The cat was watching me even before the phone rang. It startled us both. I had been on the floor, curled in a ball holding my knees to my chest, my eyes swollen and sore. She had been perched on the arm of the couch with her front paws pressed primly together, keeping watch. She moved quickly, running under the dining table, away from the repeated rings. I moved more slowly, willing myself to get up and pick up the phone.
It was the school. My son’s elementary school just a few blocks away. My stomach dropped into my feet, like heavy stones tied to something you want to drown. He had been having a hard time, couldn’t get through the morning. He had started crying in first period and couldn’t stop. Crying and shaking. Did something happen? He was in the nurse’s room now. They thought I should come and get him. How soon could I get there? Did something happen at home?
Where do I even start? In my adult life, I refuse to have more than one cat. It’s like serial monogamy. I can only give that kind of attention to one creature at a time. When the cat dies, I can take a break from cat-care and cat-stuff until I’m ready to start all over again. And when my boys were still in diapers, not even one cat, no pets at all. Only so much poop and pee I am willing to deal with that is not my own.
But when I was a kid, there was always more than one cat.
There was Teasybell in Pakistan. I only know her by the picture in which my oldest brother is holding her against her will. He has a thrilled grin on his face even though she is pushing her unsheathed claws up to his chin and struggling to slide backwards out of his hands. Even in the old photo, you can see that her fur is angling up against its grain.
There were Flower and Tiger, the two cats we had for the brief period my parents tried to stay together in the US before separating and eventually getting divorced. Tiger had kittens that my sister and I dressed in baby doll clothes and brought into our shared bed, until my sister rolled over on one of them during the night and crushed it to death. Flower crawled under the neighbor’s car and up into its warm idling engine on a cold day and was killed when the driver took off.
The walk to the school—only two, maybe three blocks away—was slow in that way time is when reality is unreal. I was actually walking quickly, at a responsible parent pace, but the falling leaves in the wind were moving in slow motion, reaching out to me, like a hypnotist’s hands. The ache in my stomach was familiar. So old. From a time when I was my son’s age. When I would sob on the kitchen floor and beg my mother to let me stay home.
As I walked, I kept re-playing the events of the morning, trying to puzzle out just when I crossed the line. And if I had crossed the line. And what do we mean when we say “crossed the line”, anyway. Where exactly is that line? No one tells you before it’s too late.
Post-separation, there were the cats at my father’s house: Pixie, an ironically named large cat with short hair; Fluffy, an obviously named cat with very long hair; and the foundling, Puss-in-Boots. In the few years after my parents’ divorce, but before our father’s second marriage, he picked us up on Friday afternoons from our mother’s house in Pittsburgh to drive us to the much smaller town in which he lived, about an hour away. On one drive, it was not yet winter, but it was getting cold and the days were getting shorter. Outside the windows of the old blue Ford Torino, it was dark and raining and all I could see were neon signs for Burger King, McDonalds, KFC, and the stoplights changing like watercolor paints. So it seemed miraculous that my father could make out the shape of a small cat hiding in some weeds by the side of the road. He brought her into the car, dried her off with the soft lining side of his jacket, then let us hold her in the backseat while he drove. She was a dark tabby, but with four white paws; older than a kitten but not yet fully grown, she was skin and bones, and she didn’t seem to follow our movements with her eyes. Puss-in-Boots was blind.
My father had recently given away his dog Guffy’s litter of puppies. So when we got to his house, he placed Puss-in-Boots against Guffy’s warm, full belly and nudged her snout towards the dog’s nipples. As the weeks passed, I don’t how much milk there was, if any, but the blind cat continued to suckle at the dog’s side and then to curl up and sleep there.
My husband had gone to Ikea the day before and purchased two kits for low wooden shoe racks for our tiny mudroom. We had promised our son that he could help build them (he took his toy tools to bed instead of a teddy bear, cuddled a little plastic saw or painted wooden hammer to his chest). But after the kids’ bedtime, we got in a get-things-done mood and reneged, without even thinking about it. While they slept, we stayed up late putting together the shelves with that annoying little Allen wrench.
In the morning, my husband left early for work. We had recently moved from another state and I hadn’t yet found a job. After cereal and brushing teeth and finding a shirt whose seams did not scratch, I had my son ready to leave for school and I sent him down to the mudroom to get his shoes. I was grabbing my coat and looking for my keys, so at first I didn’t realize where the noise was coming from—a crashing sound, a cracking and flying and breaking. Then my radar kicked in and I ran down the half-flight of stairs to the mudroom. He had grabbed his toy battle-axe (from the Renaissance Faire) and was wildly destroying the new racks—shoes were flying, wood splintering, his little body whirling around, his face red and wet. And then all I could see was red too.
Post-separation, there was a succession of cats at my mother’s house as well. While I was still in elementary and middle school we had two: Arthur, technically my sister’s cat, and technically female despite the name, who had countless litters of kittens, survived more than a few collisions with cars, and outlived all the other cats we ever had, including my father’s; and Chesapeake, my calico, named after the logo on the side of Railroad cars, that gave birth to a kitten right by the side of my body while I slept. When I heard her cries, I woke up, ran down the hall and woke my mother and sister and we watched her give birth to three or four more. She licked the blood off their bodies, cut their umbilical cords with her teeth, and ate the afterbirth while we watched. My mother decided she must be still be hungry and brought dry cat food to the bed, which we fed to the new mother from our hands.
As my siblings grew older, they began to have social lives on the weekends that kept them tethered to the city (one even went away to college), so over time I became the only child my father picked up some Friday afternoons. By this time, he had moved from the small apartment over the maintenance barn on the campus of the small college at which he taught, to a real house. The small house was at the end of a gravel lane that forked up and behind an old neighborhood straddling the side of a steep hill. After my father’s house, there were just woods. He had built us a tree house and built himself a garden, and the dog and chicken and cats roamed where they liked. Inside the house, there were fish tanks and old plumbing: separate hot and cold faucets for water in the kitchen and bathroom sinks.
He didn’t cook much, so we usually drove into town to go out to eat. When I was alone with him, we went to a diner on the old Main St. We sat at the counter on swiveling red stools in a long row and he ordered coffee and pie. I ate large plates of hot macaroni and cheese. I lifted the fork to my mouth over and over while my father talked with someone else, the man sitting on the other side of him. I thought I was going out to eat with my father and I felt jealous of this stranger. He wasn’t a man I recognized from the college. He wasn’t a man from the church. He wasn’t like those friendly men and women who walked up to us in the shopping mall, beaming when they saw “Dr. Bell,” their favorite teacher. I was never introduced to this man. And I was not a part of their conversation.
And then the memory stops. There is no “affect bridge”: hypnotist speak for recovery of lost memories. So I start to fill in the blanks and make up memory stories. They disappeared for a while and then came back. No, the man left and I felt relieved. No, the man left, but then Dad had to go to the restroom and didn’t come back for a very long time. I kept eating the macaroni, the steam rising in a veil before my eyes. I kept swiveling on my red stool, my feet dangling in the air.
How to describe a stomachache. Philosopher and human rights activist Elaine Scarry argues that pain is the most absolute definer of reality. For the person in pain, there is no reality besides pain; if it hurts, it must be real. And Scarry emphasizes that it is enormously difficult to put physical pain into words: “When someone’s hurt, you can see language being destroyed. . . . They utter a monosyllable or cry. . . . Physical pain has no voice. But when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story.” My old stomachache. All I remember clearly is doubling over as if I had been punched, curling up on the kitchen floor, my hands pressed into my belly or clasped between my thighs. Begging my mother not to make me go to school. Begging my mother not to make me go for the weekend alone with my dad.
But none of that really matters. Meaning, you don’t really need to know that we built Ikea shelves and that our son destroyed them. The backstory is meaningless. Anything could have happened, any infringement on my rules, any impulsive act of childish logic and emotion. In the end, my son’s actions just coincided randomly with my inability to control my triggers.
I could not believe what he was doing TO ME.
I didn’t run down to see if he was okay when my radar kicked in. I ran down so fast it was as if I had pounced. I was LOUD (deafening even myself). My words gave way to guttural, atavistic sound, like a cat makes when its hackles go up, its ears go back, and it bares its teeth in the face of an enemy in its territory. I know I grabbed the battle-axe from his hands and swung it up in the air. I know the red crept up my neck to my face and my brow, the veins unraveling like the strings on stalks of rhubarb when being cut. I was offended. I was self-righteous.
There are worse lines to cross. Physical rather than verbal. But this was my line. My demon. And I tumbled right over it.
Anthrozoologist John Bradshaw has tracked and studied the feral cat colonies of London. Although the male cats strike out on their own and vie for territorial control, the female cats form colonies, adopt orphaned kittens, and nurse anyone’s children, not only their own. They also protect each other’s kittens from the dangers of canines and other predators. So these are colonies of “breeders.” They sound like communes in which the pre-requisite for membership is being both female and fertile.
Yet if you neuter the cats—as humane animal control centers are doing in London—and therefore take away the females’ ostensible reason for living together, they stay in the colony. Out of habit? Just for shared food? Out of choice? They are even joined by castrated males, who no longer “need to spend a lot of time fighting one another and in competition.” Bradshaw concludes: “these neutered feral colonies are usually very harmonious.” Isn’t that a bit an oxymoron, “neutered feral”? I mean, once you grab a cat off the street and fix it, the road to taming has begun, right?
When my sister was at my father’s with me, or earlier in time, when my brother came, too, there were Dad disappearances. He went out on errands, I suppose, or had an occasional weekend class or social event to attend. But he seemed often gone and unaccounted for, for long stretches of time. While he was gone, my brother and sister and I roamed the woods and fields. My brother knew a lot about primal survival, how to catch little fish in the streams and toast them over little fires we built on the banks, how to hide under rock outcroppings in a lightning storm, how to camouflage our bodies with fallen evergreen branches. Once, we were at home alone and the heat went off. A strange man in a bright orange vest came to the door and asked us to pay the utility bill if we wanted him to turn the heat back on. We didn’t have any money. So we gathered all the blankets from the bedrooms, piled them in the living room and huddled under them together. Once Dad dropped my sister and me at the skating rink but forgot to pick us up, so we walked along the two-lane highway as it started getting dark, all the way to the Dairy Queen, where we went in to ask for directions. We wanted butterscotch sundaes, but we didn’t have any money. Once, my sister and I were left in the car in an underground parking garage. We climbed from the backseat into the front to play “car,” turning the steering wheel, turning on and off the blinkers, making zoom-zoom sounds, and giggling. Until I released the parking brake—not knowing what it was— and we began to roll backwards. We froze. We twisted around to look out the back window into the dark. A stranger ran towards the car, opened the door, and pulled up the brake.
Once, when I was the only weekend kid, I was up in the tree house and watched Dad walk out of the house and get in the car and drive away. I didn’t call out.
A few years before the battle-axe day, when we lived in another state where my children were born, I had felt the tremors begin, the little triggers that brought out my hot-as-coals, roaring beast from the knot where it lived just under my skin. My monster voice. So I had hauled myself off to an anger management workshop for parents. I was one of the few women in the room. And I learned that some of the men were there on court order. This was me? This? Did I really have anything in common with these fucked-up people?
By the time we got to the battle-axe day, I had learned enough and practiced enough that I could tie my hands behind my back with an imaginary rope, retract my claws before I felt the urge to pounce. I could lift my legs and leave the room—the house even, if necessary—and breathe until my normal voice returned. Still, I knew why the school was calling that day. And I knew why I threw up before I made myself walk over there: my own child was afraid of being out in the world, but also of coming home. He was afraid of me.
Stomachache. It sounds like what it means. Say it again and again and again, and your whole body begins to reject itself.
After my father died (when I was ten), we rarely went to visit his second wife (and her children). I don’t know how my father’s pets came to an end. And to this day, I have very little contact with his brief second family.
But after my father died, the succession of cats at our mother’s house continued. There were Thing 1 and Thing 2, sibling kittens we fostered, and JT, named for the 1970s music star, a black cat that got hit by a car and died while I was away at boarding school. There was Prince Cloud, an elegant tuxedo cat my brother had briefly, as mellow as a stoned teenager. And Frank, an orange tabby we rescued, who developed a fondness for an afghan my mother had crocheted. He sat upright on the afghan and rubbed his fuzzy cat penis back and forth obsessively. I was reading Our Bodies, Ourselves at the time and learning to masturbate, but I could hardly walk through the living room when Frank was there. Nothing we tried could make him stop.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t clearly remember which of these cats, in addition to Arthur, was around when I was in eighth grade. But I do remember eighth grade because I started to get tonsillitis. Repeatedly. My throat swelled shut and I lost my voice so often that I ended up missing more than half of the school year. I did my academic work at home, spreading out my papers on the living room rug, with game shows and soap operas on the small black-and- white old TV, with Arthur napping on the radiator cover, while everyone else was at work or school. My favorite workbooks were from Language Arts. It was the year I got a clear handle on the rhetorical device called “irony”: situational, verbal, or dramatic.
One morning it was time for me to take my spoonful of pink penicillin. My mother was in a hurry getting ready for work. I was staying home, again, in my pajamas but standing in the kitchen with her. She poured the spoonful and brought it to my face. I refused to open my mouth and take it. I was sick of all this medicine and it hurt so much to swallow. I started backing up to the back door and she kept coming closer, the spoon of pink liquid delicately balanced in her hand. I refused. And refused again. And swatted the spoon away, pink liquid hitting the cabinet. And then she slapped me. Hard and fast and unbelievable. Leaving an instant redness. The imprint of her silver puzzle ring on my cheek.
The irony is that, although I remember this, it is not the reason I felt so angry at her years later. She always thought it was and she apologized repeatedly. But it wasn’t. That one slap was never why I grew up angry.
There was a room in my mother’s house with wallpaper etchings of a scene in which buildings rose right up out of the water. She didn’t choose it; like the little boy’s wallpaper in my bedroom, it was already in the house when she left my father and we moved in. The scene was incongruous and fantastic to me as a child. There were narrow boats floating in the water-alleys between the buildings and it was clear that you could only get from building to building by boat, or by jumping in and paddling with your own hands. I now realize that this must have been an etching of Venice, but back then I didn’t know anything about Venice, so the etching on the wall was otherworldly to me—how did they build those buildings anyway? Who held his breath and swam under the water to lay the first stones in the mud at the bottom of it all? Did everyone walk around all day with wet feet, pulling leeches from between their toes, and smelling of fish and seaweed? Did toddlers learn to swim before walking?
I had friends who lived in that water-world and emerged from it to talk to me and keep me company. When I walked in that room sometimes, they were there and they had names and official titles and made me their leader of sorts. They filled me in on the political intrigue of their water-world and sought my outsider’s advice to steer things to their advantage. I talked for them in a variety of voices, and with them, out loud and at length, but went quiet if anyone in the family came into the room.
After my father died, my water-world friends continued to visit me. Even as I went through middle school, they continued to visit me. My mother confronted me and told me she had read that, at my age, talking like this was a sign that I would most likely develop schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder as an adult. She worked full time, so she got permission to have me leave school early once a week and take a city bus to the psychiatrist’s office by myself. After a few weeks, I started to get off the bus and start walking and exploring the neighborhood, and arriving late for the appointments. Soon, I either intentionally missed the bus or got off at the wrong stop and didn’t show up at the shrink’s office at all.
Scarry says, “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”
Is my son growing up angry too? I need to ask him. If so, if only some days, I need to ask him what he’s angry about. I need to listen.
On battle-axe day, once I got him home from school, we curled up together and watched a movie. Old Yeller. I always knew he would love the story. This kid who liked to build things, to work with his hands. I knew the story of the son in charge of the homestead while the father was away would appeal to him. That, and the weapons as tools in everyday life.
I had loved the book when I was a kid. I had cried my eyes out when I got to the ending. The boy has to shoot his own dog, remember? Old Yeller gets rabies. But my son watched the ending dry-eyed. Not callous. Not unsympathetic. But with understanding of the boy’s dilemma, and with respect for his fortitude. Then my son turned to me and demanded to know why we didn’t live on the frontier. Why we had imprisoned ourselves in this quiet neighborhood, this soft house and its rooms of assemble-it-yourself furniture. Why he couldn’t learn to shoot a gun at ten years old?
We don’t get to choose the planets on which we land. The colonies of our parents’ making. And neither did they. And we don’t get to know just why they do what they do, or did what they did. Was my father really out cruising at the diner, looking for tricks? Or at any other time he disappeared? Or just negligent and self-absorbed? Or falling into states of disassociation completely out of his control?
One thing seems clear: my father loved plants and animals so much more easily than humans. Because the beauty of plants seems to defy the concepts of gender and sex, regardless of what science tells us. Because animals don’t seem to feel shame. Even now I have a cat who, like all cats, spreads her legs high in the air, doubles over and cleans her own furry anus with her own tough tongue right in the middle of the living room, right in the middle of the day, the sunlight streaming through the window to spotlight her every move.
Author of the poetry collection From the Belly (Sibling Rivalry Press), Virginia Bell won NELLE Magazine’s Nonfiction Prize in 2020 for the personal essay, “Chicken,” and her poetry won Honorable Mention in the 2019 RiverSedge Poetry Prize, judged by José Antonio Rodríguez. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Night Heron Barks, Kettle Blue Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Rogue Agent, Gargoyle, Cider Press Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, the Nervous Breakdown, the Keats Letters Project, Blue Fifth Review, Voltage Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. Along with Jacob Saenz and Jan Bottiglieri, Bell is Co-Editor of RHINO Poetry and teaches at Loyola University Chicago.