again and went on raining. It would go on for many days.
ONE DAY IN the rain Gene showed up on the doorstep, holding a fistful of dripping black-eyed Susans. “What are you supposed to be?” I asked him, snorting the humid dirt smell of the woods.
“A gentleman caller,” he said, while chewing on his bottom lip. His left eye was twitching enough to warrant an exam. I stepped up close to him, looked at him in his big dirty pores. “You can come in,” I said. “But we’re not talking about the weather.”
“So you say, little lady!” he exclaimed, and showboated in, tracking or not tracking mud.
I stayed unspeaking, would only look at the cat: my new confidante. Eventually he left, miffed. I am happily left, I thought. Or, as Garbo said—not as herself but as a spent ballerina in The Grand Hotel (1932)—“I want to be alone . . . I just want to be alone.” The amplified repeat was my favorite part. I didn’t need my old things anymore. I didn’t need anything, really. The cat was okay company. The cat didn’t talk.
We stayed dry together. For generally I preferred to stay either dry or completely saturated. Because of this preference I did not leave the cabin. To pee I had taken to straddling the shower cube, then washing it down with a cold hoseful of water. To shit—which was less often, as I had reduced my calories and fiber dramatically, out of convenience—I did slop through the mud to the purple outhouse with its moon door. There I sat in that gross little prism and opened up my backhole.
Something about the mountain air and rain made me feel loose, celebratory, despite my persistent lostness. I congratulated myself for having had the foresight to move the firewood. But it was not enough to keep my mood buoyed. For it would not stop raining, water washing the days in and out in a tireless pulse. A week of this weather.
Sometimes in this close lull I’d catch myself thinking of my loved ones, the audience to my disappearing act, and get a rising acid wave up my throat. I’d pet the cat and breathe. Unbidden, a photo or painting of something I’d never seen: Pop, Ma, and Ken, sitting calmly at a dinner table. I did not think they’d be better off without me. My leaving had no selflessness in it. Even the scant absence I had by then wrought—unexplained, but explicable—had given me a thrill. If I was not happy on the mountain, I was not unhappy either.
In the deep of night, lightning began to crack more aggressively, all over the valley. I woke and stood on the porch with the Thing in my arms and we watched it. The lightning came charging through the small hatches where the trees opened up to the sky. I was an animal in shelter, holding another animal, which I had hurt, but which was healing. I was tired, listening to thunder, seeing the lightning, counting between them. Rolling onto the floor I watched to see if the cat stirred with any thunder clap. One Mississippi, two, three, four, five. Clap. The cat did not. I then returned to the bottom of the bunk to sleep, a dupe for nature’s next blow.
I WOKE THINKING: earthquake, tornado, hurricane. There was a mean wet wind lashing itself across my everything. Despite this I kept my eyes closed for a good few minutes. As soon as I opened them, I would have to deal with whatever this was.
I counted again, once more in Mississippi’s. When I got to one hundred, I opened my eyes. There was water on my face.
It is raining in the cabin, was my first coherent thought. My eyes opened.
Is this an end, I thought. Am I dying.
No, for it is wet. Unless death is wet.
My logic was a dial tone, dulled further by the blood-thrum in my ears. My eyes were not feeding my head logical data. I yelled into the cold wet wind: “Fuck!” And that seemed to calm everything for one moment.
My shivering body was still under blankets but it was also under dead leaves and branches. A few were mere inches from my face, poking and bladed. I perceived my luck, unpoked, before I perceived the size of the situation. I think more often it is the other way around.
At last I allowed myself to think the thought: a tree has fallen through the roof.
Or, a large section of tree has fallen through a large section of roof.
I felt the scrambling of my perception, as when I had awakened that morning at Omar’s. Had that only been a month prior. Two. I visualized a calendar. I began to count the days, then stopped. I cleared this away. Reapproached.
Let it be known: I did not think about death very much, when once a tree nearly fell on top of me. I had been sleeping in a cabin in a remote mountain valley. I had a common impulse of survival. If I may be congratulated for any old achievement, let it be that.
Then another piece of roof heaved in and the shock was over.
Where is my biggest tarp, I wanted to know. I remembered. My biggest tarp was underneath the wood on the kitchen table. The wind was trammeling the valley. It had knocked the tree down. I shielded myself with my covers, my sleeping bag, a deep breath, before deciding what to do.
Plan: nail the blankets up between the rooms. Free up the tarp. Nail that up too. Start a fire. Forget the bedroom. Go the long way around the cabin to the latrin
e once outdoors is possible again. Practice partially ignorant living, regarding: tree in cabin, regarding: roof open to elements.
Gathered myself and lumbered upward, out of the bed. Used the tree branch as a counterbalance: launched myself out into the sodden bedroom where all corners had gone soft. A branch made a thwack as I landed on the wet wood. More roof crumbled from the edge of the hole, black and glossy. Stepped forward slowly as if on ice. Took me a minute to get to the stove or five. Was gasping, possibly in fright. Shoveled the burnt stuff out into the bucket. Retrieved split logs thankfully adjacent on kitchen table. Gathered semi-dry tinder from a corner of the room. Stuffed it meaningfully into the metal belly. Tried to light a match. Where was my lighter. Tried to light another match. Blown out; blown out, by powers more forceful than my own little lungs. At last, hunched, got the wood aflame. I turned to extract the tarp.
When I turned back, to check on the little fire: smoke. The metal chimney had been bent and crushed into a series of breakneck crimps. The outside clean metal, the inside tarred. Fine black dust everywhere, a powdery explosion. I tried to get water, but no water came from the faucet. Didn’t use all of my jugs of drinking water to stop it: I wasn’t dumb, just shocked. I took only the littlest jug, and dumped it. The fire hissed as if to attack. Then it submitted, saying goodbye in a doublewide white-smoke bonanza. Held my sleeve in front of my mouth, then, I think, blacked out.
When I came to, shock freshened, I surged.
Once all the wood was on the floor I seized the freed tarp. Scaled the bed with nails and the axe. Coughed and hammered the nails with the butt of those tall rafters, bones clattering against each other. Clothes damp on the inside, damper on the out. Everything was miserable. I mean: I was miserable. Here I couldn’t live, couldn’t be dry. The wind bulged the tarp. I might as well’ve been nude and dipped in honey, defenseless and licked.
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